Shoshone River Canyon: Teddy Roosevelt's Opening Shot

The road into Cody, Wyoming, from the east passes through a tight red-rock canyon where the Shoshone River has cut through a volcanic ridge. Theodore Roosevelt reportedly called this stretch the most scenic fifty miles in the United States. Whether he actually said it in precisely those words is not settled in the documentary record. What is settled is that the canyon, the river, and the irrigated valley beyond were central to one of the most consequential water projects in early western history.

Buffalo Bill Cody, who founded the town bearing his name in eighteen ninety-six, understood that the agricultural basin needed water and that water in this region came from dams. He partnered with the Bureau of Reclamation, formed under the Newlands Reclamation Act of nineteen hundred two, and the Shoshone Dam was completed in nineteen ten. At the time of its completion, it was the tallest dam in the world, rising three hundred twenty five feet above the riverbed.

The dam, renamed Buffalo Bill Dam in nineteen forty-six, created the reservoir that made irrigated farming viable across forty thousand acres of what would otherwise be arid rangeland. The Shoshone Project brought settlers who would not otherwise have come, turned river water into property, and committed the federal government to maintaining a water delivery system that still operates today.

The canyon you are driving through is also the eastern approach to Shoshone National Forest. The vertical red walls on both sides of the road are Absaroka volcanic rock, deposited roughly fifty million years ago. They have been carrying this road since nineteen oh five, when it was first graded for wagon traffic.