The Irma Hotel and Its Cherrywood Bar
Near Cody, Wyoming
On the corner of Sheridan Avenue stands the Irma Hotel, the building Buffalo Bill loved most in the town he founded. He named it after his youngest daughter, Irma Cody, and he opened it with a grand party on November eighteenth, nineteen oh two, inviting the press and dignitaries from as far away as Boston. He called it the sweetest hotel in the West and boasted it was the most modern in the Rockies.
Its most famous feature is the back bar, a masterwork of carved cherrywood accented with mirrors, arches, and columns. Tradition holds that it was a gift to Buffalo Bill from Queen Victoria, presented after he performed for her in England. Cody kept rooms here and used the hotel as a kind of headquarters for his ambitions.
His fortunes, though, faded. In nineteen thirteen he was forced to sign the hotel over to his wife, Louisa. After his death in nineteen seventeen the property was foreclosed upon and sold, then bought back by Louisa, who held it until she died in nineteen twenty-one.
The Irma still operates today and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a working piece of the frontier that refuses to close.
