The Road Buffalo Bill Built

William Cody founded the town of Cody, Wyoming, in eighteen ninety-six. He chose the site deliberately: the Shoshone River canyon east of Yellowstone's back door, a corridor he believed would become the primary tourist approach to the park's eastern entrance. He lobbied the Burlington Railroad to extend its line to the new town. He lobbied Congress for a road through the canyon. He was right on both counts.

The fifty-mile drive from Cody to Yellowstone's east entrance through Shoshone Canyon is one of the more dramatic approach roads to any national park in the country. The canyon walls close in, the river runs alongside the road, and the scale of the landscape shifts from the open basin of Cody into something more enclosed and theatrical. Cody designed that theatrical quality into the approach. He understood that arriving at Yellowstone should feel like arriving somewhere.

The Shoshone Dam, renamed Buffalo Bill Dam in nineteen forty-six, was completed in nineteen ten on this road, at the mouth of the canyon. When it was finished it was the tallest dam in the world, three hundred twenty-five feet. It impounded the Buffalo Bill Reservoir, which controls water for irrigation across the Bighorn Basin to the east. The Bureau of Reclamation built it; Cody lobbied for it and used it to secure the economic future of the town he had founded.

Theodore Roosevelt visited in nineteen oh three, the same trip during which he laid the cornerstone of the Gardiner arch on Yellowstone's north side. Cody guided him personally through the region. The photograph of the two of them together is on the wall of the museum named for one of them. The road you just drove is the road Cody wanted you to drive.