The Sheridan Inn and Buffalo Bill's Porch Auditions

When the Sheridan Inn opened on June nineteenth, eighteen ninety-three, it was the finest hotel between Chicago and San Francisco, or so the Burlington Railroad's publicity department insisted. The claim was not entirely wrong. The inn was designed by Thomas Kimball, a prominent Omaha architect, and built in the Queen Anne style with a broad wrap-around porch and dozens of dormers, one for each bedroom window. The railroad owned it. It was meant to impress.

What gave the inn its lasting mythology was a man who arrived within a year of its opening and made the front porch his casting office. William Frederick Cody, known to the world as Buffalo Bill, was assembling performers for his Wild West show and he had a system. He would sit on the Sheridan Inn's porch and watch cowboys, ropers, sharpshooters, and riders demonstrate their skills in the yard in front of him. If he liked what he saw, he hired them. If he didn't, he tipped his hat and moved on.

Cody had bought a ranch in the area in eighteen ninety-four and became a genuine presence in Sheridan County for the last two decades of his life. He helped promote the region's cattle industry, invested in irrigation projects, and was part of the social fabric of a place that suited his sense of Western scale. The Buffalo Bill of the Wild West show was a manufactured celebrity, but the man who sat on that porch was a working rancher who knew the country and the people in it.

The Sheridan Inn was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen sixty-four. It still operates as a restaurant and events venue. The porch is still there. The dormers are still there. And the yard where the auditions took place is now a parking lot, which is perhaps the most honest thing that could have happened to it.