Updated Last: September 20, 2026
In 1948 the Colorado National Guard posted soldiers on a grave. The grave was on Lookout Mountain above Golden, it already had tons of concrete poured over it, and the man in it had been dead for thirty-one years. The soldiers were there because an American Legion post in Wyoming had publicly offered ten thousand dollars to anyone who would go and get him.
Buffalo Bill Cody founded the town of Cody, Wyoming in 1896 and is not buried there, and a good many people in Cody have never entirely accepted it. We used the town as a base, and mostly what we did was drive — over the Bighorns on U.S. 14, up the Chief Joseph Scenic Byway, and on toward a gate into Yellowstone that turned out to be shut.
The Argument Over Buffalo Bill’s Body
Cody died in Denver on January 10, 1917, of kidney failure, at his sister’s house. What happened next is where the trouble starts. Winter had made the road up Lookout Mountain impassable, so the body went into cold storage at Olinger’s Mortuary and stayed there roughly six months before the burial that June.
The claim, which you will hear in Cody and which has been in circulation for a century, is that Denver stole him. An earlier will had named a spot near Cody. He changed it, and asked for Lookout Mountain and what is, to be fair, one of the great views in the West. The conspiracy version holds that Denver interests paid his widow Louisa to bring him down out of the mountains, or that friends swapped the body for an unclaimed ranch hand and buried the real Cody quietly on Cedar Mountain outside town, where a monument stands today.
The evidence runs the other way. The funeral was open casket, thousands filed past, family was present and photographs were taken, and if the man in the box had been somebody else it is hard to believe no relative would have said so. The story gained its force later, pushed by Cody’s niece Mary Jester Allen after Louisa died. It gained enough force that his foster son Johnny Baker had both Codys reburied under concrete as insurance against theft — and then, in 1948, the reward offer out of Wyoming brought the National Guard up the hill.
So the concrete is real, and it is a reasonable thing to stand in front of and conclude that nobody has moved anything. That was my own reaction the first time. But it is worth being clear about what the concrete proves: it proves the fight was real, not that the body is. The two are easy to mix up.
I have a longer history with that hillside than most people who stop at it. I went to high school in Golden and lived at the foot of Lookout Mountain, and I hiked it, rode a bicycle up it, rode horses on it and had friends who lived on it. I have been to the grave and the little museum beside it more times than I can count, including our 2018 Cody post. None of which settles anything. It just means I have been standing on the Colorado end of this argument since I was about sixteen.
Over the Bighorns on U.S. 14
It is about three hours from Sheridan to Cody if you do not stop, and we stopped. U.S. 14 climbs out of the Powder River country, crosses the top of the range and then drops down the west side through Shell Canyon, and the descent is the best forty minutes of road in northern Wyoming.
Shell Falls is the pull-out everybody makes, and it is worth it. The drop is 120 feet, and at peak runoff — which is roughly when we were there — Shell Creek puts something like 3,600 gallons a second over the lip. What it is falling over is the point. That is Precambrian granite, about 2.9 billion years old.
The canyon itself is over eight miles long and 2,500 feet deep, and Shell Creek cut most of it within the last million years or so. Driving down it you pass through the Madison Limestone, then the Bighorn Dolomite, then the Cambrian Flathead Sandstone, and then you cross the Great Unconformity — the surface where those sediments sit directly on the basement, with well over a billion years of missing record in between. The road does in half an hour what a geology course does in a semester, and there is a sign at the bottom that tells you so.
We had already been leaning on the age of this range from the Buffalo side and from Sheridan, and this is where it becomes something you can put a hand on rather than a number in a paragraph.
Moose, Again
We came around a bend on the way down and there were three of them in the willows beside the road — what looked like a bull, a cow and a yearling. We stayed in the truck and let them be.
Every moose in the Bighorns descends from twenty-nine animals Wyoming Game and Fish trucked in from Jackson Hole between 1948 and 1987, which is the story we told from the other side of the range in Buffalo. By the time we got to Cody we had seen thirteen moose in two weeks. For an animal that was not here at all inside living memory, that is a remarkable thing to be able to write down.
Cody, Wyoming
Cody sits at 5,016 feet on the Shoshone River with about ten thousand people, which makes it the last real town before Yellowstone and the reason everybody stops. We did not do much here this time. The days were long driving days and the town was a Walmart, a fuel stop and a restock before going into the park — which is a legitimate use of Cody and probably its oldest function.
We did not go back into the Buffalo Bill Center of the West on this trip. We gave it four hours in 2018 and barely got through it, and it is covered properly in that earlier post. Five museums under one roof — Buffalo Bill, Whitney Western Art, Plains Indian, Cody Firearms and the Draper Natural History Museum. If you have a day in Cody, that is the day.
The Dam That Made the Town
What is easy to miss is that Cody did not found a tourist town. He founded an irrigation scheme. The Shoshone Land and Irrigation Company acquired water rights on the river, and in early 1904 Cody handed those rights over to the Secretary of the Interior so the federal government could build something he could not.
What the government built is the dam you drive through on the way west out of town, in a granite gorge so narrow the highway has to go through tunnels to get past it. Exploratory drilling started in July 1904, construction in the autumn of 1905, and it was finished on January 15, 1910. At 325 feet it was the tallest dam in the world when it was completed, beating the Croton Dam in New York. Seven men died building it. It was called Shoshone Dam until 1946, when it was renamed for Cody on the hundredth anniversary of his birth, and the crest was raised in 1993 to add another 260,000 acre-feet. The Shoshone Project waters more than 93,000 acres today.
We drove through it rather than stopping at it, on the way to the east entrance a few days later. Everything around Cody that is green instead of sagebrush is green because of that dam.
The Chief Joseph Scenic Byway
What we wanted was the northeast entrance. It is the least-used gate into Yellowstone, and the way to it from Cody is Wyoming 296, the Chief Joseph Scenic Byway, which climbs to Dead Indian Pass at 8,071 feet and then drops into the Clarks Fork country to meet U.S. 212.
The road is named for what happened on it, and it is worth knowing before you drive it.
September 8, 1877
Roughly seven hundred Nez Perce, with two thousand horses, came over this pass on September 8, 1877, with the United States Army behind them. They were four months and a thousand miles into a flight that had started in Idaho, which we wrote about from the other end at White Bird.
What they did here was a piece of tactical theater. They circled horses in the open to raise a dust cloud that read as a move south toward the Shoshone, and then went north through heavy timber instead. Their actual route was Dead Indian Gulch — a narrow slit in the rock dropping close to a thousand feet, in places barely wide enough for two horses side by side. Colonel Samuel Sturgis had looked at that ground and written it off as impassable, which is why he was not watching it. He took the bait and moved south, and seven hundred people and two thousand horses came down the gulch and out onto the plains with nobody in front of them.
The pass has a name that has been questioned for a long time and two competing explanations — that a Nez Perce man was killed near here during the 1877 flight, or that Crow scouts killed a Bannock man and buried him here the following year. Neither account is settled.
That is Index Peak above Lake Creek. It and Pilot Peak stand over the road for most of the run west, and they are the landmark everybody uses out here.
Road work is the permanent summer condition of mountain highways in this part of the country. There is a short season to fix what winter did, and it overlaps exactly with the season you want to drive.
Cooke City and a Gate That Would Not Open
We got all the way to Cooke City and all the way to the Yellowstone entrance, and it was closed. The gate itself was not the problem — the problem was the interior road beyond it, where the high link toward Canyon and Hayden Valley was still being plowed out. Late snow, late opening. That is a normal May in this country and we should not have been surprised.
This was the consolation prize, and it is a better one than it looks. A young moose grazing beside the road, on its knees, and it stayed that way the whole time it was feeding. That is not an injury and it is not unusual. A moose can reach eight feet up into a tree, which is the whole design, but the same proportions make ground level almost impossible — the legs are too long and the neck is too short. So it folds down one front knee, then the other, and eats from there.
These two were inside a fenced enclosure in the middle of Cooke City, which they had clearly jumped into and which they had let themselves out of again by the time we came back through.
The Mine That Nearly Happened Here
Cooke City is a mining camp that never quite gave up. Prospectors were poking at the New World district in the 1860s, and the Homestake and Little Daisy mines worked it between about 1904 and 1925. Then in 1989 and 1990 a company called Crown Butte found high-grade gold, copper and silver, and by 1993 had a permit for a modern underground mine about four miles from the northeast entrance of Yellowstone, sitting on a drainage divide with creeks running off it into the Yellowstone system.
It did not get built. In August 1996 the Clinton administration, several environmental groups and the company reached an agreement in which Crown Butte was paid sixty-five million dollars to walk away, with twenty-two and a half million of that put in escrow to clean up the historic workings that were already leaching. The last of the private claims were bought out in 2005 for nine million more, and the district went back to public ownership. The little town we drove into is what is there instead.
What Was Blooming
Arrowleaf balsamroot, which turns whole dry hillsides yellow in late spring and is one of the few plants out here you can identify at fifty miles an hour.
Indian paintbrush on the left. On the right is meadow death camas, and it is the most interesting plant we photographed all week.
Blue camas was one of the great food plants of the Northwest. The bulbs were dug in late spring, mostly by women and children working with pointed sticks, and baked in earth ovens for anywhere from a day and a half to five days, which converts the inulin in them into something sweet and keeps for months. It was a staple and a trade good, and it was central to the Nez Perce — the same people who came over the pass we had just driven.
Death camas grows in the same ground and looks almost identical once the flowers are gone. The safety rule was to dig only while the blue blossoms were still showing, because that is what proves the bulb under your stick is not this one. Meadow death camas flowers white. When William Clark’s men ate camas with the Nez Perce in September 1805 they found it sweet, and a good many of them were sick that evening.
Pronghorn and the Cat That Is Not There
There are always pronghorn and mule deer in the background out here, to the point that you stop pointing them out to each other. The pronghorn deserves better than that.
It is the only surviving member of its family. A dozen or so relatives were running around North America in the Pleistocene and every one of them is gone. It is not an antelope, and the horn is its own peculiar thing — a bony core in a keratin sheath that the males shed and regrow every year, which almost nothing else does.
And it is absurdly fast. Not fast like a cheetah, which beats it flat out, but fast for a long way: roughly 55 miles an hour over half a mile, 42 for a mile, and something like 35 sustained for four. Nothing alive in North America can make it run like that. The usual explanation is that it is not running from anything that still exists — that the speed was built against the American cheetah and the other Pleistocene predators, and simply never got dialed back.
That is a hypothesis rather than a settled fact, and it is worth saying so. But some of the better evidence for it came out of the ground at the north end of the Bighorns, the range we had crossed two days earlier. Natural Trap Cave, above Lovell, is a bell-shaped sinkhole in the Madison Limestone — eighty-five feet deep, with an opening about twelve feet by fifteen that animals simply fell through and could not get out of. What came out of the bottom of it includes dire wolves, mammoths, camels, ancient horses and American cheetahs, and isotope work on those cheetah remains indicates they were eating pronghorn.
Where We Stayed: Buffalo Bluff RV Park
We had 50-amp service, good water pressure and sewer, and wifi fast enough to stream. The laundry was good and the showers were new and clean. Our site was a pull-through with the rear window looking west at the mountains, which is the right way round in Cody. It is a small park, but there is an enclosed dog run, and Jake has never once objected to a small dog park.
What We Missed
The northeast entrance. We drove the whole Chief Joseph Byway to get to a gate that was still closed for snow. If you are aiming at that entrance in May, call the park first; the interior roads beyond it are among the last in Yellowstone to open.
The Beartooth. U.S. 212 east of Cooke City over the Beartooth Pass was not an option either, and when we came at it from the Montana side later that summer it had been torn up by flooding. That one took two tries and we still have not driven all of it.
Cody itself. We were based here and spent the whole time on the road. The Irma Hotel, the nightly rodeo and a second run at the Center of the West are all still sitting there, and the town deserves more than we gave it this time.
Practical Tips
Check road status before you commit to the northeast entrance. It is a long, beautiful drive to a gate that may not be open. The National Park Service posts road status daily, and in May and early June it changes constantly.
Stop at Shell Falls even if you are running late. It is right on U.S. 14 with a paved pull-out, an interpretive site and a short walk to the overlook. Ten minutes buys you 2.9 billion years.
Drive the Chief Joseph Byway in the morning. The light on the Clarks Fork side is better early, the pullouts at Dead Indian Pass are usually empty, and there is an interpretive stop at the summit that explains the 1877 crossing while you are looking at the ground it happened on.
Cody is the right place to restock. It is the last full-service town before the park from this direction, with a supermarket, fuel and hardware. Prices inside Yellowstone and in the gateway villages are considerably higher.
Give the Center of the West a full day, not an afternoon. Five museums under one roof. Four hours is not enough, which we have now proved twice by not going back.
Watch for moose on the U.S. 14 descent. Willow bottoms along the creeks on the west side of the Bighorns are the place, early and late. Stay in the vehicle. A cow with a calf is the most dangerous animal in these mountains and it is not close.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is Buffalo Bill actually buried? On Lookout Mountain above Golden, Colorado, where he was buried in June 1917 after an open-casket funeral attended by family and thousands of mourners. A long-running claim holds that the body was switched and the real Cody buried near Cody, Wyoming, but the documentary evidence supports Colorado. The dispute was sharp enough that a Wyoming American Legion post offered a $10,000 reward for the body in 1948 and the Colorado National Guard posted troops at the grave.
How tall is Shell Falls? 120 feet, on Shell Creek in Shell Canyon on U.S. 14 in the Bighorn National Forest. At peak runoff it carries roughly 3,600 gallons per second, and it falls over Precambrian granite about 2.9 billion years old.
What is the Chief Joseph Scenic Byway? Wyoming Highway 296, running about 46 miles from near Cody to U.S. 212 in the Clarks Fork country, crossing Dead Indian Pass at 8,071 feet. It is named for the Nez Perce flight of 1877, which crossed this pass on September 8 of that year.
How did the Nez Perce escape at Dead Indian Pass? They raised a dust cloud with circling horses to suggest a move south toward the Shoshone River, then went north through timber and descended Dead Indian Gulch — a near-vertical slit dropping about a thousand feet and in places only wide enough for two horses abreast. Colonel Samuel Sturgis had judged the route impassable, moved south, and roughly seven hundred people and two thousand horses reached the plains unopposed.
Is Yellowstone’s northeast entrance open in May? Sometimes. It is the least-used entrance and the interior roads beyond it are among the last to clear. We drove to it in the third week of May 2022 and it was closed. Check the National Park Service road status page the morning you go.
Why do moose kneel to eat? A moose is built to browse high — it can reach about eight feet up — and the same long legs and short neck make grazing at ground level awkward. Rather than splaying its legs, it folds down onto its front knees and feeds from there. It is normal behavior, not injury.
How tall is Buffalo Bill Dam? 325 feet. It was the tallest dam in the world when it was completed on January 15, 1910, and was known as Shoshone Dam until it was renamed for Cody in 1946. Seven workers died during construction. The Shoshone Project it feeds irrigates more than 93,000 acres.
Was there almost a gold mine next to Yellowstone? Yes. Crown Butte Mines was permitted in 1993 to develop a gold, copper and silver mine in the New World district about four miles from Yellowstone’s northeast entrance. In August 1996 the company accepted $65 million from the federal government to abandon the project, with $22.5 million escrowed for cleanup of older workings. The remaining private claims were purchased in 2005.
Can you tell death camas from edible camas? By the flower. Blue camas, the traditional food plant, flowers blue; meadow death camas flowers white and is highly toxic. Once the flowers are gone the bulbs are very difficult to tell apart, which is why camas was traditionally harvested while the blue blossoms were still visible.
Next Stop
Since the northeast gate was shut, we went the way we had always gone — west out of Cody, through the tunnels past the dam and up the Wapiti valley to the east entrance, and into Yellowstone at Fishing Bridge.
