Traveling Wyoming: Western Spirit Is Still Alive At Cody’s Legendary Irma Hotel

CODY — When Buffalo Bill Cody built the Irma Hotel in 1902 for nearly $100,000, it was considered the grandest of accommodations available in the Rockies, and it filled up almost immediately with those seeking adventure in the wild American West.

Today, it is still full of people seeking out Western adventure, and it offers uncommon vintage charm in a hotel stuffed full of iconic Buffalo Bill history. It is also a hub of the town, serving as a Grand Central Station for Cody.

All kinds of tourist activity buzzes around the hotel, which is walking distance from adventure, whether that be food, guns, art, shopping or music — whatever is your pleasure.

The Irma hosts nightly music shows on site. Musical acts play to a full house of people enjoying appetizers, a cocktail from the saloon or Irma’s famous prime rib buffet.

At 300 seats, the prime rib buffet draws a large dinner rush in Cody. There’s a packed house every night for dinner, straining a limited amount of servers that nonetheless do a good job handling so large a crowd.

The hotel is also adjacent to Cody Trolley Tours, which offers an hour-long historical tour of Cody. There’s a Wild West show every night at 6 p.m., which features Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch, Wyatt Earp, and Buffalo Bill Cody himself. It concludes with the obligatory shoot-out.

The half-hour show is free, but if you want a seat to watch, it’s $3. Surely a bargain after adventuring all day long.

The Irma itself is stuffed full of all kinds of history, from the extravagant cherry-wood backbar that owner Mike Darby believes was sent to Buffalo Bill Cody from Queen Victoria herself, made of parts first fashioned in France.

“It was shipped over here to New York on a steamship, then rode a locomotive all the way to Red Lodge, Mont.,” Darby told Cowboy State Daily. “Then it was offloaded onto horse-drawn freight wagons and brought across the country in pieces.”

The backbar was re-assembled in its present location and has never been moved since to Darby’s knowledge.

The back bar hides an interesting artifact that was discovered recently. It was a pool cue that Darby believes has been there since at least 1919, based on a photo taken between 1904 to 1905 that shows the dining room in its previous life as a a pool hall.

The pool hall became a dining room during Prohibition, which started in 1920.

The top of the bar has been replaced and bar stools have since been added. But the original brass foot rail around the bar is still underneath the platform that the bar stools are sitting on.

Cactus And Sagebrush

The remnants of cactus and sagebrush still lie underneath the Irma Hotel, Darby said, like little ghosts from 1901, when construction began on the hotel.

The workers building the hotel placed the locally quarried sandstone for the hotel’s basement directly on the ground, Darby said. They didn’t even bother clearing all the plants away.

“It’s not a full basement,” he said. “But it still has the original coal chutes they used to fire the boilers. And, believe it or not, we still have the original steam system throughout the hotel.”

That steam system makes lots of noises when it’s in use. But that’s OK with Darby. Those are the sounds of living, breathing history that he’s keeping alive at the Irma.

“I really don’t feel like we’re owners of the hotel,” he said. “I feel like we’re caretakers for the town of Cody and the state of Wyoming.”

Darby has gone to great lengths to honor that — including sourcing custom-made wallpaper and carpeting that mimics historic patterns.

Upstairs wooden windows were rebuilt rather than replaced, and the creaking doors everywhere in the hotel are not going anywhere.

That includes the mournful sounding bathroom door that closes oh-so-slowly in the ladies restroom.

Guest rooms do get refreshed as needed — new blinds or new bedding, for example. Behind the walls, plumbing, wiring and utilities have been replaced and modernized over the years.

But the toilets do still use an antiquated, brassy-looking pull-chain to flush, which, if you’re not expecting it, can be a little difficult to find. The hint here is to look up. Way up, above the toilet seat.

Even historic artifacts get refreshed from time to time at the Irma, like the Henry H. Cross paintings that were recently restored by the Buffalo Bill Center of the West.

“Those are just tremendous paintings,” Darby said. “They really depict how Cody was.”

The paintings have been re-hung in the dining room right by photographs of Buffalo Bill, his daughter Irma, and his wife, Louisa.

When Cowboys Get Tipsy

Bullet holes in the tin ceiling in the dining area were covered up by a previous owner, Darby said. But that tin ceiling is only the second one, and the original still lies underneath.

“The cowboys could get a little tipsy, so to speak, and they’d get happy and shoot their guns off,” Darby said. “They did kill a woman who was sleeping upstairs.”

That particular room, Room 70, is one of the haunted rooms, Darby added.

“We’ve had people stay in there and the bathroom door will open and close,” he said. “They even barricaded it to try and stop it from opening and closing, and it still just kept bumping against the barrier.”

One of the most haunted guest room is Room 35, the Paul Stock room.

“That one is one of the most rented rooms in this building,” Darby said.

The earliest report of problems in the room dates all the way back to 1912, Darby said.

“A soldier had to be taken out of the room,” he said. “He just kept shooting and shooting. And no one ever figured out what was wrong. They had to just escort him out of the room.”

While no one has ever quite figured out what was causing the man to go crazy with shooting up the place, some have since reported seeing half of a soldier’s body walking across the room, with a saber.

“He came out of one wall, walked across the room, and went out again,” Darby said. “That scared the hell out of our (then) head housekeeper.”

The guest rooms, however, are not the most haunted spot in the hotel.

That would be the ladies restroom — formerly Buffalo Bill Cody’s office.

Buffalo Bill Cody And His Guns

The cherry bar in the dining room is one of the most popular selfie spots in the Irma Hotel. People walk in off the street just to take pictures in front of the bar, usually right by the collection of guns.

Those guns are mostly replicas of the rifles Buffalo Bill Cody used in his Wild West Show, although there is one notable exception.

That would be the Lucretia Borgia, a .50-caliber Springfield rifle that was Cody’s favorite buffalo killer — the very rifle that gave him his legendary name.

The original stock of Lucretia Borgia has disappeared, and there are various tales about where it went.

One legend has it that Cody struck an elk in the head to finish it off after shooting it, breaking the stock.

Another is that he loaned Lucretia to Grand Duke Alexis of Russia while on a hunting trip. The Duke was so excited after killing his quarry that he threw the rifle up in the air. His horse then stepped on it after it hit the ground.

How the rifle got its name is uncertain. But Lucretia Borgia was well-known during Buffalo Bill’s time, thanks to the 1833 Victor Hugo play “Lucrezia Borgia.”

In the play, the Italian femme fatale murders many of her foes. She was a deadly woman, making her name a great fit for Cody’s favorite buffalo-killing rifle.

He used “old” Lucretia to kill thousands of buffalo while helping feed the crews that were building the Kansas Pacific Railway line.

And that is how he got the name, Buffalo Bill.

There are several legends about Cody’s buffalo-killing prowess.

Among these is one where Cody made a bridle-less run on a herd of buffalo, killing 11 with 12 shots — a remarkable feat.

There’s also the tale of a buffalo-killing contest between Cody and one Bill Comstock, then chief of scouts at Fort Wallace, Kan.

According to his own account, Cody won that easily, killing 69 buffalo to Comstock’s 46.

“I felt confident I had the advantage of Comstock in two things — first I had the best buffalo horse that ever made a track,” Cody wrote in his autobiography. “And second, I was using what was known at that time as the needle-gun, a breech-loading Springfield rifle — caliber .50.”

Comstock was armed with a Henry rifle, which Cody acknowledged “could fire a few shots quicker than I could, yet I was pretty certain that it did not carry powder and lead enough to do execution equal to my caliber . 50.”

In fact, nothing is quite equal to the legendary Buffalo Bill Cody.

Even to this day the hotel that he named after his beloved daughter Irma is still making history, and helping those who hunger for Western adventure to make their own vacation legends.

Contact Renee Jean at renee@cowboystatedaily.com

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.