Drinking Wyoming: The Spotted Horse’s Famous Spotted Horse Rescued From A Brothel

​SPOTTED HORSE — Nothing is airtight in the Spotted Horse Bar and Grill anymore, and it hasn’t been for decades. 

The off-the-beaten-path dive bar on the back road between Gillette and Sheridan is 101 years old, after all. 

“This has been a general store, it’s been a post office, a gas station and it was once a school,” the bar’s owner, Jennifer McLaughlin, told Cowboy State Daily. “It was established in 1924, and my dad bought it in 1992.”

One of the early things McLaughlin and her dad, Jerome Schantz, did was to add what’s become the bar’s landmark spotted horse to the front of the business. 

It’s one of the things that McLaughlin believes draws people into this tiny joint along Highway 14-16. 

“It’s like a monument,” McLaughlin said. “When people come here, that’s the picture they all take.”

She was 20 when she and her dad brought the horse home, and it’s something she’ll never forget.

“My dad and I used to work construction in Montana,” she said. “Kind of in the late '90s. That horse came off a — I don’t know what else to call it — the whorehouse in Miles City.”

She can’t remember if her dad bought the horse outright or at an auction. But she’ll never forget driving home with a giant horse that came from a brothel in the back of her dad’s truck.  

Once they got it to Wyoming, they painted it up as the Spotted Horse’s spotted horse, adding big splotches of white paint. 

Then they placed the newly painted spotted horse near the old Standard Oil sign, a remnant of its days as a gas station. 

Schantz added cinder blocks to the dirt platform, giving it a more finished look. Then he added a few knickknacks, including some petrified wood, in case it needed just a little more character.

“My dad is the one who decorated this place,” McLaughlin said. “And it’s pretty unique with antiques and signs and you just name it, it’s in here.”

Carrying On A Legacy

Little has changed with the bar’s décor. Its horse display is the same as it ever was, other than the effects of time and weather. 

That’s taken a definite toll on the horse, as it has on the bar. Both could use a few coats of paint and many other repairs. 

Preserving the place, which is 37 miles north of Gillette, the nearest town of any size, is one of McLaughlin’s biggest concerns right now. 

That led her to seek out grant money to help her fix the place up. She’s getting a $50,000 historic preservation grant from American Express to help her spruce up the bar’s exterior.

McLaughlin took over the bar after her father died in 2020.

“We had some distant kind of relation by marriage who had been, he wasn’t an owner, but he lived here when the owner passed away,” she said. “So, my dad knew that the place was going up for bid and he just thought, ‘Well this would be some place I’d like to maybe live and have a bar.’”

McLaughlin has promised her dad she would keep both the bar’s history and his legacy alive, even though that’s not what she’d ever pictured herself doing.

“I had always told my dad, ‘Don’t be looking at me for taking this over,’” she said. “But that was when I was much younger. This was never anything that I thought I was going to do, but it just, you know, I believe that God put us out here for a reason.”

McLaughlin was laid off from her job at a coal mine right before her father died. 

Had that not happened, McLaughlin wouldn’t have been able to spend as much time with her dad before what was a sudden and unexpected death.

“So, just everything in the cards worked out for getting my husband and I out here before my dad passed away,” she said. “I honestly think it was a God thing that he got us out here.”

The bar, McLaughlin has since come to realize, really is a special place in Wyoming, and it now holds a similar place in her heart.

Ranch Burgers, Polish Dogs

Local legends say the location’s name has always been Spotted Horse, even if it hasn’t always been a bar. 

The name, McLaughlin said, came from a Cheyenne chief who frequently traveled through the area on a spotted horse. 

Since it was built in 1924, the bar has always been a nerve center for the sparsely populated area, whether a general store, a gas station, or now a bar and grill.

“You know, back in the day they used to have dances,” McLaughlin said. “There was a dance hall south of the building that got taken down by a tornado.”

The annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally is the bar’s busiest time of year, though hunting season is a close second. Lunch, rather than dinner, is the busiest time of day. 

Her ranch burgers, made with beef from Wyoming ranchers, are a draw, as are her Polish hot dogs.

She’s particularly proud of the burgers, and they need to be good. There’s not much else on the menu.

“There are all kinds of ranches around us,” she said. “And they kind of keep us going in the winter. So, I buy beef from them.”

Those same ranchers come to her bar for lunch and get their beef back from McLaughlin as a delicious, juicy burger. It’s win-win.

“We’re just keeping each other going,” McLaughlin said, chuckling a little bit.

It’s the Wyoming way in many small, out-of-the-way communities across the Cowboy State.

McLaughlin serves a few craft beers from Sheridan, as well as hard liquors like whiskey, but she admits Friday nights are pretty tame at the old Spotted Horse anymore.

“Nothing is too wild,” she said. “I, for one thing, drive a school bus, so my hours are pretty limited since school started. 

"During the National Finals Rodeo we’ll try to do a special every night. And we do a fantasy rodeo league thing, so it can get kind of wild then.”

Back in the day, though, McLaughlin said things were a bit wilder.

“Things have tamed down since then, I’m not going to lie,” she said. “And that’s OK. I’m fine with that.”

An Unexpected Lifeline

Fixing the bar up has been a never-ending process, McLaughlin said, one that she decided needed a little help with this summer.

Electrical systems, sewer systems, windows — there are plenty of things to go wrong with a structure that’s more than a century old.

“This building is definitely showing her bones,” McLaughlin said. “It just needs a little work, obviously. It’s 101 years old.”

One day, out of idle curiosity, she started Googling for grants to see if there were any for preserving historic buildings. Getting one would be like winning the lottery, but it doesn’t hurt to look. 

“The first one that popped up was this preservation for historical restaurants from American Express,” McLaughlin said. “So, I filled it out on my phone, and I just had five days before the deadline was due.”

Friends told her it was probably a scam. 

McLaughlin feared they were probably right.

Two months later toward the end of July, she heard back from American Express, the real American Express. There was no scam. 

She was getting a $50,000 historic preservation grant that she could use to fix her bar’s windows and to spruce up its appearance. 

“I couldn’t believe it,” McLaughlin said. “I had kind of given up hope. I knew they were going to announce the winners in July, and I hadn’t heard anything.”

The American Express grant won’t help her fix the electrical, sewer systems and other things inside the bar that need repairs. 

But it’s a big help when it comes to keeping her father’s legacy alive, and it feels like another “God” thing to her. 

“There were like 5,000-and-some entries,” McLaughlin said. “Being one of 50 to get picked was just kind of overwhelming for me. It’s still overwhelming. Just thinking about it, just talking to you, I can start crying.”

She’s not really crying, though, for the drafty windows that will get fixed on the Spotted Horse. It’s that horse she once painted with her dad that will now get a new coat of paint that really does it to her. 

There won’t be any dry eyes in the house once that’s been repainted. 

“My dad did tell me that he wanted me to keep (this) going,” McLaughlin said. “So, between the two of us, me and my husband, we are keeping it going.” 

Not too long ago, McLaughlin took a photo of the family dog, Mac, with a rainbow in the background. It was the perfect picture. And it’s the kind that tells a story all by itself. Once upon a time, somewhere over the rainbow in Spotted Horse, Wyoming, two people and a dog named Mac kept a Wyoming dream alive on Highway 14. 

Stop in and share a ranch burger sometime, if you want to become a part of it.

Contact Renee Jean and renee@cowboystatedaily.com

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