The Irma Hotel

The Irma Hotel is one of Cody’s most iconic buildings. It was built in 1902 by Buffalo Bill himself, at a time when Cody was still a small frontier town, but he already imagined an elegant place to welcome travelers on their way to Yellowstone. He invested nearly eighty thousand dollars in the project, a considerable sum for the time. The hotel is named after his favorite daughter, Irma Louise Cody, a deeply personal tribute right in the heart of the town he helped create. Buffalo Bill and his wife Louisa had four children, but their first two died very young, at ages eleven and five. His eldest daughter, Arta, reached adulthood but died prematurely in 1904. Irma was the last, and the only one still alive when the hotel opened, which helps explain the strong bond her father had with her. Despite that closeness, Irma’s life was not easy. She married and helped run the hotel with her husband, but faced both personal and financial hardships. She died in 1918 at just thirty-five years old, during the Spanish flu pandemic, only a few days after her husband—a tragic end for the woman whose name still lives on here. For its time, the Irma Hotel was a remarkably modern place in this remote part of the American West, offering comfortable rooms, a restaurant, and a bar that quickly became a lively meeting spot for travelers, cowboys, businesspeople, and visitors curious to experience the West. Its motto says it all: “Fancy enough for royalty, plain enough for cowboys.” One of the most well-known stories is tied to the bar itself. Made of solid cherry wood, local legend says it was a gift from Queen Victoria to Buffalo Bill, in recognition of the success of his Wild West Show in Europe. The reality is likely a bit different, as it seems he actually purchased it during a trip to France before having it shipped to Wyoming, but the story has stuck. It even traveled farther than you might expect. In 2018, a well-known opera director revealed that this very bar inspired the set design for the first act of Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West at La Scala in Milan. Buffalo Bill himself didn’t get to enjoy his hotel for long. Facing financial difficulties in 1913, he had to transfer ownership to his wife Louisa, with whom he was then on difficult terms, before his death four years later. After that, the hotel changed hands several times, was expanded in the 1930s to accommodate the first automobile travelers, and was eventually designated a National Historic Landmark in 1973.