Robert E. Bonner

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Robert E. Bonner | Buffalo Bill Cody and Wyoming Water Politics | The Western Historical Quarterly, 33.4 | The History Cooperative

Buffalo Bill Cody
and Wyoming Water Politics

Buffalo Bill Cody entered into irrigation development in Wyoming in 1895 expecting to run his own show. By 1910, fickle corporate power, unruly state politics, and a new federal development bureaucracy had marginalized Cody in his own enterprise, creating in the process a twentieth-century model for western water development.

William F. (Buffalo Bill) Cody had a life on the ground as well as on the stage. From 1894 to about 1910 his life was centered in Wyoming's Big Horn Basin, where he set out, like many in the West, to make big money developing irrigation projects. Those were crucial years in the history of western water development. The Carey Act of 1894 gave each public-land state a million acres on which they could encourage irrigation and settlement, and in 1902, the Newlands Act put the federal government directly into the irrigation development game. Cody was at the center of the working out of both the Carey Act and the Newlands Act in Wyoming. Watching how he, the state of Wyoming, the Reclamation Service, and other players—notably the Burlington Railroad—used these laws and the opportunities they provided, we can learn something of the politics of development from the ground up.

William F. (Buffalo Bill) Cody talking with a plowman on his Shoshone River ranch. Courtesy of the Garlow Collection, Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, WY.

1

The larger part of this story concerns Wyoming's first federal reclamation project. The Shoshone Project was authorized early in 1904. Construction on it began the next year, and land was offered for homesteading in 1907. Water flowed in the main canal of the first divison of the project in 1908. Construction continued for another forty years, eventually irrigating over 93,000 acres of the valley of the Shoshone River in the northern part of the basin. By most measures it is one of the most successful federal reclamation projects in the West. What is not commonly known is that before the U. S. Reclamation Service (USRS) took it on, Buffalo Bill held the rights to develop the valley under the Carey Act, by which federal lands were made available for private development under state supervision. Those who know that Cody once held those rights have said only that he gave them over to the government to make way for the federal project. There is much more than that to be told. ¹ . . .

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