Beck, a town founder, lived there and supervised its ups and downs. “The Colonel,” as the townspeople often referred to Cody, invested a great deal of money in the birth and growth of the town. In May 1896, Beck and surveyor Charles Hayden laid out the site of the present town. In the fall of 1895, construction began on the Cody Canal, which would carry water from the south fork of the Shoshone River northeast to the town. Beck began looking at other possibilities to the east and soon settled on the town’s present location. And DeMaris was not interested in selling. However, Beck did not like the location or the fact that a great deal of the land was already owned by Charles DeMaris. That year a town site was laid out near DeMaris Hot Springs, two miles west of present-day Cody. Beck, Cody’s Wild West show partner Nate Salsbury, Harry Gerrans, Bronson Rumsey, Horace Alger, and George Bleistein founded the Shoshone Land and Irrigation Company. The Shoshone River, originally named “Stinking Water” by the Crow, clearly showed irrigation potential. The only thing missing was enough water to allow ranchers and farmers to make a living from the arid land. He saw the beauty of the region, its proximity to a Yellowstone already attracting tourists, the abundance of game and fish, and land available for ranching and farming. On learning that a group of Sheridan businessmen was already interested in founding a town there, Cody eagerly joined the effort. Marsh and others, he personally had never been to the northern basin. Although Cody had heard of this area from Indians, Yale paleontologist O.C. “Buffalo Bill” Cody was visiting Sheridan, Wyo., in 1894, when his son-in-law, Horace Boal, took him to the top of the Bighorn Mountains for a view to the west over the Bighorn Basin. It was named for the daughter of William F. The Irma Hotel, shown here around 1920, opened in 1902. This made the area one of the last frontiers settled in the lower 48 states. Ten years later, those restrictions were lifted and early settlers began to come into the basin. The Bighorn Basin was restricted from white settlement by treaties with the Indians in1868. The east entrance to Yellowstone National Park lies 53 miles to the west, up the North Fork of the Shoshone. This basin is surrounded by mountain ranges on three sides: the Absarokas to the west the Owl Creek Mountains to the south and the Bighorn Mountains to the east. Cody, Wyo., is located on the Shoshone River in the Bighorn Basin in northwest Wyoming.
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