Shoshone River

About

Buffalo Bill Dam — World's Tallest in 1910. Long before surveyors arrived, the Shoshone was the heart of Shoshone country. The Newe, who called themselves the "grass-house people," gave the river its name, while the Absaroka (Crow) hunted bison across the lower valley. The 1825–1840 fur-trapping era, the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty that established the Wind River Reservation for the Eastern Shoshone, and the 1878 Sheepeater War all played out within the Shoshone watershed. The Crow's own name for the water — "Stinking Water" — traveled with the earliest accounts of the region.

Settlement followed the recognition of the river's irrigation potential in 1895, a promise that helped justify the founding of Cody. The town took shape in 1896 under the patronage of William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody, the showman whose name still anchors the region's identity. Two decades earlier, the Shoshone Canyon upstream had drawn painter Thomas Moran, who made it a key subject during the 1871 Hayden Expedition.

The defining work came in 1910, when the Buffalo Bill Dam was completed in Park County — the tallest dam in the world at the time of its construction. Built through the Bureau of Reclamation's Shoshone Project, it married the river's hydraulic energy to agricultural ambition, backing up the Buffalo Bill Reservoir and transforming an arid stretch into watered farmland. The dam bears the name of the man who founded Cody, and the reservoir behind it remains the central feature of the valley.

The watershed also fed an extractive economy. It was logged across the 1880s–1940s to support the 1895–1910 Northern Pacific Railway expansion and the 1903–1910 dam construction. The Cody Tie Hack camps, operating from 1900 to 1940 along the North Fork, supplied cross-ties for the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad. That era wound down with the 1910 dam completion, the 1940 exhaustion of the high-country timber stands, and the 1954 closure of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, which together ended large-scale resource extraction in the valley.

Today the river is defined by its three character sections. From Buffalo Bill Dam to Cody, it runs Class I–II as a tailwater trout fishery. From Cody to Lovell, it eases into a Class I wide valley float, then transitions to plains below Lovell. Optimal flows run 800 to 4,000 CFS. In 2018, Park County and the city of Cody developed a river trail system along the Shoshone, improving public access for fishing, paddling, and wildlife viewing along the Yellowstone gateway corridor. Framed by the Shoshone National Forest and Buffalo Bill State Park, the river once dismissed for its smell is now the engine of a working Wyoming landscape.