Buffalo Bill Center of the West

William F. Cody was a scout, a bison hunter, and above all a showman whose Wild West show toured America and Europe and shaped how the whole world pictured the frontier. When he died in 1917, the people who had followed him formed a memorial association, and ten years later they opened a small museum in a log cabin to hold his rifles, saddles, show posters, and personal effects. The Buffalo Bill Museum today is the redesigned heart of the complex, telling the story of both the real man and the larger-than-life character he built.

Because Cody was a bridge between the actual frontier and its legend, the museum does something unusual: it lets you see the difference. You look at the genuine gear of a working scout in one case and the theatrical costumes of a global entertainer in the next, and you begin to understand how the myth of the West was manufactured even as the real West was still being settled.

The Plains Indians Museum is the quiet standout for many visitors, a deep and respectful collection of Arapaho, Lakota, Crow, Cheyenne, Blackfeet, and Pawnee art and regalia, most of it from the decades around 1900. Its first curator was George Horse-Capture, a member of the A'aninin tribe, and the museum hosts an annual powwow each June, so it is a living cultural space rather than a case of relics.

Next door, the Whitney Western Art Museum hangs the classics of Western painting, Frederic Remington, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, alongside contemporary artists working the same country today. And the Draper Natural History Museum turns from art to the land itself, walking you down from a mountaintop to the plains of the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, with grizzlies, wolves, and elk and a live raptor experience that draws children straight in.

The Cody Firearms Museum, completely rebuilt in 2019, is often called the most comprehensive firearms museum in the United States. It holds roughly seven thousand guns, more than four thousand of them on display, plus some twenty thousand related artifacts, tracing the technology from sixteenth-century hand cannons to the present day.

Its backbone is remarkable: the entire factory collection of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, moved here from Connecticut in 1976. That is the reference collection of one of America's most famous gunmakers, kept whole. Even visitors with no interest in firearms tend to find it fascinating as a history of manufacturing, design, and the tools that armed the frontier the rest of the Center describes.

The Center of the West sits right on Sheridan Avenue in downtown Cody, an easy walk from the town's shops and cafes, about an hour east of Yellowstone's East Entrance up the North Fork of the Shoshone. Because the admission is good for two days, the smart plan is to give it an afternoon, sleep in Cody, and return the next morning fresh for the museums you did not reach.

Behind the galleries is the McCracken Research Library, with tens of thousands of books, hundreds of manuscript collections, and more than a million historic photographs, open to researchers digging into Cody, the Plains tribes, ranching, Yellowstone, or Winchester. Between the five museums and the library, this is the rare stop where a family, an art lover, a naturalist, and a history buff can each spend a full day happy, then meet up for the drive into Yellowstone.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.