Wyoming (pre-Yellowstone)

After ten hours of sleep and a bland bagel procured from a grocery store, I continued across Wyoming, feeling much better. It was a pretty day, and there was much going up and down of mountains and through forests, plains, & scenic rocks.

Cody, WY

It is a strange phenomenon that after crossing the Missouri you start to feel like no matter where you stand there will be some place within a hundred mile radius that claims a connection to Buffalo Bill Cody. And once you get out to Wyoming, it's sometimes a hundred miles between towns... Cody, Wyoming has one of the more reasonable claims as it was in fact founded by him in 1896. It also contains (as well as all the "gateway to Yellowstone" sorts of tourist junk) the quite impressive complex called:

the Buffalo Bill Historical Center

Plains Indian Museum Beading, past and present... The dress is decorated with elk ivories (each elk has two teeth that are really ivory instead of enamel, and these are considered luxury items)

Draper Museum of Natural History This is an excellent walk-through of the wildlife of the Yellowstone area (4 ecosystems from plains to alpine) both past and present.

This is one of the famous Yellowstone Observation Coaches, which once drove tourists on five or six day tours though the park. A sequence of 30-40 wagons would stay about 500 feet apart to avoid getting in each other's dust cloud, thus enabling the largest stagecoach robbery in US history when one man robbed seventeen coaches in succession and escaped.

Buffalo Bill Museum This museum has displays on Bill Cody's life and the madness that was the Wild West Show, as well as some context on how the average cowboy lived. --- The complex also houses the McCracken Research Library, with a large collection of documents and photographs on the American West, and the Whitney Gallery of Western Art and Kriendler Gallery, which has art both depicting and inspired by the west. --- Cody Firearms Museum (below) It takes a certain mindset to walk around looking at cases containing more than 5,000 firearms, sorted by style, so that to the uninitiated it looks as if each case is full of nearly identical weapons. Below is Annie Oakley pictured above one of her favorite sharpshooting rifles. And the Remington armory presents sewing machines. Tee hee!

This is the extremely pink and frilly cabin in which I stayed for the night. I was quite impressed. Below is a detail of the picture on the wall, which has character all its own.

This instructive piece bears a title that I can't quite make out in the photo, but the gist of it was "The Happiest Moments of a Girl's Life" and the scene captions are along the lines of: The Proposal, The Dressmaker's, The Wedding, The Honeymoon, The First Dinner in Their Own Home, and Their New Joy.

In this location Carmen Sandiego would probably steal: the Cody Firearms Museum