What drew Buffalo Bill to the Bighorn Basin was not gold or silver, but water. Sheridan businessmen George Beck and Horace Alger had purchased water rights to irrigate land along the Shoshone River, and after State Engineer Elwood Mead surveyed the area in 1894, they formed the Shoshone Land and Irrigation Company. Cody invested his showman's fortune and celebrity into the venture. By 1895, workers were digging the Cody Canal, transforming arid rangeland into farmable acreage. The town that rose beside it in 1896 had a population of just over 300 by 1900, but the railroad arrived in 1901, and the following year Cody opened the Irma Hotel, named for his daughter, boasting it was the most modern accommodation in the Rockies.

Cody understood something essential about the town's location: it sat just 50 miles from the East Gate of Yellowstone National Park. The same tourists who flocked to his Wild West shows would pay to experience the real West on their way to the geysers and hot springs. The town became a natural staging point, a place where visitors could outfit themselves before venturing into the wilderness. Today, that geographic advantage remains the town's identity. Cody calls itself the "Rodeo Capital of the World," hosting the Cody Nite Rodeo every summer night and the Cody Stampede, one of the largest Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association events in the country. Old Trail Town preserves more than 25 historic Western buildings, offering a glimpse of frontier life as Buffalo Bill would have known it.

Weeks after Buffalo Bill died on January 10, 1917, his friends formed the Buffalo Bill Memorial Association. That organization has grown into the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, a complex of five museums affiliated with the Smithsonian since 2008. The original Buffalo Bill Museum opened in a log cabin in downtown Cody in 1927, displaying his saddles and famous buckskin jackets. The Whitney Western Art Museum followed in 1959, housing masterworks by Bierstadt, Remington, and Russell. The Cody Firearms Museum contains the most comprehensive collection of American firearms in the world, anchored by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company factory collection transported from Connecticut in 1976. The Plains Indian Museum tells the stories of the cultures Buffalo Bill both competed with and celebrated. The Draper Natural History Museum, opened in 2002, explores the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem. Together, 320,000 square feet of exhibit space make it the largest Western-themed museum complex in the country.

Cody has produced an unexpected range of notable figures. Jackson Pollock, the abstract expressionist painter who revolutionized American art, was born here in 1912. Former Wyoming Governor and U.S. Senator Milward Simpson called Cody home, as did western artist Frank Tenney Johnson, whose moonlit paintings defined a genre. The twice-weekly Cody Enterprise newspaper has chronicled local life since Buffalo Bill and Col. John Peake founded it in August 1899. Today, with a population just over 10,000, the town remains what its founder envisioned: a gateway to wilderness, a celebration of Western heritage, and a community built on water brought to the desert through determination and engineering.