The story
The Occidental Hotel anchors Main Street in Buffalo, Wyoming, founded in 1880 where the Bozeman Trail met the Bighorn Mountains and rebuilt in brick through 1903-1910 — the frontier hotel whose registers and legends hold Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Calamity Jane, Buffalo Bill, Teddy Roosevelt and the gunmen of the Johnson County War, and whose saloon, its embossed tin ceiling still carrying bullet holes, was famous across the territory; Owen Wister set his Virginian's showdown in Buffalo, and the restored hotel names its suites for the canon. Rescued from dereliction by a devoted 1997-2007 restoration, the Occidental operates with original back bar, stained glass and creaking authenticity — and with Wyoming's best-known hotel telling: a little girl named Emily in house tradition on the upper floors, giggling, tugging clothes and bouncing balls; a cowboy figure in the saloon; footsteps, piano notes and doors with minds of their own — accounts staff and guests trade nightly and investigations have chased. Present the Occidental as living Old West first, its Emily the house's adopted child. Details from the hotel's pages.