“There's a cat sleeping on one of the rocking chairs out front, and nobody seems to know whose cat it is.”

Broadway Street in Sheridan doesn't look like much from the interstate. You pull off I-90 expecting a gas station and a Subway, and instead there's a real downtown — brick storefronts, angled parking, a saddle shop that smells like it's been open since Eisenhower. The Bighorn Mountains sit at the end of every cross street like a painting someone hung too close to the wall. It's late afternoon when I park, and the light is doing that Wyoming thing where everything turns copper and the shadows get long enough to trip over. A guy in a cowboy hat nods from across the street, not performatively, just because that's what you do here. The Sheridan Inn is right there on Broadway, impossible to miss — a long wooden porch, a row of dormers, and the kind of presence that says this building was here before the town figured out what it wanted to be.

And it was. The inn opened in 1893, back when Sheridan was a railroad town and Buffalo Bill Cody used to audition acts for his Wild West Show from the front porch. That porch is still there — 69 feet of it, lined with rocking chairs that creak in a way that feels deliberate, like they're performing their own history. I drop my bag and sit in one for twenty minutes before checking in. Nobody rushes me. A couple from Billings is doing the same thing two chairs down, watching a pickup truck parallel park with the intensity of a spectator sport.

Sleeping where Buffalo Bill held auditions

Inside, the Sheridan Inn has the bones of a frontier hotel and the manners of a place that's been carefully restored without being sanitized. The lobby is all dark wood and mounted elk heads, but it doesn't feel like a theme park — it feels like someone's very specific grandfather decorated it and everyone agreed not to argue. There's a bar off the main hall, the kind where the bartender knows the names of the regulars and the regulars know the names of the beers, which are mostly local. I order a Wyoming Pale Ale and ask about dinner.

The rooms upstairs have that particular quality of historic hotel rooms: high ceilings, slightly uneven floors, and the faint suspicion that the walls have heard more interesting conversations than yours. My room faces Broadway, which means I can hear the occasional truck downshifting at the light, but by ten o'clock Sheridan goes quiet in a way that feels almost aggressive. The bed is good — firm, clean, no complaints. The bathroom has been updated with modern fixtures but the mirror has a slight warp at the edges that I choose to find charming. Hot water arrives in about forty-five seconds, which for a building this old feels like a minor miracle.

What the Sheridan Inn gets right is its relationship to the street. You're not sealed off from town — you're on top of it. Walk out the front door and you're immediately in downtown Sheridan, which is small enough to cover on foot in an hour but interesting enough to take three. The Mint Bar, a block south on Main, has a neon sign and a back room full of taxidermy that ranges from impressive to unsettling. A jackalope stares at you from above the pool table with the confidence of something that knows it doesn't exist. For breakfast, Cowboy Café on Main does eggs and hash browns with the kind of no-nonsense efficiency that suggests they've been feeding ranchers since before dawn and you're lucky they're still serving at eight.

“Sheridan is the kind of town where the mountains feel like they're eavesdropping on every conversation you have on the sidewalk.”

The Wi-Fi works but don't expect to stream anything ambitious — I lost connection twice trying to load a map of the Bighorn National Forest trails, which felt like the building's way of telling me to just go drive up there and figure it out. The inn's restaurant serves solid Western fare in the evenings, but the real draw is eating on the porch when the weather cooperates, watching the light change on the mountains while a train horn sounds from somewhere south of town. I made the mistake of ordering the bison burger thinking it would be a novelty; it was genuinely one of the better burgers I've had this year, and I say that as someone who has eaten too many burgers this year.

One thing worth knowing: the inn hosts live music some weekends, and the sound carries through the building with the kind of cheerful disregard for soundproofing that you'd expect from a 130-year-old structure. If you're a light sleeper, ask for a room on the far end. If you're not, grab a drink and lean into it — the crowd is local, the music is country, and nobody's checking their phone.

Morning on Broadway

I leave early, before the café opens, and Broadway is empty except for a woman sweeping the sidewalk in front of the saddle shop. The Bighorns are blue-gray in the morning light, and there's frost on the rocking chairs. The cat is gone. A magpie lands on the porch railing and looks at me like I owe it something. Sheridan is 130 miles from Yellowstone's northeast entrance via Highway 14 through the Bighorn Pass — one of the most beautiful drives in the state that almost nobody talks about. Take it slow. The switchbacks earn the view.

Rooms at the Sheridan Inn start around 130 $US a night, which buys you a piece of Wyoming history, a porch with a view of the mountains, and the quiet satisfaction of sleeping somewhere that Buffalo Bill once stood and pointed at a trick rider and said yes.