Great American Saloons: Irma, My Irma
Croke, Bill
GREAT AMERICAN SALOONS by Bill Croke Irma, My Irma L ike the Wild West Show and everything else William F. Cody did, it was done on a grand scale and with other people's money. Throughout the...
...I give it to her straight...
...He spent many a night (sometimes passed out) in its antique four-poster, now coveted by guests willing to pay a little more for the privilege of sharing "the Scout's" bed...
...The vacuum cleaner fades out...
...At $1.10 per plate, we made about $22 each for a half-hour of extremely bad service...
...It stayed put as the old barroom gave way to the dining room, and is now a popular place to eat, or relax with coffee and newspaper...
...A crystal chandelier hangs from a ceiling of burnished stamped copper...
...Lincoln Bedroom...
...We ain't pilgrims...
...Buckets full...
...Were Buffalo Bill and the Queen friends...
...We'd pack them into the Governors' Room...
...Bottle clinking shot glass...
...He was a guest in 1908, using the hotel as a base for Van Gogh-like excursions into the surrounding country to paint landscapes of brown butte and rimrock...
...In the early twentieth century, the Irma (billed as "Buffalo Bill's Hotel in the Rockies") was the favored launching point for upscale summer tourists seeking the scenic treasures of Yellowstone Park, fifty miles west...
...What are they...
...He pours himself a drink...
...In a crisp white shirt, pressed black slacks, and brightly shined shoes, I diplomatically dealt with irate cooks, slow bartenders, demanding tourists, and the local cowboys who didn't know the meaning of the word "tip...
...What's the story behind the bar...
...Poison him...
...At the end of the bar sits the Irma's original cash register, a brass monster...
...Tourists were marvelous...
...The problem with old ladies from Queens is that if six of them order Reubens, then each sandwich will be completely different...
...Some years later, told that Cody was planning to build a hotel in the town he had named for himself, Her Majesty ordered the bar custom carved in France...
...Could be...
...Hold the sauerkraut on one, add two strips of crisp bacon to another, etc...
...We're the Saltof-the-Earth types who won the Wild West, and helped invent the Myth...
...The bar was assembled in the hotel and is now too big to move...
...You're kidding...
...He immediately became violently ill...
...There is a bottle of whiskey and a glass at his elbow...
...But to his dying day he claimed that she tried to poison him...
...I look in the mirror and see a man seated at a table...
...She was known for her sturdy constitution, but one wonders if years of childbirth and hotel work didn't wear her out...
...Yes, she spiked one of his drinks with Dragon's Blood...
...There, old ladies from Queens would sit under the stern, stiff-collar gazes of all those governors, and battle the flies coming in the open windows (no air conditioning...
...He named the hotel the Irma after his youngest daughter, the only one of his four children to survive him...
...When it came to local history they could be as gullible as kids...
...The Pollocks left Wyoming for Arizona when Jackson was yet a baby, and he never returned...
...Generations of Wyoming politicians — notably the Simpsons— have used the place as unofficial campaign headquarters...
...62 May 1999 The American Spectator cent, but I didn't like waiting on any of the locals...
...So to that end tonight's pot goes toward the new church...
...It was a popular turn-of-the-century remedy for curing alcoholism...
...I mean, what exactly are they...
...Much of the state's political history was made in a cushy smoke-filled banquet chamber called the Governors' Room, where portraits of all past Wyoming chief executives line the yellowish plaster walls...
...Throughout the year 1902 the square, three-storied tawny sandstone edifice rose above the dusty streets of Cody, Wyoming, finally opening on the 18th of November...
...He shuffles the deck again...
...Atop the grand staircase, the first room on the right is #12, the Irma's version of the BILL CROKE is a writer living in Cody, Wyoming...
...The worn, beet-colored carpet matches the bar, which takes up the entire west wall...
...Well, to get clinical, ma'am: They're the testicles of a castrated calf that will be raised with the Golden Arches in mind...
...This isn't a joke, you really eat them...
...The American Spectator • May 1999 63...
...Then each fall, the hotel was inundated by well-heeled elk hunters, and became the scene of raucous banquets hosted by local outfitters...
...Just what you think they are, sir...
...Where do you get them...
...Then there were Rocky Mountain oysters, or as the Salt-of-the-Earth types called them, calf fries...
...We had a standard spiel on the history of the Irma, but running through it hundreds of times during the course of a busy summer got boring, so at the peril of losing our jobs, we occasionally improvised...
...Uh, no...
...She was 36...
...Because of his affair with the Queen...
...Cody claimed that she was just trying to get him off the sauce, you44 The bar was shipped to New York in three pieces, then transported by train to Red Lodge, Montana...
...It was shipped to New York in three pieces, then transported by train to the nearest railhead at Red Lodge, Montana...
...They're quite tasty...
...I'm building a church across town," he says, as blue cigar smoke wafts upward into the chandelier...
...She was Irma Garlow by then, a lawyer's wife, eventual mother of three, and manager of her namesake...
...Jackson Pollock's father worked as a dishwasher in the hotel kitchen around the time the future Abstract Expressionist was born in Cody in 1912...
...The above exchange can be translated thus: "My great-grandfather knew Bill Cody, and we've been coming in ever since...
...Her alibi was that—" "With what...
...There are forty tables, plus a half-dozen ornately carved high-backed wooden booths lining the east wall...
...When lunch was served there was genuine consternation, and the manager's presence was many times demanded...
...Yessir...
...What...
...Yes ma'am...
...asks the man's wife...
...The small suite was Bill Cody's whenever he was in town...
...The Irma's dining room is the largest open space in the hotel, extending seventy-five yards from the Sheridan Avenue entrance to the kitchen door...
...Above the booths, two massive trophy elk heads are inclined toward each other as if exchanging ungulate gossip...
...Uh, Dragon's Blood...
...The bar is a century-old shiny cherry-wood masterpiece of carved Doric columns interspersed with ten-foot-high mirrors, above a backbar littered with the bric-a-brac (small bronze equestrian statues, a stuffed golden eagle, faded framed photographs, Indian artifacts) of the hotel's history...
...The kitchen staff considered bus tours tedious assembly line work...
...So just remember: We ain't pilgrims, and it's a distinct pleasure to wait on us...
...Are you in...
...The ivory-tressed showman was present in white tie and tails, remaining sober on doctor's orders as the champagne corks popped and the toasts were raised...
...Someone is vacuuming the dining room and lights slowly dim...
...W e had lunchtime bus tours, usually made up of senior citizens...
...Kind of like antabuse...
...They would come into Cody after a long morning in Yellowstone, bringing with them foul humor and full bladders...
...You're a smart man," he says...
...And he claimed that she tried to poison him once...
...The tourists were incredulous, sometimes horrified...
...So I took the orders in detail, already knowing the outcome...
...Trying to cheer them up was an oversized head shot of Wyoming's then-Senator Alan Simpson, dominating one wall...
...There, at the Scout's behest, it was met by three wagons and accompanying teamsters for the final seventy miles souththrough the sagebrush wastes of northern Wyoming via the Meeteetse Trail...
...It was a gift from Queen Victoria...
...You can't raise children in a town without a church...
...In the summer of '94 the Irma Hotel was made of money...
...No, really...
...A t the end of a dinner shift I sit counting my tips and sipping decaf at the Queen's bar...
...The manager was always too busy for this, and since the tour company paid for everything collectively—including our gratuity— I would hide in the kitchen with Candace, a fellow waitress, until lunch ended...
...He smokes a cigar and shuffles a deck of cards...
...So, how's the prime rib tonight...
...Along with the mandatory evening dinner shift, that made for hundred-dollar days...
...His wife attempted to divorce him on a couple of occasions...
...The landed gentry and the professional classes in Cody were good for about 8 perBuffalo Bill's hotel in the Rockies still thrives...
...We've been ranching in these parts for four generations...
...Know what I mean, son...
...You wouldn't even have a job without the Myth...
...Bill Hickok either had a mirror in front of him, or a wall behind...
...We expect better service than you give the tourists, even though they tip twice as much...
...She survived her famous father by only two years, succumbing to the Spanish flu in the epidemic of 1919...
...Breaded, deep fried and served with a hot sauce...
...Frederic Remington most likely put money in that register...
...Bill Cody was quite a ladies' man, you know...
...I dutifully explained the kitchen policy—no special orders—but it always seemed to go in one ear and out the other...
...I never had the pleasure of washing the dishes in the Irma, but upon moving to Cody in 1994 I became a waiter in the cavernous dining room...
...Oh, more than friends...
...You see, we're the reason they're here...
...The Monarch and the Plainsman had hit it off famously at the Wild West Show's command performance at Earl's Court in London in 1887...
...Cody—her name was Louisa, by the way—Mrs...
...Until the end, that is...
...Over the years the guest register has been signed by Frederic Remington, General Nelson Miles, Prince Albert of Monaco, Ernest Hemingway, Jimmy Doolittle, and John Wayne, among others...
...Passing tourists on brightly lit Sheridan Avenue stop and look in the windows...
...77 know, sober him up...
...They're collected in the spring, at branding time, ma'am...
...Behind the east wall the Irma Bar sounds crowded and noisy...
...Then frozen...
...It's quite possible that the Plainsman and the Queen had a fling...
...It was a gift of Queen Victoria in honor of the Irma's grand opening in 1902...
...While in residence he did a rough pencil sketch (which survives) of Irma riding her horse, entitled Irma Going to the Irma...
...Really...
...In the picture Simpson looks like he is about to impart one of his self-effacing, Twainesque political anecdotes, but the surly throng—card-carrying AARP members—was never amused...
...Some scholars believe that the bar was a gift in return for sexual favors...
...it's as important as a school...
...I think I'd like to be remembered as a man who brought a touch of grace and civilization to this godforsaken country...
...Tessin" "I mean, we ain't tourists...
Vol. 32 • May 1999 • No. 5
