The Stinking Water miracle

How one Wyoming river transformed a desert into a garden

If a river could feel embarrassed, Wyoming’s Shoshone River probably would have spent much of the 19th century blushing.

For nearly a hundred years, maps, trappers, soldiers and settlers knew it by a far less dignified name: the Stinking Water River.

The name was not intended as an insult. It was simply an observation.

Long before highways, irrigation canals or the town of Cody existed, travelers following the river noticed the unmistakable smell of sulfur drifting from hot springs and mineral seeps along its course. The odor was often compared to rotten eggs or decaying animals. Frontier people were not known for subtlety. If something smelled bad, they called it Stinking Water and moved on.

The name may date back to 1807 when explorer John Colter, a former member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, passed through the region. Historians generally credit Colter with popularizing the name after encountering the sulfurous springs near what is now Cody and Yellowstone.

For decades nobody seemed to mind.

After all, the West was filled with colorful names. Wyoming already had Crazy Woman Creek, Gooseberry Creek, Greybull River and countless other places named after memorable incidents, animals, or first impressions. A river’s job was to provide water, not sound elegant.

Still, the Stinking Water was an impressive river.

Its headwaters gathered snowmelt from nearly 3,000 square miles of rugged mountains surrounding Yellowstone and the Absarokas. The North Fork and South Fork joined west of present-day Cody before flowing eastward through what would later become the communities of Cody, Powell, Byron and Lovell.

Each spring the river carried enormous volumes of water out of the mountains. In flood years it became a roaring torrent. In dry years it shrank dramatically. For centuries the river followed its own schedule, indifferent to the people living beside it.

To many early settlers, that was part of the problem.

The northern Big Horn Basin possessed rich soils, abundant sunshine and a growing season surprisingly well suited for agriculture. What it lacked was water when farmers needed it.

Without irrigation, much of the country looked more like desert than farmland.

Then came one of the most ambitious engineering projects in the American West.

In 1901, just as plans were developing to harness the river, the Wyoming Legislature officially changed its name from the Stinking Water to the Shoshone River, honoring the Native people long associated with the valley. Six weeks later the federal government adopted the change.

The timing was perfect.

Only a few years later, construction began on the massive Shoshone Dam west of Cody. When completed in 1910, it stood 325 feet high and was the tallest dam in the world. Later renamed Buffalo Bill Dam, it became one of the earliest and most celebrated projects of the new federal Reclamation Service.

For the first time, the river’s spring runoff could be stored and released when farmers needed it.

Additional projects soon followed. Corbett Dam diverted water into canals serving the Cody area. Willwood Dam, completed in 1922 near Powell, expanded irrigation farther across the Basin. A growing network of canals and laterals spread across thousands of acres that had previously supported little more than sagebrush.

The change was dramatic.

What had once been dry rangeland began producing sugar beets, alfalfa, beans, grain and livestock feed. Entire communities sprang up around the promise of irrigation. Powell itself was largely a product of the Shoshone Project, established to provide homes and farms for settlers willing to work the newly watered land.

Water from the river eventually irrigated more than 93,000 acres of farmland across the northern Big Horn Basin.

Fields that had once appeared brown and barren turned green each summer.

Rows of sugar beets stretched toward the horizon. Alfalfa fields produced multiple cuttings each year. Families built farms, businesses, schools and communities on land that had previously received only a few inches of rainfall annually.

Buffalo Bill Cody had envisioned exactly this future.

When he founded Cody in 1896, he believed irrigation would unlock the Basin’s agricultural potential. He promoted the region relentlessly, convinced that water stored behind a dam could transform the valley. In many ways, he was right.

Today the Shoshone River still performs the same miracle every summer.

An average of roughly 670 million gallons of water flows downstream each day from the mountains. Snow that falls near Yellowstone eventually nourishes fields around Cody, Powell, Byron and Lovell before continuing into the Big Horn River, the Yellowstone River and ultimately the Missouri.

Most residents driving across the Basin scarcely notice the river anymore. The green fields, thriving farms and irrigation canals have become part of the landscape.

Yet it is worth remembering that none of it was inevitable.

A little more than a century ago much of this country was dry sagebrush. The river itself was known chiefly for its unpleasant smell. What changed was not the water but what people learned to do with it.

The river formerly known as the Stinking Water became the Shoshone River. More importantly, it became the river that transformed a desert into a garden.

Not bad for a stream once compared to a dead steer.