9 Classic Wyoming Dive Bars Still Worth the Stop

In a lot of Wyoming towns the bar is the de facto town hall in places where the actual town hall is a Quonset hut with a single-line agenda. A few of these saloons date to territorial days, and some still serve the ranchers and outfitters whose families have drunk there for generations.

This is the working short list. Not the longest list of every bar with a Wyoming address; the real classics, the ones with a story or a feature you cannot get anywhere else, the bars that out-of-staters keep finding their way back to. Rural Wyoming bars do change hands and close, so call ahead before driving any distance.

1. The Mint Bar, Sheridan

Where: 151 N. Main Street, Sheridan, in the heart of downtown.

The story: Opened in 1907, which makes it the oldest bar in Sheridan. Through Prohibition it posed as the Mint Cigar Company and Soda Shop, with the bar in the back room. The neon bucking-horse sign went up in 1938, and the late-1940s remodel gave the room its rustic look, with the walls covered in cedar shingles branded with thousands of Wyoming ranch brands.

What you will see: The taxidermy is honest, mostly local. The bar runs the length of the room. The booths along the south wall have hosted three generations of cowmen, World War II veterans, oil workers, and lately a steady drift of motorcycle tourists who heard about the Mint and made the drive up from Yellowstone.

The drink: Bourbon-water or a beer. The Mint is not a craft cocktail bar and has the right amount of dignity not to pretend.

2. The Occidental Saloon, Buffalo

Where: 10 N. Main Street, Buffalo, inside the Occidental Hotel.

The story: The hotel dates to 1880, and the saloon’s early years were rough enough that one visitor called it “a regular gambling hell.” Owen Wister spent hours in the lobby and saloon and based characters on the people he met there; Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover and Ernest Hemingway are on the hotel’s guest roll, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are part of its lore. Look up at the tin ceiling and you can count the bullet holes.

What you will see: The 1908 saloon, built to replace the original rough barroom: an imposing back bar with stained-glass accents and an embossed tin ceiling, all preserved and restored. The hotel closed in the mid-1980s and reopened after it was bought and restored in 1997, so it has outlasted the Johnson County War and its own near-death both.

The drink: A whiskey neat, in keeping with the room. The Occidental’s bar program is limited and good.

3. Buffalo Bill’s Irma Hotel Bar, Cody

Where: 1192 Sheridan Avenue, Cody, inside the Irma Hotel.

The story: Buffalo Bill Cody opened the Irma in 1902 and named it for his daughter. By the hotel’s own story, the French-made cherrywood back-bar was a gift from Queen Victoria for a Wild West command performance, shipped to New York, railed to Red Lodge, Montana, and freighted to Cody by wagon. Some local accounts say Cody simply bought it in France. Either way it is still in use.

What you will see: Hand-carved cherrywood at a scale you would not expect to find in a Wyoming hotel saloon. The Irma serves food and drinks all day, and in summer there is a free gunfight reenactment out front in the evenings.

The drink: A Wyoming Whiskey old-fashioned, if available. The Irma’s bartenders know the bar’s history and will tell you about it without being asked.

4. Million Dollar Cowboy Bar, Jackson

Where: 25 N. Cache Street, Jackson, on the northwest corner of Town Square.

The story: The corner’s history goes back to the late 1890s, when it held a doctor’s office and the town’s first bank. In 1937 the building became the Cowboy Bar, holder of the first Wyoming liquor license after Prohibition, and by 1940 it was the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar. The signature feature is the bar stools: saddles. Card games moved to the basement when gambling got too risky to run in plain sight.

What you will see: Tourists from every country, sitting on saddles, holding their phones. Live music Monday through Saturday nights, a DJ on Sundays.

The drink: Beer, mostly. The crowd is too large and the turnover too fast for serious cocktail work. Order what comes from a tap or a bottle.

Verdict: Touristy and proud of it. Worth one visit for the saddles alone.

5. The Silver Dollar Bar, Jackson

Where: 50 N. Glenwood Street, Jackson, inside the Wort Hotel.

The story: Built in 1950 by a German cabinetmaker, with 2,032 uncirculated Morgan silver dollars from the Denver mint set into the bar top. The dollars are still there, embedded in the polished wood. The Wort Hotel itself opened in 1941.

What you will see: A long dark room with a bar that genuinely glints when the overhead lights catch the silver. Live music several nights a week in summer; quieter in shoulder season. The Wort’s lobby and restaurant are also worth walking through.

The drink: A proper cocktail. The Silver Dollar runs a more serious bar program than the Cowboy Bar across town, and the bartenders know what they’re doing.

6. The Stagecoach Bar, Wilson

Where: 5755 W Hwy 22, Wilson, about 15 minutes west of Jackson at the base of Teton Pass.

The story: The Stagecoach is most famous for the Stagecoach Band, which played there nearly every Sunday night from February 16, 1969, for more than fifty years, until the bar’s owners ended the arrangement. Check what is on before you drive out for a Sunday.

What you will see: A long, low-ceilinged room with a back patio, a pool table, and a working-class crowd of Teton Pass commuters, ski-area employees, and visitors who heard about the Sunday tradition. Less polished than the Jackson square bars; more honest.

The drink: A pitcher of beer split with whoever you came with.

7. The Buckhorn Bar, Laramie

Where: 114 Ivinson Avenue, Laramie, in the historic downtown.

The story: Established in 1900, the oldest bar in Laramie, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places; the second floor was a brothel until the 1950s and is now the Parlor. The back-bar mirror still has a bullet hole from an early-1970s shooting, a spurned or jealous lover by every telling, though the tellings disagree on the details. The Buckhorn was a railroad-era saloon when Laramie was a Union Pacific division point, and the patron base since then has rotated through railroad workers, oil and gas crews, University of Wyoming students, and the current mix of all of the above.

What you will see: Dark wood, low light, the mirror with the hole, the long bar, a respectable selection of whiskeys, Wyoming distillers included, for a town of about 31,000. Pool tables in the back. Music depends on the night.

The drink: Whiskey, and a chance to ask the bartender for the actual story behind the bullet hole.

8. The Rustic Pine Tavern, Dubois

Where: East Ramshorn Street, Dubois, northwest of Lander on the way to Jackson via Togwotee Pass.

The story: The building went up in 1919, and for decades it hosted community meetings in its dance hall, with lodgers upstairs. The tavern still operates out of that original building. It has served generations of Dubois ranch hands, dude-ranch wranglers, and Forest Service crews in a town of under 1,000 people.

What you will see: Antlers, log walls, a pool table, taxidermy. The crowd is local on weeknights and a mix of local-and-tourist on weekends in summer.

The drink: Whiskey-water or a draft. The Rustic Pine does not pretend to be anything other than what it is, which is the working bar of an actual western ranching town.

9. The Cowboy Bar, Meeteetse

Where: 1936 State Street, Meeteetse, about 30 minutes south of Cody on Wyoming Route 120.

The story: Meeteetse is the kind of town the rest of America imagines when it imagines small-town Wyoming. Population under 350. One main street. The Cowboy Bar was built in 1893 and has operated ever since, with an 1893 back bar and bullet holes in the ceiling. Local lore puts Butch Cassidy at the bar in the 1890s, when he worked the area.

What you will see: A genuinely small-town western bar with a quarter of its trade from working ranches in the surrounding country and the rest from passersby on the Cody-Thermopolis route. The town also has a chocolate shop (Meeteetse Chocolatier) two doors down that is improbably good and worth pairing with the bar visit.

The drink: Whiskey or a beer. The Cowboy Bar serves food; the burgers are honest.

An earlier version of this list ended with the Outlaw Saloon, the honky-tonk on South Greeley Highway in Cheyenne where Frontier Days crowds went after the rodeo. It closed in December 2025 after the bank foreclosed, which is the other half of the Wyoming bar story: they do not all last.

A note on what did not make the list

A list this short leaves out plenty of working bars that locals will defend: the ranch-town bars of Pinedale, the Casper roadhouses, the Snowy Range and Bighorn cowboy bars, the Yellowstone-gateway saloons across the line in Montana. All have their case. The list above is the shortest set of bars with a documented historic feature, a long lineage, or a thing you cannot find anywhere else.

Wyoming bars are best understood as a slow rotation. Some of these will close, replaced by something new that may or may not be worth the stop in another fifty years. The Mint, the Irma and the Occidental have each come through more than a century.

Hours worth knowing

Hours of sale in Wyoming are set locally, and many towns allow 6 a.m. to 2 a.m., but few bars use all of it, and small-town spots often keep shorter or seasonal hours. That is never a problem in Jackson, Sheridan, or Cheyenne, where something is always open. It matters more in the smaller towns on this list: call ahead before driving any distance to a place like the Rustic Pine or the Cowboy Bar in Meeteetse.

Dress the part

Wyoming bar culture respects real Western dress and has no patience for costume. If you’re road-tripping to these bars, the Western dress code guide covers what reads right. A Justin basket-weave belt and clean jeans is the standard; a Tony Lama floral is appropriate for the Irma or the Occidental.

Related reading on this site

• Sheridan, Wyoming: home of King’s Saddlery
• Buffalo, Wyoming: the Occidental Hotel, the TA Ranch, and the Bighorn Front
• Cody, Wyoming: Buffalo Bill’s town and the gateway to Yellowstone
• Jackson, Wyoming: town square, Tetons, and the gateway to Yellowstone South
• Buffalo Bill Cody: a working biography
• The Johnson County War of 1892
• Cheyenne Frontier Days: a complete guide
• Wyoming hot springs you can actually soak in: fees, seasons, access

Further reading

• The Occidental’s own history pages, for the saloon and the hotel’s guest roll.
• The Wort Hotel’s history page, for the Silver Dollar Bar.
• Travel Wyoming’s feature on the state’s historic bars.