photo courtesy of wyotrailsandtails
Dave Walsh 18 Jan ’16
This Wonder was the starting point for a famous stage route, and a destination point for U.S. Presidents. This a Wyoming Wonder that “once was”. In its day, back before Wyoming Statehood, this Cheyenne hotel was a well-known social center. It was built in 1875 by noted caterer, Barney L. Ford, and would serve the local community as a welcome gathering spot, and travelers, as a stopping-point on their journey west.
It also became the starting place of the fabled Cheyenne-Deadwood Stage Line. Stagecoaches left from here, and Presidents stayed here. President Ulysses S. Grant spent the night the year the hotel was built, just after the Civil War. Later, in 1903, just 13 years after Wyoming became a state, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt spent three days, at the Inter-Ocean Hotel.
The name itself was a simple one, referring to its location between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The Inter-Ocean Hotel was the first hotel in America to have electric lights, and that alone attracted visitors from all over the world for 41 years, until it was gutted by fire on a sub-zero night in 1916.
The Inter-Ocean Hotel, a Wonder of Wyoming, that “once was”.