10 Classic Wyoming Dive Bars Still Worth the Stop
From the Mint Bar's neon sign in Sheridan to the cherrywood back-bar at the Irma in Cody, the working short list of Wyoming saloons that have outlasted three generations of fads.
Wyoming has more bars than people in a few of its smaller counties, which is a useful piece of context before judging the state’s drinking culture. The bar is the de facto town hall in places where the actual town hall is a Quonset hut with a single-line agenda. Some of these saloons have been in continuous operation since territorial days. A few still serve the actual cattlemen and outfitters whose grandfathers carved their initials into the back-bar.
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. Verified open as of April 2026; rural Wyoming bars do change hands, so call ahead before driving any distance.
1. The Mint Bar, Sheridan
Where: 151 N. Main Street, Sheridan. Heart of downtown, half a block from King’s Saddlery.
The story: Opened in 1907. The current building dates to 1948, when the present neon sign was installed and the back-bar was rebuilt with cattle brands burned into the wood. The brands belong to actual ranches in the Powder River Basin and Bighorn foothills, dozens of them, many of which are still working ranches a century later. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991.
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: Opened in 1880. The most-cited “oldest continuously operating bar in Wyoming.” Owen Wister wrote part of The Virginian in the hotel; Theodore Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway both stayed at the Occidental; Butch Cassidy reportedly visited. The wood floor still shows the bullet holes, real ones, from a series of 1880s shootings the bar has documented and now points out with small framed cards.
What you will see: The original cherrywood back-bar (still in service), pressed-tin ceiling, gas-lamp fixtures converted to electric. The Occidental survived the cattle-baron era, the Johnson County War, the railroad bypass, Prohibition (with various creative arrangements), and the long quiet decades when Buffalo was a town nobody outside Wyoming had heard of.
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. The cherrywood back-bar was a gift from Queen Victoria to Cody after his Wild West show performed in London for her Diamond Jubilee in 1887. Shipped from England, freighted by rail and wagon to Cody, installed in the hotel’s saloon. Still in continuous use 124 years later.
What you will see: A back-bar that is genuinely one-of-a-kind in the United States, hand-carved European cherrywood at a scale you would not expect to find in a Wyoming hotel saloon. The Irma serves food and drinks all day; the saloon proper is busiest after the nightly summer “Cody Gunfighter Shoot-Out” in front of the hotel (free, runs Memorial Day through late September).
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: A saloon has occupied the corner since the 1890s; the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar in its current form opened in 1937. The signature feature is the bar stools, actual western saddles mounted on swivel posts. The “Million Dollar” name comes from a period when management set silver dollars into the wood (similar to the Wort Hotel’s Silver Dollar Bar, see below). The bar is the most-photographed interior in Jackson and possibly in the state.
What you will see: Tourists from every country, sitting on saddles, holding their phones. Live country music most nights in summer. A second-floor steakhouse (the Million Dollar Cowboy Steakhouse) is connected via a back staircase if you need dinner.
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 because there is no other bar in the country with saddle stools at this scale, and the building is genuinely on the National Register.
5. The Silver Dollar Bar, Jackson
Where: 50 N. Glenwood Street, Jackson, inside the Wort Hotel.
The story: Opened in 1950 with 2,032 silver dollars set into the bar top. The dollars are still there (verifiable, you can count a section if you want), embedded in the polished wood and visible through the protective layer. The Wort Hotel itself opened in 1941 and survived a 1980 fire that gutted the upper floors, with the Silver Dollar Bar on the ground floor mostly intact.
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: A roadhouse on the Jackson-to-Idaho stage route since the 1940s, the Stagecoach is most famous for the “Stagecoach Band,” which played every Sunday night for over 50 years (1969 to 2020). The Sunday tradition continues with rotating performers, and “Stagecoach Sunday” remains a thing locals will drive in for. Hank Williams Jr. is among the better-known musicians who have sat in.
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. Sunday band starts around 6 PM.
7. The Buckhorn Bar, Laramie
Where: 114 Ivinson Avenue, Laramie, in the historic downtown.
The story: Opened in 1900. Original tin ceiling. The back-bar mirror still has a bullet hole in it from a 1971 shooting (the round went through the mirror and into the wall behind; the hole is preserved and pointed out as part of the bar’s tour-of-itself). 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 for a Wyoming town of 32,000. 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: 119 E. Ramshorn Street, Dubois, about 90 minutes northwest of Lander on the way to Jackson via Togwotee Pass.
The story: Opened in 1933, the year Prohibition ended. The bar is built almost entirely from local pine logs, with elk antler chandeliers (real, gathered from local sheds), and a back-bar that has served three generations of Dubois ranch hands, dude-ranch wranglers, and Forest Service crews. The town of Dubois has under 1,000 people; the Rustic Pine is one of about three places in town that is open after dark, and the only one with a serious bar.
What you will see: Antlers, log walls, a wood stove, a pool table, taxidermy. The crowd is local on weeknights and a mix of local-and-tourist on weekends in summer. The town’s annual Square Dance Festival uses the bar as its informal headquarters.
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 has been in continuous operation in some form since 1893. Local lore (less verified than usually claimed) places Butch Cassidy at the bar before his Hole-in-the-Wall years; what is documented is that Cassidy was active in the area between 1893 and 1896 and that the bar was open then.
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.
10. The Outlaw Saloon, Cheyenne
Where: 312 S. Greeley Highway, Cheyenne, south of downtown.
The story: A large country honky-tonk with a 6,000-square-foot dance floor, mechanical bull, and a bar that does volume. Less a “dive” in the historic sense than a working country music venue and the place visitors to Cheyenne Frontier Days end up after the rodeo. Live country acts most weekends, two-step and line-dance classes some weeknights.
What you will see: The biggest crowd in the state outside of a Frontier Days week. Cowboys, off-duty rodeo athletes, college students from the area, and the general Cheyenne post-work crowd. The venue is too big and too organized to be a true dive, but it earns inclusion as the largest and longest-running country bar in the state capital.
The drink: Beer in a plastic cup. You are here to dance and to hear music, not to evaluate the cocktail program.
A note on what did not make the list
A list this short leaves out plenty of working bars that locals will defend. The Pinedale Bar in Pinedale (a fixture of the Pinedale ranching community), the various Casper roadhouses, the Bear Trap Cafe in Riverton, the Rifleman Club bars in several smaller towns, the dozen or so Snowy Range and Bighorn cowboy bars, the Yellowstone-gateway saloons in Gardiner and West Yellowstone (technically Montana but Wyoming-adjacent). All have their case. The list above is the shortest set of bars where there is a documented historic feature, a continuous-operation lineage, or a thing you cannot find anywhere else, the entries that earn the drive.
Wyoming bars are best understood as a slow rotation. A few of these will close in the next decade, replaced by something new that may or may not be worth the stop in another fifty years. The Occidental, the Mint, and the Irma have all survived three generations of bar fads; bet on them outlasting the next three as well.
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
- 9 Wyoming hot springs you can actually soak in
Further reading
- The Occidental Hotel: A History, available at the hotel front desk in Buffalo.
- Hotels and Saloons of the Wyoming Frontier, Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office publication.
- Wyoming Travel and Tourism, “Wyoming’s Historic Bars and Saloons” (state visitor guide section, updated annually).
Frequently asked questions
What is the oldest bar in Wyoming?
Several Wyoming saloons claim continuous operation back to the 1880s. The Occidental Hotel saloon in Buffalo opened in 1880 and is the most-cited oldest continuously operating bar in the state. The Irma Hotel bar in Cody opened in 1902. The Mint Bar in Sheridan dates to 1907. All three predate Wyoming's transition from territory to early statehood-era frontier service.
What is the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar made of?
The bar stools are actual western saddles mounted on swivel posts, which is the bar's signature feature and the reason almost every visitor to Jackson has at least one photo from inside. The bar opened in its current form in 1937, though there has been a saloon on the same Town Square corner since the 1890s. The 'Million Dollar' name comes from a stretch when management actually displayed silver dollars set into the wood, similar to the Wort Hotel's Silver Dollar Bar a few blocks away.
Are Wyoming bars open 24 hours?
No. State law allows bars to serve from 6 AM to 2 AM, with most operating roughly noon to midnight or 1 AM. A handful of historic bars have shorter hours; some Saturday-only or seasonal operations run in the smaller towns. Verify hours before driving any distance, particularly outside of Jackson, Sheridan, Cheyenne, and the other larger towns.