“Anybody who came in on the railroad, there was the Johnson Hotel, the Connor Hotel, and they all had bars and restaurants too,” she said. The Buckhorn, like many other businesses in Laramie, featured an upstairs brothel until about the 1950s, Hopkins said, which is where the parlor is now. “Lots of animals are born with two heads,” she said. Hopkins told Cowboy State Daily the two-headed horse is real, not a fabrication. A number of wildlife trophies are scattered about the bar itself, as well as the walls of the bar, including the eagle that’s kept watch at the top of the bar for decades.Īmong the taxidermied specimens is an actual two-headed horse, and there is a dwarf calf. Its bar was shipped in from Ohio, and its topper was a custom job. “But it was such a railroad town, and it was known for, you know, pretty much always has been, the Wild West.”Īfter Prohibition, the bar reopened as the Buckhorn, and that’s been its name since. “I don’t know if they broke it up into sections and used it for different things during prohibition,” she said. It shows up in the earliest, about the 1911 city directory, that’s when it first shows up, and it was the Hub Bar then.”ĭuring Prohibition, the bar was shut down and may have been a cigar shop, Hopkins said. “It’s evolved over time, and it’s had a lot of different owners. “It’s claimed that it’s the oldest bar in this location in Laramie,” Hopkins told Cowboy State Daily. When Laramie was just an end-of-tracks railroad town - essentially a tent city - it had a bar inside of a tent that was in the general vicinity of the present-day Buckhorn Bar. The Buckhorn Bar & Parlor, including likely predecessors, is at least 120 years old, according to owner Mary Hopkins, and could predate Laramie itself. “I would be really sad if it didn’t continue in a way that’s similar to what it’s been, just because it’s such an interesting place.” “There’s really no place like it,” she said. Her house was also close enough that friends would walk over after the bar closed and knock on the door to see if she was home. She would use those to look inside the bar to decide if she was going to head over on a given night. It was a lot of fun.”įrancis lived across the street from the Buckhorn and kept a pair of binoculars handy. They would be, you know, just really living it up. “There was a contingent of Norwegian students who went to UW, and they would get to singing their songs really loudly in Norwegian at the Buckhorn,” she said. I wanted to be out West, and I wanted to meet some cowboys.”įrancis never saw someone do the Buckhorn Roll, but remembers how the snow piled up outside the bar like mountains, while everyone inside the bar remained warm and cozy. “So, I wanted something really different. “I had lived in Vermont my whole life, and I also went to college in Vermont,” she said. “But you know, I think that’s more of an unrealistic investment for me at this point.”įrancis, who is from Vermont, chose the University of Wyoming to study law because it would be an adventure. “I’m trying to see if I can get my friends together to buy the place,” she told Cowboy State Daily. White’s isn’t the only group of students that made a pact over beers to buy the bar if it ever went on the market. “We always used to joke about that, but $4.9 mill’s a little steep for our group,” White said. That has old schoolmates texting and calling White to say they should all buy the bar as a group. The legendary Laramie watering hole, as it happens, is for sale, listed at $4.995 million. Just another day in the life of the legendary Buckhorn Bar, the strangest cool place where White has ever been. Since then, the carpet’s been removed and steel rims added to discourage rolling down the stairs on purpose, but at that time in the late 1990s, someone doing the Buckhorn Roll was no big deal. A person would stand at the top of the parlor’s carpeted stairs and simply roll down them, all the way to the bottom. The Buckhorn Roll was once an unofficial rite of passage for many University of Wyoming students. “I was like well, OK, there’s another one who successfully completed the Buckhorn roll,” White said. “Their friend was holding the door open, and this young lady came rolling down the steps, right out onto the sidewalk.” “As we walked into the front entrance, coming out of that side entrance was somebody who was doing the Buckhorn Roll,” White said. It was the middle of a wintry, 1996 Saturday in Laramie and Jeff White was headed for the Buckhorn Bar & Parlor with a few co-workers at a restaurant just a few buildings down.
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