CODY, Wyo. — The towns that bookend the great Yellowstone and Teton parks are distinctly different.
Jackson is the SUV. Cody the RV.
Jackson has the tony Coldwater Creek clothing store. Cody has a Wal-Mart.
Jackson, at the south end of the Teton-Yellowstone corridor, is more likely to have celebrities' private planes sitting on its runway. Cody's airport is across from a Dollar Discount Store. If you are flying directly to the parks, you'll fly into one of these two towns — Cody, to the east, Jackson to the south.
Jackson is the town, Jackson Hole the area; "hole" is a western term for a high valley, in this case a 50-mile long basin. Jackson was Davey Jackson, a local trapper.
The Jackson town center is a collection of boardwalks with shops and restaurants. There's even a bagel place. Jackson is also the jumpoff point for great rafting.
The town square features a bizarre sight: arches covered with hundreds of antlers. This is where the world's only public auction of elk antlers takes place every May. Boy Scouts comb the nearby National Elk Refuge for horns discarded by maturing bulls. The Scouts sell some five tons in two hours, to be used for furniture, belt buckles, even a powder sold in Asia as an aphrodisiac.
Most of the money returns to the refuge for the following year's elk feeding program.
Cody is "Rodeo Capital of the World." The Cody Nite Rodeo — the longest running in America — has operated for 64 years, the past 25 years or so from an open-air arena on the edge of town. Riders from New Mexico, Mississippi and Saskatchewan wrestled bulls, raced steeds, dusted their thighs with their big brimmed hats as they staggered back to the gate after being tossed. Kids were invited down to try to get a ribbon off a calf's tail. The smells of popcorn, dirt and animals filled the air.
Cody was named by, and for, William Frederick Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill.
The Buffalo Bill Historical Center, housing five different museums, honors both the men who came to tame the west and the people they pushed out in the process. Cody respected the Indians and blamed their problems mostly on broken promises by the white man. But he did scalp one, and his famed Wild West Shows were responsible for not just perpetuating, but in many cases creating, the stereotypes and false images that have hounded American Indians ever since.
In the museums, exhibits and films show Americans banning the religious Sundance (this is pre-ACLU), and flooding villages out as they reroute the Missouri River, forcing nomad hunters to become sustenance farmers.
Eliot Kleinberg writes for the Palm Beach Post. E-mail: eliot—kleinberg@pbpost.com