Buffalo Billed: Denver Looking for New Concessionaire for Pahaska Tepee

The cafe at the Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave on Lookout Mountain sold its last bison chili dog in December.

For decades, Bill Carle and his family had run the city's best souvenir store and cafe out of the circa 1921 Pahaska Tepee, a structure built by Johnny Baker, William F. Cody's adopted son, that held the original Buffalo Bill Museum until the city built a new structure in the '70s.

While that museum is still open, the Carles' lease was not renewed and the Pahaska Tepee was closed by the city at the end of the year, in order to "facilitate operational changes" and "provide access for historic preservation efforts." At the time, the city provided no timetable for those efforts, but Denver Parks & Recreation just issued an RFI for Pahaska Concession Services.

"DPR is soliciting responses from companies with the interest, capability, and financial backing to operate indigenous-focused food and beverage, retail marketplace, and cultural programming concession services at Denver Mountain Parks’ historic Pahaska facility located at Lookout Mountain Park. This is a Request for Information (RFI) only," according to the announcement. "This opportunity seeks Statements of Interest from vendors focused on providing a food and retail experience that honors and celebrates contemporary indigenous culture in keeping with the historical theme of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West traveling show."

Interested concessionaires might find inspiration in Cody's own food and retail experience: He opened the first Mexican restaurant in the country outside of Madison Square Garden in New York City, when Buffalo Bill's Wild West show was in residence there in 1886.

Thirty-one years later, Cody was buried on Lookout Mountain overlooking Denver; today his resting place is a Denver Mountain Park.

Cody's culinary history was discovered when Ask a Mexican author Gustavo Arellano was investigating his 2012 book Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America; ten years ago, Arellano joined then-Buffalo Bill museum director Steve Friesen at a Denver dinner that created a contemporary version of that Wild West menu, complete with Indigenous elements.

According to Friesen, Cody not only enjoyed serving big meals filled with local ingredients, but invited all of the performers in his shows — cowboy and Indian alike — to sit side by side and share in those meals. Now retired from the museum, Friesen went on to write his own book, Galloping Gourmet: Eating and Drinking With Buffalo Bill, which quotes one newspaper reporter's observation that “Colonel Cody displays no more care about anything than the proper feeding of horse and man.”

That line is not in the RIF, which does note that the historic facility has dropped the word "tepee"; deadline to respond is June 16.