SPOTTED HORSE — Nothing is airtight in the Spotted Horse Bar and Grill anymore, and it hasn’t been for decades.

The off-the-beaten-path dive bar on the back road between Gillette and Sheridan is 101 years old, after all.

“This has been a general store, it’s been a post office, a gas station and it was once a school,” the bar’s owner, Jennifer McLaughlin, told Cowboy State Daily. “It was established in 1924, and my dad bought it in 1992.”

One of the early things McLaughlin and her dad, Jerome Schantz, did was to add what’s become the bar’s landmark spotted horse to the front of the business.

It’s one of the things that McLaughlin believes draws people into this tiny joint along Highway 14-16.

“It’s like a monument,” McLaughlin said. “When people come here, that’s the picture they all t

See Full Page