The land that would become the Heart Mountain War Relocation Center was originally part of the Shoshone Project, an irrigation project under the auspices of the Bureau of Reclamation. In 1897, of land surrounding the Shoshone River in northwestern Wyoming was purchased by William Buffalo Bill Cody and Nate Salisbury, who in May 1899 acquired water rights to irrigate surrounding Cody, Wyoming. After the project proved too costly for the original investors, the Wyoming State Board of Land Commissioners petitioned the federal government to take it over. The rights for the Cody-Salisbury tract were transferred to the Secretary of the Interior in 1904 and the Shoshone Project was approved later that year as one of the earliest Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) projects.