Jim Gatchell Memorial Museum, Local history museum in Buffalo, Wyoming.

The Jim Gatchell Memorial Museum in Buffalo, Wyoming tells the story of Johnson County through objects from daily life, conflict, and trade. The building itself was constructed in 1909 as a Carnegie Library with rough stone walls, Norman-style columns, and a semicircular apse at its heart.

The building opened in 1909 as Buffalo's Carnegie Public Library, funded by a $12,500 grant from Andrew Carnegie on land donated from the Johnson County Courthouse grounds. The library occupied it until the late 1980s, when the Jim Gatchell Memorial Museum, founded in 1957, acquired and moved into the structure.

The museum's name honors pharmacist Jim Gatchell, whose Buffalo drugstore drew settlers, cowboys, Indigenous people and soldiers. Many gave him personal objects, which became the collection's core. Today the dioramas recreate the Wagon Box Fight, the Johnson County War, the siege at the TA Ranch and Buffalo's Main Street in 1894.

The museum occupies the 1909 Carnegie Library next to the Johnson County Courthouse, so it is an easy walk from downtown Buffalo. Inside, a raised main floor and a large basement level hold the galleries. The grounds include a two-room furnished log cabin, so allow time to see both the building and the cabin.

The museum holds several traditional medicine bags and clothing items from Indigenous communities that were originally given to the pharmacist as gifts. These personal objects are now rare, showing how different cultures knew and traded with one another in this frontier setting.