Rudy “Butch” Stanko: The Wyoming Maverick Who Ended Montana’s No Speed Limit Era

Longtime Wyoming residents know Rudy "Butch" Stanko because he was the host of an infamous University of Wyoming kegger, because he started a bar fight outside the Buckhorn, because he was named the toughest man in Wyoming, because he ruled most poker tables that invited him to sit, and because he was big, loud and a notorious troublemaker who grew to enjoy the experience of being arrested.

Some of those who knew him in Montana remember getting passed by Butch in his purple Camaro or his turquoise Lincoln. They remember seeing him fight a 121 mph speeding violation all the way to the Montana Supreme Court.

Here was a man who, according to his first cousin Carol Presentowski Schmidt, "hated the laws." 

Yet through his obsessive legal crusade against a Montana speeding ticket, Butch accidentally created the very thing he despised most: another law. 

In fact, Rudy “Butch” Stanko — who sometimes went by “Buffalo Butch” — is the man whose heavy foot and stubborn disposition brought an end to the “Montanabahn." That’s what locals called Montana’s highways during a time when there was no speed limit. 

Then along came Butch, a libertarian with a conspiratorial mind, a cattle-auction dealmaker, stockcar racer and convicted felon. He wouldn’t let that 121 mph ticket go. 

True Stanko

The Stankos settled in Sheridan and Casper, where Polish immigrants planted their flag and their sausage-making traditions.

Butch grew up in a family of showmen, the son of a Rocky Mountain Packing Company proprietor who would eat wieners in public as "Chief Rocky Mountain" and earned his stripes as the Pacific coast amateur boxing champion during World War II.

At the University of Wyoming in the late 1960s, Butch started cultivating his larger-than-life persona. 

Every May Day, he transformed Vedauwoo — that otherworldly rock landscape just outside Laramie — into ground zero for what he called Polish May Fest.

It was, Schmidt said, "a famous kegger every year" where Butch would sell tickets, tap kegs and serve Polish sausage to anyone who wanted to party among the granite towers.

Butch took five years to graduate, maybe six, said Schmidt, but when he finally crossed that finish line, he did it in style.

"He liked to say that he slid in front of the district court judge or the city court judge in Laramie with his graduation gown and said, 'Your Honor, I am graduated,'" Schmidt said, imagining the judge's relief at seeing this particular student finally leave his jurisdiction.

But Butch's most legendary college moment came on the wrestling mat, where he faced off against Curley Culp, the celebrated wrestler and Pro Football Hall of Famer out of Arizona State.

Knowing he was outmatched, Butch "came out like a bull" prodding the mat with one foot. Then he proceeded to "run circles like a little mouse around Curley Culp," Schmidt recalled. 

"Curley’s coach just sort of looked at him. It was like the ‘Tom and Jerry’ cartoons, and the whole place was just laughing,” said Schmidt. “And then Curley Culp pinned him. He knew it was coming. He made a show of it." 

A knack for showmanship joined forces with a head for business and Butch went on to build a multimillion-dollar meat packing empire. 

But even then, the seeds of his future legal troubles were germinating.

He was, Schmidt noted, "super-smart" and "really, actually brilliant in business," but he was also quick to spin bare threads of a conspiracy into something others didn’t see. 

Cards & Cattle

By the 1980s, Butch was an accomplished cattle buyer, working the auction barns across Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska and South Dakota with a disregard for speed limits and the calculated precision of a professional poker player. 

Dan Ingalls, a rancher who became both a business partner and friend, witnessed firsthand how Butch turned every cattle sale into a high-stakes game of psychological warfare.

Their first encounter at the Billings livestock auction was vintage Butch. Ingalls was trying to buy cattle, but Butch kept outbidding him, running up prices to levels that made no economic sense. 

"He just don't let me get them," Ingalls said. "He won't let me buy anything."

Instead of backing down, Ingalls made a move that would influence the rest of his life: He crawled over the rail, clambered across the seats and sat down right next to his tormentor. 

"He didn't say a word. He didn't say nothing. He kind of looked sideways at me and kept about his business, and I just sat there right beside him,” remembered Ingalls. 

Eventually, Butch broke the silence with a simple question: "What do you want these cattle for?" 

When Ingalls mentioned his grazing allotment near Jackson Hole, Butch's ears perked up. He had stories about that country — stories that sounded like the kind of tall tales that grow in the telling. 

According to Butch, he was the man who introduced bison to the Jackson Hole area. 

"There wasn't any buffalo there. I brought them in," he claimed, insisting his bison went on to propagate around Jackson and inside Grand Teton National Park. 

Whether or not Butch’s bison actually escaped to become part of the Yellowstone buffalo herds, the story captures something essential about the man: he was always at the center of his own mythology.

In the years to come, Ingalls would drive through the night from Wyoming to make the Wednesday morning sale in Billings, arriving exhausted and ready to sleep in his pickup. Butch insisted Ingalls park at his place on Duck Creek Road near the Yellowstone River, where they would start each morning with shots of "bitter straight cranberry juice" and healthy breakfasts. 

"He ate healthy and he exercised. He worked out," Ingalls remembered. By then, the wild man of the University of Wyoming had transformed himself into something of a health nut.

Montana made a good home base. There were cattle auctions from Great Falls to Dillon to Billings. The cattle Butch purchased fed a profitable network of meat packing plants in Montana, Colorado and Nebraska. 

To no one’s surprise, Butch didn’t get along with the federal inspectors who regulate and police the meat packing industry. Depending on whose side you take, what happened in 1984 to Butch was either a set up or a win for sanitary food processing. 

To Prison

Speaking up for his father, Scott Stanko steps in to pick up the story where Butch left off with his death to cancer in 2023.

A practicing attorney, Scott Stanko told Cowboy State Daily, “There was never a dissatisfied customer or anyone that was actually harmed by any of his meat that he produced.” 

But Butch was brought up on federal charges and investigative news programs revealed some allegedly unsavory corners of his meat empire. 

Butch went to prison the first time in 1984 on conspiracy charges related to violating the federal meat inspection act.

Specifically, he accepted a plea deal for his role in selling tainted meat to a school lunch program in Montana through a Colorado company he operated.

Siding with Butch, his buddy Ingalls said, “They talked him into pleading guilty on contaminated meat. Promised him only a slap on the wrist. And then they put him in prison.”

After a six-year term, Butch returned to Montana and the cattle game. He also started winning high-profile poker tournaments while growing his blonde hair and mustache long like Buffalo Bill. 

On his high-speed drives to cattle sales, Butch started turning conspiratorial thoughts over in his mind. He’d eventually commit them to the pages of an antisemitic self-published book called “The Score,” which he wrote while on a sojourn to Australia.

The cover derogatorily featured the Star of David as part of the United States flag and offered a variety of takes on the "Jewish dynasty." 

His son Scott remembered, “It was titled that way so he could ‘settle the score’ with his competitors.”

While in prison, Butch spent a lot of time in the law library, where he cognitively benchpressed statutes and decisions. After his release, and back out on Montana’s highways, Butch carried a Jedi-master’s knowledge of the state’s traffic laws wherever he sped. 

He figured the Montana Highway Patrol was onto him. They knew he needed to get to cattle auctions in a hurry, or so he told himself and those around him. 

Purple Camaro

By the mid-1990s, Montana had entered what would later be remembered as the Montanabahn era — those wild years when the daytime speed limit was merely "reasonable and prudent," leaving interpretation entirely up to individual drivers and the highway patrol officers who had to police them. 

Whereas Wyoming was the first state in the nation to increase its speed limit to 75 mph in 1995 after Congress repealed a federal mandate that had restricted speed limits to 55 mph nationwide, Montana chose not to create a hard and fast limit.

For most drivers, this meant traveling at least 80 mph. For Butch, it meant breaking 100 mph. 

"The state patrol knew he was coming back from the Great Falls cattle sale and were waiting, ready to ambush him,” Scott said. 

It was 1996. The driving conditions were built for speed. 

He had "one of them hot Camaros with the big motor," said Ingalls, describing the purple hotrod tearing up the highway. 

Ingalls heard the story many times: "'Butch told me, he says, ‘I come by there and it's a clear day. Wide road with a wide shoulder. Brand new pavement. Not a car in sight and not a breath of wind.'”

That’s when Butch said he blew right past the highway patrolman waiting for him. 

After pulling over, Butch delivered one of the great lines in the annals of American traffic stops. 

As Ingalls told it: "The guy comes right out there and he said, 'You were speeding.' And he pointed his finger in his face. And Rudy said, 'No, sir, you were speeding.’ He said, ‘This car is designed to do 160 miles an hour. Look it up. You were the one speeding, not me.'"

The officer's response: arrest. 

For Butch, the cuffs going on equaled an opening bet at the card table. This time, Butch was all in. 

Accidental Lawmaker

What happened next was pure Butch Stanko: instead of paying the fine and moving on like any reasonable person, he decided to take the entire state of Montana to school on constitutional law. 

Representing himself, he appealed the case through every level of the state court system, armed with legal knowledge he had acquired during his previous stint in federal prison and a briefcase full of what his son described as "stock car racing trophies as evidence."

The case that reached the Montana Supreme Court in 1998 was about more than speeding. It was about the fundamental question of what constitutes a law in America, Butch argued. 

He declared that "reasonable and prudent" was too vague a test to be constitutional. A former stock car driver in a Chevy Camaro doing 121 mph on an empty highway sounded reasonable to Butch, who singlehandedly forced the state of Montana to confront the reality of the Montanabahn. 

How fast is reasonable? What constitutes prudent? 

"I asked a cop how fast I could go and he never gave me an answer," Butch told reporters after the ruling. "They said it's up to the discretion of the cop and that ain't right."

In a 4-3 decision in 1998 that sent shockwaves through the transportation law community, the Montana Supreme Court agreed. 

The "reasonable and prudent" standard, they ruled, was unconstitutionally vague, violating due process rights because it left too much discretion to individual officers.

The ruling didn't just overturn Butch's conviction — it invalidated Montana's entire approach to speed regulation. 

Within months, the Montana Legislature was forced to enact numerical speed limits, ending forever the brief, glorious era when Montana highways were the last refuge of unbridled highway speeds. 

Arrested For Fun

When Butch died a couple years ago at 76, his son Scott had lots of material to work with when preparing the obituary. 

There was the scene in Casper when Butch punched his way to the “Toughest Man In Wyoming” title. Or how about that summer he took his kids up to Ingalls’s cattle range around Two Ocean Mountain. And then all that mischief as a college kid in Laramie. 

His obituary, written with the kind of mythmaking flair Butch would have appreciated, called him "a true original" who "blazed his own trail through the West." 

“In his later life, at 68 years old, he set an American weightlifting record with a 391-pound bench press, and became a champion poker player in Deadwood, S.D.,” wrote Scott, who followed his father into the world of professional poker. 

“He never compromised on doing it his own way,” continued the obituary. 

That meant wrestling and fist-fighting big guys like himself. It also meant grappling to his heart’s delight with any authority attempting to impinge on his rights. 

As his friend Dan Ingalls remembered, someone’s worst day with the cops was like Christmas morning for Rudy. 

He called Ingalls once from jail in Hot Springs, South Dakota. He’d been tossed in a cell for speeding. 

Ingalls remembered, "And he says, ‘You can't believe what happened to me. I'm so excited.’ He says, ‘I got picked up, put me in jail for the weekend. It got to be the most fun thing I've done in years.’ And he was so dang excited. You know, like a kid and they just inherited a candy store.”

From a jailhouse phone in South Dakota, Butch spelled out his legal strategy, “This is the deal. This is going to be so much fun.”

David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.