WILLIAM FREDERICK “BUFFALO BILL” CODY (1846-1917)
By Dale L. Walker

THE AMERICAN WEST as we know it had not yet been defined geographically when the man who would become “Buffalo Bill” was born. He was a child on an Iowa farm when the war with Mexico and settlement of the Oregon country extended the bound-aries of the United States to the Pacific Ocean. Nor was the West understood. There were no dependable maps, trails westward were still being broken by mountain men and pioneers, and the Indians who inhabited the lands for millennia were being shoved aside. Even when he died, in the midst of the First World War, when railroads and telegraph wires had “opened” it, the West remained a mysterious hinterland to most of the American populace.

For more than 40 years of his own lifetime, Buffalo Bill Cody defined the West. The myths—actually half-truths—he enacted through his fabulous “Wild West” shows and through the example of his life, changed America’s and the world’s perception of the frontier beyond the Mississippi: He taught his audiences that it was a place so filled with romance, adventure, and danger, a place so big and glorious, that it was impossible to separate truth from myth.

Few men knew the West from experience better than William Frederick Cody, born near Le Claire, Iowa, on February 26, 1846.

He began his career before his teens as a wagon train messenger, teamster, miner, and trapper. At age 15 he rode with the Pony Express and thereafter served in the Kansas Cavalry in the Civil War, and received his celebrated “Buffalo Bill” moniker when he was hired to supply meat for Union Pacific track gangs. (He later estimated that he killed 4,280 buffalo in the 18 months of this employment.)

More importantly, he became Chief of Scouts for the U.S. Cavalry, took part in at least seven Indian battles, and in 1872 was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his gallantry in Indian campaigns.

In 1867, Cody had a fateful encounter with a New York writer of dime novels named Edward Z.C. Judson, best known by his pen name, “Ned Buntline.” Judson spent some time with Cody after which he returned home to write the first of a string of hair-raising adventures about his newfound hero. Five years later, Cody made his show business debut in Buntline’s melodrama, The Scouts of the Prairies, and by the time the first season ended in New York, had earned $6,000, money he needed for his growing family.

“Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” opened on July 4, 1882, in North Platte, Neb., and over its spectacular 25-year run traveled the United States and toured Europe four times. The show introduced the American West to people who had never been there and had little hope of going, and every act had a grain or more of truth behind it. Among the standard fare were a Pony Express race, a stagecoach chased by bandits, an enactment of Custer’s Last Stand, Indian attacks on covered wagons—all with a terrific amount of livestock—horses, mules, and buffalo—coursing around the arena.

Added to these dust- and hair-raising acts were appearances by such frontier notables as Cody’s friend, Chief Sitting Bull, and markswoman Annie Oakley (called “Little Sure Shot” by Sitting Bull); and, always in the finale, the appearance of Buffalo Bill himself, that bigger-than-life figure racing his white mare around the circle, waving his wide-brimmed hat, bowing to the audience.

By the end of his life he had gone through several fortunes, making bad investments and trusting too many people. Annie Oakley, who adored him, said, “He was totally unable to resist any claim for assistance... or refuse any mortal in distress.”

Denver newspaperman Gene Fowler said he “lived with the world at his feet and died with it on his shoulders.”

When he died on January 10, 1917, and was buried on Lookout Mountain above Denver, 18,000 people were in attendance.

Dale L. Walker is a regular contributor to American Cowboy on historical subjects and is past president of the Western Writers of America. He is author of The Boys of ’98, an account of Theodore Roosevelt’s military career in the Spanish-American War, a subject treated in brief in the piece that follows.

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