William F. Cody
"Buffalo Bill"
1846 - 1917
 

In a life that was part legend and part fabrication, William F. Cody came to embody the spirit of the West for millions, transmuting his own experience into a national myth of frontier life that still endures today.

Born in Scott County, Iowa, in 1846, Cody grew up on the prairie. When his father died in 1857, his mother moved to Kansas, where Cody worked for a wagon-freight company as a mounted messenger and wrangler. In 1859, he tried his luck as a prospector in the Pikes Peak gold rush, and the next year, joined the Pony Express, which had advertised for "skinny, expert riders willing to risk death daily." Already a seasoned plainsman at age 14, Cody fit the bill.

During the Civil War, Cody served first as a Union scout in campaigns against the Kiowa and Comanche, then in 1863 he enlisted with the Seventh Kansas Cavalry, which saw action in Missouri and Tennessee. After the war, he married Louisa Frederici in St. Louis and continued to work for the Army as a scout and dispatch carrier, operating out of Fort Ellsworth, Kansas.

Finally, in 1867, Cody took up the trade that gave him his nickname, hunting buffalo to feed the construction crews of the Kansas Pacific Railroad. By his own count, he killed 4,280 head of buffalo in seventeen months. He is supposed to have won the name "Buffalo Bill" in an eight-hour shooting match with a hunter named William Comstock, presumably to determine which of the two Buffalo Bill’s deserved the title.

Beginning in 1868, Cody returned to his work for the Army. He was chief of scouts for the Fifth Cavalry and took part in 16 battles, including the Cheyenne defeat at Summit Springs, Colorado, in 1869. For his service over these years, he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1872, although this award was revoked in 1916 on the grounds that Cody was not a regular member of the armed forces at the time. (The award was restored posthumously in 1989).

All the while Cody was earning a reputation for skill and bravery in real life, he was also becoming a national folk hero, thanks to the exploits of his alter ego, "Buffalo Bill," in the dime novels of Ned Buntline (pen name of the writer E. Z. C. Judson). Beginning in 1869, Buntline created a Buffalo Bill who ranked with Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone and Kit Carson in the popular imagination, and who was, like them, a mixture of incredible fact and romantic fiction.

In 1872 Buntline persuaded Cody to assume this role on stage by starring in his play, The Scouts of the Plains, and though Cody was never a polished actor, he proved a natural showman, winning enthusiastic applause for his good-humored self-portrayal. Despite a falling out with Buntline, Cody remained an actor for eleven seasons, and became an author as well, producing the first edition of his autobiography in 1879 and publishing a number of his own Buffalo Bill dime novels. Eventually, there would be some 1,700 of these frontier tales, the majority written by Prentiss Ingraham.

But not even show business success could keep Cody from returning to the West. Between theater seasons, he regularly escorted rich Easterners and European nobility on Western hunting expeditions, and in 1876 he was called back to service as an army scout in the campaign that followed Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn.

On this occasion, Cody added a new chapter to his legend in a "duel" with the Cheyenne chief Yellow Hair, whom he supposedly first shot with a rifle, then stabbed in the heart and finally scalped "in about five seconds," according to his own account. Others described the encounter as hand-to-hand combat, and misreported the chief’s name as Yellow Hand. Still others said that Cody merely lifted the chief’s scalp after he had died in battle. Whatever actually occurred, Cody characteristically had the event embroidered into a melodrama--Buffalo Bill's First Scalp for Custer--for the fall theater season.

Cody’s own theatrical genius revealed itself in 1883, when he organized Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, an outdoor extravaganza that dramatized some of the most picturesque elements of frontier life: a buffalo hunt with real buffalos, an Indian attack on the Deadwood stage with real Indians, a Pony Express ride, and at the climax, a tableau presentation of Custer’s Last Stand in which some Lakota who had actually fought in the battle played a part. Half circus and half history lesson, mixing sentimentality with sensationalism, the show proved an enormous success, touring the country for three decades and playing to enthusiastic crowds across Europe.

In later years Buffalo Bill’s Wild West would star the sharpshooter Annie Oakley, the first "King of the Cowboys," Buck Taylor, and for one season, "the slayer of General Custer," Chief Sitting Bull. Cody even added an international flavor by assembling a "Congress of Rough Riders of the World" that included cossacks, lancers and other Old World cavalrymen along with the vaqueros, cowboys and Indians of the American West.

Though he was by this time almost wholly absorbed in his celebrity existence as Buffalo Bill, Cody still had a real-life reputation in the West, and in 1890 he was called back by the army once more during the Indian uprisings associated with the Ghost Dance. He came with some Indians from his troupe who proved effective peacemakers, and even traveled to Wounded Knee after the massacre to help restore order.

Cody made a fortune from his show business success and lost it to mismanagement and a weakness for dubious investment schemes. In the end, even the Wild West show itself was lost to creditors. Cody died on January 10, 1917, and is buried in a tomb blasted from solid rock at the summit of Lookout Mountain near Denver, Colorado.
 

~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~
 

The controversial, half-fictitious career of William Frederick Buffalo Bill' Cody (1846-1917), American scout and publicist, helped create the prototype "Wild West" hero.

William Cody, born in Scott County, lowa, and raised on a farm, served briefly in the Civil War. Hunting buffalo for construction crews of the Kansas Pacific Railroad, he was dubbed "Buffalo Bill" because of his proficiency. He also served as civilian scout for U.S. generals Sheridan and Carr. Though he went east to begin a stage career in 1873, he returned west in 1876 to avenge Gen. Custer's defeat. Claiming to have killed Chief Tall Bull, he later brought the Wild West indoors and toured widely with his Wild West Show. Clever publicists, like Ned Buntline, Prentiss Ingraham, and John Burke, billed him as "Prince of the Plains" and made him the hero of countless stories and novels.

Often in trouble and always in debt, Buffalo Bill toured Europe to recoup his fortunes. He became the darling of Queen Victoria's Jubilee in England and went on to France, Spain, and Italy, spreading the legend of the American West, depicting the wild yet romantic life which Europeans liked to think of as uniquely American, and paving the way for the 20th-century cowboy movie. The name Buffalo Bill was magic; in Victorian days he personified the American dream.

But triumph turned to ashes. Tired of sham hero worship, Buffalo Bill drank heavily and involved himself in many foolish liaisons. Women doted on him, but his wife wanted a divorce. Sick children sought his touch, but his only son died in his arms. Manipulated by shrewd men, he had to perform his Wild West act daily to avoid bankruptcy. Finally, disillusioned, he petitioned the Federal government for the $10 monthly Congressional Medal-holders' dole. All his dreams had become nightmares.

In 1910 Sam Goldberg released a slide series showing Buffalo Bill in action, and Harry Powers made the first moving picture of the Wild West Show, "300 thrills in 300 reels." But Bill himself was not able to utilize the new mass-media opportunities. Instead, the old man watched William S. Hart, Harry Carey, and Tom Mix fill the heroic void. When he died he was buried in Cody, Wyo.; since citizens of Denver plotted to steal the body, tons of concrete were poured over it. Thus the man whose life revolved in frantic motion had found his resting place.

Buffalo Bill epitomized a whole phase of the American western movement and the final winning of the Great West. His reputation had been contrived and half-fictitious, but to his own code and image he remained faithful.
 

~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~
 

(1846-1917), western scout and showman. Anyone interested in the history of the American West must eventually reckon with the life and legacy of William F., "Buffalo Bill," Cody. A master of show business, Cody confirmed American and European audiences in their conviction that the real West was a place of glory and adventure, an enormous space reserved for the equestrian exercises of Indians, cowboys, and outlaws.

With his buckskin outfits and sharpshooting skills, Cody was by no means a frontier fake. Born in Iowa, he moved with his family to Kansas in 1854 and, following his father's early death, began a long occupational odyssey. He worked as a messenger for the freighting firm of Russell, Majors, and Waddell; he served as a scout for the U.S. Army; he killed buffalo to feed workers on the Union Pacific Railroad; he guided celebrities on hunting expeditions; he tried his hand at mining, at ranching, and at townsite development.

In 1872, the flexible Cody added "actor" to his list of occupations, appearing on stage in a frontier melodrama in Chicago. In 1883, Cody departed from the limitations of stage plays and launched his open-air Wild West Show. For thirty years, the show toured the United States and Europe.

Featuring horses and riders in a variety of displays, the Wild West Show held equal appeal for American crowds and European royalty, with England's Queen Victoria a particular fan. Although the down-to-earth project of transporting, feeding, sheltering, outfitting, and organizing cowboys, Indians, sharpshooters, advance men, laborers, cooks, managers, horses, and even buffalo may well have been the show's most impressive feat, audiences were riveted by the evocation of another, less practical world--a world of parades, races, and reenactments of stagecoach robberies and Custer's Last Stand. Over time, the show added events and participants beyond the framework of the American West, with the staging of the Charge at San Juan Hill and the creation of the Congress of Rough Riders of the World, including Russian, French, German, British, Arab, Argentinean, Mexican, Cuban, Hawaiian, and Filipino riders.

Marketing both himself and his show, Buffalo Bill Cody traded heavily on the authentic adventures in his personal history. He had in truth been a child of the West and a genuine scout and hunter. But the necessary theatricality of the Wild West Show, the flourishes of dime novelists using Cody as their main character, and Cody's own creative habits as an embellisher of his autobiography soon made the line dividing authenticity from illusion an impossible one to trace. Accordingly, depending on the interpreter's perspective, the Wild West Show was a trick and a fraud in its distortions of western reality or an innocent diversion, of considerable mythic power, from the mounting pressures of urban industrial life.

Although the show brought in substantial revenue, Cody spent his last years in financial uncertainty, drained in particular by unwise investments in an Arizona mine. At the time of his death in Denver, his unsuccessful struggle for financial stability had forged yet another link in the chain that made Buffalo Bill Cody, both intentionally and unintentionally, a key representative of the fortunes of the American West.

JACANA HOME PAGE | CLASSIC VIDEO CLIPS | JACANA ASTRONOMY SITE

JACANA PHOTO LIBRARY | OLD MAUN PHOTO GALLERY | MAUN PHONE DIRECTORY

FREE FONTS | PIC OF THE DAY | GENERAL LIBRARY | MAP LIBRARY | TECHNICAL LIBRARY

HOUSE PLANS LIBRARY | MAUN E-MAIL, WEBSITE & SKYPE LIST | BOTSWANA GPS CO-ORDINATES 

MAUN SAFARI WEB LINKS | FREE SOFTWARE | JACANA WEATHER PAGE

  JACANA CROSSWORD LIBRARY | JACANA CARTOON PAGE | DEMOTIVATIONAL POSTERS

This web page was last updated on: 09 December, 2008