William Cody was born in Scott County, Iowa, on February 26, 1846, but in 1854 his family moved to the vicinity of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. His schooling was sporadic at best, and after his father died in 1857 he worked as a messenger and as a teamster, joined the Pikes Peak gold rush to Colorado in 1859, turned to trapping, returned to Kansas broke in 1860, and then rode for the Pony Express. When the Civil War began he joined the antislavery guerrillas called Jayhawkers, and in 1863 the Ninth Kansas
Cavalry employed him as a scout in its campaigns against the Kiowa and Comanche. Cody then volunteered for the Seventh Kansas Cavalry in early 1864 and soldiered in Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas, and Kansas. After the Civil War Cody married Louisa Frederici in St. Louis in 1866 and then returned to Kansas. From 1867 to 1868 he earned the nickname of Buffalo Bill by supplying the construction gang of the Kansas & Pacific Railroad with the meat of 12 buffalo a day. He then returned to scouting, again as a civilian employee, for the Fifth Cavalry of the U. S. Army in campaigns against the Plains Indians.
Cody’s life took a melodramatic twist in 1869 after an interview with Ned Buntline, the pseudonym of Edward Z. C. Judson, writer of DIME NOVELS. Buntline, who never let the facts get in the way of an adventurous tale, wrote Buffalo Bill: King of the Border Men, which bore no resemblance to Cody’s experiences but made him a celebrity. Exploiting the popularity of the Buffalo Bill he created, Buntline wrote the play Scouts of the Prairies, which opened in Chicago in December 1872 with Cody playing himself. Over the next decade until the 1882-83 season, Cody was on the stage playing himself in dramas that mingled facts and fiction. Cody continued to scout and risked his life on the frontier in mild weather and then acted heroic on urban stages in winters. For bravery in an April 1872 battle with NATIVE Americans, Congress awarded him the Medal of Honor (rescinded in 1916, since Cody was a civilian employee and that medal is intended for military personnel), and in July 1876 he killed Yellow Hand, the son of a Cheyenne chief, in a celebrated duel that he subsequently reenacted countless times as he toured the country. His theatrical career enabled Cody to acquire a substantial ranch in Nebraska, but his career as a scout led him to move to Wyoming. In 1894 he served as a guide for a fossil-gathering expedition
William F. (Buffalo Bill) Cody (shown standing, sixth man from the left) (Library of Congress)
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Of Professor Othniel C. Marsh in the Big Horn Basin. Cody was attracted to that area and received a substantial grant of land from Wyoming on which he developed an even more celebrated ranch.
In 1883 Cody began touring with the “Buffalo Bill Wild West Show” and continued to do so until 1912. The show re-created exciting scenes like an Indian raid on a stagecoach, celebrated the daring of Pony Express riders, and exhibited skillful riders, ropers, and marksmen. Cody himself was an expert horseman and a great shot, but the most famous marksman in the show was a woman named Annie Oakley. And Cody’s most famous celebrity was Sitting Bull, who toured with the show in 1886, just 10 years after he and the Sioux wiped out George Armstrong Custer and his command at Little Big Horn. The Wild West Show toured Europe with great success, and it was a hit at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. The show created and perpetuated myths about the West in general and about Buffalo Bill in particular, and it had an incalculable influence on how Americans have perceived cowboys and Indians and the settlement of the West. Cody died in Denver, Colorado, on January 10, 1917.
Further reading: Sarah J. Blackstone, Buckskins, Bullets, and Business: A History of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (Westport, Conn.: Brenchwood Press, 1986); Don Russell, The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960).
World History
