- Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody), 1916.
(1846–1917). A folk hero was created in the late 1860s when a dime novelist listened to the wild West tales of a young Indian scout. The writer was Ned Buntline (the pen name of E.Z.C. Judson), and the subject of many of his pulp stories was the bigger-than-life figure he nicknamed Buffalo Bill. The scout's legendary feats as a frontiersman rank with those of Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, and Wild Bill Hickok. (See also Western.) William Frederick Cody claimed he got his nickname for killing, by his own count, 4,280 buffalo within 17 months. After service in the American Civil War he supplied fresh buffalo meat to the laborers laying the track of the Kansas Pacific Railroad. Buffalo Bill was born on Feb. 26, 1846, in Scott County, Iowa. In 1854 his family moved to Kansas, near Fort Leavenworth. His father died when the boy was only 11. Young Cody got a job riding as messenger with supply trains. He entered school at the age of 13, but attended for just 2 1/2 months. When he was 14 he became a rider for the Pony Express. During the war Cody went on raids against Confederates and did some scouting against Indians. Early in 1864 he enlisted in the Seventh Kansas Cavalry of the Union Army. In the 1870s, as a scout and guide for the Fifth Cavalry, he acquired a reputation not only for accurate marksmanship but also for total recall of the terrain and knowledge of Indian ways. In 1872 he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his scouting, but the United States Congress withdrew the award 44 years later because he held no service rank at the time. (The medal was restored in 1989.) From 1872 to 1883 Cody was an actor in melodramas, primarily in Buntline's ‘The Scouts of the Plains'. Between seasons he conducted hunting parties in the West. He interrupted his stage career to guide cavalry in 1874 and to take part in the war with the Sioux in 1876. In that war he allegedly scalped a Cheyenne in single combat at Warbonnet Creek in Nebraska. - A poster advertises Buffalo Bill's Wild West show in 1899.
Cody was able to become a major landowner. He bought a ranch in Nebraska, and in 1895 he formed the Shoshone Land and Irrigation Company, which held hundreds of thousands of acres in northwestern Wyoming. There he founded the town of Cody, the home today of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center. The flamboyant Cody made a fortune as a showman but lost nearly all of it through unwise investments. On Jan. 10, 1917, less than four years after losing his Wild West exhibition to creditors, Buffalo Bill died in Denver. On the peak of Lookout Mountain, 20 miles (32 kilometers) from Denver, his body rests in a vault hewn from the rock. |