Buffalo Bill
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For other uses, see Buffalo Bill (disambiguation) and Buffalo Bills (disambiguation).
"Bill Cody" redirects here. For other uses, see Bill Cody (disambiguation).
| Buffalo Bill | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | William Frederick Cody February 26, 1846 Le Claire, Iowa, U.S. |
| Died | January 10, 1917 (aged 70) Denver, Colorado, U.S. |
Cause of death
| Kidney failure |
Resting place
| Lookout Mountain, Golden, Colorado 39°43′57″N 105°14′17″W |
| Other names | Buffalo Bill Cody |
| Occupation | Army scout, Pony Express rider, ranch hand, wagon train driver, buffalo hunter, fur trapper, gold prospector, showman |
| Known for | Buffalo Bill Wild West shows which provided education and entertainment about bronco riding, handling bovine and equine livestock, roping, and other herdsmen skills seen in present day rodeos |
| Spouse(s) | Louisa Frederici (1843–1921) (m. 1866–1917) |
| Children |
|
| Parents |
|
| Awards | Medal of Honor |
| Signature |  |
William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody (February 26, 1846 – January 10, 1917) was an American scout, bison hunter, and showman. He was born in the Iowa Territory(now the U.S. state of Iowa), in Le Claire but he grew up for several years in his father's hometown in Canada before his family moved to the Kansas Territory.
Buffalo Bill started working at the age of eleven after his father's death, and became a rider for the Pony Express at age 14. During the American Civil War, he served from 1863 to the end of the war in 1865. Later he served as a civilian scout to the US Army during the Indian Wars, receiving the Medal of Honor in 1872.
One of the most colorful figures of the American Old West, Buffalo Bill started performing in shows that displayed cowboy themes and episodes from the frontier and Indian Wars. He founded his Buffalo Bill's Wild West in 1883, taking his large company on tours throughout the United States and, beginning in 1887, in Great Britain and Europe.
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[hide]Nickname and work[edit]
William Frederick Cody ("Buffalo Bill") got his nickname after the American Civil War when he had a contract to supply Kansas Pacific Railroad workers with buffalomeat.[1] Cody is purported to have killed 4,282 American bison (commonly known as buffalo) in eighteen months, (1867–1868).[2] Cody and hunter William Comstock competed in an eight-hour[3] buffalo-shooting match over the exclusive right to use the name, in which Cody won by killing 68 bison to Comstock's 48.[4] Comstock, partCheyenne and a noted hunter, scout, and interpreter, used a fast-shooting Henry repeating rifle, while Cody competed with a larger-caliber Springfield Model 1863, which he called Lucretia Borgia after legendary beautiful, ruthless Italian noblewoman, the subject of a popular contemporary Victor Hugo play of the same name. Cody explained that while his formidable opponent, Comstock, chased after his buffalo, engaging from the rear of the herd and leaving a trail of killed buffalo "scattered over a distance of three miles", Cody - likening his strategy to a billiards player "nursing" his billiard balls during "a big run" - first rode his horse to the front of the herd to target the leaders, forcing the followers to one side, eventually causing them to circle and create an easy target, dropping them close together.[5]
Cody had documented service as a soldier during the Civil War and as Chief of Scouts for the Third Cavalry during the Plains Wars. He claimed to have had many jobs, including as a trapper, bullwhacker, "Fifty-Niner" in Colorado, a Pony Express rider in 1860, wagonmaster, stagecoach driver, and a hotel manager, but historians have since had difficulty documenting them. He may have fabricated some for publicity.[6]
Cody became world famous for his Wild West Shows, which toured in Great Britain and Europe. Audiences were enthusiastic about seeing a piece of the American West.[7] Emilio Salgari, a noted Italian writer of adventure stories, met Buffalo Bill when he came to Italy and saw his show; Salgari later featured Cody as a hero in some of his novels.
Early life and education[edit]
William Frederick Cody was born on February 26, 1846 on a farm just outside Le Claire, Iowa.[8] His father Isaac was born in Toronto Township, Upper Canada (now Ontario), on September 5, 1811. Mary Ann Bonsell Laycock, Cody's mother, was born about 1817 in New Jersey, near Philadelphia. After Mary Laycock moved to Cincinnati to teach school, she met and married Isaac Cody. She was a descendant of Josiah Bunting, a Quaker who had settled in Pennsylvania. There is no historical evidence to indicate Buffalo Bill was raised as a Quaker.[9] In 1847 the couple moved to Ontario, having their son baptized in 1847, as William Cody, at the Dixie Union Chapel in Peel County (present-day Peel Region), not far from his father's family's farm. The Chapel was built with Cody money, and the land was donated by Philip Cody of Toronto Township.[10]They lived in Ontario for several years.
In 1853, Isaac Cody sold his land in rural Scott County, Iowa for $2000, and he and his family moved to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas Territory.[8] In these years before the Civil War, Kansas was overtaken by political and physical conflict related to the slavery question. Isaac Cody was against slavery. He was invited to speak at Rively's store, a local trading post where pro-slavery men often held meetings. His antislavery speech so angered the crowd that they threatened to kill him if he didn't step down. One man jumped up and stabbed Cody twice with a bowie knife. Rively, the store's owner, rushed Isaac Cody to get treatment, but he never fully recovered from his injuries.
In Kansas, the family was frequently persecuted by pro-slavery supporters. Cody's father spent time away from home for his own safety. His enemies learned of a planned visit to his family and plotted to kill him on the way. The young Cody, despite his youth and being ill at the time, rode 30 miles (48 km) to warn his father. Cody's father went toCleveland, Ohio to organize a colony of thirty families to bring back to Kansas, in order to add to the anti-slavery population. During his return trip he caught a respiratory infection which, compounded by the lingering effects of his stabbing and complications from kidney disease, led to Isaac Cody's death in April 1857.[11][12]
After the father's death, the Cody family suffered financially. At age 11, Bill Cody took a job with a freight carrier as a "boy extra." On horseback he would ride up and down the length of a wagon train, and deliver messages between the drivers and workmen. Next he joined Johnston's Army as an unofficial member of the scouts assigned to guide the United States Army to Utah, to put down a rumored rebellion by the Mormon population of Salt Lake City.[12]
According to Cody's account in Buffalo Bill's Own Story, the Utah War was where he first began his career as an "Indian fighter"[page needed]:
At the age of 14, in 1860 Cody was struck by gold fever, with news of gold at Fort Colville, Idaho and the Holcomb Valley Gold Rush in California,[13] but on his way to the gold fields, he met an agent for the Pony Express. He signed with them, and after building several stations and corrals, Cody was given a job as a rider. He worked at this until he was called home to his sick mother's bedside.[2]
Cody was active in the concordant bodies of Freemasonry, fraternal organization, being initiated in Platte Valley Lodge No. 32, North Platte, Nebraska, on March 5, 1870. He received his 2nd and 3rd degrees on April 2, 1870, and January 10, 1871, respectively. He became a Knight Templar in 1889 and received his 32nd degree in Scottish Rite of Freemasonry in 1894.[14][15]
Military service[edit]
After his mother recovered, Cody wanted to enlist as a soldier in the Union Army during the American Civil War, but was refused because of his young age. He began working with a United States freight caravan that delivered supplies to Fort Laramie in present-day Wyoming. In 1863 at age 17, he enlisted as a teamster with the rank of Private in Company H, 7th Kansas Cavalry and served until discharged in 1865.[2][12]
The next year Cody married Louisa Frederici. They had four children together. Two died young when the family was living in Rochester, New York. They and a third child are buried in Mount Hope Cemetery, in the City of Rochester.[16]
From 1868 until 1872, Cody was employed as a scout by the United States Army. Part of the time he scouted for Indians; at other times, he hunted and killed bison to supply the Army and the Kansas Pacific Railroad. In January 1872, Cody was a scout for Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich of Russia's highly publicized royal hunt.[17]
Buffalo Bill's Wild West[edit]
In December 1872, Cody traveled to Chicago to make his stage debut with friend Texas Jack Omohundro in The Scouts of the Prairie, one of the original Wild West shows produced by Ned Buntline.[18] During the 1873–1874 season, Cody and Omohundro invited their friend James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok to join them in a new play called Scouts of the Plains.[19]
The troupe toured for ten years. Cody's part typically included an 1876 incident at the Warbonnet Creek, where he claimed to havescalped a Cheyenne warrior.[20]
In 1883, in the area of North Platte, Nebraska, Cody founded "Buffalo Bill's Wild West", a circus-like attraction that toured annually.[6](Despite popular misconception, the word "show" was not a part of the title.)[7] With his show, Cody traveled throughout the United States and Europe and made many contacts. He stayed, for instance, in Garden City, Kansas, in the presidential suite of the former Windsor Hotel. He was befriended by the mayor and state representative, a frontier scout, rancher, and hunter named Charles "Buffalo" Jones.[21]
In 1893, Cody changed the title to "Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World". The show began with a parade on horseback, with participants from horse-culture groups that included US and other military, American Indians, and performers from all over the world in their best attire.[6] Turks, Gauchos, Arabs, Mongols andGeorgians, displayed their distinctive horses and colorful costumes. Visitors would see main events, feats of skill, staged races, and sideshows. Many historical western figures participated in the show. For example, Sitting Bull appeared with a band of 20 of his braves.
Cody's headline performers were well known in their own right. People such as Annie Oakley and her husband Frank Butler did sharp shooting, together with the likes ofGabriel Dumont, not to mention Lillian Smith. Performers re-enacted the riding of the Pony Express, Indian attacks on wagon trains, and stagecoach robberies. The show was said to end with a re-enactment of Custer's Last Stand, in which Cody portrayed General Custer, but this is more legend than fact. The finale was typically a portrayal of an Indian attack on a settler's cabin. Cody would ride in with an entourage of cowboys to defend a settler and his family. This finale was featured predominantly as early as 1886, but vanished after 1907; in total, it was used in 23 of 33 tours.[22] Another celebrity appearing on the show was Calamity Jane, as a storyteller as of 1893. The show influenced many 20th-century portrayals of "the West" in cinema and literature.[7]
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With his profits, Cody purchased a 4,000-acre (16 km2) ranch near North Platte, Nebraska, in 1886. Scout's Rest Ranch included an eighteen-room mansion and a large barn for winter storage of the show's livestock.
In 1887, Cody took the show to Great Britain in celebration of the Jubilee year of Queen Victoria. Queen Victoria attended a performance.[6] It played in London before going on to Birmingham and Salford near Manchester, where it stayed for five months.[23]
In 1889, the show toured Europe, and in 1890 Cody met Pope Leo XIII. On 8 March 1890, a competition took place. Buffalo Bill had met some of the Italian "butteri" (a less-well known sort of Italian equivalent of cowboys) and said his men were more skilled at roping calves and performing other similar actions. A group of Buffalo Bill's men challenged nine butteri, led by Augusto Imperiali, at Prati di Castello, near Rome. The Italian butteri easily won the competition. Augusto Imperiali became a sort of local hero after the event: a street and a monument were dedicated to him in his home town (Cisterna di Latina), and in the 1920s and 1930s, he was featured as the hero in a series of comic strips.
Cody set up an independent exhibition near the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, which greatly contributed to his popularity in the United States.[6] It vexed the promoters of the fair, who had first rejected his request to participate.[citation needed].
On October 29, 1901 outside Lexington, North Carolina, a freight train crashed into one unit of the train carrying Buffalo Bill's show from Charlotte, North Carolina to Danville, Virginia. The freight train's engineer had thought that the entire show train had passed, not realizing it was three units, and returned to the tracks. 110 horses were killed by the accident or had to be put down later. These included "Old Pap" and "Old Eagle". No people were killed but Annie Oakley's injuries were so severe that she was told she would never walk again. She did recover and continued performing later. The incident put the show out of business for a while and the major disruption may have led to its eventual demise.[24]
In 1908, Pawnee Bill and Buffalo Bill joined forces and created the "Two Bills" show. That show was foreclosed on when it was playing in Denver, Colorado.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Tours Europe[edit]
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West toured Europe eight times, the first four tours between 1887 and 1892, and the last four from 1902 to 1906.[25]
The Wild West first went to London in 1887 as part of the American Exhibition,[26] which coincided with the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria. The Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, requested a private preview of the Wild West performance; he was impressed enough to arrange a command performance for Queen Victoria. The Queen enjoyed the show and meeting the performers, setting the stage for another command performance on June 20, 1887 for her Jubilee guests. Royalty from all over Europe attended, including the future Kaiser Wilhelm II and future King George V.[27] These royal encounters provided Buffalo Bill’s Wild West an endorsement and publicity that ensured its success. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West closed its successful London run in October 1887 after more than 300 performances, with more than 2.5 million tickets sold.[28] The tour made stops in Birmingham and Manchester before returning to the U.S. in May 1888 for a short summer tour.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West returned to Europe in May 1889 as part of the Exposition Universelle in Paris, France, an event that commemorated the 100th anniversary of theStorming of the Bastille and featured the debut of the Eiffel Tower.[29] The tour moved to the South of France and Barcelona, Spain, then on to Italy. While in Rome, a Wild West delegation was received by Pope Leo XIII.[30] Buffalo Bill was disappointed that the condition of the Colosseum did not allow it to be a venue; however, at Verona, the Wild West did perform in the ancient Roman amphitheater.[31] The tour finished with stops in Austria-Hungary and Germany.
The Wild West tour returned to Germany in 1891; it toured cities in Belgium and the Netherlands before returning to Great Britain to close the season. Cody depended on a number of staff to manage arrangements for touring with the large and complex show: in 1891 Major Burke was the general manager for the Buffalo Bill Wild West Company; William Laugan (sic), supply agent; George C. Crager, Sioux interpreter, considered leader of relations with the Indians; and John Shangren, a native interpreter.[32]
The show's 1892 tour was confined to Great Britain; it featured another command performance for Queen Victoria. The tour finished with a six-month run in London before leaving Europe for nearly a decade.[33]
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West returned to Europe in December 1902 with a fourteen-week run in London, capped by a visit from King Edward VII and the future King George V. The Wild West traveled throughout Great Britain during the 1902-03 tour as well as the 1904 tour, performing in nearly every city large enough to support it.[34] The 1905 tour began in April with a two-month run in Paris before moving into the rest of France, where it performed mostly one-night stands, concluding in December. The final tour of 1906 began in France on March 4, and quickly moved on to Italy for two months. The Wild West traveled east: performing in Austria, the Balkans, Hungary, Romania, and the Ukraine, before returning west to tour in Poland, Bohemia (later Czech Republic), Germany, and Belgium.[35]
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was enormously successful in Europe, making Buffalo Bill an international celebrity and an American icon.[36] Mark Twain commented, "…It is often said on the other side of the water that none of the exhibitions which we send to England are purely and distinctly American. If you will take the Wild West show over there you can remove that reproach."[37] The Wild West brought an exotic foreign world to life for its European audiences, allowing a last glimpse at the fading American frontier.
Several members of the Wild West show died of accidents or disease during these tours in Europe:
- Surrounded by the Enemy {Oglala Lakota} b. 1865-d. December 1887, from a lung infection. His remains were buried at Brompton Cemetery.[32] Little Chief and Good Robe's one-year-old son Red Penny had died four months earlier. He was buried in that same cemetery.
- Paul Eagle Star {Brulé Lakota} b.1864-d. August 24, 1891 in Sheffield, from tetanus and complications due to his horse falling on him and breaking his leg. He was buried in Brompton Cemetery.[32] His remains were exhumed in March 1999 and transported to South Dakota's Rosebud Indian Reservation by his two grandchildren, Moses and Lucy Eagle Star II. Eagle Star's reburial occurred in Rosebud's Lakota cemetery two months later.
- Long Wolf {Oglala Lakota} b. 1833-d. June 11, 1892 from pneumonia; originally buried in Brompton Cemetery. His remains were exhumed and transported to South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in September 1997 by descendants including his great-grandson, John Black Feather.[38] Long Wolf's reburial occurred at Saint Ann's Cemetery in Denby.
- White Star Ghost Dog {Oglala Lakota} b.1890-d. August 17, 1892, from a horse riding accident; originally buried in Brompton Cemetery. Her remains were exhumed and transported to South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in September 1997 along with those of Long Wolf. Her reburial occurred at Saint Ann's Cemetery in Denby
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