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| The monument without the grave in Cody, Wyoming. |
Note: Once
again this is a post that ran away with me.
Too late to get it up yesterday, I am posting it a day late.
On
January 10, 1917 a family gathered around the bed of a dying man in Denver, Colorado. His health had been failing for some time and
he was in great pain from renal failure. His great mane of white hair was soaked with
sweat. The day before a Catholic priest with whom he had become
friendly was called to the bedside and the 70 year old allowed himself to be baptized into the church and receive the
Last Rights. When the old plainsman, soldier, hunter, scout, and showman drew his last breath it was international news. Buffalo
Bill was dead. Coincidently so was
the man named William Fredrick Cody.
The
funeral arrangements for such an illustrious figure—at the turn of the 20th Century he had been said to be, “the
most recognizable human being on earth”—could hardly be simple. Telegrams of condolences poured into the home
of his sister, Mary Decker where his
wife Louisa, daughter Irma, and other sisters had gathered
from the likes of President Woodrow
Wilson, German Kaiser Wilhelm II,
members of the British Royal family,
and children who had to scrape together carefully counted pennies to pay for
each word.
One
of the largest assembly spaced in Denver, the Elks Lodge Hall had to be secured for the funeral which was
attended by thousands far overflowing the building’s capacity and into the
street. Despite the death bed conversion
the service was not a funeral mass, but
a Masonic ritual. The deceased had been an active Mason since
1870 and achieved his 32nd Degree in the Scottish
Rite in 1895. Wyoming Governor John B. Kendrick led the funeral procession which
included military honor guards,
veteran performers from his famous Wild
West shows, and contingents of Native
Americans. The procession ended at a
cemetery where the body was temporarily interred.
More
permanent arrangements were somewhat controversial. Bill had designated Cody, Wyoming, the town he founded on the Shoshone River as the western
gate way to Yellowstone Park, as
his final resting place in a 1909 will. Development of the town and his near-by TE Ranch was a project that consumed
much of his time—and a good deal of his fortune—over the last 20 years of his
life.
But
a superseding 1913 will left the decision on a final resting place to his wife
Louisa. She, other members of the
family, and the attending Priest all attested that in his final hours Cody had
picked the peak of Lookout Mountain west
of Denver in Golden, Colorado as his final resting place. It was selected, it was said because to the
west was the panorama of the Rocky
Mountains and to the east the vista of the Great Plains spread out.
Some members of the family living in Cody objected but Louisa prevailed. He choice may have been influenced by an
offer of $10,000 from Colorado to locate the grave there and support for the
construction of the grave site and museum. Cody had lost most of his fortune by the
time of his death, so this is not entirely implausible.
Cody’s
body was relocated near the summit on June 3, 1917. In the mid-‘20’s Cody civic leaders began a
long campaign to have the body moved to their town. By this time the grave was a pilgrimage site
for tourists and Cody wanted that trade.
A niece became a spokesperson for the cause. But it was frustrated at every turn. In 1948—an economic down-turn year when
tourism was dramatically off—Cody residents reportedly raised $10,000 dollars
as a reward for anyone who would obtain the body and bring it north. The Denver American Legion post responded by posting an armed guard at the
grave while a new, deeper shaft was blasted into the solid rock and Cody and
his wife, who died in 1923, were place at the bottom under tons of freshly
poured cement.
Today
more than 100,000 people annually still visit the grave site and 65,000 pay the
modest fee for admission to the near-by museum
Not
that the town of Cody suffers much. It’s
dramatically beautiful setting alone attracts visitors, as does the rich
hunting and fishing in the surrounding mountains. The Buffalo
Bill Dam above the city is the reservoir
for an irrigation project conceived and
started by Cody himself and which became the Federal Government’s first big water
reclamation public works project in the 1920’s.
The
small city of Cody with less than 10,000 year round residents, may not have a
grave site but it does have the magnificent equestrian monument to Buffalo Bill, The Scout executed by
famed sculptress Gertrude Vanderbilt
Whitney and dedicated in 1924.
Nearby is the Buffalo Bill Center
of the West incorporating 5 museums—the Draper Natural History Museum, the Plains Indian Museum, the Cody
Firearms Museum, the Whitney Western
Art Museum (home to many works by artists like Fredrick Remington and Charles
Russell), and, of course, the Buffalo Bill Museum.
The
town maintains a connection to the Wild West show tradition by hosting nightly amateur rodeo completions all summer
and the Professional Rodeo Cowboys
Association (PRCA) sanctioned Cody Stampede is held annually over the
July 4th holiday and is one of the
premier events on the circuit.
Cody
himself still holds a unique place in the American
national psyche. He was both an
authentic frontiersman and a bombastic caricature
of one.
Cody
was born on a farm near Le Claire, Iowa Territory on February 26, 1846. His father, Isaac, was originally from Toronto
Township, Upper Canada and his
mother was a Quaker and former
school teacher. Not long after his birth
his father rented his Iowa land and the family returned to Toronto Township
where the child was educated by his mother and in good local schools. Unlike the depiction of him in some places,
he was not at all illiterate, but quite well educated for a farm boy, and well
spoken, almost courtly in his speech and manners.
In
1853 Isaac, an ardent abolitionist
sold his Iowa land to finance relocation to Bleeding Kansas hoping to reinforce the anti-slavery population hoping to form a government under the popular sovereignty provisions of the
1850 Kansas-Nebraska Act. Whether by accident or design the family
moved to the pro-slavery stronghold
of Fort Leavenworth. Isaac was assaulted with a bowie knife and nearly killed trying to
give a speech in the town. He frequently
had to hide for his life and his family was in constant danger.
When
he recovered from his wounds he went east to recruit new settlers. In his weakened condition he died on the
return trip leaving young Bill an orphan.
He
joined Jayhawker band in the virtual
civil war battling pro-slavery Bushwhackers
died while at the age of 11. Then he
worked as a teamster, joined an
expedition against the Mormons during
the short lived and nearly bloodless Mormon
Wars in Utah in 1857, tried his hand prospecting in a 1859 Colorado gold rush, and answered the call for “skinny,
expert riders willing to risk death daily” to ride for the Pony Express during its legendary brief months of operation when he
was 14.
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| William Fredrick Cody, age 19 at the end of his service in the Union Army during the Civil War. |
Too
young to join the army, he became a scout for the Kansas Militia in campaigns against the Comanche and Kiowa until
he could finally enlist in the Union Army
when he turned 17 in 1863. He served
as a teamster and sometimes scout with the 7th
Kansas Cavalry and saw action in Missouri
and Tennessee. After the war he served as a civilian
scout and dispatch rider for the Army out of Fort Ellsworth, Kansas.
That
led, in 1867 to a job as a hunter for the construction crews on the Kansas Pacific Railway. He provided buffalo meat for the table and helped keep the enormous herds clear
of the tracks. His skill became
legendary and in a year and a half of service may have killed over 4,000 bison.
Cody won the exclusive right to the nick-name Buffalo Bill in a one
day competition with another hunter, William
Comstock. Cody won the completion with
61 kills to Comstock’s 48.
The
hunting job for the first time brought Cody into contact with important men who
were not Army officers. His skill as a
marksman and rider and his dashing appearance—he had taken to wearing the fringed-buckskins of Indian hunters, long hair, and a low
crowned, wide brimmed sombrero—attracted
their attention. Accounts of his exploits began to show up in newspaper articles. Then he met writer Edward Zane Carroll Judson better known as Ned Buntline who was inspired to create a fictional Buffalo Bill
based very loosely on the real hunter.
In 1869 Buntline published Buffalo Bill, The King of Border Men,
which began running as a serial in the New York Weekly. That was so successful that Buntline was soon
churning out lurid Buffalo Bill tales in monthly dime novels.
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| Cody about 1875 as he appeared on stage. |
Cody
returned to the state annually for the next 11 years in a new production each
time. For the 1873-74 season he invited an old friend—Union vet, hide hunter, gambler, and lawman William
Butler Hickok better known as Wild Bill.
If Cody and Texas Jack were unpolished as actors, Hickok, who was drunk
almost all of the time, could not remember his lines and staggered around the
stage. He was not invited back.
During
the run of these shows, Cody broke with Buntline over the use of his name and
image. He continued under his own
management, hiring playwrights to craft new shows. He also took control of the Dime novels and hired
Prentiss Ingraham to write most of
them.
Cody’s
family lived in Rochester, New York while
he toured with these shows. He had
married Louisa Frederici shortly
after the Civil War and together they had four children, two of whom died and
were buried in Rochester.
In
the off season, Cody returned to the west every year where he continued to act
as a guide for wealthy tourists and dabbled in various business schemes, most
of which failed. After the 1876 massacre
of Custer and the 7th Cavalry, Cody
was once more called into service as a scout.
During a skirmish at Warbonnet
Creek in Nebraska on July 17,
1876 Cody had an alleged “duel” with a Cheyenne
warrior named Heova'ehe or Yellow Hair. Cody was reported to have shot then hand-to-hand
combat stabbed and killed the Indian and taken his scalp. Some witness accounts
differed and the press misreported the name of the warrior as Yellow Hand, but the incident became
famous as “The first scalp for Custer.” Cody
had the incident written into the script of his next show.
In
1879 Cody attempted to separate himself from the Dime novel character by
publishing an autobiography, The Life and Adventures of Buffalo Bill,
Col. William Fredrick Cody.
While the book has known errors and not a few exaggerations it is
thought to be on the whole a fairly accurate account of his life to that
point. A second auto-biography was undertaken
years later with a ghost writer and is riddled with errors because Cody died
before he could read the proofs.
Before
the 1883 season, Cody scrapped plans for another theater tour. He had bigger ideas. That summer working from land he recently
purchased on the banks of the North
Platte River in Nebraska, he put out a call for experienced riders,
cowboys, scouts, as well as Indians promising good wages and a new kind of
adventure. He was assembling a
spectacle, a pageant of the West to tour the nation in a circus-like troupe. The show
would begin with a grand entry of
all of the performers to stirring music by a large brass band and then feature exhibitions of horsemanship,
sharpshooting, cowboy completions—rodeo type events—and was sprinkled with vignettes
of pioneer life. Highlights included a
robbery of the Deadwood stage, a reenactment
of the Duel with Yellow Hair, and a finale of an Indian raid on a cabin with
Bill and the Cavalry riding to the rescue.
It was all thrilling and Cody was sure audiences had never seen anything
like it.
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| Cody and Sitting Bull |
In
1885 Cody’s troop included Sitting Bull
and a number of Lakota warriors and
their families. Although the show
featured the scenes of Indian warfare, Cody hoped that the teepee village erected on the show grounds and open to public
visits, would showcase native family life and soften prejudices against
them. He paid his native performers very
well and often spent time with them. His
relationship with Sitting Bull would have later repercussions. Many Sioux, especially members of the Oglala band remained with the show
season after season and their descendants
still perform around the country doing traditional dances at Pow Wows and rodeos like Cheyenne Frontier Days.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was an
immediate hit in its initial tours and was expanded and improved every season
with new attractions. By 1886 the show
was making Cody rich. He bought more
land near the town of North Platte which
he dubbed Scout’s Rest Ranch and
built an eighteen-room mansion and a large barn for winter storage of the show’s
livestock.
Rather
than take the show on the road for the 1886 season he built exhibition grounds
on Staten Island, New York where it
played from June to October. That winter
he moved indoors with a slightly downsized program to Madison Square Garden then returned to the Island for the next
summer. During this New York stay more
than a million people bought tickets to the show including the editors and
publishers of all of the major newspapers and magazines who covered the
extravaganza lavishly. It attracted the
attention of wealthy elite and of a parade of literary celebrities. Thomas
Edison took time to see the show and when it came time for him to make the
first American motion picture with a
plot, The Great Train Robbery, he was inspired by the Wild West show.
But it also played to children from the slums, including young Jewish immigrants who would go on to
largely create an infant movie industry for
which westerns would become a
staple. Buffalo Bill and the Wild West were
firmly setting an image of the west in the American mind.
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| Buffalo Bill impressed the ladies of London in 1887. |
When
the show closed its final Staten Island season, Cody packed it up and loaded it
on a ship to England where he
engaged to play as part of the American
Exhibition which coincided with the Golden
Jubilee of Queen Victoria. He entertained the Royal family which was so impressed that Prince Edward arranged a
second grand Command Performance for
the Queen and her Jubilee guests including young Kaiser Wilhelm and most of the
crowned heads of Europe. Young Annie
Oakley, Cody’s star attraction, especially dazzled the crowd and later shot
a cigarette out of the Kaiser’s lips.
The show played more than 300 performances in London and then visited Manchester and Birmingham before
returning to the States in October of 1887. An estimated 2.5 million people saw these performances.
It
was the first of four European tours before 1892. He visited the Exposition Universelle in Paris
in 1889 followed by appearances in the south of France, Spain, and Italy where he and members of the
troupe were received by Pope Leo XIII at
the Vatican. The 1891 tour began in Germany followed
by appearances in the Netherlands, Belgium, and a return to Britain. In 1892 there was another trip to England and
another Command Performance
Back
home Cody greatly expanded his show and renamed it Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World. The new show added representative riding
groups from horse cultures around the world—Turks, Argentine Gauchos,
Arabs, Mongols and Cossacks. It also included a U.S. Cavalry unit, Northwest Mounted Police, Indian Lancers, and other mounted
military and an expanded group of natives representing several tribes. The Grand Entry ride of these hundreds of
performers was both colorful and impressive.
The
new show was designed with the World
Columbian Exposition in Chicago in
1893 in mind. But Exposition authorities
refused Cody’s request for space to perform on the grounds. Defiantly he bought land nearby and opened up
anyway. Despite the annoyance of the
fair who viewed it as competition, the millions of visitors that flooded the
city for the Exposition provided more than enough audience for both. After the
fair concluded, Cody packed the show up for more tours of American cities.
In
1890 Cody responded to a request by General
Nelson A. Miles to come to South
Dakota where the Lakota reservations were tense with the spread of the Ghost Dance which was thought to be
encouraged by Sitting Bull. Miles hoped
that he could intercede with the old man.
He found Sitting Bull personally friendly, but embittered by White men and hardships on the reservations. There was nothing Cody could do to stop the Ghost
Dancing. He could not prevent the Wounded Knee Massacre, arriving on the
scene with Miles two days after the rampage by the 7th Cavalry as the frozen bodies of the dead were gathered and
dumped in slit trenches for
burial.
During
the off season of 1895 Cody founded the Wyoming town that he modestly named for
himself and its development as a tourist destination, hunting haven, and his TE
Ranch occupied much of his time and money over the next several years.
This
episode inspired the play Indians by Arthur Kopit and Robert
Altman’s film version Buffalo Bill and the Indians staring
Paul Newman as Cody who was portrayed as a bombastic phony. In real life Cody was deeply shaken by the
incident.
Still,
on the cusp of a new century Cody was at the peak of his fame.
Then
outside Lexington, North Carolina on October 29, 1901, a freight train crashed into one unit of
the train carrying Buffalo Bill's show from Charlotte, North Carolina
to Danville, Virginia. Annie Oakley
was so severely injured that it was thought for a time that she would never
walk again, although she did eventually recover and return to the show. 110 horses were killed, including Cody’s two
favorite personal mounts. Also destroyed
was a lot of equipment, props and scenery for the show. It was a financial set back that shook the
foundation of Cody’s enterprise.
To
recover, Cody took the show to Europe for four more tours from, 1902 to 1906. In addition to stays in major cities, the
show played one night stands in nearly every town in Europe big enough to accommodate
them. By the time the final tour was
completed he had penetrated deep into Eastern Europe—Austria, the Balkans, Hungary, Romania, and the Ukraine,
Poland, and Bohemia.
Despite
the success of the European tours, the costs of mounting the traveling
extravaganza in the states, a series of bad investments, and money tied up in
his Cody, Wyoming developments put a strain on the show. He had to fold it after the 1907 season.
The
next year he teamed up with his chief rival as Wild West show operator, Pawnee Bill to form the joint Two Bills Show. But the joint endeavor also struggled and
during an appearance in Denver in 1910 the Sherriff
foreclosed on the show and sold its assets piecemeal. An era had ended.
Cody
himself was not yet ready to totally abandon show business. In 1916 he made The Adventures of Buffalo Bill for
Chicago’s Essanay studios featuring members of his old shows and a large cast
of Indians and soldiers, including General Nelson Miles himself largely focused
on the 1890 trip to South Dakota. The
film was released on January 29, 1917 shortly after Cod’s death. Prints of the film have been lost and only a
couple of short clip survived.
Cody
would repeatedly show up in films, stage shows, and television in the years
since his death notably in Annie Oakley starring Barbara Stanwick in 1935, Cecil B DeMille’s 1936 The Plainsman,
the 1944 highly fictionalized bio
pic Buffalo Bill starring Joel McCrea opposite Maureen O’Hara, in Young Buffalo Bill staring
Roy Rogers at Republic Pictures, the Broadway
and film versions of the musical Annie Get Your Gun, and the
aforementioned Paul Newman vehicle. He
was either a recurring regular character or was portrayed in individual
episodes of too many televisions show to recount.
Buffalo
Bill also makes numerous appearances in literature including work by highly
respected authors Larry McMurtry and
Jerome Charyn.
Perhaps
the best elegy to the old man was written by poet e. e. cummings in 1920 and expressed the ambiguity of his life.
“Buffalo Bill’s”
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death
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