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 Rites. 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 count
pennies to pay for each word.
One of the largest assembly spaces 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 gateway 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, Wyoming 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 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 schoolteacher. 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.
Bill joined Jayhawker
band in the virtual civil war battling pro-slavery Bushwhackers. 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 an 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. 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 scouted 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.
In
December 1872, Cody traveled to Chicago
to make his stage debut with his
friend Texas Jack Omohundro in The
Scouts of the Prairie, one of the original Wild West shows produced by Buntline. The effort was panned by critics one of whom compared Cody’s acting to a “diffident
schoolboy.” But the handsome performer was
a hit with the sold-out crowds.
Cody returned 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 George Armstrong 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 him and then
in 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 autobiography 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 the 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.
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 the 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.
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 members of the Royal family who were 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. He definitely bought land nearby and opened
up anyway. Despite the annoyance of fair
officials 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.
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.
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.
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 were a lot of equipment, props and scenery for the
show. It was a financial setback
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 Sheriff 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 Cody’s death. Prints of the film have been lost and
only a couple of short clips survived.
Cody repeatedly showed 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, Young Buffalo Bill staring Roy
Rogers at Republic Pictures,
the Broadway and film versions
of the musical Annie Get Your Gun, and the 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
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