08/31/2025
Buffalo Bill Coty
Buffalo Bill, by name of William Frederick Cody, (born February 26, 1846, Scott county, Iowa, U.S.—died January 10, 1917, Denver, Colorado), American buffalo hunter, U.S. Army scout, Pony Express rider, Indian fighter, actor, and impresario who dramatized the facts and flavour of the American West through fiction and melodrama. His colourful Wild West show, which came to be known as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World, evolved into an international institution and made him one of the world’s first global celebrities.
Early Years
Cody’s father, Isaac, moved his family from their farm near LeClaire, Iowa, on the Mississippi River, to Kansas, where he operated a trading post near the Kickapoo Indian Agency. At the time, Kansas was engulfed in a violent struggle between those who opposed slavery and those who supported it (see Bleeding Kansas). While delivering an antislavery speech, Isaac was stabbed, and he ultimately succumbed to his wounds three years later, in 1857. To support his family, Cody already had begun working at age nine for the Russell, Majors and Waddell freight company, where he made use of his skills as a horseman. In 1857 Cody came to be celebrated as the youngest Indian fighter on the Great Plains after he killed a Native American who helped attack the cattle drive on which Cody was working. On the same cattle drive, Cody met the young Wild Bill Hickok, who intervened on his side in a fight Cody was having with an older man.
Pony Express Rider
Although Cody’s name does not appear in the official records of the Pony Express, there is significant evidence that he served two tours of duty as a rider (including his own claim in his autobiography that he had done so, substantiated in print by Russell, Majors and Waddell’s Alexander Majors). Cody was 14 years old when he began riding for the Pony Express in the spring of 1860, but, because he had already delivered messages between wagon trains for Russell, Majors and Waddell, he was initially assigned a short 45-mile (70-km) run. While some of Cody’s exploits as a rider were the creations of publicity agents, there is no doubt about the courage and dedication he showed while in the service of the Pony Express. Of particular note was a dramatic round-trip ride of some 300 miles (480 km) in Wyoming between Red Butte Station and Pacific Springs Station on which Cody completed not only his own leg but those of missing relief riders, a sleepless odyssey of nearly 22 continuous hours of riding. On another legendary ride, Cody outran Sioux warriors to Three Crossings Station, Wyoming, only to find the station keeper dead and the horses stolen. He narrowly escaped to the next station, but, after arriving there, he gathered and led a group of men against the Indians, surprising them at their camp and retaking the stolen horses. Cody’s cunning was the centrepiece of another often-recounted episode in which, called upon to deliver a large sum of money and fearing that he would be robbed, he hid the currency under his saddle blanket and stuffed paper into his Pony Express mochila (saddlebag). When he was indeed held up at gunpoint, he threw the treasureless mochila at the bandits and then made good his escape.
Scout And Soldier
During the American Civil War (1861–65), Cody first served as a Union scout in campaigns against the Kiowa and Comanche and later (in 1863) enlisted with the Seventh Kansas Cavalry, which saw action in Missouri and Tennessee. After the war he worked for the U.S. Army as a civilian scout and dispatch bearer out of Fort Ellsworth in Kansas (1866–67). In 1867–68 he hunted buffalo to feed construction crews on the Union Pacific Railroad. During this time he is said to have slaughtered some 4,280 head of buffalo, and he soon became known as the champion buffalo killer of the Great Plains.
Cody acquired a reputation not only for accurate marksmanship but also for total recall of the vast terrain he had traversed, knowledge of Indian ways, courage, and endurance. He was in demand as a scout and guide, mostly for the U.S. Fifth Cavalry, throughout much of the government’s attempt to wipe out Indian resistance to settlement of the land west of the Mississippi River (1868–76). In 1872 Gen. Philip Sheridan arranged for Cody and Lieut. Col. George Armstrong Custer to guide Grand Duke Alexis of Russia on a hunting trip that had been set up by U.S. Pres. Ulysses S. Grant. That same year Cody, who frequently took dangerous assignments that others refused, was awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroic actions on April 26 as scout for a contingent of the Third Cavalry that was pursuing Indians who had stolen army horses hear Fort McPherson in Nebraska. (The honour was revoked in 1916 as part of a general review to identify individuals who had received the award but had not technically been members of the military as officers or enlisted men. Scouts were classified as civilians. However, the U.S. Army restored the Medal of Honor to Cody posthumously in 1989.) During his army service, Cody’s reputation continued to grow. In all, he is believed to have engaged in 16 Indian fights, including his much-publicized scalping (July 17, 1876) of the Cheyenne warrior Yellow Hair (erroneously translated as Yellow Hand) in Sioux county, Nebraska, which was hailed as a response to the massacre of Custer’s command at the Battle of the Little Bighorn earlier in the year.
The Wild West Show
Such exploits provided choice material not only for newspaper reporters but also for dime novelists, who transformed the hard-riding, fast-shooting Cody into a Western folk hero. Among these early authors were Ned Buntline (pen name of E.Z.C. Judson) and Prentiss Ingraham. Recognizing the financial possibilities inherent in dramatizing the West, Cody was easily persuaded in 1872 to star in Buntline’s drama The Scouts of the Prairie. Though his acting was far from polished, he became a superb showman, and his audiences greeted him with overwhelming enthusiasm during his 45-year career as an entertainer.
For many years Cody performed during the winter and continued scouting for the army in the summer or escorting hunting parties to the West. In the process, the line began to blur even further between the scout William F. Cody and the legend and entertainer Buffalo Bill. Indeed, as early as his scalping of Yellow Hair in 1876, Cody had consciously worn his flamboyant theatrical clothes into battle, later donning the same outfit to re-create his attack onstage. In 1883 Cody, with the help of producer and partner Nate Salsbury, organized his own Wild West show—a spectacular outdoor entertainment with a cast of hundreds, featuring fancy-shooting, hard-riding cowboys and yelling Indians, along with re-creations of a buffalo hunt, the capture of the Deadwood (South Dakota) stagecoach, and a Pony Express ride. Its stars included Annie Oakley, the famous rifle shot, and, in 1885, Chief Sitting Bull. The show played at Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887 and was staged throughout Europe. In 1893 three million people attended the show (by this point known as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World, which included Cossacks and vaqueros) during its tenure on the Midway adjacent to the official grounds of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. By the end of the 19th century, Buffalo Bill was one of the most-recognized persons in the world.
Final Years
Buffalo Bill continued to perform in his Wild West show until 1916, although at age 71 he often had to be helped onto his horse backstage. While Buffalo Bill’s exhibition remained extremely popular in the United States and abroad, in the end—largely through poor investments, including his purchase of an unproductive gold mine—he lost the fortune he had made in show business. His last public appearance occurred just two months before his death.
