William Cody

American frontiersman and showman

• Born: February 26, 1846
• Birthplace: Scott County, near LeClaire, Iowa
• Died: January 10, 1917
• Place of death: Denver, Colorado

Capitalizing on the legends created about his prowess as a frontier plainsman, “Buffalo Bill” Cody popularized the American West through his Wild West Show, which brought the sights of the last frontier to the eastern United States and Europe.

Early Life

William Cody was born in Iowa but grew up on the Kansas plains. His father, a staunch abolitionist, was pursued and attacked more than once by proslavery fanatics in the Kansas territory, and on several occasions only the young Cody’s daring saved his father’s life. When his father succumbed to illness in 1857, Cody sought work with what would become the firm of Russell, Majors, and Waddell, who hired him as a cattle driver and later as a Pony Express rider and stagecoach driver. By age twenty, the young man, grown to six feet and sporting shoulder-length, wavy hair and a goatee, had achieved his reputation among plainsmen as a daring scout and buffalo hunter, working for the Army and for the railroads. His brief stint in the Union Army during the Civil War brought him no distinction but did provide the opportunity for him to meet and woo Louisa Frederici in St. Louis. They were married in 1866, and Cody took his bride back to Kansas, to share his life on the plains.

Cody’s work as a scout and buffalo hunter led to several important encounters that secured his future fame. A dime novelist, traveling the West in search of new material, was introduced to Cody and from that meeting took away ideas for future novels. During the next four decades, more than two hundred novels about “Buffalo Bill” appeared. The eastern United States soon was familiar with Cody’s exploits as a buffalo hunter (extravagant claims put his total kill for a single day into the thousands) and as an Indian fighter, slayer of chiefs Tall Bull and Yellow Knife.

Cody’s skill as a hunter for the railroads, the source of the legends that earned for him the sobriquet “Buffalo Bill,” led to other career-enhancing engagements. He was called upon to lead several hunting expeditions for celebrities, including the Grand Duke Alexis of Russia, and a group of wealthy New York businesspeople. Some of the latter invited Cody to visit in New York, and from that visit his career as the premier American showman was launched.

Life’s Work

When Cody went to New York City in 1872, he was merely accepting the invitation of the East Coast magnates whom he had entertained on a buffalo hunt. Once there, his reputation having preceded him, he found that he was a minor toast of the town. One evening’s entertainment included a trip to the theater to see a play, Buffalo Bill, the King of Border Men (1871). Cody was captivated by the attention given to him by the audience in the theater, and to his stage character. E. Z. C. Judson, who as novelist Ned Buntline had done much to build Cody’s legend, encouraged him to take up the stage part himself. Reluctant at first, Cody finally gave in, and Judson then quickly wrote and produced The Scouts of the Plains (1872).

While the show was extremely confusing and without dramatic merit, and Cody was stiff in his role, the play was a box-office success, and for several years, Cody appeared in a number of stage dramas. Through this endeavor, he met Nate Salsbury, who was to manage his later efforts with the Wild West Show. Salsbury, along with publicist and lifelong friend John Burke, would remain one of Cody’s staunchest supporters when that show brought pressures to bear on the flamboyant and somewhat irresponsible Cody.

For several years, Cody alternated his acting career with real-life work as a scout and mediator in the last of the Indian Wars. Then, in 1883, he helped form a traveling troupe that would bring the western plains to the cities and towns of the East and Midwest. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show toured for the next three decades, making stops in virtually every city of significance in the United States.

The troupe for Cody’s show consisted of Indians whom Cody recruited from tribes that had been sent to reservations; plainsmen who had driven stagecoaches, herded cattle, or fought some of the same Indians with whom they now toured; and hundreds of horses, cattle, and buffalo. During the early years, Cody was the main attraction, performing feats with his rifle and introducing the cast in their grand parade at each location. He was joined at various times by other legendary figures such as Chief Sitting Bull , the victor of Little Bighorn, and trick-shot artist Annie Oakley . Cody managed to secure for his show the original Deadwood Stage, and the exciting chase that led to its rescue from marauders became a highlight of the performance.

The show played at such diverse locations as the World Cotton Exposition in New Orleans in 1884 and the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Cody and some of his cast were invited to the Vatican in 1889. Queen Victoria attended a performance in 1887, and the Prince of Wales, later Edward V, saw the show on more than one occasion. New Yorkers saw the show performed in Madison Square Garden; the residents of Paris and Barcelona also witnessed the feats of Cody’s performers. Well into the new century, Cody moved with his collection of people, animals, and paraphernalia, collecting huge receipts from people whose appetite for the West seemed insatiable.

Showmanship took its toll on Cody, however, and brought out the worst as well as the best in his character. Always a hard drinker, he was sometimes so drunk while on tour that colleagues feared that he would not be able to perform. A generous man by nature, he often squandered huge sums of money on projects in which unscrupulous entrepreneurs or well-intentioned but ill-fated friends encouraged him to invest.

Cody found himself caught up in the fast life, and his relationship with his wife, never strong, deteriorated. For years, he had been accustomed to leave behind Louisa and his children, first for duty with the Army, then for his career onstage and with the Wild West Show. Other women pursued him; certainly he pursued some of them. His relationship with Louisa reached its low point in 1904, when Cody sued for divorce, claiming that Louisa had tried to poison him at Christmas in 1900, and that he could no longer live with her. At the divorce trial, Cody’s affair with an actress and other improprieties were made public, Louisa was able to generate substantial public sympathy, and the suit was dismissed. After a period of estrangement, the two were reunited, and Cody managed to live amicably with Louisa in his later years.

The Wild West Show’s prosperity, especially during the first decades of its life, allowed Cody to obtain significant real estate holdings in the West, most notably in the North Platte, Nebraska, area, and in Wyoming. He was also instrumental in founding the town in Wyoming that bears his name. Often, he would retire to one of these places during the off-season, to relax and renew ties with the land that he helped portray to the rest of the world.

Running a business such as the Wild West Show entailed certain risks. On one trip down the Mississippi River, a steamboat crash cost Cody half of his livestock. On one of the early tours in Europe, his Indians began to get homesick and to desert the show. Disease took a major portion of his livestock in another year. Competition became fierce at times, and especially after the death of Salsbury in 1902, Cody found himself going more and more in debt to keep the show running. Eventually, he found it necessary to accept offers from outsiders to finance his operation. In 1913, the show was seized by agents to pay creditors.

The last years of Cody’s life were not pleasant. He tried his hand at the new motion-picture industry, persuading the aged General Nelson Miles to assist him in producing a documentary of the famous Battle of Wounded Knee. The film was not a commercial success. Other schemes, including a mining venture, were similarly unsuccessful. Meanwhile, Harry Tammen, an unscrupulous editor of the Denver Post, managed to loan Cody sufficient capital for his ventures so that Cody soon found himself unable to reach a settlement and break his contract with Tammen. As a result, Tammen was able to force Cody to tour with the Sells-Floto Circus in 1914 and to restrict his activities further by limiting his salary and expense account.

By 1916, Cody was suffering the infirmities of old age. In the winter of 1916, he traveled to Denver to stay with his sister. There, on January 10, 1917, he died in her home. Despite his wishes to be buried in Wyoming, he was laid to rest atop Lookout Mountain, outside Denver.

Significance

As a frontiersman, scout, and hunter, Cody would have achieved a place in American history without the fame that his Wild West Show provided him. Even when the exaggerations about his exploits are stripped away, his accomplishments in helping to settle the West were substantial: He helped bring to a successful close several skirmishes and one major uprising in the Indian Wars, he participated as the youngest member of the celebrated Pony Express team, and he kept the railroads moving across the country by providing meat for the construction crews.

Cody’s Wild West Show did more than his real-life exploits on the frontier to bring to the civilized world of the eastern United States and to the countries of Europe a sense of the life of the American West. He was a symbol of that land: handsome, brash, generous, free-living, unafraid of any danger. Carrying on the tradition of the showman established by the legendary P. T. Barnum, Cody barnstormed across two continents, sharing the sense of excitement that had characterized the West in its infancy and adolescence. While he toured, the West matured, and the frontier that Cody dramatized in his shows was disappearing. Nevertheless, the thrills Cody and his fellow performers generated in countless youngsters lived on for years after his death. Cody’s legacy continues in the games of “Cowboys and Indians” that endure, long after the West had become homogeneous with the rest of the United States.

Bibliography

Burke, John. Buffalo Bill: The Noblest Whiteskin. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973. A popular biography, providing sufficient details about Cody’s early life on the frontier but concentrating on the years Buffalo Bill spent as an actor and showman in the eastern United States and Europe. Informal style, highly readable.

Carter, Robert A. Buffalo Bill Cody: The Man Behind the Legend. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000. Popular biography, offering a narrative account of Cody’s life. Carter argues that Cody’s Wild West Show made him the first American media hero.

Cody, William F. Story of the Wild West and Camp-Fire Chats. Philadelphia: Historical Publishing, 1888. One of Cody’s several autobiographies, containing accounts of various plainsmen. Because many details of Cody’s early life are drawn from this autobiography, it is important for scholars; additionally, its informal style and tendency toward exaggeration mark it as typical of popular literature about the West written during the late nineteenth century.

Croft-Cooke, Rupert, and W. S. Meadmore. Buffalo Bill: The Legend, the Man of Action, the Showman. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1952. A brief account of Cody’s life, relying heavily on Cody’s autobiography for details of the early years. Contains an interesting introductory chapter on the impact of the Wild West Show in England.

Havighurst, Walter. Annie Oakley of the Wild West. New York: Macmillan, 1954. Life story of one of the star attractions in the Wild West Show; provides much information about Cody and others who traveled with her.

Hine, Robert V. The American West: An Interpretive History. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. Provides excellent background about the American West; discusses Cody as the foremost American hero.

McMurtry, Larry. The Colonel and Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and the Beginnings of Superstardom in America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. A dual biography of Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley, tracing Bill’s career from his days as a scout and Indian fighter to his performances with the Wild West Show.

Russell, Don F. The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960. A well-researched, scholarly biography that goes far in separating the legend from the facts about Cody’s life.

Wetmore, Helen Cody, and Zane Grey. Buffalo Bill: Last of the Great Scouts. Commemorative ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. A new edition of a biography written by Cody’s sister, originally published in 1899. Contains the original illustrations by Frederic Remington and other artists.

Yost, Nellie S. Buffalo Bill: His Family, Friends, Fame, Failures, and Fortunes. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1974. A carefully researched biography, relying heavily on records from the nineteenth century and on interviews with people who knew Cody or his family and friends. Debunks many legends and establishes a historical basis for many others.