Spurred West. Ian Neligh
time is adding with a kindly hand are a reminder of the other changes which are fast effacing in the great domain, which he has seen spring from the wilderness, the old landmarks and the old faces which are vanishing into history.”
Cody had taken his fame as an army scout and his reputation as a prolific buffalo hunter to unheard-of levels of celebrity, which included novels, plays, and ludicrous stories based on the exaggerated, or outright fictional, events of his life. Cody had managed to turn himself into a legend and, for a time, audiences just couldn’t get enough.
“And last of all the center of this glittering spectacle, comes Buffalo Bill, that unique, picturesque personality, without a precedent, without a successor, the single product of an era,” one writer gushed. “Who is Buffalo Bill? Col. W.F. Cody, late chief of the Government scouts of the United States. What is Buffalo Bill? The most popular, fascinating figure in America to-day, one of the most graceful and expert horsemen in the world.”
Cody’s performance for the City of Rochester in 1895 was a roaring success, but dark clouds loomed on the horizon for the performer. Just the year before, his credentials and the right even to call himself “Buffalo Bill” were called into question in newspapers of the time.
“Several newspapers throughout the country have recently been publishing statements, emanating from more or less unreliable sources, claiming that Buffalo Bill (Col. William F. Cody) was not the legal or moral holder of that title,” said writer Frank A. Small for the Courier Journal.
The issue questioning the scout and entertainer came about exactly a year earlier when the well-known “poet scout” Captain Jack Crawford claimed a Wichita banker named Billy Mathewson was in fact the real Buffalo Bill. Crawford was a well-known scout himself, an author of popular Wild West stories, and had once joined Cody in his early attempts to regal audiences from the stage.
Crawford accused William Cody of imposing himself on the Eastern United States, adding because an author once wrote about Cody in a book that it ruined “a great many Americans youths by firing their young hearts, incidentally filling the Western penitentiaries with wicked Easterners, who aspired to come West and be ‘Buffalo Bills’ themselves.”
“Asking Col. Cody what he had to say about it, the smile that overspread his countenance, the toss of his head, the shrug of the shoulders, the wave of the hand and the look of contempt as his athletic figure appeared to rise in height, brought to mind the words of Brutus to the fiery Cassis, as he said: ‘It passes me by like the idle winds, which regard not,’” Small wrote.
Clearly it did bother Cody that someone was trying to take away his name and reputation earned on the frontier. After all, it was his very credibility in the West that helped pave the way to his success as a showman. Cody then went about showing the writer pages from a scrapbook which held letters of thanks and appreciation for his many deeds from admirers, including William T. Sherman, George Armstrong Custer, and many more.
“Smiling at my expressions of astonishment, Col. Cody returned the book to its usual resting place saying: ‘I don’t think it is necessary for me to speak, except this [Mathewson] says I worked for him. I never laid eyes on him, and, of course, never worked for him. He, like thousands of Western men, may be good and true and have contributed his share in his immediate locality in the making of history of the times, but this is the first intimation that I have had that any reputable person other than myself has ever claimed the title of Buffalo Bill,” reported the Courier Journal.
Despite this, it is generally acknowledged the frontier was at one point full of “Buffalo Bills.” That Mathewson had the nickname before Cody is probable. Cody’s claim to the name only became official, not after winning a buffalo-shooting contest, as he claimed, but when he was introduced to the world by an author.
That author was the adventurer, legendary scoundrel, and obsessive liar who called himself Ned Buntline.
King of the Border Men
Truth for Ned Buntline, whose real name was Edward Zane Carroll Judson, was an entirely unnecessary and boring inconvenience. For the popular fiction writer, reality provided something of a distraction from the nuts and bolts of telling a really good story. A short man with a walrus mustache, Buntline had a trademark limp from a broken leg that hadn’t healed right after jumping from a hotel window while he unsuccessfully tried to escape a lynch mob. The ungraceful plummet to the Earth only occurred after being shot by the brother of a man he killed who had accused him of stealing his wife. After breaking his leg, Buntline was caught and hanged from an awning post but, as fate would have it, was cut down by a passing stranger. Adventurer, marksmen, bail jumper, serial adulterer, Navy veteran—Buntline had lived a life as wild as any he could make up. In 1869 when he came to Fort McPherson, Nebraska, he was the highest paid writer in the United States, making $20,000 a year, which equates to $369,000 today.
There are different versions of how Buntline met Cody. What ultimately matters is that Buntline was in Nebraska looking for a story, and he found one. The writer followed Cody and, for a time, a detachment of the Fifth Calvary to Colorado’s Fort Sedgwick. During the journey Cody spun his own stories of his frontier prowess. Buntline took what he learned and headed back east to write Buffalo Bill the King of the Border Men; The Wildest and Truest Tale I’ve Ever Told. Predictably, the story was entirely false. Buntline exaggerated or changed many of Cody’s already thrilling real-life accounts into something almost unrecognizable. Buntline even turned Cody, who had an unhealthy appreciation for the consumption of spirits, into a champion of the Temperance movement. It was, of course, a roaring success and the first of several fictional stories he would go on to write about Cody.
Capitalizing on the achievement and Cody’s sudden fame, the two began working together to provide theatrical presentations to a public hungry for tales of the West as told and acted by those who actually lived the stories. Real scouts including Cody and, albeit only briefly, his friend James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok and John Baker “Texas Jack” Omohundro entertained crowds during part of the year and then returned to the frontier to continue their work as scouts for the remainder. Cody’s continuing performances were inspired by some of his actual deeds in the West, such as his fight and eventual scalping of a Cheyenne sub chief named Yellow Hair in a fight to the death. It seems as if Cody sought out more and more thrilling events to participate in so he could regale his eastern audiences with fresh material.
In 1882 Cody and promoter-manager Nate Salsbury came up with the idea of a Wild West show over lunch one spring day in New York City. The idea was not just to tell the audience about the thrilling adventures, cowboys, Native Americans, and stunning horse- and marksmen of the West—but show them. Cody didn’t want to put on a circus but rather something that was both educational and exciting, a show that gave its audience a glimpse into a vanishing world and kept as authentic as possible. In Omaha, Nebraska, in May of 1883 the earliest version of Cody’s Wild West show, then called “The Wild West, Honorable W.F. Cody and Dr. W.F. Carver’s Rocky Mountain and Prairie Exhibition,” started with a raucous bang. For the next thirty years Cody exhaustively traveled North America and Europe loading and unloading a small army of performers, buffalo, and horses on and off trains, moving across the Atlantic and back again. Just before the turn of the century, the Wild West provided 341 performances in more than 130 cities, traveling 11,000 miles in the process.
Cody was said to have been a kind man and paid all performers, including Native Americans, the same rate, which was not the norm for the time. He brought the world his version of the Wild West, often including notable celebrities such as Annie Oakley, Bill Pickett, Sitting Bull, and Will Rogers. Oakley chose to join Cody’s show and leave another because of the thoughtful way he treated the horses and other animals, unlike the managers of the other exposition she was involved with at the time.
Eventually, Cody’s Wild West show went bankrupt in 1913 and Buffalo Bill Cody died while visiting his sister in Denver in 1917—but the Wild West itself would endure.
Bison, the Magnificent Animals
William Cody certainly capitalized on the Old West and what it provided before and after he became famous. He also knew it was quite literally disappearing. Certainly the people