The Wild West, Part 2

It would be hard to overestimate the impact that just one person, William Frederick Cody, has had on the American West. Born in 1846, just outside what is now LeClaire, Iowa (home of American Pickers), Buffalo Bill grew up playing with Indian kids in Kansas. As an adult, he worked as an Army scout, Pony Express rider, ranch hand, wagon train driver, town developer, railroad contractor, bison hunter, fur trapper, gold prospector, and ultimately showman, bringing his Wild West shows to cities across the United States and throughout Europe, until his passing in 1917 at age 70. And his life touched all kinds of people, from Queen Victoria and President Theodore Roosevelt, down to Howard Eaton and his brothers, and countless others who may have read about his adventures in the New York Weekly, the Chicago Tribune, or in the novel Ned Buntline wrote about him, Buffalo Bill, King of the Bordermen. Still others may have viewed his exploits onstage in the hit play Buffalo Bill, which premiered in 1872, or through his touring show Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, which ran from 1883-1908, or in the 1912 motion picture he produced about himself, The Life of Buffalo Bill.

Obviously, Buffalo Bill was bigger than life, and he seems to have liked it that way. But Bill Cody himself is even more complex a character than his on-stage persona. Born into an antislavery family, Bill lost his father at age 11 due in part to injuries he suffered as a result of being stabbed while delivering an antislavery speech four years earlier. After his father’s death, Bill worked delivering messages on horseback for a freight carrier prior to joining the United States Army as a scout in the Utah War between the United States Government and the Mormon community in Salt Lake City. It was during this campaign where Bill, at age 11, shot and killed his first Indian and began his self-appointed career as an “Indian fighter.” When the Civil War broke out, Bill tried to enlist as a soldier in the Union Army but was refused because of his age (15). As a result, he began working with a freight caravan that delivered supplies to Fort Laramie, WY, and later became a scout with Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer. Cody worked on and off as an Army scout as the Indian Wars moved westward across the continent. And he was awarded the Medal of Honor in 1872 for his work helping the US Government to kill, contain, and remove Native Americans from their homeland.

Ironically, only ten or so years later, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was perhaps the one place in the United States where Native Americans could speak their languages and continue their traditional way of life, as the government had so thoroughly decimated their communities. Within the show, they were free to express some version of their traditions and were paid well, with their participation in the show giving them some chance to improve their lives. In addition, visitors were encouraged to meet them in the tent camps after the show and experience their way of life. Cody wanted the paying public to see the human side of the “fierce warriors,” and maybe find some commonality with them. And Buffalo Bill himself ultimately became friends with Native Americans, including the great Hunkpapa Lakota leader, Sitting Bull. Although the two men fought on opposite sides during the Great Sioux War of 1876, by 1885 they were friends, and it was widely believed that Buffalo Bill might have been able to prevent Sitting Bull’s murder by US officers in 1890 had his wagon train not been diverted.

Cody received the nickname “Buffalo Bill,” as a result of his work supplying workers on the transcontinental railway with bison meat. He and another hunter, Bill Comstock, competed in an eight-hour bison-shooting match over the exclusive right to use the name, which he won by killing 68 bison to his competitor’s 48. However, thanks in part to Buffalo Bill and his fellow game hunters, including a young Theodore Roosevelt, the population of American bison fell from an estimated 60 million in the late 18th century to about 1000 in 1889 and were on the brink of extinction. Around this time, personalities such as Howard Eaton and Theodore Roosevelt, as well as Buffalo Bill himself, started conservation efforts to protect the bison, including through the sanctuaries of the National Parks, leading to a resurgence of the wild bison population, which has slowly risen to about 31,000 as of March, 2019. So Buffalo Bill, once an “Indian fighter,” became over the course of his life an Indian supporter, and similarly moved from slaughtering bison to helping to preserve the species, publicly speaking out against hide-hunting and advocating for the establishment of a hunting season.

In life, you only get one saddle. These belonged to Howard Eaton and Theodore Roosevelt, and are on display at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming.

And isn’t this kind of how we all are? Each of us, especially as children and young adults, is a product of our times and the culture that surrounds us. It can be pretty difficult to move from our self-involved, short-sighted perspectives, particularly when we are surrounded by others who think the same way we do and support our view of the world as “right.” It is only through a lifetime of meeting and coming to know others with different experiences and perspectives that we may be lucky enough to expand our own awareness and take in a wider view. Education can help with this, but not if what we learn simply involves taking on new, different, or more sophisticated stereotypes. There’s really no substitute for the kind of hands-on experiential learning that can happen when we move out of our personal comfort zone, with the humility that may allow us to see that our existing perspective is actually quite limited. And I think that’s part of what ultimately happened to Buffalo Bill. To be sure, the self-styled, larger-than-life persona remained, but he ultimately seems to have come to understand a wider perspective as he matured. Later in his life, he was quoted as saying, “every Indian outbreak that I have ever known has resulted from broken promises and broken treaties by the government.”

Buffalo Bill first passed through the eastern part of Yellowstone in the early 1870s, around the time it was designated as a National Park. He was so impressed by the development possibilities of the land that he returned in the mid-1890s to start a town: Cody, Wyoming. He opened the Irma Hotel, named after his daughter, in 1902, where they still stage a gunfight in the middle of the street at 6:00pm every evening. And he also built the Wapiti Inn and Pahaska Tepee in 1905 along Cody Road (now the road leading to the East Entrance of the park) to accommodate visitors in a more rustic, traditional Old West style. He also established the TE Ranch, located on the south fork of the Shoshone River, out of which he operated an early dude ranch, offering pack-horse camping trips and big-game hunting. And the town he founded, Cody, Wyoming, proudly holds the title of “Rodeo Capital of the World,” holding rodeos every night for three months every summer.

During his lifetime, Buffalo Bill was possibly the most recognizable celebrity on Earth, due to the popularity of his show across the United States and Europe. And the American West changed dramatically during his lifetime, too, in part because of his participation. Native Americans, driven from their homelands, had been forbidden to speak their languages or practice their customs, and were ultimately installed on reservations. Bison, which had once numbered in the millions, were being brought back from the brink of extinction. And the “frontier” was gone: railroads crisscrossed the North American continent leaving ghost towns in their wake. By the time of Buffalo Bill’s death in 1917, the Wild West had become primarily a figment of the American imagination, where it has remained for over a century. But learning more about his life has provided me with a greater understanding of not only the man himself, but also of the time and place in which he lived. If you ever have the chance to visit the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, in Cody Wyoming, I highly recommend you do. You’ll learn a great deal about the Native Americans who once lived in the Old West, and you’ll get a proper education about one man, Buffalo Bill Cody, and some of the folks with whom he explored, experienced, and exploited the Wild West.