Buffalo Bill Cody: The Man Who Sold the West to the World

William Frederick Cody, the man the world called Buffalo Bill, was by the reckoning of the scholars who edit his papers the most famous American in the world at the turn of the twentieth century. His Wild West Show toured Europe and America for thirty years and put cowboys, bison, and Lakota performers in front of audiences from London to Rome to Chicago. He invented modern celebrity, in some sense, the sustained personal brand built on a curated mythology grounded in real biography. Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders took a name Cody’s show had been using since 1893. Hollywood Westerns built on it. Most of what the rest of the world thinks “the American West” looks like came from Cody’s stagecraft.

He was also a real frontiersman before he was a showman. Teenage teamster on the freight trails, Civil War cavalryman, contract bison hunter for the Kansas Pacific Railroad (about 4,280 kills by his own count, which earned the nickname), U.S. Army scout in multiple Plains Indian campaigns, Medal of Honor recipient. Most of the biography was real before it was mythologized, and the parts that were not are worth knowing too.

This is the unembarrassed version of his life.

Early life and the frontier years (1846-1872)

Cody was born February 26, 1846, in Le Claire, Iowa. When he was eight the family moved to the Kansas frontier, where his father Isaac, an antislavery man, was stabbed by a proslavery opponent; Isaac died in 1857. Will, at eleven the oldest male in the household, went to work as a cattle drover and teamster for the freighting firm Russell, Majors and Waddell, and spent the next few years with westbound supply trains.

The Pony Express is where the record and the legend part. Cody’s 1879 autobiography says he rode for the Pony Express as a boy, and historians have cast doubt on the claim. He promoted it on stage and in the arena for the rest of his life anyway, and the Pony Express ride became a fixture of the Wild West.

The Civil War: Cody enlisted in the Seventh Kansas Volunteer Cavalry in 1864 and served as a private for a year and a half, seeing action in Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, and Tennessee.

The bison years: In 1867 and 1868 Cody hunted bison to feed the crews building the Kansas Pacific Railroad across western Kansas. He claimed about 4,280 kills; the figure is his own, not a railroad tally. The “Buffalo Bill” nickname dates to this work.

Army scout years (1868-1876): Cody’s work for the Army began in 1868 as a hunter and guide, then as a scout at $75 a month, guiding troops and carrying messages between forts. He became Chief of Scouts for the Fifth Cavalry and was at the 1869 Battle of Summit Springs, where he was said to have killed the Cheyenne Dog Soldier leader Tall Bull. He received the Medal of Honor for gallantry in action on April 26, 1872, as a civilian scout with the Third Cavalry at the Loup Fork of the Platte River, Nebraska. (A 1916 to 1917 review revoked it, with those of four other civilian scouts, as civilians were ruled ineligible; all five were restored in June 1989.)

The “First Scalp for Custer” incident, July 1876: Three weeks after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Cody, scouting for the Fifth Cavalry, killed a Cheyenne warrior named Yellow Hair (sometimes mistranslated as Yellow Hand) in a skirmish near Warbonnet Creek, Nebraska, on July 17. The fight was minor and real. Cody dressed it in stagecraft within months: back on stage in the same costume, with Yellow Hair’s war bonnet, shield, and scalp, in a play titled The Red Right Hand; or, Buffalo Bill’s First Scalp for Custer. The line between real biography and self-promotion was already blurring.

The theater years (1872-1882)

Cody first appeared on stage in 1872 in Chicago, playing himself in Scouts of the Prairie, a melodrama by Ned Buntline (Edward Z. C. Judson). Buntline had made Cody a dime-novel hero in 1869 with the serial Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men. The play was savaged by critics and packed anyway. Cody then split from Buntline and formed his own troupe, The Buffalo Bill Combination, with Wild Bill Hickok and Texas Jack Omohundro; it toured for the next ten years, fall through spring, while Cody went back to scouting and guiding hunts in summer.

His stage reputation was built less on acting talent (he was not a natural actor) than on the authenticity of the scout he played. Audiences came to see Buffalo Bill, not to see good theater. The arrangement worked. Cody made enough money in this decade to invest in cattle ranching in Nebraska and to begin assembling the cast of frontier figures who would later become the Wild West Show.

The Wild West Show (1883-1913)

On May 17, 1883, Cody and the marksman William “Doc” Carver opened their Wild West exhibition at Omaha, Nebraska. The partnership lasted one season; from 1884 the actor-manager Nate Salsbury ran Buffalo Bill’s Wild West with Cody. The show was an outdoor spectacle, not a stage play: real cowboys riding broncs, real Lakota performers, mounted shooting demonstrations, an attack on the Deadwood stagecoach, a recreated Pony Express ride, and reenactments of Little Bighorn and Summit Springs. Audiences had never seen anything like it.

The show ran for thirty years. It toured the United States, then went abroad in 1887 for a London season beside the American Exhibition at Earl’s Court, timed to Queen Victoria’s Jubilee: a command performance for the Queen, and more than two million paying visitors. It spent nearly a decade in Europe all told, including the 1889 Paris Exposition and an audience with Pope Leo XIII in 1890. Sitting Bull joined the cast for four months in the summer of 1885. Annie Oakley joined in 1885 and became the show’s most popular featured performer.

By the 1890s the show traveled by special train; in 1899 alone it covered more than 11,000 miles and gave 341 performances in 132 cities.

Lakota performers: A complicated piece of the show’s history. Hundreds of Plains Indians performed in it over its run, Sitting Bull the most prominent, and after Wounded Knee a number of Lakota Ghost Dancers held as prisoners of war toured Europe with Cody. Pay was $25 a month, relatively good money, plus the chance to see parts of the country and Europe otherwise closed to them. Cody treated his Lakota performers comparatively well by the standards of the era and used his political influence to advocate for tribal causes, but the show was also deeply complicit in romanticizing the conquest of Native America. Modern scholarly assessments (Louis S. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 2005) treat this with the complexity it deserves.

Cody, Wyoming (1895-1917)

In 1895 Cody, George T. Beck, and a group of investors set out to irrigate the Shoshone River country of the Bighorn Basin, and in May 1896 Beck laid out the present town of Cody. The thesis: rail access, proximity to Yellowstone (the east entrance is 53 miles west), and irrigated farmland would support a tourism and ranching center.

Cody personally drove the project. When the private irrigation scheme proved too costly, he transferred his water rights to the federal government in 1904, and the new Reclamation Service built the Shoshone Dam from 1905 to 1910; it was renamed Buffalo Bill Dam in 1946, a century after his birth. The Burlington railroad line to Cody opened on November 11, 1901. He opened the Irma Hotel on November 18, 1902, and Pahaska Tepee, his lodge near Yellowstone’s east entrance, on July 5, 1904.

The town slowly succeeded but Cody’s personal finances did not. The estate of his partner James Bailey, who died in 1906, entangled him financially; Pawnee Bill bought the Bailey estate’s share in 1909, and Cody’s patent medicines, Arizona mine, and oil and irrigation ventures mostly failed. Deep in debt to the Denver newspaperman Harry Tammen, he saw the show forced into bankruptcy in 1913.

Final years and death

From 1913 to 1917, Cody continued performing in increasingly diminished traveling combinations, never quite paid off his debts, and spent most of his time traveling between Cody, Wyoming, his sister’s home in Denver, and various performance commitments. His health declined steadily; he was 70 by 1916 and the constant travel had been wearing him down for years.

He died at his sister’s home in Denver on January 10, 1917, at age 70, of uremic poisoning (kidney failure).

Harry Tammen, co-owner of the Denver Post and the man who had brought down the show, took over the funeral, and Cody was buried on Lookout Mountain, near Golden, Colorado, on June 3, 1917, under ten feet of concrete. He had wanted Cedar Mountain above his namesake town, but Louisa said he had changed his mind. The story that Tammen paid her $10,000 for the body has never been confirmed, and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West thinks it probably did not happen. Wyoming took it badly for decades. The Colorado grave site has its own small museum, the Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave, and is open to visitors most of the year.

Legacy

The myths Cody constructed about the American West, projected through the Wild West Show across thirty years and two continents, became the global template for what the West meant. Hollywood Western movies built on his stagecraft. The image of the cowboy as heroic individual, the bison as totemic, the conflict between settlers and Plains tribes as morally narratable rather than tragic, all of these came significantly from Cody’s framing.

He also spoke up, in an era when it surprised people, for women’s suffrage, for American Indian rights, and for the conservation movement. He was personally complicated, a heavy drinker for much of his life, and a charming charismatic in person who reportedly disarmed almost everyone he met.

The town that bears his name is now home to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, five museums under one roof plus the McCracken Research Library. (See our guide to Cody, Wyoming for what to actually do there.)

What he was not

Some of what gets attributed to Cody is wrong:

• He did not “kill the bison.” Commercial hunters across the Great Plains drove the species to near-extinction; Cody’s claimed 4,280 kills were a tiny fraction of an industry that killed millions. He later spoke publicly for conservation.
• He did not invent the rodeo. Rodeo evolved organically from working ranch competitions in the 1860s-1880s. The Wild West Show borrowed elements but did not originate them.
• He was not consistently a friend to Native peoples. The relationship was complex, mutually instrumentalized, and shaped by power asymmetries Cody benefited from.
• He did not personally fight in the Battle of Little Bighorn (he was scouting elsewhere at the time).

Visiting Cody

The Buffalo Bill Center of the West is a full-day visit. Pack the basics for a Wyoming day at 5,000 feet: insulated water bottle, a Pendleton wool layer for cool evenings, and for anyone planning to add a back-country leg from Cody toward the Beartooth, a Leatherman Wave and a wool blanket in the truck go further than they look.

What to read

For a serious modern biography:

• Louis S. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (Knopf, 2005). The standard scholarly biography. Substantial, accurate, treats both the man and the show seriously.
• Don Russell, The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill (University of Oklahoma Press, 1960). Older but still cited as the first comprehensive scholarly treatment.
• Larry McMurtry, The Colonel and Little Missie (2005). The popular treatment, focuses on Cody’s relationship with Annie Oakley and the show years.

For period material: the William F. Cody Archive, a joint project of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, publishes his papers online at codyarchive.org.

Why he still matters

Cody was the bridge between actual frontier experience and the global mythologization of it. He had real biography to draw from and an instinct for spectacle that knew how to translate that biography into something audiences from Sheffield to St. Louis would pay to see. The version of the American West that ended up in twentieth-century cinema, Western fashion, dime novels, country music, and global iconography ran through him.

If you want to understand why the Western mythology is what it is, you have to start with Buffalo Bill. He sold it to the world.

Related reading on this site

• Cody, Wyoming: a local’s guide to the East Gate of Yellowstone
• What is a trading post? A history of frontier commerce
• The possibles bag: frontier origins and modern uses
• The heritage gear glossary: nearly 100 terms every buyer should know
• The Western dress code, decoded by setting
• Esther Hobart Morris and Wyoming’s first-in-the-nation women’s suffrage
• Cheyenne, Wyoming: the state capital and the Daddy of ‘Em All
• Chief Washakie: the Eastern Shoshone leader who shaped Wyoming

Further reading

• Buffalo Bill’s America by Louis S. Warren (Vintage, 2006 paperback of Knopf 2005).
• The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill by Don Russell (University of Oklahoma Press, 1979).
• The Colonel and Little Missie by Larry McMurtry (Simon & Schuster, 2005).
• The William F. Cody Archive, codyarchive.org.
• Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, WY.