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

William Frederick Cody, the man the world called Buffalo Bill, was the most famous American alive between roughly 1885 and 1905. 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 Naples to Chicago. He invented modern celebrity, in some sense — the sustained personal brand built on a curated mythology grounded in real biography. Theodore Roosevelt borrowed from his template. 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. Pony Express rider as a teenager, Civil War cavalryman, contract bison hunter (4,282 kills in 18 months for the Kansas Pacific Railroad, which earned the nickname), U.S. Army scout in multiple Plains Indian campaigns, Medal of Honor recipient. The biography was real before it was mythologized.

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 Territory. His father Isaac was a free-soil Kansan who was stabbed in 1854 over an antislavery speech and died of complications in 1857, leaving Mary Cody to raise eight children alone. Bill, the oldest son, went to work at age 11 as a cattle herder for a freight company, then as a “boy extra” on wagon trains running freight into Utah and Colorado.

In 1860, age 14, he was hired by the Pony Express. He rode for several months on the Sweetwater route in central Wyoming, which was among the most dangerous segments of the line. The Pony Express collapsed in October 1861 when the transcontinental telegraph reached Salt Lake City and made horse-borne mail obsolete; Cody had spent under a year with the company, but the Pony Express association became central to his later mythology.

The Civil War: Cody enlisted in the Seventh Kansas Cavalry in 1864, served as a private, and saw action in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Missouri. He mustered out in 1865.

The bison years: From 1867 to 1868 Cody held a contract with the Kansas Pacific Railroad to supply bison meat to the construction crews extending track across western Kansas. His count of 4,282 kills in 18 months is documented in railroad records. The “Buffalo Bill” nickname dates to this period, awarded after Cody won a publicized hunting contest against another railroad hunter named William Comstock for sole right to the moniker.

Army scout years (1868-1876): Cody worked as a civilian scout under various Army commands in the Plains Indian Wars, primarily in Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, and Wyoming. He served under General Phil Sheridan and was part of the Battle of the Platte River in 1869, multiple Pawnee scout deployments, and the Republican River campaigns. In 1872 he received the Congressional Medal of Honor for “gallantry in action” with the Third Cavalry against Cheyenne and Arapaho near Loup River, Nebraska. (The Medal was rescinded in 1917 when Congress determined civilian scouts were ineligible, then restored posthumously by a 1989 Army board ruling.)

The “First Scalp for Custer” incident, July 1876: Two weeks after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Cody, scouting for the Fifth Cavalry in northwest Nebraska, killed and scalped a Cheyenne warrior named Yellow Hair (sometimes mistranslated as Yellow Hand) in close combat at Warbonnet Creek. The combat itself was real and is documented by multiple Army and Cheyenne sources. Cody dressed the moment in stagecraft within months, performing it on stage as “The First Scalp for Custer” in his theater tour the following year. The line between real biography and self-promotion was already blurring.

The theater years (1872-1882)

Cody first appeared on stage in 1872 in Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men, a melodrama written for him by Ned Buntline (Edward Z. C. Judson), the dime-novelist who had been writing fictionalized Cody adventures since 1869. Cody found stage work paid better than scouting and required less time away from family. From 1872 through 1882 he ran a stage troupe, The Buffalo Bill Combination, that toured Eastern theaters every winter while Cody returned to Army scouting work in summers.

His stage reputation was built less on acting talent (he was reportedly a wooden performer) than on the documented 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)

In 1883 Cody and his partner W. F. Carver opened Buffalo Bill’s Wild West at Omaha, Nebraska. The show was an outdoor spectacle, not a stage play: real cowboys riding broncs, real Lakota performers, mounted shooting demonstrations, a stagecoach attack reenactment, a recreated Pony Express ride, the Battle of the Little Bighorn restaged with Lakota veterans. Audiences had never seen anything like it.

The show ran continuously for thirty years. It toured the eastern United States annually, then Europe (1887 first London engagement at Earl’s Court attracted over two million spectators including Queen Victoria, who came twice). Sitting Bull joined the cast for one season in 1885. Annie Oakley joined permanently in 1885 and remained the show’s most popular performer for seventeen years.

At its peak in the 1890s, the Wild West Show employed over 1,200 performers and animals, traveled by special train, and grossed over $1 million per year (approximately $35 million in 2026 dollars). Cody was personally one of the highest-paid entertainers on earth.

Lakota performers: A complicated piece of the show’s history. Cody hired Lakota men to perform in the show, including warriors who had fought against the U.S. Army at Little Bighorn and elsewhere. Pay was approximately $25 per month plus food, lodging, and travel — substantially more than reservation alternatives at the time. 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 and a group of investors selected the present site of Cody, Wyoming, as the location for a new town. The thesis: rail access, proximity to Yellowstone (40 miles east of the eastern entrance), and the agricultural potential of the irrigated Shoshone River basin would support a tourism and ranching center.

Cody personally drove the project. He helped finance the Buffalo Bill Dam (1905-1910) on the Shoshone River, which created the reservoir and made irrigation viable. He built the Irma Hotel in 1902. He pushed the Burlington Railroad to extend a spur to Cody, completed in 1901. He built the Pahaska Tepee Resort 50 miles west on the road to Yellowstone in 1905 as a hunting lodge.

The town slowly succeeded but Cody’s personal finances did not. The Wild West Show had begun losing money by 1908 due to changing tastes (early movies were starting to displace live spectacles), and Cody’s ranching, oil, and irrigation investments mostly failed. By 1913 he was effectively bankrupt and the show was sold at sheriff’s auction in Denver.

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. The cause was kidney failure.

The funeral was held in Denver and Cody was buried on Lookout Mountain west of the city. His widow Louisa accepted a reported $10,000 payment from the Denver Post and the City of Denver to consent to burial there rather than in Cody, Wyoming, which Cody had reportedly stated was his preferred resting place. Whether Cody actually preferred Cedar Mountain near Cody (as the Wyoming version of the story holds) or Lookout Mountain (as Louisa later claimed) is a documented historical dispute. The town of Cody has not entirely accepted the Denver outcome and a marble monument stands on Cedar Mountain regardless.

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 did real work as an advocate for women’s suffrage (he supported it from the 1890s), for fair treatment of Native American performers, and for environmental conservation (he was a strong public supporter of Yellowstone protection). He was personally complicated, frequently inebriated, 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, a five-museum complex that holds the world’s most significant collection of his life’s material. (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 4,282 kills were a tiny fraction of an industry that killed millions. He later became a strong public advocate for bison protection.
• 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 Library of Congress holds the William F. Cody papers and a substantial photograph collection, much of it digitized and available online. The Buffalo Bill Center of the West holds the largest physical collection.

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: 80 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).
• Library of Congress, William F. Cody Collection.
• Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, WY.