By Patrick Allitt, PhD, Emory University
Images of the Wild West have long held a treasured place in Americans’ concept of their nation, and few people did more to nourish them than William Cody, known later as “Buffalo Bill”. Singled out by eastern writers and editors as an ideal example of western manliness when he was only 23, he became the subject of hundreds of books, poems, plays, and exaggerated news stories.
Born in Iowa in 1846, he moved with his family to the Kansas frontier in 1853. He was very poorly educated in the formal sense, but early on, he learned the range of skills that would make him one of the great outdoorsmen. When he was only 11, he was working as a cattle driver, and as a teenager, he rode for the Pony Express. During these years, he met several of the prewar generation of western legends—people like Jim Bridger and Kit Carson.
This is a transcript from the video series American Identity. Watch it now, on The Great Courses.
He worked periodically as a teamster for the Denver gold rush. He served without distinction in the Kansas regiments of the Union Army, and later on embroidered the story to imply that he had a highly distinguished war record, which we know factually to have been untrue. Still, it is true that, after the war, he showed exceptional gifts as a scout, and his knowledge of the Kansas Plains country made him very useful in the Indian campaigns immediately after the Civil War. General Sheridan promoted him to become chief of scouts of the Fifth Cavalry, in a succession of campaigns in the late 1860s and early 1870s.
The Transcontinental Railroad and 4,280 Buffalo
In the late 1860s, the first transcontinental railroad was built. Because huge work crews were going out on this job, they needed to be fed, so the Kansas Pacific commissioned William Cody to provide 12 buffalo per day. With a high-powered Springfield rifle, Cody could easily bring down far more than 12. He claimed that he killed 4,280 buffalo in 18 months of service. This may well have been true. In the days when Indians on horseback had been shooting at buffaloes, it had taken enormous skill to hunt buffalo. Buffalo hunting meant riding alongside the animal and firing arrows repeatedly into it until it fell. But with high-powered guns, it became a very routine matter. Cody said he once killed 16 of them in one afternoon, as part of a shooting contest.
He grew his hair and his mustache very, very long, and adopted fringed buckskin jackets. Already in his early 20s, he started cultivating the image of himself as someone extraordinary. He claimed to have grown his long hair in defiance of the Indians’ scalping tradition. George Armstrong Custer (General Custer) did the same. His hair became one of his distinguishing trademarks.
Learn more about the construction of the transcontinental railroads
Buffalo Bill’s Big Break
The great break for Buffalo Bill came when he met the journalist Ned Buntline in 1869 at an army camp. Buntline at once took a great liking to Bill’s appearance, swagger, and his ability to tell stories about his life on the frontier. Buntline himself was a Connecticut Yankee. He had become the author of dime novels—cheap books turned out very quickly and full of lurid adventure.
Buntline was looking around for a new hero to update the Boone, Crockett, and Carson literary tradition. After meeting Buffalo Bill, he decided that this was the man. His first book about him was called Buffalo Bill: King of the Border Men, and he attributed to William Cody exploits that various other people had done—for example, the killing of Chief Tall Bull.
Cody hadn’t even been on the expedition that led to this chief’s death. The actual killer was a man named Major Frank North. Later on, Frank North worked in Cody’s show and became his partner on a ranch. But during the show, Cody would be depicted as doing this killing, which North himself had done. It must have been a very strange sensation for him—nightly reenacting the killing, with Cody rather than himself defeating the chief in single combat.
Learn more about America’s treatment of the Plains Indians
Another writer named Prentiss Ingraham, who called himself “Colonel” Prentiss Ingraham, wrote 203 Buffalo Bill novels in the period between 1873 and 1900—more novels about him than about any other western figure, mostly completely imaginary. They were sometimes loosely based on events in Cody’s own life and the lives of other frontiersmen, as he gathered western lore.
Dinosaur Hunters, the New York Herald, and Winston Churchill’s Mother
Because of these books, the name Buffalo Bill began to spread back East, and he was still only in his mid-20s. So when the railroad made the Great Plains accessible, and when groups of eastern businessmen and visiting dignitaries developed a fashion for coming out West to go hunting and to see the great sites, they wanted to hire Buffalo Bill as their guide. In the 1870s, he made a good living at this.
One of his famous expeditions was in 1870 with Professor Othniel Marsh, whom he conducted to the Big Horn Basin in search of dinosaur fossils. Marsh made a series of skeleton discoveries that were important to the identification of several of the dinosaur species, and Cody was his guide. On another expedition, Cody guided James Gordon Bennett, the editor of the New York Herald; Leonard Jerome, whose daughter Jenny was later to be the mother of Winston Churchill; and various other millionaires on a hunting expedition in 1871.
Learn more about the complex and fascinating story of the conquest of the American West
The New York Herald itself ran plenty of stories about the expedition and did what it could to extend the legendary quality of this guide. The son of the Czar of Russia, the Grand Duke Alexis, came out in 1872 and said he wanted to hunt buffalo on the Great Plains. Once again, it was Cody who escorted him on a buffalo hunt. They arranged for a group of friendly Indians to come along and to put on shows for them, to dance, and to have shooting displays. Duke Alexis gave Cody a massive fur coat in gratitude for his work as a guide.
William Cody Visits New York City
Cody then went to New York City to visit some of the people he had hosted previously, and they looked after him on a very successful visit. He was introduced at parties and lionized by everybody he met there as the living embodiment of the Wild West.
It is important to remember that during this development of the mystique of the West, only a tiny, tiny percentage of Americans actually went there. For nearly all of them, this was only something that they had heard about happening somewhere else. Cody was in the unusual position of being in contact with both sides.
Learn more about the magic behind the mythology of the American West
He was recalled to the army from New York in 1873 into a real Indian campaign, during which he won the Congressional Medal of Honor in a campaign against the Sioux. This is one of those moments when the reality and the myth begin to mix up. He helped a column of the Third Cavalry, led by General Joseph Reynolds, to locate the enemy, and then he led an attack. It must be emphasized that his bravery and his coolness under fire were real. He did have some of the qualities that made him an appropriate person about whom to tell stories of this kind.
Common Questions About Buffalo Bill
Buffalo Bill is an American folk hero known for many acts of intrigue, from riding the Pony Express to fighting in the American Civil War to staging a famous Wild West Show, a circus that traveled America and Europe.
Buffalo Bill‘s real name is William Frederick Cody.
Buffalo Bill earned the nickname in a match between himself and Bill Comstock to see how many buffalo they could kill in an eight-hour contest. Bill killed 68 and Comstock 48, securing the Buffalo nickname for Buffalo Bill, who was known for having killed 4,282 buffalo in 18 months.
Buffalo Bill died of kidney failure on January 10, 1917.
