When we played our beloved games of “cowboys and Indians” as children, we little realised that we had things back to front – that the cowboys were not the good guys we thought they were and that the “Injuns”, whom we believed were the “baddies”, were actually the victims. A central figure in those childhood games was “Buffalo Bill”, who died 100 years ago on January 10th.
William Frederick Cody, pony-express rider, soldier, scout, bison hunter and showman, was born in 1846 near Le Claire, Iowa. The family moved to his father’s home place near Toronto, Ontario before settling in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The father was bravely anti-slavery in pre-civil war Kansas, as a result of which he was attacked and stabbed, receiving wounds from which he never fully recovered. He died when his son was only 11 and, due to the family’s straitened circumstances, the boy went to work, doing various jobs until becoming a pony-express rider at 14.
Army scout
By then, according to his account in
Buffalo Bill’s Own Story
, he had killed his first Native American “Indian” when acting as an army scout in the Utah War (a conflict between Mormon settlers and the US army). He served as a scout for the Union Army’s Seventh Kansas Cavalry in the final years of the American Civil War. In 1866, he married Louisa Frederici in St Louis, Missouri. They had four children, only one of whom survived him – and that by just one year. His wife outlived all their children.
It was as a result of a contract he had to supply buffalo meat to the Kansas Pacific Railroad work crews that he acquired the nickname of Buffalo Bill. He is reputed to have killed 4,282 bison in 18 months (1867-68).
He resumed his role of army scout during the Plains Wars, which involved the expropriation of territory from the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes.
In 1872, he became one of only four civilian scouts to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honour for bravery during the Indian Wars.
He had met the popular-novel writer, Ned Buntline, in 1869 and his stories for the New York Weekly about Cody's adventures, plus a very successful novel, Buffalo Bill, King of the Bordermen, helped create the legend that came to surround his name.
Buntline also persuaded him to portray himself on stage and he toured and performed in Buntline’s Wild West Shows before forming a troupe of his own, with James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok and others.
At the height of the Plains Indians’ resistance to white settlement, Cody returned to scout for the Fifth Cavalry in 1876.
Three weeks after the defeat of Gen Custer at the Little Big Horn, Cody was part of a regiment that encountered a party of Cheyenne and in the clash that followed, he killed and scalped a warrior called Yellow Hair.
In 1883, he established Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, a circus-like attraction that toured the US and Europe and lasted for 30 years in one form or another.
Sharpshooter
Many well-known historical figures took part, such as Lakota Sioux holy man Sitting Bull, sharpshooter Annie Oakley and frontierswoman and scout Calamity Jane.
Cody invested the money earned from the show in projects he hoped would bring economic growth to the West; among these ventures were mines, hotels, town building, coal and oil development, film-making and publishing.
Although his reputation and actions might suggest otherwise, he respected Native American culture, supported their rights, employed many of them and paid them well. He is on record as saying “every Indian outbreak that I have ever known has resulted from broken promises and broken treaties by the government”. Why then, it might be asked, did he work so assiduously on behalf of that government?
While his shows brought a taste of the Old West to the cities of the US and especially Europe, the West itself had changed greatly in his lifetime. The Native American tribes that once roamed the Great Plains were now mostly confined to reservations; railroads crisscrossed the plains and fencing divided up the land that had once been theirs for farmers and ranchers; the bison that gave him his nickname and sustained the many tribes for so long had been hunted almost to extinction.
He is buried on Lookout Mountain in Golden, Colorado, on the edge of the Rocky Mountains overlooking the Great Plains. Arguably one of the most famous Americans ever and symbol of the Old West more than any other, he has been portrayed in literature, musicals, theatre, films and television shows, especially when the Western was at the height of its popularity.