When you think of the Wild West, you probably conjure images of cowboys sauntering menacingly
through saloon doors, or weapon fights, or outlaws robbing trains. Maybe a little
Clint Eastwood or maybe John Wayne poised with his hand hovering over the holster of his six
shooter floats around there in your mind. The fact is, Hollywood took the intrigue,
violence, and lawlessness of the Wild West and ran with it, and we basically have one
man to thank for making that happen: Buffalo Bill. Welcome back to Nutty History. Today,
we’re exploring the life and legend of Buffalo Bill, the man who created Hollywood’s Wild West.
It was 1869, and Buffalo Bill was just 23 years old when he met a writer named Ned Buntline, who
was fascinated by the exciting life the young man had been leading. Buntline published a series of
dime novels inspired by Bill, which the public ate up. Bill started performing on stage in Chicago in
1872. At first, he was starring in a theatrical production called “Scouts of the Prairie” created
by Buntline. Buffalo Bill was apparently not a very good actor, but he was a handsome guy,
and the audiences loved him on stage. He eventually organized his own troupe,
and called it “The Buffalo Bill Combination”. He brought in real cowboys, Native Americans,
and scouts. In 1883, “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” was touring the country with a troupe of more
than 500 men and women. Demonstrations of sharpshooting by the likes of the famed
Annie Oakley wowed audiences. Calamity Jane, another famed sharpshooter and storyteller,
would often narrate the action, and there was even a band, unsurprisingly named “Buffalo
Bill’s Cowboy Band”. Native American raids on stagecoaches and battles between “cowboys and
Indians” were reenacted. Sitting Bull, one of the most famous plains Indians around, even joined the
troupe at one point. The term cowboy itself began to shift from one that had, before Buffalo Bill,
been basically a derogatory name, into a romantic hero of the American Frontier. Reality began
mixing with theater. It was a slushy combination, and a problematic one in many ways. One of Buffalo
Bill’s favorite quotes was “westward the course of empire takes its way”. His traveling circus
was framed as a “drama of civilization”, where manifest destiny was valorized and
Native Americans depicted as savages who stood in the way of a great, civilizing westward march.
Buffalo Bill eventually took his show over to Europe, making eight tours across the
pond between 1887 and 1906. He was received by Queen Victoria in London for her Golden
Jubilee celebration of the 50th anniversary of her reign, and between June and October Buffalo
Bill’s Wild West ran 300 performances and sold over 2.5 million tickets. The Wild West – Buffalo
Bill’s interpretation of it, anyway – had come to Europe. Seeds had been planted for what would
later become Spaghetti Westerns popularized in the 1970s by Italian filmmakers like Sergio Leon.
By the mid-1880s, Buffalo Bill was a sensation. His traveling show, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, was
being eaten up by audiences across the country. He was staying in swanky hotels, educating and
entertaining sold-out crowds with a troupe of hundreds of actors, most of them real life Cowboys
and Indians. They would reenact battles like Custer’s Last Stand at Little Bighorn, or show
the everyday live of natives, or show how to ride a bucking bronco or any number of things that,
for Bill, were authentic experiences he had as a scout, soldier, and tens of other jobs he claimed
to have had throughout his life on America’s frontier. The problem, though, is that Buffalo
Bill’s experience in the West was pretty unique. By many accounts, he was an All-American hero who
rode fast horses, used a mean rifle, and even received the medal of honor for bravery during
the American Indian wars. Yet while the medal of honor thing is true, we really don’t know what to
believe about Bill. A lot of the stuff we know of his actual life was given to us by Buffalo Bill
himself, or through the sensationalized stories told of him in dime novels that became hugely
popular towards the end of the 1800s. The story of Buffalo Bill is a complex one. On the one hand,
he was pretty much the main reason we have these romanticized, often bigoted portrayals of life
in the Wild West. But on the other hand, he did try his best to depict life on the frontier as
accurately as he knew it, and helped out a lot of women and Native Americans along the way.
Buffalo Bill was born William Frederick Cody in 1846 on a farm in Iowa. When he was seven, his
family moved to Kansas, where his father became a very vocal leader of the abolition movement
that would eventually ignite into the Civil War. Cody’s family basically had a target on their
backs in Kansas, and his father was attacked by a bunch of pro-enslavement bigots and skewered twice
with a bowie knife. With his family struggling financially, young Cody went to work. He later
claimed to have had a crazy amount of jobs – from animal trapper, to hotel manager, to stagecoach
driver to bullwhacker (a job which, thankfully, doesn’t involve whacking bulls like some bovine
mafia, it’s just a name given to someone who herds bulls). One of his first tastes for the Wild
West life came when he was apparently just 12, and worked as an unofficial scout guiding a detachment
on its way to Utah to put down a Mormon uprising that was happening in Salt Lake City. The event
went down in history as the “Utah Battle”, but it wasn’t much of a conflict. It was on the way to
this battle-that-wasn’t-really-a-battle where Cody got his first action, however. According to him,
he ended his first Native American, on the trip. Another consequence of the war was that it helped
create the Pony Express, that incredible route across the country that was so effective at
delivering mail and speeding up communication – that is until a thing called the train was
invented. Cody would go on to work as a courier for the Pony Express before he dove into theater.
Except, maybe he didn’t. As we’ve said before, a lot of what we know about Bill came directly from
his mouth. He wrote two autobiographies, and a lot of the information we just mentioned did come
from them. A lot of it has been corroborated, but there’s really no record of him ever working for
the Pony Express. Grains of salt included, Cody continued working as a scout during and after the
Civil War, where he served for Lieutenant Colonel George Custer of Custer’s Last Stand fame – a fame
that Bill helped create later by reenacting it in his shows, often using Native American actors
who had actually been in the battle. He also worked a stint for the Kansas Railroad Company,
where he reportedly killed 4,282 buffalo over the course of eighteen months between 1867 and 1868.
The mountain of buffalos that accumulated at Cody’s feet would be enough to induce a
heart-attack for any animal rights supporter, and while it was just one case of over-hunting
during the 1800s that nearly drove the bison extinct and left the Plains Indians missing a
vital part of their livelihood. But at least the buffalo were not wasted – they went to feed the
workers at the railroad company. Silver linings? Cody was almost Buffalo Bill by this point,
but he was a rival in the buffalo- business. Bill Comstock, another scout who was part Cheyenne,
fancied himself as the one true Buffalo Bill, so they had a good ol’ fashioned stand-off. Over the
course of eight hours, they killed as many of the great plains beasts as they could. In the end,
Cody beat Comstock 68 to 48 to claim the title, but clearly the real losers in the
competition were the buffalo. Fun sidebar, this is a grammatically correct sentence: Buffalo buffalo
Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo, which basically means buffalo from Buffalo that buffalo
from Buffalo bully, bully other buffalo from Buffalo. Google it if you’re thoroughly confused.
Despite the show's negative depictions of Native Americans and overt message of Manifest Destiny
and white American exceptionalism, Buffalo Bill actually did a lot of good things for both Native
Americans and women. By the 1890s, the show itself became a celebration of diversity in
certain respects. In 1893, Bill lengthened the name of the show to “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
and Congress of Rough Riders of the World”, and horse riders from all over the world
were showcased in their traditional clothing. Bill also employed a lot of Native Americans,
and he actually treated them fairly, paying them fair wages and encouraging them to promote their
traditions and ways of life - despite putting on shows where they regularly had to reenact defeats
that many of them had actually experienced first-hand. Buffalo Bill also was a vocal
supporter of women’s rights, and was active in the suffrage movement at the turn of the 20th
century. He employed many women as part of the show, and paid them the same wages as the men.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West began to run out of steam around 1910. Film was starting to take off,
and audiences moved to theaters instead of circus tents. Most of Bill’s troupe was aging,
and the show lost the spark that it once had. In 1913, the show went bankrupt. Bill had made
a fortune, but a lot of that money had gone into irrigation projects in the town he founded
and named after himself, Cody, Wyoming. He died in 1917. His life was an exciting one,
for sure. Full of contradictions. A champion of civil rights in many ways,
but also a promoter of what basically amounted to an annihilation of a culture.
What other things do you want to know about Buffalo Bill? Let us know in the comments,
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