Cody remembered in many ways
Original article can be found at
Originally published on August 21, 2017 By Lew Freedman
Editor’s note: This is the sixth in an ongoing series about Buffalo Bill Cody observing the 100th anniversary of his death.
In 1899 alone, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West traveled more than 11,000 miles in 200 days performing 341 times in 132 communities in the United States.
That was a microcosm of William F. Cody’s 30 years on the road chugging by train to anywhere in the nation where audiences awaited.
And that was aside from his European swings, crossing the sea with his human and animal entourage of hundreds almost like Noah in the ark.
Beginning with a command performance for Queen Victoria in England in 1887, from the British Isles to France, Germany, Austria, Spain, Italy and other international locales, Buffalo Bill preached the gospel of cowboys, Indians and the American frontier.
Steve Friesen, director of the Buffalo Bill Museum & Gravesite in Golden, Colo., is one of many Cody disciples who say, “Buffalo Bill is everywhere.”
Perhaps more accurately the phrase should go, “Buffalo Bill was everywhere.”
For three days in early August the Buffalo Bill Center of the West hosted the Buffalo Bill Centennial Symposium commemorating the 100th anniversary of his death, and later in 1917 the birth of the Buffalo Bill Memorial Association.
The event brought together 40 speakers to examine the legacy of William F. Cody, who during his time, between 1846 and 1917, was the most famous man in the world.
During those years, “he lived through astonishing change and he participated in much of that change,” said Paul Hutton, an author and a history professor at the University of New Mexico.
This legacy was shaped by what Cody did as a Pony Express rider, Civil War veteran, scout in the Plains Indian Wars, by winning the Congressional Medal of Honor, hunting buffalo to feed railroad workers, and then telling about it all over and over as a star of stage and showman in the Wild West.
But most assuredly, also because of where he traveled.
A post on the Colorado museum’s website which reads “Did Buffalo Bill Visit Your Town?” documents the everywhere Buffalo Bill went.
The chart is a comprehensive list of places and dates, domestic and foreign, where the Wild West appeared.
That included many exhibitions in Wyoming, even before 1890 statehood, including stops in Cheyenne, Evanston, Laramie, Rawlins, Rock Springs and Sheridan.
Not in Cody, though. The Wild West never played Cody, the community Buffalo Bill helped found in 1899 and where he was based for years.
Diverse views
When it comes to defining William F. Cody’s legacy, especially in popular culture (which he helped create) there are more diverse views than there are of President Trump.
There is no dispute Cody strongly influenced the way Americans look at the Old West, not only because he lived so many real adventures, but because of the way he was characterized by dime novels in fictional adventures.
Most consequential was the Wild West’s portrayal of genuine incidents, as well as embellished ones, such as the Battle of the Little Bighorn, (always included in the exhibition), as well as mock buffalo hunting and staged Indian battles, plus Pony Express rides.
In some cases the Wild West made people like Annie Oakley famous, and in some cases, the famous, like Sitting Bull, enhanced the Wild West cast.
Old West devotees know Buffalo Bill exploits by heart, but younger people who may not have been taught about him in history class don’t have a clear picture of him.
Paul Fees of Cody, the former curator of the Buffalo Bill Museum, who researched those 1899 travel statistics, referred to a case where in New York City people were asked who Cody was.
“They all knew he had something to do with the West,” Fees said.
Rather a minimalist outlook indeed, but Fees said “in his own time Buffalo Bill symbolized” what he called “the course of America better than anyone else.”
For those who also might not recall, in 1988 Cody appeared on a 15-cent stamp.
Buffalo Bill has his detractors. He was negatively portrayed by Paul Newman in the 1976 movie “Buffalo Bill and the Indians.”
As a scout who guided troops and killed foes in the Plains Indian Wars, Cody’s later relationship with former enemies seems remarkable.
In the name of authenticity, Cody sought to include real Indians, not imposter actors, in the Wild West. It was a challenge to gain approval for the hires from the Department of the Interior.
“It was a chance to get away from a nasty and brutish life on the reservation,” said Friesen, co-author of a book called “Lakota Performers in Europe: Their Culture and the Artifacts They Left Behind.”
“Buffalo Bill said they were the most important component of the show. That show set the standard for understanding the American West.”
Wild West natives had it all over reservation residents, Friesen said. They traveled around the United States and Europe, were able to wear tribal clothes and perform dances forbidden on the reservation – and were paid well.
Also, at a time when cultural genocide was official government policy, through “show business, the Indians were able to represent themselves.”
Name recognition
Conservationists lamenting the 19th-century, near-extinction of the buffalo sometimes blame Cody for their eradication on the Plains.
Even if Cody’s killing of 4,280 buffalo to feed railroad workers could have been a statistic on the back of his 1887 Allen and Ginter trading card, (which can be had for $699), somewhere between 30 million and 60 million bison were slaughtered by meat, fur and horn hunters, so it wasn’t really his fault.
Over time, as he performed on the stage and traveled with the Wild West, Cody the Frontiersman morphed into Cody the Showman, but one guided by his own savvy and instincts, as well as expert publicity drummers John Burke and Nate Salisbury.
To so many people William F. Cody personified the American West. The combination of him being everywhere and doing everything, then bringing it to the front door wherever you lived, made him the best-known, most-enduring, and best-liked figure transcending the 19th century West into the 20th century modern era.
“He has astounding durability in name recognition,” said Patty Limerick, an author and chair of the Board of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado.
That name recognition took a quantum leap to mainstream Americans, including youngsters, due to the energetic efforts of Ned Buntline.
Buntline was the pen name of Edward Judson Sr., who befriended Cody, plastered his name all over the nation through dime novels and talked him into doing theatre.
Buntline’s “The King of the Border Men” was the first Buffalo Bill dime novel in 1869 and hundreds, by Buntline and others, followed, most rooted in fantasy. They were the comic books of the era and clergy and sternly conservative adults insisted they were a bad influence on the youth of the day.
Christine Bold, a professor at the University of Guelph in Canada, said the books were “perceived as threats to the social order” and blamed for boys’ laziness and crimes, even up to murder.
Paralleling the idea that starry-eyed young people wanted to run away and join the circus, boys had the same idea about the Wild West. At the least, they were desperate to see it. This was akin to fans’ intense following of the sports heroes of today.
Naoma Tate, a member of the Buffalo Bill Center board of trustees from Cody, said in the early 1900s, as a 12 year old her grandfather ran away with a couple of friends just to see the Wild West in Philadelphia.
The story has been passed down orally in her family, she said.
Martin Woodside, a professor at Rutgers University-Camden, said dour authority figures worried young boys’“minds might become deranged” from too much Buffalo Bill.
Influence overseas
Scholars and casual Old West aficionados seem to weave back and forth like drunken drivers on the highway when analyzing the mix of Buffalo Bill Cody acts and the Wild West as fiction or reality.
Buffalo Bill’s tentacles stretched wide. He was the purveyor of the cowboy spirit, the front man for the frontier, the symbol of the West in the minds of those in distant lands who never saw the American West.
German author Karl May invented his own wild west world and in his lifetime (1842-1912) was the most popular and beloved writer in his country.
Cody went international in the composition of his troupe in 1893, by adding the “Congress of Rough Riders of the World” to the Wild West show name.
Already Native-Americans and African-Americans, in the form of buffalo soldiers, and Mexican Vaqueros, were part of the cast, but Russian Cossacks and Arabs joined up, too.
Back to Buffalo Bill possibly inspiring murder.
The March, 2016 issue of True West magazine explored the suggestion “a Buffalo Bill wannabe” really murdered famed artist Vincent Van Gogh in France in 1890, a twist on the report of him committing suicide by gunshot with no witnesses. Van Gogh died a year after the Wild West played Paris.
Buffalo Bill and Bram Stoker, author of the classic 1897 “Dracula” novel set in Romania, became friends.
Louis Warren, author of a seminal Cody biography, has said Stoker was a huge Buffalo Bill fan and created at least one character in another novel who was a thinly veiled Cody. Some say Stoker used Cody as the model for the American cowboy nemesis of the Count, too.
Consistent with belief in cowboy influence overseas, Warren, a University of California-Davis professor, said he once taught in Zimbabwe and had a student named Hopalong Cassidy.
Cody never performed the Wild West in Africa, but Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis professor Didier Gondola said young men in the Belgian Congo became aware of the Old West and Buffalo Bill in the 1950s and they played a critical role in the country’s 1960 rebellion and rejection of colonial rule.
“Those young people dubbed themselves ‘The Bills (after Cody),” Gondola said. “They were very instrumental.”
Buffalo Bill experts – on board with the notion he was everywhere and did everything – spoke of his influence on advertising given the splashy nature of Wild West posters, on Italian spaghetti westerns, western movies and TV shows, and artists. Not counting Wild West posters, the Center of the West owns at least 100 paintings of Cody, said Karen McWhorter, curator of the Whitney Western Art Museum.
Limerick said, “studying Buffalo Bill is entirely necessary to American self-knowledge. His life covers everything of significance in American western history. Cody’s life is a parable of the highest order.”
The symposium concluded with a dinner and the dinner concluded with Hutton speaking about Cody.
“With the passing of Buffalo Bill, the first great epoch of the American story came to an end,” he said.
And then those who invested such energy and 35 hours worth of scrutiny on the man’s life, raised a glass, a toast, to William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody.