The FReeper Foxhole Profiles William "Buffalo Bill" Cody - Aug. 2nd, 2004

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[SAMWolf]

Lord,

Keep our Troops forever in Your care

Give them victory over the enemy...

Grant them a safe and swift return...

Bless those who mourn the lost.
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FReepers from the Foxhole join in prayer
for all those serving their country at this time.

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William F. Cody
(1846-1917)

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In a life that was part legend and part fabrication, William F. Cody came to embody the spirit of the West for millions, transmuting his own experience into a national myth of frontier life that still endures today.

Born in Scott County, Iowa, in 1846, Cody grew up on the prairie. When his father died in 1857, his mother moved to Kansas, where Cody worked for a wagon-freight company as a mounted messenger and wrangler. In 1859, he tried his luck as a prospector in the Pikes Peak gold rush, and the next year, joined the Pony Express, which had advertised for "skinny, expert riders willing to risk death daily." Already a seasoned plainsman at age 14, Cody fit the bill.


William F. Cody, age 11. Tintype, c. 1857. William F. Cody Collection.

During the Civil War, Cody served first as a Union scout in campaigns against the Kiowa and Comanche, then in 1863 he enlisted with the Seventh Kansas Cavalry, which saw action in Missouri and Tennessee. After the war, he married Louisa Frederici in St. Louis and continued to work for the Army as a scout and dispatch carrier, operating out of Fort Ellsworth, Kansas.

Finally, in 1867, Cody took up the trade that gave him his nickname, hunting buffalo to feed the construction crews of the Kansas Pacific Railroad. By his own count, he killed 4,280 head of buffalo in seventeen months. He is supposed to have won the name "Buffalo Bill" in an eight-hour shooting match with a hunter named William Comstock, presumably to determine which of the two Buffalo Bill’s deserved the title.


William F. Cody, 1865, age 19

Beginning in 1868, Cody returned to his work for the Army. He was chief of scouts for the Fifth Cavalry and took part in 16 battles, including the Cheyenne defeat at Summit Springs, Colorado, in 1869. For his service over these years, he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1872, although this award was revoked in 1916 on the grounds that Cody was not a regular member of the armed forces at the time. (The award was restored posthumously in 1989).

All the while Cody was earning a reputation for skill and bravery in real life, he was also becoming a national folk hero, thanks to the exploits of his alter ego, "Buffalo Bill," in the dime novels of Ned Buntline (pen name of the writer E. Z. C. Judson). Beginning in 1869, Buntline created a Buffalo Bill who ranked with Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone and Kit Carson in the popular imagination, and who was, like them, a mixture of incredible fact and romantic fiction.


An extremely early portrait of Buffalo Bill Cody (left) and Louis Richard.

In 1872 Buntline persuaded Cody to assume this role on stage by starring in his play, The Scouts of the Plains, and though Cody was never a polished actor, he proved a natural showman, winning enthusiastic applause for his good-humored self-portrayal. Despite a falling out with Buntline, Cody remained an actor for eleven seasons, and became an author as well, producing the first edition of his autobiography in 1879 and publishing a number of his own Buffalo Bill dime novels. Eventually, there would be some 1,700 of these frontier tales, the majority written by Prentiss Ingraham.

But not even show business success could keep Cody from returning to the West. Between theater seasons, he regularly escorted rich Easterners and European nobility on Western hunting expeditions, and in 1876 he was called back to service as an army scout in the campaign that followed Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn.



On this occasion, Cody added a new chapter to his legend in a "duel" with the Cheyenne chief Yellow Hair, whom he supposedly first shot with a rifle, then stabbed in the heart and finally scalped "in about five seconds," according to his own account. Others described the encounter as hand-to-hand combat, and misreported the chief’s name as Yellow Hand. Still others said that Cody merely lifted the chief’s scalp after he had died in battle. Whatever actually occurred, Cody characteristically had the event embroidered into a melodrama--Buffalo Bill's First Scalp for Custer--for the fall theater season.

Cody’s own theatrical genius revealed itself in 1883, when he organized Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, an outdoor extravaganza that dramatized some of the most picturesque elements of frontier life: a buffalo hunt with real buffalos, an Indian attack on the Deadwood stage with real Indians, a Pony Express ride, and at the climax, a tableau presentation of Custer’s Last Stand in which some Lakota who had actually fought in the battle played a part. Half circus and half history lesson, mixing sentimentality with sensationalism, the show proved an enormous success, touring the country for three decades and playing to enthusiastic crowds across Europe.



In later years Buffalo Bill’s Wild West would star the sharpshooter Annie Oakley, the first "King of the Cowboys," Buck Taylor, and for one season, "the slayer of General Custer," Chief Sitting Bull. Cody even added an international flavor by assembling a "Congress of Rough Riders of the World" that included cossacks, lancers and other Old World cavalrymen along with the vaqueros, cowboys and Indians of the American West.

Though he was by this time almost wholly absorbed in his celebrity existence as Buffalo Bill, Cody still had a real-life reputation in the West, and in 1890 he was called back by the army once more during the Indian uprisings associated with the Ghost Dance. He came with some Indians from his troupe who proved effective peacemakers, and even traveled to Wounded Knee after the massacre to help restore order.


"Buffalo Bill" Cody and the Prince of Monacco presented Plenty Coups a rifle in a 1913 ceremony in Cody, Wyoming.

Cody made a fortune from his show business success and lost it to mismanagement and a weakness for dubious investment schemes. In the end, even the Wild West show itself was lost to creditors. Cody died on January 10, 1917, and is buried in a tomb blasted from solid rock at the summit of Lookout Mountain near Denver, Colorado.

[snippy_about_it]

You're right, Snippy does deserve a raise. I hereby announce that I will double Snippy's current salary, she's worth every bit of it. :-)

LOL. Nothing X Nothing = nada

I appreciate the nomination and the gesture, it's better than cash.

[snippy_about_it]

LOL. That's proof enough. All your life are belong to us.

[snippy_about_it]

...and how much we need the serious people to stay in charge.

True. I hope most people (voters) can see what a disaster kerry would be for America.

[SAMWolf]

Afternoon CT.

The events today in the East and in Baghdad and Afghanistan over the weekend show the threat is still real.

[SAMWolf]

Up've been getting nada! That's more than I was getting!!

[Victoria Delsoul]

Hi everybody.

[SAMWolf]

Afternoon Victoria. You're early. Can't say I agree with Mr. Bierce's opinion on Patriotism. :-(

[Victoria Delsoul]

Hi Sam, yikes, I didn't get the right graphic. :-(

[snippy_about_it]

Bierce was a strange man indeed.

[Victoria Delsoul]

I'll remember not to post his stuff again.

[snippy_about_it]

He was one of those writers who you could agree with until you read further. He had an idea that life sucked and was very cynical, he hated the government, religion and just about everything.

I'd like to run away to live in the woods too but I would miss mankind, I don't hate everything, I just tire of it sometimes. LOL. He seemed to hate everything or at least wrote that way.

He was a civil war (Union) veteran and became a writer, very famous and mysteriously disappeared on his way to Mexico to cover the fighting with Pancho Villa. Interesting live but didn't trust anyone or anything.

[colorado tanker]

Well, looks today like John Effing Kerry has gotten a dead tomato bounce out of his convention. The more people get to know Lurch, the less they like him.

[snippy_about_it]

The more people get to know Lurch, the less they like him.

We can only hope they dislike him more than they hate W. At the very least, maybe they will stay home on election day.

[SAMWolf]

The graphic is fine. Mr Bierce was a bitter man who distrusted most, if not all of Society. There are times you can't help but agree with his sentiments, just think his view of Patriotism is wrong.

[SAMWolf]

Well, looks today like John Effing Kerry has gotten a dead tomato bounce out of his convention.

:-) Maybe there's still hope. IMHO, this election is Bush's to lose. If Kerry wins it won't be because Kerry won it, it will be because Bush lost it. Does that make sense?

[colorado tanker]

If Kerry wins it won't be because Kerry won it, it will be because Bush lost it. Does that make sense?

It does. Kerry stands for nothing except being the anti-Bush. President Bush needs to clearly explain to the people that we are still at war against terror, that Iraq was a key state in the islamo-fascist network that supports terror, and that the only way to win this long and difficult war is to stay on the offensive and take the fight to the enemy's heartland. If we go over to defense as Kerry wants, we'll just get hit again, and again, and . . .

[colorado tanker]

If Kerry wins it won't be because Kerry won it, it will be because Bush lost it. Does that make sense?

It does. Kerry stands for nothing except being the anti-Bush. President Bush needs to clearly explain to the people that we are still at war against terror, that Iraq was a key state in the islamo-fascist network that supports terror, and that the only way to win this long and difficult war is to stay on the offensive and take the fight to the enemy's heartland. If we go over to defense as Kerry wants, we'll just get hit again, and again, and . . .

[SAMWolf]

Yep. All Kerry has is "I'm not Bush"

[Victoria Delsoul]

There is something terribly wrong when people hate everyone and everything.

[WaterDragon]

I never tire of reading about Buffalo Bill! Thanks!

By the way, I found this at Jewish World Review today (August 2nd).....

[ T O D A Y I N H I S T O R Y ]

On this day in …

* 1776, members of the Continental Congress began attaching their
signatures to the Declaration of Independence.

* 1876, frontiersman "Wild Bill" Hickok was shot and killed while
playing poker at a saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory.

* 1934, German President Paul von Hindenburg died, paving the way
for Adolf Hitler's complete takeover.

* 1939, Albert Einstein signed a letter to President Franklin D.
Roosevelt urging creation of an atomic weapons research program.

* 1945, President Truman, Soviet leader Josef Stalin and British
Prime Minister Clement Attlee concluded the Potsdam conference.

* 1964, the Pentagon reported the first of two attacks on U.S.
destroyers by North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin.

* 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, seizing control of the oil-rich
emirate. (The Iraqis were later driven out in Operation Desert
Storm.)