Do You Ever Get ‘Buffalo Bill’ and ‘Wild Bill’ Confused?
By Sue Hancock Jones
All my life I’ve been confused about the two Bills—”Buffalo Bill” Cody and “Wild Bill” Hickok. Until now their histories have been intertwined in my mind like strands of spaghetti. I couldn’t remember who did what and when.
Now I’ve got it. William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody (1846–1917) was the only one of the two that became a rancher. But, like some ranchers before him, he had to go from poverty to brilliance before he could own a ranch.
According to the late and great Larry McMurtry, Cody also happened to be the most recognizable celebrity on the planet at the turn of the 20th century. James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok (1837–1876) never made it to the turn of the century. He died at the age of 39 after being shot in the back of the head while playing poker in a saloon.
Despite the outcome of their lives, the two men knew each other and Hickok even mentored Cody, who was nearly 10 years younger.
William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody
Although Cody was born in Iowa Territory, his family moved to what became known as “Bleeding Kansas” prior to the Civil War. While his father was delivering an anti-slavery speech, a man jumped up and stabbed Isaac Cody twice with a Bowie knife.
Because his father never fully recovered from the stabbing and died three years later, young Bill Cody began working at age 9 to support his family. At age 11, he met Hickok at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., when the two worked for a stagecoach and wagon-freighting company. Hickok became Cody’s mentor as Cody rode up and down the length of a wagon train delivering messages between the drivers and workmen.
Cody left the freighting company and joined Johnston’s Army as an unofficial member of the scouts assigned to guide the U.S. Army to Utah to put down a rumored rebellion. In what would become known as the Utah War, Cody saved the life of one of the soldiers when he killed a Sioux warrior. “So began my career as an Indian fighter,” he later wrote in his autobiography, Buffalo Bill’s Own Story.
At the age of 14, Cody got “gold fever” and was on his way to the California goldfields when he met an agent for the Pony Express and signed on to build several stations and corrals. Cody even became a rider for a short time until he was called home to his sick mother’s bedside.
After his mother recovered, Cody began working with a freight caravan that delivered to Fort Laramie in present-day Wyoming. At the age of 15, he served as a Union scout in campaigns against the Kiowa and Comanche before enlisting in 1863 with the 7th Kansas Cavalry.
James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok
After the war he reunited with his old friend “Wild Bill” Hickok in Kansas, where they both served as scouts. Cody worked for the U.S. Army as a civilian scout and dispatch bearer out of Fort Ellsworth. He was granted a leave of absence to hunt buffalo to supply Kansas Pacific Railway construction workers with meat.
Cody reportedly killed 4,282 buffalo in 18 months in 1867–68. Cody and another hunter, Bill Comstock, competed in an eight-hour buffalo-shooting match over the exclusive right to use the name “Buffalo Bill,” which Cody won by killing 68 animals to Comstock’s 48. With the name came the birth of a legend.
Because of his reputation for accurate marksmanship and total recall of vast terrain, Cody was in high demand as a scout and guide throughout much of the attempt by the government to end Indian resistance to settlement in the West. He reportedly engaged in 16 Indian fights.
In 1872 at the age of 26, Cody was awarded the nation’s Medal of Honor for his heroic actions as a scout when he saved the lives of several soldiers by rushing onto an active battlefield and pulling them to safety. Such exploits provided great stories for newspapers and dime novels as they transformed the youthful Cody into a Western folk hero. One of those writers was Ned Buntline, who persuaded Cody to make his stage debut in 1872 as a star in Buntline’s drama The Scouts of the Prairie.
Recognizing the financial possibilities of dramatizing the West, Cody became a superb showman even though he wasn’t a very good actor. The handsome performer was a hit with sold-out crowds. For 11 years Cody performed during the winter and spent the summer either scouting or escorting hunting parties to the West.
In 1877 he purchased 4,000 acres near North Platte, Neb., to raise cattle and horses. Cody used imported and blooded cattle and thoroughbred horses at a time when crossbreeding and thoroughbred animals were not common in the area. In the 1890s, he and a neighboring rancher installed a 12-mile canal from the North Platte River to irrigate their ranches. This enabled Cody to devote 1,000 acres to farming.
It was on this ranch that Cody developed the idea for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, a circus-like attraction that toured annually and made Cody an American icon and an international celebrity.
His production dominated entertainment throughout its era in both America and Europe. To use the words of the 1883 Hartford Courant, Buffalo Bill “out-Barnumed Barnum.”
“Buffalo Bill” Cody (front, center) posed in front of his new home in 1886 on Scout’s Rest Ranch in North Platte, Neb. The 18-room mansion was the centerpiece of his 4,000-acre ranch. (Courtesy Denver Library Western History Collection)
Cody named his ranch “Scout’s Rest Ranch” and used it as a place to relax between show tours. He built an 18-room mansion for his wife and four children and a large two-story barn for winter storage of the show’s livestock. “Scout’s Rest Ranch” is painted on the barn roof today just as it was in Cody’s day in what he considered “letters large enough to be read from the Union Pacific a mile away.”
The proceeds from his Wild West show were so great that he looked for investments and remembered the potential he saw in the Yellowstone/Big Horn Basin area of Wyoming Territory. He had wandered into the region in 1871 leading hunting expeditions. Partnering with entrepreneur George T. Beck, Cody invested in constructing an irrigation canal to reclaim the semi-arid Shoshone River Valley and make it conducive for settlement.
The men selected a town site in 1896. Beck wanted to call it “Shoshone,” but the Post Office Department rejected the name as too similar to another Wyoming community. Using his position as president of the newly formed Shoshone Land and Irrigation Co., Cody wrote the government agency and requested the official town name of “Cody.” The request was approved, and Cody the man poured money into Cody the town, including the purchase of the 4,000-acre T E Ranch with the T E brand and 1,000 head of cattle.
Besides his T E Ranch, Cody started the Cody Trading Co.; the Cody Enterprise, a weekly newspaper; and the grand Irma Hotel named after his daughter. One of Cody’s dreams was to create a ranch museum that would give visitors a taste of what Western life offered. In 1917 within six weeks of his death, 10 citizens of Cody incorporated the Buffalo Bill Memorial Association. Their aim was to build a monument to William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Today that monument is the impressive Buffalo Bill Center of the West.
