Cody, William (“Buffalo Bill”)
The Oxford Companion to United States History
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2001
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© The Oxford Companion to United States History 2001, originally published by Oxford University Press 2001. (Hide copyright information)
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Cody, William (“Buffalo Bill”) (1846–1917), scout and showman.Born in Iowa, Cody moved with his family to Kansas in 1854. With his father's death in 1857, he went to work for a freight company. The claim that he rode for the
Pony Express cannot be documented. In the 1860s he served as a scout with Kansas cavalry and U.S. Army units fighting the Comanche and Kiowa Indians. Cody married Louisa Frederici in 1866. In 1867, the Kansas Pacific Railroad employed him to supply buffalo meat to railroad construction crews, giving rise to his nickname, Buffalo Bill. During these years he was also an army scout with the Fifth Cavalry under General Philip Sheridan, the former
Civil War leader now engaged in subduing the Plains Indians. An expert rider and marksman, Cody possessed an uncanny sense of direction.
Cody's acting career began in
Chicago in 1872 when he produced and starred in a Western melodrama by the popular writer Ned Buntline ( E.Z.C. Judson). In 1876, during the Sioux War, he briefly rejoined the Fifth Cavalry. From 1883 until 1916, he toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, an open‐air production that indelibly engraved elements of the mythic American West in the national imagination and that proved equally popular in Britain and Europe. He also operated cattle ranches, first in Nebraska and then near Cody, Wyoming, the town named for him. Countless dime novels contributed to his celebrity, as did his showmanship, familiar buckskin costume, and fanciful 1879 autobiography. He made the
cowboy an American hero, the Sioux the symbol of all Native Americans, and “Buffalo Bill” the quintessential frontiersman. For all his entrepreneurial ventures, he died penniless.
See also
Circuses;
Indian History and Culture: From 1800 to 1900;
Indian Culture and History: The Indian in Popular Culture;
Indian Wars;
Literature, Popular;
Popular Culture;
Railroads;
West, The.
Bibliography
Don Russell , The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill, 1960.
Nellie Irene Snyder Yost , Buffalo Bill: His Family, Friends, Fame, Failures, and Fortunes, 1979.
Joy S. Kasson , Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History, 2000.
Sarah J. Blackstone
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