Photo and article courtesy of Matthew Kerns.
On January 10, 1917, 108 years ago today, died. The shadow his life and legacy cast over the popular understanding of the American West is immense. Westerns aren't set in the American West; they're set in Buffalo Bill's Wild West.
Cody’s life took him from message delivery boy for the parent company of the Pony Express to jayhawker, Union soldier, hotel owner, buffalo hunter, and scout. He was the fictional hero of a series of dime novels written by Ned Buntline, who convinced Cody and his friend and fellow scout John "Texas Jack" Omohundro to join him on a stage tour called "The Scouts of the Prairie" in the winter of 1872. From the moment he rose to prominence in 1869 until his death nearly fifty years later, Bill Cody exemplified and embodied the American West.
Though initially referred to as a melodrama or a "blood and thunder" production, his initial play with Texas Jack was the very first Western, the antecedent of the many plays, movies, and shows that would follow. The following season, Cody and Omohundro parted ways with Ned Buntline and added to their dramatic company their mutual friend James "Wild Bill" Hickok, though his refusal to take his dramatic career as seriously as his friends did led to his departure from the stage before the end of a full season. Cody and Omohundro spent the next several years touring together in the winter and hunting together in the summer before General Custer's death at the Little Bighorn sent both men to Montana to once again serve as scouts under the auspices of the United States Army. They parted dramatic ways after their tour of 1876 but remained friends until Texas Jack's death in Leadville, Colorado, in 1880.
After a few more years touring stages, Cody began what he came to call his Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World. Touring the nation by train, Cody brought the West to all of America, planting his version of the American frontier indelibly into the minds of citizens in the more than 1,400 cities the show visited.
Traveling to Europe, Cody became the first American superstar and perhaps the most well-known man in the world by the end of his life. Throughout this time, he extolled and showed to the world the virtues of the cowboy, first popularized by his old friend Texas Jack and now acted out on the world stage by the cadre of entertainers in Buffalo Bill’s entourage.
In late 1916, Cody traveled to Glenwood Springs to recuperate from a bronchial infection. Realizing that his health was not improving, Cody boarded a train to Denver to return to his family. On the return ride home, he made a stop at the Leadville station on January 6th, 1917.
As the train pulled in, he told his daughter and his nurse about his old friend Texas Jack, buried across town. Thirty-seven years after his best friend's death, Buffalo Bill Cody still teared up talking about Texas Jack. Not well enough to leave the train due to his declining health, Cody was unable to walk across town to Evergreen Cemetery and the grave he had generously erected for his friend. As the train pulled out of the station, Cody waved goodbye for the last time to the people of Leadville and to his old pard Texas Jack.
Four days later, Buffalo Bill was dead.
If you have never taken the opportunity, I urge you to visit the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, and the Buffalo Bill Grave and Museum on Lookout Mountain, Colorado. The lasting legacy of the man is immense. There really is an American West—prairies and plains and canyons and deserts—but the version of it in John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies, in Louis L’amour and Johnny Boggs books, in shows like Bonanza and the Lone Ranger is the one William F. Cody created—Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.
This is the last picture of William F. Cody, known to the world as Buffalo Bill, taken as he left Glenwood Springs the week before his death.
-Matthew Kerns
For more information, the reader can visit https://www.facebook.com/jbomohundro?mibextid=ZbWKwL
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