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Indian Scout Medal of Honor Recipient William F. (Buffalo Bill) Cody
"Buffalo Bill"
(1846-1917)
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, February 26th 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.
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 Bills deserved the title.
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 For his service over these years, he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1872, although this award was revoked in 1916 on the grounds that Cody was not a regular member of the armed forces at the time.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.
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 Custers 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 chiefs name as Yellow Hand. Still others said that Cody merely lifted the chiefs 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.
Codys own theatrical genius revealed itself in 1883, when he organized Buffalo Bills 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 Custers 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 Bills 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.
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.
CITATION
Rank: Civilian Scout. Born: Scott County, Iowa. Organization: 3rd Cavalry U.S. Army. Action date: 26 April 1872. Place: Platte River, Nebraska. Gallantry in action.
The medal which reads "The Congress to William F. Cody, guide, for gallantry at Platte River, Neb., April 26, 1872," had been retained by the Cody family, because the army had not requested its return. The bronze, star-shaped medal may be seen at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center at Cody, Wyoming.
But not even show business could keep Cody away from the west, so when the big Sioux rebellion broke out in 1876 Cody was once again back in service as an army scout. It was also during these Indian wars his fight with Sioux chief Yellow hand took place.
William Frederick Cody (1846-1917), the boy who would become Buffalo Bill, was born in a log cabin near LeClaire, Iowa Territory, on February 26, 1846. His father, Isaac, worked variously as a trader, a surveyor, and as overseer for an absentee landowner.
Isaac Cody himself was a product of westering pioneers. The first Codys in America were Huguenots who fled France for the Isle of Jersey to escape religious persecution. By 1698 they owned land in Massachusetts. Isaac was born in Ontario in 1811 and grew up in Ohio. Twice widowed, he wed schoolteacher Mary Bonsell Laycock in 1840 in Cincinnati. She was descended of Pennsylvania Quaker pioneers. With Martha, Isaac's five-year-old daughter from his first marriage, they moved to Scott County, Iowa, where six of their seven children were born: Samuel, 1841; Julia, 1843; William, 1846; Eliza, 1848; Helen, 1850; and May, 1853.
Only prolonged illness kept Isaac from striking out for California during the gold rush. After the accidental death of Samuel in 1853, the Codys headed west, moving briefly to Missouri then to Kansas where Isaac supplied hay and wood to Ft. Leavenworth and traded with the Kickapoo Indians. Another son, Charles, was born in 1855. Isaac, a man of principal and an active civic leader, was stabbed in 1854 while making a speech against slavery. The attack did not deter him from his economic or political activities, but its lingering effects led to his death in 1857.
Bill ("Willie" to his family) and Julia supported and cared for the younger children and their ailing mother. Martha left to marry and died shortly thereafter. Bill took a job as a herder and mounted messenger with Russell, Majors, and Waddell, the Leavenworth freighting firm and organizers of the Pony Express. A year later he accompanied a wagon train to distant and exotic Fort Laramie.
During the next two years young Cody trapped beaver, trekked to the gold fields of Colorado, and found time for several months of schooling. He also joined ("to my shame," he admitted) in some of the "border war" mischief by anti-slavery gangs of Jayhawkers.
It has been generally assumed, not without controversy, that Cody rode for the Pony Express at age fourteen or fifteen. Because of internal contradictions in his autobiography, scholars have made a good argument for denying his participation. However, most of his actions in 1860-1861 cannot be independently verified. The crucial role he and his Wild West show later played in commemorating the Pony Express, and his close friendship with men central to the Pony Express, both cloud the issue and in some ways make the debate irrelevant. In the absence of other records, the most it may be possible to say is that as a skilled horseman, an adventurous youth, and an erstwhile employee of the company, Bill was in the right place at the right time.
Mary Cody died on November 22, 1863. Bill mourned deeply. Early in 1864 he enlisted in the 7th Kansas Cavalry, a volunteer Union regiment that included many of his Jayhawking comrades, and fought honorably to the end of the Civil War. In St. Louis he met Louisa Frederici and married her there in 1866. They moved to Kansas to be with his family, which had been further bereaved by the death of little brother Charles late in 1864.
Bill and Louisa had four children, only two of whom survived to bear children of their own. Arta Lucille (1866-1904) was born at Leavenworth; Kit Carson (1870-1876) and Orra Maude (1872-1883) at Ft. McPherson, Nebraska; and Irma Louise (1883-1918) at North Platte.
Like his father, Bill seldom stayed long at home. After a stint as a stagecoach driver and a half-hearted effort at inn keeping near Leavenworth, he set out to make a living on the plains. His talents and physical gifts combined with an apparent fearlessness made him successful at contract jobs for (the) Army and railroad. Supplying 4,280 buffalo to feed railway construction workers during eight months in 1867-1868 earned him his nickname, "Buffalo Bill." General Philip Sheridan considered him a modest and well-spoken natural leader and made him chief scout for the 5th Cavalry in 1868. During his years as scout (1868-72; 1874; 1876), he fought in nineteen battles and skirmishes, was wounded once, was cited and rewarded for valor and "extraordinarily good services," won the Congressional Medal of Honor for gallantry, and a month after Custer's defeat, he killed a Cheyenne warrior in hand-to-hand single combat.
Sheridan assigned Cody in 1872 to guide the Grand Duke Alexis of Russia on one of the century's most celebrated hunts. The resulting publicity helped launch Cody's acting career when later that year he and Texas Jack Omohundro opened in Chicago in "Scouts of the Prairie" written by dime-novelist Ned Buntline. The "flavor of realism and nationality" that one perceptive critic found in the melodrama defined not only Cody's stage plays for the next dozen years but also his great arena show, Buffalo Bill's Wild West (1883-1913). Better than any other medium of its day, the Wild West tied America's development to "the winning of the West." The show put it into a clear narrative format and presented it to millions of people in the U.S. and abroad. In Europe, Buffalo Bill is still one of the most recognizable of Americans.
Cody invested his earnings in the modern West mining in Arizona, ranching in Nebraska, town building in Wyoming, filmmaking, and tourism. Most of his ventures did not return profits in his lifetime. When his Wild West show failed in 1913, his indebtedness forced him to tour through 1916 as an attraction with other shows. His death in Denver on January 10, 1917, of kidney failure, led the press to lament "the passing of the Great West." He was accorded a state funeral, still perhaps the largest in Colorado history.
In his person, Cody reconciled for Americans the seemingly contradictory values of individualism and wilderness on the one hand with those of civilization and progress on the other. A Chicago newspaper editor summed it up: "He has been more than picturesque; he has been worthwhile.
Biography from the Buffalo Bill Historical Center
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