Easterners first started marveling at Cody in 1872 as a daring scout and fearless hunter, not as an actor or showman. That year, someone else played him at New York’s Bowery Theatre in a four-week production of Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men. Cody caught the show as a guest in a private box and was thunderstruck. Before the curtain fell he was introduced, and the audience roared. Nervous and tongue-tied, he managed but a few words, waving in his buckskin suit to the well-dressed theatergoers below. That was all it took. Buffalo Bill was hooked on the euphoria of acclaim. As Cody put it, “I was shown the elephant.”
He was timid at first, and his knees knocked. For all his confidence in the saddle, Buffalo Bill was never a natural on the boards. In his initial struggles in stage acting on the East Coast, he often flubbed his lines. In one of his first premieres, before General Sheridan, a phalanx of Army officers, and a house of three thousand, he later recalled, his stage fright “broke me all up and I could not remember a word.”
Yet in the open-air arena, Cody and his traveling troupe succeeded because they reincarnated what he and so many others had known on the rolling Western frontier. So it fell upon his broad shoulders to preserve America’s great Western adventure, to make it breathe again, to present it to a modern world. “All the people back East want to find out just what the West looks like,” he once told Lulu. “And you can’t tell them on a stage. There ain’t no room. So why not take the West right to them?”
The Western archaeologist Warren K. Moorehead would recall the day in the early 1880s when he was just a boy and the Wild West show came to his hometown, Newark, Ohio. “I shall ever remember my sensations when witnessing the grand buffalo hunt,” he said. “Three or four poor, old, scarred bison were driven into the fair-ground enclosure by some whooping cow-punchers. Buffalo Bill himself dashed up alongside the lumbering animals and from a Winchester repeater discharged numerous ‘blanks’ into the already powder-burned sides of the helpless creatures. The crowd roared with appreciation.”
Buffalo Bill’s enormously popular Wild West show made him wealthy, thrilled millions in the United States and abroad, and enshrined the daring, adventurousness, and endurance of America’s cowboys. (Library of Congress)
Cody scouted the reservations for native actors, including Sitting Bull for a time. He toured the old cow towns and enlisted cowboys and daredevils. He bought horses and stocked up on wagons, cattle and coaches, Gatling guns and grandstands, and eighteen-car trains to haul it all around. In an average week, his cast and crew could devour more than five thousand pounds of beef, four hundred pounds of ham, and eight hundred pounds of chicken. Two thousand loaves of bread were sliced and buttered. Six gallons of mustard were poured on, one barrel of pig’s feet pried open, and five hundred pies served fresh from his coal-fired ovens.
Everything came in quantities as enormous as Cody’s habits, particularly his affection for an uncorked bottle and a double shot glass. Repeatedly he was forced to promise he would lay off the spirits during the lengthy show seasons, which often ran for months at a time.
“I solemnly promise you that after this you will never see me under the influence of liquor,” he once wrote to show promoter Nate Salsbury, his general manager. Then Cody thought better of what he had just pledged. “I may have to take two or three drinks today to brace up on,” he admitted. And he corrected himself again. “This drinking surely ends today and your pard will be himself and on deck all the time.” Salsbury warned Cody that he had better restrict himself to a single drink a day, and Cody promptly agreed. He poured a bottle of whiskey into a large schooner and carried it around with him—his one drink a day. Later he swore to Salsbury that when the shows were over, when he finally put down the rifle and took up retirement, he was going on a “drunk that is a drunk.”
Drinking, for Buffalo Bill, came with the territory. It also helped boost his saddle-and-sirloin reputation as America’s leading frontier hero. To him a drinking bender was “a hell of a toot” and an especially raucous night a “hoof-her-up.” A year before he and his Wild West crew first headed out on the road, fifteen cowboys riding herd through Nebraska chanced upon Cody’s ranch in North Platte. “Cody was at home and sitting on the veranda,” recalled Frank C. Huss. “After hand-shaking and introductions, we were asked what we would have to drink. Each called for his favorite and each was supplied. There must have been a big supply on hand!”
Twice a day in his traveling extravaganzas, in large downtown venues or small fairgrounds, in the United States or in Europe, Buffalo Bill Cody reclaimed the daring and splendor of the old Wild West. In afternoon and evening performances, the acts featured trick ropers, broncho riders, and sharpshooters. The cast included Arab acrobats, Russian Cossacks, and Filipino horsemen. Annie Oakley would fire off spectacular hip shots at swirling targets. When outlaws robbed the Deadwood stagecoach, Cody’s cowboys saved the day.
A typical opening act silenced the crowd with a bugle call, followed by a quarter-mile horse race featuring a cowboy, an Indian, and a Mexican vaquero. Pony Express riders relayed the mail, and Indian braves raced each other on foot and on horseback. “Cowboy fun time” spotlighted trick mules, bucking bronchos, and horsemen swooping small items off the ground. Ambushing Indians would attack a settler’s cabin until a posse rode to the rescue “with enough firing of pistols to make a small boy howl with delight.”
Cody, billed as the “Champion All-Round Shot of the World,” would storm into the arena astride a favorite horse, armed with a shotgun, Winchester rifle, and pistol, while his Thoroughbred kicked up the dirt and sawdust floor. He would shoot at clay pigeons or composition balls, sending them spinning or shattering as he whirled in every direction. He would fire English style, the butt of the gun below his armpit. Then he would fire American style, the butt of the gun below his elbow. He could hit a ball in the air as he galloped past it, knocking down twenty clay pigeons in ninety seconds.
In Chicago in 1893, Buffalo Bill scored his high-water mark. When he set up camp that spring next to the World’s Columbian Exposition—popularly known as the Chicago World’s Fair—it marked Cody’s most successful season ever; profits topped $1 million. It quickly became a must-see event, what one grizzled Chicago newspaper editor (who in his career had “seen just about everything worth seeing once”) called “the greatest show” he had ever seen in his life.
In early 1892, Cody had returned to the United States after several seasons touring Europe. He sailed home on the luxury liner RMS Umbria to New York and concentrated on how to attach his hugely popular Wild West extravaganza to the Chicago World’s Fair. It would be, Cody said, “the supreme effort” of his life.
But the Chicago fair promoters, who were raking in generous donations to build their promenades, house their exhibits, and electrify the White City, decided to lock him out. Cody’s act, they said, “had a prime object … to make money by a display of the savage and repulsive features of Indian life.” The fair, they said, would in part honor Native Americans and highlight their efforts to adapt to the white world, but without all the savagery and banditry whooped up in Cody’s show. And fair leaders scoffed at rumors that if denied a role inside the exposition, Cody would lease a spot next door. Too expensive, they said; “a fabulous price.”
Cody remained determined. In Pittsburgh, he announced his plans to join the next year’s fair. He spent a week in Lincoln and other parts of Nebraska and calmly went hunting, shooting two swans. He would tour England one more time, he said, before the fair opened in Chicago.
He staged his 1892 season at Earls Court in London. At a luncheon to celebrate the opening, he was feted by the U.S. minister (ambassador) and consul general, an English count, and the bishop of London. Spanish, French, Turkish, and Russian dignitaries partook as well. For the debut performance, twenty thousand people crowded into the court arena. Cody had brought with him a cast and accompaniment of four hundred, plus forty Sioux “braves and squaws.” To kick off the first day, he purchased $370
worth of “Wild West” souvenir spoons for his lucky chosen friends and fans.
At Windsor, Queen Victoria presented Cody with a large gold seal embossed with her personal monogram and etched with the British Order of the Garter: “Honi soit qui mal y pense” (Shame be to him who thinks evil of it), words associated with Sir Gawain and the Knights of the Round Table.
As the Wild West drew enthusiastic London crowds, Cody continued to dream of Chicago and next year’s world’s fair. He sent scouts hunting for horses and riders from many countries, including Argentine gauchos, and planned to ship them to America for the Chicago engagement. “I am getting together the wildest, most novel, the largest show ever conceived for the World’s Fair,” he proudly announced in a June 1892 letter to the Omaha Daily Bee. He pledged that in Chicago he would be “repeating my success here in the metropolis of the world.”
In England, Cody also was drawn to the increasingly popular sport of long-distance horse racing. To reporters in London, he spoke often about a recent Vienna–Berlin ride that left many horses ridden to death. “I’m not at all surprised that many of them came to grief,” he said. “Blood is a good enough thing in its way, but in a long-distance ride of this kind it cannot, as a rule, hold its own against wiry bone and muscle.”
To Cody, the European Thoroughbreds were no match for the heartier American Western-bred bronchos, and European riders no rivals to American cowboys. “The strain on the horses in such a ride is tremendous,” Cody said. “But the strain on the rider is still greater.” He did not think the sprint between Vienna and Berlin a “fair test of endurance either in men or horses.” He rattled off Civil War campaigns and hard riding on the Plains that he said were “superior” to two hundred princes and high military officers racing just under four hundred miles between the capital of Austria and the capital of Germany in seventy-one hours.
Cody boasted to the European press that he could wallop any European rider in a true contest of long days and open terrain, and on a short track as well. “On the race course at Manchester several years ago I laid a bet that I would ride ten miles on 20 of my ponies faster than any other man on the same number of English Thoroughbreds,” he said. “The English rider … I beat him by 64 yards, and I guess that was about the hardest 20 minutes’ work I ever did.” He spoke of the great bursts of Pony Express mail riders “before the days of steam and telegraphs.… When Lincoln was standing for the presidency, the election returns had to be conveyed from Sacramento to St. Joseph”—from the capital of California to Pony Express headquarters in Missouri. “And mind you the track was nothing like so good as the road between Vienna and Berlin. Well, in the carrying of those mails the average rate of riding was 17 miles an hour. On one occasion I covered as much as 322 miles in one continuous ride, though not, of course, on the same horse, at an average speed of 15 miles an hour, and mind you, this was through hostile Indian territory too.”
A reporter asked, “Was this your only feat of the kind?” Three times in the winter of 1869, Cody replied, he had dashed back and forth between Fort McPherson and Fort Kearney, ninety-five miles at a stretch. He recalled one forced ride of sixty hours when his horse weakened and they walked much of the way, only to see the horse bolt and kick when Cody tried to water it. The horse took off, and Cody chased it on foot some thirty-five miles, “within a half a mile of my destination.” Then he knew the horse’s days were done. “I gave it a bullet from my Winchester,” he said, “and there an end.”
Cody loved racing. He had grown up around horses, in the corral and on horseback. General Philip Sheridan’s memoirs recalled a young Bill Cody ferrying military dispatches across the Kansas frontier in 1868, including one sixty-five-mile stretch “infected with Indians.” Sheridan wrote that “Cody rode about 350 miles in less than 60 hours, and such an exhibition of endurance and courage” convinced the general to hire him as a lead scout.
In England in 1892, Cody was thinking of long-distance horse racing in America. He had his own ideas, and he told the press that his show promoter Nate Salsbury had offered to back fifty cowboys armed with revolvers against any “100 of the best of European cavalry.” But Cody did not race against English riders, and his American bronchos did not take on Europe’s uniformed cavalry. Instead he set sail a few weeks after the Vienna–Berlin disaster, bound back to New York. Much of his Wild West show baggage continued on to Chicago and was offloaded at the rail yards there. Buffalo Bill still was determined to star at the world’s fair.
And he was restless. He hosted a company of English and Bavarian aristocrats on a hunting trip through the Rockies. Traveling across Arizona, Utah, and Colorado, he suggested a national game preserve in the Rocky Mountains. “The fate of the buffalo, which a few years ago roamed the plains in herds of tens of thousands, is to be the fate of all other game,” he warned, “unless something is done to check the wholesale destruction of wild animals.”
In January 1893, Cody traveled to Washington. Over dinner and cigars with friends not far from the White House, he discussed his game park idea and his Chicago plans. But the Interior Department rejected both proposals: no preserve and no official place for Buffalo Bill at the World’s Columbian Exposition.
He tried again to change the minds of the fair promoters, but they insisted that the exposition was designed as a tribute to the modern world and the coming new century, and not as a look back at the legacy of the fading West. The fair’s Committee on Ways and Means saw too much “incongruity” between the future world the fair would highlight and Cody and his cowboy past. The answer remained no.
Cody returned to Omaha, disappointed but unbowed. On March 21, he announced new plans to purchase “saddles and other goods and to fix upon rates with the Union Pacific railway company for the transportation, on April 1, of 300 horses from North Platte to the World’s Fair.”
“I leave for North Platte tonight,” Cody declared. “We open up our Wild West show in Chicago one week before the beginning of the fair.” He said Salsbury had leased a large lot between Sixty-Second and Sixty-Third streets, right next to the fair. The cost would be $180,000 for those fourteen acres of ground directly opposite and across the street from the fair’s main entrance, no small sum. “Great Scott!” Cody had complained. “These Chicago real estate men simply want the earth.”
“We shall have in our employ 400 people, 325 of whom will be performers,” Cody reported. He promised Cossack, Arabian, Amazon, Chilean, Sioux, and cowboy riders; Mexican lasso champions; and English, German, French, and American soldiers. “You see,” he boasted, “it is quite an undertaking. We have no syndicate back of us. Mr. Salsbury and myself are doing it all. To start our Chicago show will cost $275,000. We shall perform for about six months and two weeks and shall have seating capacity at each performance for 20,000.”
Within three weeks, the first of Cody’s horses and show luggage were unloaded from railcars at his new Chicago show grounds, the wooden rafters and grandstands rising next to the fair’s glittering White City promenades. Crew members exercised the horses in the stall yards, while the clop of hammers constructing wooden seats accompanied the sound of water graciously spraying in the fair fountains. A giant landscape of Western landmarks, showcasing Pulpit Rock and Devil’s Slide, was hoisted up as stage scenery for the Wild West, not far from the Ferris wheel soon to be swirling above Lake Michigan.
On the fairgrounds, promoters and the big moneymen in morning coats, hats, and canes inspected the exposition’s finishing touches. At the Wild West arena, Cody printed fresh letterhead with a picture of Christopher Columbus—“Pilot of the Ocean, the first Pioneer”—opposite a picture of Cody—“Pilot of the Prairie, the last Pioneer.”
In his show ads, Cody took direct aim at the fair and promised to outdazzle the White City. He would be “second to none.” “The biggest outdoor animated amusement exploit extant or known, either ancient or modern,” the ads boasted. “Action, skill, daring, danger defied; one thousand animated pictures in two hours giv
en by flesh and blood; creation’s greatest handiwork, nature’s noblest mechanism, too natural and colossal for canvas or building. The grassy sward our carpet, heaven’s blue canopy our covering.…” And when the city’s poor children were denied free admission to the fair, Cody would promptly throw his gates wide open and place in their small hands free tickets to sit starstruck before his Wild West cowboys and Indians.
Cody’s promotional campaign was a master stroke. “I am doing the business of my life,” he wrote to his sister in August. With the Chicago season half over, he was well on his way to pocketing a fortune. “Am well, but hard worked.”
Every rail line, trolley car, horse car, wagon, and bus leading to the fair stopped first at the front gate to the Wild West show. Even before either the fair or the show had opened, Chicago residents were flocking to the site to take a look around and size up the contests. Many were entranced by such sights as the arrival of the old Deadwood stagecoach, twenty-five head of buffalo, and the colored blankets and yellow feathers of the Arapahos, Sioux, Brulés, and Oglalas.
Seventy-six Sioux from the Pine Ridge Reservation had pulled into Chicago’s Northwestern Depot, among them Jack Red Cloud and Chief Standing Bear. In a late-season snow dusting, they sparkled in eagle feathers, bear claws, and elk teeth, in blue trousers and buckskin jackets. Some stepped onto the train platform already face-painted, some adorned in yellow bonnets. At the show grounds, carpenters, reporters, and spectators crowded around. Some of the Sioux whooped and yelled on cue; others grimaced in their smeared paint.
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