Being Buffalo Bill: Man, Myth & Media | Dickinson Research Center

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Young William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody, 1860 ca.
1994.010.0812

Being William F. Cody

William Frederick Cody was born in LeClair, Iowa on February 26, 1846 and moved with his family near Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. Upon the death of his father in 1857 Cody was employed variously as an ox team driver and served as a messenger for the firm Russell, Majors, and Wadell, which later founded the famous Pony Express. Cody was probably one of its riders for a few months in 1861. According to legend, he once covered 300 miles in a little over 21 hours, using 20 horses. The Pony Express met its demise on October 24, 1861 when the new telegraph service across the West was connected coast to coast.

The young Cody gained experience as an assistant wagon master on trips to Fort Laramie and Fort Bridger, Wyoming. Besides being an experienced stagecoach driver and covering the route from Plum Creek (Lexington) to Fort Kearny in Nebraska, Cody prospected for gold in the Pike's Peak rush of 1858-1860.

In 1864, Cody enlisted in the Seventh Kansas Volunteer Cavalry. He also did some horse thievery and fought against the South during the Civil War. In St. Louis, he met Louisa Frederici and married her on March 6,1866. For a while, the couple ran a hotel business named the Golden Rule House in Salt Creek Valley, Kansas. During their rocky marriage in which Cody would unsuccessfully sue for divorce in 1905, Louisa bore him three girls, Orra, Arta, and Irma and a son, whom Cody named Kit Carson after the famous scout.

In 1867 Cody abandoned the hotel business when the Kansas Pacific branch of the Union Pacific Railroad offered him the job of procuring meat for its construction workers. It was here for the next year and a half that Cody earned his sobriquet of "Buffalo Bill" by delivering twelve bison a day. Estimates are that he killed more than 4,000 in one eight-month period. Cody nicknamed his .50-70 caliber rifle Lucretia Borgia after the daughter of Pope Alexander VI, who was rumored to have assisted in various poison plots conducted by her family.

Cody's abilities and experience as a guide, horseman, and plainsman were noticed by Lt. Gen. Philip Sheridan when he hired him as Chief of Scouts for Gen. Eugene Carr's U.S. Fifth Cavalry in 1868. He held this Army position for four years. Serving as a dispatch rider as well, Cody had over a dozen encounters with hostile Indians, a well-known one being the Battle of Summit Springs in the Colorado Territory, July 11, 1869. Though a controversial exploit, the standard version is that Buffalo Bill spotted a fine horse that an Indian sub-chief named Tall Bull was riding, killed the Indian from ambush and took his mount. Cody named the steed Tall Bull, ran it in a number of private races, and won a considerable amount of prize money.