Buffalo Bill on Lookout Mountain

William Frederick Cody was born in Iowa in eighteen forty-six, and by eleven he was working as a cattle herder on the Great Plains. By his own later account he rode for the Pony Express as a young teenager, the mail relay connecting Missouri to California before the telegraph made it obsolete, though historians still debate whether that ride actually happened. He served as a Union scout during the Civil War, then as a civilian scout and buffalo hunter for the United States Army, supplying meat to crews building the Union Pacific Railroad.

In roughly eighteen months he reportedly killed more than four thousand two hundred bison, earning him the name Buffalo Bill. He received the Medal of Honor in eighteen seventy-two for his conduct as a scout in Nebraska. In eighteen eighty-three he launched Buffalo Bill's Wild West, an outdoor traveling show recreating stagecoach robberies, buffalo hunts, and Pony Express rides.

The show toured the United States, then crossed the Atlantic. In eighteen eighty-seven it performed in London during Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, and Victoria attended a command performance. By eighteen eighty-nine he was reportedly the most recognized American in the world.

The show ran roughly thirty years, shaping how millions imagined the frontier. Cody died in Denver in January of nineteen seventeen and is buried on Lookout Mountain, west of Golden.