Oakley: Where Buffalo Bill Earned His Name

Just ten miles west of Oakley, in the spring of eighteen sixty-eight, a twenty-two-year-old scout named William Cody won, by his own account, a contest against a hunter named Comstock to see who could shoot the most bison in a single day. Cody took sixty-nine to Comstock's forty-six. The nickname Buffalo Bill stuck, and a legend was made on the shortgrass plains of northwest Kansas.

Oakley itself was founded in eighteen eighty-four by David Hoag, who named the township after his mother, Elizabeth Oakley Gardner Hoag. It grew along the Smoky Hill Trail and later the railroad and today anchors a community celebrating that origin story with the Buffalo Bill Cultural Center, which sits in town, about ten miles east of where the contest is said to have taken place.