Buffalo Bill and the Wild West

William Frederick Cody was born in Iowa in eighteen forty-six and came to the Kansas and Nebraska plains as a boy, where he learned to ride and to hunt in the open country along the Platte River valley. By his early twenties he had earned a nickname that would follow him for the rest of his life: Buffalo Bill.

The nickname came from his work as a meat contractor for the Kansas Pacific Railroad in the late eighteen sixties, supplying bison to the construction crews building across the plains. The bison herds that had once covered the plains in numbers that stunned early observers were already in catastrophic decline by then. Cody was one of many hunters contributing to their elimination, though he later became an unlikely advocate for conservation.

He made North Platte, Nebraska, his base and later built a ranch there that he called Scout's Rest. From North Platte he launched the enterprise for which he is best remembered: Buffalo Bill's Wild West, a traveling show that opened in eighteen eighty-three and ran for about thirty years. The show employed genuine cowboys, sharpshooters including Annie Oakley, who joined in eighteen eighty-five, and Lakota performers including Sitting Bull, who toured with the production that same year. The show performed before royal audiences in Europe and crossed the Atlantic multiple times.

Buffalo Bill's Wild West was one of the most widely seen American entertainments of its day. It shaped the world's image of the American West, for better and worse, in ways that have not entirely faded.