Buffalo Bill's Scout's Rest Ranch: Where the Wild West Show Was Born

William Frederick Cody was already famous when he bought a ranch outside North Platte, Nebraska, in eighteen eighty-six. He had been performing as Buffalo Bill since the early eighteen seventies, first in dime novels by Ned Buntline and then in theatrical melodramas. What he needed now, at forty years old, was a home base for the enterprise he was building: Buffalo Bill's Wild West, the outdoor arena spectacular he had launched four years earlier and was rapidly making into the most popular live entertainment in America.

He called the property Scout's Rest. The main house is a two-story Victorian frame structure with a wide porch and a view across the Platte River valley. It was designed to receive visitors and impress them, which it did: Cody hosted European royalty, army generals, and newspaper editors here. The barn nearby was built to shelter the horses, buffalo, and elk that would travel with the show. The operation required hundreds of animals and hundreds of employees, and Scout's Rest was the logistical center of it all during the off-season.

The show that operated from this headquarters was genuinely unprecedented in scale. At its peak in the late eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties, Buffalo Bill's Wild West employed more than six hundred performers, including Annie Oakley, who joined in eighteen eighty-five, and Sitting Bull, who toured for one season in eighteen eighty-five and drew enormous crowds that wanted to see the man who had defeated Custer. The show's sharpshooters, trick riders, and staged attack sequences were watched by millions of people in the United States and Europe. Queen Victoria attended a performance in eighteen eighty-seven.

Cody lost the ranch in a series of financial reversals in the early nineteen hundreds. The state of Nebraska acquired the property in nineteen sixty-four, and it is now preserved as a state historical park. The house and barn are on the National Register of Historic Places. The site is one of the more vivid places in the Great Plains to consider what the mythology of the American West actually looked like from the inside: a very large theatrical operation, managed from a Victorian farmhouse in Nebraska.