Buffalo Bill and the Show That Justified the Policy
Near Cody, Wyoming
William Frederick Cody was born in Iowa in eighteen forty-six. By fourteen he was riding for the Pony Express. By his twenties he was scouting for the United States Army on the southern Plains, leading troops toward the villages they had been sent to suppress. Along the way he killed bison, claiming later to have killed four thousand two hundred eighty in eighteen months to feed Kansas Pacific Railroad crews. The exact number is contested. The general fact of his role in the commercial bison hunt that reduced an estimated sixty million animals to fewer than a thousand by the eighteen eighties is not.
In eighteen eighty-three he invented the Buffalo Bill Wild West show. It ran for thirty years across North America and Europe and attracted audiences in the millions. The show featured cavalry charges, stagecoach robberies, and theatrical battles between cowboys and Indians, performed by actual Plains Indian people. Sitting Bull joined the show for the eighteen eighty-five season and was paid fifty dollars a week. Annie Oakley performed for seventeen years. The narrative arc was consistent: the frontier was wild, the cowboys were heroic, and the conquest of the West was the inevitable progress of civilization.
The show was touring European capitals at the same time the federal government was enforcing reservation confinement on the Plains. The performers in Cody's arena were people whose nations were simultaneously losing land, horses, and children to government boarding schools. The Wild West show's mythology of noble savagery overcome by heroic settlement provided popular justification for the policies it had nothing officially to do with.
Cody founded the town of Cody, Wyoming, in eighteen ninety-six, specifically as a railroad gateway to Yellowstone. He lobbied for the road through the Shoshone Canyon. He guided Theodore Roosevelt through the region in nineteen oh three. The fifty-mile drive you would take from Cody to Yellowstone's east entrance is his infrastructure project. The park at the end of it was built partly on the dispossession that his show helped people feel comfortable with.
