By Photo: Moffett, Chicago, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
William Frederick Cody was born in Iowa in 1846 and grew up in Kansas. As a teenager he worked for freighting companies; he later claimed to have ridden for the Pony Express. He served in the Civil War and then worked as a buffalo hunter supplying meat to railroad crews, which gave him his nickname.
He became an Army scout on the plains and received the Medal of Honor in 1872. The medal was rescinded in 1917 because he was a civilian, then restored in 1989.
The show
Dime novels made Cody famous, and he started performing on stage in the 1870s. In 1883 he launched Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, an outdoor show featuring trick shooting, cavalry charges and stagecoach robberies. Annie Oakley performed with it, and so did Sitting Bull for a season. The show toured the United States and Europe for decades and shaped how much of the world pictured the American West.
The town
In the 1890s Cody invested in an irrigation and town development project in the Bighorn Basin of northwest Wyoming. The town of Cody was founded in 1896. He built the Irma Hotel, promoted the route to Yellowstone and pushed for a dam on the Shoshone River, now the Buffalo Bill Dam.
Cody lost much of his fortune in his later years. He died in Denver in 1917 and is buried on Lookout Mountain above Golden. The Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody houses his collections and is the town’s main attraction.
