1846-1917
[Okay, apologies! I am publishing this despite that it's in serious need of editing. I am having mucho trouble with blogger this evening, the spellchecker won't even stay "checked" I promise to revisit tomorrow]
William Frederick Cody, better known to history as "Buffalo Bill Cody," was born on this day in La Claire in what was then the Iowa Territory (now the state of Iowa). His father was from Canada and his mother from back east in the U.S. His father was staunchly anti-slavery, so this occasioned the family moving about when he was a youngster; eventually losing his father when the elder Cody succumbed to a respiratory infection that was acerbated by having been viciously stabbed twice with a hunting knife while delivering an anti-slavery speech near Fort Leavenworth in the Kansas Territory. William was just 11 years old at the time. This meant that he absolutely had to go to work (something his father no doubt would not want for his son, despite that laws at the time allowed for fathers to legally extract free labor from children, particualrly sons, until the age of emancipation). He went to work as a "freight carrier" on horseback, delivering items and services (including messaging) back and forth as needed and traded along wagon trains. From this time, his skills on horseback were obvious. When he was just a little bit older, he found himself embroiled in the Army and the Utah War, as a boy scout. This is how he got taken up with the west. He put down his experience in Utah as the beginnings of his career in "Indian fighting." He leaves out that he was a western gold panner for a time, starting from the age of 14. It lasted for only a matter of months and he never did reach his favored panning destination in California before being hired as a Pony Express agent. It was his first official job. During his years prior to reaching legal age, he claimed to have had a large number of different jobs to make extra money, the fact that historians "have trouble" verifying these is not surprising (at least from where I stand) given that he was so young and judging from the area that he was living in. The west at the time really was wild if you were a young white boy. No doubt though, Cody was given to exaggeration of the number, size and scope of these jobs. At the age of 17 he found himself make at home owed to an illness that he mother contracted, it was fortunately temporary, and he attempted to formally enlist in the military to fight on the side of the Union Army in the Civil War. He was rejected owed to his age, so he instead went back to working as a carrier, this time for the military in what is now Wyoming. Finally later in 1863 he was able to enlist with the 7th Calvary Kansas; he was discharged two years later. He then married and moved east, with his family formally living for many years in Rochester, New York--while Cody himself actually worked a good deal of the time out West. He had, at some point along the way, made the acquaintance of one James Hickock (better known as Wild Bill Hickock) who he reunited with in 1866 when they were both serving as military scouts based out of the Kansas territory. Hickok is just one of hundreds of people Cody knew that would later be of historical import/interest. At the time, Cody was still just 21 years of age. It was this time that he began in earnest the scouting career for which he would become well known, and upon which he would base his later career in performance all over the world. All of this would, mind you, be only about half of legend that became "Buffalo Bill Cody" (a nickname that he got because of buffalo hunting). Writer/newspaper man Ned Buntline invented the rest. Buntline was in fact one of the originators of both the concept of and the actual staging of wild west shows in the very early 1870's. Buntline (whose real name was Edward Zane Carroll Judson) put together the first who in which Cody participated and make no mistake, it was performance, and Cody had been turned into an actual actor. It was the beginning of his very long stage career in in this newly created genre of stage performance (shooting and riding shows that included baiting wild animals had been around for at least a couple of centuries, this was different in that it used original materials interwoven with actual exhibitions and reenactments). His first performance was in Chicago in December of 1872. Two years later he founded his own show under the name Buffalo Bill Combination; it was the first in a line of names his wild west exhibition would perform all over the world (point of trivia: the word "show" was never a part of any incarnation of the touring act). The truth is that William Cody was a stage actor/proprietor more than he was ever anything else in his life. His various touring outfits contained all sorts of people from the true faces of the west (Tatanka Iyoutake) to the purely performative (horse riders from a variety of cultures) to people in-between (Annie Oakley and her husband). With all of that, one would think that Cody would have a fair number of film performance credits to his name considering that he lived well into the age of the theatrical feature, but he had comparatively few and most them as in "actualities." In other words, he appeaser in non-narrative films as himself. Of those, it is equally surprising that he only appears on film on five occasions in the 1890's, three of those coming in the year 1898. Unsurprisingly, his very first film appearance came in an Edison picture in 1894, simply entitled Buffalo Bill, directed by William K.L. Dickson. The film is of him shooting, was filmed inside the infamous Black Maria and is considered lost (Wild West performer Annie Oakley's filmed appearance in the same stifling little studio survives and is widely available to view). Edison's studio filmed him again in 1897, this time in documentary footage of the McKinley inaugrual parade in which he was a participant; the survival of Buffalo Bill and Escort is uncertain, but doubtful. All three of the shorts in which he was captured on film in 1898 were also Edison, the first two being strait documentary style footage shot in the field, the third is a staged affair: Indian War Council is a reenactment of a "war council" with Cody "addressing them." His other 20 credits appearing in films related to his wild west shows come in the 20th century. Cody was filmed in various capacities right up until the time of his death, showing up in documentary style films from a variety of studios from American Mutoscope & Biograph (which "grew" out of the Edison Co.), Lubin, Selig, Kineto (a UK company), Universal (in 1913), Gaumont, and Pathe among others. Ever the showman, Cody and his company got involved in the production side of the film industry as well. His name appeared on at least two production companies: the Buffalo Bill and Pawnee Bill Company and the official Col. Wm. F. Cody Historical Picture Co. (in connection with Essanay in Chicago). The later of these produced a film in 1914 entitled The Indian Wars; this film was incorporated into Essanay's documentary western in 1917 The Adventures of Buffalo Bill, which was released only weeks after his death. Cody is listed as a producer on both of these films. Additionally, Cody is credited with writing credits on two films from the silent era and three thereafter. In 1909 he is credited with a short film from France, Les aventures de Buffalo Bill; ad in 1926 he also gets credit for the frame work story that went into the serial Fighting with Buffalo Bill, a Universal Production. In his life time, Cody only appeared in one film; and of course it was in the capacity of a cameo. Two years before his death, he made a cameo appearance in The Circus Girl's Romance (June 1915), fittingly a Bison production. Cody died in Denver, Colorado on the 10th of January at the age of 70, just shy of 71, having been baptized a Catholic just the day before. He was given a full Masonic funeral and had tributes from kings and President Woodrow Wilson. He is buried in a location that is now within the confines of the Buffalo Bill Memorial Museum. Cody in his lifetime became outspoken on trophy/hide hunting and was instrumental in the establishment of hunting "seasons." He also believed in equal pay for equal work for women. The most important stance that he took was on the treatment of Native group as sovereign nations; he pointed out that every "war" that he had witnessed or been involved with from a young age, was as the result of broken treaties and promise on the part of the United States government. I can find, however, no mention of any views on the black population of the country, a sorry irony considering that his father basically had died in the abolitionist cause. His influence though has been wide, including in the 1950's Belgian Congo, where youth dressed like Cody and called themselves "Bills," the Bills were active in Congolese culture long into the 1960's.
Wikipedia (long list of external links at bottom of page)
