The Aventures of Buffalo Bill

With the death of William Frederick Cody, at Denver on January 10, 1917,
there passed away the last of that intrepid band of pathfinders who gave
their lives to the taming of the West, a gallant company of brave men
steadfastly pushing back the frontier year by year and mile by mile, and
ceasing from their labors only when the young and vigorous life of the
Pacific States had been linked up for all time with the older civilization
of the Atlantic seaboard.

The fame of Colonel Cody, or Buffalo Bill as he was popularly called,
recalls that of Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Kit Carson, but he cannot
be said to rank with those earlier heroes in point of actual national
service. He played no large part in the upbuilding of our Continental
Empire. Yet he was made of the same stern stuff, and, on his more
circumscribed stage, he was a gallant and picturesque figure, a true
superman of the brave old days. When, in 1883, Cody gave up his roving
life and organized the Wild West show it meant that the Wild West itself
was gone for good and all. Together with Boone, Crockett, and Carson his
life rounds out the century of continental occupation, counting from the
year Boone crossed the mountains into Kentucky to the final completion of
the Union Pacific Railway. Boone was born in Pennsylvania and died in
Missouri; Crockett was born west of the Alleghanies, in Tennessee, and
died in Texas; Carson and Cody were born west of the Mississippi, and died
in Colorado.

Perhaps the most picturesque period in Buffalo Bill's life was his service
as a rider in the service of the famous Pony Express just before the Civil
War. This was perhaps the most perilous job that a man could undertake,
and young Cody was barely fifteen years old. Yet he had had previous
experience in Indian fighting and at the age of eleven he had killed his
first Indian. Shortly afterward the Civil War began and Cody enlisted in
the Union Army, serving as a scout. When the fighting was over he
returned to the Far West. The transcontinental railways were in process of
construction, a romantic episode in American history fittingly depicted in
the glowing pages of Zane Grey's _The U. P. Trail_. The builders of the
Kansas Pacific Railroad wanted buffalo meat to feed their laborers and
Cody undertook the contract. In eighteen months (1867-68) he killed 4,280
buffaloes, and thereby earned his title of Buffalo Bill.