Buffalo Bill Cody Quotes

William Frederick ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody, hunter, Indian-fighter and showman, joined the Pony Express – the West’s legendary mail service – at the age of fourteen, in response to an ad which ran: ‘WANTED young skinny wiry fellows not over eighteen. Must be expert riders willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred. Wages $25 a week.

I am and always have been a friend of the Indian. I have always sympathized with him in his struggle to hold the country that was his by right of birth. But I have always held that in such a country as America the march of civilization was inevitable, and that sooner or later the men who lived in roving tribes, making no real use of the resources of the country, would be compelled to give way before the men who tilled the soil and used the lands as the Creator intended they should be used.

The people of Cody like you to think that Buffalo Bill was a native son. In fact, I’m awfully proud to tell you, he was an Iowa native, born in the little town of Le Claire in 1846. The people of Cody, in one of the more desperate commercial acts of this century, bought Buffalo Bill’s birthplace and re-erected it in their town, but they are lying through their teeth when they hint that he was a local. And the thing is, they have a talented native son of their own. Jackson Pollock, the artist, was born in Cody. But they don’t make anything of that because, I suppose, Pollock was a complete wanker when it came to shooting buffalo.

In concluding, I want to express the hope that the dealings of this Government of ours with the Indians will always be just and fair. They were the inheritors of the land that we live in. They were not capable of developing it, or of really appreciating its possibilities, but they owned it when the White Man came, and the White Man took it away from them. It was natural that they should resist. It was natural that they employed the only means of warfare known to them against those whom they regarded as usurpers. It was our business, as scouts, to be continually on the warpath against them when they committed depredations. But no scout ever hated the Indians in general.

The Indian makes a good citizen, a good farmer, a good soldier. He is a real American, and all those of us who have come to share with him the great land that was his heritage should do their share toward seeing that he is dealt with justly and fairly, and that his rights and liberties are never infringed by the scheming politician or the short-sighted administration of law.

The White Man has taken most of our land. He has paid us nothing for it. He has destroyed or driven away the game that was our meat. In 1868 he arranged to build through the Indians' land a road on which ran iron horses that ate wood and breathed fire and smoke. We agreed. This road was only as wide as a man could stretch his arms. But the White Man had taken from the Indians the land for twenty miles on both sides of it. This land he had sold for money to people in the East. It was taken from the Indians. But the Indians got nothing for it.

there would have been no warfare. One of the great Indian warriors of history was Red Cloud of the Oglala Dakota Sioux tribe, who had a reputation for daring and ferocity. In June of 1866, Sherman called Red Cloud and several other Lakota Sioux leaders to Fort Laramie to discuss a new treaty to permit a new road to be built through Sioux territory. Even before an agreement had been reached, however, a battalion

Colonel Carrington was able to construct three forts in the Powder River country: Fort C.F. Smith in Montana and Forts Reno and Phil Kearny in Wyoming. But Lakota and Cheyenne warriors raided the forts again and again, seizing supply wagons, attacking the men

affinity for William F. Cody, who lived most of his adult life in Nebraska. My father, George W. Carter, could have seen Buffalo Bill's Wild West when it came to Omaha in August 1908.

In addition, I feel a personal connection. In April 1855 my great-granduncle Alexander Carter Jr. and his younger brother, Thomas Marion Carter, left their home in Scioto County, Ohio, and headed west.

and biographies of him have appeared at irregular intervals ever since. A search of "Buffalo Bill Cody

biography much easier. On a personal note, I should like to thank Stanley R. Moore, Dr. Michael Rostafinski, and John Tebbel for advice and information; my wife and "first reader," Reade Johnson; and my editor at John Wiley, Hana Lane, for

the lives of the Codys in North Platte, Nebraska. Two other volumes have been especially helpful:

In addition, I feel a personal connection. In April 1855 my great-granduncle Alexander Carter Jr. and his younger brother, Thomas Marion Carter, left their home in Scioto County, Ohio, and headed west. Starting by steamboat, the two brothers floated down the Ohio River until it joined the Mississippi and then traveled upstream to St. Louis. In St. Louis they found little transportation west, so they walked, hitched rides, and rode horseback to reach St. Joseph, Missouri. There they caught a stagecoach to Council Bluffs, Iowa, riding on top of the stage, with seventeen men and women-a three-day ordeal.

Clearly, the earl was a first-rate reporter, with an excellent memory. Dunraven accompanied

friends easily and apparently kept them for years; it seems that virtually everyone he ever encountered liked him, unlikely as this seems. A skeptic might suspect that some of those friends were drawn to him by his generosity, which was legendary; he spread money around lavishly wherever he went. Many

with such skill that he approached the Indian camp within fifty yards before he was noticed. The Indians fired immediately upon Mr. Cody and Sergeant Foley. Mr. Cody killed one Indian; two

Some twenty-five thousand people toiled up the mountainside to pay their respects. Three thousand automobiles (which included some Sells-Floto circus wagons) also climbed the mountain that day, not without

born there on February 22, 1841. Meanwhile, Isaac built a four-room log cabin on his claim, and there his first daughter in his marriage to Mary Ann, Julia Melvina, was born on March 28, 1843. It is altogether

a brigadier

present counties of Clare, Galway, and Mayo, whence came the family name, in a contraction of Connaught-Galway to Connelly, Conly, Cory, Coddy, Coidy, and, finally, "Cod " Y• All this almost makes sense. However, it is only one of the legends Mrs. Wetmore offers up as fact in her book, despite her disclaimer in the preface that "embarrassed with riches of fact, I have had no thought of fiction." For the truth about William Cody's lineage, we must turn to Don Russell's authoritative biography, The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill. Russell's research was thorough and exemplary; the notes for his book in the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, are proof of that. According to Russell, "Buffalo Bill's most remote definitely known ancestor was one Philip, whose surname appears in various surviving records as Legody, Lagody, McCody, Mocody, Micody ... as well as Codie, Gody, Coady, and Cody." Russell traces Philip to Philippe Le Caude of the Isle of Jersey, who married Marthe Le Brocq of Guernsey in the parish of St. Brelades, Isle of Jersey, on September 15, 1692. Although the family names are French, the Channel Islands have been British possessions since the Middle Ages. No Irish or Spanish in sight; just good English stock. The Cody Family Association's book The Descendants of Philip and Martha Cody carries the line down to the present day. Buffalo Bill was sixth in descent from Philip. Philip and Martha purchased a home in Beverly, Massachusetts, in 1698, and occupied it for twenty-five years, farming six acres of adjacent land. In 1720 Philip bought land in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, and he and his family moved there, probably in 1722 or 1723. When he died in 1743, his will was probated under the name of Coady. The spelling of the family name had stabilized by the time Bill's father, Isaac, the son of Philip and Lydia Martin Cody, was born on September 15, 1811, in Toronto Township, Peel County, Upper Canada. It is Lydia Martin Cody who may have been responsible for the report of an Irish king in the family genealogy; she boasted that her ancestors were of Irish royal birth. When Isaac Cody was seventeen years old, his family moved to a farm near Cleveland, Ohio, in the vicinity of what is today Eighty-third Street and Euclid Avenue. That move would ultimately embroil William Cody in a lawsuit many years later, one of several suits he was destined to lose. Six years after arriving in Ohio, Isaac married Martha Miranda

After the services, the many flower offerings sent in Cody's memory were taken to the headquarters of the Denver Flower Girls Association, where they were dismantled, so that each of the several thousand children in the grade schools of Denver could be given a souvenir flower.

Fifth

famous monarch whose three sons, Heber, Heremon, and Ir, founded the first dynasty in Ireland about the beginning of the Christian era." The Cody family, Mrs. Wetmore asserted, came down from the line of Heremon. Their original name was Tireach, which signifies "The Rocks." Murdeach Tireach, one of the first of this line, was crowned king of Ireland in the year 320. Another of the line became king of Connaught

cherished his Nebraska

By 1849, when news of the discovery of gold in California reached the East, Isaac Cody was a solid citizen of his community. In 1847 he contracted with William F. Brackenridge to clear a six-hundred-acre farm on the Wapsipinicon River.

Buffalo Bill. In this context, Cody was often called "the last of the great scouts." Some are also aware that he was an enormously popular showman, creator and star

cynical. As his latest biographer, I believe his life has a valuable contribution to make in this new millennium-it provides a sense of who we once were and who we might be again. He was a commanding presence in our American history, a man who helped shape the way we look at that history. It was he, in fact, who created the Wild West, in all its adventure, violence, and romance.

enormously

Everybody saw them, and anger and revenge mounted all day long as people filed past or remained

Tho was Buffalo Bill Cody? Most people know, at the very least, that he was a hero of the Old West, like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and

that she looked upon a future career as a stage shot, and she went to her first performance with the assurance of one who had been doing it always.

and he adopted her into his Hunkpapa Sioux tribe, giving her the name "Watanya cicilia," which means "Little Sure Shot." At the time, Annie was only twenty-four years old.

The show played Montreal in August, where the reviews were raves, both in English and in French, especially for "le fameux chef indien." On October 5 the St. Louis Republican reported that "Buffalo Bill's Wild West attracted an immense crowd to Sportsman's Park yesterday afternoon.

choosing sites for the Wild West to play-began to show up in greatly diminished receipts. Losses mounted as the decrepit old tub chugged south. By the time they neared New Orleans, Cody decided that he'd better go on ahead and look into Pony Bob's arrangements himself. At the site of the exposition, he hired a hack and headed through a pouring rain for the show grounds. The first man he saw there was traveling across the arena in a rowboat. Fortunately, Cody was

Tom Mix was born in Pennsylvania, and when he was ten years old his parents took him to see Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West. It changed young Tom forever. He took his mother’s clothesline and taught himself rope tricks. He took scraps from around the house and made his own “cowboy outfit.” And when he was finally old enough, he lit out for the rapidly vanishing West, ready to leave a mark as distinctive as Buffalo Bill or Wyatt Earp before it was gone forever.

BY 1876, THE YEAR THE Battle of the Little Bighorn was fought, the United States had become a nation of some forty million people, the vast majority of whom had never seen a fighting Indian—not, that is, unless they happened to glimpse one or another of the powerful Indian leaders whom the government periodically paraded through Washington or New York, usually Red Cloud, the powerful Sioux diplomat, who made a long-winded speech at Cooper Union in 1870. Or, it might be Spotted Tail, of the Brulé Sioux; or American Horse, or even, if they were lucky, Sitting Bull, who hated whites, the main exceptions being Annie Oakley, his “Little Sure Shot,” or Buffalo Bill Cody, who once described Sitting Bull as “peevish,” surely the understatement of the century. Sitting Bull often tried to marry Annie Oakley, who was married; he did not succeed.

during that 1882-1883 season, his last with a combination,

Turner, Frederick J. "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1894.

Cossacks, and Arabs huddled in nearby fields while the cowboys rounded

Where the first trembling rays of the morning sun gleam upon the flowers and crags and snow of Mount

flooded the lot, a thousand spectators were in danger. Cody and

We hope so much that you will be able to come and have tea with us on Wednesday, as we would be much disappointed not to see you. Yours sincerely,

fighting for their existence." Deloria also notes that

exhibition, moreover, is not merely entertaining,

Cody, Wyoming, 1977. Buffalo Bill Museum. Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Peter H. Hassrick, Director, N.D. "Buffalo Bill's Wild West." Wyoming Horizons. August 1983. Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of the Rough Riders of the World, show programme. Copyrighted by Cody and Salsbury, Chicago, IL, 1893. Doherty, Jim. "Was He Half Hype or Sheer Hero? Buffalo Bill Takes a New

The show is worth seeing-if it is worth

of English and Americans at Dresden, who support a very respectable English daily newspaper. Governor Francis18 and family, of Missouri, visited with Colonel Cody while we were at Dresden.

William F. Cody the man as distinguished from Buffalo Bill the public figure that we

In the New York Herald, people who had been following the progress of The Scouts of the Prairie read this notice:

His job was to take the boat down the Mississippi, booking the show and renting show grounds along the way. The idea was to earn money on the trip south, arriving in New Orleans in time to open just before Christmas and play through the spring. Haslam, though

the white tents. 17. Two views of The Wild West in Paris, igo5. Colonel Cody, a Hawkeye by birth, is personally lionized by the Parisians, and his unique exhibition, so full of historical and dramatic interest, made a wonderful impression upon the susceptible French public. The twenty lessons I took in French, at the Berlitz School of Languages, London, only gave me a faint idea of what the language was like, but as I was required to make my lectures and announcements in French, I had my speeches translated, and was coached in their delivery by Monsieur Corthesy, editeur, le journal de Londres. Well, I got along pretty fair, considering that I did not know the meaning of half the words I was saying. Anyway it amused them, so I was satisfied. I honestly believe that more people came in the side show in Paris to hear and laugh at my "rotten" French than anything else, and when I found that a certain word or expression excited their risibilities, I never changed it. I can look back now and see where some of my own literal translations were very funny. Colonel Cody's exhibition is unique in many ways, and might justly be termed a polyglot school, no less than twelve distinct languages being spoken in the camp, viz.: Japanese, Russian, French, Arabic, Greek, Hungarian, German, Italian, Spanish, Holland, Flemish, Chinese, Sioux and English. Being in such close contact every day, we were bound to get some idea of each other's tongue, and all acquire a fair idea of English. Colonel Cody is, therefore, entitled to considerable credit for disseminating English, and thus preserving the entente cordiale between nations. 18. Entrance to the Wild West, Champs de Mars, Paris, Igo5. The first place of public interest that we visited in Paris was the Jardin des Plantes (botanical and zoological garden) and le Musee d'Histoire Naturelle. The zoological collection would suffer in comparison with several in America I might mention, but the Natural History Museum is very complete, and is, to my notion, the most artistically arranged of any museum I have visited. Le Palais du Trocadero, which was in sight of our grounds and facing the

Lyceum Theatre. The reviewer for the Times noted that the redskins had been "greatly scared at its horror" as they watched the show unfold from their boxes. Henry Irving played Mephistopheles,

precipitously, and can probably be attributed to

trial as more of a circus than a serious legal action. One of the many journalists

very least, that he was a hero of the Old

showed pictures of Otto Floto and all four Sells Brothers. The Brothers Ringling were

that more than a billion words were written by or about William Frederick

shown up in movies and television shows,

field he sought was the sawdust. In short,

determined to fight to the last ditch, for she

Champion of the Sioux. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1932; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1957. Wallis, Michael. The Real Wild West: The 101 Ranch and the Creation of the American West. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. Walsh, Richard J., with Milton Salsbury. The Making of Buffalo Bill. Indianapolis: Bobbs- Merrill, 1928. Ward, Geoffrey C. The West: An

Crockett, and Kit Carson-one of those larger-than-life

prairie boys. Tangle foot gets away with you. And I will have no one with

that history. It was he, in fact, who created the Wild

completed that year, cost Cody and Dillon

and Capt. Jack all busted flat before

was

decade later. And it was McDonald himself who recalled that M. C. Keefe had a small herd of buffalo and suggested that perhaps they should be used.

Look here," he said, "I am much pleased to meet you, sir, but I want you first to understand distinctly that I am no Yank.

autobiography of General Sheridan.

Free-soil man.

for hundreds of stories had been handed down from their fathers and grandfathers of the way in which the white man had killed their people and driven them from the land that had been theirs for centuries.

busy undertaker, said, "Deadwood was then hog-wild; duels and gunfights

1888 when he published a book with biographies of Boone, Crockett,

next ten years, Cody would divide his life and his

project, has stated, "The Papers of William F Cody

William F. Cody, 1879-1917 by Sarah J. Blackstone. Prominent among the many people to whom

all shooting. Doc Middleton, the Nebraska

I did say that I would never have another Scout or western man with me. That is one whom I would work up. For just as soon as they see their names in print a few times they git the big head and want to start a company of their

showman, creator and star of Buffalo Bill's

where he spent most of his time

where he spent most of his time

Carson-one of those larger-than-life figures from which legends are made. Cody

Already the Colonel wanted to build an addition onto the Irma,

On the upside, Will's daughter Arta had pitched in to help Julia manage the Irma Hotel. Near the end of March Arta cabled her father that the books, statements,

I have listed in the bibliography the many books that contributed to this volume but would like to single out two for special mention. They are Don Russell's The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill, which no writer on the Colonel could do without; and Nellie Snyder Yost's Buffalo Bill:

Cody, with his sidekick Wild Bill Hickok standing by, is credited with carrying out the entire Pony Express operation single-handedly. Moreover, he is portrayed as an overbearing braggart, which he could have been but certainly wasn't, and a gunslinger, which he never was and never could have been. Bat Masterson, who was a gunfighter and knew Cody, vouched for that. Cody packed a gun only when he needed to-as a Pony Express rider, a hunter, and a scout. An interesting historical footnote is provided in the last scene of Pony Express, in which the Pony Express statue has this quote from Abraham Lincoln

only overcome his initial stage fright

been trying to murder me with his pen for years," Hickok recalled in a newspaper interview in 1873, "having failed, is now, so I am told, trying to have it done by some Texans, but he has signally failed so

Ned Buntline had all kinds of plans for his show. He spoke of playing it

Louisa apparently had also attempted to drive Julia out of the Irma, for

On New Year's Day, 1904, Arta was married again, to Dr. Charles W. Thorp. After the wedding, the couple traveled to

As for Horton's reasons for killing himself, money is ruled out; he stood to inherit a small fortune from his mother. It is probable that a rift had developed between him and Arta,

All parties interested in a general celebration of the 4th of July in this city are requested to attend a meeting at the courthouse on the 17th at 8 P.M.,

The most complete version of what happened in North Platte that day is to be found in Nellie Snyder Yost's biography of Buffalo Bill.

That same summer another hunt was arranged for four special guests: his sisters May and Helen and General Augur's two daughters. Twenty-nine years later, in her book Last of the Great Scouts, Helen Cody Wetmore told the story of the hunt. "A gay party it was," she wrote. "For men, there were a number of officers ... and Dr. Frank Powell ... for women, the wives of two of the officers, the daughters of General Augur, May, and myself." Buffalo Bill was away from the post at the time and was unaware of the outing that had been planned.

theatergoers,

the days when Cody and the troopers of the Fifth Cavalry rode hell-for-leather across the prairie in pursuit of hostile Indians. Nor, though it is not usually considered a milestone in American history, should we forget Joseph F. Glidden's 1874 invention of barbed wire, which, more than the rifle or the plow, transformed Buffalo Bill's Great Plains by insuring the survival of thousands of family farms, and making possible the

Reviews and the show's own publicity always stressed its "realism." There is no doubt it