Colonel Decker Quotes

the last rays of the sun touched the hills at night," now, on his next to last day on earth, he had changed his mind and wanted to be buried on Lookout Mountain. "It's pretty up there.... You can look down into four states," he said. At any rate, Denver won the old plainsman's remains, and Lookout Mountain in nearby Golden, Colorado, would receive them-but not immediately. The funeral services were scheduled for Sunday, January 14, but the body would be kept in a mortuary vault in Olinger's Funeral Home until Memorial Day, when it would be finally buried on Lookout Mountain. Cody's funeral, like his life, was carried out on a grand scale. Described as "the most impressive and most largely-attended ever seen in the West," it was a service of such pomp and ceremony as only a head of state would have been granted. At ten o'clock on the morning of January 14, Cody's body was taken from the Decker home to the state capitol, where it lay in state in the rotunda, beneath the huge dome and its flagpole, on which the Stars and Stripes floated at half mast. The body was dressed in a frock coat on which were pinned the badges of the Legion of Honor and of the Grand Army of the Republic. The coffin bore the inscription: "Colonel William F. Cody, `Buffalo Bill."' Troopers from Fort Logan formed lines in the rotunda, through which passed the governors of Colorado and Wyoming, delegations from the legislatures from those states, officers of the United States Army, members of the fraternal organizations of which Cody was a member, veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic, thousands of men, women, and children. Among the mourners were a handful of old Indians and former scouts-those who had been performers in Buffalo Bill's Wild West. The rotunda was open for three hours. During that time, some eighteen thousand people according to the Denver Post's estimates-twenty-five thousand was the New York Times's guess-filed past the casket. At noon the crowd was kept back while the family, including his foster son, Johnny Baker, bade the Colonel farewell. A delegation of Knights Templar from North Platte followed.