[Music] His work and reputation would take him around the world and create a cultural icon of the Wild West.

But his legend took root on the plains of western Kansas.

[Music] (upbeat music) Buffalo Bill hit it just right.

He was mostly as a showman.

A lot of historians say that he gave the Europeans the idea of the west and introduced the cowboy in the popular form with the hats, the horses and stuff like that.

He was a good showman, but he was also a hunter, army scout, maybe rode the Pony Express.

A lot of different things.

Buffalo Bill was so popular that there's, by the 1900, there were 50 books about Buffalo Bill, but there are also all the pulp magazines where you'd get them for a nickel or a dime.

They might take a real event and make it romantic and exploit it a lot or expand it a lot.

And so you really have to go in and dig the research about Buffalo Bill, who he was, what he did, and he was a great man and a great performer.

But he had his failures too and his successes.

So it's a very interesting story.

We're in Dighton, Kansas today.

Kirk Shapland is a Buffalo Bill reenactor and has been doing it for years and is an excellent Buffalo Bill historian.

So tell us about Buffalo Bill Cody.

How did he come into the Great Plains and earn his fame, first of all, as a hunter and scout?

Well, when Bill was still small, they lived in Iowa.

That's where he was born, but his dad also had itchy feet.

He had heard that the Kansas was gonna be opened as a territory soon.

But Bill had an uncle that lived in Weston, Missouri, just on the border.

There's a lot of turmoil right now during this time.

You've got the Missouri pro-slavery people and you have the other people who would like to open Kansas as a free state.

Bill's father had been a free state man in Iowa.

During all this turmoil of bleeding Kansas, it's all politically charged and people are getting on stumps and they're making speeches.

His dad, he was with his dad when this happened.

He was watching his dad.

His dad was cajoled to get up on this stump that everybody in front of this trading store and make a speech.

And there was a Missouri, we'll call him a Missouri ruffian who pulled a bowie knife and stabbed him.

Bill was just a little boy when this happened.

He'd been stabbed in the lungs and it never completely healed and eventually he succumbed to probably pneumonia or something like that.

Yeah, I'd heard it was three years later.

Yeah, what that did was leave little Billy Cody as the man of the house.

He began to get jobs with these wagon trains that were going west and his first job would have been with a big wagon train that was heading out to Wyoming.

And he experienced all of these things that we think of when we think of going west.

In the movies and in history books, wagon trains, scouting.

He was a messenger for Russell and Majors.

Yeah, yeah, yes.

And then so that was the incentive of Bill becoming a Pony Express rider.

Well, and there are a lot of people, this is one of the more controversial things.

And that's why I mentioned it.

There are a lot of people that won't give Bill his due.

He said it was a shorter run but because he was so young at the time, he had, Alexander Majors made him bring his mother and she had to give permission and say that he could ride Pony Express.

Now, he says he rode Pony Express in his 1879 autobiography.

Bill may have stretched the truth, but he was the real deal.

I don't think that he was gonna out and out lie about that.

We'll touch on how Bill met Hickok.

They were lifelong friends.

And Bill had started on one of these trips out west with the wagon train.

And on one of those trips, he met Wild Bill.

Up to this point, Bill had been kind of a problem at home because he'd been living a life of a man as a little boy.

And so he wasn't really, he didn't like to do what his mother said and he was not well kept.

And Wild Bill kind of took him under his wing.

Wild Bill was always a gentleman and he impressed that upon little Billy Cody.

His mother, Bill's mother was very thankful for that because she didn't know what to do with the kid.

And Hickok kind of started him out.

So Bill, after the end of the Civil War, had found a young lady and he had gotten married.

And she had made him promise that he would give up any kind of Western life.

So for a while he tried and he was keeping a boarding house.

It wasn't going very well because he had a lot of friends and his friends didn't have to pay to stay at the place and they didn't have to pay to eat.

He was going broke.

And Wild Bill said, "Well, they need scouts out at Fort Harker.

That's where I got a job."

That brings him out West and he starts scouting between all the posts.

At Harker, at different times, he's at Larned, he's at Wallace, he's at Hays.

He rides between all of these posts.

He finds a great believer in him in Little Phil Sheridan.

For him to have taken such a shine to Cody leads credence to the ability and the truth of what he did do out on the plains.

So as a scout up around Hays, you find out that the railroad's coming through.

He's approached by the Goddard brothers.

They had saloons in Hays, the brothers did across the street from one another, but they had taken a contract to supply the meat for these railroad workers.

And they approached Bill.

This new job, supplying meat for railroad workers, would lead to Cody earning and ultimately winning his famous moniker in a competition immortalized in bronze in Oakley, Kansas.

I'm Lewis Evins from here in Oakley, Kansas and we're sitting here in the Buffalo Bill Center.

So we do have a two times life-size sculpture of Buffalo Bill.

It does draw people's attention as they go by and helps to highlight the fact that Buffalo Bill did have a presence in this area back in the 1860s.

Less than a quarter of a mile, probably a couple hundred yards south of here is the Union Pacific Railroad.

Well, what Buffalo Bill was doing here in 1868 was working on that railroad.

His part in that was to provide meat basically to feed the people that were building a railroad through this part of the country.

There was 2000 give or take people working on the railroad.

Well, they ate a lot of stuff.

It was a period of about eight months, I believe.

And during that time, Bill's own count was some 4,280 head of Buffalo.

Yeah, and that sounds like a whole lot of killing he did with the Buffalo and that was the demise of the Buffalo herds.

But when you get to think about it, 15, 16 Buffalo per day really.

Yeah.

To feed these crews.

And yeah, later with the Buffalo Slaughter, these guys, I mean, a lot of them, because they were in the Slaughter, Bill wasn't.

Some of what the people killed as professional Buffalo hunters for the hides was much more than what Bill did.

You know, he was a businessman.

He was an entrepreneur, as it showed up later in his life, what an entrepreneur he really was.

But he was getting his start more or less here in our area in the spring of 1868 in the Buffalo hunting business.

Well, he had it kind of down to a science and he became some of the people that worked around him began to call him Buffalo Bill.

Well, at the same time, Fort Wallace, they had a Buffalo Hunter working for them.

He was really a scout, probably more than a Buffalo Hunter, but again, William Comstock.

That was Comstock's home range.

And Comstock was more commonly known as Medicine Bill, but they say some people had begun to call him Buffalo Bill and Cody had already gotten that name from the railroad workers.

And there was a Buffalo Bill Matthews down by Lyons.

Yes, there was, there was a whole handful.

So there's a lot of Buffalo Bills.

Anyway, they decide that they need to have a competition and this is, and Comstock was a scout as well.

And so this was kind of driven by the soldiers at Fort Hayes and the soldiers at Fort Wallace.

And supporting officers.

And supporting officers, more officers than, you know, than the regular soldiers.

But so you had the guys at Hays and they believed that their guy, you know, Cody, he's the guy, he can do it.

You got the guys at Wallace and they think that it's Comstock.

A wager was put up and both sides had their Buffalo Bill or who they thought should be Buffalo Bill.

And so they put together a contest.

The contest was to basically see how many, who could bring down the most Buffalo in one day, horseback like what they typically hunted.

So they had an excursion train come out.

There was a lot of hoopla about it at the time as the legend reads.

And... basically at the end of the day, after much celebration and this and that, They made kind of a party out of it.

Buffalo Bill had won by bringing down 69 Buffalo to Comstock's 46.

They made three runs and before the day was over, Bill, who'd been using a Springfield 5070 he had killed 67 head, I believe it was, or 69 somewhere in that realm.

And what was the name of that gun?

Well, he named it LaCretia Borgia.

And as he put it, he'd seen a play by Victor Hugo.

And the main character in the play was LaCretia Borgia.

And in the play for political gain, she poisoned people.

And the way he said in his own words, he figured that that rifle in his hands was as good as poison.

He outdid Comstock there that day with that gun.

We have one on the wall up here.

That would be a rack mate basically to the one that Buffalo Bill would have used in his Buffalo hunting.

We have all these experiences in Kansas with the scouting and the hunting for their Buffalo and everything.

But this solidifies the beginning of the legend.

He's given that name, Buffalo Bill, and begins to build his fame.

I found out through the Chamber of Commerce that Buffalo Bill, that the contest actually took place in this county and that was news to me.

So the idea was dreamed up then that, okay, what we need in Oakley is a two-time life-size sculpture of Buffalo Bill in the act of harvesting a buffalo.

And I've been asked why no one else was, why he didn't put it out for bids or something like that to artists.

And I said, well, you know, we're the only one person can do that sculpture.

And that's Charlie Norton.

Charlie had a very, very keen sense of how it had been out here in the West.

The most important thing about the sculpture as far as I'm concerned is the fact that it needed to be authentic.

From his horse, from Buffalo Bill's horse, to the rifle he's shooting, to the clothing that Buffalo Bill was wearing, all those things needed to be correct.

And there's only one person that I felt that I knew, and I'm sure there probably is no one else that could have done it any better than he did.

And one thing about, I'd say Buffalo Bill, and when some of us realized that he got his name here in our community in 1868, realizing what a gift that was to us that really needed to be, basically a story that needed to be told and nailed down to where it took place.

Buffalo Bill went on to become, at the turn of the century, he probably was the most well-known and most recognizable figure of a human being through his Wild West exposition that he took all over the world.

Europe, England, but all over the United States, you know.

What you need to know about this time period is that the newspapers from the East were sending reporters out to the West.

So people in New York and Chicago, these big businessmen, they were reading these newspaper accounts about adventure out West, and they wanted to come and experience the West.

Phil Sheridan sees Bill and what he can do, and he knows he's a little flashy, and he wants him to guide these Easterners.

They'd had this hunt with the Grand Duke, and the Grand Duke was the, well, the son of the czar of Russia, and he'd come over for his 21st birthday, and he wanted to hunt buffalo.

And they went out in the plains of Nebraska, and they put on one heck of a show.

The previous year had been another hunt, not quite as grand, but it was called the Millionaire's Hunt, and Phil Sheridan and some of his cronies from New York and some people from Chicago, I had all come out on a hunt, and Bill had guided them.

That was so well received that some of these millionaires said that they would like to invite Buffalo Bill to come and see them in their homes.

Bill goes ahead and takes his trip to the East, and on his way to New York, he stops in Chicago, and he's invited to a play.

There are these men that are writing these dime novels about Western characters.

A man named Ned Buntline aligns himself with Bill.

And this play is based on one of these dime novels, and there's an actor that's playing Buffalo Bill on the stage.

When it's made known that the real Buffalo Bill is in the audience, he is asked to stand up and say something.

Buntline contacts him the next year, and he wants him to perform as himself on the stage.

This is his beginning into show business.

We had the Frontier Showmanship with all these guided hunts and newspaper accounts of daring deeds, but now we're gonna put this on the stage.

So you see Bill spending all this time on the plains and learning all these things.

Now, he's of course not planning to build this show and to create Western culture as we know it.

He has no idea of that.

He's just living his life.

But the old glory blowout, he was in town at North Platte, and during that time in those years, he was doing the stage shows, and he was scouting at McPherson, at Fort McPherson, which was near North Platte, and he was asking what was happening for the Fourth of July.

And they said, "Well, why don't you do something?"

And so that is the spark, and he decides, "Why can't I get some of these young cowboys from Nebraska?

"Why can't I get the Indians?"

And so he pulls together a show from his experience of his whole life on the plains, because he already knows that there's this huge interest in what's happening out West.

Most people were afraid of the Indians or hated the Indians.

He said that he wanted to introduce the Indians, and it was generally the Sioux that he would have in his show.

He was trying to show the people of the United States who these people were.

One of the reasons you would wonder why these warriors off the reservation would be even willing to come with Bill.

He had fought most of these warriors.

Most of them knew who he was.

But that was a point in his favor because they were a warrior culture, and there was honor in Bill.

They did not think ill of him.

They thought him a worthy adversary.

They believed him to be an honorable man, and they would go with him.

What's little written about the people in the show is that it was one big family.

That they ate together, they took care of each other.

Annie Oakley was one of those.

Annie Oakley said it was one great big family, and he told them to take care of her.

She had a great experience.

So not only is he bringing the Indian, the warrior to the forefront, but the cowboy, huge, huge part of American culture.

He's a hero to us today, the cowboy.

During this time, the cowboy would come up from Texas.

He was very young man, often in his late teens.

He would hit the end of trail town where the cattle were to stop.

He'd get paid and go to town and drink and shoot and carouse, and the cowboy was a dirty little guy that just made a lot of trouble.

They were low lifes.

They were not well thought of.

They were just these herders.

Well, you see Bill, he had never really been a cowboy himself.

Texas Jack had been scouting with Bill there.

He was of some notoriety as well because he was also written in dime novels, and he had some fame as well.

But Jack had come up with a herd from Texas and worked his way up into Nebraska.

That's where he and Bill met, and he started to scout up there with him.

And because of his friendship with Bill, it gave him the idea of showcasing, changing the opinion of these very skilled young men.

And so the cowboys would show riding wild horses and roping and all kinds of things.

Gradually, as the show travels the whole United States and eventually the whole world, everybody sees these daring deeds these cowboys can perform.

He did gather a lot of his people that took part in the exposition.

He got them out here in the West where they were legitimate representatives of the West.

But he did that.

It's hard to really put your arms around it, but he did that for nearly 40 years.

What you're going to show with these young men is the American myth.

The American mythos.

This is our legend.

You know, we don't have the Knights of the Round Table, but we got the cowboys, we got the Indians, and they eat it up over in Europe.

He did a command performance for the Queen.

The whole show performed for the Queen in her court and nobody else.

And she liked it so much she had them do it again the next night.

And paid for it, didn't she?

She paid them.

Tens of thousands of people.

I mean, big crowds.

Yeah.

And France the same way.

Bufordville was a rock star.

Yeah, they were the first superstars.

Yeah.

He and Annie Oakley.

He was a visionary.

So the seeds were planted for all that right here.

Without Buffalo Bill, without his show, you do not have Western movies.

You do not have rodeos.

You do not have country music.

You do not have, you may not even have the Star Spangled Banner.

He was a huge proponent for that and began to play that at his show before it was the national anthem.

And big hats.

And big hats.

[LAUGHTER] It's America.

His legacy is America.

Here's the most popular man, world-known American in his day.

When Bill passed, the radio was, they had the radio.

And the radio was all about the big one.

We're fighting WWI.

All stations stopped to announce.

Yeah.

The death of Bufordville.

They stopped the reporting about the World War nationwide to report that.

Mark Twain went to watch the show.

He said it was the most American thing.

He had created the most American thing that he'd ever seen.

And he thoroughly enjoyed it.

And I think it was Teddy Roosevelt that said that Buffalo Bill was the American's American.

So, you know, I would say his legacy is America.

Yeah.

I'll agree.

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