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William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody was a child of the West. By the time he reached the age 25 he had encountered nearly every adventure a young man could experience in the West.
Born in 1846 in Iowa, he moved with his family to Leavenworth, Kansas when he was age eight. There the family became involved in the abolitionist cause. After his father died of fever, eleven year old Will went to work as a messenger boy and herding cattle. Later that year he took a job as driver on a wagon train, making the first of many Great Plain crossings. He went on to fur trapping and gold mining, then joing the Pony Express in 1860. During the Civil War he served with the Seventh Kansas Cavalry and scouted for the Army following the War. He soon gained the nickname “Buffalo Bill” as a hunter for the Army and Kansas Pacific Railroad.
Cody’s show business career began on December 17, 1872 in Chicago; he was age twenty-six. “The Scouts of the Prarie” was drama created by dime novelist Ned Buntline, who appeared in it with Cody, and another well-known scout, “Texas Jack” Omohundro. The show was a success, dispite on critic’s characterization of Cody as “ a good-looking fellow, tall and straight as an arrow, but rediculous as an actor. Other critics noted Cody’s manner of charming the audience and the realism he brought to his performance. Actor or not, Buffalo Bill was a showman.
The following season Cody organized his own troupe, the Buffalo Bill Combination. The troupe’s show “Scouts on the Plains” included Buffalo Bill, Texas Jack, and Cody’s old friend “Wild Bill” Hickok.
Wild Bill and Texas Jack eventually left the show, but Cody continued staging a variety of plays for the next decade, appearing all over the United States. In fact, his Combination appeared in Denver from July 21-23 and at the Central City Opera on July 30 in 1879 and then again in Central City on April 2 and Denver from April 5-10, 1886.
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