Legends of the Old West - BUFFALO BILL Ep. 1 | “Tragedy and Transformation”

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

William Cody experiences more than his share of grief at a young age: by the time he is 18 years old, he’s lost three family members and has been forced to grow up fast. He sees some of the violence of Bleeding Kansas, then much more in the Civil War, and then marries the love of his life. He finds his calling as a buffalo hunter and earns his world-famous nickname in the process. Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial. For more details, visit our website www.blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We’re @OldWestPodcast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. On YouTube, subscribe to LEGENDS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage. To purchase an ad on this show please reach out: [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the evening of September 18, 1854, a large group gathered at Major M.P. Rively's store on Salt Creek near Leavenworth, Kansas. Four months earlier, Congress had passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and created two new territories, Kansas and Nebraska. The act also stated that, going forward, the citizens of each territory, rather than Congress, could determine for themselves if slavery would be allowed. The citizens of Kansas Territory wanted to be a state, and the question of whether or not the state would allow slavery divided the territory as much as it divided the country.

The men at Rively's store were debating the issue and tensions ran high on both sides. One of the men there that night was Isaac Cody. Some of the men in the crowd knew that Isaac's brother was a Missouri slave owner and begged Isaac to speak in their favor. After much conjoling and after hearing several other men speak in favor of allowing slavery in the state of Kansas, Isaac was finally convinced to share a few words. Isaac rose to his feet and stepped up on the box to address his neighbors. He spoke for a few minutes about his understanding of the issue, telling the men that he had been a pioneer during the statehood movement in Iowa and had helped organize that state. Gentlemen, he said, I tell you now, and I say it boldly, that I propose to exert all of my power

in making Kansas the same kind of state as Iowa, and I shall always oppose the further extension of slavery. Isaac planned to continue, but a man in the crowd stood up and yelled at Isaac to get down off the box or the man would pull Isaac down. Isaac recognized the man as one of his brother's employees, a fiercely pro-slavery man from Missouri. Isaac defiantly remained on the box and continued to speak. He said,

These are my sentiments, gentlemen, and let me tell you. Isaac didn't finish his speech, or even that sentence. The other man jumped up on the box, pulled out a Bowie knife, and stabbed Isaac twice. Isaac fell to the floor, and the man made a hasty escape. Isaac was rushed to his home, where he was attended by a doctor while his wife, daughters, and son watched and waited, wondering if their patriarch would make it through the night. Isaac didn't die that night. It took four years for his wounds to take him down, and he spent those years desperately hiding from the increasingly hostile conflicts that erupted in the events that became known as Bleeding Kansas.

Isaac's death would put his 11-year-old son, William Cody, on the path that would turn the boy into Buffalo Bill, arguably the most famous American in the world during the waning days of the Old West. From Black Barrel Media, this is Legends of the Old West. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season we're telling the story of William F. Cody, known as Buffalo Bill, the man who turned the American frontier into the Wild West. This is Episode 1, Tragedy and Transformation. His father's death wasn't the first tragedy in Bill Cody's life. The earlier loss was the one that sent the family to Kansas in the first place.

William Frederick Cody was born in a log cabin in Scott County, Iowa, in February of 1846. cabin in Scott County, Iowa in February of 1846. Bill was the fourth child of the family, with two older sisters and an older brother, Samuel. After Bill, his parents would have three more girls and another son. As the little cabin filled up, Isaac and Mary decided to move the family to nearby LeClaire on the banks of the Mississippi River. William, who was known as Willie to his family, and his brother Samuel loved exploring the area, swimming, sailing on the river, and stealing apples from their neighbor's orchard. Both boys learned to ride horses,

though Bill's first experience was very nearly his last. He said later, Somehow or other, I had managed to corner a horse near a fence and climbed on his back. The next moment, the horse got his back up and hoisted me into the air. I fell violently to the ground, striking upon my side in such a way as to severely wrench and strain my arm. I abandoned the art of horsemanship for a while and was induced, after considerable persuasion, to turn my attention to my letters, my ABCs, which were taught me at the village school. So, the future world-famous Scout of the Plains had an inauspicious beginning as a horseman. Samuel, on the other hand, took to riding immediately, and while he was tearing across the Iowa cornfields on his father's horse, young Bill learned to track animals, becoming a young

expert at trapping quail. When he mustered the courage to ride again, he found that he had a knack for horsemanship, saying, Many a jolly ride I had, and many a boyish prank was perpetrated after getting well away from, and out of sight of, home with the horse. While the boys learned to ride and trap, Bill's father Isaac was active in the process of Iowa statehood and remained active politically afterward as a member of the Iowa legislature, a justice of the peace, and a well-regarded stump speaker. One afternoon, he was called to canvas for a local candidate at a convention held at a nearby tavern. With their father away, Bill and Samuel mounted their horses and headed out to check on their cows.

Samuel's mother had warned him against riding a particularly vicious mare named Betsy, but the boy was undaunted. As the brothers returned from the cow pasture, they passed a local schoolhouse, just as the children were being dismissed. Samuel put his heels to the mare's sides and raced about to show off his skill as a rider for the gawking students. and raced about to show off his skill as a rider for the gawking students. As he turned the horse and galloped by the school, the mare balked, reared, and fell on the boy. Samuel was severely injured.

Someone picked him up and rushed him to a neighbor's house, while Bill rushed home on his horse to tell his father what had happened. Isaac took the horse from Bill and sped toward Samuel, leaving Bill to walk to the neighbor's house where Samuel was resting. When Bill finally arrived at the house where his brother had been taken, he walked in to find his parents and sisters sobbing with grief. The doctor had just given them the horrible news. Their son would never recover from his injuries. Samuel Cody died the following morning at the age of 12.

Bill was seven. The following year, Isaac decided to move his family, setting off west toward his brother Elijah's farm on the Kansas-Missouri border. They lived for a time on Elijah's farm until Isaac established a trading post in Salt Creek Valley, four miles from the Kickapoo tribe's agency. Soon enough, Isaac returned to his family with two new ponies as a gift for his son, telling him that he was taking the family with him across the river where they would build their lives in Kansas. river where they will build their lives in Kansas.

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e-commerce in the U.S. Shopify is also the global force behind Allbirds, Rothy's and Brooklinen and millions of other entrepreneurs of every size across 175 countries. Because businesses that grow, Thank you. Shopify.com slash realm. Growing up in Iowa, Bill Cody had never met a Black man or an Indian until his family set off for Kansas. The Codys' neighbors, like themselves, were mostly English farmers. In Leavenworth, Kansas, where the family now lived, Bill Cody was exposed to a broader swath of humanity than he had ever seen in Scott County, Iowa. Leavenworth was the first city founded in what would become the state of Kansas, and the Mormon, Santa Fe, and California trails passed through the area. Long wagon trains carrying settlers to the west were a common sight,

and Bill recalled that one of his earliest Kansas memories was watching a funeral service for a large group of Mormon pioneers. Refugee slaves rushed to the area, assisted by abolitionists as they fled the horrific conditions in neighboring Missouri. Leavenworth was on the border, both of the settled east and the frontier west, as well as the line between slavery and abolition, and both sides of the argument were primed for violence. So-called border ruffians from Missouri crossed into Kansas to recapture escaped slaves, harass abolitionists, and, at times, use their bowie knives and guns to force voters into supporting the expansion of slavery.

From the Kansas side, militant abolitionists called freestaters, like John Brown and his sons, were just as ready to fight for their cause. Skirmishes, massacres, and general unrest became the rule along both sides of the Missouri River. Bill Cody recalled that one day, while he was waiting at his father's store, I noticed a small party of dark-skinned and rather fantastically dressed people, whom I ascertained were Indians, and as I had never seen a real live Indian, I was much interested in them. These were the Kickapoo people, whose agency was northwest of Leavenworth.

Bill was immediately fascinated with the men and women, but was frustrated to find that he had no way to communicate with them until his father promised to help him learn native sign language. At home, Bill was excited to ride the pair of ponies his father had given him, but Isaac warned his son that they hadn't been broken. Mindful of his brother's accident with the mare, Bill promised not to ride the animals. One day, Cody was trying to pet one of the ponies in an attempt to tame it as a drove of horses and riders came up from the west to camp at a nearby stream. Isaac Cody called his son to come and meet one of the men who was from California. The man left a passing impression

on young Bill. He was a genuine western man, Bill said, about six feet two inches tall, well built, with a light, springy, and wiry step. He wore a broad-brimmed California hat and was dressed in a complete suit of buckskin, beautifully trimmed and beaded. The man noticed that Bill had been working with the ponies and offered to help break the animals. Bill wrote, The stranger untied the rope and jumped on the pony's back. In a moment, he was flying over the prairie, the untamed steed rearing and pitching every once in a while in his efforts to throw his rider, but the man was not unseated. He was evidently an experienced horseman. I watched his every movement. I was

unconsciously taking lessons in the practical education which would serve me so well through my life. When the pony was broken, the rider sat down with Cody's father, explaining that he had been a horseman for most of his life. He ran away from home as a child, joined a circus as a bareback rider, and found work catching and breaking wild horses in California. He explained that he had an uncle living on the Missouri side of the river before he ran away from home and was hoping to see him. He told Isaac that his uncle's name was Elijah Cody. The rider was Horace Billings, the son of Isaac and Elijah's sister. Bill was taken with the man, who was revealed as his cousin, and the man's skill with horses and his tales of western adventure.

I thought he was a magnificent-looking man, Bill said. I envied his appearance, and my ambition just then was to become as skillful a horseman as he was. Everything that he did, I wanted to do. He was a sort of hero in my eyes, and I wished to follow in his footsteps. Unfortunately for young Bill Cody, tragedy was about to intercede again. He would have to put his ambition on hold and transform himself from a wide-eyed boy to a working man at the ripe old age of 11. Not long after the visit from Horace Billings, Isaac Cody was stabbed at the Rively store for

speaking out against the expansion of slavery. Between that night and Isaac's death four years later, Bill and the rest of the Cody family were constantly under threat from the kind of border ruffians who had wielded the knife against Isaac. Bill said, My father had shed the first blood in the cause of freedom of Kansas, and now he was threatened with death by hanging or shooting if he dared to remain. Now he was threatened with death by hanging or shooting if he dared to remain. More than once, Bill had to help his father hide from determined mobs or escape from armed gunmen.

Elsewhere in Kansas, pro-slavery men from Missouri sacked the town of Lawrence, which had been founded by Free State settlers from New England. The border ruffians managed to burn a house and a hotel, ending the publication of a pair of free state newspapers. The tensions in Kansas were mirrored in Washington, D.C., where Senator Preston Brooks from South Carolina attacked Senator Charles Sumner, an abolitionist from Massachusetts, with a cane on the Senate floor. The laws of polite society were breaking down. The Brown family farm was burned as part of the same violence that led to the sacking of Lawrence, and John Brown set out for vengeance for the destruction of his property and the capture of his sons. Until then, there had been no killings by abolitionist forces in Kansas, but John Brown and his followers headed toward the pro-slavery stronghold of Pottawatomie,

and by the next morning, five pro-slavery men were dead. The shocking event was the match that lit the powder keg of bleeding Kansas and vaulted the nation forward on its path toward civil war. Bill Cody was 11 years old when his father died, but he was now the man of the house. He left school and found work, hoping to help support his mother and siblings. Bill would later claim that he rode for the famous Pony Express as a teenager,

but the truth is less extraordinary. He got a job driving his neighbor's ox cart to town to haul hay for a few weeks before finding work as a messenger for Russell and Majors, the company that would soon found the Pony Express. Bill Cody didn't ride hell-bent for leather across hundreds of miles of foreboding western landscapes. He carried messages on horseback from company headquarters in Leavenworth to the telegraph office at the military outpost of Fort Leavenworth, which was three miles away. He would later claim to have worked as a teamster in Utah during the Mormon War, prospected in Colorado with the 59ers and had an encounter with Sioux Warrior Chief Rain in the face.

The biographies that Buffalo Bill authorized were dreamed up by the promoters for his later Wild West shows, and it's hard to separate the historical fact from the fantastical fiction designed to sell show tickets. So it's impossible to substantiate many of the stories he told about his childhood. But it is known that by the summer of 1860, his uncle Elijah had left Missouri for Denver and Bill went along as a wagon driver. Though Cody's later stories painted him as the youngest, fastest, and best pony express rider in the West, the truth is that Cody spent most of his childhood in and around Leavenworth, where one of his teachers recalled that he wasn't much of a student,

but was a determined baseball player. He likely did meet fellow teamster Wild Bill Hickok around this time, though probably not as part of a raiding party to reclaim horses from the Sioux on the Powder River, like Cody would later claim. But Wild Bill, like Cody's cousin Horace Billings, would prove to be the kind of man that the young Bill Cody would imitate in the years following his father's death.

Bill Cody was now a young teenage boy without a father in a land fraught with partisan tension, and he was drawn to the Kansas Jayhawkers who took the war to the Missouri ruffians. As far as Bill was concerned, the border ruffians had killed his father and were threatening his mother, his sisters, and his little brother Charlie. Bill took up with a gang of horse thieves who promised to avenge the losses of Free State Kansas settlers at the expense of their pro-slavery neighbors. Bill left the gang fairly quickly after his mother strongly protested his involvement. But by the following year, he was riding with the Red Leg Scouts,

a militia group dedicated to the defense of Kansas on their own terms. Cody barely mentions the Red Leg Scouts in his multiple autobiographies, but they were one of the most brutal groups of fighters at the time, destroying property and taking lives in their bloody quest for retribution. By that time, the Civil War was raging, and the Cody household was about to suffer another devastating loss. was about to suffer another devastating loss. In November of 1863, Bill Cody returned to Leavenworth from his raiding excursions with the Red Leg Scouts to tend to his ailing mother. She had been sick for a while, and within a few weeks of his return, Mary Cody was dead.

Within a few weeks of his return, Mary Cody was dead. By Bill's own account, he was inconsolable. He promised his mother on her deathbed that he would stay away from the Redleg Scouts and the conflict that was tearing the nation apart. But now, with his mother gone, Bill Cody felt lost and alone. He sought comfort in drink and later wrote, One day, after having been under the influence of bad whiskey, I awoke to find myself a soldier in the 7th Kansas. I did not remember how or when I enlisted, but I saw I was in for it.

Like it or not, 18-year-old Bill Cody was a soldier. And in the spring of 1864, he and the rest of the 7th Kansas received word from the top brass. They were going to war. Private William F. Cody was serving as a teamster for the 7th Kansas Cavalry when they found themselves in Tennessee that spring. It was the final year of the war, though no one knew it yet. Cody arrived near Memphis shortly after Confederate troops, under the leadership of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, perpetrated the Fort Pillow Massacre, which one historian called, one of the bleakest, saddest events of American military history. Cody remembered being in Memphis just after Forrest won a decisive victory over Union Army

Brigadier General Samuel Sturgis at the Battle of Bryce's Crossroads in northeastern Mississippi, and then later being with the 7th for Forrest's crushing defeat at the Battle of Tupelo. Soon, the 7th Kansas was sent back west to join the fighting in Missouri, where they took part in the Battle of Westport, sometimes called the Gettysburg of the West. The Union's Army of the Border, as it was known, pushed the Confederacy's Army of Missouri out of present-day Kansas City in the last campaign west of the Mississippi River. Cody's stories of this time paint him as a scout and a spy for the Army,

reuniting with his old friend Wild Bill Hickok in service to the Union Army in the United States. The official record tells a different story. In January of 1865, Bill Cody was ordered to serve as an orderly in a veterans' hospital. Four weeks later, he was working as a courier and a messenger for the Freedmen's Bureau in St. Louis. Soon enough, the war was over, and Bill Cody was headed back to Leavenworth. It was still home, but a home without a father, a mother, or any immediate prospects. It was also, by October of 1865, a home without a younger brother, when Charlie Cody died from illness. But Bill didn't have time to mourn the loss. He had to work. He took a series of jobs with various freighting interests, driving horses from Leavenworth to Fort Kearney,

and later piloting a stage between Kearney and Plum Creek in western Nebraska. The work was hard and the conditions were miserable. In the bitter cold of February of 1866, Bill Cody decided that that life was not for him. It was the same month that a group of former Confederate soldiers conducted the first post-war armed bank robbery outside of Kansas City, Missouri. The robbery of the Clay County Savings Bank went down in history as the first robbery of the James Younger gang. For Bill Cody, farther to the west, he wrote later, While bounding over the cold, dreary road day after day, I at last determined to abandon

staging forever and marry and settle down. He couldn't stop thinking about St. Louis and the beautiful woman there who had captured his heart. Louisa Federici was the daughter of an Austro-Italian merchant in St. Louis, and she had fallen for the handsome Bill Cody nearly on sight, though their first meeting didn't go quite like either might have expected. Bill had seen her and asked a friend, one of her cousins, for an introduction. The cousin brought Bill to the Federici house, where Louisa was engrossed in reading a book. When the cousin pulled the chair out from under her, Louisa sprang to

her feet and slapped the person she thought was the culprit, only to find it was a handsome young man she had never met. Louisa, her cousin laughed, allow me to present Private William Frederick Cody of the United States Army. As Louisa stammered and blushed, Bill grinned and told the cousin that he believed he and Miss Frederici had met. When she finally worked up the courage to ask where, he replied, on the field of battle, a joke about the slapping incident a few seconds earlier. Louisa struggled to overcome her embarrassment to talk to Bill, whom she recalled was, about the most handsome man I had ever seen. He was quite the most wonderful man I had ever known, and I almost bit my tongue to keep from telling him so.

Their romance during the time Bill was stationed in St. Louis was brief, but proved to be enduring. When Bill decided on that cold February morning that it was time for him to settle down and start a family, he rushed to St. Louis and married Louisa Federici without delay. They moved to Leavenworth, where Louisa soon realized she was trading a decidedly middle-class life for the love of a man whose prospects didn't seem all that promising. for the love of a man whose prospects didn't seem all that promising. Bill rented out his mother's home as a hotel that he called the Golden Rule House, but he spent money faster than he could make it.

And on top of financial concerns, Louisa didn't get along with Bill's sister, Helen. The following year of Bill's life was spent away from his family. By his own account, he missed the birth of his daughter while he was, quote, railroading and trading and hunting, looking around for anything that would come along. He failed at running a saloon, sold buffalo meat in Hayes City, Kansas, and tried to start a town that he called Rome on a rail line. He wrote to his wife that the investment in the town was worth $250,000, which might have been true if the railroad hadn't bypassed the town altogether. Everything Bill did to earn money failed, and now his wife was asking where the $250,000 was. So, in the fall of 1867 and throughout 1868, Bill Cody fell back on the profession that he

knew best, hunting buffalo. The meat was used to feed the Irish workers who labored day and night to push the railroad west. Newspapers in Kansas started mentioning his hunting feats, like bringing in 19 bison in one day. Bill sold bison meat to the railroad at seven cents a pound, sometimes bringing home $100 in a single day. And hunting Buffalo, Bill Cody earned the name that would stick with him for the rest of his life. As the railroad workers laid their tracks, they sang a little tune. workers laid their tracks, they sang a little tune. Buffalo Bill, Buffalo Bill, never missed and never will, always aims and shoots to kill, and the railroad pays his Buffalo Bill. It was a fun little ditty at the time, and of course, no one could have dreamed that the nickname

would stick with 22-year-old Bill Cody for the rest of his life and would become his stage name when he became one of the most famous people in the country in less than five years. Next time on Legends of the Old West, Bill becomes an army scout with his friend and mentor Wild Bill Hickok. He rides into battle with the 5th Cavalry. He receives the Medal of Honor. He leads a buffalo hunt for the Grand Duke of Russia and meets Ned Buntline, the man who will make him famous. He does all that and more next week on Legends of the Old West.

Members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week to receive new episodes. They receive the entire series to binge all at once with no commercials, and they also receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Memberships are just $5 per month. This series was researched and written by Matthew Kearns. Original music by Rob Valliere. I'm your host and producer, Chris Wimmer.

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