When we come into this world, we have absolutely no idea. Not an inkling.
Or. Perhaps, we know everything. What if, when we are born into this place, we know every little detail about where we came from before and how our entire lives will unfold before us. Then, with that first breath of oxygen — POOF — it all disappears.
Either way. We don’t know our futures. I think it is for that very reason that I like to look at people’s early lives. There are many famous birthdays today, from Levi Strauss to Victor Hugo and John Harvey Kellogg to Tony Randall.
But one that has always interested me is Bill Cody. We all know him as Buffalo Bill, the famous western man with the Wild West Show. But he didn’t start out with those intentions. In fact, he went down a lot of different paths before he got there.
He was born on February 26, 1846, on a farm just outside Le Claire, Iowa. I don’t know much about Iowa, but Le Claire sounds wholesome to me. Anyway, this father, Isaac Cody, was born in Upper Canada. And his mother, Mary Ann Bonsell Laycock, hailed from Trenton, New Jersey. It seems unlikely that those two should meet, but she moved to Cincinnati to teach school, and by some greater purpose, Isaac was there too. If it weren’t for that chance meeting, there would be no little Bill Cody.
They must have been the moving around kind of people because Bill was born in Iowa, but in 1847, they moved to Ontario, where he was baptized. They packed up and moved again. In 1853, Isaac Cody sold his land in rural Scott County, Iowa, for $2000 (around $68,000 in today’s money), and the family moved to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas Territory.
As it was, Kansas got to be a rough place to live in the years before the Civil War. The state was split terribly by political and physical conflict over the slavery question. And Bill’s dad, Isaac Cody, was strongly against slavery.
Isaac was invited to speak at a place called Rively’s store, which was a local trading post where pro-slavery men often held meetings. And boy, did he give a whopper of an antislavery speech. His words so angered the crowd that they threatened to kill him if he didn’t step down. And at that moment, a man jumped up and stabbed Isaac twice with a Bowie knife. The store’s owner rushed Cody to get treatment, but he never fully recovered from his injuries.
Trouble followed the family in Kansas, and pro-slavery supporters frequently harassed them. People wanted Issac Cody dead. So for that very reason, he spent time away from home for his safety. But, his enemies learned that he planned to visit his family. They plotted to kill him as he made his way.
Young Bill heard of the plot. He was ill at the time, but despite that and his young age, he rode 30 miles to warn his father. It saved Isaac’s life.
Later, Isaac Cody took a trip to Cleveland, Ohio, to organize a group of thirty families to bring back to Kansas to add to the antislavery population. It was during his return trip that he caught a respiratory infection. He still had ongoing complications with kidney disease from the old stabbing wound. The combination of this led to his death in April 1857. Bill was just 11 years old.
The family suffered financially after Isaac’s death. And that is when Bill started working like a crazy little guy. The first job the 11-year-old took to support his family was as a “boy extra” for a freight carrier. This work entailed delivering messages along the wagon trains, from the drivers to the workers. He’d ride on horseback, to and fro, all throughout the convoys.
As a boy, he was a scout for the Army, a rider for the Pony Express, a trapper, bullwhacker, a “Fifty-Niner” in Colorado, wagonmaster, stagecoach driver, and a hotel manager. All of this before he served in the Civil War for the Union Army by the time he was 18.
There is much more to his life than I can write about here, including the part most of us know, that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.
His bigger show ended on January 10, 1917. Bill Cody was 71 years old at the time of his death. But he started out as just a little baby. As we all do. One breath at a time.
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“What we want to do is give women, even more, liberty than they have. Let them do any kind of work they see fit, and if they do it as well as men, give them the same pay.”
— Bill Cody
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My restless, roaming spirit would not allow me to remain at home very long.
— Bill Cody
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Frontiersmen good and bad, gunmen as well as inspired prophets of the future, have been my camp companions. Thus, I know the country of which I am about to write as few men now living have known it.
— Bill Cody
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Before the show of the west. Much before.
