"Buffalo Bill" from Prairie to Palace: An Authentic History of the Wild West

by John M. Burke

Surrounded by enemies, he lived amid dangers so constant and ever-present that they became part of his daily life, and fear was unknown. Self-preservation taught him to oppose strategy with strategy, and to learn the wiles of the red man in order that he might exist in his country, and study the habits of the animals infesting the country, for the dual purpose of avoiding danger and providing himself with food and raiment. At the same time this wild life broadened his moral nature, expanded his mind, and prepared it to receive great truths. Broad men are the product of broad countries; narrowness and prejudice are insular.

Sir Charles Dilke has recorded the history of “Greater Britain,” but during the lifetime of this frontier boy he has seen with his own eyes the growth of “Greater America.” In the short span of a life still in its prime, he has seen the slow wagon-train crawling over the weary miles of wind-swept prairie harassed by Indians and other foes, and he has seen the long parallel iron rails push their way across the map of the continent until they span it from gulf to gulf and from ocean to ocean. The “prairie schooner” and the pony express have in his time given way to the Pullman coach and the electric wire.

In his boyhood the strife and struggles, the perils and privations, which had beset the Puritans in New England a century before, were being reënacted on the Western plains; and of this period in the development of our country this boy can truthfully say, “All of which I saw, and part of which I was.”

In later life, when great military commanders intrusted their lives, and those of their men, to his keeping, they did it with an unhesitating confidence, begotten of the knowledge that he was born and trained upon the spot; a veritable product of the soil. His father having died while he was still young, he matured early. His widowed mother taught the boy at her knee the elements of reading and writing, and thus laid the foundation of an education which has been completed in the school of the world.

Living for years in cabins or tents, and oftener under the canopy of heaven, pursuing a career of independent activity which carried him through the various stages of cattle-herder, teamster, bronco “buster,” wagon-master, stage-driver, pony-express rider, hunter, guide, scout, and soldier, he still found time to acquire an education which, added to his native refinement and gentleness of bearing, enables him to appear to advantage in any society or place. While perfection exists only in the other world, and is not claimed for him, the herder and scout has borne inspection, and passed muster, in the accepted centers of refinement and cultivation of the world.

From the Rocky Mountains to the Colosseum at Rome is a “far cry,” and yet that is the history of the settler’s son now known around the world as Col. William F. Cody, or “Buffalo Bill.”

The pages of this book are not devoted to the recording of a legend wherein the untutored, wild, and reckless roamer of the plains has by chance, or the magic of phenomenal powers, won the open sesame to the grandeur of patriarchal palaces, but rather to the telling of how native courage and brilliant daring combined with sincerity of purpose and purity of motive have made savage warriors of the prairies to welcome and appreciate the joys of peace, have opened in the heart of apparently desert places storehouses of wealth, and shown princely powers that manhood, prowess, and honor are found as truly on the prairies of the great West as in the centers of art and civilization. The sturdy hero of the plains has been met by gracious hands at the portals of the palace.

The discovery that a new world existed on the western shores of the Atlantic was scarcely more a surprise to the grandees of the Old World, than the realization that far beyond the great Father of Waters there existed a country whose inhabitants were hunting buffaloes and living in rude tents on prairies and amid rugged mountains, which needed but the plow and the miner’s pick for keys to unlock treasuries filled with richer products and rarer gems than the bright gleam of the mythical Aladdin’s lamp e’er shone upon.

Now the world recognizes and gives tardy but sincere applause to the venturesome spirits that first directed the attention of the world to the grandeur and latent power of the great West. Occasionally a noble of the East, in search of sport and adventure, visited this new country and, returning, told of its vastness and magnificence. Romancers, upon a few facts, accepted with hesitation, built stories which, though thoroughly entertaining, were regarded as novels, never as histories.

Taking up the thread of the beautiful story so graphically told by the facile pen of Washington Irving in his narration of the fur traders’ trials, adventures, and discoveries, and weaving all into a contemporaneous history, our Cody and his fellows have gathered together the living actual facts of the prairies, and held them up to the wondering, admiring gaze of the world in the court-yards of the palaces of Europe. The barefooted urchin, that, astride of his fleet-footed bronco, rode with a smile through every danger, carrying news and cheer from old homes in the East to the strugglers of the prairies, has since been accorded courtly welcome by crowned monarchs, to whom he has exhibited in triumph trophies of American valor and American enterprise. Kingly warriors have dragged captives chained to their chariot-wheels as proofs of their victories; subjects have shouted loud pæans of praise and glory of their lords and princes returning as victors; but when, save in the history of William F. Cody, have the conquered walked hand in hand with the conqueror, willing witnesses to his glorious achievements; or when, before, have kings and queens and emperors joined in according glad applause to a victor whose only royal heritage was his native manhood, and whose only spoils of victory were willing captives to peace and civilization.