Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show presented eager spectators with reenactments of what Buffalo Bill considered true western life: battles between army soldiers and Indians, stagecoach ambushes, Pony Express deliveries, horse races, buffalo hunts, and trick shooting. Touring with his show for more than three decades, Buffalo Bill did more than any other person to both preserve and create the legend of the Wild West.
Young Man of the House
Born on a frontier farm in Scott County, Iowa, on February 26, 1846, William F. Cody did not enjoy a carefree childhood; he began working as a young boy. His family was one of the first to move to the Kansas Territory in 1847, where Cody saw men "dressed all in buckskin with coonskin caps or broad-brimmed slouch hats—real Westerners of whom I had dreamed," he remembered in his autobiography.
When Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, settlers began heated debates about whether Kansas should become a free or a slave state. Cody's father, Isaac, bravely announced his antislavery position among a group of proslavery supporters. As eight-year-old William watched, one of the proslavery supporters stabbed Isaac Cody in the back. Cody drove the wagon back home with his father's head in his lap.
