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HON. W. F. CODY - ("BUFFALO BILL")

was born in Scott County, Iowa, from whence his father, Isaac Cody, emigrated a few years
afterward to the distant frontier territory of Kansas, settling near Fort Leavenworth. While
still a boy his father was killed in what is now known as the "Border War," and his youth was
passed amid all the excitements and turmoil incident to the strife and discord of that unsettled
community, where the embers of political contentions smoldered until they burst into the burning
flame of civil war. This state of affairs among the white occupants of the territory, and
the ingrained ferocity and hostility to encroachment from the native savage, created an atmosphere of adventure well calculated to educate one of his natural temperament to a familiarity
with danger, and self-reliance in the protective means for its avoidance.

From a child used to shooting and riding, he at an early age became a celebrated pony-express
rider, then the most dangerous occupation on the plains. He was known as a boy
to be most fearless
and ready for any mission
of danger,
and respected
by such men
then engaged
in the express
service as old
Jule and the
terrible Slade,
whose correct
finale is truthfully
told in
Mark Twain's
"Roughing
It." He accompanied
General Albert
Sidney Johnston
on his Utah
expedition,
guided trains
overland, hunted
for a living,
and gained his
sobriquet by
wresting the
laurels as a
buffalo hunter
from all claimants
- notably
Comstock, in
a contest with
whom he killed
sixty-nine buffaloes
in one
day to Comstock's
forty-six
- became
scout and
guide for the
now celebrated
Fifth Cavalry
(of which General
E. A. Carr
was Major),
and is thoroughly
identified
with that
regiment's
Western history;
was chosen by the
Kansas Pacific
Railroad to
supply meat to
the laborers
while building
the road, in
one season killing
4,862 buffaloes,
besides deer and
antelope; and was
chief of scouts
in the department
that protected
the building of the Union Pacific. In these various duties his encounters with the red
men have been innumerable, and are well authenticated by army officers in every section of
the country. In fact, wherever you meet an army officer, there you meet an admirer and
indorser of Buffalo Bill. He is, in fact, the representative man of the frontiersmen of the past
- that is, not the barroom brawler or bully of the settlements, but a genuine specimen of Western
manhood - a child of the plains, who was raised there, and familiar with the country previous
to railroads, and when it was known on our maps as the "Great American Desert." By the
accident of birth and early association, a man who became sensibly inured to the hardships and
dangers of primitive existence, and possessed of those qualities that afterward enabled him to
hold positions of trust, and, without his knowing or intending it, made him nationally famous.

Gen. Richard Irving Dodge, Gen. Sherman's chief of staff, correctly states in his
"Thiry Years Among Our Wild Indians" : "The success of every expedition against Indians
depends, to a degree, on the skill, fidelity and intelligence of the men employed as scouts, for