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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 not known as the "Border War," and his youth was passed amid all the excitements and turmoil indecent 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 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 ponyexpress rider, then the most dangerous occupation on the plains. He was known as a boy to be almost 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 wrestling the laurels as a buffalo hunted for a living, and gained his sobriquet by wrestling 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 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 "Thirty 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