Buffalo Bill Cultural Center, Oakley, Kansas

The next stop on our trip north was in Oakley, Kansas. We stayed at High Plains RV Park, which offered us a nice grassy site at the end of the row, so we did not have anyone next to us. The only thing about this part of Kansas is the weather; it can turn in a moment and one night found me out taking the awning down before the rain and hail hit. But other than that, we visited the Buffalo Bill Cultural Center. Oakley celebrates the birthplace of the legend of Buffalo Bill. Why is Oakley the birthplace of Buffalo Bill? Let's find out.

Not every place can claim to be the Birthplace of a Legend. Our Legend received his title in 1868, just 10 miles west of the Center. He is known to the world as Buffalo Bill Cody, famous for his Wild West Show that toured across America and overseas. This was the late 1800s, a time when the world was starved for information of the Wild West. How did it all come about? (We also visited the Buffalo Bill Cody Museum in Cody, Wyoming.) 

In the spring of 1868, William F. Cody was hunting buffalo to feed the men that were constructing the Kansas Pacific Railroad. In the spring of 1868, as the construction reached Old Monument Station, William Cody was being referred to more and more as "Buffalo Bill."

The soldiers at nearby Fort Wallace had a buffalo hunter of their own that supplied then well with meat. It just happened that his name was also Bill -- Bill Comstock, Chief of Scouts. The soldiers thought that if anyone should be called Buffalo Bill that it should be Buffalo Bill Comstock, not Cody. The only sensible thing to do was to have a contest to see once and for all who should be "Buffalo Bill." A time was set, and a wager of $500 was made. The rules would be to see who could bring down the most buffalo (actually bison) in an 8-hour day. The place was set 20 miles east of Sheridan, which is approximately 10 miles west of Oakley in what is now Logan County, Kansas.

William Comstock

A herd was found and Cody and Comstock both entered the herd at the same time. Comstock took one group and Cody the other. Cody soon had his buffalo circling nicely to the left, shooting the leaders as she went. Comstock, on the other hand, followed his herd and shot the buffalo at the tail end of the herd. At the end of the first run Cody had brought down 38 to Comstock's 23. At this point the score was announced and champagne was uncorked. This proved to be an excellent drink on the Kansas prairie. 

On the second run Cody managed to bring down 18 to Comstock's 14. This brought the score to 56 to 37 in Cody's favor. At this point the champagne was again uncorked for all to enjoy. Cody realized that he was far ahead of his competitor so he decided to show off, and so on the final run, he rode Brigham without a saddle or bridle. This created a fever pitch of excitement amongst the onlookers. Cody brought down 13 buffalo on the final run, the last of which he drove down to the spectators and brought down within 50 yards of one of the wagons.

This ended the great legendary match with Cody bringing down 69 buffalo to Comstock's 46. Cody was declared the winner to be forever known as "The Buffalo Bill." 

William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody was born in Iowa in 1846, but it was here in Oakley, Kansas in the spring of 1868 while hunting buffalo (actually, they are bison, not buffalo), for the crews building the Union Pacific Railroad, that the "Legend of Buffalo Bill" Cody was born. 

The statute sits up on top of a hill; it stands 16 feet tall and weighs 9,000 pounds. The twice-life size monumental bronze of Buffalo Bill on his horse Brigham, in pursuit of a buffalo. 

There are more exhibits out by the statute, but I'm going back inside the Center to view those exhibits before heading back outside.

Fred, an American Bison

Jim Ferguson, host of the radio show, "The Revolution with Jim and Trav," harvested Fred 60 miles north of Burlington, Colorado in 2003. Fred weighed 2,071 pounds. Standing next to Fred is Buffalo Bill holding his 73 Winchester, a model commonly used in the Wild West Show. First produced in 1873, this gun was often referred to as "The Gun that Won the West." 

Jim & Gayle with "Fred"

Red Fox

The red fox is the most common on the Kansas plains, thriving with urban development, swift foxes are also common, but require large, open prairies and fields with little structure. The red fox is the most widely distributed carnivore in the world. The red fox catch small rodents with a characteristic high pounce. This is the first thing cubs learn as they begin to hunt. Foxes have whiskers on their legs as well as around their faces that are used to help them find their way. 

Wheat

Sorghum (Milo)

Corn

Plaster cast of a mosasaur (Platecarpus) skull

Calcite & Quartz

Fossil Wood

Fossil Drift Wood

Calcite

Fossil Oyster Shells

Annie

I did not really like seeing the stuffed Annie and then reading her story -- before and after. Why did they have to give her a real name? Annie was a registered longhorn owned by Logan County Commissioner, Carl Uhrich of Oakley, Kansas. Annie lived to be 10 years old and raised six calves in her life. She weighed in at 1,200 pounds. 

The Western Cattle Trail was the largest and last system of the cattle trails. It ran from south Texas to Canada, encompassing numerous feeder routes, branches, and splinter routes. Because of the Kansas quarantine of the Eastern/Chisholm route in 1875, the end of the Indian Wars in the winter of 1875, the opening of the gold fields in the Black Hills in 1876, and the establishment of vast ranches in the north, trail drivers on the Western delivered millions of longhorns over the next two decades to supply the demand for beef.

Like the Eastern Trail in Texas, the Western Trail followed the former Shawnee Trail route in south Texas to San Antonio where it turned west to establish its own path. The trail crossed at Doan's Crossing on the Red River and continued past Camp Supply in Indian Territory, on to its first railhead of Dodge City, Kansas, and continued to Ogallala, Nebraska, and beyond. 

At Ogallala, a gateway to the north, herds were shipped out to the East and dispersed not only from the main trunk of the Trail, but via various splinter routes to Indian agencies, miners, and ranches. When the Kansas legislature quarantined the Western in 1885, trail drivers established a detour around the state in order to re-connect with the old, established route in Wyoming. Ultimately, the gathering area for cattle moved from south Texas to the Panhandle. 

By the early 1890s, the longhorn grew out of favor, railroads were in place, settlements were claiming the open range, and foreign investors had bought and fenced many of the vast ranches. When one last herd was trailed north from Texas in 1897, it was the end of an era of trail driving.

That's the end of the exhibits inside the Cultural Center, and now we will head back outside to look at the exhibits that are around the statute.

Not long after the legendary contest, Cody was transferred to Fort McPherson, Nebraska. This photograph shows Buffalo Bill with his celebrated hunting rifle, Lucretia Borgia," across his lap. Sitting next to him is another famous hunter, the Earl of Dunraven. 

Legends are sometimes too good to be true, but Buffalo Bill was the real thing. He was born William Frederick Cody in a log cabin in Iowa in 1846, grew up on the plains of Kansas, and fought for the Union during the Civil War as a trooper with the Seventh Kansas Cavalry.

He earned his credentials as a frontiersman. At various times he worked as a trapper, a bullwhacker (driving the oxen for wagon trains), Pony Express rider, stagecoach driver, and hunter. But he became famous as a civilian scout for the military.

Scouts were the eyes and ears of the army. They guided troops over the plains, found water and hunted fresh game, trailed Indian war parties, acted as couriers and translators, and fought alongside the soldiers. From the moment General Philip Sheridan appointed Cody to be Chief Scout and Guide for the 5th U.S. Cavalry in 1868, he was on army payrolls for four consecutive years, more than any other scout and guide during the Indian Wars. Cody participated in 19 battles and skirmishes, and in 1872 he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for gallantry.

Later that year, dime-novelist and playwright Ned Buntline persuaded Cody to appear in a blood-and-thunder melodrama, playing himself on stage. He was so successful that he started his own theater group with fellow scouts Texas Jack Omohundro and Wild Bill Hickok. 

In 1883, he brought Indian people together with cowboys, cavalrymen, outlaws, sharpshooters, elk, buffalo, and 200 horses on a two-and-one-half-hour arena show. For the next 30 years, Buffalo Bill's Wild West carried the story of America's West to millions of people worldwide.

Cody died in 1917 and is buried on Lookout Mountain near Denver, Colorado.

Buffalo Bill, c. 1873, wearing a beaded buffalo-hide coat trimmed in beaver fir.

Union Pacific Construction Train 1868

Cast of Buffalo Bill's Wild West, London, 1887 (Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley are highlighted). Cody and his partner, Nate Salsbury, loaded 18 buffalo, a dozen elk, a small herd of longhorn cattle, and 200 horses onto the S.S. State of Nebraska for the stormy voyage across the Atlantic to England. (We visited the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming.)

Buffalo Bill in his Wild West show demonstrating his way of hunting buffalo from horseback, c. 1909.

Annie Oakley

Annie Oakley resting at her Wild West show tent at
the Chicago World's Fair c. 1893

At a time when shooting was America's second most popular sport (after horse racing), Annie Oakley (1860-1926) was the superstar. She was born Phoebe Ann Moses in Darke County, Ohio. Her family was extremely poor, and she learned to shoot game to help support them.

Annie met the love of her life, sharpshooter Frank Butler, when at age 15 she beat in a match. When Frank made her part of his shooting act, she took the stage name "Annie Oakley." The great Sioux leader Sitting Bull adopted her. Buffalo Bill made her famous, and England's Queen Victoria called her "a clever little girl." She was the star of the Wild West show for 17 years, from 1885 through 1901.

Indian warriors with canvas teepees. Prior to the
1870s most teepees were made of buffalo hides

Pawnee women and children pose in front
of an earthen lodge

At the end of the Ice Age, about 9,000 years ago, people hunted wooly mammoths and ancient bison on the plains of what is now Kansas. They used spears and atlatls, or throwing sticks, and they made beautiful stone points from native flint. They were migratory and did not live in permanent settlements.

About 2,200 years ago, ancestors of the modern Pawnee Indians moved from the eastern woodlands onto the plains and into the river valleys of western Kansas. They brought new technologies with them -- bows and arrows, pottery, and a knowledge of farming. They also followed the buffalo, but they built earth lodges and grew crops.

By 1500, Atapaskan people (called "Apaches" by the Spanish) had moved into western Kansas. They also hunted and, to a lesser extent, engaged in farming. There are many places, natural features of beauty or starkness, that they called sacred. Kansas was not just a hunting ground. It was truly "home" to the native peoples.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 opened Kansas to white settlement. Though the government attempted to make treaties with most of the Indian tribes in the territory, many of the Indian peoples did not want to give up their homes.

In 1857, in response to Comanche raids, General Edwin V. Sumner led the first military expedition against Indians in western Kansas. Col. John Chivington commanded militia troops in the brutal massacre of a peaceful Cheyenne camp at Sand Creek in nearby Colorado, warfare broke out all over the central plains. The army was forced to establish a series of forts.

After 15 years of repeated hostilities throughout the Smoky Hill region, chiefs Little Wolf and Dull Knife led one last escape of Cheyenne people from captivity in Indian Territory to their northern plains homelands. They passed through what is now Logan County as they eluded the cavalry. Though not bloodless, their trek won the admiration of some in the eastern press and ended a dramatic chapter in the taming of the American West. 

Little Wolf, Northern Cheyenne Chief

Sitting Bull & Buffalo Bill
Enemies in 1876, friends in 1885

Pawnee  (on left) and Sioux Chiefs (on right) with Buffalo Bill (center). Wild West Show, Statton Island, New York 1886. On the plains, the Pawnee and Sioux were mortal enemies. Buffalo Bill was able to keep peace between many diverse cultures while traveling in America and over seas.

1874 - R.M. Wright sitting on top of a pile of
purchased 250,000 hides

On the Kansas Pacific Railway

Buffalo mounts were sent back East in the promotion of the Kansas Pacific Railway which was laying track across the Great Plains, linking the Missouri River Basin with the Rocky Mountains west.

Life on the plains

"The death knell of the buffalo sounded when men got to hunting them for their hides only ... and they did, recklessly, ruthlessly." ~~ William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody

There may have been as many as 30 million bison on the North American plains at their height. But after about 1840 their numbers began to decline. By 1880 only a few hundred survived. Why? 

A 300-year climate cycle called "the little Ice Age" came to an end in the 1840s. The weather on the plains grew hotter and dryer, and the prairie grasses grew more slowly. Before long, there were more buffalo than the land could support, and the herds grew smaller.

But Indian people still relied on the buffalo and killed up to 250,000 per year. Huge numbers of wild and domesticated horses, as many as 2 million, competed for the range. And by the 1850s and 1860s, habitat began disappearing to towns, farms, railroads, and livestock raising.

Finally, in the 1870s, world demand for leather -- and a nationwide economic depression -- brought thousands of out-of-work adventurers onto the plains as "hide hunters." Hunting pressures on the herds led to their near extinction.

Buffalo Bill, who began his career and gained notoriety by hunting buffalo to feed the Kansas Pacific Railroad workers and leading celebrated buffalo hunts for European royalty, later worked to save the buffalo, preserving a small herd of buffalo -- of which many buffalo today are descendants. 

The crusade to save the buffalo that began in the 1880s has been called the beginning of the modern conservation movement.

The Last of the Plainsmen

Early Exploration across Kansas

Zebulon Pike

John C. Freemont

For over 300 years -- from 1541 to 1853 -- the role of the military in Kansas was one of discovery. The first Europeans in what is now Kansas were Spanish soldiers led in 1541 by Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. They failed to find cities of gold, but Coronado recognized the richness of the prairie soil and claimed the country for Spain. The French established a claim through the expedition in 1724 of Etienne Veniard de Bourgmont.

The first American exploring party was commanded by Lt. Zebulon Montgomery Pike in 1806. Kansas was part of the new-acquired Louisiana Purchase. In 1819 the first scientific survey of Kansas was led by Maj. Stephen H. Long. Neither Pike nor Long saw any agricultural value to the Kansas plains. The Kansas plains were commonly referred to as the Great American Desert during this time period.

The first exploration of the Smoky Hill River basin as a means of travel was conducted by John C. Freemont during the 1840s. The route he explored later became established as the Smoky Hill Trail.

The final exploration in 1853 was conducted by Capt. J.W. Gunnison of the army's topographical engineers. He led one of the five government expeditions searching for the best transcontinental railroad route. The path he surveyed here later became the Kansas-Pacific Railway.

Dull Knife's band of captured Northern Cheyenne, 1879

The Comanche people of the central plains and Rockies were among the first Indians to master the horse. By 1706 they had moved into what is now Kansas and had conquered or driven out the Apaches. Their rule of the prairie buffalo country led other people to call them "Lords of the Plains."

But by 1800, their lordship of western Kansas was contested by the Sioux, the Arapaho, and especially the Cheyenne. Life became more complicated for the Indian people of Kansas after 1830 when the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act. The government began forcing Indian people in the eastern states to give up their lands in exchange for land beyond the Missouri River. Soon there were Shawnee, Kickapoo, Delaware, Miami, Ottawa, and other tribes competing for resources of Kansas.

After the Civil War, many of the tribes in Kansas were forced once again to move, this time to Indian Territory (Oklahoma).