History with the Cap'n- Buffalo!

Happy Buffalo Bill Day everybody!

I'm not entirely clear on when or how William F. Cody a.k.a "Buffalo Bill" climbed high enough up the pantheon of American heroes to merit his own day. Seemingly indifferent to my questions, someone somewhere has declared that Americans should spend February 26th remembering and celebrating the life and works of Buffalo Bill. Since the man headed a traveling frontier themed show -dubbed Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, in a fit of humility- that popularized the romantic idea of the Wild West, and permanently etched a place of Cowboys and Indians into our popular culture, I cannot begrudge the man a little memorialization. So I will use today's blog post as an opportunity to regale you with historical trivia related to Buffalo the man and Buffalo the animal (though not Buffalo the city in New York, because I feel they have enough problems without some snarky blog taking cheap shots at them).

• Buffalo Bill got his start riding for the Pony Express. He answered an ad that read "WANTED young skinny wiry fellows . . .Must be expert riders willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred."
  

• Since the Pony Express didn't even last two years as a long distance communication enterprise (and I bet you thought it was a long running institution of the Old West), Cody had to land a new job. He found work hunting food for railroad construction crews. Thus he began hunting American buffaloes, since they were the most plentiful source of good food (re: meat) around. Thus the moniker.

• Actually, I must note for accuracy that Buffalo Bill never had any real contact with buffalo, because there are no wild buffaloes native to North America. Cody hunted and killed bison. You can find buffalo in Africa and Asia, just not the American west. Some might explain this mislabeling of bison as an honest mistake of identification on the part of some early settler. After all they sort of have a similar appearance and some similar attributes. I don't really agree with that -do you even know what a proper buffalo looks like?- and I would equate that kind of error to mistaking an opossum for a koala.
  

• In fairness to Buffalo Bill, he was very successful at hunting and killing bison. Historians estimate that he killed about 4,280 bison in about a year and a half. Hunters had a variety of methods they employed in hunting bison. In fact the hunters has so much success rate that the bison population in North America has fallen from an estimated 60 million when Europeans began settling her to now only 50,000 bison roaming free today. That's actually improvement from the nineteenth century when the bison were down to a few hundred.

• My younger brother once told me that you can make a complete gramatically correct sentence using only the word "buffalo". As in "Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." Some have claimed this is the longest English language sentence you can create with just one word. I cannot be certain this is true, but I would love to watch people try to top it. (NOTE: The link does not lead to anything my younger brother wrote, just an article on the same topic.)

• Buffalo Bill would later go into acting alongside another famous Bill of the Old West, Wild Bill Hickok.
  

• The only natural predator of an adult bison, or buffalo if you prefer, is a wolf pack. Just to clarify, I am not talking about a pack of wolves taking on a herd of bison. I mean to say that it takes several wolfs at once to have any shot of killing an adult bison.

• When Buffalo Bill died he was honored by heads of state and then not buried where he had specified in his will. His wife claimed that he had changed his wishes on his death bed. A dispute arose between his proposed burial site (a town he founded) and his actual burial site (a place with a nice view), over who had the more legitimate claim to serve as Cody's eternal resting place. The feud would go on to involve a bounty for grave robbing and it would be settled when the two towns exchanged smoke signals. To give you the proper context for that I should mention that they were proposing grave robbery in 1948, and exchanging smoke signals in 1968.
  

So in case you have any social events planned for today and want to demonstrate your affinity for all things buffalo, I have hopefully left you well prepared to perpetuate the legends of Buffalo Bill and the Wild West.