Buffalo Bill Cody — the Showman Who Made and Lost Several Fortunes

Summary

William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody was, for a stretch of the late nineteenth century, plausibly the most famous human being on earth — a frontier scout turned showman who packaged the American West into a touring spectacle and sold it to millions of people across the United States and Europe. Buffalo Bill's Wild West, founded in 1883, earned him several fortunes over three decades. He spent or lost every one of them, and died in 1917 effectively broke, his great show foreclosed and auctioned out from under him.

Cody made money the way few entertainers ever have, and he gave it away and gambled it away with equal abandon. He was famously, almost compulsively generous, handing cash to old friends, broke cowboys, and anyone with a hard-luck story. He was also a serial sucker for investment schemes wholly outside his expertise: an Arizona gold-and-tungsten mine that swallowed money for years, irrigation and land-development ventures in Wyoming, a hotel, ranches. The show kept refilling the well, and the schemes and the generosity kept draining it faster.

The two enterprises that defined his decline were a mine and a loan. The Campo Bonito mine near Oracle, Arizona, which he organized into a $600,000 company around 1910, never came close to paying back what he sank into it. And in January 1913, short of cash to keep his combined "Two Bills" show afloat, Cody borrowed twenty thousand dollars from Harry Tammen, a Denver Post owner and circus operator — a loan that, when Cody fell behind, gave Tammen the lever to seize and auction the entire Wild West show that July.

For his last years the most famous showman in the world was, in effect, an employee — performing for the very circus interests that had taken his show, unable to retire because he could not afford to. He died in Denver on January 10, 1917. By the most cited accounts his once-enormous earnings had dwindled to under a hundred thousand dollars in assets, much of it encumbered. Buffalo Bill is the classic case of the great earner undone not by a single crash but by a lifetime of bad bets and open-handedness that no income could outrun.

Timeline

The Fortune

Cody was born near Le Claire, Iowa Territory, on February 26, 1846, and went to work young after his father's death — as a freight hand, reputedly a Pony Express rider, and a Civil War-era army scout. He earned the nickname "Buffalo Bill" in the late 1860s supplying bison meat to Kansas Pacific Railroad construction crews, and burnished it in a famous shooting contest. His real fame, though, was manufactured: the dime novelist Ned Buntline turned Cody into a fictional hero in the early 1870s, and Cody soon began playing a version of himself on stage.

In 1883 Cody launched the enterprise that made him rich and immortal: Buffalo Bill's Wild West, an outdoor extravaganza of trick riding, sharpshooting, mock battles, and staged frontier scenes that toured the country and then the world. It was a genuine phenomenon. The 1887 London run, mounted for Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, played to enormous crowds; over its London season the show reportedly sold more than two and a half million tickets. The Wild West toured Europe repeatedly over the following two decades and made stars of performers like the sharpshooter Annie Oakley and, briefly, the Lakota leader Sitting Bull.

The money poured in. At its height the show grossed enormous sums and Cody was earning a fortune, channeling some of it into respectable trophies of success. He bought Scout's Rest Ranch near North Platte, Nebraska. He lent his name and capital to the founding of the town of Cody, Wyoming, in 1895; opened the elegant Irma Hotel there, named for his daughter, in 1902; and built up the TE Ranch nearby. For a time he looked like exactly what he appeared to be: a self-made celebrity converting fame into lasting wealth.

The Cracks

The first crack was temperament. Cody simply could not hold onto money. His generosity was legendary and indiscriminate — he subsidized old scouts and broken-down cowboys, picked up the tab for anyone around, and gave to nearly every appeal. That openhandedness was part of the persona that made him beloved, but it meant that even in the fattest years a great deal of cash flowed straight back out. He lived large, traveled constantly, and kept a payroll of performers, animals, and crew that made the show as expensive to run as it was lucrative.

The deeper cracks were his investments, which were almost uniformly outside anything he understood. The most ruinous was mining. Around 1905-1906 a promoter interested Cody in claims near Oracle, Arizona, and by 1910 he had organized the Campo Bonito mine into a corporation capitalized at six hundred thousand dollars, chasing gold and the tungsten ore scheelite. The mine devoured money for years; the cost of getting the ore out consistently exceeded the value of what came up. Cody also tied up capital in Wyoming irrigation and land-development schemes around the town that bore his name — ambitious projects, slow to pay, that the federal government eventually had to take over.

Meanwhile the show itself was becoming harder to sustain. The novelty of the Wild West was fading as the frontier receded into history and competing amusements multiplied; a serious 1901 train wreck killed many of the show's horses and injured performers. Cody's longtime partners died or moved on, and in 1908 he merged his operation with Gordon "Pawnee Bill" Lillie's to form the combined "Two Bills" show. The arrangement kept him on the road past the age when he might have retired, precisely because the mine, the land schemes, and his own generosity had left him without the cushion to stop.

The Collapse

The end was engineered in a single transaction. By the close of the 1912 season the Two Bills show needed cash to winter its animals and outfit the next year, and the mine was no help. In January 1913 Cody, in Denver, borrowed twenty thousand dollars at six percent from Harry Tammen — co-owner of The Denver Post and proprietor of the Sells-Floto Circus, a rival operation. The loan was secured against the show, and Tammen, who wanted Cody's name and assets for his own circus, was in no hurry to see it repaid.

The 1913 season was a disaster — a long run of money-losing dates worsened by bad weather and weak crowds. When the show reached Denver that July, Cody had fallen behind on the loan. Tammen had the Two Bills show seized under a writ of attachment, and its assets — the horses, wagons, tents, and gear of the most famous outdoor show in the world — were sold off at auction at Denver's Overland Park. The Wild West, the enterprise Cody had built and run for thirty years, was simply gone.

Stripped of his own show and still deep in debt, Cody spent his final years as a hired performer, appearing for Tammen's combined circus and later for other outfits because he could not afford to retire. The most celebrated showman on earth ended his career working off other men's obligations. He died on January 10, 1917, in Denver, at his sister's home. By the most commonly cited accounts his once-vast earnings had shrunk to under a hundred thousand dollars in assets, much of it encumbered — a fortune made several times over and lost just as many.

What Went Wrong

After

Buffalo Bill died far richer in fame than in money. His funeral drew enormous crowds, and his burial on Lookout Mountain outside Denver — a site whose choice still provokes argument in Wyoming, where many felt he should rest in the town he founded — became a lasting tourist attraction. Tammen, who had taken his show, is widely said to have had a hand in the funeral arrangements as well, a final indignity in a story full of them.

The institutions Cody seeded outlived his fortune. The town of Cody, Wyoming, and its Irma Hotel still stand and still trade on his name; the Buffalo Bill Center of the West there preserves his legacy as one of the great museums of the American frontier. The image he marketed — the romance of the Wild West, half history and half invention — shaped how the world pictured America for generations and still echoes through Western film and fiction.

In this catalogue Cody is the showman's archetype of ruin. There was no embezzlement, no market crash, no villain who stole a static pile of capital — only a man who earned spectacular sums again and again and dissolved each fortune through generosity, bad investments outside his competence, and a loan that cost him the very enterprise that made the money. He proved that being one of history's great earners offers no protection at all against being one of its great losers of wealth.

Lessons

References

• Buffalo Bill Wikipedia
• William F. 'Buffalo Bill' Cody Colorado Encyclopedia
• A Brief History of William F. 'Buffalo Bill' Cody Buffalo Bill Museum & Grave
• How to Steal a Wild West Show True West Magazine