"Buffalo Bill" from Prairie to Palace

An association of some thirty years with the subject of these pages, a familiarity with his history gained by opportune meetings and conversations with comrades now living, and those since dead--who were witnesses of the events that assisted to make the individual prominent--makes me feel it a public duty to accede to the publisher’s request to compile a short, sharp, and veracious account of the unique history of this picturesque character.

Born at a time, and reared in an atmosphere, the most romantic and adventurous known in the history of our American frontier, when the tidal wave of human progress, sweeping westward, was making history faster than the historians could record it--it was his fate to be in the field, and his fortune to grasp the opportunities to meet the situation’s requirements, and, in the beaten path of what seemed ordinary daily duty, to rise, by reason of his sterling qualities, his daring, and his courage, to the distinction of a leader.

So quickly was the history of the central West recorded, as to make the Great American Desert of our childhood seem almost a geographical mirage, a tale of the romancer. It would seem to be a fairy story were it not for the fact of its settlement, and the evidences of its now almost ancient civilization.

The busy, hustling citizen of to-day scarcely has time to think, and does not realize that the youths of the time of Benton, Beal, Fremont, Bridger, and Carson are the relicts of the perfected history and work that they inaugurated.

One of the most picturesque characters that evoluted from the peculiar circumstances of the times is “Buffalo Bill,” Gen. W. F. Cody, N. G. S. N. The romance, the fiction, woven around his personality is dispelled in the white light of stern and veritable facts, just as the golden rays of the morning sun drive the mist from the mountain-tops.

The compiler of the accompanying pages has attempted to present to the reader, in a terse, compact compendium of facts, the story of a career that, if given in a detailed biography, would absorb volumes, believing that owing to his prominence at home and abroad the public desire some authentic knowledge of the notable events in his career. In fact, here are presented a few plain truths, unadorned, for the benefit of those too occupied to have heretofore learned the story and triumphs of the frontier lad of nine years, from the wild Western scenes of Kansas and Nebraska, from the prairies of the Platte to the parlors of the East and the palaces of Europe.

“BUFFALO BILL”

FROM PRAIRIE TO PALACE.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

Half a century or less ago, the people then active in the world were unable to move from place to place more rapidly than in the days before the Christian era. The fickle winds drove ships out of their course and baffled their efforts to hold on their way to their destination. On land the rapidity of progress from place to place was measured by the fleetness of a horse. The steam-engine was in its infancy; the telegraph and other electrical devices were only known through the fable of the singing tree and the talking fountain in the tales of the Arabian Nights; glittering gold still lay unheeded and unseen in the beds of California streams.

The great peaks of the Rockies towered into the clouds, their grandeur and beauty unknown to a world which had not then heard the sound of the waters thundering down the cliffs of the Yosemite, a rival of Niagara. Amid the beauties of the Garden of the Gods reigned a stillness as profound as that which pervaded the Garden of Eden before the creation of man.