Here is something worth sitting with before you drive the North Fork Highway, before you walk into the museum that carries his name, before you order a drink at the hotel he built for his daughter: the most famous man in the world in 1890 was an entertainer.
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Not a general. Not a president. Not a captain of industry in the rockier sense. William Frederick Cody — Buffalo Bill — was famous because he understood something about audiences that most people in his era hadn’t yet articulated: that a story told well enough becomes indistinguishable from the thing itself. He didn’t just perform the American West. He became the version of it that the world chose to believe in.
And then, because he was who he was, he built a town around it.
The Making of a Myth
Buffalo Bill’s actual biography is genuinely remarkable, which made the embellishment easier to sustain.
He was born in Iowa in 1846, the son of a man who took a public antislavery position at a time and place where that position could get you killed — his father was stabbed at a political meeting and never fully recovered. The family moved to Kansas. The father died when William was eleven. By fourteen, William Cody was riding for the Pony Express, covering routes through territory where the job description included being shot at by people who meant it.
He earned the name Buffalo Bill in 1867 while hunting bison for the Kansas Pacific Railroad, supplying meat to the construction crews laying track across the Great Plains. In one eighteen-month period he killed 4,280 bison. The number is staggering by any modern measure, and it would complicate his legacy in ways he couldn’t have anticipated — but at the time it made him famous in the particular way that frontier celebrity worked, which was through the kind of story that spread from camp to camp and eventually found its way into the newspapers that were hungry for frontier dispatches.
The newspapers found a willing subject. Cody understood early that the story about a man and the man himself were different things, and that the story was more durable.
The Wild West Show
In 1883, Buffalo Bill organized what he called Buffalo Bill’s Wild West — not a show, he always insisted, not a circus, but a dramatic representation of actual Western life staged for audiences who had never seen it and desperately wanted to.
The distinction mattered to him because it kept the enterprise on the side of authenticity. What he was selling, he maintained, was the real West — real cowboys, real Native American performers, real marksmanship, real riding. The fact that it was also spectacle designed for maximum theatrical impact was beside the point. Or rather, it was the point, carefully obscured behind the frame of historical documentation.
It was, in the language we’d use today, a content strategy. Buffalo Bill identified his audience — people hungry for a version of the American frontier that was simultaneously thrilling and already passing into memory — and he built an experience that delivered exactly what that audience wanted. He understood pacing, he understood narrative, he understood that the right performers in the right sequence could produce something that felt true even when it was constructed.
The show toured for three decades. It played across the United States and Europe. By 1887 it had performed before Queen Victoria, who reportedly enjoyed it so much she stood and bowed as the American flag passed — the first time she had shown that particular courtesy to the American colors. By 1894 the show had toured Europe four times. Mark Twain called it the country’s most distinctly American export to the world.
At the peak of his fame, Buffalo Bill Cody was recognizable to more people on earth than almost any other living human being. He achieved that through performance, through story, through the careful management of a public image — through, in other words, the tools of an entertainer who happened to have genuinely lived parts of the life he was performing.
Building the Destination
By the mid-1890s, Buffalo Bill was fifty years old, wealthy, famous beyond any reasonable expectation, and looking for somewhere to put down roots. He had lived his adult life in motion — on tour, on campaign, in the public eye — and he wanted land. He wanted a place.
What he built instead was a destination.
The founding of Cody, Wyoming in 1896 looks like homesteading on the surface. A man of means establishes a town bearing his name in the Wyoming high desert, brings in settlers, files the appropriate paperwork. But the details of how Buffalo Bill founded Cody reveal something more deliberate than homesteading.
He didn’t just build a town. He engineered the infrastructure around it.
He convinced the Burlington Railroad to extend a line to Cody, understanding that a destination without access is just a place. He commissioned the construction of the Irma Hotel in 1902 — named for his daughter, marketed as the most modern hotel in the Rockies, designed explicitly as a staging point for travelers heading to Yellowstone. He marked out the wagon road west toward the park, the road that would become the North Fork Highway, understanding that the journey to the destination was part of the product. He built Pahaska Tepee, his hunting lodge at the Yellowstone border, as both a personal retreat and a landmark that extended his brand all the way to the park entrance.
He was building, in other words, what we would now call a tourism ecosystem. Lodging, transportation, access, and a famous name attached to all of it. The town of Cody was as much a production as the Wild West show — a permanent, physical version of the story he had been telling on stage for two decades.
The genius of it, and the thing that separates Buffalo Bill from the purely cynical reading of his career, is that the landscape he chose as a backdrop was genuinely extraordinary. The canyon, the river, the Absaroka Range, the proximity to Yellowstone — he didn’t manufacture those. He recognized them, as an entertainer recognizes a stage, and he built around them.
The Contradictions
Buffalo Bill was not a simple man, and the town he built is not a simple place.
He killed bison by the thousands and later became one of the first prominent American voices calling for their conservation, understanding perhaps before most of his contemporaries that the world he had performed was disappearing and that the disappearance was partly his doing.
He employed Native American performers in his Wild West show at a time when most of the country considered Native Americans enemies or problems to be solved. He paid them — equally, by the accounts we have — and he gave them a platform to be seen as human beings with skills and dignity at a moment in American history when that was genuinely unusual. The nature of that employment was complicated, the power dynamics were real, and the show’s portrayal of Native life was filtered through the same mythologizing lens that shaped everything else Buffalo Bill touched. All of that is true simultaneously.
He performed a version of the American West that bore only passing resemblance to the one he had actually lived in, and he lived in it long enough that the gap between the performance and the reality became harder to measure. By the end of his life it’s not clear that he always knew the difference, or that the difference entirely mattered.
He died on January 10, 1917, in Denver, in debt, having outlived his own era by enough years that the world had moved on from the story he’d spent his life telling. He was buried in Colorado. Some Cody residents still believe there was a deliberate plot to steal his body and return it to Wyoming, where he had always said he wanted to rest. Whether the plot was real or not, the impulse behind it is understandable: Cody, Wyoming is as much his creation as anything he ever built, and the idea that he might belong somewhere else feels, from inside the town, like a mistake.
What the Town Reveals
Walking through Cody with Buffalo Bill’s biography in mind changes what you see.
The Irma Hotel is not just a historic building — it’s a piece of infrastructure, the lodging component of a tourism system a man designed and built by hand. The North Fork Highway is not just a scenic drive — it’s the road he had cut through the canyon because he understood that the approach to Yellowstone was part of the experience he was selling. The Buffalo Bill Center of the West is not just a museum — it’s the permanent version of the show, the place where the mythology he spent his life constructing is examined, questioned, and preserved all at once.
Cody, Wyoming exists because an entertainer looked at a canyon in Wyoming and saw, with the instincts of someone who had spent his career reading audiences, exactly what people would come to see. He was right. They came. They’re still coming.
The performed West and the real West have always existed in the same frame here. Buffalo Bill put them there deliberately, because he understood better than almost anyone of his era that the line between the two was more useful as a place to stand than as a boundary to cross.
He was, in the end, an entertainer. That’s not a diminishment. In his hands, it turned out to be enough to build a town.
To understand what Buffalo Bill built and why it lasted, spend time at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West — 720 Sheridan Ave. Old Trail Town shows you the West he was performing. The North Fork Highway shows you the landscape he recognized and built around.
Angela DiLoreto is a bestselling author, former Fortune 500 marketing executive, and a passionate advocate who successfully worked to change stalking laws in several states after a family friend was murdered by her stalker. That fight — for justice, for voices that weren’t being heard, for stories that needed to be told — runs through everything she does. She and her husband Vince travel the country by RV with their two rescue chihuahuas, Gracie and Loki, chasing history, great food, and the overlooked people and places that shaped America. Angela created Fitting in Adventure and the Historic Footnotes series because the best stories are usually the ones nobody’s heard yet.