Buffalo Bill

Buffalo Bill, also known as William Frederick Cody (1846-1917), won his nickname in a bet against William Averill Comstock (1842-1868) in the spring of 1868. At the time, Cody was a Civil War veteran, civilian scout for the Third Cavalry Regiment, and contract buffalo hunter for the crew laying track for the Union Pacific Railway in Kansas. Comstock was also a Civil War veteran, great-grandnephew of novelist James Fenimore Cooper, and chief of scouts and interpreter for Custer's Seventh Cavalry, the regiment stationed at nearby Fort Wallace.

The officers at Fort Wallace put up $500.00, wagering that Comstock could kill more buffalo on horseback in one day's time than Cody could.

On the day of the bet, the officers arranged for an excursion train to travel from St. Louis to the end of the track at Monument. Cody's wife Louisa and baby daughter Arta were on board with the rest of the audience. The officers provided champagne and lunch for contestants, bettors, and spectators.

Cody rode out on his horse Brigham and shot his favorite Springfield Model 1863. The rifle, which he named Lucretia Borgia after a popular Victor Hugo--and Renaissance--villainess, was possibly the one he was issued in the Civil War. Cody had had the rifle factory-upgraded to breech-load and fire .50-.70 cartridges. Comstock rode I-do-not-know-which-horse and used his 16-shot Henry rifle.

The hunt started at 8:00 a.m. and ended around 4:00 p.m, with Cody the winner. He shot 68 or 69 buffalo (reports vary) to Comstock's 48. Buffalo Bill describes the event most vividly in his autobiography.

Comstock already had a cool nickname, Medicine Bill, so he was stuck with that. He had earned this nickname several years earlier when he had saved the life of a Sioux woman with a deadly rattlesnake bite on her finger. He bit the finger clean off.

We get the word buffalo from Greek boubalos, originally a kind of African antelope. The word came into English through Latin, maybe Portuguese, and Middle French, by 1580.

William Frederick Cody, "Buffalo Bill."

United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3a21252.

Dead Man's Hand

Wild Bill Hickok (1837-1876) died of a gunshot wound to the back of the head while playing poker in a saloon in Deadwood, then a gold-rush town in the Black Hills, Dakota Territory. The game was five-card stud and Wild Bill held a pair of black aces and a pair of black eights, all facing up. In the hole, he held the two of spades, according to a writer who interviewed eye witnesses.

The man who shot Wild Bill used a Colt .45 at close range. The shot went through Wild Bill's skull and cheekbone and hit another player in the wrist. The shooter, Jack McCall, was most likely avenging a petty insult Wild Bill had made to him earlier.

Wild Bill carried a Smith & Wesson No. 2 revolver, which, of course, he had no time to draw before he died. He had not drawn in a gunfight since his own friendly fire killed his deputy in a shootout in Abilene in 1871.

McCall was acquitted at his first trial in Deadwood, but made the mistake of bragging about the murder some months later. He was arrested and convicted at a second trial in Yankton and hanged for his crime. McCall could not use double jeopardy as his defense, because his first trial had been held in Dakota Territory, which, according to the 1868 Treaty of Laramie, was not U.S. land, but belonged to the Lakota Sioux.

Regrettably, this is not the first "dead man's hand" we know of. The first dead man's hand might have been played in Illinois forty years earlier, but, within ten years of Wild Bill's death, his gained ascendancy as the definitive dead man's hand. The shootout is still reenacted on summer evenings in Deadwood, South Dakota.