Distinctly Montana Magazine

30 D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A M A G A Z I N E • S P R I N G 2 0 2 4 For now, Cody was re- quired to ride out on his horse to introduce in the show, but was permitted to ride a car- riage in the promotional pa- rades, in which he was also contractually required to par- ticipate. But he didn't take part in the Indian attack on the stagecoach anymore, and only sometimes shot glass balls with his rifle. Mostly he was symbolic, standing in, as he ever did, for something essentially both Western and uniquely American, the pur- suit of progress accompanied by a nostalgia for the lost wilderness. In this capacity, he was also expected to shake hands and greet with local reporters, mayors, and aldermen. He was still handsome in a way that even time and illness couldn't diminish. His looks, which had inspired a poem by an anonymous English woman who, apparently speaking for much of the female population of Victoria's kingdom, had called him "[n]ature's per- fected touch in form and grace." Some English newspapers had wrung their hands about the relative invirility of Britain's males in comparison with the great Buffalo Bill himself. * Now, of course, he was thinner in the cheeks. His famous locks, so much a part of his image, were also thinning, so he eventual- ly took to wearing a tou- pee under his hat. "Once," Cody's biographer Robert Carter writes, "as he swept off his hat in his trademark salute to his audience, the toupee came off as well. He swore he would never wear it again, but he did." Neither was the horse ideal; his pros- tate gave him trouble, and it was painful to ride a mount. For all that, the Sells Floto bandmaster Karl King, who remem- bered him keeping "pretty much to himself in his private dressing tent," said the old scout "had a certain amount of dignity about him I admired," and that, despite his pain, Cody "still looked wonderful on a horse... In other words, I liked the old boy." Cody, along with Wyatt Earp, who lived until 1929, and Mark Twain, who lived until 1910, had achieved the bittersweet ac- *In fact, the gallant Buffalo Bill served to inspire the character of cowboy turned vampire hunter Quincey Morris in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Stoker himself had met Buffalo Bill, and remembered the impression he made.

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