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w w w. d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m
Finally, he could not ride a horse at all. Near the end, Dr. W.
W. Crook saw him and wrote that "the Colonel shows flashes of
old time fire, telling his friends he soon will go on the road with
a new show, bigger and better than ever. But it is evident his
mind is wandering."
Some accounts say that when he learned he had 36 hours to
live, he called in his friend and told him to forget about it, let's
play some cards. Biographer Louis S. Warren writes that Cody's
nephew reported the old man "returned in his mind to his private
railroad car," smoking, reading the newspaper, and thinking
himself somewhere between shows, on this continent or another.
He might have imagined a landscape traveling by his window, on
that final trip, perhaps one that was wild and untouched, except by
the presence of a track stretching on and on into ever more virgin
territories, unmapped and maybe unmappable, until it dissolved
into the horizon, where it met a big, blue, cloudless sky.
Buffalo Bill's grave in Lookout Mountain, Colorado
ROBERT
RATH
