Cure For The Common Cody

Fortunately for the financial prospects of Mack's auction, Buffalo Bill reenactors are not normal people. Nevertheless, the Old West reenactment business is a grand tradition, with some 130 years of history and showmanship behind it -- for the first Buffalo Bill impersonator was none other than Bill Cody himself.

"The first 25 years of his life, Cody did just about everything a man might want to do," says Steve Friesen, director of the Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave (and gift shop) on Lookout Mountain Road in Golden, Colorado. "He hunted buffalo, rode for the Pony Express and came to Pike's Peak for the gold rush -- although he was a pathetic gold miner. He was the scout of choice for the army, and dime novels were written about him. At 25, when he went to New York, he was the toast of the town."

To Cody's amazement, a play about his life was running in the theater district. "Naturally, he went to see it," Friesen continues. "He must have thought, 'Hey, why should this guy get all the money playing me? I could play me.'"

This is how Cody, long-time friend Wild Bill Hickock and dime novelist Ned Buntline happened to open a production called Scouts of the Prairie the following year. By all accounts, it featured a hastily written, stilted script and lousy acting, much of it committed by Cody.

"It was panned by the critics," Friesen says. "They thought Bill was a rotten actor but a wonderful stage presence. If only he could just be himself."

(Occasionally he could. One story has him advancing to the footlights where his wife was seated in the front row: "Oh, Mama," he reportedly said, "I'm a terrible actor.")

The next year, after spending the summer on the prairie, Cody, Hickock and Buntline returned to New York in Scouts of the Plains.

"This time, they acted out real things," Friesen says. "It was much better. They ran around onstage shooting off their guns and yelling. Wild Bill thought that was such a hoot. He liked to discharge his gun right in an actor's face, give him powder burns, and say, 'Now you look like a real Indian.'"

Cody went on to start his own Wild West Show in 1883, which featured a huge cast of Native Americans, cowboys and Mexican vaqueros. By the Colombian Exposition of 1893, the financial and popular high point for Buffalo Bill's Wild West, the entire company had toured Europe several times, and trick shooters and Russian Cossacks had joined the Congress of Roughriders. It was then that Cody impersonators began to crop up -- most notably one Samuel Cowdry, who changed his name to Cody, grew the requisite hair and bought the requisite wardrobe, and went into show business until a lawsuit filed by the real Cody stopped him.

After Cody's death in 1917, a new wave of impersonators swelled up. It has yet to crest.

Today, there are at least three home ports for Buffalo Bill Cody memorabilia -- Denver, North Platte, Nebraska, and Cody, Wyoming -- all of which routinely duke it out as Bill world headquarters. And beyond that there are endless possibilities, as more museums embrace the idea of living history and more American events stress a connection to the Old West.

At the Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave in Golden, the line between impersonator and academic is often very thin indeed.

"There are an awful lot of Bills out there," says Friesen, whose museum maintains a database of Buffalo Bills, Buffalo Soldiers, Annie Oakleys, Belle Starrs and other denizens of the long-gone West. Friesen himself became Wyatt Earp for a trip to London and the premiere of the Royal Armoury's Buffalo Bill show (imported to Denver earlier this year), in the company of a Buffalo Bill, a Calamity Jane and a Sitting Bull. But the peace-loving Mennonite never really nailed the gunslinger role, he confesses. "I'm too analytical," he says. "Reenactors in general are not. They are not professional historians, but they're very good amateurs. And then there's the matter of being an actor. They're actors of a different kind. They become Buffalo Bill. And yet it's interesting -- if you give them lines, they have problems and develop actual stage fright. You have to let them improvise."

Which they are not only willing but eager to do, judging by the museum's front-desk gossip one recent morning.

"Tom and Terry are back," exhibits coordinator Kimary Marchese tells Friesen. "He's wanting to do Cody again and he's available on weekends. He has a very nice chuckwagon."

"Have you heard from any of the young Bills?" Friesen asks her.

"Oh, sure. There's Lance and then there's Kirk. And another guy, in Deer Trail [Colorado], isn't it?"

"Any word about Mack?"

"Terry heard a rumor he'd grown his hair back. That he wasn't really quitting at all. But then I got a notice about this auction."

Neither Marchese nor Friesen will be attending the auction. "Mack's stuff is good reproductions," says Friesen, "but we're seeking out original Wild West artifacts."

In a pinch, Marchese herself passes as Annie Oakley. "She was petite and I'm not," she admits, "but I just went ahead and picked the outfit that made the most sense with my figure, and when we're short an Annie Oakley around here, I step in."