Over the years, I have often run across a photograph that is inevitably mislabeled as a portrait of William Frederick Cody, famously known as Buffalo Bill. Whenever I see it, I can’t help but do a double take: “That’s not Bill Cody,” I say to myself, “It can’t be.” Well, it does resemble him a bit, with cowboy hat, bandana, long hair, moustache, and goatee. But it’s not him. The eyes, nose, ears, and chin confirm that this is not the genuine Buffalo Bill.
Maybe it’s one of his imitators? And there certainly were imitators—there were copycats who cashed in on his worldwide fame. They dressed like him and gave performances like his, appearing in melodramas on stage or traveling around in bucking bronco Western shows.
There were also Buffalo Bill “doubles” who belonged to his own entourage, functioning when needed as “stand-ins” as the illustrious hero’s health declined. One of those was a cowboy performer named Curt Alexander (originally from Leon, Iowa), whom I’ve written about before. In early 1917, just two months after Buffalo Bill’s funeral, while Alexander was visiting his nephew (a merchant who owned a clothing store in Cedar Falls), he spooked the local citizens when, attired in cowboy regalia, he was seen on downtown streets.
But this isn’t Curt Alexander. Instead, the man in this photograph is yet another imitator, also an Iowan (from the Quad Cities, as was Cody himself), who at birth was christened Franklin Samuel Cowdery, but later modified his name to Samuel Franklin Cowdery. The real Buffalo Bill had been born in Le Claire in 1846, the year Iowa was granted statehood, whereas S.F. Cowdery was born in Davenport in 1867.
As a teenager, Cowdery moved to Montana, where he soon became adept at horseback riding, target shooting, and rope tricks. He would also later claim that he was born in Birdville, Texas, had survived an Indian raid during which his parents died, drove cattle on the Chisholm Trail, and prospected for gold in the Klondike, where he learned about kite-building from a Chinese cook.
In 1888, he joined a Western-themed traveling vaudeville troupe to perform as a trick roper, cowboy, and marksman. Around this time he took on the surname of Cody, and was advertised as “Captain Cody, King of the Cowboys.” That same year, he also performed briefly in Annie Oakley’s touring show. While on tour, he met a woman named Maude Lee, whom he married, and together they devised an act in which she assisted him in daring target-shooting stunts. Aiming backwards through a mirror, he shot glass balls that she held up.
Did Cowdery have any actual contact with the genuine Buffalo Bill? At least one source suggests that they met. But he did have some fateful encounters with Cody’s lawyers, who were on the lookout for fraudulent uses of Cody’s name and the brand phrase “Wild West.”
In 1890, when Cowdery and Maude moved from the U.S. to London, they joined a troupe that called itself the Wild West Burlesque, which Cody’s lawyers soon closed down. They moved on to a different outfit, but made the mistake of billing themselves as “Captain Cody and Miss Cody: Buffalo Bill’s Son and Daughter.” That too triggered legal threats. Then the marriage to Maude began to dissolve. She moved on to other acts, somehow survived a parachute mishap, and ended up back in the U.S., where she died in an asylum.
Meanwhile, Cowdery fell in love with an older married equestrian named Lela Blackburne Davis, whose father was a wealthy horse breeder. She was 15 years older than Cowdery and the mother of four children. In 1892, the unwed couple and their quasi-adopted children became S.F. Cody and Family: Champion Shooters of America. They crossed the channel to perform in France.
It was in France that Cowdery learned about the frenetic popularity of bicycle racing. In addition to his sharpshooter performances, he began to challenge leading cyclists to contests in which he would race against them while riding on a horse. He inevitably won, and soon became known throughout Europe for his skills as an expert horseman.
In 1898, Cowdery, Lela, and their crew returned to England. It was also the year of the Spanish-American War, and Cowdery began to consider the use (military and otherwise) of large-scale observation kites. His ideas were eventually a great success. He developed a man-lifting kite that could soar as high as 1,000 feet, proposed experimental kites for the British War Office, and co-designed the first British airship or dirigible.
In 1907, he set a world record for the longest airship flight, remaining aloft for three hours and 25 minutes. In the wake of that success—and in light of the rumors that the Wright brothers had successfully tested an airplane—Cowdery set about to devise his own powered aircraft. He succeeded the following year, in what is now considered to be the first airplane flight in Britain. He was now a national hero. Never again would he be known as Samuel Franklin Cowdery from Davenport, Iowa. He had completely morphed into Colonel Samuel Franklin Cody, which is the name he is given today.
Cowdery’s daring was also the tragic cause of his death. On August 7, 1913, he piloted a public demonstration flight of a new hydroplane, which he had designed for use in a future flying contest. But something went wrong, and just as the plane was descending, parts of its fuselage pulled apart, the wings folded, and he and a celebrity passenger (neither of whom wore seatbelts in those days) died when they plunged to the ground from the sky. He was only 46.
On the day of Cowdery’s fatal crash, the real Buffalo Bill Cody was still living, although he was in his mid-60s and troubled by declining health. He died four years later, on January 10, 1917. At Buffalo Bill’s funeral service in Denver, Colorado, it was reported that those in attendance numbered at least 20,000.
Had Colonel S.F. Cody (née Samuel Franklin Cowdery) been in attendance at that funeral, he might have felt some satisfaction to find that the crowd numbers at his own funeral in London were greater. The attendance at his service was 50,000.
Note: One of Lela Cody’s great-grandsons (and thus also said to be the great-grandson of Samuel F. Cody) is British BBC broadcaster John Simpson. Detailed accounts can be found in Simpson’s autobiography, Days from a Different World: A Memoir of Childhood (Macmillan 2005), and, more recently, in an online video interview with Simpson on the celebrity genealogy series on YouTube called Who Do You Think You Are? Other biographical articles on S.F. Cody are on Wikipedia, and the Handbook of Texas website.
Roy R. Behrens is Emeritus Professor and Distinguished Scholar at the University of Northern Iowa. For more information, see BobolinkBooks.com/ballast.