Reflections on Buffalo Bill Cody: Lessons for Warfighters and Strategists

Reflections on Buffalo Bill Cody: Lessons for Warfighters and Strategists

By Tom Ordeman, Jr.

In 2020, I had occasion to begin reacquainting myself with one of my childhood heroes: Buffalo Bill Cody.

As a youngster, my family took occasional trips to the city in Wyoming that bears his name. We visited the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, and I read the semi-apocryphal biography penned by Cody's sister. Not long before the pandemic, I acquired a copy of Cody's own autobiography at my local library's annual book sale. During the pandemic, I listened to an audiobook of that selection while taking our high energy puppy out for his daily constitutionals. It was a great reminder of this larger-than-life figure, whose exploits have faded from the public consciousness over time, but who served as such an inspiration during my own youth.

Then, in 2021, I watched as American troops concluded their two-decade-long campaign in Afghanistan. Like many members of my generation, the events that precipitated America's foray into that ancient land proved life-changing for me. When the entire enterprise collapsed, I found myself trying to make sense of it. As a historian by training, I'm fond of the phrase, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes"; and as a practicing Catholic, I'm fond of the repetitive line from Ecclesiastes: "There is nothing new under the sun." In 2023, I consumed another audiobook, this time William Dalrymple's exhaustive tome on the First Anglo-Afghan War, Return of a King. It would seem that, like other events, America's ill-fated campaign in Afghanistan was predicted in prior historical stanzas.

Conversely, the more I learned about what had happened in Afghanistan - and also in Iraq, but let's focus on the first for the sake of discussion - the more I found myself stewing on the exploits of a man who could arguably be counted as one of America's earliest special operators.

As most Americans know, during the post-Civil War era, Washington dispatched much of the remainder of the U.S. Army westward to facilitate the settlement of western states by settlers of European ancestry. Volume upon volume has been written on this period, and more recently, on later concerns about the ethical compromises associated with displacing the American Indians from territory to which they possessed a pre-existing claim. By and large, discussion of those controversies falls outside the scope of this article. I introduce the topic merely to note that, when revisiting Cody's life, it became apparent that the over-simplified version of events - that it was the federal cavalry and settler militias against a monolithic corpus of American Indians - serves as a dangerous over-simplification of the historical narrative.

The truth, of course, is more complicated. Students of the French and Indian War - or those who read Lynne Reid Banks' Indian in the Cupboard novels at around the same age that I was when I originally learned about Buffalo Bill - will remember that tribes like the Iroquois allied with the English, while tribes like the Algonquian allied with the French. American Indian tribes, like most of the planet's inhabitants, found themselves in competition with one another, leading to shifting states of alliance and war between the various tribal confederacies. The arrival of European colonists led not to an immediate state of war between colonist and native, but to an intermingling of the pre-existing tribal political structure with that of the Europeans. Colonists from one European country leveraged their relationships with the indigenous tribes to engineer a strategic advantage against their rivals, and vice versa.

By Cody's day, the various European factions had largely consolidated into a single American entity, though the American Revolution, Civil War, and other conflicts demonstrated that the Europeans themselves were prone to violent political disunity. Long before foreign scouts arrived to survey the Great Plains for the arrival of Europeans, a similar dynamic had played out among the tribes of those Plains - Arapaho, Sioux, Commanche, and others - in which they competed for territory and resources. U.S. Army troops managed to partner with some tribes, affording them strategic advantage in their own conflicts with their rivals.

William Frederick Cody was born in Le Claire, Iowa Territory, in 1846. By 1868, aged twenty-two, having come of age on the Kansas plains and worked on wagon trains and as a Pony Express rider, Cody was operating as a sort of primitive defense contractor. General Philip Sheridan named him “Chief of Scouts” for the 5th Cavalry Regiment, a title bestowed after a particularly daring mission that Cody completed through hostile territory, and in recognition of his experience tracking, guiding, living off of the land, and thriving under austere circumstances. Cody's support to the 5th Cavalry leveraged his knowledge of the territory, but also his knowledge of the Plains Indians themselves. He could communicate in their languages, and in his role as Chief of Scouts, Cody trained and led a Pawnee militia in a manner similar to the mission profile of today's Army Special Forces. Additionally, Cody was familiar enough with the Sioux and their dialects to have earned a moniker in their language: "Pahaska," or "Long Hair." Cody's tenure as Chief of Scouts followed a stint of active duty military service during the Civil War, and preceded a later, non-operational appointment as a Colonel in the Nebraska National Guard.

From his childhood onward, Cody experienced many hostile encounters with the natives, killing some in a combat context, and one - a Cheyenne named Heova'ehe, "Yellow Hair," sometimes mistranslated as "Yellow Hand" - in a bizarre 1876 duel known as the Battle of Warbonnet Creek. Even during this phase of his life, Cody seemed to show respect to his adversaries. According to Cody himself:

"While at the [Red Cloud Agency] I learned the name of the Indian Chief whom I had killed in the morning; it was Yellow Hand; a son of old Cut-nose—a leading chief of the Cheyennes. Cut-nose, having learned that I had killed his son sent a white interpreter to me with a message to the effect that he would give me four mules if I would turn over to him Yellow Hand's war-bonnet, guns, pistols, ornaments, and other paraphernalia which I had captured. I sent back word to the old gentleman that it would give me pleasure to accommodate him, but I could not do it this time."

Today, we know that the Pawnee and the Cheyenne, like the other tribes, eventually lost their land to European settlers, resulting in their consolidation into the reservation system. Nearly a century and a half later, it would be easy to interpret that outcome as a foregone conclusion. Having spent a great deal of the last decade studying the First World War, and specifically the challenges associated with determining the post-war state of affairs in the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, I've come to recognize that some of those whom society now considers to be monsters were doing the best they could under difficult circumstances, attempting to reconcile a litany of mutually exclusive imperatives. Though condemnation may be in vogue, I lean toward learning of, and from, their mistakes.

To this end, Bill Cody's legacy merits consideration. As a twenty-something Chief of Scouts, Buffalo Bill found himself effectively conscripted into show business, appearing onstage as himself and recounting stories of his frontier exploits on stages east of the Mississippi. As demand for plains scouts and buffalo hunters diminished, Cody became an actor and showman. In 1883, Cody founded Buffalo Bill's Wild West, the most famous of a genre of traveling vaudeville acts of the time. Popularizing the danger, action, and intrigue of the American frontier, Buffalo Bill's Wild West became an international sensation, touring not only the United States, but also extensively in Europe. Notably, Cody's show hired American Indians, and while traveling with the show's company, they showcased their culture and lifestyle to fascinated attendees. Cody was known for paying a fair wage, which allowed members of his cast to improve the circumstances of their families and tribes. Later in his life, Cody became an advocate for the American Indians, publicly encouraging officials in Washington to treat "the former foe, present friend, the American" fairly and respectfully. Cody was once quoted as saying, "Every Indian outbreak that I have ever known has resulted from broken promises and broken treaties by the government."

As I mentioned, as I reacquainted myself with Cody's life, I couldn't help but make the inevitable comparisons to more recent events. The American government - under a succession of administrations led by Presidents from both parties - made promises to the Afghans that were broken on a rolling basis, leading to a growing animosity between the two parties. In a manner similar to the conflict between the natives and the European settlers, complex cultural and political factors were reduced to singular, monolithic concepts by troops and citizens alike: references to "the Indians" and "the Taliban" both lump disparate groups together, while ignoring important contextual distinctions within those bodies. Operation Pineapple Express, the now-infamous effort by special operations veterans to extricate Afghans and their families during the fall of Kabul, echoed Cody's own efforts to promote the welfare of the American Indian tribes during and after formal hostilities. The list goes on, and expands considerably when one considers the wider context of post-9/11 operations.

Conversely, despite some of these uncomfortable similarities, the contrasts between contemporary operations and those of Buffalo Bill's day also merit consideration. While scouts like Buffalo Bill may not have "gone native" in the strictest sense of the phrase, they would have been comfortable living off the land in a manner that today's special operators practice only during their selection pipeline. They would have been prepared to share in the austere lifestyles of the tribes with which they partnered, building common cause and esprit de corps with those they sought to influence. Additionally, scouts like Cody would have brought intimate knowledge not only of the terrain, but also of the political and cultural dynamics of the indigenous tribes, to their work. In this sense, Cody and his colleagues would have functioned not only in a capacity comparable to that of the 18-series Special Forces, but also as the nineteenth century equivalent of 48-series Foreign Area Officers.

Buffalo Bill's Wild West toured the United States and Europe for more than three decades, ending just a few years before Cody's 1917 death. In 1872, Cody had received the Medal of Honor, but this was revoked in 1917 following actions in Washington to recalibrate the military awards system. Cody's award was restored in 1989 following a lengthy campaign by his family and Wyoming Senator Alan K. Simpson, which led to the recognition of scouts like Cody as officers. While Cody's ranch outside North Platte, Nebraska is now a state historical park, he gave his name to the city in northwestern Wyoming where a complex of memorial museums were eventually built in his honor. Today, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West features museums highlighting western art, natural history, firearms, the Plains Indians, and Buffalo Bill himself. The complex deserves a pilgrimage by every American, and both Cody's memoirs and the sensationalized biography by his sister are worth reading. Archival versions of both are available at the Internet Archive, and prolific LibriVox reader Barry Eads has recorded both volumes as free audiobooks.

In his 2005 book, Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground, author Robert D. Kaplan recounts American troops, many of them Green Berets, describing overseas hot spots as "Indian Country" in recognition of conditions encountered by American troops during the Indian Wars. For various reasons, some legitimate and some less so, study of these campaigns and their historical context - both by professional historians and by serving troops - has fallen out of favor. While many warfighters may have shifted their focus back to more conventional conflicts, ample grounds persist to expect some continuation of "Indian Wars" throughout the world: either small wars in their own right, or proxy conflicts in which American forces seek strategic advantage against prominent nation state competitors. In this regard, Buffalo Bill deserves renewed consideration, both for his own heroism and character, and also for the key operational concepts to which his story serves as an accessible entrée.

Note: A 2021 podcast interview about Buffalo Bill Cody, conducted by the author and featuring Center of the West Curator Dr. Jeremy Johnston, can be found here, and bonus content from that interview can be found here.

Tom Ordeman, Jr. is an Oregon-based information security professional, freelance military historian, and former federal contractor. A graduate with Distinction from the University of Aberdeen’s MSc program in Strategic Studies, he holds multiple DoD and industry security certifications. Between 2006 and 2017, he supported training and enterprise risk management requirements for multiple DoD and federal civilian agencies. His research interests include the modern history of the Sultanate of Oman, and the exploits of the Gordon Highlanders during the First World War. His opinions are his own, and do not necessarily reflect those of any entity with which he is associated.