EDUCATORS ’ PERSPECTIVE
Wild West Finance : Buffalo Bill Cody ( Part 2 )
By Brian Grinder and Dan Cooper
Cody , Wyoming loved Buffalo Bill Cody . His comings and goings were front page news in the local paper , which Cody founded in 1899 . He also built the town ’ s first hotel and named it after his daughter , Irma . Historian Robert E . Bonner notes that Cody was “ the biggest landowner in the area and he also owned the blacksmith shop , the livery barn and other businesses in town . Probably half the population of the area worked for Bill Cody .”
Residents often marked major events in their lives by their interactions with Cody . Lifelong Cody resident Glenn Newton passed away on New Year ’ s Day in 1979 at the age of 88 . His obituary noted that , “ At age 12 he played the coronet for the Buffalo Bill Cowboy Band . He brought Buffalo Bill from his ranch southwest of Cody to the train in Cody when Buffalo Bill went to Denver on his final illness .”
Cody ’ s TE Ranch was about 34 miles from Cody . It served as a 19th century man cave for the showman , who did not get along well with his wife , Louisa . She lived year-round in North Platte , Nebraska . Cody increasingly spent the Wild West offseason a good western state away from North Platte in northwestern Wyoming , often inviting other celebrities to hunt , fish and engage in various outdoor activities in the area . 1
Cody was the town ’ s biggest promoter . He used Buffalo Bill ’ s Wild West to trumpet the advantages of his eponymously named town . He described the area as a virtual Eden with ample water for irrigating crops provided by a canal built by Cody ’ s Shoshone Land and Irrigation Company . Cody biographer Louis Warren reports that Cody ’ s partner-in-residence , George Beck , was overwhelmed with letters of inquiry from prospective settlers , but , as Warren put it , “ Hundreds wrote . Few came .”
One of the ways Cody and his canal company tried to boost the population in the Big Horn Basin was through colonization . In late 1895 , Cody struck up a
correspondence with a group of potential colonizers from Germany . By March 1896 , Cody claimed that 50 families from Germany had agreed to buy 5,000 acres and would be arriving within a month . The colonists never showed up , which was fortuitous since the canal was not yet finished . Despite Cody ’ s efforts , only a few German families ever relocated to the area . Other ethnic groups were also contacted , but nothing came of these inquiries .
William and Louisa Cody
At first , Cody feared that Mormon colonizers might overrun the Big Horn Basin and resisted Mormon settlement there . However , as time passed and the prospects of a huge influx of settlers from elsewhere dimmed , Mormons , who had successfully built their own irrigation canals in Utah and Wyoming , began to look like a way out for Cody ’ s struggling canal company . According to Warren , Mormons held a critical advantage over the canal company in the form of communal labor . “ Farmers in Cody ,” Warren writes , “ wanted the ditch dug for them ; Mormons dug their own , collectively , as part of a greater spiritual effort to reclaim the wilderness . They were not fixated on how much money the ditches could make . They were , rather , bound by a spirit of collective religion .” For a time , the prospects of selling out to Mormon colonizers looked promising , but the church eventually chose another site for settlement .
One of the canal company ’ s more curious negotiations involved Eugene Debs , head of the Social Democratic Party . Debs developed a plan in 1897 to form a colony in the West that would be used as a base to spread socialism to other states . When canal company recruiter D . H . Elliot heard of Debs ’ s intentions , he wrote to the socialist leader and tried to convince him that the Big Horn Basin was a socialist paradise . According to Warren , both Cody and his Wild West manager , “ the virulently antiradical [ Nate ] Salsbury ,” approved Elliott ’ s actions . However , the Socialist party was deeply divided over the colonization scheme , and it was quickly dropped .
Despite all the money , time and effort expended to recruit settlers , only 12 individuals had filed patents on canal company land by the turn of the century . According to Bonner , all 12 were associated with the Wild West Show or the canal company . Warren put the dire situation in perspective writing , “ Six years after he began his efforts , Cody ’ s namesake town remained smaller than Buffalo Bill ’ s Wild West traveling camp .” As the new century commenced , it became clear that the canal project would never become profitable . According to Warren , “ By 1910 , the litany of canal washouts , flooded fields and other broken promises left the Shoshone Irrigation Company with a checkered past . Cody and his partners had been sued at least 26 times .”
Bonner notes that the canal company owed more than $ 240,000 at the end of 1905 . Cody loaned thousands of dollars to the canal effort , but it was clear that his investment would never be recovered . As the new century wore on , two developments determined Bill Cody ’ s financial fate . The first was the federal government ’ s
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