Mr. Cody is very popular here and leaves nearly every performance to change his suit of buckskin for a dress suit and attend a dinner or reception. His name appears among the noted guests of every great entertainment in Paris.
– “Last View of Paris,” Capper’s Weekly, Sept. 5, 1889.
When William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody strode into Delmonico’s restaurant in New York City, he could confidently take his seat, feeling completely at home. In just over forty years he had become the most desirable dinner guest on two continents, progressing from eating hardtack with fellow scouts on the Plains to banqueting with princes in Europe. He was as comfortable dining at Delmonico’s in New York City as he was around a campfire in the Rockies. His dining companions across two continents included the likes of Thomas Edison, Theodore Roosevelt, Oscar Wilde, and other celebrities. As his friend Annie Oakley observed “He was probably the guest of more people in diverse circumstances than any man alive.”
Cody himself certainly encountered diverse circumstances during his life, circumstances that would mold him into one of the best known persons of his day and a representative of America’s West. He began as a teamster, trapper, gold seeker, and Civil War soldier. He earned his nickname as a buffalo hunter and a Medal of Honor as a scout. He then parlayed his knowledge of the West, growing notoriety, and charisma into a career as an actor, showman, entrepreneur and innovator. Throughout it all, Buffalo Bill ate and drank with the gusto of a gourmet. Yet his love of food and drink, as well as the food innovations he introduced, are comparatively little known dimensions of a remarkable life.
Will Cody, now in his twenties, discovered gourmet dining on a “grand hunt” with General Sheridan and his friends in 1871. The friends included other generals, members of Sheridan’s staff, several businessmen, and editors of Chicago and New York City newspapers. The entourage had sixteen wagons carrying tents, baggage, general supplies, cookware, groceries and plenty of alcohol that would be required for eleven days of “roughing it” on the high plains.
While Cody had eaten his share of wild game over the past decades, he was not prepared to dine in such high style. The hunt began at Fort McPherson, Nebraska and ended at Fort Hays, Kansas. There were also three smaller wagons which carried the firearms and ammunition the hunting party would be using. The main objective of the expedition was buffalo hunting but no creature escaped unscathed. Elk, deer, coyotes, turkeys, even prairie dogs, fell before the hunters’ onslaught. Will was along to act as hunting guide and entertainer. In addition to locating buffalo and other prey for the hunters, he shared stories of his exploits on the frontier as the group sat around a fire each evening. Cody’s culinary adventures were just beginning as he enjoyed such delicacies as buffalo steaks prepared with mushrooms around that same fire.
Buffalo Bill’s trip east to New York in 1872 was prompted in part by his growing public reputation. He was the right person in the right place at the right time. When Ned Buntline wrote Buffalo Bill: King of the Border Men in 1869, Wild Bill Hickok was better known. But, unlike his friend Hickok, Cody liked people and was very gregarious.
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So Ned chose to focus on him, although Hickok was also in the story. Buntline’s choice was a good one; Cody loved the spotlight and it loved him. While Buntline’s dime novel enhanced Buffalo Bill’s reputation on the national scene, it was his hunting trips with General Sheridan in 1871 and early 1872 that awakened his inner gourmet.
General Sheridan and the men who had gotten to know Cody on his hunting trips with them in 1871 and 1872, saw his growing public reputation as well as his outgoing personality. They intended to introduce him to their society friends. They not only introduced him to their society friends, they took him to dinner at some of the finest establishments in their cities.
After a decade presenting plays, basically melodramatic dime novels, on stages across the country, Buffalo Bill decided he wanted something more. He wanted to re-create the West he knew, with its wide open spaces, diversity of peoples and abundant wildlife. He wanted the crowds that thronged to his shows to see, smell, hear, and even taste the real west…but a stage would not be large enough for what he had in mind. Cody wrote, “Such exhibitions as I had prepared to give could only be shown in large open-air enclosures.” And so, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was born in 1883.
Buffalo Bill was once again the right person at the right time. His Wild West started at a time when the West that it depicted was waning and would soon disappear altogether. Later, advertising for his show would even draw parallels between the peoples of the West and the dinosaurs, creatures from a long dead past being popularly re-assembled in museums of the day. It was a time when people were curious about a West they had read about but not experienced. Those who participated in western expansion pronounced the show authentic and found it an opportunity for reminiscence. One woman from Deadwood, South Dakota encouraged visiting the Wild West “for the sake of living it over again for one night,” noting that the visitor would be “harrowingly homesick for a least a week.” After his visit to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, Mark Twain declared that it was “genuine” and that the “effect produced upon me by its spectacles were identical with those wrought upon me a long time ago by the same spectacles on the frontier.” The show even included the smell of campfires and, for the lucky, an opportunity to taste an authentic western “rib roast.”
Buffalo Bill didn’t give up fine dining when he started the Wild West, he shared it with his employees. One observer noted that show personnel received “just as good meals as the high liver at a first class hotel.” Reporters who visited the show wrote that the food was excellent and enjoyed by everyone from the lowest canvas men (who erected the tents) to Buffalo Bill himself.
“Galloping Gourmet”
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During the show’s visit to Boston in 1899 a reporter stated that one “could not have found a better meal in Boston, as far as the quality and quantity of the food were concerned.” Yet another reporter observed that “It must be said that Mr. Cody looks well after the inner man and his necessities.”
When the Wild West arrived in a town, the first tent erected was the dining tent and the show’s cooks immediately started preparing breakfast. With breakfast over, they began lunch and then supper. Wild West employees entering the dining tent encountered a space that was clean and attractive, a place that some said “would put to shame many a hotel.” The tables were covered with tablecloths and set with napkins, silverware and china of various kinds. The food tent was “clean and inviting as a restaurant.” The staff did not line up mess-hall style to be served their food; instead, white-clad waiters took their orders and delivered their food.
Over the course of thirty years Buffalo Bill’s Wild West grew to be one of the biggest shows on earth. Such an ambitious operation required careful logistics for everything from transportation to marketing to food preparation. Those logistics, in turn, stimulated innovations, particularly when it came to feeding as many as 1,500 performers and support staff while entertaining 12,500 guests twice a day. The action in the Wild West arena was what drew everyone, but it was just one part an operation that fascinated visitors, reporters and even heads of state.
The range wagon was described as a “monster range on wheels,” a “gastronomic hub,” and an “altar of gastronomic hopes.” It was the sort of contraption which inspired newspapermen to wax eloquent. As the fires leapt high within it, some described it as “a small Vesuvius” from which “belched forth smoke and whence issued savoury dishes heaped with meat and potatoes.” One description even went to so far as to state it was “almost as important a piece of impedimenta to this big band of pilgrims as was the ark to the ancient Israelites.” Such sentiments aside, it was vital to the Wild West’s functioning and was the center of a kitchen operation that occupied a half acre. The area was fenced off from the curious public by ropes, although the food preparation could be observed from outside those barriers.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West began as a presentation of life in the American West. While that was always a central theme of the show, as the years progressed the scope of the presentation expanded. The people of the West were joined by diversity of peoples and acts from all over the world. As these changes were made, the show came to be described as “history, humanity, heroism on horseback” and “a great school of anthropology.” This was particularly evident in the dining tent where it appeared that, as one Englishmen observed, “the types of humanity depicted in the coloured plates of a good atlas or geograph had suddenly left those pages to take a stroll” into the tent. This diversity of humanity performed, worked, and dined, together.
While each of the different groups occasionally ate their own food, or had preferences in the types of food they were served, dining was one occasion when they shared a common experience. The sight of so many different peoples from so many different nations eating together in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West prompted one newspaper to observe it was the “exemplification that in time knowledge and acquaintance will dispel racial prejudices and national hatred, and emphasize the fact of all mankind’s kindredship.”
In 1886 Buffalo Bill introduced a new type of food to New York City, provided in a temporary restaurant at Madison Square Garden. The food in the restaurant was prepared by the wives of two Mexican vaqueros.
The Madison Square Garden effort did help introduce tamales to New York city; within eight years tamale carts were to be found throughout the city and tamale parties were all the rage. Buffalo Bill did not realize it at the time but he had not only introduced a new culinary offering to New Yorkers, his was the first Mexican restaurant to open east of the Mississippi.
Rib roasts were just part of the gastronomic delicacies introduced to Europe by Buffalo Bill and John Burke during the Wild West’s travels around the continent. The uniquely American exhibition that was Buffalo Bill’s Wild West included many foods and drinks that were unfamiliar to European palates. Even common foods in the United States, like corn bread, were novelties on the other side of the Atlantic. Their introduction began in Great Britain.
During his days of traveling with the Buffalo Bill Combination, Cody had contemplated taking the show to Europe but never got around to it. After Mark Twain saw Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in 1884, he urged Cody to take the show to “the other side of the water,” where it would have the advantage of being the first distinctively American exhibition. Then Mr. John R. Whitley, who called the show “a genuine product of American soil,” invited him to take it to the 1887 American Exhibition in London, celebrating the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria’s reign. And that is exactly what Cody did.
Crossing the bridge, visitors first encountered what the official program of the American Exhibition referred to as “the American bars of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.” The largest bar was a total of 700 feet in length, wrapped around the Wild West amphitheater and was said to be the biggest in the world. American bartenders were imported to provide the drinks. Visitors to the bar received an “almanac of American drinks” which was a calendar with a concoction for every day of the year, except Sunday. An American visitor reported, “hard to please indeed must be he whose taste can not be hit off here to a nicety. Noggs, slings, cocktails, cobblers, skins, twists, fizzes, swizzles, flashes of lightning, sours and ticklers — what more do you want in the way of liquoring up?” Other drinks offered included mint juleps, pineapple punches, old chum revivers, bosom caressers, and claret sangarees (sangrias). Altogether there were supposedly four hundred different kinds of drinks.
While the large installation outside of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West did not introduce the American Bar, or the American cocktail, to Britain, it did help popularize them. One observer reported about London, “Straight drinks are the rule here…and they know nothing more about mixed drinks than what little knowledge they have imported from the United States.” Newspapers noted that American cocktails became a rage during the exhibition. A wave of “American” bars opened in London and elsewhere. Two years later it was observed that no London restaurant could be considered whole without an American bar, complete with shakers, lemon squeezers, and lots of crushed ice, since “no American bar would be of any account without its ice…a necessity of life to the vast majority of Americans.” One of the best known hotels in London, the Savoy, opened its American bar in 1893. It is still in operation, serving American cocktails with plenty of ice.
Buffalo Bill is commemorated throughout the world as one of the best known characters in American history. His name has also appeared on eating and drinking establishments throughout the world. These ranged from a bar in Denver’s Albany Hotel, a place he frequently stayed, to a bar in Thailand and a steakhouse in Zimbabwe. These and other establishments celebrate Buffalo Bill and the Old West, an historic period that was unique to America. They tap into the romance of the Wild West and the life of Buffalo Bill. They also commemorate their culinary connections to William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, America’s first galloping gourmet.
In 1903 Will Cody wrote his sister, “If you don’t prepare your dough properly, you can’t expect good bread.” This statement not only used food imagery, it laid out a philosophy he implemented throughout his life. While Cody had his impulsive moments and his failures, his successes show he prepared his dough properly. And his good bread lasted. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West is considered one of the most successful shows of all time. Buffalo Bill was one of the most famous people of his time and his name is still familiar worldwide. He even made his mark on our culinary history.
Steve Friesen grew up in Kansas but a summer job brought him to the West in 1973. Since then he has largely worked in historical museums, with the last 22 years spent as director of the Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave on Lookout Mountain. He notes that the subject of his previous book “Buffalo Bill” also spent a great deal of time in Colorado before choosing to be buried here in 1917.
