Did Buffalo Bill Cody and Wyatt Earp meet?
For all the “history buffs” of the Old West, Western students and writers who have been at this longer than I have, can anyone answer the question I have posed in the title of this article? Did Buffalo Bill Cody and Wyatt Earp meet? If so, can you tell me information about any meeting or relationship between the two of you? If not, how or why do you think such a meeting would NOT take place?
Cody and Earp were about the same age. Sources place Cody’s birth in Iowa in 1846 (early 1845, but since corrected); Earp was born in Illinois in 1848. Cody died in Denver, Colorado, in 1917; Earp died in Los Angeles, California, in 1929. Both men spent time in and out of Kansas and the Great Plains in general. I’ve seen accounts that Earp at least met and may have spent some time with “Wild Bill” Hickok, and Cody can definitely clearly bond with Hickok, even doing a failed stage performance with Hickok in the 1870s.
Given such close proximity, and given Cody and Earp’s quick tendency as showmen to always try to profit from their images (Cody certainly much more than Earp), I find it surprising that the two weren’t associated in some way.
I understand, and in no way am I informed about Wyatt Earp, that Earp never pushed the tales, the show, or the reputation as strongly as Cody. However, in later years I believe that Wyatt took advantage of the not always accurate accounts of his life to make money when he could. Certainly, he never seemed to seek or achieve the mythical status in his life that Cody and Hickok did, probably because he never really cultivated it.
But even if that’s true, I’m surprised there aren’t any accounts I can find of Cody and Earp ever meeting. When you consider that Cody went out of his way to recruit the “big names” he could find for his famous Wild West in the 1880s and 90s, I’m surprised he didn’t make an effort to track down Earp and turn him into an offer. Perhaps the ups and downs of “real life” as Earp encountered it in the various cow towns of Kansas and later Arizona discouraged Cody from the idea. Or, we could easily speculate, Earp’s reputation in those years, bitten, sometimes lawyer, sometimes outlawed, caused him to ignore Cody’s attempts to beautify the “Wild West” and Earp simply did not want to be a part of it. .
However, it’s fun to speculate how the two may have considered each other. I suspect they knew enough about the reality of life on the plains in the 1860s-1890s that they both understood what was real and what the show was about in each other.
So I ask again: Did Buffalo Bill Cody and Wyatt Earp meet? If you have any information on that, and especially if you can direct me to some sources, I invite you to leave a comment on my website!
