To all the “history buffs” students and Western writers of the Old West who have been at it longer than I have, can anyone answer the question I’ve posed in the title of this article? Did Buffalo Bill Cody and Wyatt Earp meet? If so, can you point me to any information about any meeting or relationship between the two? If not, how or why do you think such a meeting would NOT take place?
Cody and Earp became closed at the same age. Sources place Cody’s birth in Iowa in 1846 (1845 at earliest writings, 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 knew and may have spent some time with “Wild Bill” Hickok, and Cody can definitely be clearly linked to Hickok, even putting on a failed performance with Hickok in the 1870s.
Given such close proximity, and given Cody and Earp’s quick tendencies as artists always trying to profit from their images (Cody certainly much more so than Earp), I find it surprising that the two weren’t somehow associated.
It is my understanding, and I am by no means knowledgeable about Wyatt Earp, that Earp never pushed storytelling, showmanship, or reputation as strongly as Cody. However, in later years I believe Wyatt took advantage of the not always accurate accounts of his life to make money where he could. He certainly never seemed to seek or achieve the mythic status in his lifetime that Cody and Hickok achieved, 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 getting together. When you consider that Cody went out of his way to recruit every “big name” he could find for his famous Wild West in the 1880s and 1890s, I’m surprised he didn’t make an effort to track down Earp and turn him into a offer. Perhaps the ups and downs of “real life” as Earp encountered it in the various cowboy neighborhoods of Kansas and later Arizona put Cody off the idea. Or, we could easily speculate, Earp’s tough, sometimes lawman, sometimes outlaw reputation in those years caused him to ignore Cody’s attempts to exalt the “Wild West” and Earp simply didn’t want to be a part of it. of that.
However, it is fun to speculate on how the two were considered. I suspect they knew enough of the reality of life on the plains in the 1860s and 1890s for both of them to understand what was real and what was show business in each other.
So, I ask again: did Buffalo Bill Cody and Wyatt Earp ever meet? If you have any information about it, and especially if you can direct me to some sources about it, I invite you to leave a comment on my website!