Collection
Buffalo Bill at Oracle
What Cody was actually doing here, who brought him, and who got the credit.
Mines, not shows
William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody came to Oracle for mining. From at least 1902 his company was mining near Oracle; its claims included the Campo Bonito gold mine. It was a costly venture: by 1913 Cody conceded in his own letters that the mines were unlikely to earn back what he had put in.
At the Mountain View
When Cody was in Oracle, he and his wife Louisa stayed at the Mountain View. In 1911 he arrived in a Packard touring car driven by Herbert Bowyer, the foreman of Curly Neal’s ranch. At Christmas in 1912 he played Santa Claus for the children of Oracle at the hotel.
Curly and Cody had known each other since the late 1860s, when Curly was a young Army scout.
Who got the credit
Cody’s life is one of the best-documented of his century. Curly Neal is almost entirely missing from it. His name does not appear in Louisa Cody’s 1919 memoir of her husband, and, as far as the record shows, the men Cody named in his letters as his Oracle partners and managers were all white. The friendship survives in Arizona sources and in Black history, not in Cody’s.
Sources: The Papers of William F. Cody (codyarchive.org), including Cody’s letter of September 24, 1913; Barbara Marriott, Annie’s Guests; Louisa Frederici Cody, Memories of Buffalo Bill (1919); BlackPast.org.
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