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A fourteen-piece ragtime orchestra made up of Black musicians performed with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show for two seasons in the early 1900s.
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Nan Aspinwall is the first woman to ride across the country solo on horseback. She completed the nearly 4,500 mile journey from San Francisco to New York in 1911.
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After the performers rode into the arena for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, a now familiar song opened the fanfare: “The Star Spangled Banner.”What might surprise people, says Buffalo Bill Museum Curator Jeremy Johnston, is the tradition of playing the anthem before events predated its adoption as America’s National Anthem.
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Some characters in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show were known for their sharpshooting skills, but Buffalo Bill Museum Curator Jeremy Johnston says their performances built up a common myth about westerners.
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In his Wild West Show, Buffalo Bill romanticized the Pony Express, the horse-back delivered mail service that operated between April 1860 and October 1861. He also claimed to have been a rider for the Pony Express and that he completed the longest ride for the service. But, Buffalo Bill Museum Curator Jeremy Johnston says whether he actually rode for the Pony Express is up for debate.
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The allure of American Cowboys attracts many people to our area to visit. But it turns out that cowboys do not only exist in the West. Known as the Butteri in Italy, some say the Italian tradition goes back centuries and has a surprising connection to Buffalo Bill Cody.
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Vincent Mercaldo was a collector of Western imagery. But he was also a painter and an artist. Samantha Harper, the archivist at the McCracken Research…
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Samantha Harper is an archivist at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West’s McCracken Research Library. This job means that Harper digs through documents,…
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One of the oldest objects in the Buffalo Bill Museum collection is a Waterbury mantle clock that belonged to Buffalo Bill Cody’s mother Mary. Jeremy…
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The McCracken Research Library receives hundreds of collections of journals, notebooks and photographs annually. Often, library staff are not able to go…