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A beloved gift shop celebrating Buffalo Bill Cody closed. What’s that mean for the showman’s legacy?

Bill Carle is surrounded by jewelry, dream catchers, and other tourist items at the Pahaska Tepee gift shop and cafe where he worked.
Olivia Weitz
/
Wyoming Public Media
Bill Carle has worked at Pahaska Tepee Gift Shop and Cafe for decades. The shop closed on New Year's Day.

At 70 years old, Bill Carle was still selling fudge and sharing stories about Buffalo Bill with just about anyone who walked in the door. He started working at Pahaska Tepee Gift Shop and Cafe for his grandmother, just down the hillside where William F. Cody, better known by his Wild West stage name Buffalo Bill, is reportedly buried.

“As a 9-year-old, when I first came to work, my job was to pull the pennies and the nickels off of the grave of Buffalo Bill up there. And I had a little wooden box with some screen in the bottom, and I'd have to go up there every night and pull off the change,” he said.

Until the start of the year, Carle ran the gift shop and cafe at Lookout Mountain Park west of downtown Denver. The shop celebrated Buffalo Bill, whose Wild West Show introduced millions of people to the American West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cody was a showman, a bison hunter and a military scout, among other occupations.

But the aging building needs work, and the city and county of Denver, which owns the property, says it’s time to revisit how Cody’s story is told. The gift shop closed on Jan. 1. The museum and gravesite will remain open while officials assess the building and plan future updates.

Buffalo Bill’s adopted son, Johnny Baker, who performed with the Wild West Show, opened the Pahaska Tepee building in 1921 as a museum with a dining room.

A lot has changed since then. Carle said over the years, people’s memory of who Buffalo Bill was has faded. The most common question he gets now: Who was he?

“ The old saying in history is one generation's hero is the next generation's villain.  And I think Cody has been there. I think he's come out of it now. But they still don't care. I think the people that write history to teach history curriculums don't care about Cody anymore,” he said.

Carle wants people to remember Buffalo Bill as a romantic figure of the Old West who rode for the Pony Express and was part of the gold rush in Colorado.

But lately, Cody has been criticized for being a scout in the Plains Indian Wars and killing bison Indigenous peoples depended on.

Some say his traveling Wild West Show glorified westward expansion and depicted harmful stereotypes of Native American people that continued into Western movies and pop culture today.

Carle said he’s seen changing attitudes about Buffalo Bill play out in the gift shop. He said few people anymore want to buy stuff with Buffalo Bill’s face on it.

“What I ended up doing is kind of going away from Buffalo Bill and going to more buffalo merchandise, buffalo icons. And it'll say ‘Buffalo Bill,’ but I'll put a buffalo there, not Buffalo Bill,” he said.

Carle shared about one of his new tumblers.

“ It’s got an image of a buffalo … kind of imprinted with American flag,” he said.

Another signal of change? He said a Denver Parks and Recreation employee visited his shop recently and told him a Native American statue on display with a headdress made of lollipops was “indefensible.”

“ And I guess maybe the world changed more than I thought it had. And I also probably was maybe not sensitive enough, although I'd never had one complaint,” he said.

Denver Parks and Recreation said some of the shop’s merchandise represents a fundamental mismatch in values.

But a bigger problem is the more than 100-year-old log building itself. Director of Denver Mountain Parks Shannon Dennison said Lookout Mountain Park, where the gift shop and cafe are located, is getting a lot of visitors.

“Over half a million visitors per year. The septic system can't handle it. The building wasn't built for it, and it's really just exceeded its loading capacity,” she said.

The shop closed on New Year’s Day despite a petition with more than 7,000 signatures to keep it open.

Dennison said the closure also is an opportunity to rethink how Cody’s story is told at the cultural site overall, which includes the gravesite, a museum and exhibits. Her team plans to work with the Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave to do that.

“Our top three feedback things that people want to know about are the female performers that were in the show, the Indigenous performers who traveled with the Wild West and actually Cody's family,” said Jacqui Ainlay-Conley, director of the Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave. “ I think that personalizes him. So those are three of the areas that we're interested on expanding our focus.”

Ainlay-Conley added, “I don't think it's like canceling Cody. It's telling a more complete picture, and then it's bringing the other voices that were in the Wild West, which can be the performers.”

Ainley-Conley said visitor feedback shows that people tend to leave the museum with a rosy picture of Buffalo Bill.

“Buffalo Bill has a very complicated story. And so I think putting that in historic context and maybe doing a little more analysis,” she said.

The museum added a video that visitors see before the main exhibit area that analyzes Cody’s place in history, but Ainley-Conley would like to add more programming.

She said the current museum, built in the 1970s, doesn’t have enough physical space to bring in speakers. She hopes she can soon do that next door in the Pahaska Tepee building where the cafe and gift shop are located.

Additionally, Dennison said she hears feedback that people want to know more about the history of bison and their eradication. She sees an opportunity to tell the story of bison and Buffalo Bill.

“ This is such a great place to be able to do that, to talk about not only what the impacts were on the removal of buffalo from the landscape, both intentional and unintentional, Cody's role in that, his role in advocating for the buffalo, his role in killing them – and then Denver's role in trying to bring them back and save them in our conservation herd,” she said, referencing parks and recreation’s conservation bison herds.

Some people in Wyoming say Buffalo Bill is actually buried near Cody. But that’s another story for another time.

From Buffalo Bill’s Denver grave, you can see for miles: downtown Denver city lights, the Rocky Mountains, the Great Plains.

Carle said the fact that people still visit his gravesite puts him in a status that few famous people ever reach. But, he added, having his gravesite right off Interstate 70 in a busy metropolis helps with visitation, too.

“It was his show that made him world famous, and there's a romantic image of him that just lives on, that people want to connect with, in spite of the fact that they're afraid to wear his T-shirt with his picture on it. There's a connection there because he just represented the West. Everything that was romantic and interesting about the West,” he said.

Denver Parks and Recreation said they’ll have more details about preserving the historic cafe and gift shop building and its future in the coming months.

Dennison said when people visit cultural sites, they want to connect with the past, both the good parts and the bad.

“ I think there's a lot of fear about what might change up here. The heart of what's important to people will always be here. The views, the story, the history, the buildings.  And so our goal is to make sure that we're investing so that people can continue to have that experience for the next century,” said Dennison.

Park officials said going forward, it’s not just going to just be about Buffalo Bill. There’ll be more voices that they say will help tell a fuller picture of the history of the American West.

Olivia Weitz is based at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody. She covers Yellowstone National Park, wildlife, and arts and culture throughout the region. Olivia’s work has aired on NPR and member stations across the Mountain West. She is a graduate of the University of Puget Sound and the Transom story workshop. In her spare time, she enjoys skiing, cooking, and going to festivals that celebrate folk art and music.

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