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November 2024
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This being June, a month of marriage and romance, we bring our readers some honeymooners. They regard each other fondly, as newlyweds are supposed to, and they make a handsome pair, despite the photographer’s fraudulent backdrop. The place is Leavenworth, Kansas, and the couple, of all people, are William Frederick and Louisa (Frederici) Cody, who were married in St. Louis on March 6,l866, and then moved out to Kansas. There young Cody, who had already served the Army as a scout, would gain fame killing buffalo in vast numbers to feed the construction gangs of the Kansas-Pacific Railroad. His work would win him the unforgettable nickname of Buffalo Bill, to be celebrated for years in dime novels, on the stage, and in the famous Wild West shows in which he forever played himself. Cody was a real frontier hero, a dead shot who duelled with the notorious Yellow Hand, a scout who his commandant swore could see better than a man with field glasses. He was also a great ham, an exaggerator, and a man who could barely read or sign his own name. The good and bad merge into a great figure who departed us at seventy, still full of energy and joy in life, in 1917. Louisa lived four more years and then joined him in a grave atop Lookout Mountain, near Golden, Colorado. The remarkable Leavenworth photographer who took the picture, E. E. Henry, is the subject of an article in this issue, beginning on page 16.

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