DID YOU KNOW?
Anyway, in 1872 Gen. Phillip Sheridan arranged for Cody and Lieut. Col. George Armstrong Custer to guide Grand Duke Alexis of Russia on a hunting trip that had been set up by U.S. Pres. Ulysses S. Grant.
traversed, knowledge of Native American ways, courage, and endurance. He was in demand as a scout and guide, mostly for the U.S. Fifth Cavalry, throughout much of the government’s attempt to wipe out indigenous resistance to settlement of the land west of the Mississippi River (1868–76).
Three Crossings Station, Wyoming, only to find the station keeper dead and the horses stolen. He narrowly escaped to the next station, but, after arriving there, he gathered and led a group of men against the Native Americans, surprising them at their camp and retaking the stolen horses.
Also, Bill Cody’s cunning was the centerpiece of another often-recounted episode in which, called upon to deliver a large sum of money and fearing that he would be robbed, he hid the currency under his saddle blanket and stuffed paper into his Pony Express saddlebag. When he was indeed held up at gunpoint, he threw the treasureless saddlebag at the bandits and then made good his escape.
Scout and soldier
During the American Civil War (1861–65), Cody first served as a Union scout in campaigns against the Kiowa and Comanche and later (in 1863) enlisted with the Seventh Kansas Cavalry, which saw action in Missouri and Tennessee. After the war he worked for the U.S. Army as a civilian scout and dispatch bearer out of Fort Ellsworth in Kansas (1866–67). In 1867–68 he hunted buffalo to feed construction crews on the Union Pacific Railroad.
Now, during this time, he is said to have slaughtered some 4,280 head of buffalo, and he soon became known as the champion buffalo killer of the Great Plains. Cody acquired a reputation not only for accurate marksmanship, but also for total recall of the vast terrain he had