Category Archives: History

He perfected the Wild West show, toured the world, got rich and then lost millions. What happened?

William “Buffalo Bill” Cody was a lucky man.

From a hardscrabble youth that began in a log cabin in Iowa Territory, he grew up to survive the Civil War, the Indian Wars, and buffalo hunts to create a Wild West show that traveled the globe and made him the most famous man on earth.

But his luck ran out in Arizona Territory in the last decade of his life.

Arizona wouldn’t give him the pot of gold he sought in one mining claim after another. Nor silver or copper. All his claims turned up wanting, costing him as much as a half million dollars—almost $12.5 million in today’s money. That shattered his dream of a comfortable retirement and gave him financial heartbreak instead.

Blame it all on a little piece of scenic heaven known as Oracle, just north of Tucson, where, in 1910, Buffalo Bill started pumping money into mines sold to him as “sure things.”

“He got salted,” says Chuck Sternberg, curator of the Oracle Historical Museum, which displays several pictures of Buffalo Bill in the days when he was a town fixture.

The dry holes would force Buffalo Bill to abandon his hope of retirement in his mid-60s, sending him back on the road for yet more seasons of Wild West shows—but smaller now, sometimes in collaboration with Gordon “Pawnee Bill” Lillie, as he could no longer afford the extravaganzas that had made him so famous.

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In a dusty Panhandle camp near Canyon, Texas, Plains Indians and white combatants clashed in two historically crucial battles, separated by a decade, at the same site.

Today, it’s mostly parcels of sectioned-off ranch land, set apart from other dusty Texas Panhandle acreage by only a few historical plaques and a medium-size bluff. But peering at a cluster of cottonwoods lining a narrow nearby creek, it’s easy to imagine the scene there just at daybreak on June 27, 1874, when hundreds of Comanche, Cheyenne, and Kiowa warriors eased their mounts from behind the trees and prepared to attack a hunting camp known as Adobe Walls. Only 28 men and a woman (all white?—?she was the wife of one of the men) were currently in the camp. Besides outnumbering their enemies by at least 10-to-1, perhaps as much as 20- or even 30-to-1 (the number of Indian assailants has never been determined), Comanche mystic Isa-tai promised an additional advantage: His magic would ensure that all the whites would still be sleeping when the pre-dawn assault took place, assuring easy victory.

But some in the camp were awake, and the subsequent Battle of Adobe Walls was so extraordinary?—?from the legendary frontier figures who fought in it to the miracle shot that essentially marked its conclusion?—?that it’s easy to forget it was the second time vastly outnumbered whites faced a determined tribal coalition in the same rugged vicinity.

The original intent of Adobe Walls and its later iteration was commerce, not combat. In the mid-1840s, a trading firm built an outpost in isolated Hutchinson County just below the Canadian River. The original building was made of logs, but it was soon replaced by a better, broader structure of adobe bricks, which provided the camp’s name. Hunters and trappers passed through, and pioneers headed farther west. But Indians who considered the region their homeland made periodic raids. Peril trumped profit, and by 1849 proprietor William Bent had had enough. He closed down his operation and moved on. The adobe walls of the abandoned post soon tumbled, and scattered stacks of bricks were the only evidence that the trading post had ever existed. Few remembered it until November 1864.

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“A group of young boys raged together freely and safely around; one of them seemed to be of Irish and Mexican descent. After a little persuasion, he told …… that his name was Santiago Mackin (sic) and he had been kidnapped in Mimbres, New Mexico; of his young companions, he seemed to be treated kindly, and no one tried to stop our conversation … Beyond its smart looks which made it clear that he had fully understood everything we told him in Spanish and English, he took no further notice of us.”

On a balmy September morning in the little valley east of the Mimbres Mountains in southwest New Mexico, seventeen-year-old Martin McKinn and his eleven-year-old brother Santiago were herding cattle near their ranch on Gallina Creek, a tributary to the Mimbres River. The two McKinn boys were the sons of an Irish father John and their Mexican mother, Luceria. That morning their father had gone to Las Cruces with some neighbors to purchase supplies.

It was about eleven o’clock on September 11th and the boys were taking a break for lunch. Martin was sitting beneath a shade tree reading a book and Santiago had gone down to play in the creek. Suddenly, Santiago heard a rifle shot then he saw an Apache he later identified as Geronimo, run up and crush Martin’s head with a rock. Geronimo then removed his brother’s shirt and coat and put them on. Santiago tried to run away but they caught him.

Searchers found later Martin’s body but Santiago was missing, something that gave them hope that he might be a captive.

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