Buffalo Bill, Texas Jack, & Wild Bill
150 years ago the most famous scout, the most famous cowboy, and the most famous lawman of the West stood on stage together for the first time.
On September 6th, 1873—150 years ago—three men stood on stage together for the first time. The first man was Buffalo Bill Cody. Bill had started his acting career a year earlier when he and his best friend Texas Jack had made their acting debuts in Ned Buntline's play, The Scouts of the Prairie. Buffalo Bill had earned a reputation as one of the most capable scouts on the American frontier, and stories of his famous hunts with aristocrats like the Grand Duke of Russia kept him in the public eye as one of the most famous men in the American West.
The second man was Texas Jack Omohundro. America's first famous cowboy, Texas Jack also served as a scout at Fort McPherson, Nebraska, with Buffalo Bill. Jack had famously lassoed and captured buffalo for the Niagara Falls Museum and rode along with the Pawnee tribe during their annual summer hunt, making a name for himself as one of the most fearless men in America. Less than a week earlier, Jack had married the leading lady from his first tour with Buffalo Bill, a famous Italian prima ballerina named Giuseppina Morlacchi, the dancer who had introduced the cancan to America. She joined the new cast of the new show as well.
The third man had no experience as an actor but was perhaps the man the audience most wanted to see. He was already a legend as a lawman and a gunslinger in the American West. His name was Wild Bill Hickok. No man was more associated with the frontier, and no one symbolized the West like Wild Bill. He had served his last stint as a lawman and was looking to join in the fame and fortune his friends Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack had experienced as actors on their previous tour.
They weren't supposed to make their debut together until September 10th. Buffalo Bill had agreed to act in a show about himself playing at the Bowery Theatre, and Texas Jack and his new bride arrived in town just after their August 31st marriage in Rochester, New York. When Wild Bill showed up, he and Jack decided to make a guest appearance at Buffalo Bill's show.
The trio toured for almost 7 months together before Wild Bill decided that the life of a traveling stage actor wasn't for him. He grew bored with the show and sometimes distracted himself by firing the gunpowder-filled blanks of his stage revolvers at the legs of the extras that played the show's Indian warriors. He chafed against the stilted dialogue and the ridiculous situations. In March, when the show played Rochester, Hickok walked out of the theater and away from acting forever. Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack met him at the hotel, and the three departed as friends. Two and a half years later, Wild Bill Hickok was shot in the back of the head by Jack McCall in a Deadwood saloon.
These three men, Buffalo Bill, Texas Jack, and Wild Bill only toured together for about seven months, but the shadows they cast over what would eventually become the Western loom large, and their legends have never faded.
