Eastern Chic and Western Mystique: New Yorkers and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West  

“The Buffalo Bill Center is the best Western museum that Eastern money can buy.” – Al Simpson

Not long ago, I left my home–and more importantly, my dog–to spend the summer in Cody, Wyoming, for an internship at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West’s McCracken Research Library. A born and raised New Yorker, I wasn’t sure how I’d adjust to dry heat and the scent of bruised sagebrush; the high altitudes or the pervasive risk of bears. I wondered if I would make friends, or spend June, July, and August with my head buried in books, studying the myths and realities of the West through words instead of experiences. 

It’s still early; I have two months of summer in Cody left, and I’ve barely scratched the surface. And while Wyoming has thus far surpassed my naive expectations, I have also discovered a pleasant surprise, one which both curbs my homesickness and heartens my resolve: without New Yorkers, the magnificent, world-class Buffalo Bill Center of the West that we enjoy today would not exist. 

“He had dreamed a dream, but he had also worked out positive plans for the accomplishment of the dream.” – Mary Jester Allen on her uncle, Buffalo Bill

Soon after William F. Cody’s death, an informal group of Cody locals wishing to commemorate Buffalo Bill gathered to discuss exactly how they would honor the founder of their hometown. When the Wyoming Legislature appropriated $5,000 toward a memorial statue, the group of townspeople formally incorporated into the Buffalo Bill Memorial Association (BBMA).  

It was two short months later that President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war and the United States officially entered the fight. The BBMA (and the state appropriated money) stagnated through those war-torn years. But the dream of honoring Buffalo Bill endured, and his niece, Mary Jester Allen, was prepared to call in any favor to make it happen. 

During and after World War I, Allen lived mainly in New York City, where she took advantage of the fast-paced environs to build connections with wealthy and powerful New Yorkers, as well as beef up her experience in public relations. She knew that a proper statue to her beloved uncle would cost more than the $5,000 appropriated to the BBMA by the state of Wyoming. She also knew that wealthy Easterners were enamored with Western mystique: “Indians, cowboys, cattle, mountains, mines, wide-open spaces, and above all, Buffalo Bill.”   

“A chance to get away from the social cocktail party group and come out here and enjoy the ‘simplicity of living.’” – Irving “Larry Larom” on the appeal of the West to Easterners

One famous easterner with deep pockets and a yearning for the Old West was A.A. Anderson, an artist and old friend of Buffalo Bill who built a European-style lodge in Meeteetse which he called the Palette Ranch. By inviting his long and prestigious rolodex of contacts to Palette Ranch, Anderson was “perhaps the most influential individual in bringing eastern aristocracy to this corner of Wyoming,” wrote Robert E. Bonner in William F. Cody’s Wyoming Empire: The Buffalo Bill Nobody Knows. Anderson was a key figure in the establishment and protection of the Yellowstone Forest Reserve, and the McCracken Research Library houses his archival records, historical materials, and stories of his close friendship and hunting trips with Buffalo Bill. 

One of his most influential guests was the English-born New Yorker William Robertson Coe. A lover of all things nature, W.R. Coe was so entranced by his 1908 stay at Palette Ranch that he purchased his own ranch on Carter Mountain, one that was previously owned by Buffalo Bill. Coe was deeply passionate about the American West and spent his life collecting and curating rare and valuable Western Americana, most of which he later donated to Yale University’s Beinecke Library. One of his acquisitions, a portrait of Buffalo Bill by French painter Rosa Bonheur, hangs in the Whitney Western Art Museum. 

Much like Coe, New York City-raised Irving “Larry” Larom had an adventurous spirit which brought him to Cody in 1910. He fell in love with the region and returned annually, eventually purchasing Sunny Jim and “Buckskin” Jenny McLaughlin’s rustic homestead in the South Fork, which he and his business partner, fellow New Yorker Winthrop Brooks (of Brooks Brothers, the oldest apparel brand in continuous operation in the United States), turned into a wildly successful dude ranch called Valley Ranch. When he sold the property in 1969, he estimated the guest list at over 16,000 names. And “the list,” wrote a writer for the Cody Enterprise, “reads like the Social Registers of New York City, Philadelphia and Boston.” Larom later gifted his large collection of Plains Indian artifacts to the BBMA, which are now housed in the Plains Indian Museum. 

Another New Yorker integral to the development of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West was Colonel Arthur W. Little, whose father founded the printing house Little and Company (not to be confused with the publishing house Little, Brown and Company, which is a different entity). Colonel Little was a war hero, author, champion of equal rights–and lover of Western Americana. The story goes it was Colonel Little who first proposed a commemorative Buffalo Bill sculpture by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, though letters show that both Colonel Little and W.R. Coe were in contact with the New York City heiress and sculptor regarding a potential statue, as well as Mary Jester Allen and a few other early board members. 

Archival records reveal the deep, inextricably tangled web of influence these, and many other New Yorkers, had on Cody and the eventual Buffalo Bill Center of the West. They beseeched for funding, fought over decisions, and made introductions and donations that would one day determine who was an ally to the museum and what valuable artifacts would be displayed in its galleries. But one of the greatest, most prominent, and physically largest contributions made to the museum by a New Yorker was yet to come. 

“The subject of a suitable memorial for Col. Cody is now agitating our peaceful village” – Caroline Lockhart in a letter to W.R. Coe

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was an heiress twice over, from both her great-grandfather, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and her husband, Harry Payne Whitney. It was after their marriage that she began to pursue sculpture seriously, studying in her hometown of New York City and Paris. When the eastern supporters of the BBMA began prevailing upon her to sculpt the Buffalo Bill memorial statue, she was already a well-known and well-regarded artist. In January of 1922, W.R. Coe wrote to ask about her possible interest in the commission, and while Whitney’s letter in reply has been lost to time, she must have been agreeable to the idea, because on February 8, 1922, the Cody Enterprise reported that the larger-than-life woman had agreed. 

If you’re wondering how that $5,000 appropriated by the state for this venture was enough to pay for an original monument by such a highly acclaimed artist, I can tell you that it didn’t. For one thing, the BBMA had already used $4,000 of the appropriation to acquire land for the statue (land which Whitney objected to and later substituted with 40 acres across the street that she paid for herself); for another thing, the ultimate cost of Whitney’s completed work for the BBMA was five million dollars in today’s money. Despite an obvious lack of funding, Whitney went ahead with her plans, paying entirely out of her own (admittedly deep) pockets.  

Cody locals attempted to raise some money, throwing local fundraising events like dances and social clubs, as well as entreating Boy Scouts to collect donations with the motto, “A Buffalo Nickel for Buffalo Bill,” but in total, they raised around $150 of the $50,000 goal they hoped to achieve. Whitney, too, attempted to raise at least some of the estimated $250,000 ($5 million in today’s money) for the bronze statue, the plinth, the land, the shipment, installation at the site, and the value of her time and expertise. Her friends organized yet another group, this time called the Buffalo Bill American Association, to recoup the many sunk costs she had already invested. 

But no funds were incoming, and, in the end, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney bankrolled the entire thing herself. Not only is she the artist and creator behind one of the most iconic portrayals of Buffalo Bill and, in many ways, the West in general; she is also its sole patron. 

“All good Americans when they die go to Paris; but all good Americans when they live come to Cody” – Juliana Force, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s secretary

Without Whitney’s generosity and passion for the sculpture and Buffalo Bill’s legacy, or her New York wealth, we likely would not have the spectacular masterwork that now looks over the canyon, commemorating and preserving the memory of Buffalo Bill. 

In correspondence sent not long before the July 4, 1924 debut of the statue, Juliana Force, Whitney’s staunch and competent secretary, was quoted saying, “There are only two classes of people in New York, the quick and the dead… You call it energy, intelligence, responsiveness—anything you want, but it is really being alive. And that is the thing which I think Mrs. Whitney has put into her statue of Buffalo Bill… Buffalo Bill was quick.” 

My research has revealed countless times when a New Yorker (or eastern transplant) furthered the Buffalo Bill Center of the West-too many times to possibly relate them all here. As I sit here in the McCracken Research Library, in the basement of the massive, state-of-the-art Buffalo Bill Center of the West, I now realize that I am not a pioneer in myself; I am certainly not the first New Yorker drawn to the West, nor will I be the last. 

In these few short weeks, a small summer in the long stretch of ceaseless progress and expanding frontiers, I hope only that I can contribute something worthwhile to the people and town of Cody. In the words of Force, New Yorkers only know how to be two things: quick, or dead. But there’s something about the crisp air, the reaching dead wood, the beauty and the violence that coexist so well in the Bighorn that reminds me: I won’t actually die if I slow down and enjoy it all. If, like me, you want to learn where you came from to figure out where you’re going, come slow down at the Center of the West with us this summer.