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An intermediate level English resource on  American history 

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Who was Buffalo Bill ?

Discovering an American folk hero ......

The name "Buffalo Bill" is one of the most famous names in the history of the West.
Once Bill was known as a great fighter and a great hunter. Today people prefer to
remember other sides of his character. Later in his life he was a great showman and
one of the first people to see that it was necessary to protect America’s natural
environment .

      Buffalo Bill Cody was born on a farm in Scott county, Indiana, on

26th February 1846.      

      In those days, life in the American West was a constant struggle

for survival, and native Americans and white pioneers would fight to
the death to protect their homes and their people.     

      Clearly, young Bill was a tough boy, who knew what he was
doing. Before he was thirteen, he was an expert horse-rider and very
good with a gun; and in those days, when the West was wild, that
meant he had excellent qualifications for a job.      

      Before the age of twenty, Bill left home and took a job with the
Pony Express company, and very soon he became reputed as one of
their best riders.     

      It was the time when the West was being opened up. After the Pony Express, Bill got a job
supplying buffalo meat to the men building the Kansas Pacific rail-road. In the space of 17 months,
he claims to have killed 4,280 buffaloes. This is where he got his name, “Buffalo Bill".
    In the 1870s, he worked as a scout for the army, during the "Indian campaigns", and took part in
General Custer’s war against the Sioux. Once, he killed Chief Yellow Hand in a duel. This was just
one of the exploits that were written about in popular story books. In those days, anyone who killed
Indians was seen as a hero. It is very different today. 

      Today, we look at the Indian wars in a different light. Though many American Indians still call
themselves “Indians", the expression “native Americans" is considered to be more correct. Huge
areas of land have been given back to the Indian nations, and Americans accept that White pioneers
stole it from them in the past.

    In fact, Buffalo Bill was one of the first

men in modern America to realise that
white Americans and Indians could, and
should, work together. Bill made his peace
with the Indians, and when he established
his famous “Wild West Show", he
recruited many famous Indians to work
with him. They included Red Cloud, Red
Shirt, and even Sitting Bull. His grandson
says, “At its height, there were over 650
people who travelled with the show,
including 250 American Indians. With
these Indians, with all the cowboys, they
re-enacted the robbery of the Deadwood
stage coach and the Pony Express mail relay system".

    With the money he earned from his show, Bill purchased some land in Wyoming; but by then the
West was already changing dramatically. Bill, the once-great buffalo-hunter looked nostalgically at
the few rare buffaloes that were still around, and realised that they had to be protected. At the same
time, he began trying to conserve aspects of the old Western life that were rapidly disappearing into
the twentieth century. One of the things he did was to help establish America’s first National Forest
reserve in Wyoming.

       When he died, aged 70, Buffalo Bill knew that the old West was almost dead too, except in
history and stories. Yet he knew, too, that one of the most famous names associated with its
legends, was his own.

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WORDS : 

showman: man who runs a show - struggle: fight, battle  - survival: existence -
pioneer: person colonizing new territory - tough: strong, resistant - ancestor:
grandfather and earlier generations - expanse: open space - willing to: ready
to, prepared to - supply: bring, provide -  claims to have: says he - duel:
organised fight between two people - exploit: action - area: zone - recruit:
employ - height most important moment - re-enact imitate, play - mail: post - purchase: buy - 
reserve: protected zone.-  

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Student worksheet

Who was Buffalo Bill ?

For help with the following exercise, check out  Forming questions in English

Exercise:

Here is an imaginary interview with Bill Cody, aged 65; What questions were asked, in order to elicit
these answers..

Reporter : How ............................................... .......................................................    

Bill: I was under 20
Reporter : What ................................................ ......................................................... ................
Bill: I got a job providing buffalo meat for the men building the railroad.
Reporter :: How  ............................................. ....................................................... ..........................
Bill: Seventeen months 
Reporter : Later on ................................................. ........................................................ ....................
Bill: Well, I realised that really we would do better to living and working together, rather than killing
each other.
Reporter:What  ........................................... ....................................................... ..................................
Bill: I used it to buy myself some land in Wyoming.
Reporter: Do.. ................................................ .........................................................
.................................
Bill: Oh no! I realise now that we ought to be protecting nature, not destroying it!

The audio recording

Note that there are several small differences between the written text above and the version in the
audio file. These are deliberate, and serve to show synonyms or different ways of expressing the
same thing.  Look out for the differences as you listen to the audio file.

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Revised 2015 . Originally published in Freeway, the intermediate level English newsmagazine.
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Linguapress intermediate English reading

Level:  intermediate
Target readers : teenagers, young adults

Readability - Plain English.

 Flesch-Kincaid Grade level: 9
Reading ease level:  67
Upper Intermediate

CEF level: B2
IELTS Level  5

The new reference grammar

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Selected grammar pages

Verbs in English

Noun groups in English

Word order in English

Reported questions in English

Miscellaneous

Language and style 

Word stress in English

The short story of English

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