I remember…slowly driving up Lookout Mountain outside Denver, an ice storm had passed through the night before, but that wasn’t about to stop me. Once on the summit, I was the only one there and my feet occasionally slipped as I walked the final little trail leading to the grave of Buffalo Bill Cody. The evergreens and vegetation were covered in frost crystals and the morning mist was so think you could only see thirty feet in the distance.
Quietly approaching my favorite western hero for the first time, I was enveloped in a cloud and I sat on a bench for fifteen minutes feeling like it was just the two of us, high on top of a mountain, alone.
When I headed back to the car, the museum employee had arrived, and after breaking open the door since the lock had been frozen shut, he let me wander around the displays as long as I liked. I happened upon a framed letter written by Cody to his foster son, Johnny Baker, the man who had founded this museum.
Buffalo Bill had lost his own son to typhoid and back in his hometown of North Platte, NE this little boy named Johnny just kept following him around, idolizing him, so Cody took him into his life and they were like father and son up until Cody’s death. According to Annie Oakley, Johnny was one of the few people who could give her a run for her money with a Winchester rifle.
I almost felt I was intruding as I read the letter, it was that personal. In a tender, fatherly manner Cody wrote something to the effect of, “…you are as much my son as if you were blood and I love you for being you.”
I used to imagine as a child that if I ever met Cody, he would put his hand on my shoulder and teach me how to shoot, how to ride and sneak me drinks when he’d go into a saloon.
“Here, put some hair on your chest.” he’d say. Because I had read the story of Johnny Baker, I knew that’s what he had done for Johnny.
To me, life could be filled with slap on the back adventures and love.
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