”I saw Buffalo Bill just once,” said Nebraska writer and historian Nellie Yost, 86 when we met her. She then recalled the day in 1911 when she saw the Wild West show.
”We drove down from our ranch in McPherson County with our team and wagon; my father, mother, brother and me. It was about 36 miles from our ranch to Hershey, where we met the train that would take us to North Platte. It was loaded with all of the folks it could hold. People were standing in the aisles but we all squeezed in, but the last poeple couldn`t get into the coaches and had to ride in the vestibules.”
At the show grounds, they found their seats in the grandstand, about three tiers up.
”I`ll never forget Mr. Cody,” she said. ”He rode into the arena riding a white horse and was dressed in white buckskins. There was a tub of water right down below from where we were sitting and when he stopped there the people hollered, cheered and clapped. He bowed in all directions, and so did his horse. It was very beautiful.”
”Then he doffed his big white hat, so gracefully, and dismounted. He dipped up a hatful of water and gave the horse a drink and when the horse had all that it wanted, he took another hatful and took a drink himself. I can still see him doing that.”
A gentleman with even more vivid recollections of Buffalo Bill is Ben Elliott, 103, formerly of North Platte and now professor emeritus on the staff of the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Elliott`s parents had settled in North Platte shortly after the Codys, and when the Elliotts returned to their native England for a visit, they called on Cody in London, where he was playing an extended engagement.
”My mother never got over the way he treated them there,” Elliott said. ”He did everything he could to make the visit more enjoyable and provided tickets to his show for my family and all of their English friends.”
The Elliotts dined with Cody, his daughter, Arta, and Annie Oakley in his tent.
Elliott recalls the first time he saw Cody. It was at the Union Pacific depot in North Platte one Sunday afternoon in 1896.
”My dad took me down to watch the Wild West train pull in. Only 2,700 people lived in town at that time, but that day we had 30,000. I can still see Cody stepping off of the train. He had on a blue serge suit and waved his hat at the people. He was a big, stately looking individual, and that was my first closeup view of Bill Cody.”
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Later, Elliott worked a summer at Scout`s Rest Ranch, where he helped harvest sugar beets. When Cody was in town, local boys would gather at the post office, hoping for a dime tip from the Colonel for fetching his mail.
”I`d go in and get it for him and bring it out to his buggy,” Elliott said, ”but he never gave me a dime for my trouble.”
Elliott also recalls one memorable Thanksgiving Day from his childhood:
”My two brothers went out skating on the North Platte River, and they ran into a soft spot in the ice and broke through. It wasn`t deep, but they got a good dunking, and it was colder than blazes. They were close to Cody`s ranch house at Scout`s Rest, and Cody took them in, dried them off and gave them Thanksgiving dinner. Later he brought them home in his carriage, and I remember his standing in the door of our house while my mother and father thanked him.”