Buffalo Bill, a fake Italian, but a real Freemason

Mussolini, who banned Freemasonry, falsely claimed that the hero of the West was born in Romagna. He didn’t know that he had always been a Freemason.

by Massimo Introvigne

Il Duce wanted to make it Italian. In 1942, the Florentine publisher Nerbini, who had enriched himself thanks to Buffalo Bill by printing more than a thousand popular novels about the exploits of the legendary hero of the West, received surprising instructions from the fascist regime. He should reveal to his readers that the cowboy was actually an Italian immigrant, that his name was Domenico Tombini and that he was from Romagna like Mussolini himself.

The story, which had already been started in 1937, confusing Buffalo Bill with a real Italian immigrant to the United States called Domenico Tambini (not “Tombini”), was false but part of Mussolini’s attempt to preserve in print the American heroes of comic books and pulps. he personally loved, particularly Mickey Mouse, by “Italianizing” them. The full story is told in the new edition of a highly recommended book, “Eccetto Topolino.” Lo scontro culturale tra fascismo e fumetti” by Fabio Gadducci, Leonardo Gori and Sergio Lama (Edizioni NPE, 2022).

One thing Mussolini, who banned Freemasonry in Italy, didn’t know was that Buffalo Bill was a Freemason.

Colonel William Frederick Cody (1846-1917) was born in Le Claire, Iowa, in 1846. By the age of ten, he was already traveling the West carrying messages for pay. At eleven years old, he enlisted as a scout in the federal army of Colonel Albert Johnston (1803-1862), who sought to subdue by arms the Mormons of Utah, who considered themselves independent of the United States and openly practiced polygamy, a scandal for Protestants. America. From there began a long military career that lasted until 1872, during which Cody fought Native Americans but also treated some of them as friends. Killing nearly five thousand bison for the army, for individuals such as Grand Duke Alexei (1850-1908), son of Russian Tsar Alexander II (1818-1881), and occasionally for Native Americans, he won the nickname “Buffalo Bill”.

Awarded a medal for bravery, already famous, Cody makes his living exploiting his legend. With the shows he put on and took around the world, including to Italy, under the name Wild West Show, Cody contributed more than any other to spreading the myth of the American West. Even one of his former enemies, Native American leader Sitting Bull (1831-1890), defeated and arrested by the American army, was “entrusted” to Buffalo Bill as an alternative to imprisonment. Cody took the legendary chef with him to perform at the Wild West Show with the equally famous shooter Annie Oakley (1860-1926).

Scholars of the American West considered Cody an unapologetic apologist for the injustices perpetrated against Native Americans. His more recent biographers explain that the story is more complicated. Although he was certainly not an advocate for Native American rights, Cody spoke with respect for Native customs and religion. He also fought passionately for the causes he believed in, including against slavery and against Mormon polygamy. This last battle was won, but not by Cody alone. Polygamy was officially abandoned by the LDS Church in 1890 and has only been continued to the present day by schismatic groups.

Cody’s sympathy for Native American religion, as a byproduct of the principle that there is one fundamental religion that all humans agree on, and his dislike of Mormons (a bête noire of American Freemasonry at 19^th century) can be linked to his remarkable Masonic career. According to documentation published by American scholars of the Scottish Rite, Buffalo Bill became a Freemason on his 24th birthday, in 1870, in Platte Valley Lodge no. 32, North Platte, under the Grand Lodge of Nebraska.

It took him a year to reach the rank of master because he failed his first exam and had to retake it. But from that moment on, he took off again, rising to the 32nd degree of the Scottish Rite. He was also admitted to parallel Masonic organizations, including the Order of the Knights Templar in 1889 (at Palestinian Commandery No. 13 in North Platte, Nebraska) and the Ancient Arab Order of Nobles of the Mystic Shrine in 1892 at the Tangier Temple in Omaha, Nebraska. The Shrine is an organization whose symbols are “Oriental” and “Arab” and to which an elite group of American Masons belong.

When Buffalo Bill died at the age of 71 in 1917, a dispute arose not only between the states of Wyoming, where he lived, and Colorado, where he had died, over where he should be buried, but also between the State of Colorado and the Freemasons. The latter affirmed that the hero of the West wanted a solemn Masonic funeral. But the state funeral that the governor of Colorado had in mind had to take into account that not all of his constituents liked Freemasonry. So, Buffalo Bill had two funerals. The first was a state funeral, in Denver, and the second, a Masonic funeral at Mount Lookout in Golden, Colorado, where he was buried in the grave four months after the first funeral.

According to the Winter 2010 issue of the “Bulletin of the American Research Society of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite”, it was at the time the largest funeral in American Masonic history, attended by fifteen thousand brothers. and sympathizers and with all the pomp of the rite.

The same source rightly points out that at the time it was also a great place of propaganda for Freemasonry, which, until a few years ago, continued to attract tourists with reconstructions of the event at Mount Lookout. Mussolini probably did not notice – and, busy with the war as he was, he did not organize celebrations for “Domenico Tombini”.