Wild West History in Downtown Orlando – Orange County Regional History Center

by Joy Wallace Dickinson

Pioneer Florida was a lot like the Wild West, so perhaps it’s fitting that an icon of the American frontier – a venerable bison named Barney – left his mark on history and roared down the street for eternity main sandy area of ​​a Florida city, Orlando, long ago 1912.

It happened on October 22, after the evening performance of Buffalo Bill Cody’s traveling show, then the biggest entertainment ever seen in Orlando. Over two performances, Cody’s extravaganza drew a crowd of 10,000, according to the Orlando newspaper. Daily Reporter-Star. This is more than double the town’s population in 1912, which was around 4,000.

American icons

Barney was part of a breed that had nearly disappeared by 1912 – the largest land mammal in North America since the end of the Ice Age. Millions of plains bison, or American buffalo, once lived across much of North America. “No other wildlife species has had as much impact on humans and the ecosystems they inhabited as bison,” notes the National Park Service.

In the 1890s, a study estimated that only a few hundred animals remained, and in 1905 the American Bison Society was formed to help bring them back. Today, about 20,500 plains bison roam in conservation herds, and another 420,000 in commercial herds, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Commission.

Like the bison, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his Wild West show were also American icons. The show’s stops in Florida in 1912 were announced as part of a farewell tour of the “grand old man of the West,” although this was probably said with a wink, one news report noted from Florida. The spectacle was an extravaganza by 1912 standards – the “largest gathering of men and horses ever seen in Florida,” noted one news article, with three trains needed to transport its actors, tents and animals to across Florida, from Tampa to Orlando to Palatka. in Jacksonville.

And, although it now appears to be a period piece, Buffalo Bill’s touring show may well have been the most influential saga in American entertainment, helping to shape popular conceptions of the West and the “cowboy.” until our days. The shows are credited with influencing Walt Disney in his design of Frontierland at the original Disneyland. At Disneyland Paris, “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show” attracted thousands of spectators before it closed in 2020, decades after the original show became the toast of the French capital in 1889.

Born in 1846 in Iowa Territory, William F. Cody experienced many aspects of real life in the American West in his youth. “He herded cattle and worked as a driver on a wagon train, crossing the Great Plains several times,” according to the Buffalo Bill Museum. “He went into fur trapping and gold mining, then joined the Pony Express in 1860.” After the Civil War, Cody joined the United States Army and earned the nickname “Buffalo Bill” as a hunter. While he was still in his twenties, popular novelist Ned Buntline transformed him into a national folk hero, a fictional combination of Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone and Kit Carson, and Cody lived the rest of his life between worlds myth and reality. , one of the American entertainment giants.

By the time he arrived in Orlando, Cody had toured for more than 40 years in combination shows sometimes featuring now legendary characters, including “Wild Bill” Hickok, Annie Oakley and the great Lakota leader Sitting Bull. And if the reports from Orlando were correct, Barney the Buffalo had been with him for more than 30 of those years. Barney might even have been one of the animals Cody took with him on his tours of Europe.

Where a buffalo roamed

However, it was in Orlando that the long life of the great buffalo ended. This happened around 10:30 p.m., after the show’s second performance at the West Livingston Street Fairgrounds. Show workers were trying to get Barney back to the show cars, somewhere near what is now Church Street Station. Whether it was old age or fever that affected poor Barney we will never know, but he broke loose and ran amok down Orange Avenue. Barney headed first to the Kanner store, where a shocked Mr. Kanner was still at work, then to Duckworth, where a gathered crowd feared he would shatter the expensive glass window.

With the ends of their lassos tied to their saddles, four of the show’s wrestlers threw their ropes over him and pulled the old buffalo to “the light on the corner of Guernsey” at Orange and Church, according to the Daily Reporter-Star. There old Barney breathed his last. The wrestlers managed to get him onto a wagon, but he died on the way to the train, perhaps not far from the historic 1889 station that still graces Church Street. At Palatka, the show’s next stop, his skin would be made into a rug, worth perhaps as much as $300, the Reporter-Star» noted the anonymous writer. “It so happens,” the story concludes, that Orlando had its place in “an incident of the disappearance of the Wild West.”

Church Street in Orlando, 1882, courtesy of the State Archives of Florida.

Barney art box

In 2024, the History Center had the chance to collaborate with the City District on its Art Box program. The project showcases the talents of local artists who have painted signal boxes throughout the neighborhood, transforming these everyday structures into works of art that brighten our urban landscape. In our case, that also means providing a history lesson through the talents of artist Kelly Williams-Cramer. On a traffic strip near the intersection of South Street and Orange Avenue, about a block from where he met his fate, Kelly’s art pays homage to his beloved Barney.