Con-man Harold Hill, after being run out of Illinois, in The Music Man,
1962. Time for another Marathon Pundit travel series. In August I traveled to Iowa--which will be the focal point of much of the nation when the 2012 presidential campaign begins. On Wednesday.
Iowa of course isn't that far from Morton Grove, just a two hourdrive west on Interstate 88, the Ronald Reagan Memorial Highway.
I began my last travel series, Four Corners Furtherance, with a Buffalo Bill Cody post, I will do the same here.
The great showman, Indian Wars scout, buffalo hunter, and Pony Express rider was born in 1846 in a four-room log cabin near LeClaire, Iowa in Scott County, near the Quad Cities. The cabin no longer stands and the site is now a cornfield. I learned that in LeClaire's Buffalo Bill Museum, which is nicely situated in the center of town on the banks of the Mississippi. The museum also has exhibits dedicated to bridge engineer and Civil War ironclad builder James Buchanan Eads, as well as James Ryan, the inventor of the flight recorder. But the museum was a disappointment--there wasn't a lot of Buffalo Bill stuff there. Ryan was a native of LeClaire, I wasn't able to ascertain Eads' link to Iowa, other than members of his family lived in the Hawkeye State.
But I did get directions to the Cody Homestead, via the Cody Trail, at the museum. Buffalo Bill's father Isaac managed a 600 acre farm from there. The home, built with native limestone, still stands--albeit with significant alterations. Buffalo--what else?--graze nearby. I didn't pay the $2 entry fee to get inside--I was in a cheap mood after leaving LeClaire. Buffalo Bill and his sister Julia attended school in a log cabin, a shack really, near the limestone beauty. A reconstruction of the school stands nearby and is pictured on the lower right. The Codys also owned a frame house in LeClaire--the home still stands--but in Cody, Wyoming. It was moved there in 1933.
Like many pioneers, Cody's father was restless--he moved the family to Kansas Territory in 1854. It was in Grasshopper Falls where Isaac was stabbed after denouncing slavery in "Bleeding Kansas." Three years later the wound was listed as a factor in his death from pneumonia. Nine years later his mother, Martha, died of tuberculosis.
Next: Pike's Peak
Buffalo Bill posts:
- Buffalo Bill's gravesite
- Buffalo Bill's Scout's Rest Ranch
- July 4, 1882: Buffalo Bill Cody and the birth of the rodeo
Travel series:
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