the late 19th Century. But Buffalo Bill himself never looked backward. "All my interests are still with the west - the modern west," he wrote near the end of his life. He used his fame and public attention as a soapbox for western causes, for the rights of Indians and women, and for conservation. As early as 1879 he cautioned the government to "never make a single promise to the Indians that is not fulfilled." All frontier scouts respected the Indian, he said. "Every Indian outbreak that I have ever known has resulted from broken promises and broken treaties by the government." America was the Indian's heritage, and the Indian had only fought for what was his. In 1894 a woman reporter asked him whether he thought the majority of women qualified to vote. He was caught off guard but answered, "As well qualified as the majority of men." The women in his Wild West were as skilled and courageous as the men. "If a woman can do the same work that a man can do and do it just as well," he said "she should have the same pay." Cody recognized very early that a developer in the West was obligated to be a preserver as well. He has spoken out against the hide-hunters of the 1870s and 1880s for slaughtering the buffalo "cruelly, recklessly." In Wyoming and Colorado he worked to establish game preserves and limit hunting seasons. Gifford Pinchot, noted conservationist and head of the Forest Service for Theodore Roosevelt, lauded him as "not only a fighter but a seer." Cody used his wealth as well as words. Because so few of his investments - in ranching, mining, irrigation, publishing, town building - paid off during his lifetime, he died almost broke. But he had helped his West to make the transition from a wild past to a progressive future. His was the New West, he wrote, "with its cities, drawing upon the mountains for the water to make it fertile, and upon the whole world for men to make it rich."William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody was born i...
