{"id":62,"date":"2008-02-26T09:29:11","date_gmt":"2008-02-26T15:29:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs2.davenportlibrary.com\/sc\/?p=62"},"modified":"2014-01-15T15:50:48","modified_gmt":"2014-01-15T21:50:48","slug":"happy-birthday-buffalo-bill-from-your-biggest-fan-samuel-f","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/sc\/2008\/02\/26\/happy-birthday-buffalo-bill-from-your-biggest-fan-samuel-f\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy Birthday, Buffalo Bill! From your biggest fan, Samuel F."},"content":{"rendered":"

As every Buffalo Bill-ophile should know, William F. Cody<\/strong> was born in (or rather, near) LeClaire, Iowa on February 26, 1846.<\/p>\n

\u00a0So, to celebrate the birth of this illustrious Scott County native son, why not visit the library and read up on Buffalo Bill’s famous exploits?\u00a0Or this weekend, visit the Buffalo Bill Museum<\/a> in LeClaire!<\/p>\n

\u00a0However, we don’t necessarily recommend going as far as Samuel Franklin Cody<\/strong>, the Davenport native who was born a Cowdry in 1863, but changed his name to emphasize how much he looked like the famous Buffalo Bill.\u00a0 He actually rode with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show as a substitute for the great man, and in 1889, he left America to establish a Wild West Show in England.<\/p>\n

\u00a0While he was there, however,\u00a0Samuel’s\u00a0interests turned to\u00a0flying machines.\u00a0 He became Chief Kite Instructor to the British Army Balloon Factory in 1902 and began working on\u00a0a winged machine powered by a 50 horsepower engine.\u00a0\u00a0On October 16, 1908, Cody flew his plane a quarter mile in the first powered sustained flight in England,\u00a0becoming \u00a0Britain’s answer to the Wright Brothers, who only beat him to it by 5 years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Cody continued to work on his planes, including an enormous biplane, the Flying Cathedral,<\/em> and became one of the country’s best pilots.\u00a0 Flying in the early days was a dangerous business, even for an expert like Samuel.\u00a0 On August 7, 1913, while he was testing his new plane, the Cathedral VI<\/em>,\u00a0 it broke up in flight and crashed.\u00a0\u00a0Samuel F. Cody\u00a0was buried in a London military cemetery and his funeral was attended by 50,000 people–a fitting goodbye for the man considered by many to be the father of British aeronautics.<\/p>\n

The Davenport newspapers reported his death, although from a much different perspective: The Daily Times<\/em> said that Samuel had been a good friend of Buffalo Bill and that his uncanny resemblance to the great man had led him to a career in the Wild West Show.\u00a0\u00a0Of his feats of aviaton, the article simply states that\u00a0he had\u00a0also been a flyer and had died in an airplane\u00a0crash in England.<\/p>\n

So, if you\u00a0already know\u00a0all about Buffalo Bill, why not\u00a0learn more about\u00a0his greatest fan–not to mention England’s famous aviator?\u00a0 We can supply newspaper articles and books, including\u00a0Colonel Cody and the Flying Cathedral: the Adventures of the Cowboy who Conquered the Sky<\/em> (Jenkins, 2001).<\/p>\n

And go ahead and have two pieces of cake–one for an American Legend, and one who stepped out of the Legend’s shadow to create a legacy of his own.\u00a0 Both from Scott County!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As every Buffalo Bill-ophile should know, William F. Cody was born in (or rather, near) LeClaire, Iowa on February 26, 1846. \u00a0So, to celebrate the birth of this illustrious Scott County native son, why not visit the library and read … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[252,340,341,339],"class_list":["post-62","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-history","tag-aviation","tag-buffalo-bill","tag-samuel-franklin-cody","tag-william-f-cody"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pd0CXc-10","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/sc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/sc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/sc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/sc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/sc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/sc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5174,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/sc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions\/5174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/sc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/sc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/sc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}