While the key characters and all dialogue and actions are products of my imagination, many of the names in this book represent real people alive in the fall of 1898. My only addition to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was the story’s shooting victim, Little Elk. In Sedalia, many characters were genuine—Prentice, the police chief; Sheriff J. C. Williams; the mayor, Dr. Overstreet; and the musician Scott Joplin. The ragtime king studied music composition at George R. Smith College and supported himself by playing piano at the Maple Leaf Club, a saloon over Blocher’s Feed Store on Main Street. The music store owner John Stark saw Joplin’s brilliance. He published “Maple Leaf Rag,” which brought fame to Joplin and riches to Stark.
Descriptions from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, better known as the Chicago World’s Fair, are genuine—right down to Citizen Train’s refusal to shake hands. Also true is the Ferris wheel anecdote about a clever woman calming a crazed passenger by putting her own skirt over his head.
While I take many liberties, I try my best to be true to the spirit of the people and of the age. For example, Professor Gentry’s Dog and Pony Show with its baby elephant named Pinto and 150 aristocratic animal actors played Sedalia in September 1898—though the time was actually after the Wild West left town instead of before the big show.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World performed in Hannibal, Missouri, on August 20, 1898, and performed for three nights in Kansas City a month later. The show played Sedalia on Friday, September 23—without Colonel “Buffalo Bill” Cody—and certainly without his wife, Louisa “Lulu” Cody, who was at home in Platte City during the entire period.
The Cody marriage was as stormy as Annie Oakley’s marriage to Frank Butler was harmonious. Buffalo Bill became enamored of actress Katherine Clemmons at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893—and was caught by Lulu—which landed her the deed to their Nebraska home. However, the dust-up didn’t prevent the colonel from engaging in a long-term liaison with Katherine. This indulgence cost him eighty thousand dollars (over twenty million dollars in today’s purchasing power.) The affair ended when Katherine married the financier Jay Gould’s globetrotting yachtsman son, Harold, on October 12, 1898. Katherine must have been sentimental. Along with six other of the colonel’s old girlfriends, she showed up for Bill’s funeral in 1917.
Here’s one final true event. At the home of Charles Koock Sr., 5th Street at Park in Sedalia, guests really were entertained by a musicale on Wednesday evening, September 21, 1898.