William Frederick Cody (Buffalo Bill)

William Cody earned his nickname supplying buffalo meat to Kansas Pacific Railroad crews, reportedly killing over four thousand bison in less than two years — a staggering figure emblematic of the industrial-scale slaughter that devastated the species and, deliberately in some military strategy, undermined the food source of Plains nations resisting U.S. expansion. He served as an Army scout during the Indian Wars before pivoting, with a showman's instinct, to entertainment: his Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, launched in 1883, became the most successful touring spectacle in American history, employing figures including Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull and touring internationally for over three decades. The show packaged frontier violence and Native life as nostalgic pageantry even as the actual frontier it depicted was closing in real time, cementing a romanticized version of the West in the popular imagination that persists today. Cody died in 1917 deeply in debt despite decades of enormous earnings, having spent freely on ventures that rarely matched the show's success.