They Stole Buffalo Bill's House
Tracking the showman and his home from LeClaire, Iowa, to Golden, Colorado.
Categories: Renegade Roads
By: Scott M. Fisher 04/01/2008
They were describing the “theft” of the boyhood home of William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, who was born just outside of town in rural Scott County in 1846. “Young Will” spent the first decade of his life there, living in, among other places, a two-story, frame house that sat on a small bluff overlooking the Mighty Muddy. Today, it is an empty lot with a sign to mark the “crime scene.”
Those river guys are long since dead now, but their unforgiving grudge has intrigued me ever since. The facts are that in 1933, the Union Pacific Railroad purchased that empty two-story house. They then hauled it out to Cody, Wyoming, where the house became one of the initial exhibits at the then-new Buffalo Bill Historical Center. For some Depression-era LeClaire residents, it was their only link to their favorite son who, they recalled, occasionally visited the area with his famous Wild West show when they were kids. They never forgave the railroad for “stealing” the house.
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