Buffalo Bill, Buffalo Bill, Never Missed and Never Will.

Always aims and shoots to kill, and the company pays his Buffalo Bill.

That charming little rhyme has long been associated with one of America's great

mythmakers, a showman by the name of William Cody, but you probably know him better as Buffalo Bill.

Now, trying to pin the exact origin of that little poem is tricky.

The story goes that it was originally composed by some unidentified workers for the Kansas Pacific Railway around the year 1867.

At the time, William Cody was a buffalo hunter near the town of Sheridan, Kansas. He made a living

tracking the still impressive herds of American bison that roamed the plane and selling the

meat to railway workers. Bill had a reputation for being a crack shot and a reliable source for

meat, even during the lean times.

Cody would eventually claim that during his two-year stint as a full-time buffalo hunter,

he killed a remarkable 4,280 animals on the Kansas Prairie.

His railway worker customers were supposedly the first folks

to start calling him Buffalo Bill. Their little rhyme about their favorite buffalo hunter was

apparently so catchy that some of the local papers printed it for posterity. But the American West was filled with characters

with colorful nicknames, and William Cody was far from the only Buffalo Bill out there,

making a name for himself on the frontier. We're told that one day it came to his attention

that a certain William Comstock, a celebrated guide and hunter in his own right, was also using the name Buffalo Bill.

Apparently Comstock, who also lived in Kansas, was not happy that there was some other William traipsing around his home state using a nickname that he felt that he had earned.

So a competition was proposed.

In his autobiography, William Cody would describe the competition like this.

Quote, we were to hunt one day of eight hours, beginning at eight o'clock in the morning.

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