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Cody liked to shoot his bison from a horse’s back, galloping close to the herd and lung-shooting them at very close range. For this, a light powerful rifle was his weapon of choice. A Winchester 1873 was especially well liked, as was a Spencer carbine.

Cody smiled when he named his favorite buffalo gun: “Lucrezia Borgia,” a breechloading 50-caliber Springfield that was special to him. With it he slew 4,250 animals in a single year. (The real Lucrezia Borgia, a sixteenth-century Italian socialite, had an equally bloody reputation.) The Indians had a nickname for Cody’s Lucrezia. To certain red men, she was known, affectionately or fearfully, as “Shoot Today – Kill Tomorrow.” When Buffalo Bill and the West he knew were both gone in 1917, Lucrezia Borgia remained draped across a set of elk antlers at the ranch, next to the knife Cody used to kill Yellow Hand.

When Cody died, the “real” Old West died with him. Today, we’re fortunate that the recollections of those who really had “been there, done that” have survived in the yellowing pages of the old outdoor literature. The witty Chauncey Thomas, the orator most capable, delivered a succinct but sufficient eulogy for this unique period in American history: “The Old West is dead, and the frontier six shooter is a relic. Where the Indian roamed we have the suffragette; we run short of carfare instead of cartridges, and instead of pulling the .45, we are pulled by the 5:40.”