In a sketch from Harper's Weekly, Comstock (left) alerts fellow mounted scout Edmund Guerrier and two couriers during the 1867 Hancock Expedition. (Weider History Group Archive)

Custer described Comstock as ‘perfect in horsemanship, fearless in manner, a splendid hunter and a gentleman by instinct, as modest and unassuming as he was brave’

You could see it in his eyes. There was nothing plain about plainsman William Averill “Medicine Bill” Comstock, grandnephew of novelist James Fenimore Cooper, favorite scout of George Armstrong Custer in 1867 and onetime friendly rival of the infinitely more famous Buffalo Bill Cody. Comstock never played up his kinship to Cooper, creator of frontiersman Nathaniel “Natty” Bumppo of the Leatherstocking Tales. Yet, like Bumppo (aka “Hawkeye”), Comstock chose to live as a fearless warrior who often dressed in buckskins and moccasins. Several companions thought he was half Indian, and Comstock did nothing to dispel the notion. He was a man of mystery and contradictions, but all who knew him agreed about his appearance: small in stature, wiry as whip leather and dark in coloring, with long hair tucked beneath a wide-brimmed sombrero and eyes that could pierce like an arrowhead.

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W.E. Webb, writing in the November 1875 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, recalls the first time he saw the scout, standing in the doorway of a west Kansas stagecoach station, “He leveled those shining eyes at me with the precision a man would have used with field-glasses….I felt that I had been photographed and could be hunted the world over by him did he ever have occasion.” The best surviving photograph (at left), a carte de visite found among the papers of an army surgeon Comstock befriended at Fort Wallace, Kansas, supports this observation; the eyes staring back are arresting and challenging, the face oddly contemporary.

Comstock not only looked the part of a rugged frontiersman but also had a catchy frontier nickname—“Medicine Bill,” a moniker likely acquired during his pre-scouting days as an Indian trader. Like many aspects of his life, there are several versions of its origin. The artist and Harper’s Weekly correspondent Theodore R. Davis says Arapahos gave Comstock the name after he amputated a tribesman’s rattlesnake-bitten finger, saving the man’s life. Private William Carney of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry told it this way: “One day a young Sioux squaw, while trying to catch a rattle snake, got bit on the finger. Bill, who was standing close by, without a moment’s hesitation, grabbed the wounded finger and bit it off, slick and clean. From this time he was called Medicine Bill.” Either way, the name stuck. He was also called “Will.”

Sometime after he became an Army scout, Medicine Bill squared off against William Cody, who bore an even catchier sobriquet, “Buffalo Bill” (see “Living the Legend: Super Scout Buffalo Bill” in the February 2009 Wild West). Cody de-scribed their famous buffalo-shooting contest in his 1879 memoir, The Life of Hon. William S. Cody: Known as Buffalo Bill, the Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide. Cody, who was hunting buffalo to feed the hungry men building the Kansas Pacific Railway, had heard about the chief of scouts at Fort Wallace. “Billy Comstock….had the reputation, for a long time, of being a most successful buffalo hunter, and the officers in particular, who had seen him kill buffaloes, were very desirous of backing him in a match against me,” Cody wrote. And so the game was set: The winner would be he who shot the most buffalos from horseback in an eight-hour period. The wager was a hefty $500, but the stakes for Cody were much higher. His celebrated moniker hung in the balance.

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