Natty Bumppo probably would have shunned such mass slaughter—he shot only what he needed to survive—but a Plains scout made his living largely by reputation. Comstock’s weapon of choice was his 16-shot Henry rifle, while Cody was armed with his beloved Lucretia Borgia, a Springfield Model 1866 .50-caliber breechloading rifle known on the frontier as a needle gun. “He could fire a few shots quicker than I could, yet I was pretty certain that it did not carry powder and lead enough to do execution equal to my caliber 50,” Cody wrote.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Wild West magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

As it turned out, he was right. Buffalo Bill won the contest with 69 kills, while Medicine Bill finished with 46. Other contemporary references to this event are nonexistent, although Cody said the railroad ran a special excursion train from St. Louis for more than 100 spectators, including Cody’s wife and infant daughter, and champagne cocktails were enjoyed by contestants and onlookers alike. The Kansas Historical Quarterly in its summer 1957 issue placed the shoot-off in Logan County, some 2 ½ miles west of Monument, Kan.

Cody, like Comstock, would soon become a chief of scouts, but unlike Medicine Bill, Buffalo Bill would also be a top showman and self-promoter and live a long life. Cody was a notable exception in the scouting profession; Army scouts on the Plains were often shadowy characters. As Custer noted in his memoir, My Life on the Plains, a wise officer relied on his scout’s skills but did not inquire too deeply into his personal life. “Who they are,” he wrote, “whence they came or whither they go, their names even…are all questions which none but themselves can answer.”

This was especially true of Comstock, Custer’s guide during the lieutenant colonel’s early Indian-fighting days in Kansas. Comstock’s star was on the rise in the summer of 1868, after he dodged a murder rap, but he was not destined for greater fame and fortune. That August the plainsman, still only 26, was gunned down on the plains of western Kansas, his body left to rot in the sun. Today, just over 140 years after his death, it’s possible to visualize the scout who resembled Natty Bumppo, but it’s impossible to truly know this elusive son of the West who made such a strong impression on all who met him.

Contrary to his carefully crafted Western/Indian image, Comstock was born in Michigan in 1842, the son of a prosperous Michigan lawyer and state legislator who had built a fortune in Chicago and Detroit with Indian and military supply trade. Comstock’s mother died when he was 4, his father suffered a reversal of fortune, and young Will was sent to live with relatives. His older sister, Sabina, eventually took him in, perhaps even before her marriage to prominent lawyer Eleazer Wakeley in 1854. Three years later, when Will was 15, Wakeley was named district judge of Nebraska Territory, and the family moved to Omaha. In 1860 a census enumerator found the 18-year-old Comstock working as an Indian trader in Nebraska Territory with two employees and $500 in property. It was likely during this period Comstock gained his knowledge of native culture that later would serve him so well.

In the fall of 1865, Comstock scouted briefly for the Army at Fort Halleck (in future Wyoming), then moved to western Kansas, settling on what came to be known as Rose Creek Ranch. Its meadows produced fine hay—a valuable commodity in this arid, forage-sparse country—which Comstock sold to the newly established Fort Wallace for $20 to $30 per ton. At 200 to 300 tons per year, the scout had a good thing going. But business success was not enough for the adventuresome young man. By August 1866 he had become chief of scouts at Fort Wallace, the westernmost and most Indian-troubled of the Smoky Hill Trail posts. He held that position until death.

Comstock was popular with most everyone at the fort, from the new commander, Captain Myles Keogh of the recently formed 7th U.S. Cavalry, to a canine companion named Cuss, described by correspondent Theodore Davis as an “evil-looking dog.” The post surgeon, Theophilus H. Turner, roamed the prairies with Comstock, hunting and collecting fossils. Probably with Comstock’s help, Turner recovered dinosaur vertebrae in a ravine near an old Indian camp and alerted scientist friends back East. Eventually the vertebrae, determined to belong to an Elasmosaurus platyurus (the longest of the marine saurians discovered to that time), were shown at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to