Authors: Roberta Bernstein
Date Submitted: May 31, 2001
Article Type: Journal

Samuel Franklin Cody (no kin to Buffalo Bill) was a brash cowboy and Wild West showman whose outrageous feats on horseback paled next to his triumphs of self-promotion. That he went on to become a British aviation pioneer, buried at the age of 46 with pomp and circumstance in a British military cemetery, is a largely forgotten story carefully reconstructed in no-frills prose by Garry Jenkins, a London journalist. He does justice to a man whose ‘determination and dauntless courage’ were noted by no less than King George V.

Cody began as a cowboy on the Texas-to-Montana cattle drives of the mid-1880s, heading east in l888 to perform as a cowboy and pistol shot in a Wild West vaudeville show. Fed up with the lack of respect those shows garnered, he headed for Europe,where his eccentric frontier swagger stuck out.

Settling in London, he turned his inventiveness, resourcefulness and sense of adventure to experiments in flight, first with balloons, then with man-lifting kites and finally with planes he designed, built and flew, and with which he went on to set British aviation records.

PDF Link: Journal Issue