In Buffalo Bill country, they like their guns: Cody, Wyoming, offers a taste of the Wild West
The embodiment of the American frontier’s lawless, gun-slinging past, present-day Cody would make its founding father proud
Spend some time in the Old West town of Cody, Wyoming, and you begin to understand why Americans are so attached to their firearms.
I find myself standing in an indoor shooting range, earmuffs in place, plastic safety glasses covering my eyes and a muzzle-loaded .50 Kentucky Flintlock musket pressing into my shoulder. Energy zings through my body as I line up the sights, hold my breath and pull the trigger. Black powder ignites with a bright orange flame, filling the air with the smell of gunpowder smell. Smoke spews forth. Bullseye.
“Some people pull the trigger, scream, then drop the gun,” says Scott McEndree, instructor at the Cody Firearms Experience. That’s why he puts just one bullet in a gun the first time a visitor shoots. As he loads six rounds into my next weapon, a Colt 1873 single-action army revolver, I realise I’ve passed the not screaming test.
Wyoming is far, both geographically and politically, from cultural centres such as New York and Los Angeles. The population of the western state’s biggest city is less than 60,000. Self-sufficient people who prize the Second Amendment (which protects of the right to bear arms), big skies and a lot of space are drawn to the United States’ least populous state.
William F. Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill, was born in 1846. He delivered mail for the Pony Express, served as an army scout and earned his nickname by shooting dead more than 4,000 buffalo, to feed the men building the Kansas Pacific Railroad.
