William Frederick Cody, later known as Buffalo Bill, was born in a log cabin in Iowa in 1846, grew up on the plains of Kansas, and served the Union during the Civil War as a trooper with the Seventh Kansas Cavalry. He worked as a trapper, bullwhacker, Pony Express rider, stagecoach driver, and hunter, but became most famous as a civilian scout for the military, guiding troops, finding water and game, trailing Indian war parties, acting as a courier and translator, and fighting alongside soldiers. After General Philip Sheridan appointed him Chief Scout and Guide for the 5th U.S. Cavalry in 1868, he remained on army payrolls for four consecutive years, more than any other scout and guide during the Indian Wars, took part in 19 battles and skirmishes, and received the Congressional Medal of Honor for gallantry in 1872. Later in 1872, Ned Buntline persuaded him to appear on stage as himself, and his success led him to form his own theater group with Texas Jack Omohundro and Wild Bill Hickok. In 1883 he created a two-and-one-half hour arena show featuring Indian people, cowboys, cavalrymen, outlaws and lawmen, sharpshooters, elk, buffalo, and 200 horses, and for the next thirty years Buffalo Bill's Wild West carried the story of America's West to millions around the world. He died in 1917 and was buried on Lookout Mountain near Denver, Colorado. Oakley also stood near important western travel routes and railroad development: the Smoky Hill route to the Colorado goldfields became more practical after Green Russell surveyed a road in 1860, and in 1865 Colonel David Butterfield's Butterfield Overland Dispatch established a stagecoach line between Leavenworth and Denver with stations every 12 miles, including one at Russell Springs south of Oakley, before the Kansas-Pacific Railroad reached Denver in 1870. After the Civil War, the Kansas Pacific advanced westward, reaching Sheridan just west of Oakley by 1868, where a rough railroad camp served buffalo hunters, laborers, outlaws, horse traders, and soldiers, and where Buffalo Bill raffled off his horse Brigham; a buffalo hunting contest between Bill Cody and Billy Comstock is said to have begun 20 miles east of Sheridan. A rifle associated here with Buffalo Bill, nicknamed Lucretia Borgia after Victor Hugo's play, was a .50/70 caliber Springfield model 1866 trapdoor rifle, a converted Civil War musket that used metallic cartridges.