Vintage 1974 Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show Ticket 🎟️ North Platte Nebraska Reserved Cushion Seat, Single Colors or All 4

Were You at Buffalo Bill's Wild West in North Platte in 1974? 🎟️ Unused Reserved Seat Show Tickets

Size: 5 1/2" x 1 1/2"; the older, smaller blue ticket 4" x 1 1/2" ~ little to no wear, unused with the stub still attached.

I have a soft spot for a ticket that never got torn. It's a ticket to Buffalo Bill's Wild West - Saturday night at 8:00 P.M., reserved cushion seat, rain or shine, adults five dollars, kids four, tax included, Good Only 1974 - for one of two July Saturdays, the 13th or the 27th, in North Platte, Nebraska. Every one of these came off the press this way and stayed that way: full ticket, adult stub still attached, never handed to an usher.

Pick a color — white, orange, blue or yellow — each one the same show and the same terms, printed on its own color of card. Want one of each instead? The All 4 option gets you exactly that, one ticket in every color, not four of the same. There's also an older, smaller blue ticket on offer, 4 x 1 1/2 inches.

In the middle is a round portrait of Buffalo Bill in black ink inside the fancy Buffalo Bill's Wild West script, with the show terms printed below in bold black and red. The left end has a clever bit of box-office thinking printed on it - ADULT STUB, DETACH THIS STUB TO MAKE CHILD TICKET - so the same ticket worked for a grown-up or a kid depending on where it was torn.

🖨️ Weldon, Williams & Lick, Fort Smith, Arkansas

Run your thumb along the edge and you'll find the printer's name in tiny type: Weldon, Williams & Lick, Ft. Smith, Ark. The firm was founded in Fort Smith in 1898 by Chauncey Lick, O.D. Weldon and George T. Williams - Lick, the company tells it, had come to town answering a help-wanted ad with a watch and $1.47 in his pocket - and its ticket business got its start the way these things usually do — the local opera house needed reserved-seat tickets in a hurry, and somebody had to print them. Each full-size ticket here runs 4 by 1 1/2 inches, about 10.2 x 3.8 cm. That turned into a specialty: by the 1920s the company was printing tickets for the St. Louis Cardinals, and at one point it handled something like 95% of all Ringling Bros. circus tickets. A little reserved-cushion-seat ticket for a Nebraska summer show was well within its wheelhouse. The same Fort Smith company went on to print some 8.8 million tickets for the 2012 London Olympics.

🤠 Buffalo Bill's Actual Hometown

North Platte wasn't borrowing anybody's name for this show. William Frederick Cody was born on February 26, 1846, outside Le Claire, Iowa. He went to work at 11 after his father died, rode for the Pony Express at 15, served the Union from 1863 to the end of the Civil War, and then scouted for the Army in the Indian Wars. He was awarded the Medal of Honor in 1872; it was taken back in 1917 along with 910 others, and Congress gave it back to him in 1989. Cody started Buffalo Bill's Wild West around North Platte in 1883 and made the town his home at Scout's Rest Ranch, where in 1886 he built the big Second Empire house that was for a time the largest in town. He lived there until 1913. It started in 1878 with 160 acres south of the Union Pacific tracks and grew to 4,000, and he had SCOUT'S REST RANCH painted across the roof of the big barn so it could be read from the Union Pacific trains a mile away. Money troubles caught up with him, and late in 1911 he quietly sold Scout's Rest to his Wild West partner, Gordon "Pawnee Bill" Lillie, for $100,000. Nobody knew until 1913, when the Codys finally moved out and went to Cody, Wyoming. The ranch has been a Nebraska state historical park since 1965 and a National Historic Landmark since 2021.

North Platte's rodeo pride goes right back to Cody. Cody Park calls itself the site of the country's first spectator rodeo, his 1882 Old Glory Blowout, and the rodeo world agrees - the ProRodeo Hall of Fame calls that July 4, 1882 show America's first spectator rodeo and the start of the Wild West shows, and in 2008 it inducted North Platte's Buffalo Bill Rodeo. The show itself went everywhere. In 1887 it opened in London at Earl's Court during Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, the first of its trips to Europe, and the Queen came to a command performance. It came home, too: on October 12, 1896, the day before North Platte's Irrigation Fair, the whole Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders paraded right through downtown. The end came hard. On August 21, 1913 the best of its animals and gear were sold off in Denver to Harry Tammen and Frederick Bonfils of the Denver Post and the Sells-Floto Circus, and Cody rode out the 1914 and 1915 seasons with Sells-Floto. The town kept his show alive long after he was gone - Nebraskaland Days started in North Platte in 1968, and by 1970 its Frontier Revue had performers dressed up as Buffalo Bill. North Platte had even built itself a new Wild West Arena in 1972, on ground that once belonged to Cody and his family, near Scout's Rest Ranch. So a Buffalo Bill's Wild West show in North Platte on a Saturday night in the summer of 1974, cushion seats and all, was the town staging its own famous son's show all over again - and not for the first time: it ran the summer before too, in 1973, with a plainer block-letter ticket that cost a little less. Exactly who staged that particular run of shows isn't part of the record.