The fair’s organizers had turned down Buffalo Bill’s request to install his Wild West show on the fairgrounds, so he set up camp next door and made a fortune. Chicago was a world’s fair, so Cody used the opportunity to expand his narrative, renaming the show Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World. And five years later life imitated art: a U.S. Army cavalry regiment sent to wage the Spanish-American War in Cuba, commanded by the fair patron Teddy Roosevelt, named itself after Buffalo Bill’s fictional warriors, the Rough Riders.
