“Pawnee Bill,” Last Link With Old West, Dies In Ranch Home

Famous Frontiersman And Showman Succumbs At Age Of 82

PAWNEE, Okla., Feb 4 (U.P.)-The last of the old West lay dead today in the red stone ranch house atop Blue Hawk Hill.

It was personified in “Pawnee Bill” who died last night on his 2,000-arce ranch in his eighty-second year.

Born. Gordon W. Lillie, he was the last survivor of the doughty frontiersmen—“Buffalo Bill,” Kit Carson, “Deadwood Dick”, “Wild Bill” Hickok, and the other heroes in buckskin who opened up the West.

“Pawnee Bill,” the “White Chief” of the Pawnee Indians, was a dead-shot with rifle or six-shooter, a superb horseman, a showman whose name was known all over the world, and he also was a prime mover of first rate importance in American history.  Largely through his effort, the vast plain which is now Oklahoma was opened to white settlement and became a state.

This hero of a generation of youth that is now middle-aged had been in falling health since 1936 when he was injured in an automobile accident in Taos, N. M., in which his wife, May Manning Lillie, almost as famous as he, was killed.  He spent his last years among the Pawnee Indians, the Indian relics, and the buffalo herd which he had assembled on his ranch.  He expired peaceably in bed; many of his contemporaries had expired at the business end of a six-shooter.

Leader Of  “Boomers.”

“Pawnee Bill” will live in history as the leader of the “boomers” who gathered in thousands in Kansas in the 1870s and ‘80s, clamoring for the Government to open up what then was a vast Indian reservation known as Indian Territory, for white homesteading.  This land had been given the Indians in lieu of the land they had given up, either by force or persuasion, in various states and there was considerable opposition.

But the “boomers” won out at last and on April 22, 1889, some 5,00 of them lined up on the Kansas border, and at a signal rushed into Indian Territory on horseback,  in covered wagons, and afoot to stake out their homesteads.  Some few sneaked across the night before and staked out what they regarded as the best land.  These came to be known as “sooners” because they were “soon or premature.

:Pawnee Bill” was known to his contemporaries as a fine showman who, first alone, then in partnership with Col. William (Buffalo Bill) Cody, toured the country and the world with a wild west show that probably never has been equaled.

“Pawnee Bill” and “Buffalo Bill” retired from the show business in 1912. He bought his ranch here, in this Pawnee country, where in the 1807s he had been the Government agent to the Pawnee tribe, and began assembling the collection of Indian relics which is now one of the finest in the world.  He also began building up his herd of buffalo to save the animal from extinction. 

Article from the Ft. Wayne News-Sentinel dated Wednesday, February 4, 1942. 

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