About Schmidt|Scout's Rest Ranch, North Platte — Buffalo Bill's House and a Parking Ticket

Warren pulls the Winnebago in at Buffalo Bill's ranch, wanders the house, reads the placards, and collects a parking ticket for his trouble. The location is real and it is one of the best stops on Interstate 80 across Nebraska.

Scout's Rest Ranch, at 2921 Scouts Rest Ranch Road just north-west of North Platte, was William F. Cody's home place. He built the eighteen-room Second Empire house in 1886 with money from the Wild West show and put up an enormous white barn beside it where he wintered the show's stock and rehearsed the acts. Nebraska Game and Parks runs the property now as Buffalo Bill Ranch State Historical Park: the house is furnished and open in season, the barn holds show posters and tack, and there are cottonwood-shaded picnic grounds down toward the river.

Cody spent his life turning the frontier into a paid performance, then retired to a mansion on the prairie. Warren, standing in those rooms with a pamphlet in his hand, is a man trying to work out what his own thirty-two years amounted to.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.