Julia Cody Goodman Family Papers, 1861-1954

Julia Melvina (Cody) Goodman, elder sister of William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, was born on March 28, 1843 in LeClaire, Scott County, Iowa, near Davenport, to Isaac and Mary Ann Bonsel (Laycock) Cody. Julia was one of seven children born to Isaac and Mary. In 1853, Isaac Cody sold his land in Iowa moved his family to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas Territory. After Isaac’s death in 1857, Julia helped her mother take in boarders for needed funds and care for her younger brothers and sisters. In 1862, Julia married James Alvin “Al” Goodman at Leavenworth, Kansas. The next year, she and Al became guardians of Julia’s younger siblings still at home after the death of her mother. Over the next twenty years, Julia and Al had eight children of their own, William, Edward, Elizabeth, George, Josephine, Henry, Finley, and Walter. The couple managed the farm of Joseph Cody at Valley Falls, Kansas before being asked by William F. Cody to manage his Scout’s Rest Ranch near North Platte, Nebraska, which Al and Julia did beginning in either 1883 or 1885. Due to Al’s declining health, he and Julia left the ranch in 1899 and moved into North Platte. Al Goodman died in 1901. In 1902, at William F. Cody’s request, Julia took charge of the Irma Hotel, which Buffalo Bill had opened in the new town of Cody, Wyoming. She ran the hotel for a few years and then built a boarding and room house in Cody. She lived in Cody for nearly twenty years before moving to Southern California in 1922. During the 1920s, she visited various family connections around the country, giving talks about Buffalo Bill Cody during her travels. She was an avid writer of her childhood and young adult experiences, as well as the experiences of her famous brother. In 1925, she co-founded, with other family members, the Cody Family Association for the descendants of Philip Cody, at Beverly, Massachusetts, 1695. The Cody family also organized to commemorate Buffalo Bill in various ways. She died October 26, 1928 in Honolulu, Hawaii and is buried in North Platte, Nebraska.