06/07/2026
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.5311231742238830&type=3
Welcome to the Showmen's League of America
American and Canadian Chapters
Rich in history and founded in camaraderie, The Showmen’s League of America is a community of showpeople - both men and women - dedicated to service and fellowship. By providing financial aid and memorial services, we promote the mutual welfare of our members and all showpeople, in good times and bad. By maintaining our traditions, we honor the legacy of those who have come before us. By welcoming new members from all areas of the amusement industry, we build a strong future. We invite you to our website and to join us, to share our mission, and join in friendship with some of the greatest men and women in the world.
The Showmen's League of America was founded in 1913, by a group of outdoor showmen meeting at the Saratoga Hotel in Chicago. Buffalo Bill Cody, the Wild West performer, was elected the Club's first President. The Showmen's League of America is the oldest organization of its type in North America.
Buffalo Bill Coty
The Showmen's League of America was founded in 1913, by a group of outdoor showmen meeting at the Saratoga Hotel in Chicago. Buffalo Bill Cody, the Wild West performer, was elected the Club's first President. The Showmen's League of America is the oldest organization of its type in North America.
Buffalo Bill, by name of William Frederick Cody, (born February 26, 1846, Scott county, Iowa, U.S.—died January 10, 1917, Denver, Colorado), American buffalo hunter, U.S. Army scout, Pony Express rider, Indian fighter, actor, and impresario who dramatized the facts and flavour of the American West through fiction and melodrama. His colourful Wild West show, which came to be known as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World, evolved into an international institution and made him one of the world’s first global celebrities.
Early Years
Cody’s father, Isaac, moved his family from their farm near LeClaire, Iowa, on the Mississippi River, to Kansas, where he operated a trading post near the Kickapoo Indian Agency. At the time, Kansas was engulfed in a violent struggle between those who opposed slavery and those who supported it (see Bleeding Kansas). While delivering an antislavery speech, Isaac was stabbed, and he ultimately succumbed to his wounds three years later, in 1857. To support his family, Cody already had begun working at age nine for the Russell, Majors and Waddell freight company, where he made use of his skills as a horseman. In 1857 Cody came to be celebrated as the youngest Indian fighter on the Great Plains after he killed a Native American who helped attack the cattle drive on which Cody was working. On the same cattle drive, Cody met the young Wild Bill Hickok, who intervened on his side in a fight Cody was having with an older man.
Pony Express Rider
Although Cody’s name does not appear in the official records of the Pony Express, there is significant evidence that he served two tours of duty as a rider (including his own claim in his autobiography that he had done so, substantiated in print by Russell, Majors and Waddell’s Alexander Majors). Cody was 14 years old when he began riding for the Pony Express in the spring of 1860, but, because he had already delivered messages between wagon trains for Russell, Majors and Waddell, he was initially assigned a short 45-mile (70-km) run. While some of Cody’s exploits as a rider were the creations of publicity agents, there is no doubt about the courage and dedication he showed while in the service of the Pony Express. Of particular note was a dramatic round-trip ride of some 300 miles (480 km) in Wyoming between Red Butte Station and Pacific Springs Station on which Cody completed not only his own leg but those of missing relief riders, a sleepless odyssey of nearly 22 continuous hours of riding. On another legendary ride, Cody outran Sioux warriors to Three Crossings Station, Wyoming, only to find the station keeper dead and the horses stolen. He narrowly escaped to the next station, but, after arriving there, he gathered and led a group of men against the Indians, surprising them at their camp and retaking the stolen horses. Cody’s cunning was the centrepiece of another often-recounted episode in which, called upon to deliver a large sum of money and fearing that he would be robbed, he hid the currency under his saddle blanket and stuffed paper into his Pony Express mochila (saddlebag). When he was indeed held up at gunpoint, he threw the treasureless mochila at the bandits and then made good his escape.
Scout And Soldier
During the American Civil War (1861–65), Cody first served as a Union scout in campaigns against the Kiowa and Comanche and later (in 1863) enlisted with the Seventh Kansas Cavalry, which saw action in Missouri and Tennessee. After the war he worked for the U.S. Army as a civilian scout and dispatch bearer out of Fort Ellsworth in Kansas (1866–67). In 1867–68 he hunted buffalo to feed construction crews on the Union Pacific Railroad. During this time he is said to have slaughtered some 4,280 head of buffalo, and he soon became known as the champion buffalo killer of the Great Plains.
Cody acquired a reputation not only for accurate marksmanship but also for total recall of the vast terrain he had traversed, knowledge of Indian ways, courage, and endurance. He was in demand as a scout and guide, mostly for the U.S. Fifth Cavalry, throughout much of the government’s attempt to wipe out Indian resistance to settlement of the land west of the Mississippi River (1868–76). In 1872 Gen. Philip Sheridan arranged for Cody and Lieut. Col. George Armstrong Custer to guide Grand Duke Alexis of Russia on a hunting trip that had been set up by U.S. Pres. Ulysses S. Grant. That same year Cody, who frequently took dangerous assignments that others refused, was awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroic actions on April 26 as scout for a contingent of the Third Cavalry that was pursuing Indians who had stolen army horses hear Fort McPherson in Nebraska. (The honour was revoked in 1916 as part of a general review to identify individuals who had received the award but had not technically been members of the military as officers or enlisted men. Scouts were classified as civilians. However, the U.S. Army restored the Medal of Honor to Cody posthumously in 1989.) During his army service, Cody’s reputation continued to grow. In all, he is believed to have engaged in 16 Indian fights, including his much-publicized scalping (July 17, 1876) of the Cheyenne warrior Yellow Hair (erroneously translated as Yellow Hand) in Sioux county, Nebraska, which was hailed as a response to the massacre of Custer’s command at the Battle of the Little Bighorn earlier in the year.
The Wild West Show
Such exploits provided choice material not only for newspaper reporters but also for dime novelists, who transformed the hard-riding, fast-shooting Cody into a Western folk hero. Among these early authors were Ned Buntline (pen name of E.Z.C. Judson) and Prentiss Ingraham. Recognizing the financial possibilities inherent in dramatizing the West, Cody was easily persuaded in 1872 to star in Buntline’s drama The Scouts of the Prairie. Though his acting was far from polished, he became a superb showman, and his audiences greeted him with overwhelming enthusiasm during his 45-year career as an entertainer.
For many years Cody performed during the winter and continued scouting for the army in the summer or escorting hunting parties to the West. In the process, the line began to blur even further between the scout William F. Cody and the legend and entertainer Buffalo Bill. Indeed, as early as his scalping of Yellow Hair in 1876, Cody had consciously worn his flamboyant theatrical clothes into battle, later donning the same outfit to re-create his attack onstage. In 1883 Cody, with the help of producer and partner Nate Salsbury, organized his own Wild West show—a spectacular outdoor entertainment with a cast of hundreds, featuring fancy-shooting, hard-riding cowboys and yelling Indians, along with re-creations of a buffalo hunt, the capture of the Deadwood (South Dakota) stagecoach, and a Pony Express ride. Its stars included Annie Oakley, the famous rifle shot, and, in 1885, Chief Sitting Bull. The show played at Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887 and was staged throughout Europe. In 1893 three million people attended the show (by this point known as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World, which included Cossacks and vaqueros) during its tenure on the Midway adjacent to the official grounds of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. By the end of the 19th century, Buffalo Bill was one of the most-recognized persons in the world.
Final Years
Buffalo Bill continued to perform in his Wild West show until 1916, although at age 71 he often had to be helped onto his horse backstage. While Buffalo Bill’s exhibition remained extremely popular in the United States and abroad, in the end—largely through poor investments, including his purchase of an unproductive gold mine—he lost the fortune he had made in show business. His last public appearance occurred just two months before his death.
Showman Patty Conklin
Patty was a showman’s showman, effortlessly occupying the centre of attention, whatever the crowd. He was elected president of the Pacific Coast Showmen’s Association in 1929, a position he thought would help the business. The following year he met and married an aspiring actress from Nanaimo. Edythe and Patty had one child, James, in 1933. Patty was elected president of the Showman’s League of America for both 1935 and 1936. Not since Buffalo Bill Cody, the League's founder in 1913, had any president been re-elected for a second term.
In 1935, Patty hosted the Showmen’s convention in Toronto. With his eye on the Canadian National Exhibition, he asked the new general manager of the Ex, Elwood Hughes, to act as toastmaster. Major American shows had been providing the midway at the CNE since it had become the biggest annual outdoor exhibition in the world, many years before. Against this competition, Conklin Shows bid and won the midway contract for 1937, partly because of Patty’s expertise and partly because of his rapport with Hughes. After the contract was signed, Elwood and Patty toured Europe to find the best and newest attractions. A polio epidemic hit Toronto that summer and attendance at the Ex fell sharply. Financially, it was a severe setback to both the show and the CNE.
By 1940, Conklin was making a profit on the Ex and in later years would shatter records for midway ride and show grosses for any exhibition, anywhere. In 1940, however, the exhibition grounds were taken over to billet and train troops for Canada’s war effort. The CNE would not resume operations until 1947. In the interim, Patty promoted a huge charity show, the Fair for Britain, at Christie Pits Park in Toronto, and was granted the right to play the coveted prairie A circuit of big fairs, including the Calgary Stampede. The war years were good for Patty. He retired and sold everything in 1946.
Renewal
Elwood Hughes lured Patty out of retirement and back to the CNE for 1947 with an unprecedented ten-year contract. Contract in hand, Patty invested in permanent attractions for the Ex. On a borrowed half million dollars, he built a permanent line up of games, fun houses, rides and shows. In 1953 he had the mighty Flyer built, a classic wooden roller coaster that remained a CNE landmark for 40 years. Midways used to be dominated by shows--freak, girl, athletic, illusion, animal and anything else that imaginative producers could contrive. As patrons have demanded more excitement, rides have taken over. Patty began exploring the festivals of Europe to find spectacular rides. In 1955 he set a new trend in the industry by purchasing right off the Octoberfest grounds North America's first major European spectacular, the Wild Mouse.
Back in the business, Patty concentrated on the Ex and, with brother Frank, on developing the eastern road show. He would never again play the fairs in the west. Under Frank's management and with the help of Jimmy Sullivan’s World’s Finest Shows, Conklin Shows began working a string of solid Ontario fairs and acquired all of the major fairs in Quebec. The show eventually got almost every big fair in the east, with the exception of Ottawa’s Central Canada Exhibition.
At the age of 70, Patty partnered with Harry Batt to produce the "Gayway" for the Seattle World’s Fair. World’s fair midways were notoriously unprofitable. Brother Frank and son Jim tried to talk him out of taking on this huge task at this juncture in his career, but Patty’s persistence won out. With imagination and energy belying his age, he helped make the Seattle midway a winner that has yet to be surpassed at a world’s fair.
Patty sent his son to a private school and then to McGill University in Montreal. Few expected Jim to fit into the rough world that was his father’s home. Jim began working games at Crystal Beach, accompanying his father on scouting trips, learning the fine points of running a road show office, attending the fair conventions and operating a line up of joints at the CNE. In 1963 Jim’s uncle Frank died from the multiple sclerosis that had crippled him for several years. Jim, 30 years old, stepped in to take over Frank's eastern road show operations.
Expansion
Patty survived the 1960s and Jim continued his training. Along with Jim, came Alfie Phillips, who had also apprenticed at the Crystal Beach amusement park. Alfie was another second-generation showman. Alfie Phillips, Sr., after his career as a world-class diver, including both the 1928 and 1932 Olympics, had produced water shows for Patty. Still working the Ex, one of the most respected men in the business, Patty died at 78 in 1970. Jim, Alfie and a roster of loyal and capable senior staff trained by Patty were ready to carry on.
Showmen's Rest in Forest Park, Illinois, is a 750 plot section of Woodlawn Cemetery mostly for circus performers owned by the Showmen's League of AmericaThe first performers and show workers that were buried there are in a mass grave from when between 56 and 61 employees of the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus were interred. They were killed in the Hammond circus train wreck on June 22, 1918, at Hessville, Indiana, (about 5 1⁄2 miles east of Hammond, Indiana), when an empty Michigan Central Railroad troop train from Detroit, Michigan, to Chicago, Illinois, plowed into their circus train. The engineer of the troop train, Alonzo Sargent, had fallen asleep. Among the dead were Arthur Dierckx and Max Nietzborn of the "Great Dierckx Brothers" strong man act and Jennie Ward Todd of "The Flying Wards".
The Showmen's League of America, formed in 1913 with Buffalo Bill Cody as its first president, had recently selected and purchased the burial land in Woodlawn Cemetery at the intersection of Cermak Road and Des Plaines Avenue in Forest Park, Illinois, for its members. Services were held five days after the train wreck. The identity of many victims of the wreck was unknown. Most of the markers note "unidentified male" (or female). One is marked "Smiley," another "Baldy," and "4 Horse Driver."
The Showmen's Rest section of Woodlawn Cemetery is still used for burials of deceased showmen who are said to be performing now at the biggest of the Big Tops. A Memorial Day service is held at Woodlawn Cemetery every year.
Other Showmen's Rests include one at Mount Olivet Cemetery, Hugo, Oklahoma. Hugo is a winter circus home which calls itself Circus City, USA. In Miami, Florida, the largest Showmen's Rest is at Southern Memorial Park where large elephant and lion statues flank hundreds of markers commemorating circus greats and not-so-greats. Tampa, Florida's Showmen's Rest is located close to the Greater Tampa Showmen's Association near downtown.
Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus wreck
Following the wreck of June 22, 1918, the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus had to cancel only two performances: the one in Hammond, Indiana and its next stop Monroe, Wisconsin. This was due in part by the assistance by many of its so-called competitors, including Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus lending needed equipment and performers so that the show could go on. The city of Hammond also joined in to help the surviving circus performers and workers. Many of the city's residents and shopkeepers gave food and clothing as well. Statues of five elephants surround the Showmen's Rest section of Woodlawn Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois. The elephants each have a foot raised with a ball underneath, and the trunks lowered. (Raised trunks are a symbol of joy and excitement; lowered trunks symbolize mourning). The base of the large central elephant is inscribed with "Showmen's League of America". On the others are the words "Showmen's Rest". Some nearby residents say the sounds of ghostly elephants can be heard at night. However, as a note, there were no elephants that were buried there. And for those looking for an explanation for the sounds, Brookfield Zoo is only a few miles away (although no elephants are in captivity at the Zoo as of June 2015)
