Mussolini, who outlawed Freemasonry, falsely claimed the hero of the West was born in Romagna. He didn’t know he was a lifelong Freemason.
by Massimo Introvigne
Il Duce wanted to make him Italian. In 1942, the Florentine publisher Nerbini, which had grown rich with Buffalo Bill by printing more than a thousand popular novels about the exploits of the legendary hero of the West, received some surprising instructions from the Fascist regime. He should reveal to his readers that the cowboy was actually an Italian immigrant, his name was Domenico Tombini, and he was from Romagna like Mussolini himself.
The story, which had already been launched in 1937, confusing Buffalo Bill with a real Italian immigrant to the US called Domenico Tambini (not “Tombini”), was false but was part of Mussolini’s attempt to keep in print American heroes from comics and pulps he personally liked, including Mickey Mouse, by “Italianizing” them. The full story is told in the new edition of a highly recommended book, “Eccetto Topolino. Lo scontro culturale tra fascismo e fumetti” by Fabio Gadducci, Leonardo Gori, and Sergio Lama (Edizioni NPE, 2022).
One thing Mussolini, who outlawed Freemasonry in Italy, did not know was that Buffalo Bill was a Freemason.
Colonel William Frederick Cody (1846–1917) was born in Le Claire, Iowa, in 1846. At the age of ten, he was already running around the West carrying messages, for a fee. At eleven, he enlisted as a scout in the Federal army of Colonel Albert Johnston (1803–1862), who sought to subdue with arms the Mormons of Utah, who considered themselves independent of the United States and openly practiced polygamy, a scandal for Protestant America. From here began a long military career that lasted until 1872, during which Cody fought Native Americans but also treated some of them as friends. Killing nearly five thousand bison for the army, for private individuals such as Grand Duke Alexei (1850–1908), son of Russia’s Tsar Alexander II (1818–1881), and occasionally for Native Americans, he earned the nickname “Buffalo Bill.”
Discharged with a medal for valor, already famous, Cody made a living by exploiting his legend. With the shows he put on and took around the world, including Italy, under the name Wild West Show, Cody contributed more than any other to spreading the myth of the American West. Even a former enemy of his, Native American chief Sitting Bull (1831–1890), defeated and arrested by the U.S. Army, was “entrusted” to Buffalo Bill as an alternative to being jailed. Cody took the legendary chief with him to perform in the Wild West Show together with the no less famous gunfighter Annie Oakley (1860–1926).
Scholars of the American West used to regard Cody as an unashamed apologist for the injustices perpetrated against Native Americans. His more recent biographers explain that the story is more complicated. While he was certainly not an advocate for Native American rights, Cody spoke with respect of native customs and religion. He also fought passionately for causes he believed in, including against slavery and against Mormon polygamy. The latter battle was won, although not by Cody alone. Polygamy was officially discontinued by the LDS Church in 1890 and was continued to the present day only by schismatic groups.
Cody’s sympathy for Native American religion, as a by-product of the principle that there is a fundamental religion on which all humans agree, and his aversion to Mormons (a bête noire of American Freemasonry in the 19th century) may be linked to his remarkable Masonic career. According to documentation published by American Scottish Rite researchers, Buffalo Bill became a Freemason on his 24th birthday, in 1870, in the Platte Valley Lodge no. 32, North Platte, under the Grand Lodge of Nebraska.
It took him a year to reach the rank of master because he flunked his first exam and had to retake it. But from then on he went on a roll, rising to the 32nd degree of the Scottish Rite. He was also admitted into parallel Masonic organizations, including the Order of Knights Templar in 1889 (at Palestine Commandery no. 13 of North Platte, Nebraska) and the Ancient Arabic Order Nobles of the Mystic Shrine in 1892 at Tangier Temple in Omaha, Nebraska. The Shrine is an organization whose symbols are “Oriental” and “Arabic” and to which an elite group of American Masons belong.
When Buffalo Bill died at the age of 71 in 1917, a dispute arose not only between the states of Wyoming, where he lived, and Colorado, where he had died, over where he should be buried, but also between the State of Colorado and the Freemasons. The latter argued that the hero of the West desired a solemn Masonic funeral. But the state funeral the Colorado governor was thinking of had to take into account the fact that not all his voters liked Freemasonry. So, Buffalo Bill had two funerals. The first was a state funeral, in Denver, and the second a Masonic funeral on Mount Lookout in Golden, Colorado, where he was laid to rest in the tomb four months after the first funeral.
According to the Winter 2010 issue of the “Bulletin of the American Research Society of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite,” at the date this was the largest funeral in American Masonic history, in the presence of fifteen thousand brothers and sympathizers and with all the pomp of the rite.
The same source rightly points out that at the time it was also a great propaganda spot for Freemasonry, which until a few years ago continued to attract tourists with reenactments of the event on Mount Lookout. Mussolini probably didn’t notice—nor, busy with the war as he was, did he organize celebrations for “Domenico Tombini.”
