A bronze sculpture of William 'Buffalo Bill' Cody

By Walter Winans (American, 1852-1920)

Footnotes

Walter Winans (1852-1920)
The son of William L. Winans, he was born and educated in St. Petersburg, his father and uncle being involved in building the Russian railway network, the basis of the family's fortune. He moved to Kent on his eighteenth birthday, and spent most of his life in Europe. A highly gifted shooter, and possibly one of the most famous pistol shots of the Edwardian period, he first came to public notice at the 1899 N.R.A. Imperial meeting at Bisley, where he made sixteen bull's-eyes in succession in a revolver competition, and was revolver champion in five successive years. Webley's advertising for the Webley-Fosbery revolver incorporated two targets shot by Winans, showing both his accuracy and the speed of the revolver; indeed, he was reputed to be able fire one round per second with comparable accuracy to a single-action revolver fired at half that speed. He also sung its praises in his own book 'The Art of Revolver Shooting' (1901), the first of his four works on shooting. When at Bisley he would stay at Elcho Lodge, flying the star spangled banner over the Camp. He won two Olympic medals for Running Deer competitions; a gold at the 1908 Olympics, and a silver four years later, and also made a highest possible score during the Imperial meeting of 1920. He was also a gifted sculptor and painter, winning a gold medal for his sculpture, American Trotter, at the 1912 Olympics. He had a large stud farm in Vienna, and was a member of several Imperial Russian orders, as well as the Imperial St. Petersburg Yacht Club. A prolific hunter, at one time he had more hunting rights in Scotland than any other individual, covering some 250,000 acres. A keen horseman, he died of heart failure during a trotting match at Parsloe Park in Essex, aged 68, only a few weeks after achieving his perfect score on the Running Deer.

'Buffalo Bill's Wild West' came to England in 1887 and 1891 with much publicity on both occasions, and it is possible that Winans created this and another sculpture after seeing the first tour at Earl's Court