“Once Upon a Time” is a new column that journeys back through Central Florida’s past to uncover overlooked, surprising, and downright remarkable moments that deserve to be dusted off and shared once again. Each installment dives into a notable event in the region’s rich cultural tapestry: forgotten roadside attractions, frontier-era dramas, oddball characters, pioneering innovators, and the everyday lives that shaped communities across Orange, Seminole, Polk, and Lake counties.
On the night of October 22, 1912, downtown Orlando became the unlikely stage for a dramatic and unforgettable incident when a veteran bison named Barney the Buffalo escaped from Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, which used to feature a “stampede” of the animals being shot at (with blanks) by cowboys in the performance. Watch an excerpt of a PBS documentary by Ken Burns above to get a look for yourself.
The legendary traveling show had just wrapped its second performance at the fairgrounds on West Livingston Street when Barney, said to have been with the show for over three decades, broke free during the late-night loading of animals. By then, Barney had become one of the last remaining buffaloes in the troupe, a living symbol of a vanishing American frontier.
Barney barreled through downtown streets, startling residents and business owners alike. Eyewitnesses reported seeing the massive animal barge into Kanner’s Dry Goods Store before brushing up against the plate-glass windows of Duckworth’s department store. The chase continued until handlers finally lassoed the elderly buffalo near the intersection of Orange Avenue and Church Street. Exhausted and unwell, Barney was loaded onto a cart, but he collapsed and died shortly afterward, never making it back to the circus train he’d worked so hard to escape.
The incident quickly became part of local legend. At the time, Orlando had a population of just over 4,000 people, and the unexpected visit from the aged buffalo left a lasting impression. Though the exact cause of Barney’s death, whether illness or simply the weight of years, is unclear, many in the community saw his demise as symbolic: the literal death of the Old West playing out on the streets of a modernizing Southern town.
Over a century later, Barney’s memory lives on. In 2024, local artist Kelly Williams-Cramer (Instagram) honored the buffalo’s final journey with a mural on a traffic control box a couple of blocks away from the very intersection where he fell (City District Main Street had already given the box at Orange and Church to someone else). The piece has become a point of quiet reflection for passersby. Additionally, the Orange County Regional History Center has chronicled his story in their Historic Animals of Central Florida series, helping preserve Barney’s tale as both a local curiosity and a metaphor for cultural transition. Joy Wallace Dickinson also wrote a fantastic in-depth piece on the museum’s blog, HERE, that’s definitely worth a read.
Now, what if we had a little plaque embedded in the ground to commemorate Barney for real?
