Gordon William Lillie was born on February 14, 1860 in Bloomingdale, Illinois, United States, the oldest of the two sons and two daughters of Susan Ann (Conant) and Newton Wesley Lillie. His mother came of a Boston family. His father, born in Quebec of Scottish parents, had established a successful flour mill in Bloomington.
He received the ordinary education.
At his teens, Lillie worked in the mill in the evenings and on Saturdays. His father wished him to succeed to the business and his mother urged him to become a teacher, but visiting cousins from Kansas, with their tales of Indians, buffalo, and wild game on the Indian Territory frontier, fired him with the hope of going west to make a fortune. His dreams were further fueled by reading of the exploits of such famous plainsmen as William F. ("Buffalo Bill") Cody and James Butler ("Wild Bill") Hickock, as portrayed in Street and Smith's New York Weekly, Beadle and Adams's dime novels, and other favorites of the day. In 1874 fire destroyed his father's mill, and the entire family moved to Kansas and resettled near the town of Wellington. There the boy helped with the chores of their primitive home, taught school for a few months, and made frequent visits to nearby Indian encampments, where he became acquainted with the Pawnees.
Still longing for adventure, Lillie left home at the age of fifteen intending to become a cowboy, but at Wichita became involved in a gunfight in which he was forced to kill his opponent. After acquittal by a coroner's jury, he rode on to visit his Pawnee friends, now removed to the Indian Territory, and stayed nearly a year, working in the Pawnee rock quarry and the government sawmill. During the next five years he led a varied existence: he spent some time in the Cherokee Outlet (later part of Oklahoma) and the Texas Panhandle, killing buffalo and other animals for their hides; held a government job as schoolteacher and interpreter at the Pawnee Agency; and worked as a cattle rancher.
His knowledge of the Pawnee language and customs led in 1883 to his introduction to show business. Buffalo Bill Cody was organizing a new version of his traveling Wild West show and wished to include a group of Pawnee Indians. The federal Indian Commissioner gave his consent if Lillie traveled with them as interpreter and protector, and for several years he toured the country with this and other shows, thus gaining his nickname of Pawnee Bill. In 1888 he launched his own tent show, "Pawnee Bill's Historic Wild West". The show failed after a few months, however, chiefly because of competition from Cody's better-known enterprise.
Returning to Wichita, Lillie took an active role in the Kansas "boomer" movement, seeking to open the unassigned lands of neighboring Indian Territory (later Oklahoma) to white settlers. At the request of the Wichita board of trade, he organized the Pawnee Bill Oklahoma Colonization Company, and when the land was officially opened on April 22, 1889, he led a group of 3, 200 colonists in their run to stake claims. He led a similar group at the opening of the Cherokee Outlet in 1893.
Meanwhile, in 1890, Lillie had revived his Wild West show. For nearly twenty years he spent the summers touring the United States and Canada and the winters in Kansas and Oklahoma. In 1894, at the invitation of King Leopold, he took his show to the international exposition at Antwerp, Belgium, and later toured in Holland and France. After years of sometimes bitter competition from Buffalo Bill's show, Lillie agreed to a merger in 1909, but Cody was erratic in his business methods and the combination lasted only four years, after which the company was disbanded.
Lillie retired to Oklahoma, where he had acquired a 2, 000-acre ranch near Pawnee, and for the rest of his life he devoted himself to the interests of the state he had helped to open. He joined the national effort to save the buffalo from extinction and maintained a large herd on his estate, bred prize swine and cattle, actively supported the local Boy Scout movement, and promoted the building of good highways across the Southwest. Still a showman, he established on his ranch an Old Town and Indian Trading Post that recaptured the romance of pioneer days and attracted many visitors. A few days before his eighty-second birthday he died at his ranch home. He was buried at Highland Cemetery in Pawnee.
Lillie was known mainly for his Wild West show, which became one of the best-paying circus properties in the United States and his short partnership with William "Buffalo" Bill Cody. Lillie also helped in the establishment of an 8, 000-acre tract in the Wichita Mountains as a national game preserve.
At a performance given in Philadelphia Lillie met May Manning, daughter of a physician. They were married on August 31, 1886. Their son, born the following summer, lived only a few weeks. (A son adopted many years later died in an accident at the age of nine. ) Lillie's wife learned to ride and shoot and joined his tent show "Pawnee Bill's Historic Wild West", gaining fame for her riding and marksmanship. In September 1936, shortly after celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary, Pawnee Bill and his wife were injured in an automobile crash. She died three days later.
