He was friends with William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, a one-time fugitive from the law, champion wrestler and African big-game hunter who was willing to go naked and cover himself in elephant dung to get his prize.
He was also friends with the famous before they were famous — Milward Simpson and his sons, Pete and Al, as well as famed Admiral Chester Nimitz and entertainer Arthur Godfrey, among others.
And that’s just a glimpse of the life lived by James Calvin “Kid” Nichols, a successful businessman, rural electricity guru and man with a penchant for helping people out, chewing cigars and buying flashy cars.
Jim Nichols, 88, of Billings remembers him as grandpa with a silver belt buckle with a steer head on it. The steer had rubies for eyes and silver for horns. He would arrive at their Georgia home where Jim’s dad ran one of his grandfather’s veneer mills.
“We would play gin rummy, my mom and dad and him and us kids. I had five brothers,” he said.
His grandfather always won.
Kid Nichols began his life Sept. 23, 1883, in Farnhamville, Iowa. He became a champion wrestler in the state.
By the time he arrived in Cody in 1904, he had blacksmith skills, but was still pursuing his wrestling and was looking for a lumberjack opponent in Marquette, Wyoming. The town site is now under the Buffalo Bill Dam.
When the wrestler was unavailable, he went back to Cody.
Kid Nichols, left, worked as a blacksmith in Cody at Buffalo Bill’s Imra Livery & Barn. Photo taken from the book, “The Candy Kid,” written by Nichols’ daughter, Lucille Patrick. (Courtesy Jim Nichols) 
Stationery used by Kid Nichols to write challenges to opponents for bouts. (Courtesy Jim Nichols) 
A wrestling flier promotes a Kid Nichols’ battle in Cody. (Courtesy Jim Nichols) 
Kid Nichols poses with members of a Chicago youth club he worked with while living in the Windy City. Photo taken from the book, “The Candy Kid,” written by Nichols’ daughter, Lucille Patrick. (Courtesy Jim Nichols) 
James Calvin “Kid” Nichols poses for a photo in his younger days. (Courtesy Find a Grave)
From Bedbugs To Buffalo Bill’s Home
He told a reporter writing for a Buffalo Bill Birthday Souvenir edition published nationally, including the Clay County Progress newspaper in Clay County, N.C., on Feb. 20, 1946, that he got a room in Cody at the Heart Mountain Inn and was driven out by bedbugs.
The next day he moved on to Dad Burn’s Saloon for a room and decided to seek out Buffalo Bill.
He found him at the Irma Hotel bar.
“I presented him with a letter that had been sent to me by my mother telling me to look him up as he had been a school chum of her two older brothers,” Kid Nichols said. “I recall when I walked up and introduced myself, he was very pleased to know that I was a nephew of the Kibbe boys, and immediately he wanted to know where I was staying.”
Kid Nichols said Buffalo Bill insisted he come to his house to stay, but he politely told the colonel that he was just in town for a few days and would be fine where he was at. Nichols said he did not drink at the time and eased himself out of the bar.
When he went back to his room, he found all his possessions gone.
He went to the bar owner to tell him his things had been stolen and was informed that Cody has sent someone over to get his bags and take them to the Wild West showman’s home.
“There (at Cody’s house) I found it and enjoyed some good fatherly advice and hospitality for the remainder of my first stay in Cody,” he said.
Kid Nichols soon become a blacksmith in Cody, but kept up his wrestling on the side.
Friends With The Simpsons
Jim Nichols said his grandfather and future Wyoming U.S. Sen. and Gov. Milward Simpson at some point teamed up. They would take a tent around the region and stage wrestling and boxing matches.
Simpson himself was a heralded athlete and starred in three sports at the University of Wyoming.
The wrestling matches would sometimes go on for three hours. During those years, it wasn’t uncommon for legs or arms to be broken or other injuries to happen during the bouts.
In an oral history on file at the Buffalo Bill Center for the West, former Wyoming State Rep. Pete Simpson confirmed that his dad would open for Kid Nichols, the town’s blacksmith.
“Dad boxed when he was a kid and he boxed preliminary fights on Kid’s ticket when he would do exhibitions or wrestling matches around here,” he said.
Jim Nichols said the story in the family is that anyone who could “pin” Kid Nichols or “knock out” Milward Simpson would get $100.
In 1907, Nichols and another Cody resident were promoting the possibility of an athletic club in the basement of the Cody Drug Co. They advertised a gym furnished with boxing equipment, rowing machine, wrestling machine, parallel bars and more.
“J. C. Nichols will give instructions in wrestling,” the Wyoming Stockgrower and Farmer reported Dec. 5, 1907. “This is a good thing boys and you should all come in. With such as instructor as J. C. Nichols the club is sure to win.”
By 1909, Kid Nichols was doing well and invited a banker from Iowa and his wife, along with his wife and young sons, to go elk hunting that September.
Jim Nichols said his grandfather took them near Yellowstone, and the game was scarce outside the park boundary. His grandfather went into the park and pushed some game out across the boundary.
Without his banker friend who was fishing, Kid Nichols shot three elk — first thinking he had missed one. He was planning to fill his tag and his friend’s with the game. However, he was confronted by armed U.S. soldiers who at that time enforced laws in the park.
They alleged that the elk were shot in the park and he was poaching. Kid Nichols, who knew the boundary, denied it.
A Bad Hunt
The family story recorded in “The Candy Kid: James Calvin ‘Kid’ Nichols” written by his daughter Lucille Patrick, says the armed soldier in charge took Kid Nichols’ pistol away from him and then hit him in the face with a pistol.
Nichols then grabbed his own pistol with one hand from the soldier, grabbed the soldier’s pistol in his other hand and, using the weapon, hit the soldier in the head, knocking him out.
He then shot another soldier in the calf as the uniformed contingent went for their rifles. He removed the bolts from the soldiers’ rifles and took off for a Buffalo Bill-owned camp in the mountains to hide out in a cellar.
His odyssey took him to rancher friend where he hid in a haystack and eventually escaped to Canada.
He got a job in Canadian lumber mills and wrote to his wife.
She gave the letters to the police, Jim Nichols said. He was arrested and sent back to Cody, but escaped and went back to Canada. He eventually reached out to the judge and said he would return if he were promised a fair trial.
As part of the trial, Jim Nichols said the judge visited the crime scene where the bones of the elk still lay along with the cartridge cases from Kid Nichols’ weapon. It proved he was outside the park boundaries.
“They charged him $100 in court costs and turned him loose,” Jim Nichols said.
Meanwhile, his grandfather’s first marriage ended by 1916. The union produced sons, one of them Jim Nichols’ dad. His grandmother had an alcohol problem, he said, and Kid Nichols could no longer deal with that in their relationship.
In the third decade of his life, Kid Nichols took a job with a railroad as a brakeman and was involved in an accident that took off two of fingers. He received a $14,000 settlement.
He gave it to his wife, and she went back to Iowa with the boys, Jim Nichols said.
Kid Nichols and the Mercer he drove. The photo is taken from “The Candy Kid” written by his daughter, Lucille Patrick. (Courtesy Jim Nichols) 
Kid Nichols, right, in a photo with the Iowa State University football team. He had to leave school after an altercation with a wrestling coach over a co-ed, Jim Nichols said. Photo taken from the book, “The Candy Kid,” written by Nichols’ daughter, Lucille Patrick. (Courtesy Jim Nichols) 
The cover to the book written by Lucille Patrick about her father. (Courtesy Jim Nichols) 
Kid Nichols with his sons from his first marriage, taken from the “The Candy Kid” written by his daughter, Lucille Patrick. (Courtesy Jim Nichols) 
The Clay County Progress in Clay County, N.C., printed the story of Kid Nichols’ daughter’s rescue by air. (Courtesy Jim Nichols) 
The Clay County Progress in North Carolina published a Buffalo Bill Birthday Souvenir Edition on Feb. 20, 1946, that contained the story of how Kid Nichols met Buffalo Bill. (Courtesy Jim Nichols) 
Jim Nichols, 88, still treasures the memories of his grandfather. (Courtesy Jim Nichols)
A Great Idea
Now a former great wrestler, Kid Nichols took a job as a salesman for a paper company.
His grandson said one day he saw a bundle of asphalt shingles with paper around them and the shingles all beat up. A light came on. The Kid thought of putting a thin layer of veneer wood over the shingles before wrapping them with wire.
He went to an asphalt shingle convention, sold all 11 companies there on the idea, got them to sign contracts and launched his own business.
He started buying mills in the south to produce the veneer and later plywood. The money started “rolling in,” he said.
“He would eventually have six veneer mills, which eventually became plywood mills in the south,” Jim Nichols said.
The headquarters for Kid Nichols and his business, Nichols and Nichols — by then he had married again — became Chicago. He had an office in the Tribune Tower in downtown Chicago.
But he never forgot Cody.
When the original log Buffalo Bill Museum was built, Nichols supplied logs for the building cut on Carter Mountain, the Cody Enterprise reported July 4, 1927.
Around 1930, he bought the Diamond Bar ranch about 10 miles south of Cody.
The ranch became a home noted for its hospitality and style. In the 1940s, he had an Iowa-style barn built on the property and raised cattle.
In his oral interview for the museum, Pete Simpson said that as he grew up, Cody had no fireworks display on the Fourth of July except for those on Kid Nichols’ ranch.
“He did fireworks off of the pasture down there,” he said.
He also said he remembers seeing famed World War II Admiral Chester Nimitz at the ranch.
“The time we saw him was at Kid Nichols,” he said.
His brother, the late U.S. Sen. Al Simpson, added: “Can’t forget that. After the war he was a national hero.”
The pair had several stories about the Kid.
A Plane Rescue
Another story in the Nichols family was when Kid Nichols’ daughter, Barbara, stepped on a pitchfork sometime in fall 1938. The family thought they had dealt with the wound, but she joined her dad on a hunting trip and got a blood infection.
Jim Nichols said a local rancher who was part of the hunting party rode his horse into Cody and contacted a pilot, Bill Monday, who had a small plane. A doctor rode in from Cody to help.
They put the girl in the plane with the pilot, pointed the plane downhill and tied ropes to the plane that were secured by horses as the engine revved.
“They cut those ropes and plane just shot up in the air and went to Cody,” Jim Nichols said. “My grandpa bought (the pilot) a new plane. There are pictures in Cody somewhere of that rescue.”
Kid Nichols was quoted in the Buffalo Bill Birthday Edition that he knew it was dangerous feat.
“While I knew it was dangerous, I was taking a chance on my daughter’s life and his (the pilot) on the takeoff, I am frank to admit it was a big order and one I wouldn’t give unless it was absolutely necessary,” he said.
Kid Nichols loved automobiles. He bought Cadillacs, owned a Mercer that he designed, a Stutz Bearcat in the 1920s that his wife sometimes drove, Thunderbirds and more.
Jim Nichols said he witnessed his grandfather at the ranch give a new Thunderbird to his Aunt Barbara in trade for the plain station wagon that she showed up with.
He had driven the station wagon up a trail he graded to his cow camp, and it didn’t bottom out. The Thunderbird kept hitting rocks and he was replacing the oil pan too frequently.
During the 1940s, Kid Nichols wanted electricity at the ranch and learned how expensive it would be. So, he worked as an advocate for ranchers and farmers to form rural electric cooperatives across the country and lobbied in Washington for the effort.
Jim Nichols said the story about getting electricity to his ranch is that he unrolled toilet paper rolls from an airplane and dropped them to show utility contractors the route for the poles.
Newspapers in the middle decades of the past century mentioned his name often.
In 1957, Kid Nichols was on a team of hunters with Milward Simpson, Lander rancher Bill Scarlett, and radio and TV star Arthur Godfrey at the annual “one-shot antelope hunts,” the Scottsbluff, Nebraska, Star-Herald newspaper reported Aug. 17.
Family stories about the patriarch also include his purchase of a saddle once used by Pancho Villa during a visit to Mexico, and there are several stories about his exploits in Africa on big game hunts.
Jim Nichols said Kid Nichols once had permission to go into an African preserve that was supposed to be kept for England’s Prince of Wales. The prince had gotten sick, so Kid Nichols asked for permission to go in and hunt.
Ivory Success
His grandfather was after elephant tusk ivory.
He ended up shooting a bull elephant and getting the 10th largest tusks ever taken legally at the time. Nichols said an aunt ended up with them after he died, and before she died she sold them to the Coors family of brewing fame.
“But the way he got that elephant to get close to him, he did what his guide told him to do,” Jim Nichols said. “He took off all his clothes and covered himself in elephant (dung) so he would not smell and walked right up on him.”
Kid Nichols died in 1962 after getting cancer of the esophagus.
Jim Nichols said that his grandfather loved to chew on cigars. His grandson said while he never quit on anything in his life, the cancer brought him to submission.
At Saint Joseph hospital in Denver, Nichols said the story is that a priest came into his room and asked if he wanted to pray to Saint Joseph. His grandfather said he would skip the saint.
“All my life I’ve dealt with the head man,” Kid Nichols said. “We’re not praying to Saint Joseph, we’re praying to God.”
Jim Nichols said his grandfather wanted his remains placed on Rattlesnake Mountain outside of Cody.
His body was cremated, and Jim Nichols’ dad and two half-sisters got a small plane to fly over the mountain. The weather was bad and they “just poured him out the window.”
“That’s what he wanted,” Jim Nichols said. “I am just so proud to have him as a grandpa. Who can top that?”
Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.
