Wales’ connection to Buffalo Bill’s sidekick Nathan Salsbury

Prof McVeigh said, although already distant, Salsbury liked to boast of his Welsh lineage at a time when many immigrants to the United States preferred to distance themselves from their British ancestry.

“Nate traced his patrilineal Welsh ancestry to the ‘Salusbury’ family of north Wales, specifically the family seat of Lleweni Hall in the Vale of Clwyd, located near the market town of Denbigh.”

He added that Salsbury’s great-great-great-grandfather William, born in Denbighshire about 1622, emigrated to New England in the 1630s and eventually settled in Massachusetts – for a time in a town called Swansea.

“He died in June 1675, slain by what were then referred to as Indians.”

Prof McVeigh said Salsbury’s deep desire to emphasise his natural father’s family tree, who died while Nate was a child, may stem from his loathing of his step-father, from whose cruelty he fled to join the Unionist army as a teenager.

Whatever the motivation, it is thought Salsbury leaned heavily on Cody in order to bring their show to Wales across two tours in 1891 and 1902-03.

The two had similar upbringings in their teens, when the American Civil War broke out.

By age 20, amid the American Civil War, Bill was a scout for General Phil Sheridan’s Unionist army in Kansas.

Three years later he was a buffalo hunter for the Kansas Pacific Railroad, providing the workers with meat to fuel them as they built the transcontinental route across North America.

Similarly – but less glamorously – Salsbury volunteered for the 15th Illinois Regiment.

Taken prisoner and held at the Andersonville Prisoner of War Wamp in Georgia, where 13,000 men died of starvation and disease, Salsbury whiled away his time fleecing fellow Unionist inmates at poker, accumulating the money that would later set him up in business.

While Bill loved to boast of his career as a Pony Express postal rider, buffalo hunter, gold prospector and soldier in wars against the Confederacy and Native Americans, Salsbury kept a lower profile.