07/09/2026
The Legend of Buffalo A. Butterbread
The true story behind a poster, a borrowed name, and a time when the Comstock still believed anything was possible.
There are posters that advertise an event... and there are posters that become part of the story themselves.
This was one of those.
I created it in 1973 during one of the wildest, most colorful chapters of my life. Back then, Virginia City was attracting an unusual mix of old miners, artists, musicians, dreamers, bikers, hippies, and people who had simply wandered into the Nevada desert looking for something they couldn't quite name. The silver boom had faded nearly a century before, but another kind of boom was underway—a boom of imagination.
For reasons that seemed perfectly sensible at the time, I adopted the pen name Buffalo A. Butterbread.
Nobody ever asked what the "A" stood for.
Nobody cared.
On the Comstock, a name was less important than the stories you told while wearing it.
The poster advertised Annie Bowers singing You Can't Get a Man With a Gun with The Chickens, a wonderfully eccentric local band whose performances were as unpredictable as Nevada weather. Every show was different. One night you might hear country, the next blues, and before the evening was over someone would be playing a washboard while another musician had somehow incorporated a garbage can lid into the percussion section.
The audience loved every minute of it.
I wanted the poster to feel like the music sounded.
The giant exploding word "MAN" dominates the page, letters flying in every direction like they had been blasted from a cannon. The dramatic black-and-orange design borrowed from old vaudeville bills, silent movie posters, and nineteenth-century broadsides, all filtered through the psychedelic spirit of the early 1970s.
Everything was hand drawn.
No computer.
No digital fonts.
No "Undo" button.
Just pen, ink, rulers, lettering guides, and more than a few cups of coffee.
When I signed the artwork vertically along the border as BUTTERBREAD, I never imagined anyone would still be looking at it more than fifty years later.
The original posters sold for one dollar.
Most people folded them under their arm after the show or thumb-tacked them to a cabin wall where they slowly yellowed in the mountain sun. Few survived.
Looking at it today brings back the smell of printer's ink, the sound of guitars drifting up C Street, laughter pouring from saloon doors, and the feeling that every weekend on the Comstock was another chance for something extraordinary to happen.
Virginia City has always attracted characters larger than life.
Some carried pickaxes.
Some carried paintbrushes.
Some carried guitars.
And some—like Buffalo A. Butterbread—simply carried a pen and tried to capture the magic before it disappeared.
Today the poster stands as more than an advertisement.
It is a small time capsule from an unforgettable era when art, music, friendship, and a little harmless eccentricity flourished on the old Comstock.
And every time I see that little vertical signature—
BUTTERBREAD—
I'm reminded that, for a brief and wonderful time, Buffalo A. Butterbread was very much alive.
