Louis S. Warren (114 page)

31. WFC to Mike Russell, July 13, 1895, WA-MSS, S-197, Box 1/5, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. For contributions of Blestein and others, see Beck, autobiography MSS, 103–5.

32. WFC to Mike Russell, July 13, 1895. For Cody's partnership with Salsbury on the north side, see Robert E. Bonner, “Buffalo Bill Cody and Wyoming Water Politics,”
Western
Historical Quarterly
32, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 437.

33. BBWW 1896 program; BBWW 1897 program, WFC Collection, WH 72, Box 2/29, DPL.

34. BBWW 1901 program, WFC Collection, WH 72, Box 2/29, DPL.

35. BBWW 1901 program, WFC Collection, WH 72, Box 2/29, DPL. At this point, according to the advertisement, the water rights could be had for $10 per acre, payable in five annual installments at 6 percent interest. City names from “BBWW Routes, 1883–1916,” BBHC.

36.
Cody Enterprise,
May 5, 1905.

37. “Buffalo Bill,”
Manchester Sunday Chronicle
(UK), April 19, 1903, clipping in NSS, 1903, DPL. As an example of how much Cody's irrigation efforts enhanced his reputation and advanced him along a mythic narrative trajectory in the public eye, consider this description of his irrigation efforts in the Big Horn Basin: “The most notable recent enterprise in Wyoming is that undertaken in the Bighorn Basin by the famous scout, William F. Cody. . . . This energetic and ambitious man, who has twice won fame, first as a daring and successful scout, and then as exhibitor to two continents of the life, people, and customs of the Wild West—has laid broad and deep the foundations of a
still stronger claim to
remembrance.
He conceived the idea of planting civilization in one of the wildest regions which he had first known as hunter and Indian-fighter.” The passage goes on to describe the irrigation project and the promise of the Big Horn Basin: “In time the region must acquire a large population, supporting a many-sided life, and form a very substantial monument to William F. Cody and his work for the West.” William Ellsworth Smythe,
The Conquest of Arid America,
2nd ed. ([1899]; Norwood, MA: Norwood Press, 1905), 227–28. Emphasis added. Note that the trajectory here is “scout, exhibitor, planter of civilization.”

38. WFC to W. A. Richards, Sept. 25, 1903, MS 6 Series I:B Css, Box 1/19, BBHC.

39. Gold mines: “We have located four thousand acres of placer mines on the line of our ditch.” WFC to Mike Russell, Feb. 17, 1896, in WA-MSS, S-197, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

40. Photo p. 6.246, MS 6, Series XI, I, Box 4, BBHC; BBWW 1907 program, 14.

41. Alva Adams, a former governor of Colorado, speaking in 1911, quoted in Karen Merrill,
Public Lands and Political Meaning
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 202, n. 10.

42. Quoted in Danbom,
Resisted Revolution,
22; see also Marx,
The Machine in the Garden
.

43. Emmons,
Garden in the Grassland,
137.

44. Lawrence M. Woods,
Wyoming's Big Horn Basin to
1901:
A Late Frontier
(Spokane, WA: Arthur H. Clarke, 1997), 10.

45. Frederic Remington describes it in Samuels and Samuels,
Frederic Remington,
411.

46. William A. Jones,
Report upon the Reconnaissance of Northwestern Wyoming Including Yellowstone National Park Made in the Summer of
1873
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1875), 16–17.

47. George Beck, autobiography MSS, 109; for climate, see Woods,
Wyoming's Big Horn
Basin,
10.

48. WFC to Beck, Oct. 27, 1895, WFC Letters, No. 9972, Box 1/1, AHC.

49. See Beck to WFC, Aug. 23,1896 ; Beck to WFC, Aug. 26, 1896; Beck to H. C. Alger, Aug. 26, 1896, G. T. Beck Papers, No. 59, Box 25, 1896 Letterpress Book, Beck Css, AHC.

50. Beck to WFC, Aug. 31, 1896, G. T. Beck Papers, No. 59, Box 25, 1896 Letterpress Book, Beck Css, AHC; also for Populists, see Nate Salsbury to George Beck, Oct. 8, 1896, Beck Family Papers, No. 10386, Box 1/8, AHC.

51. Beck to WFC, Oct. 2, 1896, G. T. Beck Papers, No. 59, Box 25, 1896 Letterpress Book, Beck Css, AHC.

52. “William A. Cody and George T. Beck to Phebe A. Hearst, Bond,” Feb. 4, 1897, and “William F. Cody and George T. Beck to Phebe Hearst, Indemnity Bond,” July 12, 1901, in G. T. Beck Papers, No. 59, Doc. 6, Folder 12, AHC. The indemnity bond reveals that they could not pay it off and had to carry the bond over to July 1904.

53. John Erwin Price, “A Study of Early Cody, Wyoming, and the Role of William F. Cody in Its Development,” MA thesis, University of Denver, 1956, 139–41.

54. WFC to Mike Russell, April 9, 1896, in WA-MSS, S-197, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT; for Beck loan to Cody and Salsbury, see Beck, autobiography MSS, 117.

55. In 1870, farms made up 407,735,000 acres; by 1900, 838,592,000 acres were converted to farm. Hoftstadter,
Age of Reform,
56.

56. For crop prices, see Cherny,
American Politics in the Gilded Age,
139; Hine and Faragher,
American West,
347–48; Jeff Ostler,
Prairie Populism: The Fate of Agrarian Radicalism in
Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa,
1880–1892
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 18; see also Shannon,
The Farmer's Last Frontier;
for drought in Nebraska, see Olson and Naugle,
History of Nebraska,
235.

57. Laurence Goodwyn,
The Populist Moment,
271.

58. Nate Salsbury to George Beck, Aug. 14, 1896, Beck Family Papers, No. 10386, Box 1/8, AHC.

59. Salsbury to Beck, Aug. 14, 1896, Beck Family Papers, No. 10386, Box 1/8, AHC. For corporate perceptions of Bryan generally, see Robert H. Wiebe,
The Search for Order,
1877–1920
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 103.

60. Yost,
Buffalo Bill,
267, 275.

61. Michael P. Malone and F. Ross Peterson, “Politics and Protests,” 510–11, in The Oxford History of the American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O'Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 501–33.

62. “The Historical Census,” cited Sept. 28, 2004.

63. For the Johnson County War, see Helena Huntington Smith,
The War on Powder River:
The History of an Insurrection
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 183–242; A. S. Mercer, The Banditti of the Plains; or the Cattlemen's Invasion of Wyoming in 1892 (The
Crowning Infamy of the Ages
) (1894; rprt. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954); Merrill,
Public Lands and Political Meaning,
49.

64. Karen Merrill, Public Lands and Political Meanings, 49: “. . . the turn-of-the-century livestock owner was seen as anything but a homebuilder, and before the early 1900s, ranching and homebuilding were culturally and politically viewed as antithetical categories in stories of western development.”

65. T. A. Larson,
History of Wyoming
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1965), 121.

66. “The Historical Census” lists 29,347 native-born females and 5,000 foreign-born females in the census of 1900.

67. In the words of one rural historian: “It was in these millions of tiny commonwealths that everything important in life took place.” Danbom,
Resisted Revolution,
9.

68. Beck, autobiography MSS, 93.

69. Paul Wallace Gates, “Land Reform Movement” and “Safety Valve Theory,” in
The New
Encyclopedia of the American West,
ed. Howard R. Lamar (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 614–16, 998–99. The most trenchant critic of the safety valve theory is Shannon,
The Farmer's Last Frontier,
356–59; see also his two essays, “A Post-Mortem on the Labor-Safety-Valve Theory,” in
Agricultural History,
19 Jan. 1945: 31–37; and “The Homestead Act and the Labor surplus,” in
The Public Lands: Studies in the History of the Public Domain,
ed. Vernon Carstenson (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1963), 297–313.

70. Smythe,
Conquest of Arid America,
1–47; for more on reclamation and irrigation campaigns, see White, “
It's
Your Misfortune and None of My Own,
” 402–6; Donald Worster,
Rivers of Empire: Water Acidity and the Growth of the American West
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Donald Pisani,
Water and American Government: The Reclamation
Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West,
1902–1935
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 1–31.

71. For the Carey Act, and how it operated in Cody, see Bonner, “Buffalo Bill Cody and Wyoming Water Politics,” 433–51; also Donald Worster,
River of Empire,
157; Donald J. Pisani,
Water and American Government,
xiv, 66–67; Price, “Study of Early Cody, Wyoming,” 209–10.

72. Price, “Study of Early Cody, Wyoming,” 131–32; Jerry Bales, personal communication to the author, July 22, 2005.

73. Price, “Study of Early Cody, Wyoming,” 142.

74. Price, “Study of Early Cody, Wyoming,” 157. The average laborer earned $438 per year in 1900. Derks,
Value of a Dollar,
63.

75. Price, “Study of Early Cody, Wyoming,” 134; Jeannie Cook, Lynn Johnson Houze, Bob Edgar, and Paul Fees,
Buffalo Bill's Town in the Rockies: A Pictorial History of Cody, Wyoming
(Virginia Beach, VA: Donning, 1996), 49.

76. Nate Salsbury, “The Pan-American Exposition,” typescript, n.d., in NSP, YCAL MSS 17, Box 2/63.

77. D. H. Elliott to WFC, June 26, 1897; D. H. Elliott to WFC, July 8, 1897, G. T. Beck Papers, No. 59, Box 25, Book 12, Beck Css, AHC.

78. Howard Martin to G. T. Beck, June 27, 1904; C. M. Stewart to Beck, July 5, 1904, Folder 2; A. C. Fowler to Beck, Oct. 14, 1904, Folder 7; C. L. Goodwin to Beck, Dec. 3, 1904, Folder 7, 41 in Beck Family Papers, Box 2, AHC.

79. WFC to James R. Garfield, Jan. 29, 1909, in Gen'l Administrative and Project Records (Shoshone), Entry 3, Box 899, Folder 448-A1 (1909), RG 115, NARA-RMR.

80. Bonner, “Buffalo Bill and Wyoming Water Politics,” 439, n. 15; Edward Gillette,
Locating the Iron Trail
(Boston: Christopher Publishing House, 1925), 117–24; Price, “Study of Early Cody, Wyoming,” 124.

81. WFC to G. T. Beck, Sept. 25, [1898?], G. T. Beck Papers, No. 59, Doc. 6, Folder 12, AHC.

82. They handed the land over to the railroad's town-building subsidiary, the Lincoln Land Company. Price, “Study of Early Cody, Wyoming,” 185.

83. Bonner, “Buffalo Bill and Wyoming Water Politics,” 439; Cook et al.,
Buffalo Bill's Town
in the Rockies,
51.

84. “Boom Town of the West Which Was Built Up in a Single Year,”
Boston Herald,
Jan. 4, 1903, in Beck Family Papers, No. 10386, Box 15/20, AHC.

85. Bonner, “Buffalo Bill and Wyoming Water Politics,” 435.

86. For a sample of the vigorous social scene in early Cody, see Agnes Chamberlin Scrapbook, Park County Historical Society, Cody, WY.

87. “ ‘The Irma,' ” unattributed clipping, Nov. 22, 1902, Agnes Chamberlin Scrapbook, Park County Historical Society, Cody, WY.

88. “A Window to the Past: Nana Haight's Letters from Cody, 1910–1914,” typescript, n.d., 1–5, Local History Collection, BBHC.

89. Price, “Study of Early Cody, Wyoming,” 153–56.

90. WFC to Beck, Oct. 21, 1895, in G. T. Beck Papers, No. 59, Doc. 5, Folder 12, AHC.

91. For complaints, see WFC to Beck, June 8, 1898; “This is discouraging . . .” from WFC to Beck, Aug. 7, 1897, “It was neglect . . .” from WFC to Beck, Aug. 21, 1898, G. T. Beck Papers, No. 59, Doc. 6, Folder 12, AHC.

92. WFC to Beck, Aug. 19, 1896, in G. T. Beck Papers, No. 59, Doc. 6, Folder 12, AHC.

93. WFC to Beck, n.d., in G. T. Beck Papers, No. 59, Doc. 6, Folder 12, AHC.

94. WFC to JCG, April 12, 1903, MS 6 Series I:B Css, Box 1/19, BBHC.

95. WFC to JCG, July 19, 1903, MS 6 Series I:B Css, Box 1/19, BBHC.

96. The minimum cost for building the main canal from the river was more than $300,000; for getting that water to distributing ditches across the proposed settlement, another $245,000; for the waterworks to the town of Cody, which would provide water for up to 10,000 people, a minimum of $32,000; for the power plant to generate the town's electricity, a minimum expenditure of $165,000 was required. Frank C. Kelsey to WFC and Salsbury, Sept. 20, 1901, Engineering and Research Center Project Reports, Box 782 (Old Box), 520 SHO 10-52–530-SHO-22, Records of the Bureau of Reclamation, RG 115, Records of the Bureau of Reclamation, NARA-RMR.

97. D. F. Richards to A. O. Woodruff, May 19, 1902, in Papers of D. F. Richards, Wyoming State Archives, Cheyenne; D. R. Richards to WFC, June 21, 1902; Papers of Acting Governor Fenimore Chatterton, General Css.-Incoming, Box 2, WSA.

98. Worster,
Rivers of Empire,
157; Pisani,
Water and American Government,
xiv–xv, 90.

99. Governor DeForest Richards offered the Cody-Salsbury tract to the Reclamation Service in a letter of Jan. 26, 1903, telling federal officials that the state board of land commissioners “will be glad to relinquish this land to the United States.” See U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey, Second Annual Report of the Recla
mationService
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904), 507, see also 508–9. The government estimated that it could reclaim 125,000 acres of land and irrigate it for farming at a cost to farmers of $25 per acre. “. . . opposite the railroad station at Ralston, is the 24,000 acres of first-class land segregated by the State under the Carey Act, which may be relinquished to the Secretary of the Interior.” U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey, Third Annual Report of the Reclamation Service (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1905), 617–18, quote from 618; also U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey, Fourth Annual Report of the
Reclamation Service,
1904–5
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906), 346–50.