Louis S. Warren (14 page)

Carson, ever a private man, refused to cultivate a public. Others thought trying to make dime novel fantasies into reality was distasteful or outlandish. But the expansion of the press and the extension of the railroad gave many others the chance to assume the pose of frontier hero, and playing to the cultural longings of tourists was pervasive in Kansas by the mid-1860s. One journalist reported his 1867 encounter with a Kansas railroad conductor who, like Hickok, “had much experience in life on the plains.” Appropriating symbols of frontier identity, the conductor “always had a rifle by his side and pistols, either about his waist, or where he could conveniently put his hands upon them.” Like Hickok, he was “an excellent shot,” and he freely mingled experience and imposture, challenging his audience to separate the two. “Indeed, so marvelous were his stories that he was listened to with evident incredulity.”
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In similar ways, different figures combined elements of frontier identity with real life to create powerful attractions in many railroad towns. Custer's abilities in this regard were so formidable that we will have to explore them at length below. But so too did any number of other men and women. Prior to the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, most tourists and correspondents appear to have been drawn along the line of the Kansas Pacific, through central Kansas on the path to Denver, the center of a lavish gold strike and a vigorous mining community. Travelers could get to the city and return with ease, even before the railroad was complete. Moreover, the cattle towns which served as northern terminuses of various Texas cattle trails lay along the Kansas Pacific. The “KP” thus rolled through the most visible “progressive” landscape in the West, where the “wilderness” was giving way to pasture and mine, and the advent of farmers was imminent. Here, Wild Bill Hickok, William Cody, and other men, including Bat Masterson, plied the line as self-made embodiments of frontier myth.

After 1869, the focus of press attention shifted to the more northerly, newly completed transcontinental line, and so did those men and women who crafted frontier impostures of their own. Hickok, along with Charles “Colorado Charlie” Utter, Moses “California Joe” Milner, and Martha “Calamity Jane” Cannary, moved to the vicinity of Cheyenne, a major stop on the Union Pacific. Eastern reporters venturing to Cheyenne might disembark first at North Platte, Nebraska, where, by 1870, they would find John “Texas Jack” Omohundro, William “Doc” Carver, John Y. Nelson, Charles “Dashing Charlie” Emmett, Charles “The White Chief” Belden, and, of course, William “Buffalo Bill” Cody. All of these men gravitated to this locale in part because of its proximity to the railroad, which guaranteed the flow of writers and tourists who were their partners in formulating public personas. Each of them cultivated journalists and writers who descended from the train. Not coincidentally, every single one of these figures appeared in dime novels, and with the exception of Belden, who was murdered in 1870, all of them went on to careers on the stage and in show business before 1880. Many of them saw their cachet as guides and raconteurs enhanced as a result, and in varying degrees each made a career of appearing before audiences who thrilled at the chance to see the legend, and evaluate its validity for themselves.
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Frontier imposture of this order replicated itself in newly opened frontiers throughout the 1870s. The Black Hills were Hickok's last stop on his show of heroic life in progress; in addition to Calamity Jane, James “Captain Jack” Crawford, and other personalities whose achievements were at least as theatrical as real, the region sported ranks of men and boys who were adept at playing the role of frontier hero for tourists. Frontier imposture was an art form that drew heavily on literary fiction, with real people taking on language and shaping (or fabricating) their biographies from fictional stories, and vice versa. But where real people like Hickok inspired the fictions through the 1860s, by the mid-1870s the flow from history to fiction had reversed. Deadwood, South Dakota, became home base for the fictional “Deadwood Dick,” protagonist in a raft of dime novels after 1874. Over the next twenty years, at least three men claimed to have been the “real” Deadwood Dick, and such figures, who adopted the identities of fictional westerners from popular novels, became legion.
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By the 1860s, no region could match the West as a venue for the staging of attractions and the invention of personas that appealed to popular desires and begged audiences to separate them from reality. The best-known literary treatment of the West in this period, Mark Twain's
Roughing It,
purports to be a factual memoir of a western tour, but it employs so many jokes, tall tales, and fabrications that it challenges the most analytical reader. Published in 1872, it was inspired by Twain's travels in the region between 1861 and 1865. In other words, it was a product of the same West that gave us Wild Bill Hickok and William Cody. Just as Twain rhapsodized about the Pony Express, by 1866 Hickok was telling tourists that he had ridden the pony, a lie which William Cody grafted on to his own life story in 1874. Between the literary adventures of America's greatest nineteenth-century writer and the supposed feats of her “real” western heroes there was a vigorous interchange of symbols, fictions, narrative devices, and outright lies.
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The tourists who gathered around Hickok usually came away with a sense that there was some amount of truth entangled with their fantasy West. Something enormous, real, and natural hung in the air when Hickok entered a room and began to tell his tales. Did you see the elephant? Those who met Hickok could say yes. Relatively few Americans would be able to move to the frontier, or to play any role in the great project of annexing the West. But many could travel there over a few days, for a break from work or to survey the opportunities for a farm or a business. Seeking out western characters like Hickok and deciding how much truth was tangled in magazine fictions and in dime novel lore about them were more accessible than almost any other frontier experiences. It is not too much to say that speculating and arguing about figures like Wild Bill Hickok was the frontier experience most available to the American public.

By all accounts, Hickok made his presence known whereever he went. His impact on Cody was profound. From an early age, Hickok was a mentor to Cody, who as a young man claimed Wild Bill as a cousin.
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By the late 1860s, when both were in Hays, they both wore long hair, and dressed so similarly—buckskin, colorful shirts, and wide sombreros—that even people who knew them both would on occasion mistake one for the other in their memories. Both handed out small, calling card photographs of their long-haired selves to tourists and other potential clients.
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The younger man sensed that Hickok was getting opportunities he did not have, and he was right. Hickok was already a favorite of General William Tecumseh Sherman. By 1867, he no longer sought work as a scout; it sought him. Those droves of tourists around him had paid train fare for the thrill. Many of them paid for his guiding services, too. Being a guide required shepherding a flock of greenhorns while posing as the frontiersman that dime novels and
Harper's Monthly
taught them to expect, but for a man with the right temperament, it was not difficult. Hickok had found a way to manipulate the national press, the army officer class, and even the tourist public to his own ends. Cody wanted the same.

But Hickok's imposture was a work in progress, and in many ways he eventually proved inferior to Cody at playing the frontiersman of public longing. His violence was problematic, his ascent to dime novel stardom and public renown strewn with the bodies of his opponents, and his imposture too anti-Southern, too sectionalist for a nation aching to heal the wounds of the Civil War.
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We shall revisit these limitations when we come to the beginnings of William Cody's stage career, a moment when he linked his name publicly to Wild Bill's before he and his old friend became show business rivals and finally parted ways.

In the meantime, Hickok embodied certain elements of the frontier myth that Cody needed and wanted for his own. His early attempts to tie himself to the Hickok legend as Wild Bill's cousin in the 1860s began a decade-long effort to selectively entwine the myth of Buffalo Bill with the legend of Wild Bill. Cody retold many of Hickok's tales as his own adventures. As we have seen, both men claimed to have ridden for the Pony Express, and to have been Civil War spies.

Cody made this enthusiastic borrowing of Hickok's material somewhat more credible by inserting himself alongside Hickok in these tales, as if to protect himself against the charge of trying to substitute himself for Wild Bill. But the result was just that. When Ned Buntline arrived on the Plains in the summer of 1869, he was looking for Wild Bill Hickok, or perhaps Frank North, another legendary scout. Buntline was eager to write a novel about a real-life frontier hero. But North hated publicity, and Hickok was in a churlish mood. Cody, on the other hand, was gregarious and funny, regaling the writer with stories. Since he was claiming Hickok as a blood relative at the time, it seems likely that some of those stories informed the plot of Buntline's novel, in which Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill ride across the prairies as brothers in arms.
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When Cody wrote his own autobiography in 1879, he validated the fiction by making himself the protégé of Hickok. In some of the book's more fanciful sections, Wild Bill champions young Buffalo Bill during his fictitious adventures in the Mormon War and in his imaginary fights with Indians on the Pony Express. Cody even recapitulated Nichols's account of Hickok's feats as a Union spy, and added himself as an observer and minor participant in the action (which he certainly was not). He included an entire chapter about Wild Bill's killing of Dave Tutt in Springfield, Missouri, an event which also featured prominently in the Nichols article, without ever inserting himself in the story, as if including this tale of the code duello somehow conveyed its chivalrous legacy to Cody (who was on detached service in St. Louis, courting Louisa, and probably visiting the theater, when the killing occurred). In 1861 Hickok had been in a shoot-out with Jake McCanles and his family. Cody wrote up the killing of Jake McCanles and his “gang” as if it were a sad but inevitable coda to the Civil War rather than an ugly personal dispute over a local woman, all to link himself to Hickok's ability to use violence in defense of honor.

Cody's eager borrowing from the Hickok story was part of his overall technique of sculpting his own persona from the myths that surrounded him. During the early 1870s, when the two men appeared in stage plays about frontier life, their rivalry increased. Cody's mirroring of Hickok's biography irritated the older man, who grew to resent the acolyte's appropriation of his myth.
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But Hickok was murdered in 1876, and by 1879, his legend was practically a Cody vehicle. Cody's stage publicist, John Burke, tended to the deceased Hickok's reputation, and defended him in the press, because the two scouts were so closely linked in the popular mind that to allow bad press about Hickok would ill betide Cody.
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By 1879, in his own autobiography, Cody could claim Hickok as a mythic brother, and by telling some Wild Bill stories (the duel with Tutt) and eliding others (his killing of a Seventh Cavalry soldier in a brawl, which forced his departure from Hays in 1870), Cody contained the meaning of the Hickok myth and wrapped it around himself like a cape.
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To this day, visitors to the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, will on occasion exclaim, “Wow, a whole museum for Wild Bill!” The confusion of Buffalo Bill with Wild Bill was Cody's intention from the late 1860s onward. Its endurance is partly a testament to Cody's effectiveness, which was so pronounced that people could be unaware they were different people even when they were both alive. Wild Bill Hickok left Buffalo Bill's stage show after a brief series of joint appearances in 1873 and 1874. Months afterward, Cody was still advertising the performances of Wild Bill—and as long as they had Buffalo Bill to look at, critics seldom noticed the gunfighter's absence.
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During the 1887 shows of Buffalo Bill's Wild West, in London, General Sherman received Cody's request for a testimonial, to be used in the publicity for the Wild West show, and wrote back that Cody had “guided me honestly and faithfully, in 1865–66, from Fort Riley to Kearny, in Kansas and Nebraska.”

Sherman was mistaken. His guide on that trip was Hickok. Cody, not to be put off by a small error of fact, published the testimonial. In later editions of his autobiography, he concocted a whole expedition to go with it.
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Cody's willingness to deceive his audiences may have exceeded Hickok's. The younger man certainly proved more successful at that end of the business than his early mentor ever had. But the development of Buffalo Bill from frontier Kansan to transatlantic media phenomenon was in some ways dependent on the prior emergence of Wild Bill, who blazed much of the early path for him but whose violence made him a more questionable figure than Cody ever was. By blurring the line between Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok, and obscuring their differences, Cody used his predecessor in frontier imposture to concoct a multilayered public deception and amusement. Audiences and writers who enjoyed debating whether Cody was frontiersman or showman could revel in the chaos of symbols and stories that poured from the merger of the men's exploits. Did Wild Bill invent the Wild West show? Did he really know Buffalo Bill? Buffalo Bill—wasn't he a lawman? Did he kill somebody— an ex-Confederate? A Union soldier? In a gunfight? The real distinctions between the men made Cody the more palatable figure, and his publicists skillfully illuminated those distinctions as the need arose. But after Cody died, only the most devoted fans and scholars knew where Wild Bill and Buffalo Bill diverged—and to them would go the consummate pleasure (mine) of explicating these linked figures to curious audiences of their own (you).