Louis S. Warren (16 page)

Cody's recounting was full of verve and color and probably half-true at best, but his tale of hard drinking, hard work, and little sleep suggests the titanic energy, and the equally large appetite for drink and good times, which were nearly lifelong traits. Among scouts, nighttime travel, objectionable mules, entrepreneurial zeal, hard liquor, and conviviality were all part and parcel of day-to-day existence. Some of these scout characteristics, particularly the lively party scene, gave commanders fits. But guides and couriers like Cody, who rode hundreds of miles through Indian country on little or no sleep in return for cash bonuses, were indispensable. As Sheridan remembered Cody's legendary ride, “such an exhibition of endurance and courage was more than enough to convince me that his services would be extremely valuable in the campaign.” His faith in Cody's prowess was such that he appointed Cody to the position of chief of scouts for the Fifth Cavalry.
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Chief of scouts was not a military rank, and it was less a command position than a promise to ask Cody's advice in hiring other scouts and to retain his services in preference to others. His responsibilities took him all over Kansas for the next year, and he saw combat often. In the fall of 1868, Cody accompanied the Fifth Cavalry from Fort Hays north, to the tributaries of the Republican River called Beaver Creek and Prairie Dog Creek. The Fifth was soon in battle when a band of Cheyenne Dog Men under the noted chief Tall Bull attacked. The Dog Men earned their name from the legendary practice of select warriors, who demonstrated their refusal to retreat by dismounting in the midst of battle and plunging into the ground a stake, to which the warrior was tied by an ornamented buffalo-hide sash, the “dog rope.” From this position he could not retreat unless another Dog Man pulled the stake and whipped him—“like a dog”—to drive him from battle.
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Cody was out with a detachment and missed this first fight, but the soldiers and Cody subsequently pursued the Dog Men in a series of running fights across Beaver Creek and north into Nebraska. The number of Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapaho warriors increased to around five hundred as the moving battle continued through the next week. Then the Indians turned back south again. They scattered, and Cody and the troops lost them at the end of October.
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The battalion then moved to Fort Wallace, where Cody helped fend off a Cheyenne attack while out with a hunting party, before moving on to Fort Lyon in Colorado, where they arrived in late November 1868.
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CODY HAD ALREADY proved himself a good scout. But was he ever good enough to merit the river of military accolades that flowed through his show programs? If not, why would the military command take such an interest in furthering Cody's show business career? In fact, military commanders who later trumpeted Cody's skills initially proved skeptical, precisely because he was already a showman, self-consciously playing to popular fantasies of white scouts in ways that sometimes grated on officers. Commanders of the Plains army regarded scouts with deep and abiding suspicion. Following the high divides was indeed an art form. But the men who sold their services as guides often showed more talent for the art of deception. In the words of one travel writer, the Great Plains was “infested with numberless charlatans, blazing with all sorts of hunting and fighting titles, and ready at the rustle of greenbacks to act as guides through a land they know nothing about.”
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Some were just plain cowardly, like the “ ‘Petes,' ‘Jacks,' or ‘Jims' hanging around Hays City” who refused to carry Sheridan's dispatches. Others were merely incompetent. “Any person who has had much to do with expeditions in Indian country knows how many and how frequent are the applications made to the commanding officer to obtain employment as scouts or guides,” wrote George Custer. “Probably one in fifty of the applicants is worthy of attention.”
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Officers had less authority over the civilians than over soldiers, and were correspondingly reluctant to trust them. In other ways, the pervasive skepticism about frontier guides was a reflection of broader cultural anxieties, some of which sprang from surprisingly urban sources. Specifically, the fear that a fake guide might be posing as an “authentic” tracker to take a client's money and lead him into danger made scouts the rural counterparts of a renowned product of urban decadence, the confidence man. The figure of the confidence man was the bête noire of American moralists for much of the nineteenth century, and although he is normally considered an urban figure, he was a paradoxically prominent symbol lurking in the background of Cody's rise to fame on the Plains.

As the Industrial Revolution enticed and compelled millions of young, rural Americans to move to the city in the nineteenth century, fearful authors penned guidebooks and etiquette manuals warning of savvy criminals who waited at city railroad stations to entrap hale farm youths and blushing country maidens. Advice literature frequently referred to these social predators, who persuaded the naive newcomers of their good intentions, then led them down the darkest alleys of the urban wilderness into gambling, alcoholism, prostitution, and death. In popular accounts, the modus operandi of these malefactors was to convince their victims that their intentions were sincere, to gain their confidence. Thus they came to be known as “confidence men,” or, in the vernacular, con artists, and their reputed blandishments defined the writings of urban reformers for much of the nineteenth century.
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In later decades Buffalo Bill's Wild West show drew crowds by persuading audiences that the heroic Plains scout would not take their money under false pretenses. William Cody stood in sharp contrast to the con men who ran the tawdry circuses, lewd burlesques, and other immoral entertainments. As the rustic frontiersman new to the city, he seemed the opposite of the confidence man. Instead, Buffalo Bill was a real westerner who provided a rollicking good show of frontier virtue for urban families.

Publicists played a role in constructing this image, but Cody himself intuited the urban fear of confidence men, and how to heighten and assuage it simultaneously, from the very earliest days of his scouting career on the Great Plains. Fear of the con man became the context for Cody's ascent in officer esteem to the position of trustworthy scout, and his exposure to it provided him an education in audience longings, because in the end, the divergent processes of urbanization and frontier settlement provoked closely related anxieties. The frontier, like the city, was where young Americans went to make their fortunes. Thus, after the Civil War, the West proved to be, like New York City, Boston, and Chicago, the destination for hundreds of thousands of disparate emigrants from various rural regions of the country and the world. In frontier Kansas, as in any American metropolis, these immigrants alighted from the railroad. Usually, their first stop was in one of the booming towns, most of which were bereft of extended families, established social networks, or institutions, and rife with “unseemly” mixing of races, unregulated markets, urban decadence, and violence. Kansas cow towns inspired as much reformist zeal as the slums of Gotham. Amidst their confusing mix of German, Irish, Mexican, Jewish, and Yankee residents “bent on debauchery and dissipation,” observed one commentator, prostitutes walked the streets with derringers, “monstrous creatures undeserving the name of women.” The violence—or threat of violence—was breathtaking. “I verily believe there are men here who would murder a fellow-creature for five dollars.”
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In these small, scary towns, aspiring frontier guides waited by the train to meet prospective clients, especially tourists and land speculators, whom they approached with promises to lead them to scenic attractions or the best parcels in safety for a most reasonable fee. Small wonder that fearful commentators should think them confidence men who could swindle and debase greenhorns. Small wonder, too, that the figure of the trustworthy frontier scout should ascend to new heights of public appeal.

Cody learned from Hickok's imposture, which exploited these fears masterfully. Waiting at the train platform, Wild Bill was renowned as a man who could protect the tourist or the emigrant from both the violent town and the savage frontier, and his appearance so approached the ideal of the white Indian that tourists could enjoy a debate over how real the pose was. Cody learned to play to the fears and hopes of soldiers and tourists in similar ways. Photos from the late 1860s and early 1870s show him in the costume of the white Indian: buckskin, rifle, and long dark hair. He was about six feet tall and very handsome. Like Hickok, his appearance as a guide borrowed so heavily from fictional representations of the profession that the people who followed him invariably wondered how much they should believe his act.

Thus, when Brevet Major General Eugene Carr first encountered William Cody, in October of 1868, he had his doubts. Carr arrived on the Plains to assume command of the Fifth Cavalry that month, and Cody met him at the train station. “I was loading my baggage when attracted by a man in buckskin, with [a] broad-brimmed hat, sitting on a horse on some rising ground not far from the station,” recalled the officer. “There were so many so-called scouts who masqueraded around the railroad stations, mostly fakes and long-bow story tellers to tenderfeet, I thought to myself: ‘There is one of those confounded scouts posing.' ”
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As Carr discovered, Cody possessed very real skills as tracker, fighter, and buffalo hunter. Nonetheless, these were but the grit of truth in the cement of his artful deception, which combined genuine mastery of martial skills with a costume and manner that invited soldiers and settlers to indulge their fantasies of heroic white scouts. Long before he ever set foot on a stage, Cody was playing a role that was both deadly real—killing Cheyenne and Sioux Indians and harrying them from their homes—and presenting himself in ways that reassured, and thereby entertained, a larger public about the heroism of American conquest. The combination of Indian fighter and man who
looked
like an imaginary Indian fighter invited new acquaintances, like General Carr, to ask the same question that audiences would ask for the rest of Cody's life: Is he an entertainer? Or is he an Indian fighter? In the end, guiding offered a means to be both, and it set his feet on the path to much wider showmanship and fame.

But Cody's white Indian pose disguised the superficiality of his knowledge of Indians, which was restricted to a familiarity with their fighting techniques and their standard travel routes, since many of their paths were utilized by frontier settlers and market hunters. He never learned to speak any Indian language. At this point, he had no Indian friends. In fact, he knew next to nothing about what we would call Indian culture. Many other scouts had far more knowledge of the Plains and its inhabitants than Cody did.

But the army's interest in Cody's career was based on much larger, ideological considerations than how much he actually “knew Indians.” His pose, when combined with his not inconsiderable tracking and fighting skills, reassured the officers he guided in subtle, powerful ways. If he looked like a hero out of a novel by James Fenimore Cooper (or one of Cooper's many dime novel imitators), his abilities seemed to validate those novels as projections of larger truths about frontier conquest and Americans. If that was the case, then the American conquest of Indians
was
inevitable. And on that score, in 1867 and '68 army men needed all the reassurance they could get. For them, the heroic Buffalo Bill was a boon to the troubled reputation and miserable condition of the U.S. Army in the Indian wars.

THE ARMY'S DREARY WAR

In the 1880s, Buffalo Bill's Wild West show would stage battle scenes in which a united Sioux met a united white cavalry in glorious combat. But at almost every level, these so-called “reenactments” were artful contrivances designed to obscure the real history they represented. The Plains Indian wars were confusing, messy, and terrifying for everyone caught up in them. Throughout the many skirmishes and massacres which constituted their primary drama, the army fought and feuded in the ranks, and any sense of national purpose was almost consistently absent. Witness to the army's dismal season, Cody discovered his usefulness not only as an Indian fighter, but as a symbol of Indian fighting, as a protagonist on whom white officers and other middle-class Americans could hang their own desires and longings.

Grasping the essence of Cody's appeal to the army requires first the debunking of one prominent myth about the history of the American military. Today, it is widely believed that until the Vietnam War, Americans respected, admired, and supported their military. Then critics of the war (mostly on the left) demeaned the armed forces. Only in recent years has the army recovered its now jealously guarded status as one branch of a wildly popular armed service. According to many commentators, today's veneration of the American soldier marks the rightful return of an old tradition.

Beholden to this view, modern Americans are often surprised to learn that in the years that Cody began scouting for the military, Americans were so divided on the issue of fighting Indians, and so dubious of their army's valor, that the campaigns were anything but glorious. Part of the reason lay in public suspicions of the new federal army. From the earliest days of the United States, citizens preferred short-term, all-volunteer, local militias to a permanent military. To many people, a paid, professional military was a threat to the republic, an overly aristocratic institution at odds with democracy, a drain on public finances, and a haven for criminals, layabouts, and others incapable of making a living in commerce.

The wide popularity of the Civil War's Union army was a rare exception to this rule, a shift in perception occasioned by the volunteering of middle-class men who answered the call to save the Union, and temporarily drove darker aspersions about the army into the wilderness. But as Union veterans went back to civilian life after 1865, Americans by and large returned to their traditional anti-army sentiments.
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After Appomattox, funding for the army vanished. Almost a million soldiers mustered out by the spring of 1866, shrinking the army to 54,000 troops. Soldiers confronted the two great challenges of occupying the defeated South and winning the Indian wars despite worsening shortages of men and matériel. By 1874, Congress was budgeting for only 27,000 soldiers and officers. Recruitment was so poor that the true number of soldiers rarely exceeded 19,000, and these were but poorly provisioned.
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The army's post–Civil War missions failed to rouse public esteem. The southern occupation was inglorious, thankless, and contentious, riven with questions about the constitutionality of martial law and the rights of black freedmen and their former owners.

The Indian wars were as controversial as the southern occupation, but for different reasons. Americans were united in the proposition that Indian cultures should disappear, but they fought bitterly over how to effect that end. Frontier settlers tended to be vehemently in favor of massive military force to remove Indians altogether. But these citizens were in the minority. The more numerous easterners were more skeptical of the need for military action. Uncertain of the arability of western lands, they often believed that Indians would gradually diminish before the superior civilization and not require military conquest at all. Echoing these doubts were religious reformers, also based largely in the East, who were newly energized by their successful campaign to rid America of slavery. After the Civil War, they turned their attentions to reforming Indian policy. Seeking to settle and Christianize America's nomadic, pagan Indians, they viewed the army with deep suspicion. Indians needed to know Christian charity and hear the gospel so they could fly to Christ. The last thing the cause of civilization needed was violent ranks of drunken, blaspheming, lecherous soldiers in Indian Country.

Between these competing segments of the electorate, the army occupied a middle ground, less a conquering force than “a frontier constabulary charged with mediating among various foes,” in the words of historian Sherry Smith.
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Their role was to prevent not only massacres of whites by Indians, but massacres of Indians by whites. It was a volunteer militia of Colorado civilians that slaughtered over one hundred women, children, and elderly Cheyenne in the Sand Creek massacre of 1864. The village had been guaranteed federal protection, and the atrocity understandably enraged Cheyenne survivors. It also infuriated federal authorities, by renewing U.S.-Cheyenne hostilities, confounding federal diplomacy, and interrupting the westward flow of settlement and commerce. Throughout the 1860s, the ongoing struggle over Indian policy at the national level meant the army continually sought to justify more expenditures and larger troop deployments, often to congressional committees which were at best ambivalent. Not surprisingly, military people in the latter 1860s and throughout the 1870s felt unsupported, underpaid, and even betrayed by their country.
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In his continuing bid for respectability, Cody socialized almost exclusively with officers, most of whom were northern middle-class men like himself.
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But in doing so, he trod warily over political fault lines which crisscrossed the military and aggravated their difficulties during the Indian wars. Officers extolled higher notions of duty and honor, often professing devotion to an aristocratic code of conduct resembling—and sometimes derived from—Sir Walter Scott's best-selling lore of the Round Table.
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But the men who wore the epaulets, stars, and shoulder braids were often bitterly factionalized. Many officers sought transfers to the West in 1866, believing they would have more chance to prove themselves in combat on the Plains. Accelerated promotion through brevet ranks was the chief method of rewarding combat valor and the most coveted honor in the Civil War. But even in those relatively rare moments when the army and their Indian opponents closed on the battlefield, officers were rarely promoted. The War Department did not award brevet ranks in the Indian wars.
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Moreover, as congressional budgeteers reduced the number of troops, the number of officers' commissions fell into a corresponding decline. Thus, on the Plains, the army had too many young officers with ever fewer chances of promotion. Advancement in rank came mostly when superiors retired or died. Consequently, officers politicked furiously to have rivals disciplined, demoted, transferred, or court-martialed, and the resultant political frictions troubled the entire theater of the West.
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Commanders' frustrations were compounded by the theater of combat, for the West offered few opportunities for reversing public scorn. The weird landscape of the Plains was in thrall to weather that veered between parching heat and cold so fierce it froze a man's mouth shut.
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Reports of Indian attacks were practically continuous, but meeting Sioux or Cheyenne in decisive combat was rare. Indian war parties, even entire villages, usually outran and outsmarted army patrols, separating into small groups and dispersing into the vastness of the Plains which they knew so well. All too often, soldiers had the same experience Lt. Col. George Custer did in 1867, thundering across the Plains in pursuit of an entire Cheyenne village, only to be “discouraged by seeing the broad, well-beaten trail suddenly separate into hundreds of indistinct routes, leading fan-shape in as many different directions.”
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The U.S. Army was better armed, better mounted, and usually larger than the Indian forces. Eventually, these advantages would tell in the army's favor. But in the short term, none of them seemed to make much difference, as Indians repeatedly fought and then fled, leaving army leaders to explain to the newspapers, and to the public, why they had failed to catch Indians yet again.
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For officers it was depressing and humiliating. For soldiers, it was worse. The frontier army was plagued by scurvy, rank-and-file boredom, and high rates of desertion, all exacerbated, especially in 1866 and 1867, by the absence of any great victories. General Winfield Scott Hancock ventured out to treat with—and hopefully intimidate—the Cheyenne Dog Men in 1867. He found no warriors willing to meet him in battle, burned the wrong village, provoked more Cheyenne raids, and terrified Cheyenne diplomats who might have helped establish peace. “Hancock's War” was roundly criticized in the national press.
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Not surprisingly, soldier morale was low and desertions high. On average, the army lost fully one-fourth of its troops to desertion in the 1870s, and over a longer period, between 1867 and 1891, one-third of the army deserted.
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There were abundant reasons for discontent: drafty barracks, illfitting uniforms and boots, and a dismal diet of pork, hardtack, and coffee, which barely sustained a soldier's health. Troopers could go six months without seeing their wages, which dropped from $16 a month in the Civil War to $13 a month in 1871. They did not rise for the next twenty-seven years.
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In the future, the public would remember the grumbling, desertion-prone soldiers not only as enthusiastic subordinates of a united, heroic officer class, but as standard-bearers of a white vanguard. Thus, in 1887, when Cody debuted his reenactment of “Custer's Last Rally” in New York, the presentation of an immaculately uniformed, all-white army in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show reinforced dominant theories about race and civilization. Americans generally saw their westward expansion as the onward march of Anglo-Saxons along the arc they had followed from Britain to the New World centuries before, and which set their Aryan forebears wandering west from the Asian highlands long before that. Civilization was the product of the white race; white people moving to the West would establish it in defiance of their barbarian opponents. Just as the westering Saxons displaced the primitive Celts, so the Anglo-Saxons would defeat the Sioux and Cheyenne.
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Perhaps nothing has done more to obscure the complex history of the Plains Indian wars than these simplistic and enduring fantasies of grand racial conflicts. For on the ground, in the real Indian wars, class divisions between officers and troopers often undermined morale and esprit de corps while the ethnic and racial composition of troops confounded notions of clear-cut race war. Prominent fighters in the Plains campaigns included six all-black regiments (with white officers), the so-called Buffalo Soldiers, organized into four infantry regiments and the famed Ninth and Tenth Cavalry.
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But other troops, too, complicated ideals of a white man's army. Most soldiers were poor men, and many were immigrants. For the first decade after the Civil War, foreign-born recruits, mostly Irish and German immigrants, comprised 50 percent of the ranks. Almost a third of Custer's Seventh was Irish in 1876, and they were joined by Germans, Italians, and others. In the words of one scholar, the Plains army “was a foreign legion,” patched together from Americans, Irish, Germans, French, British, Scandinavians, Italians, and Russians. Legend has it that the Eighth Infantry band in 1880s Montana was imported wholesale from Italy.
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The Seventh Cavalry band spoke German and, according to Custer, regimental conversation was a “parody of Babel,” where “almost every language has its representatives.”
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Today we might see these disparities as quaint cultural variations. But in the 1860s, they aggravated class frictions between soldiers and their commanders, and they had pronounced implications for the ability of the army to fulfill white racial destiny: at the time, to be “white” meant more than having a pink skin. In the 1860s, “white” men were of Anglo-Saxon descent. They were Protestant, English-speaking, and usually native-born. Most of all, white men possessed an inherited facility for self-governance, which flowed from the capacity to restrain appetites for violence and sensual pleasures.
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Germans, widely known as “Dutch” (from “Deutsch,” their term for themselves) were mostly Catholics, and speakers of an alien language. They were tenuously white, at best.

The Irish were even more problematic. In popular reckoning, they were characteristically violent (a trait they displayed in the many strikes that paralyzed American cities), hostile to the rudiments of civilized behavior, and unable to restrain their appetites for liquor or sex. Many critics saw them as threats to the American republic, on a par with newly freed blacks, or savage Indians. Recalling New York's draft riots, one journalist described the noise of the Irish mob as “a howling as of thousands of wild Indians let loose at once.”
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In this sense, a war that pitted “savage” Irish troopers against “savage” Indians was singularly ironic. Indians were of mysterious origin themselves (there were none in the Bible, after all). Some theorized that the most ardent opponents of the frontier army, the Oglala Sioux, were in fact Irish—as in “O'Gallalla.”
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Laughable as it may seem, it made a certain kind of cultural sense to white Americans, who had long derided the Irish as savages. Comparisons of Irish to blacks were just as common, and they cut both ways across the racial divide, with Irish pegged as “white negroes” and blacks as “smoked Irish.”
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By the 1860s, writers had been warning for decades that the prodigious immigration of “the most degenerate races of olden day Europe,” including the “Irish, cross-bred German and French, and Italians of even more doubtful stock,” would result in political chaos, and the racial decay of American Anglo-Saxondom.
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In the 1880s and '90s, Buffalo Bill's Wild West “reenactments” of Plains battles depicted an all-white army pitted against a dark Indian menace. But in 1867, when Cody began scouting for the army, its ranks replicated the immigrant hodgepodge which seemed to threaten the Anglo-Saxon republic with racial dissolution. The result was an army riven with racial and class tensions. Irish ascended to racial respectability, to whiteness, by helping to resist and marginalize other nonwhites.
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So, just as Americans ridiculed Irish immigrants as “savages,” Irish soldiers conflated their hostilities to Indians and blacks. George Custer overheard two of his Irish troopers preparing to fire on a furious Sioux charge in 1873: