Louis S. Warren (20 page)
Authors: Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody,the Wild West Show
Tags: #State & Local, #Buffalo Bill, #Entertainers, #West (AK; CA; CO; HI; ID; MT; NV; UT; WY), #Frontier and Pioneer Life - West (U.S.), #Biography, #Adventurers & Explorers, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Fiction, #United States, #General, #Pioneers - West (U.S.), #Historical, #Frontier and Pioneer Life, #Biography & Autobiography, #Pioneers, #West (U.S.), #Civil War Period (1850-1877), #Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, #Entertainers - United States, #History
There can be little question that Cody actually killed Yellow Hair that day, although exactly how has been a source of continuing debate and controversy. He was so attuned to popular longings and so adept at the arts of imposture that he thought of himself as both a theatrical and a historical actor even when he was not on the stage. The day after he shot Yellow Hair, he wrote a letter to Louisa, at their home in Rochester, New York: “We have had a fight. I killed Yellow Hand a Cheyenne Chief in a single-handed fight. You will no doubt hear of it through the papers.” As soon as he reached Fort Laramie, he informed her, he would “send the war bonnet, shield, bridal, whip, arms and his scalp to Kerngood [Moses Kerngood owned a store in Rochester] to put up in his window.” Already, he anticipated that the scalp would enhance his image as an Indian fighter and increase his attraction for theatrical audiences. “I will write to Kerngood to bring it up to the house so you can show it to the neighbors. . . . I have only one scalp I can call my own that fellow I fought single handed in sight of our command and the cheers that went up when he fell was deafening.”
137
Granting that he shot and scalped Yellow Hair, his other material contributions were hardly substantial. Most of the real tracking on the foray was done by the mixed-blood scout, Baptiste “Little Bat” Garnier. For the rest of the expedition, Indian auxiliaries, especially Shoshones and Crows, did most of the scouting. When Merritt's command finally made its rendezvous with George Crook, Cody's tracking abilities were overshadowed by those of Crook's chief of scouts, Frank Grouard. The son of a Mormon missionary and a Polynesian woman, Grouard had spent his childhood in California before being captured and then adopted by the Lakota while working on the Plains in the late 1860s. Grouard fought alongside Sitting Bull's Hunkpapas against the U.S. Army as late as 1873. For reasons that have never been clear, he switched sides in 1874, becoming a remarkably adept army scout. Cody himself remarked that Grouard “knew the country thoroughly,” and General Crook once said he would rather lose a third of his command than do without Grouard. Cody, by contrast, had spent his career well to the south, had never been in the Black Hills before, and often stumbled. On his last mission, he carried dispatches to General Alfred Terry through the badlands of the Yellowstone, reaching his destination “after having nearly broken my neck a dozen times.”
138
But Grouard, after all, was a mixed-race man, and white contemporaries questioned his racial loyalties. Well into the twentieth century, writers were still debating whether his Hawaiian ancestry made him a Kanaka scout or a mulatto renegade.
139
Cody's imposture allowed the army command to exploit the talents of Grouard and other mixed-blood and Indian scouts even as they shoved them aside. Indeed, the white Indian's very presence was a source of pride and excitement. “
Buffalo Bill
arrived . . . ,” noted General Terry upon seeing Cody approach his command that August.
140
Officers recounted his exploits and assisted his career in the most unexpected ways. One veteran of the 1876 Sioux campaigns, Major Andrew Burt, penned a play for Cody's stage troupe,
May Cody, or Lost and Won
(in which Cody rescued his sister from Mormons), which the Buffalo Bill Combination performed to great success in 1877â78.
141
After
May Cody
debuted in Milwaukee, in January 1878, the
Milwaukee
Sentinel
asked a local Fifth Cavalry veteran, Captain Charles King, for an article about Buffalo Bill. King was on the cusp of a literary career that would see him produce sixty-nine novels between 1885 and 1909. Through all of them, he carried a torch for the army, whose valor, he believed, was unheralded among ignorant civilians.
King was a drinking buddy of Cody's who had actually written one of the first press accounts of Cody's killing of Yellow Hair, or as he was called, Yellow Hand, penning a brief article for the
New York Herald
a week after the battle. His article for the
Sentinel
foreshadowed his crusade to shore up the army's public image in subsequent decades, and it became a chapter in a small pamphlet,
Campaigning with Crook,
that appeared on newsstands in 1880. In this account, Codyâor, rather, King's stilted version of Codyâ takes center stage as the frontier hero leading the valiant Fifth to battle. “ âBy Jove! General,' said Cody, sliding down the hill toward his horse, ânow's our chance. Let our party mount here out of sight and we'll cut those fellows off.' ”
142
Cody's killing of Yellow Hand became the climax of an adventurous Fifth Cavalry campaign. “I see Buffalo Bill closing on a superbly accoutred warrior. It is the work of a minute; the Indian has fired and missed. Cody's bullet tears through the rider's leg, into his pony's heart, and they tumble in confused heap on the prairie. The Cheyenne struggles to his feet for another shot, but Cody's second bullet crashes through his brain, and the young chief, Yellow Hand, drops lifeless in his tracks.”
143
Of course, the crafty scout was ahead of King all the time. By the time the army man first published this account, in 1879, Cody's reenactment of “The First Scalp for Custer” was already popular theater fare.
144
Cody's adept use of the scrape on Warbonnet Creek to boost his reputation as an Indian fighter allowed King to create a heroic battle for the entire Fifth Cavalry, all from an encounter so small it could hardly be called a battle. Crook, waiting far to the north for reinforcements so he could pursue the Lakota, who badly outnumbered his command, complained that Merritt's march against the phantom Cheyenne actually delayed the pursuit of the Sioux who killed Custer, allowing Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse to escape. Absent Cody's theatrics, no officer would have commemorated it, nor likely remembered it. So it was that King, writing up the event later, played Cody's time with the Fifth for all it was worth: “Buffalo Bill is radiant; his are the honors of the day.”
145
More senior officers, too, exploited Cody's self-presentation as scout-hero. In 1879, as Cody completed his autobiography, not only did General Carr write the preface to it, but General Phil Sheridan wrote a letter of endorsement, on army letterhead, selectively validating the tale. “I have read your book which sketches your life on the plains with much interest
so
far as it relates to your intercourse with me,
” he announced. “I find it scrupulously correct.” The publisher attached the endorsement to the book's front matter; Cody returned Sheridan's favor by dedicating the book to him. Sheridan completed the circle by writing Cody into his memoirs in 1888.
146
For all of Cody's Wild West show career, old commanders sallied to his arena, partly for the entertainment, and partly for the heroic aura he conferred to them. In return they sometimes supported even his most fictional claims, as we can see in the story of how General Carr finally endorsed Cody's fictional heroics at Summit Springs. General Carr did not attribute the killing of Tall Bull to Cody in his battlefield report of 1869, nor in his preface to Cody's 1879 autobiography (wherein Cody first wrote that he was the legendary Dog Man's killer).
But many years after Summit Springs, in 1906, Cody wrote to the old general about his plans for a reenactment of the Battle of Summit Springs in his show. He graciously asked Carr for his permission to stage the tableau, and for a testimonial of the scout's participation in the real battle. Carr pretended embarrassment, warning Cody to stay “close to facts,” and avoid “embroidery.”
But he must have been thrilled. The old man had been a decorated, accomplished soldier. During the Civil War's Battle of Pea Ridge he was wounded three times in a day (and won the Congressional Medal of Honor). The Battle of Summit Springs had been his most successful fight in a long and mostly successful career of battling Cheyenne, Sioux, Apaches, and Comanches. But he had been forced into retirement in 1893. Now all but forgotten by the public, he battled the War Department to remove black marks on his record, from a few command decisions he made late in his career, in Arizona.
Suddenly, here was Buffalo Bill wanting to make him a hero in the Wild West show. The showman had even reserved General and Mrs. Carr private seatsâhe called it the “Royal Box”âfor the show's opening in Madison Square Garden, so they went to New York and spent an entire week there. They attended the Wild West show every single day, basking in the adulation of the crowd.
Cody hardly had to embroider his Summit Springs account any further, for Carr did much of the colorful stitching himself. For his testimonial, he wrote that on that fateful day in 1869, Cody arrived on the battlefield of Summit Springs and “saw a chief charging about, and haranguing his men.” As he drew closer, “Buffalo Bill shot him off his horse and got the horse.” The general's new version corresponded to Cody's account from his own autobiography. Carr's testimonial was reprinted in the Wild West show program, and combined with his attendance at the reenactment, it gave the highly fictional entertainment a stamp of almost unimpeachable authority.
147
Army officers did more than appreciate Cody. They were instrumental in creating his myth, seeking a place for him in the pantheon of frontier heroes. As his Wild West show career made him more famous than any had imagined possible, the presence of this heroic white Indian in the army's often controversial, frustrating campaigns helped officers to leave the many embarrassing disputes over their policies and careers in the dust of history. By writing themselves into stories of Cody's heroics (and Cody into stories of their failures) they inscribed their names alongside Buffalo Bill's, as saviors of the settler's cabin and American civilization.
Their efforts shaped public perceptions of Cody long after his death in 1917, right down to the present day. The 1920s witnessed a biography and numerous articles debunking Cody's valor. In 1929, an eighty-five-year-old Charles King fired one last salvo for his long-gone friend. Contacted by an enthusiastic Chicago journalist (a former lieutenant in the 342nd Infantry), King regaled the young writer with stories of Buffalo Bill's heroism. The interview appeared under the title “My Friend, Buffalo Bill” in the
Cavalry
Journal
in 1932. The author was Don Russell, and he was so inspired by King's account that he dedicated years of his life to a new Cody biography. Published in 1960, the hagiographic and popular
Lives and Legends of Buffalo
Bill
endured for decades as the most careful analysis of Cody's real-life battlefield exploits. But in fact Russell accepted at face value almost everything that every officer ever wrote about Cody, without once exploring why officers needed to believe in Cody's mythology, or how Cody exploited their appetite for frontier theatrics.
148
As early as 1869, Cody had learned to navigate the complicated, confusing world of frontier warfare by combining real tracking and fighting skills with the costumed theatrics of the white Indian. Central to his artful deception was his real and respectable white family and home. Officers felt no need to qualify their praise of a white man who approximated the ideal middle-class family in his private life and the heroic white scout on the battlefield.
But Cody had not learned how to defuse the tension that frayed the bond between him and Louisa. When angered, she could go weeks without speaking to him.
149
If William Cody later remembered the Fort McPherson days as among the more peaceful in his marriage, it was because “I was at home so little of the time.” He was, he recalled, “continually scouting and guiding the army” and so many officers wanted to hunt with him that “I had no trouble in getting away from home whenever I chose.”
150
These hunting excursions amounted to recreational diversions, but they proved no less important to his development of a frontier imposture as popular entertainment for an audience beyond the army and the Plains, as we shall see in the next chapter.
CHAPTER SIX
Buffalo Hunt
As it was in the Far West of North Americaâ“Buffalo Bill” and Indians.
The last of the only known native herd.
1
THE WILD WEST show's buffalo hunt reenactment visually inscribed many of Cody's hunting stories. According to his autobiography, in 1869 during the Republican River expedition scouts for the Fifth Cavalry proposed a buffalo hunt. General Carr acquiesced. The Pawnees surrounded a herd, charged it, and killed thirty-two buffalo. Cody claimed that he one-upped the Indians and dazzled them that day. “Let me show your Pawnees how to kill buffalo,” he told Frank North. Charging into the herd alone, he downed thirty-six buffalo. “At nearly every shot I killed a buffalo, stringing the dead animals out on the prairie, not over fifty feet apart.”
2
By 1883, his hunting prowess on the Republican River had grown. That year's Wild West show programs related that he shot forty-eight buffalo before the awestruck Pawnees.
3
These and other hunting accounts in the autobiography and in show programs provided the “historical” context for a perennial display of buffalo killing in the show arena. From the opening season of the Wild West show, in 1883, almost to its end in 1916, Buffalo Bill always performed a mock buffalo hunt for spectators. Thundering out from one end of the arena, he was joined by a handful of cowboys and Indians who chased a small captive herd of bison around the arena, guns firing blanks.
For the audience, the buffalo were a reminder of America's wilderness beginnings. The mock hunt also underscored Cody's long-ago reputation as “the champion buffalo-hunter of the plains,” and his show publicity made his hunting stories the best known of any contemporary hunter.
4
His language in these tales was unadorned, humorous, and his stories meshed so well with popular fantasies of buffalo hunting that it was easy to believe them.
In fact, Cody constructed these tales with some care. His continuing quest for middle-class respectability made him sensitive to the dubious reputation of professional hunters. For this reason,
The Life of Buffalo Bill
features plenty of hunting exploits, but little mention of his stint as a market hunter. The book depicts no stands, no guns mounted on tripods, no hunting on foot.
Â
The reenactment of a buffalo hunt was a standard act of the Wild West show
from its earliest days. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.
Instead, the autobiography shores up Cody's reputation as an expert hunter who shot all his buffalo from the back of a galloping horse. He told one taleâpossibly trueâabout dazzling a group of supercilious army officers by killing eleven buffalo with twelve shots.
5
He told another about a buffalo-hunting competition against another frontier scout, Will Comstock. Cody's victory over Comstock came from his superior ability to manipulate not just his gun and his horse, but the buffalo, too. “My great
forte
in killing buffaloes from horseback was to get them circling by riding my horse at the head of the herd, shooting the leaders, thus crowding their followers to the left, till they would finally circle round and round.”
6
In this manner, he killed sixty-nine buffalo without tiring his faithful horse. Witness to his victory over Comstock was a champagne-drinking crowd of St. Louis ladies and frontier army officers who came out to watch via the railroad. In the 1880s, Wild West show audiences could rest assured that in watching Buffalo Bill perform feats of marksmanship and buffalo chasing, they were following a frontier tradition.
7
The competition story and other, even more embellished vignettesâlike the one in which he drove buffalo into an army camp before killing them so he would not need wagons to transport the meatâappeared in show programs for all of Cody's career with the Wild West show.
8
Measuring these stories against William Cody's real experience, it is tempting to dismiss them as simple fictions. But if Cody's trajectory from Great Plains to great showman seems so peculiar in many ways, there could be no richer source for his later merging of show and history than the buffalo range of the Far West. Even in 1860s Kansas, buffalo hunting was an activity around which swirled a powerful national mythology, a nascent tourist industry, and a vibrant atmosphere of showmanship. How the public came to see buffalo hunting on horseback as a fundamental marker of the frontier, and how Cody came to see himself as a provider of the mounted hunt spectacle, speaks volumes about the origins of his show business imagination. By the early 1870s, before he ever ventured to the East, Cody had completed his passage from utilitarian hunting, in which he killed buffalo for cash, to show hunting, in which he killed buffalo for audiences who paid to see him do it.
In fact, buffalo-hunting competitions like the one he described in his autobiography were common among frontier army officers, and Cody probably participated in more than one. In the 1870s, during his stage career, he issued and responded to hunting challenges in the press. “The challenge issued by Buffalo Bill, through the columns of this paper, to a trial of Buffalo killing, has been accepted by a man at Fort Russell named Knox, formerly a government scout,” reported one Nebraska paper in the 1870s. “Mr. Cody will put up a forfeit of $500, the hunt to take place inside of thirty days. The ground has not been selected yet, but Mr. Cody expressed a preference for the range about twenty miles south of here.”
9
Cody's scrappy showdowns on the buffalo range were a way of shoring up his status as a real frontiersman during his years of eastern stage play. But if he participated in the ubiquitous hunting competitions of the Plains, we can yet be certain that few of his hunting exploits unfolded the way he claimed they did. In particular, the Cody-Comstock match hunt never happened, at least not the way Cody says it did. When he wrote that he turned buffalo in a circle or drove them into camp before killing them, he echoed tall tales common in the West, in which hunters herded the unherdable bison before tidily dispatching them. Such fantasies appeared in emigrant guidebooks at least as early as 1845, and by 1890 they appeared in the frontier memoirs of Elizabeth Custer, the widow of Lieutenant Colonel George Custer.
10
Perhaps more to the point, no credible eyewitness to Cody's alleged “herding hunt” has ever emerged.
11
Indeed, Cody could not have faced off against Comstock when he claims he did. William “Medicine Bill” Comstock, an army scout, was wanted for murder at the time of the alleged competition. Would he have participated in a public contest that was advertised in the press and attended by numerous officers and town ladies? Why has no advertisement, or any other record of this supposedly well attended hunt, ever surfaced?
12
It is suspiciously convenient, and Codyesque, that the story was impossible to verify. By the time Cody began hawking
The Life of Buffalo Bill
in theater lobbies, Comstock himself was long dead.
13
But, like his Pony Express fictions, the fabricated Cody-Comstock buffalo duel tells us almost as much about Cody as any real episode could. His consistent depiction of himself as a flashy horseback hunter reflects his grasp of hunting ideology common to people who would fill the seats at his show years later. Where hide and meat hunters bragged about their “stands,” speed and mobility made mounted buffalo hunting a highly attractive symbol for a very different circle of hunters known as sportsmen, or “sports.” Market hunters gauged their skills in volume, sports valued style over substance. In this respect, Cody's tales reflect his exposure to the ethos of sport hunting and of the hunting guide, a new occupation which he took up with great vigor during his days as an army scout, and which played a large role in his self-development as a showman.
From the Daniel Boone of history to the Natty Bumppo of James Fenimore Cooper, the white Indian, noble and natural, was a hunter par excellence. His facility with killing wild beasts was at once a seminal, regenerative bond with his native terrain and a mark of his belonging to the past, the time before progress, before farms and cities and commerce.
14
Like Indians and wild animals, the white Indian would vanish into history as livestock and farms spread over the country. Cody's effort to embody this figure required his crafting of a hunter image specifically to entertain a small but increasingly devoted public, who valued proximity to the white Indian as insurance against their alienation from nature in a rapidly industrializing America. In an important sense, guiding the hunt provided Cody another stage, on which he made a show of merging the figure of the hunter, the agent of American history, with the avatar of American wilderness.
HAVING CEASED SHOOTING buffalo for the Kansas Pacific in 1868, Cody's hunting thereafter was devoted almost exclusively to recreation and the cultivation of tourism. The golden spike that connected the Union Pacific to the Central Pacific, and the East to the West, was not driven until 1869. But as we have seen, tourists ventured west even before that. By 1867, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of tourists heading to frontier Kansas on the rail line, paying their $10 fare to see the West. Some were wealthy. Most were solidly middle class. They slept in baggage cars, or in their stiff seats, and in cheap boardinghouses when they could find them. They scanned the horizon for Indiansâusually in vainâand they stumbled off the train, bleary-eyed and wondering at the bleak and trashy cow towns.
Already, travel writers lamented the way that tourism had desecrated “many a lovely spot” with “the sandwich-papers, orange-peel, and broken bottles of former devotees.” For the public that felt likewise, the West was a beacon.
15
These tourists, like those before and after, were in pursuit of the authentic and the natural, searching out signs of “the frontier,” the “real West.”
16
In Hays and other towns, a whole industry of guiding, provisioning, and meeting the aesthetic demands of excursionists soon emerged. Tourists not only invited local men like Hickok and Cody to strike convincing western poses; they also shaped popular understandings of the natural world. In 1872, Congress legislated the creation of Yellowstone National Park in northwest Wyoming, largely at the insistence of the Northern Pacific Railroad's director, Jay Cooke, who saw in the place a magnificent attraction for tourists (who would, of course, buy tickets on his trains to get there, and accommodation at the hotel he built there).
17
The unmistakable cultural power of tourists in creating natural attractions extended to hunting. These visitors expected the West to resemble the one they saw in the numerous popular paintings of the period, and which they read about in dime novels, memoirs, and reports of earlier western excursionists, and in newspapers. In some sense, then, the “real West” was where one shot at buffalo. So as trains raced alongside buffalo herds, hundreds of guns blazed from the windows. Surprisingly few animals might fall in such an episode, but one tourist noted that when one old bull collapsed within sight of the tracks, the locomotive wailed to a halt, “and men, women, and children tumbled from the train and joined in the pursuit.” They climbed atop the carcass, led cheers for the president and the railroad, and, in this case, pulled the old bull on board the train as a kind of mascot.
18
They behaved much like the party of Ohio excursionists who ventured out with George Custer in 1869 and clipped locks of hair (which they jokingly compared to scalps) from a fallen buffalo, as souvenirs of their frontier experience.
19
Not surprisingly, railroads advertised buffalo hunts as an inducement to the tourist trade as early as 1868.
20
The following year, a Topeka journalist commented, “Persons from the east are stopping off here every day, hoping to get a chance to immortalize their names by killing buffalo.”
21
Trains stopped frequently to allow passengers from Topeka, Omaha, or points east to blast away at the buffalo, while trainmen installed extra cowcatchers on the back of the train to keep at bay the longhorn cattle which milled up to, and even onto, the platform at Abilene and other towns. The replacement of hunting by pastoralism, the march of civilization, was under way. In part, tourists went west to participate in it.
22
Many fantasized about longer hunting excursions, and for wealthier hunters, full-fledged expeditions were popular. As we have seen, by the 1860s, hunting animals for hides and pelts had only a tenuous acceptability, as a petty-capitalist endeavor for upwardly mobile white men. But meanwhile, other kinds of hunting, especially for recreation, had acquired a new kind of legitimacy as a leisure pursuit. Beginning in the 1830s, and accelerating through the century, industrialization, urbanization, and the growth of the market system created a large, managerial middle class and a smaller upper class of white men who were increasingly self-conscious about their own urbanity and privilege, and about their vulnerability to systems of banking, finance, and salaried living. Where their fathers, or grandfathers, had been independent farmers, they depended on a strange andâas the era's repeated financial panics reminded themâunreliable system of commerce, trade, and cash. At the same time, surging immigration of Irish, German, and other foreign laborers swelled city tenements to bursting. Managers and technicians of the new economy supervised these rough workers, whose alien characteristics and strenuous labor underscored managers' fears about losing touch with farm, field, and forest, the traditional sources of masculinity. For these middle- and upper-class men of the cities, then, an increasingly attractive, powerful antidote to urban decadence was to reconnect with traditional American landscapes and activities, to claim a bond of their own with the American earth, with indigenous Nature.
23