Louis S. Warren (25 page)

IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY and in popular memory, the encounter between mime and man, the actor playing Buffalo Bill and the real Buffalo Bill, became the central narrative moment of Cody's first New York tour. His theatrics amused crowds partly by calling attention to the uncanny resemblance between the romantic images of him created by writers and actors (Art) and his real self (Nature) and inviting them to separate the two if they could. In this respect, his stage career was a new departure in his now customary, artful juxtaposition of original and copy, a western scout who looked suspiciously similar to his many representations in the popular press.

Audiences in New York, the capital of American theater, first encountered Cody as the “King of Border Men,” in Ned Buntline's serialized story in the
New York Weekly,
in December 1869. Any impulse to dismiss him as a simple fiction was complicated by his appearance in
New York Times
coverage of minor Indian skirmishes in 1870, and then again in reports of the extravagant hunting trips of General Sheridan in 1871, and probably in other news stories which have since been lost.
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Cody's press reputation was continuing to grow at the very moment that he stepped into New York society. Sometime in 1872 or 1873, William E. Webb's memoir and western travel guide,
Buffalo Land,
arrived on book-seller shelves (Webb was the division agent for the Kansas Pacific Railroad who had forced Cody's town of Rome into oblivion). Although Buffalo Bill appears only briefly in the book, he ambles across Webb's pages (as across Buntline's) alongside the not-quite-imaginary Wild Bill Hickok, with the author praising Cody as “spare and wiry in figure, admirably versed in plain lore, and altogether the best guide I ever saw.”
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Cody's rise to fame was partly a function of the changing mass press. He arrived in the popular eye as newspaper editors hit on the technique of manufacturing news rather than merely reporting it. The master of this strategy was James Gordon Bennett, Jr., publisher of the
New York Herald,
who was a member of Sheridan's hunting expedition in 1871, and who that very year sent a former Indian war reporter named Henry Morton Stanley to Africa in search of the “missing” Dr. Livingstone. In the hands of Bennett and his imitators, wilderness scouts, guides, explorers, and explorer-journalists were all manifestations of the white vanguard, conveying civilization to dark and savage places. Readers devoured press accounts in which adventurous journalists themselves increasingly became the subject of “news.” Reports of Stanley's adventures in Africa, in fact, covered columns of print right alongside coverage of the Grand Duke Alexis's hunt the following year. For the rest of his life, Buffalo Bill Cody served as a useful story for any writer with a deadline. Not coincidentally, Bennett was one of those who invited Cody to New York and hosted him on his arrival. He had an uncanny nose for a story.
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The grand duke's hunt provided New Yorkers with their most vivid version of Cody before he arrived in their town. Although his role in the expedition was minor and he was overshadowed by Custer, he received his best coverage in the
New York Herald,
whose reporter took time out to consider “the genial and daring Buffalo Bill,” a “genuine hero of the Plains.” Even at this point, much of the fun in watching Cody came from his verve in assuming the costume of romantic hero to please the crowd, and his amusement at his own audacity. When the medical doctor attending the Grand Duke Alexis asked Cody if he always dressed in the “spangled buckskin suit” of that morning, related the correspondent, Cody grinned. “No, sir; Not much.” He went on, wrote the reporter: “ ‘When Sheridan told me the Duke was coming I thought I would throw myself on my clothes. I only put on this rig this morning, and half the people in the settlement have been accusing me of putting on airs,' and then Bill laughed heartily, and so did the Doctor, the Duke, and the whole imperial crowd.”
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In February, at least two events reminded New Yorkers of the recently completed tour of the grand duke. The first was the debut of a new act, “The Grand Goat Alexis,” at a prominent burlesque theater, in which a goat rode a horse around a ring, with a monkey thrown on his back, “and the horse thus bears a couple of stories of animals round and round the ring, amid the wildest shouts of laughter.”
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The second, of course, was the arrival of Buffalo Bill.

Throughout his visit to New York, his representation in the press and on the stage could be measured against his real person, a kind of interplay between dramatic Cody and real Cody, the former on the stage at the Bowery, the latter frequently sighted in downtown New York, at the Union Club, the Leiderkranz masked ball, and at the fashionable racetracks.

New Yorkers could continue this Cody game even after the man left the city. Almost as soon as he went back to Nebraska, Ned Buntline published a new Buffalo Bill novel,
Buffalo Bill's Best Shot,
which continued to work the line between truth and fiction with a romance inspired by the hunt with the Grand Duke Alexis. Even if they passed up the chance to read it, New Yorkers saw announcements of it over three successive days in the
New York
Times and elsewhere.
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Once he moved onto the stage, Buffalo Bill Cody would be a news staple for the rest of his life, moving back and forth over the line dividing the real and the fake, Nature and Artifice, his stature as a “real westerner” underscoring the interplay of the two. Synopses of his plays and reviews of the dime novels about him appeared in the same newspapers that reported “real” news about his cattle drives at his Nebraska ranch, his guided hunting expeditions with English aristocrats, and his Indian fights across the Plains. To audiences, then, Buffalo Bill's life was a fascinating mixture of theatrical romance and bloody reality, much like the West itself.
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CODY'S OCCUPATIONS on the Plains had all been tied to the expanding railroad, and his stage stardom, too, was partly a product of the railroad and the ways it revolutionized the theater. In earlier days, a theater owner (often a renowned actor) would hire a company of actors to work in residence, performing plays in repertory for a whole season. After the Civil War, the railroad made sedentary companies obsolete. Now, theatrical stars became the center of companies known as “combinations.” Opening at a prominent theater in New York, usually in early autumn, the combination then went on tour via the nation's new railroad networks, performing a selection of plays in many different cities and towns. Troupes disbanded at the end of the season, usually in late June. The promoter, or star, could then begin the process of hiring anew and commissioning new plays for the next season. As New York historians have observed, “The city had become a manufacturer of dramatic commodities,” and theater was becoming at least as much an industry as an art.
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Buffalo Bill's fame grew as he grafted his earlier guiding and scouting persona onto this new form of commodity production. To say the least, the theatrical career was an unlikely turn. “That I, an old scout who had never seen more than twenty or thirty theatrical performances in my life, should think of going upon the stage, was ridiculous in the extreme.”
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But if the frontiersman's metamorphosis into stage star seems counterintuitive, in another respect the stage was a fitting venue. Actors, like spies and scouts, were traditionally a marginal class in America. Professional deceivers, they were reviled by the Puritans as liars and blasphemers, and by subsequent generations of Americans for their suspicious facility with disguise. In the many warnings that moralists and urban reformers issued about the confidence man, the theater figured prominently as one of his preferred venues for the introduction of virtuous youth to urban sin and decadence. After all, the confidence man, the consummate seducer, was himself a skilled actor.
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These prejudices against the theater had weakened considerably by the 1870s, by which time successful actors were no more unpopular than successful lawyers (conversely, low-rent thespians were every bit as reviled as hack attorneys). But suspicion of actors as disreputable and their entertainments as immoral remained a backdrop for Cody's entire career.
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Nate Salsbury, Cody's managing partner for many years in the Wild West show, began his show business career as an actor after the Civil War, at which time his cousin warned him that “the majority of the American people think that a man who is talented lowers himself by going on to the stage.”
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Thus, Cody's new appeal was in some ways analogous to his appeal as a scout. Just as surrounding himself with socially dubious mixed-bloods and Indians made him stand out as a white guide and tracker, by entering the arena of actors—professional impostors—he both compounded the layers of skepticism around his own persona and simultaneously enhanced the currency of his authentic hunting, scouting, and Indian fighting. Meeting a genuine frontiersman who seemed to embody the progress of the nation was one thing, but seeing him in a context of outright fakery, supporting a drama in which he banished the savagery of the frontier, upped the value of his real biography.

Just as important, Cody's stage debut was not accidental, but a calculated development of his entertainment product. Out on the Plains, the western show that Hickok, Cody, and others crafted for tourists—tall tales, shooting exhibitions, hunting displays, and the projection of a heroic persona in keeping with popular expectations—begged a central question: if the audience was coming west on the train to see the performance, why not put the show on the train and send it east? Showmen had staged frontier exhibitions before. P. T. Barnum's failed New Jersey buffalo hunt of 1843 was a prime example. The transcontinental railroad made such attempts easier, at least potentially. Thus, in 1872, while Buffalo Bill was visiting New York, museum impresario Sidney Barnett hired Cody's friend and neighbor in Nebraska, Texas Jack Omohundro. The Texan was to accompany a herd of buffalo and a group of Pawnee Indians to upstate New York, where they would perform a mock buffalo hunt for tourists at Barnett's museum. Although Omohundro and several others put in much time and effort capturing buffalo, government agents refused to allow the Pawnees to travel east. Texas Jack backed out, too. Nonetheless, the staged hunt went forward. In August of that year, Wild Bill Hickok served as master of ceremonies for Barnett's show, in which a delegation of cowboys joined a party of Sac and Fox Indians from Oklahoma. The crew performed a mock buffalo pursuit on the grassy foreground of America's most renowned wilderness monument, Niagara Falls. But the event proved difficult and expensive to stage. Barnett lost money and folded the show.
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Still, few doubted that moving the show of western progress to the East had a future. The question was how to make it happen.

At the time of Hickok's appearance at Niagara Falls, Cody's first theatrical performance in Chicago, with Texas Jack Omohundro, was only three months away. Theatrical drama had the advantage of being far more familiar to audiences than the kind of outdoor arena exhibition that Barnett and Hickok were presenting, and on the stage Cody could incorporate rope tricks, shooting displays, and other aspects of western show spectacle which he would one day display in an arena. Read carefully, Cody's protestations of dramatic ignorance in fact suggest the omnipresence of theater on the frontier, and its familiarity to him. The “old scout” (he was twenty-six) “had never seen more than twenty or thirty theatrical performances.”
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It might seem a sizable total by today's standards, but Cody's estimate was probably low (the better to emphasize the implausibility of his career turn). Frank North, legendary scout and friend of Cody's, lived in Colville, Nebraska, where he kept a journal during 1869. It was a busy year for the young North family. There was not only a new baby at home, but also a lumber business and rental properties to tend, two major expeditions to fight the Cheyenne, and a social calendar packed with reading circles, dances, and concerts. Nonetheless, Frank North saw fourteen plays at Omaha theaters in 1869 alone.
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Although its inclusiveness had faded in previous decades, theater was traditionally the nation's foremost democratic entertainment, presenting a large variety of productions for all classes, and in all regions. Even in Iowa, at the time Cody was born, theatrical troupes performed in English and German.
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On the Great Plains, theaters were among the first buildings erected in new towns. Stage drama, in fact, preceded the stages. In Kansas, as on earlier frontiers, soldiers often entertained each other and surrounding settlers with dramatic companies at their posts. Traveling dancers, singers, magicians, jugglers, and acting troupes made their way along the trail to Denver by 1859, frequently stopping to perform in Leavenworth and other Kansas towns.
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Major E. W. Wynkoop, who fought in the Plains Indian wars with Cody in the late 1860s, became founding president of the Amateur Dramatic Association of Denver in 1861.
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Theaters operated in Leavenworth right through the Civil War (the esteemed John Wilkes Booth even appeared there).
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By 1867, William Cody had named his favorite buffalo rifle “Lucretia Borgia.” Some speculate that he heard of the famous Italian poisoner and erotomaniac from the play of the same name, a popular nineteenth-century offering which was showing in St. Louis when Cody was stationed there with the Union army in 1864. But it is just as likely that he saw the play in Denver, where it was playing when the fourteen-year-old Cody was there in the winter of 1860.
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In the Kansas cow towns, minstrel shows and burlesque proliferated, along with opera and melodrama.
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By the time Cody arrived at Fort McPherson, there was a post theater in operation there, too.
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