Louis S. Warren (4 page)

Isaac Cody's condition soon worsened again. To recuperate in safety, he traveled to Ohio, where he visited with relatives. After returning from this trip he was followed by many new emigrants. Being a “locator,” a man who could read survey lines and claim locations for settlers, his home was a beacon for new arrivals. Numbers of them could be found there at any time, sometimes seated at the kitchen table, their tents pitched in the front yard.
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In this small but very noticeable way, the westward expansion of the United States moved through the home of Isaac Cody. Amidst the swirling violence which threatened to demolish that home, he remained its link both to the money they needed and to the expanding West. Patriarch of the family, founder of the town of Grasshopper Falls, Isaac Cody was both a family bulwark and the center of a rapidly expanding Free Kansas community.

Then, in the spring of 1857, Isaac Cody fell ill again, and finally died.
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For William and Julia Cody, his passing was a catastrophe. Both children mention his death only briefly, as if it was too painful a memory to explain. Financially, the loss was devastating. Martha, Isaac's daughter by his first marriage, had married and moved out. But Isaac's death left Mary Cody to fend for herself, young Will, four girls, and another son, Charles, who was but an infant.

The economic trial was complicated by the region's rising tensions. Although some historians estimate that only a hundred Kansans died as a direct result of the slavery fight, the violence went far beyond simple murder. Beatings and death threats were pervasive. Not far from the Cody claim was the base of the Kickapoo Rangers, a paramilitary gang hell-bent on driving Free Soil settlers from eastern Kansas, and whose members included Charles Dunn, their father's attacker.
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Amidst the continuing fury of this unofficial war, Mary Cody faced what was probably the greatest challenge of her life. Like other young widows, she was constrained by a society that required a woman of good reputation to work at home. Farm women made sizable contributions to their families' economic well-being, but they did not usually take up wage labor. Such activities were for lower-class women, or women of dubious reputation. As Julia recalled, “Now Brother Willie and I would get out together and plan what he must do to help take care of Mother and the 3 sisters and little brother Charlie....”
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William was barely eleven, but he was the only male capable of outdoor work. He became the family's primary wage earner.

From boyhood, then, William Cody was drawn into a commercial revolution that was sweeping the Plains, and which was impossible to ignore around Leavenworth. Kansas was a western territory, but it was no backwater. Most early settlements were trail towns, along migration routes where the ubiquitous travelers—emigrants, tourists, salesmen, surveyors, and soldiers, to name a few—created a lively commerce. Residents prospered by selling supplies by the trails. When trails shifted, townspeople on occasion jacked up whole towns and moved them on rollers to new settings where they could better exploit the trade of passing pioneers.
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Leavenworth, at the junction of the Missouri River and various routes west, was the biggest trail town of all. Some paths actually predated the town. Wagons carrying goods had been plying the Santa Fe Trail between Missouri and northern New Mexico since 1821. By 1855, $5 million in commerce was making its way along the Santa Fe Trail each year, and Leavenworth was only a short distance north of Independence, Missouri, the trail's eastern terminus.
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Still another trail wound west as handfuls of emigrants to Oregon, and more Mormons bound for Utah, began trundling up the Platte River road in the 1840s. Then, in California, in 1848, John Marshall reached for a glittering nugget in John Sutter's mill race. In the next five years, some 165,000 people traveled this westerly route to seek their share of the gold rush.
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From the day in 1854 that Leavenworth was founded along the Platte River road to California, passersby dwarfed the resident population, and as migrations increased, so did the town's economy. Between 1854 and 1860, 80,000 emigrants passed near or through Leavenworth on their way to California.
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Many of them traveled in small groups from various points to the east, and then stopped in eastern Kansas, where they organized into wagon trains and waited for the spring grass to mature enough to feed the livestock on the Plains crossing. Julia Cody later recalled that when the Cody family arrived in the Salt Creek Valley of Kansas in 1854, “it was filled with Trains and cattle and mules running around. There must have been Hundreds of White covered wagons waiting there to make up their Trains and start West.” Little Will Cody “got just wild with Excitement” and said, “Oh, my, that is what I am going to do as soon as we get moved over here in this beautifull place.”
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The continual cavalcade through Leavenworth increased yet again, in even more dramatic fashion, with another gold strike, this time in Colorado, in 1858. Before then, there had been only the sparsest white settlement along the Platte River road, mostly at trading posts, where traders solicited Indian commerce in buffalo robes and beaver hide. Suddenly, in the spring of 1859 alone, over 100,000 emigrants headed to the Colorado mines.
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California and Utah had been so far away that only the most valuable and nonperishable goods could be supplied overland. But Denver was only six hundred miles away, and as the center of the new emigration, it rapidly developed a consumer market which had to be provisioned by wagon. Teamsters drove more than 15 million pounds of goods to Denver in 1860. By 1866, over 100 million pounds of goods found their way to the Queen City of the Rockies, and much of it passed through the vicinity of Leavenworth.
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As important as supplying Denver was satisfying the wants and needs of emigrants. By 1860, there were primitive hotels along the entire route, so that one could journey from Leavenworth to Denver in virtually any kind of weather without ever sleeping under the stars. Road ranches, whiskey holes, and general provisioners sprung up along the main routes. From their adobe hovels, tents, or frame houses, these entrepreneurs offered a wide range of consumer commodities: wheel rims, ax handles, clothes, hats, matches, whiskey, horseshoes, tobacco, baking supplies, liniments, and more, all of which had to be hauled out to these trailside outposts on freight wagons.
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So emigrant wagons and freight-hauling “prairie schooners” crowded onto the trails alongside a burgeoning form of passenger transport, stagecoaches. By 1857, stages already ran from Leavenworth north into Nebraska Territory along the Platte River, to Kearny and on to Laramie. Stimulated by the surge of emigrants to the Colorado goldfields, in 1859 Leavenworth's premier transport capitalist, William Russell, joined up with a new partner and created the Leavenworth and Pikes Peak Express, running a faster, more direct route (it took about a week) between Leavenworth and Denver via the Smoky Hill River in western Kansas. Russell and his partners expended vast sums to lay out the route and build the twenty-seven stage stations needed along the way, and the new, more direct connection thrilled emigrants with its possibilities. In Denver, the arrival of the new company's first stage on May 7 was greeted with all the joy that three hundred residents could muster. But their party at the foot of the Rockies was eclipsed by the huge celebration in Leavenworth when the stage returned on May 20. Banner headlines announcing the linkage to the Colorado mines were followed by two days of parades, dinners, and bloviating speeches.
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Kansas settlers could not ignore the prodigious expansion of Leavenworth's freight and transport industry, especially Russell, Majors, and Waddell. The company was said to employ 6,000 teamsters and 45,000 oxen. One historian calls Russell, Majors, and Waddell “the Mayflower Van Line of their time,” and however many people they really employed, their facilities were awesome in 1859. That year, one traveler extolled their Leavenworth company yard: “Such acres of wagons! such pyramids of axeltrees! such herds of oxen! such regiments of drivers and employees!”
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These developments were not lost on the Cody family. Isaac had not only driven a stage between Chicago and Davenport, he also conducted various side businesses with Russell and Majors before his death.
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Leavenworth was only a few miles from the family home. Trains of two dozen or more freight wagons were a frequent impressive sight. Teams of up to twenty oxen hauled wagons, with iron-covered wheels as tall as a man, loaded with up to seven thousand pounds of goods. Each train was accompanied by a small herd of horses, necessary for herding the extra oxen. Prairie schooners dwarfed emigrant wagons. From miles away, their canvas-covered bows bulked over the horizon like the sails of a ship on the sea. The teamsters who drove these outfits swaggered beside the wagons, and their mastery of the long whips they cracked over the backs of animals, and of an extraordinary lexicon of profanity, made them both frightening and alluring to children who watched them pass.
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Will Cody soon sought work in the industry. As Mary Cody rented out rooms in the family home to bring in cash, and Julia did “all of the heavy work” of milking and tending the farm, young Will Cody started out as an ox-team driver for a neighbor who was hauling his hay to Leavenworth for sale. The eleven-year-old boy earned a daily wage for several weeks, at the end of which he handed the money over to his mother. Soon after, he went to work as a messenger boy for Russell and Majors (shortly before it became Russell, Majors, and Waddell) carrying messages on horseback from their office in Leavenworth town to the telegraph office at Fort Leavenworth, three miles away.
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As difficult as this sorrowful time was for the family, none of the Cody children's activities were unusual enough to distinguish them from their neighbors. Indeed, if most farm women worked out of their own homes in the 1850s, their children were often found in the rural workplace. From nine or ten (and sometimes younger), children hired out to other settlers to bring in the harvest, drive horses, or herd cattle or sheep, in exchange for cash or services. In frontier towns, children worked as bootblacks, newspaper salesmen, or clerks in town businesses. In these circumstances, sons and daughters who were not yet teenagers often lived miles from home for at least part of the year. Freighting outfits on well-established, well-protected trails sometimes hired boys as “cavallard” drivers, who tended the dozens of extra horses that traveled with them. There were dangers in such work, and adventure, too. Sometime in 1858, twelve-year-old Will Cody was a cavallard driver for a wagon train headed by John Willis, traveling along the Platte River road to Fort Laramie. Willis wrote to Cody in 1897, recalling “the time the Buffalo run through the train and stampeded the teams and you stoped the stampede.”
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But as exciting and dramatic as such events look to us, they were routine to nineteenth-century Americans. Indeed, Will Cody probably was not the only child employed at many of his jobs.
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Like Willis, many employers did not scruple to hire children even for dangerous labor. In eastern states, children were often maimed and killed at work in coal mines, steel factories, and cotton mills. Given the widespread reliance on child labor, and young Will Cody's experience as a horse drover on the trail to Laramie, some of the other boyhood yarns in his autobiography might seem true. Could he have gone to the Mormon War, as he claimed? The story corresponds with historical events. There was indeed an 1857 expedition to supply the U.S. Army column sent to prevent a threatened Mormon rebellion. The column left from Leavenworth. Their wagons were captured by the Mormons and burned, just as Cody recalled, and the teamsters did endure a terrible winter at Fort Bridger while they waited for the snow to clear so they could return home.
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Could young Will Cody have been there?

The answer is no. In his account, Cody claimed to have made two separate trips to supply troops in Utah, the first with a herd of cattle that was stampeded by Indians, forcing him to return and begin the second in a wagon train later that summer. Military records show there was a cattle herd scattered by Indians, and a wagon train that followed it. But the same records indicate the cattle herd left Leavenworth only a week before the wagon train. Indians scattered the cattle after the wagons had set out. The boy could not have seen both the scattering of the herd and the beginning of the wagon train's journey.
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Cody wrote that after the Mormons burned the wagons, he survived the winter with other members of the Utah Expedition at Fort Bridger, in today's Wyoming, in the spring of 1858. But his sister Julia recalled him being in school with her that spring. When William Cody read this recollection in her memoirs, in 1911, he did not disagree. “Say that write up of yours was fine,” he wrote his sister. “You have a wonderful memory.”
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His autobiography next regaled his readers with an account of prospecting in Colorado in 1859. The story is impossible to substantiate, but he claimed to have rafted down the Platte River on his return, something that would have been next to impossible during the river's low season. If he trapped furs in Kansas soon thereafter, as he claims, his account of meeting a Sioux war party in the winter of 1859–60 smacks of fantasy. In 1879, when this adventure first appeared in print, Custer had been dead for only three years, and Rain-in-the-Face was widely believed to be his killer (thanks to a poem on the subject by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow). If Cody's story were true, its Rain-in-the-Face would have to have been the father of the alleged Custer assailant, but his name called up the potent Custer image, which was still fresh in the minds of Cody's readers. This alone explains why Cody told the story. But could it be true? Not likely. The appearance of Rain-in-the-Face with a war party in deep snow at the dead of winter is highly improbable. At precisely such times, Plains Indians generally avoided long-distance travel and warfare. Snow and cold were too severe, and a man of Rain-in-the-Face's stature was unlikely to lead any warriors who proposed such foolishness.