Louis S. Warren (58 page)

Broncho Charlie Miller

IT WAS 1887 when the London reporter met the slight young cowboy in the camp of the Wild West show. His name, he said, was Charlie Miller, and his was a simple story of emigrants and settlers. His father was a Scotsman who emigrated to New York, where he married Charlie's mother, herself an immigrant from England. They followed the gold rush west in 1849, and built a home at Hat Creek, in northern California. Their son Charlie was born eleven years later. Charlie was seven years old when local Indians, tired of being dispossessed and killed with impunity, rose up. The Miller home was among their targets. Charlie escaped, and his mother and his brother “only got away almost by a miracle.” His father was not so fortunate, and his killing left Charlie's mother without support.

So the family moved to San Francisco, where Charlie attended school for a couple of years. By 1870, the problem of money must have troubled Mrs. Miller, for she sent him to work. He was only nine. But like thousands of other frontier children, including William Cody in Kansas, Charlie herded livestock. His employer, a rancher named Thompson, kept him on for four years, “doing anything and everything about the ranch that a boy could.” In 1874, he helped drive two thousand cattle to market in Sacramento, where he met a man named Summercamp. By this time, Miller was “a pretty smart boy on a horse.” Just as a Kansas teamster had hired ten-year-old Will Cody to drive horses from Leavenworth to Laramie, so Summercamp hired this thirteen-year-old boy to join him and two other men driving a herd of horses seven hundred miles to Idaho. There were sporadic Indian attacks on other parties along the route, and progress was slow. “At one place, Camp Watson, on Big Meadow Creek, we had to lay up three weeks before we could get along.” But in the end, “we never came to close quarters with them,” and the party arrived at the ranch in safety. Charlie was soon known as “Broncho Charlie,” and he broke horses for Summercamp for the next four years.

The horses Charlie handled, along with other settler livestock in southern Idaho, devastated the camas plants on which the Bannock Indians at Fort Hall depended. Facing starvation, the Bannock and their Paiute allies went to war in 1878. There was panic in Idaho and Oregon, and many settlers joined volunteer militias. But soon the combined Bannock and Pauite forces all but collapsed.

Even by his own account, Charlie Miller's involvement in the fighting was small. He was a civilian dispatch carrier on a few occasions for the army, he said, but he admitted he saw no action until near the war's end. Then, at Blue River, with a party of ranch hand volunteers and professional soldiers, Charlie found himself in an Indian battle. Historians, when they recalled the fight at all, described it as a skirmish. But like so many men who sweat through fights their people soon forget, Charlie Miller remembered it all too well. “This was the first big Indian fight I had been in, and you bet I was pretty well scared to death.” He fired his gun a great deal, as did everyone else, but when dusk came, “the Indians went, and we didn't follow them.” Their casualties were too high. “We had twenty-one killed and wounded,” he recalled, and the Indians took theirs away, “so it is impossible to say what they numbered.” The ranch hands and soldiers claimed victory. Charlie thought it a draw.

The Bannocks returned to Fort Hall. Charlie broke horses in Idaho until 1884, when he moved to Colorado to work for a horse dealer named John Witter. Two years later, in September of 1886, a horse “bit me clean through the hand, tearing the sinews and muscles to ribbons.” Unable to work, he turned to his remaining family. By this time, his mother had moved back to New York, where Charlie found her. He stayed with her until February 1887, when he visited the Wild West show at Madison Square Garden. He was soon working for Buffalo Bill's show as a bronco rider and, sometimes, in the reenactment of the Pony Express. That spring, he set sail for London with the rest of the cast.

For a ranch hand and horse breaker, the show was more than a paycheck. Charlie's western work was often dreary, usually exhausting, and always underpaid, but he enjoyed the sense of building up a country that it gave him. As he told the reporter, when he first went to Idaho, “it was was a wild, barren desert country.” But he and other cowboys who worked there spread word of its minerals, “with the result that to-day the echoes of the hills are awakened,” with sound of steam-driven stamp mills, “crushing ore of all kinds.” Charlie helped bring the pastoral wave that replaced the primitive hunters; industry and commerce followed. Now, Idaho was “covered with towns and schools; colleges and churches are to be found all over the place.” Civilization had come to Idaho, and the fatherless boy who made his way breaking horses had helped to bring it. Charlie Miller was a protagonist of Progress.

It was a simple, gritty story the London reporter heard. How much of it was true is open to question. Charlie Miller's real name was Julius Mortimer Miller, and his descendants believe that he was born in New York and sailed to California as a boy deckhand.

But whatever his origins, and whatever the quantum of truth in his first published stab at an autobiography, Charlie Miller honed the skills of a tall-tale narrator over the course of a very long life. Some of his later stories were true. He and fellow Wild West cowboy Marve Beardsley really did ride in a six-day endurance race against two bicyclists at the Agricultural Hall in Islington. But Miller soon polished old rumors into gleaming facts, then spun them into glittering stories. In the summer of 1887, London gossip had it that Red Shirt, the “chief” of the show Indians, and the Sioux translator, William “Bronco Bill” Irving, were to be invited on a weekend fox hunt at an estate in Hertfordshire. The hunt never came off, but a cartoonist published a humorous series of sketches depicting the imaginary outing, and they made a hit among the show's cowboys. Broncho Charlie made them real in his reminiscences, substituting himself, Broncho Charlie, for Bronco Bill. He told a naive New York journalist about how he barely stopped his good friend Red Shirt from roping a fox during a hunt with some nobility on a huge Leicestershire estate, after which they went to dinner at the Dean of Windsor's house.

By the 1940s, he had convinced many an author that he was the youngest, last, and (by that time) sole surviving rider on the legendary Pony Express (which terminated the year after he was born). In others' tales, some more true than others, Miller joined the Wild West show in 1885 (and knew Sitting Bull); was the pet of Oscar Wilde's cousin, Alice Hayes; met Teddy Roosevelt at his ranch in Dakota Territory and barely missed being in the Rough Riders; became an evangelist on horseback, known as the Converted Cowboy, for the Salvation Army in New York; and fought in the Canadian army in World War I (at the age of fifty-four).

He made remarkable wood carvings, and as an old man in the 1930s, he entertained crowds of Boy Scouts with his mastery of a twenty-foot-long bullwhip, with which he could light matches clenched in the teeth of quivering twelve-year-olds. “He seemed older than god,” recalled one awed scout. “I was sitting in the first row on the ground with carrot-colored hair and freckles and he was drawn to me like a magnet. Though petrified, I was too shy to say no when he lifted me to my feet. I became even more petrified when he explained what he was about to do.” When Miller lit the match with the whip, “I was so glad to feel the flame under my nose I almost forgot to spit out the match. I asked him if he would a hold a match for me so I could light it with my .22 caliber rifle, which I had done, though not under someone's nose. He declined, saying he had lived so long by not being stupid, and that I didn't look like Annie Oakley to him.”

Of course, Miller's language turned into a highly colored vernacular, full of ki-yi-yi's and whoopie-ti-yo's. He was the subject of articles, interviews, even a children's book celebrating his alleged Pony Express career, and was a featured guest in community parades. When he died, in 1955, he was wheelchair-bound at Bellevue Hospital, where he received up to fifty letters a day, many addressed only to “Broncho Charlie.”

Where some wrote breathless summaries of Miller's true-to-life adventures, other less credulous observers marveled at the art of his deception. It might even have been Miller's wide New York press coverage that inspired—or appalled—New York novelist Thomas Berger to conjure a suspiciously similar, albeit fictional character, a man of almost-impossible vintage named Jack Crabb. In two novels and one movie (starring Dustin Hoffman), protagonist Crabb, better known as Little Big Man, danced across an imaginary stage as Cheyenne renegade, gunfighter, sole white survivor of the battle of the Little Big Horn . . . and veteran of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show.

Miller's audacity of later years drew inspiration from many sources, but there can be no doubt his apprenticeship with the West's most artful deceiver was his mainspring. His mastery of the whip and wood-carving was the real foundation on which he built the fantasies his audiences so enjoyed. But compared to the yarns of his later years, the life story he told that London reporter in 1887 was a mild-mannered synopsis. With Cody's exhibition, Miller found both validation for his life and instruction in entertainment. On the one hand, Buffalo Bill's Wild West gave him the chance to perform his horse breaking as a moment in the march of Progress, making it an important piece of American history. Miller was inspired and grateful. On the other hand, the Wild West show taught Charlie Miller that when it came to the West, people want to hear tales that are nearly unbelievable, but not quite. William Cody's show, after all, was the story of a western life—or so the showman said. So why not make your own show, with an all-but-unbelievable version of your life as the central attraction? In 1887, he was a little abashed to be so bold, but he was learning a lot from Buffalo Bill. “I think it is the only show on earth,” he told the London correspondent. “I dare say you will laugh at this, but I think so, nevertheless.” Being at the camp, he once remarked, was “was just like gettin' home.” In fact or in spirit, for the rest of his extraordinary days, Charlie Miller was never far from that Wild West community of Indians, cowboys, and consummate showmen.
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CHAPTER TWELVE

Wild West Europe

THE SUCCESSFUL British year closed in May 1888, when the Wild West show sailed directly to Staten Island and opened a two-month stand at Erastina soon thereafter. Salsbury had already arranged for a return to Europe. In 1889, Buffalo Bill's Wild West opened at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, where the new Eiffel Tower provided a startling view of Paris and an ironic backdrop for photographs of Indians and cowboys. The Paris season was almost as successful as the London debut year. Sadi Carnot, the president of France, attended the show, as did the shah of Persia.

For more than a year, Cody and the Wild West show remained on the Continent. After closing in Paris in November, the show headed south, to Lyon and Marseilles. By New Year's Day, they were performing in Barcelona, Spain. Gate receipts were not good in Spain, where epidemics of Spanish influenza and typhoid kept crowds light. Frank Richmond, the show's noted orator, died in Barcelona, as did at least four Indians. Cutting the Spanish tour short, Cody and Salsbury ushered the Wild West show to Naples, Italy, for three weeks. There followed three weeks more in Rome, and two-week stands in Florence, Bologna, Milan, and Venice. In late April 1890, the show ventured into Germany and Austria, with two-week stays in Munich and Vienna. Through late October, they played Dresden, Leipzig, Magdeburg, Hanover, Braunschweig, Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, and Stuttgart, where the 1890 season finally came to a close.
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FOR ALL THE GLAMOUR of the European tour, and for all the sensual mystique of his public image, Cody's private life was lonely and troubled. His settler's cabin had long since expanded to a house of many rooms, but the strife between him and Louisa threatened to blow it apart. He had forsaken divorce when Orra died, but he kept it in mind. In 1885, and for most of 1886, he and Louisa kept separate homes in North Platte, with him out at Scout's Rest Ranch and her at the older home in town known as the Welcome Wigwam.
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Their daughter Arta tried to heal the breach between them in long letters to her father, sent from the finishing school she was attending in Chicago. “I would give anything if our home was bright and cheerful,” she wrote. “Do not blame or feel angry toward dear mamma. . . . Do not say, dear papa, that you will go to Europe, and never return, for that is not right. You know you love your native land and will be glad to return to it, when you come back, covered with victory.”
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In 1885, during an appearance with the show in Illinois, Cody met a Kentucky widow named Mollie Moses. She was an artist, and presented him a picture of him she had drawn. They struck up a correspondence. In the beginning, he told Moses he was a bachelor. “My wife and I have separated but no divorce yet,” he explained, after she confronted him. “Thats what I meant by saying as yet I am a single man.” Writing from Scout's Rest in 1886, he invited Moses to a rendezvous at the St. James Hotel, in St. Louis. “I have got you the white horse and a fine saddle. Suppose you have your habit.” They exchanged letters and small gifts, but their separations were long. Moses pined. She asked to join the show. He was indulgent on many scores—“Yes, little girl, just as soon as I can I will send you the locket with the picture”—but on this, he turned her down. The letters ceased.
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Cody's disputes with Louisa continued. In 1886, he went directly from Erastina to Madison Square Garden, until late February 1887. Then he departed for England at the end of March. In London and Manchester, William Cody wrote many letters to his sister Julia and to her husband, Al Goodman, who managed his ranch. But there were none to Louisa, and the family was roiled by the continuing threat of divorce.
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Perhaps because his real family relations were so tenuous, he shored up his family image with public displays of sincere paternal devotion. He took twenty-one-year-old Arta with him to London, where she kept house for him and accompanied him on many public outings. He sent her on a tour of the Continent with Ed Goodman, Julia and Al's son, and at the end of 1887 Arta and William Cody took a two-week tour of Italy together.
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In Britain, Cody's real social life revolved less around royalty than around the theater, which was after all the world he knew best, and where he could be found most evenings. Irving and lesser dramatists were his most constant companions. While Arta enjoyed the Continent, Cody consorted with an American actress named Katherine Clemmons. He may have met her as early as 1886, in New York. Cody allegedly called her “the finest looking woman in the world,” but she had little talent. She posed for pictures with the Wild West camp in London, and traveled with them off and on during their European tours.
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She soon had a financial stake in her relationship with Cody. In the fall of 1891, she persuaded him to lend her the services of the Wild West managerial staff, some of the trained horses, and a dozen Indians for a melodrama called
White Lily.
He saw the play on his return to Britain, and he paid for the company's tour of the English provinces. Reviews were mediocre. The drama closed without ever playing London. But Cody and Clemmons remained lovers and business partners for two more years.
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Although Louisa Cody knew about her husband's affairs, money had been at the center of the Codys' disputes from their earliest days together. And, for all the barbs of London critics about the sharp Yankee who was flush with British gold, money remained their prime point of contention. Many newspapers reported exorbitant show profits. Some claimed it made one million dollars in London. “If you see any place where I can invest some money, I can send it—for we have a few scads now,” Cody wrote to his brother-in-law in July 1887. “There is lots of money to be had in this country for 3 percent—and if you hear of a big syndicate that has got a good thing that requires a lot of money, I believe I could float it over here.”
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However much Cody made—and he made a lot—the wealth never lasted. His inability to save for the future contributed to his legend as a show business tragedy, a frontier ingenue with childish enthusiasms, who could never quite grow up and sit on his bankbook. Where did the money go? He invested much of it in Scout's Rest and his other properties. The rest seemed to vanish. He had a taste for fine belongings, like the extravagant four-in-hand coach which he ordered and which he drove around North Platte with crowds of elegant guests.
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In addition to maintaining two homes in the town, investing much money in his ranch, and supporting his sister Julia and her husband, he also gave money to his other siblings, and to his friends. His generosity with business partners, family, and employees played a large role in draining his accounts by the end of his life.

But there is more to the story than Cody's profligacy, for Wild West profits were stunningly uneven. One month Cody could be swimming in cash. The next, he could be seeking lenders in desperation, trying to buy replacement animals, transportation, or lodging for the cast and crew. Canvas rotted, trains crashed. The constant drain of salaries, food for cast and feed for livestock, could bankrupt the show if unforeseen expenses emptied the cash box. His most recurrent emergency was competition from rival circuses and shows. Publicity costs spiked whenever other shows competed for audiences in the same markets, a situation which required heavy poster production, extra bill posters, and more advance men—all of which came at a high price. Thus, even as crowds flocked to Erastina, in the summer of 1888, Cody was scrambling for cash to pay off loans in North Platte. “This big fight against opposition has taken all our ready cash for a while,” he complained to his brother-in-law. “Business is not good.” He had borrowed $5,500 from a banker in North Platte, and the note was due in a week. “I don't know how I will come out.” He longed to mortgage his property to raise twenty thousand dollars for a two-year term, but he was constrained by Louisa, whose signature was required because her name was on the real estate deeds. “If Lulu would only help me a little I could tide over like a flirt, but she won't sign her name to anything.”
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Publicly, this most wealthy of North Platte couples seemed happy. Whenever he returned, he was well received among the merchants, lawyers, and doctors of the town. Together, he and Louisa made the rounds of dinner parties and receptions in his honor, as well as operas, dances, and socials. They even attended the Omaha inaugural ball of the Republican governor, John Thayer, in 1886.
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But his extended absences must have galled Louisa. With the show in Paris, he missed Arta's wedding to Horton Boal, a young Englishman who had recently relocated from Chicago to North Platte, where he opened an insurance business.
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Cody's visits to North Platte were tense. One winter night in late 1889, he appeared in the ranch manager's house, where sister Julia lived with her husband.

“Al, Julia, are you awake?” he asked.

“What do you want, Willie?”

“Get up, come out here, and talk.”

The Goodmans rose, and sat with him in the dining room.

“How can I stand it?” he asked. “I can't stay over there in peace with her. I want you to tell me what to do. It is more than I can stand. I don't want to leave my children.” He was crying.

“Willie, it will soon blow over, never mind,” Julia comforted. Al Goodman took Cody out for a carriage ride in the cold night. When they returned, an hour later, Cody slept at the ranch house. The next day, his sister and brother-in-law urged him not to separate from Louisa. By the end of the day, he had gone back home to his wife and daughters.
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His stay was fleeting. He departed for Europe again in early 1890.

WE HAVE SEEN how uneasy the London public could be with the juxtaposition of Cody, the ever-so-visible American, and Queen Victoria, the monarch whose reclusivity betokened British decline. In Paris, in 1889, Buffalo Bill was almost as popular as he was in Britain. Although there was no French counterpart to Anglo-Saxonism that allowed Parisian fans to claim a racial bond with Americans, France, too, was captivated by progress, civilization, and the banishment of savagery from the globe. Buffalo Bill's Wild West also narrated the progress of Western civilization in general, and the romantic trappings of Cody's white Indian, especially his long hair and goatee, invited comparisons to d'Artagnan, the heroic musketeer of Alexandre Dumas.

But even here, there were surprising applications of his image to contemporary politics, as Buffalo Bill became a parody of a political figure who had recently been undone by his self-promotion as centaur-hero. The politics of Paris were superheated for three full years before Cody's arrival. In 1886, the nation's minister of war, General Georges Boulanger, exploited his position to create a gigantic cavalry review on Bastille Day. He was handsome, charming, and he rode a stunning black stallion named Tunis. The public—or part of the public—was entranced.

Subsequently, Boulanger manipulated public longing for national greatness by maneuvering his country to the brink of war with Germany, from which France pulled back only after President Jules Grévy pushed Boulanger from office. A crowd of twenty thousand rallied on Boulanger's behalf, singing songs about his virtues and cheering his name. As an active military officer he could not hold elective office, so throughout 1887 he kept his face before the public with a modern publicity campaign, emblazoning his image across posters, clothing, candy, and even imitation coins. In 1888, he was discharged from the army for his intrigues. He turned the tables on his opponents by winning election to the Chamber of Deputies, with a two-to-one majority in Paris. A hundred thousand people gathered to cheer him. His allies urged him to seize the moment, and stage a coup d'état.

But Boulanger dithered. His enemies mobilized. He soon fell from favor as he was pursued to Brussels and then London on charges of plotting to overthrow the government. As his face disappeared from billboards, Buffalo Bill's face went up.

Quickly, commentators began comparing the two men. Both were handsome and charming. Both looked good on a horse—so good, in fact, they evoked the tradition of the “man on a horse,” the empire builder Napoleon, whose militarism and grand ambitions were disgraced in terrible defeat. One humorist wrote an exposé in which he revealed that Buffalo Bill
was
Boulanger in disguise, with a horse that mysteriously changed colors (Cody's horse was white, of course). In lyrics sung to the tune of a song that was originally composed as a tribute to Boulanger, satirists suggested the French officer was only a showman, whose place in the hearts of his countrymen had been taken by a more benign amusement:

Brave General, farewell.
Your prestige is no longer,
Our delight, we hasten to tell, is the hero of the Wild West.
All here is decadence, military and civil—
Hurrah for our France
And long live Buffalo Bill.
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Cody's usefulness as a parody of Boulanger only begins to suggest the wide resonances the Wild West show had for fin de siècle Parisians. At the Exposition Universelle in 1889, its fans included at least two painters who would soon ascend to world renown. “I have been to Buffalo's,” wrote Paul Gauguin to his friend Emil Bernard. “You must make all efforts to come to see it. It is of enormous interest.” Another, very different painter, Edvard Munch, was also drawn to the show of the man he called “Bilbao Bill,” whom he recorded as “the most renowned trapper in America.” As Munch told his father, “He has come here with a large number of Indians and trappers and has set up an entire Indian village outside Paris.”
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