Louis S. Warren (79 page)

But Cody delayed joining. In his private correspondence, he suggested his doubts. “George, America is in for it,” he wrote an old friend, “and although my heart is not in this war—I must stand by America.”
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Miles sent for Cody in late July. By that time, the Cuban campaign was already over, and the general was shipping out for what was to be a series of small, soon-forgotten battles in Puerto Rico. Still Cody could not bring himself to join. His business partners, especially Salsbury, were livid at the prospect of financial losses that would follow on the star's departure and the early closing of the show. “Your bluff about going to Cuba was a brutal violation of your contract,” Salsbury later huffed, “and a moral wrong to the people who would have been thrown out of employment if you had been compelled to make your bluff good.”
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Cody wrote to his old friend Moses Kerngood, the man to whom he had sent Yellow Hair's scalp in Rochester all those years ago, “I am all broke up because I can't start tonight [for Puerto Rico].” It was impossible for him to leave without “some preparation, and it will entail a big loss and my partners naturally object. But go I must. I have been in every war our country has had since Bleeding Kansas war in which my father was killed. And I must be in this fight if I get in at the tail end!”
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But he did not. When Cody lamented that leaving the show would cost him $100,000, Miles advised him to stay.
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His reservations about the war stemmed more from his financial liability than from concerns about moral culpability. In that sense, his personal anxieties anticipated national sentiment after 1900. The American army in the Philippines turned from expelling the Spanish to fighting an indigenous rebellion. Combat and slaughter dragged on for years, costing the lives of 250,000 Filipinos and over 4,000 Americans. Even Roosevelt had turned against overseas acquisitions by 1901.
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Cody's interest in reenacting overseas engagements waned almost at the same time. He ceased to present them after 1904, when he staged the Battle of San Juan Hill in Britain. The show retained generic displays of global warrior prowess with the Congress of Rough Riders and other exotic peoples, but connections to specific, foreign wars or battles disappeared. The colorful whirl of foreign and primitive peoples continued to reinforce the messages crafted in the early 1890s, about the capacity of white men to manage racially diverse primitives and modern technology sprung from frontier origins. “In its transportation, commissary, arenic, camp, and executive departments . . . the Wild West is at once a model and a wonder.”
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But even in its glamorous new format, for all its appeal to the press and the public, Buffalo Bill's Wild West show was anything but a guaranteed income. Cody was forty-eight years old in 1894, and the show's Brooklyn summer at Ambrose Park cost him a fortune. “I am too worried just now to think of anything,” he wrote to his sister Julia. “This is the worst deal I ever had in my life—for my expenses are $4,000 a day, [a]nd I can't reduce them, without closeing entirely. You can't possibly appreciate my situation—this is the tightest squeeze of my life.”
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Cody's struggle to shore up the political relevance and profitability of the show accompanied his fading personal interest in performing it. Retirement was a form of vanishing, of fulfilling the frontiersman's destiny, and hints of his permanent departure from the arena began to recur almost as often as the “Attack on the Settler's Cabin.” He first hinted at retirement as early as 1877, when he announced he would leave the stage and spend the rest of his days on his ranch.
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Throughout the 1890s, he mused in public about leaving the Wild West show. For all the difficulties with Louisa, he still returned to Nebraska during every break from the road. He took long hunting and camping trips. As he aged, he seems to have been drawn ever more to home in the West.

The problem was how to find his rightful place there, as the old century gave way to the new. For a man who lived his life as a performance of the story of progress, the real challenge was in the denouement. He was acutely aware that how his life story ended would determine its meaning for the public. Commenting on how stories work, the philosopher David Carr observes that “only from the perspective of the end do the beginning and middle make sense.”
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If Cody's life ended in the poorhouse, his biography would assume the dimensions of tragedy. If he ended it as a weary old showman, much of the authenticity of his early life, and of the frontier story, would be sacrificed. If he capped off his lifelong tale of frontier development with a triumphant culmination of real-life progress, he could validate the frontier myth he claimed as his own. From the mid-1890s on, William Cody dedicated himself to the search for an ending.

His efforts were of two kinds. On the one hand, Cody knew the manifold importance of entrepreneurialism as a real generator of wealth, as the commerce that expressed the maturity of civilization and its final stage of development, as evidence of the vitality and energy that characterized Anglo-Saxondom, and as proof of another great myth of America, the self-made man. To make a living in commerce required an entrepreneurial spirit and a willingness to tolerate setbacks. An estimated 95 percent of American businesses failed between 1873 and 1893.
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A wise man with money invested in a lot of different places.

Or so Cody seemed to think. His phenomenal energy spun off into dozens of different businesses after 1890. He invested heavily in theatrical productions, particularly in backing his lover, Katherine Clemmons. He bought bonds in a British short-line railroad in 1892. In 1893, he partnered with Frank “White Beaver” Powell to found the Cody-Powell Coffee Company, manufacturer and distributor of Panmalt Coffee. “Three pounds of Panmalt Coffee can be bought for the price of one pound of Java, and one pound of Panmalt is equal in strength and will go as far as a pound of Java, Mocha, or Rio.” He offered guiding services for tourist hunters out of Sheridan, Wyoming. For his sister Helen and her husband, Hugh Wetmore, and partly to advertise his other businesses, he bought a newspaper, the Duluth Press, and an office building in which to house it.
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The survival of American capitalism depended ever more on sales of consumer goods, and that entailed the expansion of sales, the sales pitch. Cody opened his show programs to advertisers. After 1893, audiences could read not only about Buffalo Bill's lifelong adventures and the history of the show, but also pitches for Mennen's Borated Talcum Powder, Sweet Orr & Co. Overalls Pants & Shirts, “The Best Union Made,” and Quaker Oats, “the Sunshine of the Breakfast Table—Accept No Substitutes.” There were ads for toys, for tools, for guns, for suspenders, and for bicycles. Cody himself endorsed more products personally: “I always use Winchester rifles and Winchester ammunition.” The John B. Stetson Company depicted “Buffalo Bill and his Stetson Hat.” Another enticed customers with the effectiveness of B. T. Babbitt's Soap, “Used by this Show.”
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In their ongoing quest for markets to stave off overproduction and renew the economy, advertisers found in Buffalo Bill and his frontier originals at least a sheen of authenticity for manufactured goods, and Cody discovered a supplemental, if small, stream of cash.

But as he approached the end of his life, most of William Cody's energy, and most of his cash, too, went into colonizing the great West. In a sense, creating community was a consistent project of his life. He was the son of a town founder, with an attempt at town founding in his own past, and the founder of the exemplary “little tented city” that sprang up in showgrounds on both sides of the Atlantic. The theory of civilization, with its advance from savagery to settlement, practically dictated that the culmination of his lifelong efforts should be a lasting town, with homes and families. With his large, but fluctuating, show profits he tried to make North Platte his own. He founded the town's Buffalo Bill Hook and Ladder Company in 1889. In 1894, he bought expensive uniforms for the town band. (Each member's flashy getup included a huge rosette, worn on the left breast, with Buffalo Bill's face on it.)
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In partnership with his neighbor, Isaac Dillon, Cody ordered a ditch excavated from the North Platte River to his four-thousand-acre spread, then announced he would divide the property and colonize it with five hundred land-hungry Quakers from Philadelphia.
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Most of these projects, including the coffee company and the colonization plan, collapsed in the depression of 1893. Even if they had not, all the civic gifts in the world could not change the fact that North Platte would never bear his image the way he wanted. A patrician, even a philanthropist, he might be. But town founder, never. For the old scout to secure his legacy, and establish civilization in his wake, he would need to make a bolder move.

ACCORDING TO GEORGE BECK, who became Cody's partner in the new town-founding project, Buffalo Bill came late to the game. Beck first scouted a new town site at the foot of Cedar Mountain, in Wyoming's Big Horn Basin, sometime in the early 1890s. From the beginning, he planned to irrigate the land with water from the Stinking Water River, which flowed through it. Among those who accompanied him on his early expeditions was Elwood Mead, state engineer of Wyoming and a prominent irrigation expert, whom Beck had retained as a private consultant. It was an eventful trip. Beck and several of the party got lost and spent the night in the cabin of a lone settler. Mead and Beck surveyed the land and “ran a line of levels” at various places to determine the feasibility of irrigation. Soon after, Mead officially changed the river's name from the Stinking Water to the Shoshone, to make the project more appealing to settlers.
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Accompanying Beck and Mead was Horton Boal, friend of Beck and husband of Arta Cody. As Beck remembered it, William Cody heard about the trip from Boal, and “came to me very anxious to get in” on the town-site plan. Beck and his partner, a Sheridan banker named H. C. Alger, “concluded to let Cody in for the reason that at the time he was probably the best advertised man in the world, and we thought that might be of some advantage.” They organized the Shoshone Irrigation Company, with Beck serving as secretary and manager, Alger as treasurer, and the world's most famous frontiersman, Buffalo Bill himself, as its president.
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Beck chose “Shoshone” as the name of their first town, but the U.S. postmaster rejected it for being too similar to the existing address of Shoshone Agency, on the Shoshone Reservation, in the nearby Wind River Mountains. The partners submitted a new name, “Cody,” at William Cody's insistence, and with Beck and the others persuaded that it could help advertise the settlement. (Had the postmaster rejected that name, they had designated another choice: Chicago.)
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Happy to be founding a town that bore his name, William Cody soon recruited more partners, especially showmen and magnates of print advertising. Nate Salsbury became a partner. At his suggestion, Cody approached George Bleistein, a Buffalo, New York, businessman who had made a fortune as a printer, particularly of posters for circuses and Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Along with two other entrepreneurs from New York, Bleistein contributed tens of thousands of dollars to the enterprise.

For all that, as far as we can tell Cody himself put the most cash into this effort. For the better part of a decade, a river of money ran from Buffalo Bill's Wild West to the Big Horn Basin, scraping canals between river and settlers, building dams and headgates, erecting pumps, office buildings, stores, and liveries.

From the helm of a show about imperial glory, “The World's Largest Arenic Exhibition,” Cody was thrilled with the imperial prospect of his town-building venture. The Big Horn Basin was “an empire of itself,” he wrote. Where Beck planned to found one town, Cody's ambitions were much larger.
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He envisioned vast networks of irrigation ditches filled with sparkling water, lined with eager settlers who would spread it on verdant fields, and pump it into their thirsty towns, paying the Shoshone Irrigation Company for every drop. The West's most famous irrigated town, Greeley, Colorado, “ain't a potato patch” to the acres that Cody and his partners would make their own. “When one stops to think that all of Utah cultivates only 240,000 acres and the cities and towns there is in Utah—how many towns can we lay off and own on our 300,000 acres?” he asked a friend.

In 1897, Cody persuaded Salsbury to partner with him in an additional concern, claiming a vast 60,000-acre swath on the north side of the Shoshone River, opposite the Cody town site and extending many miles to the east. Across this entire area the two showmen hoped to establish farms and towns which would be served by a different canal, running along the north side, and which William Cody intended to build just as soon as the town of Cody was well under way.

For now, “the key note to all” was the roughly 28,000-acre spread on which the Shoshone Irrigation Company was building Cody town “at the forks of the Shoshone River,” where “the great sulphur springs which we own” would be a health resort and prime tourist attraction. It was “the greatest land deal ever,” and a fitting retirement, too. “We will all have a big farm of our own that will . . . support us in our old age and we can lay under the trees and swap lies.”
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Culmination to Buffalo Bill's long career as the great domesticator, the town would be a permanent tribute to the man whose show finished with a brief, climactic act of settlement. He would be wealthy, retired, and the revered founder of real civilization.

As Beck and the other partners had anticipated, Buffalo Bill's Wild West proved a great advertisement. The securing of the settler's cabin, which had long been the show climax, was now recapitulated with real-life domesticity for sale in the town of Cody, where audiences could find not only land, ranches, and farms, but also
homes.
“Irrigated Homes in the Big Horn Basin,” the “Greatest Agricultural Valley in the West, NOW OPEN to the Settler and Home-Seeker,” blared a full-page ad in the 1896 Wild West show program. “Homes in the Big Horn Basin” became the advertising refrain, and the following year, the pitch assured the crowds that these homes sat in bountiful fields. An arrangement of pumpkins, corn, and sheaves of wheat bore the label “Specimen of Products of Irrigated Lands— Cody Canal,” and another featured a wagon train trundling along a fulsome riverbank, with the caption “Cody Irrigation Canal, Big Horn Basin, Wy., 1897.”
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