Louis S. Warren (80 page)

A program article explained that this was where Buffalo Bill himself recreated in the off-season, in a land that fended off the debilitating anxieties and neurasthenia of the cities. “The settler's cabin and the stockman's ranch houses and corrals” had replaced “the cone-shaped tepees” of an earlier time. “But the air that fills men's lungs with health, their brains with noble thoughts, and their veins with new life, still remains.” The air was “so pure, so sweet and so bracing, that it intoxicates when poor, weak, cramped, damp, decayed, smoke-shrivelled lungs are distended by it.”
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Audiences in 1901 could find the same promises on the back cover of their show programs, as if Buffalo Bill's settlement were where the show actually ended. “Shoshone Irrigation Company Owners of the Cody Canal Has Water Ready for Thousands of Acres of Good Lands.” Show spectators could read the official-looking endorsement letter from Elwood Mead, identified as the state engineer of Wyoming (and carefully not identified as paid consultant to the company): “I know of no place in this country which offers to prudent and industrious farmers greater assurances of material prosperity and physical comfort than the Big Horn Basin.” The country was “equally well adapted to the purposes of the stock raiser, grain grower, fruit raiser, or market gardener.” Mead told the crowds from Bay City, Michigan, to Opelika, Alabama, that “the Cody Canal takes its water supply from one of the largest rivers in the West, and reclaims some of the best land in the State. The completed portion is well and substantially built with an ample capacity to water all the land below it.”
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Of course, advertising went beyond show programs. Even before any settlers arrived, Cody himself had established the town's first newspaper, the
Shoshone News
(with John Burke as temporary editor), to advertise the basin's potential. By 1899 he had imported a new editor, J. H. Peake, to run the new paper, the
Cody Enterprise.
In the
Enterprise,
and in his Minnesota paper, the
Duluth Press,
he took out large ads, promising land and water, with a drawing of Buffalo Bill welcoming readers to a verdant mountain valley, where they could find “Titles to Homes Perfect.”
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Cody spoke often of the town in interviews with overseas newspapers. “I am making canals for irrigation purposes, opening mines, and acting as agent for the Government in granting concessions to prospective settlers,” he told an English reporter in 1903.
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Indeed, the town became the new center of William Cody's continuing, almost manic entrepreneurialism. In addition to newspapers, he founded a livery stable, began gold mines and coal mines, and drilled oil wells. In 1902, he opened the elegant Irma Hotel, named for his youngest daughter, with a remarkable collection of western paintings and fine furnishings in a granite building whose design and construction (at a reputed cost of $80,000) he supervised closely. “I am very anxious of getting the concession of putting on an automobile and horse stage line from Cody into the Yellowstone Park,” he wrote the state's governor in 1903.
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Not satisfied with a stage line, he built two hotels along the route.
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Many of his efforts failed. Gold, coal, and oil deposits were rapidly exhausted or proved so minute as to be not worth extracting. Nevertheless, as these businesses and the settlement progressed, they, and especially the town itself, increasingly became subjects of the Wild West show. The Burlington & Missouri River Railroad reached the town in 1901. Beginning about this time, a coterie of Cody residents (or people who claimed to be Cody residents) carried a banner, “Cody Delegation of Boosters from Buffalo Bill's Home Town,” in the show parade and in the grand entrance into the arena. When the emigrant wagon train trundled before the stands, their canvases read “Take the Burlington Route to the Big Horn Basin,” as if to suggest that spectators did not need to endure an Indian attack to participate in the continuing settlement and domestication of the frontier.
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The ads for the irrigated tracts awaiting the “homeseeker” pointed the way out of the arena and the city. Spectators longing to escape urban threats or their declining prospects in eastern and midwestern farms heard a consistent message: take the train to Cody town, and home.

As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, shifting cultural currents made the “Attack on the Settler's Cabin” and these promises of real western homes ever more resonant for show audiences, and the role of real-life “home builder” even more attractive to William Cody. Public anxieties about the survival of the home and family, and public veneration of home builders, today's “developers,” grew more pronounced as the frontier closed, as urbanization maintained its rapid pace, and as depression made Americans painfully aware of the uncertainties of the new industrial economy. The home continued to be the bedrock of American civilization, and those who built them were great citizens indeed. As one commentator put it, “Home building is the best business in the world. The home is the seat of the happiness and the sheet anchor of free government. In the family fireside is planted deep the flag of this republic. Those who broaden the domain of homes are the true patriots and our greatest men.”
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With their bucolic advertisements and their remote western location, the homes for sale in the Big Horn Basin were decidedly “country homes,” the most desirable of all homes. In the popular imagination, country homes included the more elegant city suburbs. They were not necessarily farms. Rather, they were situated somewhat ambiguously in what scholar Leo Marx has called a “middle landscape” between remote hinterland and decadent city. They fused modern technology of the city—ready water, electricity, and telephones—with rural virtue. The country home was, in the words of one anxious proponent, “the safe anchored foundation of the Republic,” the “fountain-head of purity and strength,” which “will nourish and sustain this nation forever.”
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As the cities erupted in polyglot confusion, the destiny of the white middle class could be secured in these rustic dwellings, nestled in an agrarian empire surrounding the cities, at once supporting them with their produce, and containing them with their virtue.
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Advertising for Cody's country home empire masked the hard road ahead for the Shoshone Irrigation Company and the town's early settlers. By 1895, when the company began work in earnest, the West's most arable and desirable land had long since been taken. The swath of Big Horn Basin claimed by the partners was not a blank slate or a showgrounds on which settlement could be projected. It was a real place, with real nature, and that nature did not go easy on pastoral dreams.

Travelers to the company's town site, especially before the railroad reached the town in 1901, had to struggle first with its remoteness. The Big Horn Basin lay behind the formidable Wind River Mountains to the south and the Big Horn range to the east, with the high country of the Continental Divide to the west. Red Lodge, the nearest settlement where supplies could be had, was an arduous two-day wagon ride north, in Montana. (Early surveyors recommended that the region be attached to the state of Montana rather than Wyoming.)
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Even after the Burlington & Missouri completed its 120-mile spur line from Toluca, Montana, to Cody, the ride from Chicago or other points east was long and tiresome.
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Reaching the area was nowhere near as difficult as farming it, however. The Big Horn Basin was a sandy sagebrush flat. The center of it was the driest area in Wyoming, garnering less than six inches of rain per year. An early government surveyor, who saw the basin fifteen years before Beck did, concluded that it appeared “very desolate, except along the valleys” of the Big Horn River tributaries. From the basin's western side, where the company laid out its town site, these tributaries, including the Shoshone River, flowed east into the Big Horn River. The larger river flowed north out of the basin's belly, joined by the Little Big Horn River in Montana and finally pouring into the Missouri River over a hundred miles away.
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The Shoshone River was sizable, and like other streams and rivers noted by that early surveyor it was fringed “with cotton-woods and narrow, grassy bottoms.” But the water was sulfurous (thus its early name, the Stinking Water), and even this rather pungent riparian oasis was eroded deep into the valley floor. The unwillingness of water to run uphill made simple irrigation ditches inadequate for watering the sagebrush-covered benches that jutted up hundreds of feet from the riverbanks and made up most of the basin's real estate. To bring water to the town site, partners had to contract for a canal that began miles upriver and tracked around a mountain to the lower flats where the town was located.

Finally, even if a steady supply of water could be secured, the climate provided other obstacles. The altitude, four thousand feet, meant early frosts and late snows. Basin winters were not the coldest in Wyoming, but with extremes of thirty degrees below zero, they were cold enough to dissuade most farmers. In the summer, on the other hand, the Big Horn Basin was often the hottest place in all of Wyoming. Winter and summer alike, as the sun warmed the basin floor, heated air rose upward, drawing cold air out of the highlands to the west. A cooling draft can lighten the burden of summer heat, but emigrants were rocked by these unpredictable gusts, which reached sixty miles per hour. Most early visitors found the basin bleak. An early encampment of miners had ventured to the Big Horn Basin in 1870, but they soon departed. In 1895, other than a few cowboys and ranchers on open-range cattle outfits, almost nobody resided in the basin permanently.

The challenges to settling this place with middle-class homeowners were huge. In 1895, George Beck drew up a map to aid him in the work of laying out the first town site. One day, he put the map down, weighted it with a rock, and walked over to talk with his engineer, C. E. Hayden, who was working a few hundred yards away. While they spoke, “a summer whirl wind came along and picked the map up and started it heavenward,” Beck later recalled. “Hayden and I followed it as far as we could but it kept going and we concluded our map was recorded in Abraham's bosom.”
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So the environment of the Big Horn Basin threatened to carry away the tidy visions of town planners. Cody himself would expend vast effort, and a vast fortune, to hold the ordered grids of his towns against the basin's uncooperative nature. As much as it fired him in its early days, and as often as he touted its glories in show programs and press interviews, the project posed a fierce challenge to his business acumen, testing his sense of personal and national destiny. Indeed, only a major shift in government policy toward the arid West would guarantee the settlement's success. In doing so, it relieved William Cody of his town site's burdens. But it also stripped his dreams away.

THE TOWN BUSINESS required extensive advertising, and not a little deception. Thus, in 1896, Cody and Beck fought hard to make their new town, which was little more than a land office, the county seat of the new Big Horn County. Success would guarantee the town a county courthouse and the aura of permanence. After that, both investor capital and settlers would be easier to recruit.

But the designation of county seat was made in an election by county voters, most of whom lived nearer to existing settlements which they favored for the seat. The company's only hope of winning the election was to continue paying work crews who were digging the irrigation ditches and hope this persuaded voters that Cody was a real town, and not another booster fantasy. If the excavation stopped, word would spread quickly that the town was failing and the election would be lost. The problem was, the partners were out of cash to pay the workers, who numbered over a hundred, or to feed the teams of horses that drew the scrapers.
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So they launched an effort to sell corporate bonds, guaranteed with their personal property, to raise the money they needed.
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The bond sales failed, however, because eastern investors were suddenly leery of western investments. Their nervousness grew with the expanding popularity of William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic candidate for the presidency, and his Populist allies, who had threatened to repudiate bonds and mortgages if they were elected. Until financiers were certain he would not be president, no eastern money could be had. Meanwhile, the Shoshone Irrigation Company remained thirsty for cash, for laborers, and for equipment. “I have had the worst time in my life standing off people as I have been told to go slow and I have written letters of excuse for not paying accounts till I do not know what to say to them any longer,” wrote George Beck. “Any man we owe a penny to has written in all kinds of English and they all seem to want payment.”
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The sober solution would have been to shut down operations in the Big Horn Basin until money could be raised. But doing so would have signified the town's prospects were illusory, thereby conceding the county seat fight, and passing up a potential boost to confidence in the town's future among investors, settlers, and the public generally.

The county seat fight was only one of many similar episodes in the early life of the town of Cody. Successful town founding required promoters to deceive much of the public much of the time. The similarities between show business and town business were not lost on the principals. As Beck told Cody, “If we can keep up a show for thirty days now we have a fine chance to make a very good thing.”
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Ultimately, Cody and Salsbury managed to sell an indemnity bond to Phoebe Hearst, wife of California senator and Comstock Lode magnate George Hearst, who advanced them $30,000 on terms of repayment in five years at 7.5 percent.
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But even so, the county seat fight was lost to nearby Basin.
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Town founding was an ongoing gamble, in which Cody, Beck, Salsbury, and the other partners wagered heavy sums and much effort on a town that might in the end prove to be more show than substance.