Louis S. Warren (81 page)

The baleful influence of the Populists on western capital influenced other aspects of Cody's personal finances. In most years, he borrowed money for his show and other businesses, securing loans with mortgages on his Nebraska property. He then paid the mortgages off with show receipts. By 1896, this was proving more difficult, he explained to a friend, because “the damn populists have repudiated so many loans that eastern capital fight shy of Nebraska and Kansas particularly.” (Thus, when Beck finally acquired the bond money from Phoebe Hearst, he promptly lent Cody and Salsbury $5,000 of it to open the Wild West show that year.)
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William Cody's struggle to raise bond money for his ditches amid the Populist insurgency suggests how much western environment and economics had combined to make the New West something less than the pastoral paradise of agrarian myth or of Wild West show programs. The need for irrigation itself reflected the absence of rain, the single most unifying environmental characteristic of the Great Plains and the interior of the West. Plains farmers had responded to aridity by planting dryland crops, especially wheat and corn, across millions of acres churned up by their plows. The result was a glut of wheat and corn, and steadily declining produce prices. At the same time, farmers bought new technology, on credit, seeding more acres against their declining incomes. Land under the plow more than doubled, and farmers cultivated more land in the last third of the nineteenth century than they had in all the prior history of the republic.
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The result was even more overproduction, still lower farm profits, and more unpaid debts. By the early 1890s, wheat was more expensive to raise than it was to buy. Almost half of Kansas farmers were in default on their mortgages. In Nebraska, the brutal droughts of 1893 and '94 drove already reeling settlers to despair.
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Just as the European encounter with the wilderness inspired both the frontier dream and the gothic nightmare, so the American encounter with the arid Far West inspired both Buffalo Bill's Wild West, a dramatic depiction of westward expansion as the route to hardy independence, and Populism, a radical politics to recapture independence lost to the very railroads and markets which had made westward expansion (and the Wild West show) possible. The ironies and contradictions of these competing western myths and realities were exemplified in the history of Nebraska, the state that produced both William Cody and William Jennings Bryan. The “Boy Orator of the Platte,” Bryan was elected to Congress for the first time in November of 1890 (just as Cody was about to attempt Sitting Bull's arrest). The congressman soon became the leading exponent of “free silver,” a catchphrase for abandoning the gold standard in order to increase money in circulation and thus to inflate those depressed crop prices which so plagued western farmers.

Corporate interests saw Bryan as a western radical, almost a trans-Mississippi monster, who threatened the very integrity of the financial system.
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Nate Salsbury, creditor and part owner of a corporate, railroad-dependent amusement and now busily hawking bonds against a real estate speculation, shared that opinion. “The money market is closed to all kinds of investments and will stay so as long as that blatherskite Bryan is rampaging around the country,” he fumed.
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At times, he considered Bryan a rival western showman who threatened ruin. “I am happy to say,” he reported after Bryan's 1896 campaign swing through New York, “that he made the most distinguished failure at Madison Square Garden the other night. . . . He came to paralyze New York and got a body blow that took the wind out of him and [his] ass-
toot
managers, and they have retired to the boundless prairies to rub themselves down with buffalo chip and get some more wind.”
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Cody remained more ambivalent than Salsbury in his politics. He was not without sympathy for the Populists, and for Bryan in particular. In 1896, the town of North Platte hosted a state irrigation fair, and the organizing committee cast about for an eminent speaker to open the event. Cody recommended Bryan. He had reservations about the free silver campaign—“I don't like some of the party's moves,” he told one correspondent—but Bryan was still his candidate, and he was certain he would one day be president. Had Bryan become president, Cody would likely have been at his inauguration. As it turned out, Bryan lost—and Buffalo Bill attended McKinley's inauguration instead.
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Cody town's appeal lay in its possibilities for escape not merely from the city, but also from the crisis of the farm. The irrigated fields of Cody town ideally would grow specialty crops, fruit and nuts in particular, and allow residents to escape the price deflation and drought that plagued dryland farmers of wheat and corn.

Indeed, William Cody's effort to found irrigated towns was only one of many similar efforts across the West, where an emerging movement saw in irrigation the chance to redeem the West not from savage Indians, who were no longer a threat, but from increasingly dangerous political trends. For all Nate Salsbury's pique, Populism and free silver were politically moderate compared to other forms of radicalism that swept the West after 1890. Western economics were notoriously unstable. With only a tiny manufacturing sector, the region's jobs were mostly in extractive industries, and wage workers like miners, lumberjacks, farmhands, and ranch cowboys were even more vulnerable than eastern workers to commodity price deflation (a condition which stoked their enthusiasm for the potentially insurrectionist industrial armies in 1894).

Thus, a new union, the Western Federation of Miners, was born in the depression of 1893. Over the next fifteen years, miners and mine owners were locked in bitter, sometimes violent strikes. In 1905, federation members led the charge to create a new, even more radical union, the Industrial Workers of the World. The IWW was a nationwide organization, but its socialist appeal for “One Big Union” was strongest in the West.

Other examples of the furious radicalism of the postfrontier West abound. Socialists grew stronger in many states as Democrats and Republicans failed to ameliorate industrial working conditions, and the state with the largest proportion of Socialist voters was Oklahoma. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the most hallowed tomb of Communists was the Kremlin wall, which holds the remains of only two Americans. One of them, journalist John Reed, was from Oregon. The other, unionist Bill Haywood, was from Utah.
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For many thinkers and policymakers, the West's tumultuous, chaotic politics made the country homes of Cody town and other irrigation projects ever more appealing, even necessary, as warm hearths of middle-class sensibility and democracy in a wilderness of political unrest.

But the key to those homes was irrigation. Frontier myth had always promised a path between ideologies of left and right, between wealth redistribution and aristocratic hierarchy. But in the postfrontier West, the old narrative of progress and civilization sprung from the frontier seemed more and more like a poetic fiction which offered no real alternatives. Ranching was supposed to be a precursor to farming, but farms failed in the cold, dry climate of the high Plains, making the region resistant to settlement. In 1900, Wyoming's population had yet to reach 93,000. A state for eleven years, it had attracted slightly more than a tenth of one percent of the seventy-five million people who inhabited the United States. Only Nevada had fewer residents.
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Indeed, ranching was not only durable but, organized along new corporate lines, it became a barrier to the advance of the domesticity and civilization of the farm. In the 1880s and 1890s, meatpackers from Chicago and other large investors consolidated control of the western range, squeezing out smallholders and homesteaders, who depended on public lands to graze their animals, by enclosing streams and rivers with barbed wire.

The resultant range wars resulted in bloodshed and a great deal of rustling; the most spectacular episode occurred in Wyoming in 1892. East of the Big Horns, in Johnson County, large ranchers with ties to railroad corporations hired a gang of Texas gunmen to assassinate smallholders, many of them homesteaders or small, independent cattle outfits, near the town of Buffalo. The mercenaries descended first on the cabin of Nate Champion, a cowboy who sided with the smallholders. But Champion fought them off all day before perishing in a hail of bullets. Johnson County's sheriff and his posse soon cornered the invading Texans, but large ranchers prevailed on the governor to request federal troops. The army escorted the hired guns to jail. Through intimidation of witnesses and judicial corruption, all of the accused killers and the ranchers who hired them were released.

Each side in Johnson County told a story, and insofar as those stories revealed much larger political and social perspectives, to choose sides was to select one narrative over another. To large ranchers and their allies, smallholders were rustlers, criminals, and vagrants who had to be stopped. To smallholders, large ranchers were greedy corporate monopolists who quashed the common man's dream.

But whatever story one believed, Johnson County's bloodshed underscored the continuing predominance of undomesticated ranching over family farming.
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Despite modern nostalgia for family-centered ranches, nineteenth-century Americans were suspicious of ranching. Unlike farming, which was bound firmly to family in the popular mind, ranching was renowned for being excessively male, and for not constituting families.
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Ranching required extensive resource use—dispersed grazing—rather than intensive cultivation. Ranching did not turn the wilderness to garden; it did not complete the ascent of civilization. Many ranchers did not even build permanent homes. In Johnson County and across Wyoming, even large ranch owners with families tended to live in cities. They sought control of the range as a pasture, but not as a home for themselves.
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So the range was populated mostly by ranch hands, or cowboys. Even in 1900, the 93,000 residents of Wyoming included fewer than 35,000 females.
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Among locals, the absence of women signified the absence of families, and of domestic order. Family was the key to social regeneration, the purpose of settlement, and still the most durable rural institution.
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Rather than the settler's cabin, with its wife and children, Johnson County called to mind an army of gunmen (or deputies) arrayed around a cowboys' (or rustlers') cabin, with bullets flying thick between the principals. Whatever else it was, the Johnson County war resonated with hypermasculine frenzy. Domesticity was nowhere on the horizon. Progress had stopped. If the story of the Far West was supposed to be one of progress from ranch and range to farm and civilization, then Wyoming was in the grip of plot failure.

Ideally, the founding of Cody offered a means out of the narrative impasse by providing an improved nature for family farms. Indeed, Johnson County was on the mind of at least one town founder. In 1892, George Beck himself owned a ranch not far from Buffalo, as well as business interests in the town, including a flour mill, an electric light plant, and a waterworks. He later claimed that ranchers invited him to join their invasion, but that he refused and warned them it would “end in disaster.”
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At the same time, he had little time for smallholders either, most of whom he considered thieves. Like most Americans, Beck became convinced that partisans in the class wars of the Gilded Age were zealots, be they ranchers and homesteaders in Wyoming or workers and owners in Chicago. What the nation needed was for both sides to show restraint (or be restrained) until the failing abundance of the frontier could be refreshed through an application of science, technology, and capital—of the kind Beck and Cody brought to the Big Horn Basin.

In this sense, William Cody and his partners in the Shoshone Irrigation Company were part of a much broader movement of professional engineers, capitalists, and reformers who saw in irrigation a trail that wound safely past savage ranchers, Populist demagogues, and menacing leftists to the bucolic country home. Visions of profuse fields along the Cody Canal hearkened to some of the oldest reform traditions in America. Since the beginning of the republic, writers and politicians from Thomas Jefferson to Horace Greeley had lobbied the federal government to remove Indians, build roads and railroads, and restrain land speculators, all to open a “safety valve” on the frontier for American workers trapped in decadent cities.

The term “safety valve” was adopted from a feature of industrial boilers, a fact which suggests how much the theory reflected urban ideas rather than western reality. In fact, the West was never a safety valve. Farm making was too expensive for most urban workers, and few in the cities had any knowledge of farming. But the idea that the West had served as an escape hatch for the downwardly mobile, a bulwark against class conflict, remained conventional wisdom throughout the nineteenth century. Around 1890, as the frontier closed, reformers began looking for ways to expand the supply of arable land to keep open, or reopen, the safety valve. The day of the irrigator had arrived.
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Irrigation promised an end to western aridity and its attendant savagery, and a new start on homemaking along the remnant frontier. Irrigation engineers, water lawyers, utopian idealists, and others banded together in national associations, created national magazines, such as
The Irrigation Age,
and held national conventions. They designed legislation to irrigate the vast western desert. Their most famous advocate was William Ellsworth Smythe (who—like Cody and Bryan—was from Nebraska). Smythe's 1899 book,
The Conquest of Arid America,
promoted irrigation of the arid West as a means of securing a millennial future: farms and work for the teeming unemployed masses; better health in the dry air; more wholesome, democratic communities (a result of having to work together to dig and maintain canals); national greatness (all the great civilizations of the ancient world had been irrigated desert kingdoms). If these were not reasons enough, Smythe and his allies spoke fervently of “reclaiming the desert,” infusing their campaigns with biblical language and the aura of the sacred. Irrigation became, in Smythe's prediction, the culmination of world history, the rise of the American people to a new level of wealth and power which would collapse age-old distinctions—between city and country, East and West, producer and worker, rich and poor—which threatened to tear the country apart as the new century dawned. His was a peaceful answer to Populists, anarchists, socialists, monopolist ranchers, rustlers, and all the other radicals who threatened the progressive march of civilization.
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