Louis S. Warren (85 page)

The allegations of poisoning began to seem almost credible as his witnesses painted a picture of Louisa's generally toxic personality. One seamstress who had worked for Louisa Cody related that she openly disdained her husband.
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Another, Florence Parker, the daughter of a ranch manager who had departed because of Louisa's constant interference, said that Louise had bragged of beating Irma Cody with a buggy whip and burning her with a match, that she consulted fortune-tellers about her husband “to get power over him so she could get possession of his wealth,” that she drank frequently, that “very vulgar” speech was “the most prominent part of her conversation,” that she often said she hated her husband, and that she killed his prize greyhound dogs with poison-laced crackers.
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Mrs. John Boyer, the wife of another ranch foreman and manager, who lived at Scout's Rest for nine years, said that on her first meeting with Louisa Cody, the wife of America's most famous showman complained that her husband “had ladies traveling with him, or women rather, that made him unloyal to her,” and that he was “immoral with any woman that he met.” Over subsequent years, “she told me all.”
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Mrs. Boyer said the woman used “such bad language” in her own home “that ladies could not stay there.” She drank heavily—“toddies,” wine, and “beer by the case.” In years past, “she used to take a drink the first thing in the morning,” and when she drank, “you could smell it on her.” She refused to entertain his guests, ladies and gentlemen alike, and she accused her husband's friends of stealing household trinkets. The Boyers hired a housemaid, a young woman who had a baby out of wedlock, to work in their quarters at Scout's Rest. Louisa Cody showed up to demand they fire the maid. Mrs. Boyer refused. Louisa “spit in the baby's face,” and accused Mrs. Boyer “of keeping that girl in the house for my husband's use.” Mrs. Boyer seized Mrs. Cody by the throat and pushed her bodily out the front door.
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Mrs. Boyer's testimony was the heart of the poisoning evidence. She recounted how Louisa had bought a concoction called “Dragon's Blood” from a gypsy camp near North Platte and put it in his coffee. Concerned that it would do him harm, “I switched the cups,” Mrs. Boyer recalled, “and it made her sick.”
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One day when William Cody was intoxicated in their home, Louisa Cody told Mrs. Boyer, “I will rule Cody or ruin him.” She called him to the top of the stairs and handed him a cup of tea, saying, “Willie, drink this it will do you good.” He drank it, then lurched toward the bathroom door and collapsed, vomiting as he fell. “You are a drunken brute,” Louisa told him. Some of the hired men put him to bed and called the doctor. “The girl that was working there, Katie Burke, said ‘She will surely kill him this time for she has worked on this tea all day.' ” Mrs. Boyer claimed that she had confronted Louisa Cody, and been told that nobody would believe her if she said anything. On other occasions Louisa told her that the potion would make him “so weak that she could get him to sign papers” and “she wanted him to make his ranch over to her.”
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Mrs. Boyer saw Louisa slip more of the potion into a bottle of whiskey on the buffet in their home, just before a banquet honoring her husband. Then she set about “nagging and jawing first about one thing and then another and he said ‘Oh Mamma, hush,' and he went over and grabbed the bottle and took a drink and said ‘The only way a man can stand you is to drink.' ” By the time he rose to speak at the banquet, he was practically incoherent. Moments later, he collapsed at the table, whereupon he was bodily carried from the room.
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Cody's banquet speech, or rather his failure to give a coherent speech, became a central moment in the trial narrative. Other witnesses, including his sister May, said that he had complained his legs were numb, and that he felt worse than he ever had in his life, moments before he fainted.
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Outside, with his stomach in agony, he walked to Guy Laing's saloon, where he climbed onto a billiard table and lay facedown, gripping the railings on both side “in a way as to relieve the agony in my stomach.” Half an hour later, he stood up, went to his carriage, and went home.
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As riveting as the story of Louisa the Poisoner was for the public, Cody had not reckoned with the powerful countermythology of the home and the domestic order which his show had been entwined with, and in many ways reinforced, for a generation. Very quickly, his wife's attorneys cast William Cody as an aggressor against his own home. Throughout the trial, Louisa Cody exploited the public's fascination with homemaking as salve to the deleterious influence of nomadism. She played the role of a loyal wife aggrieved by a befuddled, peripatetic husband, whose drinking, infidelities, and unsteady business hand became primary exhibits in the case against him.

The strategy of Louisa's lawyers was to depict the Cody household as loving, warm, and generally happy. In this story of the Cody marriage, William Cody appeared as an affectionate and kind man, but with an unfortunate thirst for alcohol and unrestrained lusts for women. Only through his marriage to Louisa Cody could his anarchic energies and unsavory appetites be contained.

Her attorneys built this case from the most respectable materials. Her witnesses were largely North Platte's middle-class professionals, including bankers, doctors, and lawyers. “She always conducted herself as a loving wife,” testified local attorney Beach “Judge” Hinman. “I have never known there to be the least friction between the two.”
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Edith Colvin, who stayed at the Cody household for five weeks in the fall and winter of 1901, described how Louisa headed up a crowd of people who welcomed her husband at the train station when he returned for Christmas, bearing gifts—steel purses and a cut-glass serving set—for his wife and daughters. Their home was decorated with his image in paintings and busts and photographs. She called him “Willie.” He called her “Mamma.” During Christmas dinner, he treated her “very nicely, indeed.”
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Others noted that Cody had seemed perfectly happy in 1901, the last time he had been in North Platte. He had discussed plans to build a Masonic temple for the town. He never made any suggestion that he was planning to leave. He ceased to return after that year. Many wondered why.
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Still others described Louisa Cody's behavior toward guests as “uniformly courteous,” and her conduct toward her husband as “never anything but proper.” She was an excellent hostess. “She was always very fully occupied in entertaining his guests. I never heard her say an unkind word to him, or manifest any ill-feeling of any description at any time.” Her reputation as wife and mother was “beyond reproach.” Another “never saw anything” to indicate trouble and bad feeling. Friends of three decades, including the Grand Master of Nebraska Masons, Frank Bullard, described her as a teetotaler, and the contention that she used “vulgar, obscene, and profane language” was “ridiculous. I never heard of such a thing. . . . I never heard her use a word that even approached that.”
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Dr. E. B. Warner, fourth-term mayor of North Platte and delegate to the 1892 National Republican Convention, had known the Codys for twentyfive years. He told the court that Louisa Cody was “perfectly ladylike; an ideal hostess,” and a loving wife and mother.
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Said Mrs. W. H. Turpie, a friend of Irma's who was a neighbor of the Codys for several years, “It always seemed to me that she simply idolized him; as much as she could any person. She was very much wrapped up in him, and doing everything for his pleasure, as far as I could see. . . .”
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Another neighbor who visited often with Louisa testified that Louisa once showed her a newspaper report of her husband's infidelities, but even then, she never said a word against him.
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In the strategy of Louisa's attorneys, the public face of the marriage was what mattered. If marriage was by definition a public institution, the foundation of home and civil society, then the judge would have to accept its public face as evidence of how well it ordered the chaotic life of the showman. If a marriage looked happy, it must be happy.

Louisa's attorneys also illuminated the challenges facing the wife and domesticator, by painting William Cody as dissolute and unable to function on his own. Most of the witnesses on this point were longtime friends of both Codys. They proved to be not only enthusiastic in defense of his wife, but so eager to fulminate against Buffalo Bill that one detects a sense of aggrievedness on their part, as if the disgrace of the scandal was only the latest of the old showman's many offenses. Their bewilderment over his abandonment of their town for Cody, Wyoming, apparently added to a popular resentment at being dragged into his marital troubles. To judge by their testimony, they felt their affection for Buffalo Bill was poorly repaid with this self-serving trial. They hit back hard, and their harshest attack was their testimony about Cody's drinking.

Alcohol and its control were major social and political issues in the nineteenth century. To temperance advocates, alcohol was the despoiler of the home, an evil force that corrupted men, broke their marriages, ruined their talents, and left their children destitute. Drink was savagery in a bottle.

Indeed, temperance advocates deployed the symbol of the home and womanly domesticity in much the same way as Buffalo Bill's Wild West did. As we have seen, Cody himself touted his show camp as a temperance community (although even heavy drinking was not unusual when the cast was out on the town) in order to appeal to the respectable middle class. In the minds of many, the home needed to be protected from alcohol, but a faithful wife and a warm domicile were also the best defense against a man's alcohol abuse. Women dominated temperance campaigns, and they depicted the fight to control alcohol as an expression of women's domesticating influence over the public spaces which men traditionally controlled, especially saloons. They were particularly powerful in the West. Carry Nation began chopping her way to glory in 1900 by attacking Kansas saloons with her hatchet. Less spectacularly, campaigns to ban alcohol were often led by, and corresponded with the rising power of, middle-class women. Thus the nation banned alcoholic beverages with the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, and empowered women with the right to vote in the Nineteenth Amendment of 1921.
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The control of alcohol and its influence thus spoke to the containment of savagery and to anxieties about the home which were central to Cody's show and his myth. Charges of habitual drunkenness struck at the heart of his public persona, and he defended himself vigorously. He testified that drinking never interfered with his business, and moreover that he had quit drinking in 1901. He may have. “Oh but I am enjoying this trip—More than I ever did any before,” he wrote a friend that year, “because I am not drinking. Everything looks bright and prosperous.” Two months later he was still abstaining. In New York, pulling together his show for another season, he was “feeling like new money. [H]ead clear all the time. . . . My prospects never looked brighter.”
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Charles Wayland Towne, a journalist who went hunting with Cody and several of the showman's old drinking partners in 1903, reported that Cody had become a teetotaler on orders from his doctor.
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Whether or not Cody had been on the wagon since 1901, residents of North Platte had not seen him since that year, and they had many stories to tell about Cody's drinking from earlier days. “I have seen him frequently when I thought he was very much under the influence of liquor,” both “in h[i]s own home and on the streets,” said Frank Bullard.
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William Cody's attorney told Bullard that Cody did not drink during his show season. Bullard shrugged. “He generally waited until he got here to get drunk.”
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A. F. Streitz, the town druggist, concluded that Cody “has been a hard drinker during his stay in North Platte during these years.” Streitz had seen Cody intoxicated “many times,” and in fact “the first time I met him in North Platte he was intoxicated.”
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C. M. Newton, a merchant who had known the Codys for fifteen years, said he had seen Cody drunk in public many times. William Cody's attorneys suggested that their client was polite and kind even when drunk:

Q: He always conducted himself gentlemanly, did he not, during the times he was drunk, on the streets?

A: I think at some times he did not act like a gentleman.

Q: What caused you to think so?

A: I think he was too much intoxicated.
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Louisa Cody's lawyers proved adept at dredging up old acquaintances to testify about his prior habits. Such people were legion in the Platte country. One recalled events two decades before, when William Cody would make his “headquarters” in Dave Perry's bar, a known resort of prostitutes. When William Cody's lawyers attempted to mitigate the remark by asking if all saloons did not have prostitutes at the time, the witness, Patrick McEvoy, disagreed. Perry's saloon, he pointed out, “was the only saloon in North Platte that allowed women to go into them.” The witness was careful to point out that he had never seen Cody with any of these shady women—but he stayed there most days and much of the night, too. “He would be unable to walk, and the boys would have to haul him in a carry-all, or hack, to take him home.”
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One local cowboy turned up to recall Cody bringing wagons of liquor to the Dismal River roundup when he was part owner of the Cody-North Ranch in the Sand Hills.
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Still another claimed, “I saw him lying drunk myself right at the store building of Mr. Burke's,” near Fort McPherson. Even while he had a wife and baby at the fort, he frequented a bordello near Cottonwood Canyon which “stood on a high knoll, and you could not help seeing him.”
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