Louis S. Warren (86 page)

In this telling, the story of William Cody was of a man who may or may not have been drinking during his show season, but was unable to stop when he was at home. Ira Bare, editor of a North Platte newspaper, who had known the Codys for more than twenty-three years, concluded “as a rule, when the Colonel drank, he kept on drinking . . . during his presence here, he was more or less under the influence of liquor. . . . I do remember instances when he did not drink, but not often.”
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How much of these stories was true and how much produced by the alchemy of resentment and memory is impossible to say. The self-deprecating humor of his autobiography, in which he often recalled having too much “tanglefoot,” buying drink for his detachment and forgetting to buy food, and scouting hostile territory with brandy-filled canteens, suggest either heavy drinking, or playful derision of the era's potent temperance movement, or both.

But however true or false the testimony about Cody's drunkenness was, the stories reflected the barely concealed antitheatricalism of North Platte, a middle-class Nebraska town which had always been uneasy with William Cody's brand of show business patricianism. Charles Iddings, a prominent mill owner and businessman in North Platte, said that whatever shortcomings of temperament or manners Louisa might have, she was simply more honorable, and credible, than her husband, because she was not in show business. While her husband traveled the world in pampered comfort, she stayed home:

She has not had the extensive travel, she has not mingled with the best people perhaps in the east and the old country. She has not had a press agent to dress up her little stories or to correct her little imperfections of speech. She simply stayed at home. She has not had a ladies maid to mix her drinks for her or fix her attire to best advantage. She has simply been a
plain body,
stayed at home and taken good care of the children and such property as she had there. . . . She has been at home most of the time during 23 years.
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The description of Louisa Cody as a “plain body” suggested she possessed democratic values of sincerity, modesty, and honesty, which William Cody—ornamented, showy, and extravagant—could not have. She was, said Beach Hinman, “a very industrious woman, and I do not know as I have noticed any extravagance in her living or dress.” She had a “certain amount of charge at all times over her ranch and farms. She went out and conducted the business of the farm, which was very extensive in later years.” Her habits were “exemplary beyond reproach.” Hinman had “never heard a mere hint of any source against her reputation or conduct.”
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In contrast, her husband's style of living was not moral. When William Cody's attorneys tried to put Hinman on the defensive by pointing out that the showman had taken his daughters with him when he traveled, Hinman demurred. “I guess Arta Cody was with him some of the time, but I don't think the truck he had around with him did his daughters any good.”
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At one time, in Hinman's presence, William Cody “got to ridiculing our Lord and Master, and I took exceptions to it....”
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In these accounts, Cody's debauchery could be attributed equally to an absence of moral regulation along the frontier—which had long since passed into history but which yet coursed through his person—and to the urban theatrical corruptions in which he immersed himself. In fact, the two forces combined in his person, to create a figure who had lost his balance and fallen into the drunkenness and moral lassitude of the savage.

This drunkard, philanderer, and blasphemer was Louisa Cody's husband, and she begged the court to allow her to remain his wife. “He always was kind to me when in North Platte,” said Louisa. “He drank a great deal, but he always was pleasant when he came home.” Testifying on her own behalf, between sobs, she denied every charge in the divorce petition. She recalled his last visit home, in 1901, when she arranged the Christmas welcome party for him. He seemed delighted. “He embraced me and kissed me,” she said. He left on Christmas night. He held her in his arms until the train was about to leave, then kissed her goodbye. That was the last time he had come home. She knew nothing of poisonings, of dragon's blood, of having treated guests badly. Arta had been devastated by the divorce petition. Louisa's attorneys submitted in evidence the last letter she received from her eldest daughter: “About Papa, oh why did he do it? My heart is just broken over it. I cannot find words to express how dreadfully I feel about it.”
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Louisa said she had been careful with mortgages only to protect him from their many creditors. She had certainly objected to some guests, but never to their faces. She wanted a reconciliation—if only he would retract the allegations of poisoning.
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William Cody's case was not helped by the letters he wrote to her, which her attorneys submitted as evidence of his continuing affection. Reading the first of these letters into the record, her attorney stumbled over his crabbed handwriting. “Better let me read it,” interrupted William Cody. “That may be one I wrote on horseback.”

He read them all, as if he was playing in a drama. “The venerable showman carried off the role with easy grace and due regard to dramatic values,” reported the Chicago Tribune.
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The letters were indeed affectionate, but they also made a powerful case for Louisa's virtues as a wife. The ideal wife of the Gilded Age stayed at home but was capable of assisting her husband in business. One of her witnesses testified that she was “a good business woman, better than the average,” and her husband's correspondence substantiated this.
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One of his letters reminded her of his $50,000 loss with his Canadian tour of 1885, the financial debacle of Ambrose Park in 1894, and the $10,000 lost in
Black
America
in 1895, all as a prelude to explaining to her that his “share of the losses” for the 1900 season amounted to another $10,000. “I had a terrible blow this morning. I got all my printing bills in. Our printing was supposed to cost $60,000 a season, but this year it's $80,000 so I have to pay. . . . This makes an unexpected loss to me of $20,000.” The show season a bust, he still had to pay half the expenses of sending the cast home and wintering the livestock. For this year, the expense of running Scout's Rest Ranch would have to be paid with hay and grain sales. “Don't you think it can be made to do it?” he asked her. Signing off as “Papa,” he scribbled a PS: “Wish you would read this letter and say nothing to any one.”
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As the ranch prospered, his reliance on her business abilities grew, and his letters expressed his gratitude.

Say you are getting right down to business—why I am delighted—I never believed you could run that big ranch. . . . But you seem to over come business troubles as well as a man who had been used to it—I am really proud of you as a business manager—Wish I had let you have the ranch years ago. May and June will be two busy months for you, then come on and make me a long visit.

With love
Papa
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Although he was loath to lose John Boyer as ranch manager, he supported Louisa when she demanded that Mrs. Boyer leave the ranch after the choking incident in the Boyer house.
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“I have turned the ranch over to Mrs. Cody and she is boss. You look to her for orders,” he told Boyer.
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By the end of the summer of 1901, the old showman could not have been more pleased with Louisa's success at a job that had for years exhausted the men he hired. “Say you are relieving me of lots of worry and work, by running the ranch and you are making no fuss about it, as though it was nothing to do.” His letters were full of his hopes for Cody town and the Irma Hotel and a military college he hoped to found in the town.
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He complimented her on her liberal food policy for hired men. He confided personal matters to her. “What makes me so poorly outside of the piles is, I have to[o] much on my mind, so many different interests to look after.” Thankfully, he had Louisa. “You have relieved me from the ranch worry—and that don't give me a thought any more for you know more about it than I ever did.”
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Other witnesses substantiated that she had indeed mortgaged her own North Platte properties, which included three houses and four lots, to help him finance his show and other ventures. Moreover, she paid the mortgages from rents on properties she owned.
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The final blow to William Cody's case, however, came in the testimony about his infidelities, which her attorneys skillfully dropped on the packed courtroom three days into the trial. Although the name of Katherine Clemmons had floated through press coverage, she split with William Cody in 1894, when the plays he financed for her reportedly lost $35,000. Soon after, Cody and a prominent “sport” named Fred May were in a fistfight in a Washington, D.C., restaurant over insults exchanged concerning the affair. Subsequently, Clemmons married Howard Gould, son of the notorious robber baron Jay Gould. The same year he filed for divorce, Buffalo Bill Cody filed a $10,000 claim against Clemmons for money lost in supporting her show.
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But now, the attention of the court, and the public, turned to William Cody's newest lover, twenty-eight-year-old Bess Isbell, reportedly a press agent first hired by the Wild West show in 1899.
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Isbell seems to have been the woman who was the center of a Buffalo Bill faux pas during the 1903 show season in London. King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra knew Cody well, having ridden in the Deadwood stage during his debut season in London in 1887. They arrived in the show camp again near the end of its 1903 season, and all went well until the end of their visit. Another press agent, Dexter Fellows, recalled: “Just when we in the press department were congratulating ourselves upon the smoothness with which we had entertained our eminent guests, Bill committed a breach of etiquette which just about made us sick.” The royal party were leaving the camp when a young woman holding a large bundle of orchids stepped forward. Cody, “with all the nonchalance he could command, said: ‘Oh, Your Majesties, permit me to introduce Miss—— ——, my ward.' ”

Because nobody is presented to kings and queens except by royal request, the queen turned away, refusing the orchids. Fellows was mortified. “Happily the newsmen present agreed to forget the incident.”
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But other witnesses to Cody's affection for Isbell trundled forward, telling tales. John Clair, a former valet for the showman, told the court a sensational story of the affair that Buffalo Bill had carried on since Isbell joined the show. The showman and the lady took adjoining rooms on the road. In Sherman, Texas, Cody asked Clair to give him a rubdown in Isbell's room, while Isbell watched, dressed only in “a sort of a kimona ladies generally wear I understand in their private boudoir.” They kissed often, but there were troubles between them. She asked to ride in the parade with Cody one day. He refused. She “sat down on the bed which [was] in Col. Cody's tent and began to sob very bitterly.” In 1901, while Arta and Irma visited their father in Buffalo, New York, Clair said, Isbell went out to Cody, Wyoming, from where she sent frequent telegrams.
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Key facts of Clair's testimony were supported by Ed Clark, a ranch manager who testified that he had built another bedroom onto Cody's small TE ranch home for Isbell's use. The woman stayed there for several weeks in 1901, and William Cody eventually joined her there that year. They rode together frequently. He deeded her forty acres of his spread at the head of Rock Creek, and handed over some of his calves, ordering Clark and several other hands to mark them with her brand, the
or “bar BQ.”
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Cody denounced Clair as a liar who was out for revenge after having been fired from the Wild West show for theft, and dismissed Ed Clark as a temporary ranch hand who was only briefly at the TE.
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He denied that he and Isbell were romantically involved. He did not take a room in Sherman, Texas, in the year in question, he said, because the show was only there for one day (which was true). In any case, on the road, even his private rooms functioned as semipublic business space, where he was surrounded by “from 1 to 10 people” until he went to bed.
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There had been no kisses between them that he recalled, although his staff was generally an affectionate crowd. As he explained it, Isbell was merely a hardworking, talented press agent. She secured positive reviews for the show in ladies' magazines, a market that the Wild West show's male press agents “did not or could not succeed in reaching.”
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Such coverage, with its appeal to middle-class women, helped maintain the show's appeal as a family attraction. In this regard, Isbell was indispensable.