Louis S. Warren (9 page)

Thus began the self-exile from his own hearth that characterized most of Cody's adult life. What began right after the Civil War as a marital estrangement became standard when he was touring with his theater company and, after that, the Wild West show. Ironically, the man who became a hero for saving the frontier family home did so primarily by seeking to escape his own troubled house. For Cody, roving as plainsman or showman was usually preferable to the stationary combat of his fireside.

OUT IN WEST KANSAS, at “the end of the tracks,” he scrabbled for a livelihood among mostly low-class frontiersmen: down-and-out prospectors, cowhands, buffalo hunters, and teamsters who moved from job to job, with no fixed address. The cash economy of Kansas had been expanding for most of William Cody's life. After the Civil War, a wave of new Kansas emigrants, combined with a dramatic increase in railroad and other investment, fueled spectacular economic growth. The railroad, especially, brought about a tectonic shift in the prairie's social, economic, and natural relations. Nowhere was that fact more apparent than where the rails extended farthest into the frontier. At track's end, thousands of Irish tracklayers, or “gandy dancers,” pounded spikes into ties and did the other work of building the railway toward the western horizon. From the other direction came hundreds of bullwhackers from Mexico, the United States, and points unknown, whips cracking beside prairie schooners creaking with tons of Colorado and New Mexico cattle hide, sheep's wool, buffalo robes, and mineral ore, all to be sold at the railroad's western terminus. At the same time, the east-west migration of goods and people swelled with a northerly flow of mostly poor and young cowboys—white, black, Mexican, and mixed-blood Texans—driving huge herds of cattle to these newly minted “cow towns,” from which 50,000 animals were shipped east in 1868 alone.
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On top of all this, black, white, and immigrant soldiers, merchants, laborers, speculators, entertainers, and tourists, the wealthy and those of middling means, came west on the railroad. Settlers followed not long after.

The rivers of mostly male workers—flowing ahead of the train, alongside the prairie schooners, and behind the cattle—converged in one vast lake of loneliness and thirst in the arid plain. Entrepreneurs took advantage. To the north, in Nebraska, the Union Pacific Railroad created a genuine moving town, famously called “Hell on Wheels,” where drink, food, and sex could be had for cash, and where card games, shell games, real estate swindles, and a hundred other ways to cheat men of their money proliferated. End-of-the-line social relations were similar even in more permanent towns on the UPED, where boomers waxed rhapsodic about civilization, but other observers were more critical. “The houses” in Ellsworth, remarked one traveler, “are alternately Beer Houses, Whiskey Shops, Gambling houses, Dance houses and Restaurants,” wherein patrons consumed large quantities of beer, whiskey, and “tarantula juice.”
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As Cody later recalled it, when he was testifying in his own divorce trial, the first year away from Louisa he was “railroading and trading and hunting; I went out to make money and I was just looking around for anything that would come along.”
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He spent the winter like many other single men on the Plains: in a “dugout,” a hole in an embankment with a crude roof over the top, sharing the dark, dingy space with a man named Alfred Northrup. Early in 1867, he helped a former neighbor from Leavenworth haul goods to open a new store. He mixed his odd jobs with stuttering efforts at founding a business. That summer, a series of drunken, bloody melees between soldiers and railroad workers compelled army officers at Fort Hays to seize the supplies of unlicensed booze merchants. In their dragnet, they confiscated the stores of William Cody, which included, among other things, four gallons of whiskey and three gallons of bitters.
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The well-known mule-whacker and aspiring saloonkeeper was also a peddler of buffalo meat on the streets of Hays; locals soon took to calling him Buffalo Bill.
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The name itself long preceded him. On the Plains, when any number of men were named Bill, appending “Buffalo” as an epithet was a way of distinguishing among them. In the 1860s and '70s there were Buffalo Bills in Texas, Kansas, and Dakota Territory. As early as 1862, an English traveler in Montana would record his meeting with “Buffalo Bill, a personage whom I have hitherto regarded as a myth.”
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The name may have been applied to Cody in derision, as a taunt. But however he earned the moniker, in the long run it was a boon to his notoriety. The name was so endemic to the frontier that upon being introduced to
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Buffalo Bill, many believed they were meeting a man of wide reputation, even if the Buffalo Bills they had heard about were different men.

In his long absences from home in the 1860s, this Buffalo Bill's career resembled a low-rent version of his father's. Before Isaac Cody's troubles with pro-slavery settlers began, he had been kept away from his family by the demands of his own stage line, and by the burdens of managing large farms for absentee investors and of founding successful towns. William Cody's stints as teamster, whiskey seller, and market hunter were of a lower-class variety.

So, too, was his next venture, when he joined a man named William Rose in a contract to grade track for the UPED.
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It was hard, dusty work, driving teams of horses behind the scraper blades which pulled up the prairie sod and churned grit into the air. Although he continued to send Louisa money, there was no way she would join him in this peripatetic life, with no fixed home and surrounded by men of low standing and hard disposition.

Then he made an audacious move. In the summer of 1867, he joined with Rose in founding a town along the course of the railroad near Fort Hays. The young men's faith in the advancement of civilization and their own interests, their conviction of the town's permanence and eventual greatness, was expressed in the name Cody chose for it: Rome.
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Cody and Rose would soon learn that, where the game of town-founding had been risky in the 1850s, it was even more treacherous for entrepreneurs in the 1860s. Along the wagon roads, travelers could stop at any roadside settlement or outpost that looked promising. Town founders secured their business and recruited new residents by appealing to emigrant needs.

But train passengers could alight only where railroad executives decided to schedule stops, and in this matter they played a rough game. Corporate survival hinged on settling a dependent population of customers along the tracks. Without farmers, merchants, and others to buy space for their freight and seats for themselves, long stretches of track would be too expensive to sustain. Company executives thus took special interest in town sites, exercising near-monopoly control over their selection. The most charming settlement along the path of the railroad, however thriving and complete with businesses, families, churches, and schools, would turn to a ghost town if the railway company failed to schedule a stop there. Indeed, as the railroads extended along the route of older emigrant roadways, preexisting hotels, stores, saloons, and other provisioning stations were forced to find a niche in the railroad's towns or face bankruptcy. In a curious way, the “civilizing” force of the railroad brought greater commerce at concentrated points along the tracks, but it cleared many Plains entrepreneurs from their holdings, leaving open prairie along the old trails where scattered homes and businesses had once stood.
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Thus, in the interval between the death of Isaac Cody and the arrival of the railroad in western Kansas, the opportunity to build towns moved out of the hands of entrepreneurs and into the hands of huge corporations. In the East, railroads were built to connect towns. In the West, railroads were built first, and the towns followed. Railroad agents, sent west to locate depots along the intended route of the railway, frequently threatened to pass existing towns by if they did not receive donations of free lots to line their own pockets. Independent town founders who succeeded in getting the railroads to build depots were usually men of considerable means, some of whom bought up every conceivable nearby railroad stop and forced the railroad to build the depot in the town.
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To circumvent such tactics, railroad companies such as the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, fueled by vast sums of investor capital and taxpayer subsidies, organized subsidiary town-building companies. On occasion, when they were bribed enough, they ran the rail line through or beside an existing town. But more often they steered away from settlements so as better to exploit the economic boom the railroad brought with it. At Cheyenne, Wyoming, for example, the Union Pacific established the town, organized the local government, and sold lots only to people who acknowledged the railroad as rightful owner of the property—all before the company even had title to the land.
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Railroad power over town creation was perhaps most potently symbolized by the shipping of the physical stuff of new settlements to the frontier. The Union Pacific and other railroads freighted whole towns in pieces, like giant toys. One western traveler reported a train loaded with “frame houses, boards, furniture, palings, old tents, and all the rubbish which makes up one of these mushroom ‘cities.' ” As it pulled into Cheyenne, “the guard jumped off his van, and seeing some friends on the platform, called out with a flourish, ‘Gentlemen, here's Julesburg.' ”
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Still, even with the might of America's railroad magnates against them, independent speculators frequently tried to horn in on the railroad's town business. Many simply bought and sold lots in towns founded by the railroad. “Thousands of dollars are daily won and lost all along the line by speculating in town lots,” wrote one observer. But the boldest speculators would claim acreage for a homestead directly in the path of the railroad. Instead of plowing fields and making farm improvements, as the Homestead Act intended, they laid out a grid of streets, and made public promises that the railroad would build a station there. These “town founders” would then sell lots to other speculators. Deeds for town properties sold and resold at increasingly exorbitant prices as the end of the tracks approached. Their pockets stuffed with coin, the claimants could exercise their option—written into the Homestead Act—to pay the government $1.25 per acre rather than wait five years for their title. The price of lots rose as the railroad came within a day's ride. It rose again as the dust of the scrapers on the rail bed hung like a dull cloud on the horizon. It crashed when, as almost always happened, the rails passed the town by.
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Ignoring the risks, Cody and Rose took this ambitious route. Using Rose's teams to grade the site of the new town, they laid out a grid of streets. They offered free lots to anyone who would build on them, although they reserved the corner lots and some other choice locations for themselves. Before long, the town consisted of thirty houses, some stores and saloons, “and one good hotel.” The young men thought they were rich.
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Cody himself opened a store in a wood frame building with a tent roof. To Louisa, he wrote that he had a home, and that he was worth $250,000. In less than two years on the Plains, Cody seemed to have recaptured his middle-class standing, and to have met Louisa's demand that he become a businessman. Soon after, he met his wife and baby girl at the end of the track, and the little family became Romans.
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Louisa appears not to have realized that his wealth was paper. Since the town's businesses had yet to attract settlers willing to pay money for land or services, Cody continued his other, less esteemed employments. Most of his income came from hunting buffalo for Goddard Brothers, contractors who supplied meat to the gangs of Irish railroad workers along the UPED. For bringing in twelve buffalo per day, he received $500 a month, a sizable sum. In addition, he had his whiskey-selling enterprise (at least until the officers seized his supply).
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It was a bold—some might say foolish—leap for a buffalo hunter and whiskey runner to make a grab at founding a town. Nonetheless, Cody wove these divergent business ventures into one another, using the profits from one to underwrite the others.

William Cody's Rome was built in a few days. It collapsed even faster. The railroad sent William Webb, their division agent, ahead of the rails to select the next town site. Many years later, Cody recalled that when Webb arrived in Rome, “I thought I was going to sell him quite a number of lots from the way he was looking the town over.” When Cody announced he was off to hunt buffalo, Webb “expressed a desire that he would like to kill a buffalo himself.” Cody took him along, and Webb indeed shot a buffalo. The railroad agent “was so delighted and seemed so happy over the killing [of] a buffalo that I thought I would sell him a block when I got back that night.”
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But Webb was not interested in buying any lots. Instead, he proposed to make a railroad stop in the town, for a heavy price. The next morning, as Cody prepared to go hunting again, Webb “came up to me and he offered me one-twelfth interest in my own town. I thought he had gone daft and I rode off and left him.”

Cody was gone for three or four days. On his return, “when I came within sight of where the town of Rome had been when I left there, I discovered that most of the houses had pulled away or gone some place or a cyclone had struck the town, and something was the matter.” He could “see people pulling down the houses and I could see a string of teams moving lumber and everything away from the town.” Webb had designated a new town, to be called Hays City, several miles to the east. The railroad stop would be there. With lumber and building supplies scarce and expensive, settlers were removing all they could carry and carting it to the new settlement.