Louis S. Warren (90 page)

Gold continued to appear in smaller quantities, just enough to keep Cody hopeful. But profits from the mine proved as elusive as the proceeds of his towns. The showman emptied something like $200,000 into his Arizona mines.
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He sought investors and wrote almost as many letters about the shafts as he had about ditches in the Big Horn Basin. Like his other investments, he complained bitterly about managers who failed to keep him informed, and he pretended to supervise the mine as much as he did his show arena.
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There was a degree of showmanship in soliciting investors that appealed to him. He led trips to Campo Bonito to convince the parties he brought along to invest their money. The guide and showman understood the value of providing these clients an authentic experience of the mining West. He fixed up his own cabin with western relics, including Yellow Hair's scalp.
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Letters to his managers instructed them to prepare suitable camping amenities for the travelers, as if Campo Bonito was a new arena for his ongoing show. “Will you have the Mrs. Thomas House sealed with light colored burlap, as it's a rather dark room—two beds like I had in my teepee—nice blankets, pillows &c. A curtain to hide the beds . . . Wash stand—fix it up something like my teepee . . . writing desk &c. . . . Hope you sowed some barley so it will look green like last winter. . . . I wish you would have the Mrs. Thomas house white washed, also the store. It would help the looks greatly. . . . You should get the soft burlap, 56 inches wide, and tack it on the walls—hard burlap goes on with paste.”
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Cody never deceived investors about his profits. Despite his attention to the entertainment of his guests, he did not hide the fact that the mine consistently failed to turn a profit. There were numerous obstructions to mining and milling, and the promised ore failed to materialize.
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The show he ran at Campo Bonito was honest, and very unprofitable.

But he was so busy running that show—or maybe he was just credulous— that he failed to realize another show was operating at his mine. Lewis Getchell was the Arizona partner who had lured Cody and Dyer into the operation. Getchell was notorious for promoting worthless commercial properties, and he found an easy mark in Cody, whose faith in the mine sprang from the fraudulent report of a crooked mining engineer (whom Getchell had commissioned, of course). Getchell lived high on Cody's money, sending the showman fake receipts for his expenses and pocketing the money the showman sent. At the same time, he employed forty-five people to scrabble in the tunnels, making the mine look potentially profitable.
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Other observers were not fooled. One engineer on a neighboring claim judged the mine “a tremendous swindle and I am very much afraid that Cody is innocent and Getchell is playing him for a sucker.”
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In a sense, Cody was defrauded by Getchell's show and then constrained by his own public image. In 1912, perplexed by the financial failure of the mine, Cody's partner, D. B. Dyer, requested an evaluation by a qualified mining engineer. The engineer, E. J. Ewing, caught a worker seeding the mill with refined minerals to make the ore look richer than it was, and he uncovered the kickbacks Getchell had engineered. Beyond losing his job, Getchell paid no penalty. Fear of adverse publicity kept Cody from filing charges. After he was taken in by Getchell's staging of a “working” mine, his need to protect his own show reputation as a clear-sighted westerner kept him from seeking legal recourse.
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By this time, Cody had spent his great profits from the 1910 season, and even though the mines began making a small profit (mostly from tungsten, used in new electric lightbulbs), it would take many years for them to return the money Cody had spent. Dyer died soon after the fraud was uncovered. Cody, unable to finance more operations, leased the mines to Ewing. For the rest of his life, he searched in vain for buyers.
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HIS PRIVATE LIFE was solitary after the scandal of the divorce trial. The fate of Bess Isbell remains mysterious, although documents offer intriguing hints. In 1906, Isbell met Cody at the Hoffman House in New York. There she signed over her power of attorney to W. J. Walls, Cody's lawyer in Wyoming, whom she instructed to sell her forty-acre ranch. After deducting expenses, Walls was to send the proceeds to her mother, Mrs. Julia Isbell, of the St. James Hotel, Denver. Why she wanted the money sent to her mother is not clear. But perhaps, as Cody had testified, she had tuberculosis. Whatever her fate, she disappeared from Cody's life after 1906.
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Cody was alone in 1910 when his daughter Irma, now living in North Platte with her husband and children, persuaded her father to visit the town that had turned against him at his divorce trial. Encouraged by reports from Louisa's friends that she wanted to take him back, town newspapers looked forward eagerly to the return of the old scout. Once again greeted by a large crowd of well-wishers and the town band, Cody was delighted. “Almost one hundred of the best people were out to the ranch for a smoker,” he reported to his sisters. “Today at 2 p.m. the Commercial Club gives me a reception. . . . So you can see I am in the lime light again. And hardly know how to meet it.”

News flashed along the wires that he and Louisa were reunited. But they were not. “I haven't seen Lulu,” Cody wrote. Although Louisa had expressed her longing for a reconciliation to friends and family, when he tried to visit, she refused to come out of her bedroom. He knocked softly. He pleaded. But the door remained closed.
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Sometime the following year, she relented. Evidence is thin and contradictory, but the family story is that he stopped in North Platte in July. Daughter Irma, her husband Fred Garlow, their children, and Arta's orphaned children contrived to leave them alone in a room together. When they emerged, Louisa and William Cody were reconciled.
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The Codys were not without resources. They still owned Scout's Rest Ranch and Louisa's house in North Platte, called the Welcome Wigwam. They owned the Irma Hotel and the TE Ranch in Wyoming. But the expenses of the Two Bills show were onerous. The partners were supposed to split the $40,000 cost of wintering livestock. Cody, desperate to raise his $20,000 share after a poor season in 1913, took a six-month loan from Henry Tammen, a shady impresario who owned the Sells-Floto Circus. Tammen also owned the sensationalist newspaper the
Denver Post,
which had reported lurid details of Cody's divorce trial in screaming red headlines. Now it reported the loan and a supposed condition: Cody had agreed to a partnership with Tammen's circus instead of with Pawnee Bill Lillie, beginning the next season.
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Cody denied he had made any such agreement, but Lillie was furious.
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Tammen would not likely have been able to enforce the condition even if Cody had agreed to it, since Cody could not unilaterally break his contract with his partner. But Tammen had another scheme for moving Lillie out of the picture. If he could not break the Cody-Lillie partnership, he would break the company.

In 1913, when the show camp arrived in Denver, days from Tammen's deadline for repayment, the Two Bills were already faring poorly from rain and low attendance. The slick publisher had maneuvered a series of foreclosure suits into the courts, and the show was attached for payment of Cody's $20,000 loan. The sheriff and his deputies arrived on the showgrounds, seized all cash on hand, and then sold all properties at auction. Buffalo Bill's Wild West was bankrupt.
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Deprived of his own show, and now under salary to Tammen, Cody toured with the Sells-Floto Circus in 1914 and 1915. The circus had dirty tents and rotting ropes, and at one showing it was nearly flooded out of existence. Still, Cody's life was not all bad. His salary was sizable: $100 a day, plus 40 percent of receipts over $3,000. He rode on horseback to introduce the show, but forsook his shooting acts. He had a private car on the train, a cook, a porter, and a carriage driver. Louisa traveled with him for free. “She has enjoyed the trip immensely,” he wrote to sister Julia.
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Years later, one fellow circus performer recalled, “He kept pretty much to himself in his private dressing tent. Had a certain amount of dignity about him that I admired. Was a handsome man for his age and still looked wonderful on a horse.”
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The misadventure with Tammen was compounded by Cody's foray into filmmaking, in which he secured the backing of Tammen and Tammen's partner, Frederick G. Bonfils, in the creation of “The Col. W. F. Cody (‘Buffalo Bill') Historical Pictures Co.” Given the significance of the Wild West for formulating western myth and the spectacle of “moving pictures,” making films seemed to many a fitting culmination for Cody's latter years. Cody envisioned a movie,
The Last Indian War,
that was educational and authentic, and thereby secured permission for it from both the army and the Department of Interior, which retained authority over Indians. He then set about gathering actual participants from the Plains campaigns and a slew of younger actors and extras to make his one and only motion picture.

Much of Cody's initial success in the filming came from his friendships with Indians, which he tended carefully. Back in 1909, there had been a flash of the discontent he occasionally encountered at Pine Ridge after one of the show contingent, Good Lance, fell sick and was left in a hospital in Garden City, Kansas, where he died. The tribal council (which included some Indians who had formerly performed with the show) sent a letter to the White House, demanding Wild West shows, including Buffalo Bill's, be banned from hiring Indians. At least some of their anger stemmed from the failure to return Good Lance's body. “We want that dead body to be sen[t] back over here,” wrote the council. “So we want him [Buffalo Bill] to do as what the Oglala Council wanted.”
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For decades, Indians and others who died on tour were buried near their place of death. But in 1913, contracts for Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Pawnee Bill's Far East Combined included a new clause, stipulating that in case an Indian employee died on tour, Cody and Lillie would “make all arrangements and pay all expenses incident to the preparation of the body for burial and transportation of the body to Pine Ridge Agency.”
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Cody followed on this gesture, the next year, as he began hiring Indians for his film. He hurried to pay back wages owed to those Indians who had been on the lot in Denver the day the sheriff seized the cash box. Since the cast could not be paid until the bankruptcy was settled, Lakotas with the show, like everyone else that year, had gone home without their salaries. So, while filming at Pine Ridge, Cody secured a personal loan and paid some $1,300 in wages to his former employees. Lizzie Sitting Eagle, Alice Running Horse, Peter Stands Up, Ghost Dog, Iron Cloud, and many others received their back wages, as well as small sums for the support of young children who had been with the show in 1913.
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His support from the army secured for Cody the services of retired General Nelson A. Miles and three troops of cavalry. Filming began in September 1913. Cody soon expanded the project, from
The Last Indian War,
about the Ghost Dance tragedy, which he had never before reenacted, to
The
Indian Wars,
including two battles, Summit Springs and Warbonnet Creek (where he scalped Yellow Hair), that were standards of the Wild West show.
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Cody played his moment as film producer for all it was worth. Now he was not only appearing in the film itself. He also heightened the film's authenticity by making himself the arbitrator between hostile forces, telling interviewers from film magazines that the Indians were fearful of the army and that he had talked them out of using live ammunition for the reenactment of the Wounded Knee massacre.
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These fictional tales titillated the public, but other attempts at authenticity were more costly and less effective. Miles insisted on reenacting central scenes in places where they actually occurred, forcing a fifty-mile trek out to the Badlands in freezing weather. Cody, who recognized a budget-busting production when he saw one, argued bitterly with the old general about the Badlands filming and other details, to the point that it reportedly ended their friendship.
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Ultimately, the film fared poorly at the box office, leading many to speculate that hidden forces conspired to destroy it. Chauncey Yellow Robe, a Lakota who differed with most of his Pine Ridge contemporaries on the usefulness of Wild West shows, denounced Cody and Miles for debasing the sacred burial ground at Wounded Knee “for their own cheap glory.”
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There were rumors of a protest against the film by the tribal council, although it never materialized. Because the release of the film was delayed in Washington (where the army had to approve it for release, as a condition of using real troops in the film), there have been rumors for many years that the film was suppressed, perhaps because the massacre at Wounded Knee was too “realistic” to reflect well on the army, or perhaps because authorities in the Office of Indian Affairs disapproved of the final product.
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For all these rumors, it is unlikely the film offended a public once again fond of their army, as World War I raged in Europe. Wounded Knee stands as a black mark on American history, and the dark reputation of the event kept Cody from staging its reenactment during his Wild West show years. But the film evaded this problem by eliminating the massacre altogether, showing no women and children among the bodies in the ravine.

In fact, evidence suggests the film failed for other reasons which are both more conventional and more revealing. In order to secure permission to hire Indians, Cody promised that his film would also illustrate “the advance of the Indians under modern conditions.”
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So, with the battle scenes over, the audience watched clips of Indians in school and performing standard farm and business tasks. The Wild West show had never ended with such an anticlimax (which was, of course, why Indian office functionaries so disliked it). The western was still young, but it was already a popular genre, and
The
Indian Wars
was no western. Audiences were less than thrilled by the story's prosaic culmination. The authentic, primitive racial energies that spectators usually identified in Indians were erased in a denouement where the Indians became much like people in the audience. Watching Indians resist vanishing was exciting. Watching them after they had symbolically vanished was dull. Cody had turned his narrative over to the Office of Indian Affairs, and their achievement was to bore the public with a didactic lesson in Indian assimilation.