Louis S. Warren (92 page)

But the twentieth century was not kind to the story of progress. The trenches of World War I brimmed with blood, and the holocausts of World War II and the nuclear anxieties that followed made it hard to believe that technology was an unimpeachable wonder and moral boon. The dream of Buffalo Bill's America, a frontier nation launched from Nature into the bright future of the Machine, suddenly seemed quaint and naive.

And yet, there remained one way in which Buffalo Bill's Wild West show would find enduring resonance, down to the present day. Americans have relegated Indian fighting to that dark space reserved for troubled memories and moral qualms, as they should. (And Cody himself seems to have felt the same way about it, at some points in his latter years even denying he ever killed Yellow Hair. “Bunk! Pure bunk! For all I know Yellow Hand died of old age.”
⁷⁰
)

But while the Wild West show was created to tell a story of the Indian wars, its show community itself has long since become Buffalo Bill's myth, a symbolically inclusive congregation that seems to define some bright and optimistic moment in our collective past. If it was a traveling company town, a corporate workforce on the road that subsumed polyglot America under the ruling management of white men, there was a sense among its cast that they were part of something more. The many adventures of its optimistic and forward-looking cowboys, Indians, cowgirls, gauchos, vaqueros, and others stand out as something so surprising, so energetic and benign, that Americans and the world cannot help but find in them some resonance of a modern American promise.

In 1971, the entertainer Montie Montana, Jr., resurrected Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, vowing to imbue “the small fry with the spirit of the Old West as their Grandparents knew it.” When the show played Los Angeles, Harry Webb, a cowboy who had ridden in Buffalo Bill's Wild West from 1909 to 1911, was seated in the stands. Webb was astonished at the “fine replica” Montana had assembled. “With a lump the size of an egg in our throat we dug a fist in our eyes and listened to the exact salutation we had heard hundreds of times as Buffalo Bill addressed his audience and introduced his Congress of Rough Riders of the World.” Webb laughed and cheered with the sports arena crowd at the bronc riding, the Indian attack on the Deadwood stage, the saloon fight of the cowboys, the wooing of an Indian maiden by her warrior lover, and the trick roping and bullwhip acts.

But as much as Webb wished the new show would succeed, he could not help noticing the absences and gaps in this reenactment of a reenactment.

No longer are there great spreads of canvas, [a] football-[field] sized arena, horse tent housing hundreds of arena and baggage stock and the half acre dining tent. Also, the huge ranges and steam boilers (that poured forth the aroma of breakfasts even before being trundled off a fifty car train . . .) were missing. Nor is there the chant of stake drivers as a circle of sledge hammers sunk hundreds of tent stakes in the earth. The old ballyhoo around concessions and the shouts of venders are also missing with this new Buffalo Bill Show. Nor will its Indians have their Sunday feasts of dog-stew on the show lot as of old. These scenes are gone forever.
⁷¹

As a community that developed a history of its own, the Wild West camp has long since become the larger and more enduring of Cody's legacies. Even the continuing success of Cody, Wyoming, now home to eight thousand people and the remarkable Buffalo Bill Historical Center (which houses five state-of-the-art museums), cannot compare to the continuing fame of William Cody's traveling company town. In the decades since Cody's death, that “little tented city” has continued to fascinate the public long after Buffalo Bill's Indian war exploits and the scalping of Yellow Hair faded into obscurity.

As we have seen, William Cody remains a respected figure among Lakota people, some of whom remember him as a good employer who provided opportunities which did not long outlive him. Pine Ridge remains one of America's poorest communities. Although movies hired genuine Indian actors in the early days of Hollywood, film producers soon discovered that it was easier and cheaper to hire non-Indians to play Indian roles.
⁷²
Since then, Indian actors have waged a long and not unsuccessful struggle to win back their place in Indian performance. In doing so, they carry on the fight of Lakotas like Standing Bear, No Neck, Black Heart, and Calls the Name, who allied with Cody to fend off the Indian Service in the 1880s and '90s.

As much as I have been able to explore the participation of Indians and cowboys and cowgirls in this show, I have attempted to open up what I see as the often unnoticed power of commodified performance—show business— as a means to adopt and adapt otherwise pernicious myths. Indians, immigrants, first-generation Americans, and native-born whites all flocked to Cody's show camp, each with a powerful economic and social rationale for doing so. Although the Wild West show's ideology was oppressive in its cultural messages of womanly domesticity and Indian subjugation, we have seen over and over again how performing it brought liberation, or something like it, to Standing Bear, Adele Von Ohl Parker, George Johnson, Annie Oakley, Broncho Charlie Miller, and a host of others.

The willingness of so many diverse peoples to attach themselves to Cody's show validates his early recognition that frontier myth had about it much ambiguity, the necessary precondition for its mass appeal. Cody himself abhorred personal conflict and partisan fights. He found in politically vague frontier symbols a means to avoid the fierce political contests of his day. In recent decades, conservatives have appropriated western symbols for their political ends. In 1986, Wyoming's congressional delegation joined a campaign to have Cody's Congressional Medal of Honor restored to him, something that they achieved in 1989. A primary player in the effort was a taciturn Republican congressman named Dick Cheney, a fact which speaks volumes about the rightward tilt of the Cody legacy in recent years.

Yet during Cody's life, the western myth was the province of no party. As we have seen, conservatives, reformers, and radicals alike found reasons to embrace his show. Buffalo Bill's Wild West was aimed at the broad middle class in ways that allowed audiences to enjoy the amusement without taking sides on the contentious issues it called to mind. By being a show about history, in an age when Americans believed their history followed a course that was largely predetermined, the sense of inevitability allowed them to remain ambivalent about American cruelties, and to celebrate American success, without any consternation about their confidence in the nation, or lack of it.

The amusement both appealed to the mass public and helped to cement it
as
a public, and in so doing, helped create modern America as a functioning political whole. But the costs of this imposture to William Cody himself were considerable. If embodying the frontier myth gave him a continuing hold on America's imagination, it made him peculiarly vulnerable to its narrative constraints as his life continued. Perhaps if he had been merely another businessman or a vaudeville star, his divorce case would have collapsed anyway. But to be a frontiersman and a showman at the same time was to walk a border between dark and light, a kind of lifelong high-wire act that in some sense kept the public on edge. To attack the domestic hearth at the center of the ideology of civilization was to change sides in the war on savagery, to court public condemnation. These were risks he intuited but only half understood. As we have seen, from the army officers who warily appraised their guides in the Indian wars, to Cody's personal acquaintances and partners such as Bram Stoker, Nate Salsbury, and Louisa Frederici Cody, the scout projected a continuing tension between hero and renegade, the figure who ventured over the frontier line to do battle with the darkness, and returned either unstained by it and heroic, or secretly corrupted and malevolent.

The implications of this argument are many, but one important lesson to be drawn, I think, concerns the widespread popular ambivalence about the frontier in the late nineteenth century. For many years now, historians have explained frontier myth, and especially William Cody's brand of it, as an unswervingly triumphalist story. We live in an anxious age, and it would be foolish to assert that the nineteenth century was not more confident than our own in many respects. But if there is one thing William Cody's biography teaches us, it is that the nineteenth century was characterized by doubts about frontier conquest, racial degeneracy, the industrial order, and the failure of the western farm landscape to generate the wealth and security that the story of progress had promised. To construe frontier expansion as a moment of supreme confidence untarnished by reflection or hesitation is to ignore all the dark fears that underlay it.

William Cody could be as defensive and egotistical as any celebrity, but at his apogee he embodied the westward-moving, industrially modern American, who was both optimistic and ambivalent. To be sure, his cheeriness was palpable. He believed fervently in capitalism as his best bet for making lots of money (a bet he seemed to lose consistently). But his simultaneous devotion to Indian friends whose relatives he fought on the Plains, to industrial might and middle-class smallholders, to rural virtue and the ribald world of stage and arena, all suggest his lifelong straddling act, a remarkable unwillingness to choose sides and a talent for creating dramatic spectacle that made it possible for him to avoid doing so.

In so many ways, the show about the triumphant fixity of the settler was Cody's way of calling attention to himself and avoiding the need to settle in one place. Like western film, which allowed generations to believe a frontier promise long after the frontier closed, Buffalo Bill's Wild West generated such powerful mythic images that one could be forgiven for thinking they were real. Cody did not believe all the lies he told, but he did believe in the West as a region that foretold America's bright future. No matter the dismal failures of his town canal systems, the bankruptcy of his mines, the expense of his ranches. The show became his most powerful token of the real West. Much more than a means of telling his story, it became the story. So long as it went on, not only did his life continue, but the story of the West continued, and the drama of onward, upward achievement continued with it.

One author recounts that when Cody's doctor told the showman he had thirty-six hours to live, Cody turned to his brother-in-law, Lew Decker, with a deck of cards, and shrugged off the news. “Let's forget about it and play High Five.”
⁷³

But his nephew, William Cody Bradford, suggests a less sure-footed ending, and one more telling. The doctors had done all they could, and Cody lay dying at his sister May's house in Denver. Johnny Baker was away in the East, looking for money for the next season's show. As if to announce one last time the seamless weave of his life and his show, and his determination to make the story of the West continue, during his last three days, as uremic poisoning sapped his vitality, he returned in his mind to his private railroad car, and imagined he was once more headed to a showground just down the road:

He would send for John Baker and lay down on the bed just as he did in his car and he would have his chair at the head of his bed. He would imagine that he was on the road with his show. He would ask me where we were and what time it was when we got in. He would lay in bed and smoke and read the paper. In fact he lived his life over again. He done just as he did when he was on the road with the show.
⁷⁴

NOTES

ABBREVIATIONS

AHC American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming

BBDC Buffalo Bill and Dr. Carver Wild West, Rocky Mountain, and Prairie Exhibition Program 1883 (Hartford, Connecticut: Calhoun Printing)

BBHC McCracken Library, Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming

BBM Buffalo Bill Museum, Golden, Colorado

BBWW Buffalo Bill's Wild West

CC
Cody v. Cody,
Civil Case 970, Sheridan County District Court, Wyoming State Archives, Cheyenne, Wyoming

CHS Colorado Historical Society

DPL Denver Public Library, Denver, Colorado

DPL-WHR Denver Public Library, Western History Room, Denver, Colorado

GAPR General Administrative Project of the Bureau of Reclamation, NARA-RMR, Denver, Colorado

JCG Julia Cody Goodman

JCGM Julia Cody Goodman memoirs

KSHS Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka, Kansas

NARA National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

NARA-CPR National Archives and Records Administration, Central Plains Region, Kansas City, Missouri

NARA-RMR National Archives and Records Administration, Rocky Mountain Region, Denver, Colorado

NSHS Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln, Nebraska

NSP Nate Salsbury Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature (YCAL), Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

NSS Nate Salsbury Scrapbooks, W. F. Cody Collection, Western History Collection, Denver Public Library, Denver, Colorado

WFC William F. Cody

WFC testimony William F. Cody's testimony in
Cody v. Cody,
Civil Case File 970, Folder 2, Wyoming State Archives, Cheyenne, Wyoming

WSA Wyoming State Archives, Cheyenne, Wyoming

YCAL Yale Collection of American Literature, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

INTRODUCTION

1. Richard J. Walsh and Milton S. Salsbury, The Making of Bu falo Bill: A Study in Heroics (1928; rprt. Kissimmee, FL: International Cody Family Association, 1978), 352.

2.
E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems,
1904–1962,
ed. George J. Firmage (New York: Liveright, 1991), 90.

3. Don Russell,
The Lives and Legends of Bu falo Bill
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960). The primary debunkers were Richard J. Walsh and Milton S. Salsbury, The
Making of Bu falo Bill;
and Henry Nash Smith,
Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol
and Myth
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), 103–11.

4. Other biographies, or biographical treatments: Rupert Croft-Cooke and W. S. Meadmore,
Bu falo Bill: The Legend, the Man of Action, the Showman
(London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1952); Henry Blackman Sell and Victor Weybright,
Bu falo Bill and the Wild
West
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1955); Nellie Snyder Yost,
Bu falo Bill: His
Family, Fame, Fortunes, Failures, and Friends
(Chicago: Swallow Press, 1979); Joseph G. Rosa and Robin May,
Bu falo Bill and His Wild West: A Pictorial Biography
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989), while not comprehensive, offer some useful correctives.

5. Correcting the excesses and dishonesties of myth is a major project of the New Western History, but of earlier scholars, too. Any list of the most helpful recent works would include: William Cronon, Jay Gitlin, George Miles, eds.,
Under an Open Sky: Rethinking
America's Western Past
(New York: Norton, 1992); Patricia Nelson Limerick,
The Legacy
of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West
(New York: Norton, 1985); Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner, and Charles E. Rankin, eds.,
Trails: Toward a New
Western History
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991); Richard White,
“It's Your
Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West
(Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1991); Don Worster,
Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the
1930s
(New York: Oxford, 1982). Predecessors who blazed this trail are also numerous, but include among the most prominent Howard Roberts Lamar,
Dakota Territory,
1861–1889:
A
Study of Frontier Politics
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), and Henry Nash Smith,
Virgin Land: The American West in Symbol and Myth
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950).

6. Among the most prominent: Philip J. Deloria,
Indians in Unexpected Places
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 52–108; Peter H. Hassrick, Richard Slotkin, Vine Deloria, Jr., Howard R. Lamar, William Judson, and Leslie A. Fiedler,
Bu falo Bill and the
Wild West (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 1984); Joy S. Kasson, Bu falo Bill's Wild
West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History
(New York: Hill & Wang, 2000); Paul Reddin,
Wild West Shows
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Richard Slotkin,
GunfighterNation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America
(New York: Atheneum, 1992), 63–87; Jane Tompkins,
West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Richard White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,” in
The Frontier in American Culture,
ed. James Grossman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 7–65.

7. For example, see William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78 (March 1992): 1347–79; Alan S. Taylor, William Cooper's
Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995); David Carr,
Time, Narrative, and History
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Ann Fabian,
The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-CenturyAmerica
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

8. The “progress of civilization” was a common refrain after the Civil War, evoking the triumph of modern, white America—with all its agrarianism, industrialism, literacy, law, Christianity, democracy, capitalism, and the family home—over the dark forces of barbarism and savagery. See Gail Bederman,
Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of
Gender and Race in the United States,
1880–1917
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 23–44; Raymond Williams,
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society,
rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 57–60; Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard,
The American Spirit: A Study of the Idea of Civilization in the United States
(New York: Macmillan, 1942), 62–97.

9. L. G. Moses, Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 1883–1933 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996).

10. See, for example, John Mack Faragher,
Daniel Boone
(New York: Henry Holt, 1994); Taylor,
William Cooper's Town;
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich,
A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha
Ballard, Based on Her Diary,
1785–1812
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990).

CHAPTER ONE : PONY EXPRESS

1. BBWW 1893 Program (Chicago: Blakely Printing, 1893), 2.

2.
The Free Press
[Ontario, CA], Sept. 2, 1885, in Nate Salsbury Scrapbook (hereafter NSS), vol. 1, 1885–86, W. F. Cody Collection, WH 72, Western History Collection, DPL.

3. BBWW 1893 Program, 7.

4. William F. Cody,
The Life of the Hon. William F. Cody Known as Bu falo Bill the Famous
Hunter, Scout and Guide
(1879; rprt. New York: Indian Head Books, 1991), 57–124. Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
91.

5. Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
91–92.

6. Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
93–102.

7. Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
104.

8. Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
108.

9. “Buffalo Bill,”
New York Herald,
July 21, 1879, 2.

10. The best discussion of the Pony Express in history and legend is Christopher Corbett,
Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express
(New York: Broadway Books, 2003). Other literature on the subject is vast, but much of it is antiquarian. The first history of the Pony Express was Frank A. Root and William Elsey Connelley,
The Overland Stage to California
(1901; rprt. Columbus, OH: Long's College Book Co., 1950); followed soon after by William Lightfoot Visscher,
A Thrilling and Truthful
History of the Pony Express, or Blazing the Westward Way
(1908; rprt. Chicago: Charles T. Powner, 1946), and Glenn D. Bradley, The Story of the Pony Express (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1913), reprinted in
The Story of the Pony Express,
ed. Waddell F. Smith, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Hesperia House, 1960), 27–146. See also Le Roy R. Hafen,
The Overland
Mail,
1849–1869:
Promoter of Settlement, Precursor of Railroads
(Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1926); Arthur Chapman,
The Pony Express: The Record of a Romantic Adventure in
Business (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1932); J. V. Frederick, Ben Holladay: The Stagecoach King (1940; rprt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989); Roy S. Bloss, Pony
Express—The Great Gamble
(Berkeley, CA: Howell-North, 1959); Robert West Howard, Roy E. Coy, Frank C. Robertson, and Agnes Wright Spring, Hoofbeats of Destiny: The Story of the Pony Express (New York: Signet Books, 1960); Raymond W. Settle and Mary Lund Settle,
Saddles and Spurs: The Pony Express Saga
(Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1955); M. C. Nathan and W. S. Boggs, The Pony Express (New York: The Collector's Club, 1962); Fred Reinfeld,
Pony Express
(1966; rprt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973); W. Turrentine Jackson, “A New Look at Wells Fargo, Stagecoaches, and the Pony Express,”
California Historical Society Quarterly
(Dec. 1966): 291–324; Carl H. Scheele,
A Short History of the Mail Service
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1970), esp. 83–86.

11. Visscher,
Thrilling and Truthful History;
Corbett,
Orphans Preferred,
173–99. For an example of the passage of Cody's pony tales from show to history, see Bradley,
Story of the
Pony Express,
127. Bradley lifted his discussion of Cody's exploits almost verbatim from Root and Connelley,
Overland Stage to California,
129–30. Root and Connelley, in turn, lifted their account almost entirely from Cody himself. Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
97, 103–7.

12. The closest, most critical analysis is John S. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction in the Kansas Boyhood of Buffalo Bill,”
Kansas History
8 (Spring 1985): 2–20, esp. 17–19. For contemporary critics, see Luther North,
Man of the Plains: Recollections of Luther North,
1856–1882,
ed. Donald F. Danker (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 23; Herbert Cody Blake,
Blake's Western Stories: History and Busted Romances of the Old Frontier
(Brooklyn, NY: Herbert Cody Blake, 1929).

13. Russell, Lives and Legends, 44–54; Sandra K. Sagala, Bu falo Bill, Actor: A Chronicle of
Cody's Theatrical Career
(Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 2002), 19–21, 110.

14. Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill;
Don Russell, ed., “Julia Cody Goodman's Memoirs of Buffalo Bill,”
Kansas Historical Quarterly
28, no. 4 (Winter 1962) (hereafter JCGM): 442–96.

15. Russell,
Lives and Legends,
272–73. Don Russell and Albert Johannsen make a compelling case that Cody authored several dime novels. See Russell,
Lives and Legends,
265–73; Albert Johannsen,
The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels: The Story
of a Vanished Literature,
3 vols. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), 2:59–61. I am not persuaded by the evidence for Cody's authorship of dime novels. Unlike the 1879 autobiography, the Buffalo Bill dime novels I have been able to examine are characterized by flowery, ornate prose nothing like Cody's letters. Johannsen reproduces a Cody letter in which the showman mentions having contributed to the dime novels of a prominent publisher. I suspect Cody was either joking, or referring to the fact that his persona helped boost sales, or both.

16. JCGM, 448; Russell,
Lives and Legends,
4–10.

17. Russell,
Lives and Legends,
7.

18. JCGM, 453; Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
21.

19. JCGM, 457, 461; A. T. Andreas and W. G. Cutler, History of the State of Kansas (1883; rprt. Atchison, KS: Atchison Historical Society, 1976), 505, 508.

20. Settlement figures are from Stephen A. Flanders,
Atlas of American Migration
(New York: Facts on File, 1998), 94.

21. D. Jerome Tweton, “Claim Association,” in
New Encyclopedia of the American West,
ed. Howard R. Lamar (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 219; Everett Dick,
The Sod-House Frontier,
1854–1890
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1937), 21–29; Richard White,
“It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own,”
141; Allan G. Bogue, “The Iowa Claim Clubs: Symbol and Substance,” in
The Public Lands: Studies in the History of
the Public Domain,
ed. Vernon Carstensen (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963), 47–69.

22. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 4; Louise Barry,
The Beginning of the West: Annals of the
Kansas Gateway to the American West,
1540–1854
(Topeka: Kansas State Historical Society, 1972), 1266.

23. JCGM, 458; Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
38; the Fourth of July meeting was announced as a territorial convention. See Martha B. Caldwell, ed., “Records of the Squatter Association of Whitehead District, Doniphan County,”
Kansas Historical Quarterly
13 (Feb. 1944): 23, n. 33.