Louis S. Warren (97 page)

53. Custer, in Dippie,
Nomad,
34; see also Coffman,
Old Army,
330, 334. For the Irish in Custer's Seventh in 1876, see Utley,
Cavalier in Buckskin,
168.

54. I am indebted to recent scholarship on whiteness and race for these insights and much of the discussion that follows. See Matthew Frye Jacobson,
Whiteness of a Different Color:
European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Noel Ignatiev,
How the Irish Became White
(New York: Routledge, 1995); David R. Roediger,
The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
(New York: Verso, 1991), and
Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and
Working Class History
(New York: Verso, 1994); Alexander Saxton,
The Rise and Fall of the
White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century America
(New York: Verso, 1990).

55. Jacobson,
Whiteness of a Different Color,
53–55. Germans' ethnic political organization also was a factor in leading some anxious Americans to denounce them for taking opportunities from “white” men. Jacobson,
Whiteness of a Different Color,
47.

56. Connell,
Son of the Morning Star,
86.

57. Ignatiev,
How the Irish Became White,
34–61.

58. Arthur Comte de Gobineau,
The Inequality of Human Races
(1855), quoted in Jacobson,
Whiteness of a Different Color,
44.

59. Jacobson,
Whiteness of a Different Color;
Ignatiev,
How the Irish Became White;
and Roediger,
Wages of Whiteness.

60. Coffman,
Old Army,
332; quote from Utley,
Cavalier in Buckskin,
120.

61. Armes,
Ups and Downs of an Army Officer,
288.

62. Armes,
Ups and Downs of an Army Officer,
247.

63. Cody,
Life of Buffalo Bill,
158–60, 209.

64. WFC testimony, March 23, 1904, p. 2.

65. Jacobson,
Whiteness of a Di ferent Color,
47.

66. Knight,
Life and Manners in the Frontier Army,
223–30. Frontier communities were almost as racially complex as the army. In 1865, more than 14,000 German, Irish, French, and English settlers lived in Kansas. Leavenworth was almost one-third German and Irish, and emigrants from both countries settled in considerable numbers along railroad routes. Over the next decade, they were joined by Russian, Austrian, German, Swedish, and Hungarian emigrants, so that between 15 and 20 percent of the frontier population was so ethnically distinctive as to appear “foreign” to native-born observers. Shortridge,
Peopling the Plains,
30–33, 92–94.

67. Colin G. Calloway, “Army Allies or Tribal Survival?,” in
Legacy: New Perspectives on the
Battle of Little Big Horn,
ed. Charles E. Rankin (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1996), 63–81. Fairfax Downey and Jacques Noel Jacobsen Jr.,
The Red/Bluecoats
(Fort Collins, CO: Old Army Press, 1973), 193–94; Thomas W. Dunlay, Wolves for the
Blue Soldiers: Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army,
1860–1890
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982).

68. “The Indians—Col. Wyncoop's Letter Resigning His Agency,”
New York Times,
Dec. 19, 1868, p. 3.

69. For frontier race degeneracy, see Conevery Bolton Valencius,
The Health of the Country,
250; Stephen P. Knadler, “Francis Parkman's Ethnography of the Brahmin Caste and the History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac,”
American Literature
65, no. 2 (June 1993): 215–38, esp. 225. Even Francis Parkman's mixed-blood trapper and guide, Henri Chatillon, was without “the restless energy of the Anglo-American.” Francis Parkman,
The Oregon Trail
(1847; rprt. New York: Doubleday & Co., 1946), 11. Seminole men, of black, Indian, and white ancestry, frequently scouted for the all-black Ninth and Tenth cavalries (whom Cody also guided). Downey and Jacobsen,
Red/Bluecoats,
193–94.

70. “Mulatto,”
Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary
1:1872.

71. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race, 18.

72. Richard Burton,
The City of the Saints and Across the Rocky Mountains to California
(1861; rprt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 89–90. Francis Parkman referred to mixed-bloods as “a mongrel race,” in a few of whom “might be seen the black snaky eye of the Indian half-breed.” Parkman,
Oregon Trail,
61.

73. Anxieties about frontier race mixing were prevalent long before Cody was born, but the abolition of slavery heightened them to a fever pitch after the Civil War. Warnings that the end of slavery would begin a slide into interracial sex and the birth of a mixed-race America gave rise to the term “miscegenation,” which was coined only in 1864, replacing the older term “amalgamation,” and reflecting the increasing emphasis on race mixing as the “miscasting” or “misbegetting” of people. The word derived from the Latin for “mixed race” but had deep resonances with “miscast,” or “misbegotten.” “Miscegenation,”
Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary,
1809. See also Gary B. Nash, “The Hidden History of Mestizo America,”
Journal of American History
82, no. 3 (Dec. 1995): 943.

74. Smith,
Virgin Land,
177.

75. Rosa,
West of Wild Bill Hickok,
101.

76. “Unfit amalgamation” is from Joseph G. McCoy,
Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the
West and Southwest
(1874; rprt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 80. Others who used Mexicans as warnings about frontier race decay include Richard Henry Dana,
Two Years Before the Mast
(1841; rprt. New York: Airmont Publishing Co., 1965), 136–37; Bancroft,
California Pastoral,
263–65, 284.

77. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 347, quoted in Joe DeBarthe, The Life and Adventures of
Frank Grouard
(1894; rprt. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958), 88.

78. West,
Contested Plains,
330; David Fritjof Halaas and Andrew E. Masich,
Halfbreed: The
Remarkable True Story of George Bent
(Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2004), 246–47; Stanley,
My Early Travels and Adventures,
180.

79. Halaas and Masich,
Halfbreed,
221–22.

80. Randolph B. Marcy,
The Prairie Traveler
(1859; rprt. Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, n.d.), 173. Custer believed that Indians were superior to even the best white frontiersman when it came to trailing, which was “peculiarly and undeniably an Indian accomplishment.” George A. Custer, “On the Plains,” Nov. 11, 1867, in
Turf, Farm and Field,
Nov. 23, 1867, in Dippie,
Nomad,
28, 31.

81. Slotkin,
Regeneration Through Violence,
289, also 95–98, 114–16; Colin G. Calloway, “Neither White nor Red: White Renegades on the American Indian Frontier,”
Western
Historical Quarterly
17, no. 1 (Jan. 1986): 43–66; for an example of how the Boone/Girty, white Indian/renegade confrontation shaped American literature, see Robert Montgomery Bird,
Nick of the Woods, or the Jibbenainosay
(Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and Blanchard, 1837). From the days of the Puritans, whites abducted by Indians showed a disturbing enthusiasm for Indian life, many of them refusing to return to white society even after they were free to do so. Indian captivity “cannot be, therefore, so bad as we generally conceive it to be,” wrote Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in 1782. “There must be in their social bond something singularly captivating, and far superior to anything boasted of among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians.” J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782; rprt. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957), 209. Literature on Indian captivity is gigantic. See Roy Harvey Pearce, “The Significance of the Captivity Narrative,”
American Literature
19 (March 1947): 1–20; James Axtell, “The White Indians of Colonial America,”
William and Mary Quarterly
32 (Jan. 1975): 55–88; Slotkin,
Regeneration Through Violence,
esp. 116–45; James Axtell,
The InvasionWithin: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); June Namias,
White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on American Frontiers
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); John Demos,
The Unredeemed
Captive: A Family Story from Early America
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).

82. Herman Melville,
Moby-Dick or, The Whale
(1851; rprt. New York: Penguin, 1992), 295.

83. When Cheyenne warriors shouted insults “in plain English” in 1867, they raised suspicions among the Tenth Cavalry's commanders that “many of our own race were with the enemy,” whose successes on the battlefield could be attributed to their being led by “the basest of white men, well drilled in war.” Armes,
Ups and Downs of an Army Offices,
249, 252. See also Theodore R. Davis, “A Summer on the Plains,”
Harper's New Monthly Mag
azine
36 (Feb. 1868): 305–6; Stanley,
My Early Travels and Adventures,
161.

84. For Carr's views on Hickok, see Rosa,
The West of Wild Bill Hickok,
101. There is no biography of Frank North, but see George Bird Grinnell,
Two Great Scouts and Their Pawnee
Battalion
(1928; rprt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973); Robert Bruce,
The
Fighting Norths and Pawnee Scouts
(Lincoln, NE: n.p., 1932); Luther North,
Man of the
Plains: Recollections of Luther North,
1856–1882,
ed. Donald F. Danker (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961); Frank North, “The Journal of an Indian Fighter: The 1869 Diary of Frank J. North,” ed. Donald F. Danker,
Nebraska History
39, no. 2 (June 1958): 87–178.

85. The story is almost certainly apocryphal, coming as it does from Nate Salsbury, in a particularly bitter memoir written around 1902. See “The Origin of the Wild West Show,” NSP, YCAL MSS 17, Box 1/63, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT; Walsh and Salsbury,
Making of Buffalo Bill,
155–56.

86. James T. King,
War Eagle: A Life of General Eugene A. Carr
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), 276, n. 40; E. A. Carr, “The Combat on Beaver Creek,”
Pearson's
Magazine
(Aug. 1904): 188.

87. Davis, “Summer on the Plains,” 303.

88. DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 88, n. 4; Smith, View from Officers' Row, 40, 83. Also Hutton,
Phil Sheridan and His Army,
36.

89. Richard I. Dodge, Plains of the Great West (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1877), 429.

90. North,
Man of the Plains,
121.

91. Finerty,
War-Path and Bivouac,
247. Cody, of course, implied that he figured this out on his own, after riding “ahead of the command about ten miles,” where he saw a “body of men” marching toward him, “that I at first believed to be the Indians of whom we were in pursuit.” Cody,
Life of Buffalo Bill,
350.

92. Carr, “Memoirs,” 30–31; George F. Price,
Across the Continent with the Fifth Cavalry
(1883; rprt. New York: Antiquarian Press, 1959), 133; Russell,
Lives and Legends,
110.

93. Cody,
Life of Buffalo Bill,
227.

94. “Mongrels” is in Rosa,
West of Wild Bill Hickok,
101.

95. Russell,
Lives and Legends,
114; Luke Cahill, “An Indian Campaign and Buffalo Hunting with ‘Buffalo Bill,' ”
Colorado Magazine,
4, no. 4 (Aug. 1927): 125–35.

96. Cody,
Life of Buffalo Bill,
226–37; Rosa and May,
Buffalo Bill and His Wild West,
28.

97. WFC testimony, March 23, 1904.

98. H. C. Bonnycastle to Chief, Personnel Division, OQMC, March 20, 1924, in William F. Cody, 201 File, RG 407, NARA, Washington, DC; Russell,
Lives and Legends,
115.

99. Keim,
Sheridan's Troopers on the Border,
150.

100. Utley and Washburn,
Indian Wars,
258; Hutton,
Phil Sheridan and His Army,
110.

101. Bvt. Maj. Gen. E. A. Carr to Bvt. Brig. Gen. Geo. D. Ruggles, May 22, 1869, and Adj. Gen. E. D. Townsend to Bvt. Maj. Gen. C. C. Augur, June 11, 1869, both in RG 533, U.S. Army Continental Command, Dept. of the Platte, Letters Recd. 1867–69, Microfilm Reel 7, NSHS; Russell,
Lives and Legends,
122–24; King,
War Eagle,
99; Rosa and May,
Buffalo Bill and His Wild West,
29–30.

102. The events leading up to the campaign may be found in James T. King, “The Republican River Expedition, June–July 1869,” pt. I, “On the March,”
Nebraska History
41, no. 3 (Sept. 1960): 165–200, esp. 165–70; pt. II, “The Battle of Summit Springs,”
Nebraska
History
41, no. 4 (Dec. 1960): 281–99.

103. King, “Republican River Expedition,” 170–75.

104. Cody's grocery wagon has been a bone of contention for biographers. Don Russell, believing crass mercantilism below the dignity of a hero-scout, argued that Cody never had such a wagon, and that it was the product of the jealousy of Luther North, whose resentment of Cody's fame had grown to “a positive hatred” by the 1920s. Russell,
Lives
and Legends,
132, 151. But Luther North mentioned the wagon only once, in an account generally complimentary to Cody, though it was incorrect about Cody's role in the battle of Summit Springs. North,
Man of the Plains,
103. The vital evidence for Cody's grocery wagon comes from his divorce trial, a quarter century before North wrote his memoirs. Eric Ericson explained the wagon and its business origins, in Eric Ericson testimony, Feb. 9, 1905, Folder 8, 21–30; May Cody, who lived with William and Louisa Cody in 1871, says that her brother had the title of “Field Settler Station” (possibly “field sutler”), as which “he furnished goods to the [a]rmy when they were out in the field. . . .” May Cody Bradford Testimony, Feb. 16–20, 1905, File 7–1, 117; William Cody himself claimed, “I had the concession from the commanding officer as a settler [sutler]” for troops in the field, “and I was at the time making a good deal of money out of my sutler store.” WFC testimony, March 5, 1905, Folder 13, 14–15, all in CC.