Louis S. Warren Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  INTRODUCTION

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE - Pony Express

  CHAPTER TWO - The Attack on the Settler’s Cabin

  CHAPTER THREE - The Village … The Cyclone

  CHAPTER FOUR - With the Prince of Pistoleers

  CHAPTER FIVE - Guide and Scout

  INDIANS SOLDIERS AND SCOUTS

  THE ARMY’S DREARY WAR

  SCOUT HERO OF’ 69

  FRONTIER THEATRICS

  CHAPTER SIX - Buffalo Hunt

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER SEVEN - Theater Star

  ORIGINAL/COPY

  LIVING THE STORY

  MIDDLE-CLASS SYMBOL, WORKING-CLASS HERO

  CHAPTER EIGHT - Indians, Horses

  CHAPTER NINE - Domesticating the Wild West

  HOMEWARD BOUND: SALSBURY, OAKLEY, AND THE RESPECTABLE WILD WEST

  CHAPTER TEN - The Drama of Civilization: Visual Play and Moral Ambiguity

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - Wild West London

  Broncho Charlie Miller

  CHAPTER TWELVE - Wild West Europe

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Ghost Dance

  Standing Bear

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Cowboys, Indians, and the Artful Deceptions of Race

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Buffalo Bill’s America

  The Johnson Brothers

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Empire of the Home

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Showdown in Cheyenne

  Adele Von Ohl Parker

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - End of the Trail

  NOTES

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ALSO BY LOUIS S. WARREN

  Copyright Page

  Once more, for Spring

  Acclaim for Louis S. Warren’s BUFFALO BILL’S AMERICA

  “The first comprehensive biography in more than forty years… .Warren’s masterful account seems destined to become a revered work of essential Western history.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “Meticulously researched, [Buffalo Bill’s America] investigates every aspect of the life of one of the best-known and most popular folk heroes of his age… . An impressive achievement.” —Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

  “Engrossing and thoroughly enjoyable.” —Booklist

  “In Buffalo Bill’s America we watch as our national dream evolves, as our nation sets about becoming what it is.” —William Kittredge, author of The Nature of Generosity

  “A masterful work, Buffalo Bill’s America is the key to understanding Cody’s fame and fortune.” —True West Magazine

  “[A] sweeping saga of an emblematic American life, a biography of one of our first celebrities.” —Las Vegas Weekly

  “Entertaining… . Meticulously researched.” — The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Warrants a top spot … among the many works dedicated to Cody and the cultural symbolism of the Wild West Show… . [The book] does a service not only to the Buffalo Bill story, but also to the saga of the American expansion as a whole.” —The Anniston Star

  “Probably the most insightful, expansive and intelligent book yet written about the West.” —Santa Fe New Mexican

  “The truth about American history’s most accomplished mythmaker turns out to be stranger than his many fictions.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Engrossing… . A brisk narrative as lively and rip-snorting as any Buffalo Bill spectacular… . This book’s considerable achievement lies in its judicious sifting of fact and fiction. All the while, it enlightens and entertains.” —The Plain Dealer

  “Nobody with any interest in the flamboyant showman will want to miss Warren’s impressive offering.” —Wild West Magazine

  “One of the most comprehensive, satisfying biographies ever written tracing the life and career of this rather complex American icon. Meticulously researched and crisply written.” —Tucson Citizen

  INTRODUCTION

  He was the most famous American of his age, when practically everyone knew his story: a child of the frontier, he grew up by turns Pony Express rider, prospector, trapper, Civil War soldier, professional buffalo hunter, Indian fighter, and cavalry scout. For all his western upbringing, his greatest success would take him far from the Plains. At twenty-three he was a dime novel hero; at twenty-six he was starring as himself in New York theatrical dramas about his life. An early pioneer of the frontier melodrama, he spent over a decade on the stage before he invented the Wild West show and took it on tour for the first time in 1883. Venturing to Europe in 1887, he and the show were a sensation, and the man who embodied the frontier became an icon along the glittering promenades of Paris, London, and Milan. By the time he was fifty-four, in 1900, he was the subject of a vast literature: fictionalized biographies by the score, dime novels, dramatic criticism, puff pieces extolling the heroism of Buffalo Bill Cody.

  His life and career straddled enormous expanses of geographic space. Born near Leclaire, Iowa, he migrated westward to Kansas, Nebraska, and then Wyoming. The western curve of his settlements described the trajectory of American expansion. Remarkably, even the dates of his birth and death bracket the ascendant arc of American power. Born in 1846, the year that the United States went to war against Mexico and became a continental nation, he died in 1917, the year his country entered World War I and took the faltering steps that would culminate in the Atlantic alliance.

  In his waning years, he was known to say that he “stood between savagery and civilization most all of my early days.”1 Ironically, if he was a guardian of white American supremacy, in his most successful years he also bridged vast cultural gulfs. Parting company with European and eastern wealth and aristocracy at the end of each show season, he would return to the West, first his ranch in North Platte, Nebraska, later the town he founded at Cody, Wyoming. He moved with consummate ease among the aristocrats who flocked to his show, the genuine cowboys, Mexicans, and Indians who populated it, and the rural white westerners who settled around the ranches where he waited out his off-season and became a benefactor to community churches and schools.

  In many ways, he seemed to hold the contradictions of a rapidly modernizing world together through the force of his personality. In a time when America represented the future of the modern world in its exploding cities and its industrial power, Buffalo Bill brought together the wild, primitive past of the American frontier—buffalo, elk, staged prairie fires, real Indians—and the astonishing promise of a technological future, in his show’s modern gunplay, its glowing electric lights and brilliantly colored publicity. He represented the coming together of old and new, nature and culture, the past and the future. He straddled the yawning chasms between worlds, and in so doing, rose to greater heights of fame than any American could have dreamed. He became the nation’s brightest star.

  More even than Charles Lindbergh or Charlie Chaplin, or other world-famous celebrities of the early twentieth century, the name of Buffalo Bill Cody still resonates in the imagination of Americans and people the world over. It is hard to overstate the impact he had on his audiences. Simply by riding into an arena on horseback he could make the crowds gasp. A seemingly simple sight—a man on a horse—became something much more: a visionary encounter, a simultaneous celebration of the past and future, even an apotheosis. Part of it was the way he rode, so much at one with the animal that the word “centaur” sprang to the lips of his admirers. Part of it was the way he offered his audiences a projection of their own fantasies. His show publicity made the most of his virtual organic connection with the horse. Where the appearance of a monster on the cultural scen
e is usually a dreadful portent, Buffalo Bill seemed to be both monstrous—half man, half horse—and wondrous. When he died, E. E. Cummings recalled the specter of this horseman as he rode fast around a ring, blasting amber balls from the air with his Winchester rifle.

  Buffalo Bill’s

  defunct

  who used to

  ride a watersmooth-silver

  stallion

  and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlike that

  Jesus

  he was a handsome man.2

  For generations of Americans and Europeans, Buffalo Bill defined the meaning of American history and American identity. From California to Maine, and from Wales to Ukraine, crowds who came to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show spoke so widely and fervently about it for years afterward that it became a defining cultural memory—or dream—of America.

  But if no American rose to greater heights than Buffalo Bill did, it seems that few have fallen further. The world’s highest-paid performer and best-loved American died almost penniless in Denver in 1917. He was celebrated through the 1960s in American film, most prominently by Joel McCrea in Buffalo Bill, and Charlton Heston in Pony Express. But thereafter his country’s memory of him became something less than golden. Where the frontier centaur was wonderful to nineteenth-century Americans, to the generation raised on Vietnam he became, like so many frontiersmen, a very different kind of monster. For many, his role in wars against American Indians and in the near extermination of the buffalo made him a figure of revulsion. In Arthur Penn’s 1970 film, Little Big Man, his character made a cameo appearance as a crass destroyer of Indian lifeway and a grasping materialist. In 1972, in Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Paul Newman portrayed him as a liar, a drunkard, a coward, and a con man. In 1991, his name was taken to much darker realms in Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs, a film in which a psychotic killer of women is dubbed “Buffalo Bill” because, as one FBI agent explains, “He skins his humps.” From demigod to vampire, culture hero to serial killer, William Cody’s career has been as strange in death as it was in life.

  But who was he? In recent decades, few scholars have pursued that question. To be sure, illustrated biographies, cultural studies of his show, and coffee-table celebrations of Buffalo Bill and his Wild West continue to roll off the presses at a gallop. But when these books veer into biography, they often take one of two approaches. Either they recount earlier writers with minor revisions, if any, or they weigh in on one side or the other of a single question: Was he a hero, or was he a charlatan? Variations on this theme— Was he a real Indian fighter, or was he a showman? Was he an honest man, or a liar?—weave through a vast Cody literature.

  In one sense, this is hardly surprising. After all, what other question can we possibly ask about Buffalo Bill Cody, who made it ever so difficult to tell where reality stopped and representation began? Never was his prowess at fusing life and art greater than in the summer of 1876, when he took leave from the stage to scout for the army. Weeks into the campaign, he learned that George Armstrong Custer and most of his command had fallen before the Sioux and Cheyenne on the banks of the Little Big Horn River. Soon thereafter, dressed in a black velvet stage costume, he swooped into a skirmish with a Cheyenne war party, killing and scalping a Cheyenne subchief named Yellow Hair, whose name was mistranslated in publicity as Yellow Hand. Within months, Cody was reenacting the episode in a play he commissioned, taking this “first scalp for Custer” before packed houses from New York to St. Louis, wearing the same stage velvet and waving the real scalp at the drama’s climax. For the rest of his life, he explained the sanguinary episode as a demonstration of his grief for the death of his personal friend, George Custer.

  That the authenticity of such a man should become a subject of historical inquiry might be a foregone conclusion. The most enduring biography of Cody, and the last attempt at a comprehensive reevaluation of his life, is Don Russell’s Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill, which appeared in 1960. Russell took up the cudgel on Cody’s behalf, beating back almost a half century of Buffalo Bill debunkers with a study that shored up the old showman as the “real thing,” a Pony Express rider, buffalo hunter, and a skilled scout and Indian fighter who never claimed a military honor he did not actually have (he did win a Congressional Medal of Honor in 1872) and who failed to claim some that were rightly his.3

  Cody’s accomplishments were impressive in many ways (that Medal of Honor was real). But as becomes clear in pages to come, we must be cautious with his Pony Express adventures, his alleged bond with the fallen Custer, and many other stories he told in his ongoing effort to evoke himself as the paragon of frontier mastery

  Still, by itself, separating truth from fiction in the Buffalo Bill myth is not enough, for Cody’s audiences often suspected that his biographical claims had an ambiguous relationship with the truth. Indeed, perhaps the most striking thing about Russell’s book and about my challenge to it, and about all the other contributions to the vigorous Buffalo Bill debate, is how much they echo arguments that were in progress during Cody’s own life. Modern writers and readers may believe themselves to be more sophisticated than Cody’s contemporaries, but, in fact, questions about whether Buffalo Bill was real or fake began to circulate with the young man’s arrival in the public eye. Rather than quash these disputes, the savvy performer often encouraged them as a means to keep the attention of his audience.4

  This aspect of Cody’s method has been elusive, partly, and paradoxically, because of the remarkably productive ways scholars of the American West have contrasted real events, or history, against popular ideas of those events, or myth. This is necessary, important work, which has provided us with insights too numerous to count, and without which our sense of the past would be deeply impoverished.5

  But grasping the artistry and the origins of Buffalo Bill requires a slightly different tack. This book explores Cody’s real achievements, but also his many fabrications, less with an air of categorizing Cody as real or fake than to understand how and why he mixed the two. Contemporary arguments over Cody’s truthfulness or heroism (or lack thereof ) mirrored much wider debates about the meaning of the Far West, and the trustworthiness of the organs of popular culture through which most Americans learned about it: newspapers, advertising, literature, painting, and theater. William Cody’s method of promoting his real achievements was to mingle them with colorful fictions, making his own life and myth almost (but not quite) indistinguishable to a public that was sometimes awestruck, sometimes skeptical, but almost invariably amused by his artistic pose as the real embodiment of public fantasy.

  I am much indebted in the following chapters to the many scholars who have probed the cultural meaning of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. 6 But for all their contributions, most cultural studies scholars venture into symbolic and cultural explorations of the show’s meaning without seriously examining the earlier frontier and theatrical occupations of its creator. One underlying assumption of such treatments is that the frontier West was divorced—or separated—from the world of popular culture and entertainments. Often, this reinforces the mistaken view that Cody was merely the creation of skilled eastern publicists, and leaves a most intriguing set of questions unanswered. How is it that a frontiersman became the world’s most popular showman? Was the West a necessary arena for developing ideas of American entertainment and popular culture? Was there some sense in which the West provided Cody the requisite context for mixing life, myth, and performance?

  How Cody adapted and reconciled life to story, and vice versa, is the central question of this book. In recent years, various scholars have examined the ways people shape their lives to fit stories they carry in their heads.7 As we shall see, Cody’s experience on the Great Plains was seminal to his realization that even his young life could be a story, lived for the amusement of a public. Incongruous as it may seem, scouting and hunting were paths to show business, and Cody’s development of a show persona reflected many of the lessons
he learned in the Indian wars and on the buffalo range. He was a genuine hunter and fighter (if not quite the hunter and fighter he said he was), but he was also an intuitive performance genius who borrowed readily from a popular theory of history, “the progress of civilization,” to turn himself into the “representative man” who had “passed through every stage” of frontier development. 8 Through this process, he became an American artist of originality and remarkable vision, on a par with contemporaries and successors such as P. T. Barnum, D. W. Griffith, Eugene O’Neill, and even Orson Welles. How he came to this, from such humble western beginnings, is a major part of the story this book tells.

  William Cody was notoriously enigmatic. His private life, and its relation to his performance career, has eluded most scholars. A key feature of my approach is to explore the most intimate social bond in Cody’s life, his marriage, which began during his time in frontier Kansas and continued through all his years in show business. Having a respectable family was fundamental to Cody’s appeal for his earliest entertainment patrons. As he developed a public image as defender of the white family, his private life as patriarch of a real family became wedded to his authenticity. Thus the tensions and divisions within that marriage, which was often troubled, offer us a valuable, and seldom seen, window into the personal cost of maintaining the illusion of a life lived in accordance with national myth. Although few remember it today, Buffalo Bill Cody sued his wife for divorce in 1904, with calamitous results. The testimony from this courtroom drama provides rare insight into just how commingled public and private life became for the most public of Americans, while illuminating both the opportunities his lifelong performance offered him, and the constraints it ultimately imposed.