Louis S. Warren Read online

  Most buffalo hunters saw the occupation as strictly seasonal, and temporary, something to be pursued during the down season on the farm or ranch or when other money was not forthcoming. But the more committed followed the example of earlier trappers. Indeed, some were former beaver trappers who moved into the buffalo robe trade as it supplanted the beaver pelt traffic in the 1850s.65 In Kansas, hunters like Ben Clark and Abner “Sharp” Grover were married to Indian women. Their mixed-race unions placed them outside the bounds of middle-class respectability in the more established settlements, as people with dubious intentions and as race traitors. In fact, throughout the history of the American frontier, such unions predominated only until the arrival of “respectable” white women in sufficient numbers to furnish marriage partners for white men. In other words, the arrival of middle-class white women like Louisa Cody rendered these earlier mixed-race families—and their devotion to market hunting—an anachronism. 66

  Settlers were all too aware that most Plains hunters were Indians, and white men who were committed to hunting as an escape from civilization were suspiciously close to them in geography and lifestyle. Indian hunters were the nation’s major source of buffalo robes. Particularly at the trading posts on the upper Missouri, but extending well to the south, Indians traded robes for guns and other goods. Sioux, Cheyenne, Osage, Kaw, Comanche, and other Indians supplied the vast majority of the 200,000 robes brought to American trading posts on the Missouri River in 1870.67

  Americans welcomed bison eradication in part because if the animals did not vanish, then neither would the Indians. In the 1830s, Washington Irving and other commentators warned about the temptations of the hunt for white men, speculating that the Great Plains, then known as the Great American Desert, would become a kind of American Mongolia, populated only by nomadic, miscegenated herdsmen and hunters, “a great company and a mighty host, all riding upon horses, and warring upon those nations which were at rest, and dwelt peacably, and had gotten cattle and goods.” 68 The idea of a continuing, lucrative Indian trade disturbed Americans with thoughts of ever more white men and boys drawn into the multiracial hunting grounds, tempted away from farm fields, from the influence of home and civilization, by the chase and by Indian women.

  Whether these deep cultural anxieties increased the tensions between William and Louisa Cody is impossible to say. But if her concerns stemmed from the multiracial character or transient qualities of buffalo hunting, she likely felt vindicated when this, her husband’s most symbolically primitive occupation, failed. When the Kansas Pacific reached Sheridan, Kansas, in May 1868, its corporate coffers were empty. Construction ceased. Goddard Brothers lost their provisioning contract, and Buffalo Bill Cody lost his salary.

  In June, at a personal “end of the tracks,” he asked Louisa to see him at Leavenworth. She brought baby Arta up from St. Louis. There the couple had a terrible row, so bad that William Cody later recalled, “I didn’t think that we would ever have another meeting; we had kind o’ mutually agreed that we were not suited to each other; she was as glad to go back to her home as I was to go to the plains.”69 Advancing civilization was no easy task. Cody had lost his home, his family, his town.

  But there were other opportunities. Upon his return to Hays, Cody turned his eyes from railroad contracts—grading and buffalo hunting—to military contracting. Army provisioning was a principal source of income for ambitious settlers in Kansas. Isaac Cody himself had contracted to sell hay to the army fort at Leavenworth. Across the West, the army hired civilians to serve as guides, teamsters, and blacksmiths, and in various other capacities. 70

  Among this latter group of civilian hires were temporary “detectives,” deputy lawmen whom officers appointed to track down and apprehend deserters and stock thieves whom regular army soldiers were unable to catch. Cody had already attempted to make a business in selling liquor to troops, only to have his goods seized by officers. In March 1868, officers at Fort Hays appointed the well-regarded hunter William Cody to the position of detective after several soldiers stole some army mules and deserted from Fort Hays. The officers who appointed him could not have known how inspired a choice they had made, but Cody did. Who better to catch horse thieves than an experienced horse thief?

  This small, obscure job assumes an important place in Cody’s story, less for what he accomplished than for the company he kept. On this and on one subsequent detective assignment, Cody rode alongside the deputy U.S. marshal from nearby Junction City. Not much happened on the trail. The two low-ranking lawmen apprehended the deserters and delivered them to authorities later that month.71

  But as Cody made his way from frontier Kansas to worldwide stardom, the curious, looming figure of that deputy marshal straddled his path. A tall man with a wide hat and two pearl-handled navy revolvers, standing half in shadow, projecting both promise and menace, he was already something of a myth. His name was James Butler Hickok. But he was better known to his friends, and to his many enemies, as Wild Bill.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  With the Prince of Pistoleers

  WILD WEST SHOW fans knew from show publicity that William Cody rode the western trails with Wild Bill Hickok. Indeed, the friendship of the two men was well-known even before Cody published his autobiography in 1879. The first dime novel featuring Buffalo Bill appeared in 1869, and it presented him as the best friend of “Wild Bill Hitchcock.”1 The two men actually appeared onstage together for one season, in 1873 and ’74, performing in a melodrama about rescuing white women from Indians. Some of the generation that brought their children to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in the 1880s and ’90s, and some of the show’s employees, too, had seen Cody and Hickok together on the stage back in the early ’70s. At least they thought they had. Sometimes they saw Cody alone, or with somebody who looked vaguely like Hickok. Cody’s theatrical publicity so assiduously played up his connections with Hickok, and so many dime novels placed them together as brothers in arms, that some recalled seeing the two men together, even when Cody appeared without him.2

  In fact, Cody forged such a strong public memory of his friendship with Wild Bill, and assumed so many of the lawman’s symbolic attributes, that the two are often confused down to the present day. In his autobiography, he claimed that he first met Wild Bill Hickok on that expedition to Utah, when a rough teamster struck the boy and “a tall, handsome, magnificently built and powerful young” Hickok thrashed the bully.3 He said he rode with Hickok against the Sioux as early as 1861, in retaliation for a raid on the stage line. According to Cody, they met again during the Civil War, when Cody served as a spy, just like Wild Bill, and carried secret dispatches from Hickok to his Union superiors. By the time Cody wrote his autobiography, a thrilling tale of Hickok’s 1865 escape from Confederate forces had been in print for over a decade. Into his life story, Cody inserted his own, mostly plagiarized version of the event, in which Hickok galloped across a field of imminent battle under a hail of southern bullets to rejoin his Union comrades, with Cody cheering from the sidelines.4

  All of these tales were fiction. Cody was not on the Utah Expedition, and neither was Hickok. Neither of them was fighting the Sioux in 1861. That year, Hickok became a teamster in the Civil War, and although he did become a spy, Cody did not. Neither was Cody at the battle where Hickok was alleged to have escaped the Confederates.

  But Cody continued to link the lives of Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill long after 1879. Others soon helped in his cause. In 1882, one effusive historian recounted the supposed adventures of the two Bills during Lieutenant Colonel George Custer’s attack on a Cheyenne village at the Washita River in 1868. “The two daring and intrepid scouts plunged furiously into the midst of the Indians, each with a revolver in either hand, and literally carved their way through the surging mass of redskins, leaving a furrow of dead Indians in their wake.” The battle of the Washita was a genuine Custer fight, but neither Hickok nor Cody was there. That did not stop Cody from reprinting the account in Wild West show programs as i
f it were real, where his audiences could savor the mutually reinforcing heroism of the two Bills under a headline that read “Cody Saves Wild Bill.”5 Other than Cody himself, no figure bulks so large in Cody’s own life story as Wild Bill Hickok. None commands our attention as much. The fact that almost all of Cody’s Wild Bill stories were fictional makes his energetic recounting of them all the more intriguing. Why work so hard to hitch his wagon to Hickok’s star?

  Perhaps the most surprising fact is that William Cody’s association with Wild Bill Hickok did go back to his boyhood days, before the Civil War. Moreover, Wild Bill’s persistent reappearance in Buffalo Bill’s childhood stories hints at the roots of Cody’s show business imagination. Of all the figures who fired William Cody’s ambition to fulfill (or to seem to fulfill) popular frontier fantasies, none was greater than Hickok. In the end, none provided a more cautionary tale of the pitfalls awaiting even the most successful. By March 1868, when Cody and Hickok rode out of Hays on the trail of eleven army deserters, Hickok’s life was already a show in progress. For Cody, who had grown up admiring Hickok, and who knew him long before he was famous, the passage of his companion from plainsman to culture hero was a subject for some study. Understanding how William Cody became the world-famous Buffalo Bill requires us to examine it, too.

  BORN TO A FARMING family in Homer, Illinois, in 1837, James Butler Hickok moved to eastern Kansas to claim his own farm in 1856. He was soon swept up in the same violence that engulfed the Cody family. Like them, he joined the Free State cause. For reasons that are unclear, friends took to calling him Wild Bill. He had an early reputation for fearlessness, and quickly became a bodyguard for the radical Free State leader Jim Lane.6 Given the close circles of anti-slavery men who congregated in eastern Kansas, it is hard to believe that he did not meet Isaac Cody. When young Will Cody rode into Grasshopper Falls with a note warning his father of a plot to kill him, he found Isaac was with Jim Lane’s militia. Hickok might well have been there, too. In any case, Julia Cody recalled that Hickok was a visitor in the Cody home shortly after Isaac died, in 1858 or ’59, when Will Cody was only twelve.7

  Perhaps the boy looked upon him as a hero, a replacement for the father and the older brother he had lost. Hickok was almost a decade older than Cody. He was over six feet tall, with broad shoulders, a narrow waist, and a somber, brooding face. For most of his adult life, he wore his reddish brown hair in ringlets, cascading to his shoulders. Generally, his demeanor was quiet and unobtrusive, but his reputation became entangled with violent episodes which were legendary—or notorious—throughout the region. He became a teamster in the later 1850s, then a stable hand for the Pony Express in Nebraska in 1861. There he was embroiled in a local feud that ended with the killings of three men at Rock Creek Station. He began the Civil War as a teamster, but eventually became a spy for the Union. After Lee’s surrender in 1865, he returned to Kansas. He was an excellent tracker, and soon became a government detective at Fort Riley. He was so successful at returning deserters and stolen mules that in short order he became deputy U.S. marshal in Junction City, a job in which he mainly continued searching for stolen government livestock. By 1866, he was scouting for the army and hiring himself out as guide to parties of tourists. In 1867, he guided General Winfield Scott Hancock and Lieutenant Colonel George Custer in pursuit of the Cheyenne. His fearless reputation and his facility with guns and fists earned him respect in powerful places. In 1869 he was sheriff in Hays; in 1871, marshal of Abilene.8

  By this time, his exploits in law enforcement only added to his already considerable fame. In fact, his elevation to lawman in Abilene was partly a result of wide press coverage, which launched Hickok to national prominence in 1867. It was the same winter that the twenty-one-year-old Cody huddled for warmth in his dugout near Fort Hays, casting here and there for ways of earning the money and status that would reunite his family. In the summer he would be grading track and founding a town. One wonders how long it took him to lay his hands on a copy of the February Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Likely not long. Army officers frequently subscribed, and this issue contained an article that was the talk of Kansas.

  That month, the self-proclaimed “Journal of Civilization” published an alleged biography of Cody’s old friend Hickok. Until now, Hickok had been locally renowned as an always colorful, sometimes gregarious, hard-drinking teamster, trail guide, hunter, and sometime lawman. Suddenly, he was a popular culture icon.

  Harper’s correspondent George Ward Nichols reported meeting Hickok in Springfield, Missouri. Nichols reported that Hickok had been a Union spy who had escaped death by the narrowest of margins, and now stood out as an energetic white man on a sleepy, backward frontier, where “the most marked characteristic of the inhabitants seemed to be an indisposition to move, and their highest ambition to let their hair and beards grow.” 9 In his frequent frontier duels, Nichols’s Hickok outdrew and outshot his villainous opponents every time. The writer described Wild Bill shooting from an open window, the plainsman placing six bullets into the center of an “O” the size of a man’s heart on a sign fifty yards distant, in “an off-hand way, and without sighting the pistol with his eye.” His mastery of animals balanced the technological wizardry of his gunplay. Nell, his black mare, answered to his whistle, dropped to the ground or galloped away at his hand signal, and, at Hickok’s command, leapt onto a billiard table in the local saloon. “When she got down from the table,” wrote Nichols, “Bill sprang upon her back, dashed through the high wide doorway, and at a single bound cleared the flight of steps and landed in the middle of the street.”10

  Thus Nichols wove the life of the real borderman into a pithy dime novel plot and strung it with the ornaments of popular fantasy, cautioning all the while that he believed every word of what he wrote. It made Hickok famous. Harper’s Monthly was no pulp magazine. Its readership was solidly middle and upper class, its circulation among the broadest in the nation.11

  Just as Harper’s Monthly told Hickok’s life like a dime novel, publishers quickly inscribed his ostensibly real adventures back into fiction. Within months of the first Hickok article, publisher Robert M. De Witt released two dime novels about Hickok’s alleged exploits.12 Readers East and West encountered Hickok in these volumes. Even remote settlers ordered De Witt novels through the mail.13

  In part, Hickok owed his spectacular rise to the ongoing American longing for frontier heroes. Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Mike Fink, and Kit Carson were all popularly imagined to be in command of nature, at ease with technology, capable of great violence, but peaceful at heart. In his fanciful rendering of Hickok’s life, George Ward Nichols was resurrecting a literary and historical type, the frontiersman, for a post–Civil War readership.

  And yet there was something peculiar about Hickok’s celebrity. He was not just a border hero, but a figure of popular entertainment. In this sense, he was a vital transition figure between older frontier heroes, backcountry residents who became renowned nationally, and Buffalo Bill, who eventually played to a much wider audience than any of his frontier predecessors. Unlike any earlier border figure, the railroad made Hickok accessible to at least some portion of the larger public. Perhaps it is not surprising that, after reading of him in dime novels, newspapers, and magazines, many western travelers sought him out. In 1868, a party of railroad tourists met Hickok in Hays, Kansas, and peppered him with questions about the condition of the country. We might imagine these greenhorns to have been awestruck and slack-jawed in the presence of the “real” Hickok. Perhaps some were. But the fact remains that the only tourist who recorded the meeting was at least as amused as he was impressed. The Harper’s Monthly biography, he winked, was “a romantic but not o’er true history” of Wild Bill.14

  Indeed, tourists and others often questioned the truthfulness of Hickok’s press coverage. Western newspapers not only reported Hickok’s exploits, or rumors of them, but also provided a venue for questioning their veracity, and the Hickok treatment in Harper’s Mo
nthly was the subject of considerable commentary in newspapers and towns across Kansas and Missouri.15 “James B. Hickok … is a remarkable man, and is as well known here as Horace Greeley in New York,” wrote one Springfield, Missouri, editor. “But Nichols ‘cuts it very fat’ when he describes Bill’s feats in arms.”16

  More than any of his mythic predecessors, Hickok was a beacon for the public because of his relevance to the ongoing debate over how to discern truth in the age of the popular press, the instrument through which most people learned of Hickok and the Far West he inhabited. In a sense, evaluating the gap between Hickok and his press reputation was a kind of game, in which tourists, frontier locals, and Hickok himself readily joined. Since frontier newspapers had wide circulation in more settled regions, where subscriptions flourished among prospective emigrants and speculators, even small local notices of Hickok’s doings found a large audience of readers. Wild Bill was many things—spy, scout, Indian fighter, lawman—but he was also an entertainer who purposely worked up his reputation for popular evaluation and enjoyment. As he remarked at the end of the Harper’s Monthly article, “I’m sort of public property.”17

  Later admirers saw Hickok as a man who abhorred publicity. In truth, he pursued it so avidly that contemporaries joked that his real aspiration was to become a newspaper editor.18 His stories dazzled George Ward Nichols, author of the article in Harper’s, as early as 1865. In 1867, he failed to impress the artist and writer Theodore R. Davis (who thought Hickok a blowhard). “Seeing he was not welcome,” wrote Davis, the “scout’s stay was short.” Hickok blustered as he strode away, “Ther’s another dodgasted sardine of a newspaper cuss bunken in the sutlers shack what wants my wind, I see you don’t!” That “dodgasted sardine of a newspaper cuss” was none other than Henry Morton Stanley (soon to become world famous for “finding” Dr. David Livingstone in Africa, in 1872). Stanley rewarded Hickok’s efforts, penning another cloying sketch—“one of the finest examples of that peculiar class known as frontiersman, ranger, hunter, and Indian scout”—for the St. Louis Missouri Democrat.19