Louis S. Warren Read online

  Hickok’s aims in this ongoing performance are not entirely clear, but in his early days it enhanced his prospects in law enforcement. He won election to constable of Monticello township, in Kansas, as early as 1858. 20 He was running for sheriff in Springfield when he met George Ward Nichols (he lost), and won his position in Hays after Nichols’s article appeared. 21 His press reputation had everything to do with his appointment as marshal in Abilene, where the town’s founders sought to present an image of hard-nosed law enforcement to attract the best class of investors. 22 Press publicity was an asset, too, among the military officers who appointed Hickok a scout. New to the country and fighting enemies they little understood, at least some in the army command were pleased to have an acknowledged hero (or, at least, an alleged one) marking their path.

  Because tourists often included writers, and because many of them were often prospective settlers, and potential local voters, Hickok complemented his cultivation of the press with an equally vigorous development of himself as a tourist attraction. Most of his encounters with travelers went unrecorded. But in surviving fragments we glimpse his ongoing public performance, a kind of one-man show of a life in progress, and we gain a sense of its allure for his audiences, among them the canny Will Cody.

  Along with all their other baggage, tourists, speculators, and potential settlers inevitably carried notions of frontier heroes absorbed from stage plays, the popular press, and the novels of James Fenimore Cooper. Whether or not they believed that buckskin-clad hunters like Hawkeye and Daniel Boone were still to be found on the frontier, Hickok was adept at imitating these frontiersmen of fantasy, adding enough local and contemporary elements to create a convincing imposture, assuming a life story that was part genuine, part invention.23

  The pose was alluring in part because his stitching of fiction to fact was so close. Hickok not only knew the Plains and its many human and animal denizens, he looked and sounded so much like popular fantasies of someone who did that it was almost eerie. At the same time, he was eager to put it on display. As the railway extended into western Kansas, Hickok routinely stood at the platform awaiting railroad touring parties. It was not a coincidence that correspondents wrote, upon arriving in Hays, “The first man we saw was ‘Wild Bill.’ ”24

  His masterful pose, combined with his genuine skills as tracker, marksman, hunting guide, and storyteller, made him a subject of tourist speculation and debate when he was but a local figure, before the article in Harper’s Monthly ever appeared. “He is a picture,” wrote a tourist in 1866, “the most striking object in camp. Six feet, lithe, active, sinewy, daring rider, dead shot with pistol and rifle, long locks, fine features and mustache, buckskin leggins, red shirt, broad-brimmed hat, two pistols in belt, rifle in hand …” The tourist went on to describe Hickok’s fireside autobiography: “Has lived since he was eleven on the prairies; when a boy, rode Pony Express on the California route, and during the war was scout and spy. He goes by the name of Wild Bill, and tells wonderful stories of his horsemanship, fighting and hair-breadth escapes.” Having reprised Hickok’s life in this way, the tourist then inserted his own amused and skeptical review. Wonderful as the guide’s stories were, “we do not, however, feel under any obligation to believe them all.”25

  Such cautious appraisal of Hickok’s imposture proliferated as his reputation grew. In the many press accounts of Wild Bill’s fistfights, gunfights, hunting exploits, Indian battles, and feuds, there are two persistent features. The first is Wild Bill himself. The second is the author’s advice about which parts of these tales are credible and which are not. To read these accounts is to realize that the most enjoyable thing about meeting Wild Bill was not the encounter with an unimpeachably “real” hero but the parsing of truth and fiction in his legend. Tourists and scribes fully expected Hickok to exaggerate his own accomplishments. He accepted money for his services as guide and lawman, but he did not seek direct financial gain from his fictions. Listeners thus received them less as fraud than as entertaining, playful jibes at tourists’ half-secret desires for an encounter with an imagined frontier, and a means of providing them with a “real” frontier story to tell on their return. In turn, their audiences of friends and relatives back in St. Louis, Topeka, or Chicago could then debate Hickok’s credibility for themselves.

  “The most striking object in camp”—Wild Bill Hickok, c. 1869. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.

  Indeed, in its combination of authentic wonder and media hoax, Hickok’s one-man show bore more than a passing resemblance to the era’s most popular diversions. By the 1860s, certain forms of trickery had become legitimate entertainment. Nineteenth-century Americans were a people shaken by rapid urbanization and the ascendance of the cash market, which alienated ever more people from familiar networks of kin, community, and trade. The social revolutions brought on by city growth and industrialization spawned myriad questions and anxieties. Americans relocated from home districts to large cities, or to western outposts on the railroad, jostling one another and the millions of foreign immigrants who joined them. How could one tell good people from bad, honest from crooked, in a bustling, polyglot metropolis, or for that matter in a hustling frontier town, where most people were strangers, everyone claimed to be honest, and seemingly everything was for sale?

  This last question raised a host of others, for recognizing shoddy goods in an age of mass production was a new and important challenge. The Industrial Revolution brought Americans face-to-face with a slew of manufactured products. Handcrafted products were each distinctive. Mass-produced goods were essentially copies of an “original” design. All were fronted by colorful advertisements making impossible promises for quality and durability. How could one know a good product from a poor one? Telling the difference between the self-made man and the man on the make, fair-made goods and poor imitations, became serious business.26

  Entertainments intrigue us by their ability to heighten and then resolve our cultural anxieties. So Americans were drawn to attractions which encouraged them to utilize their own analytical razors in the separation of truth and fiction, reality and representation. Among the most popular were what historian James Cook has called “artful deceptions,” tricks designed to entertain and even educate by providing the audience with space to dissect fakery, to probe the gaps between representation and real life. These included a host of popular attractions, including a machine that could play brilliant chess (a talented chess player actually hid inside), magicians who could make pocket watches and wallets disappear and then reappear (in a safe, mimetic performance of the pickpockets and confidence men who bedeviled city newcomers), and “trompe l’oeil” or “trick of the eye” paintings, which were so authentic that viewers, kept at a distance by rope barriers, debated for hours whether these were real paintings or merely real objects arranged and lit to resemble paintings. 27

  In 1868, the most famous of the artful deceivers was P. T. Barnum. Hickok never met him. But his entertainments so shaped the era that Hickok—and Cody—could not help but fall under their influence. Barnum called his entertainments “humbug,” and they made him a fortune. Beginning in 1835, he attracted gigantic crowds, first with a traveling exhibition of Joice Heth, a Negro woman alleged to be the 161-year-old former nurse to George Washington. In 1842, he brought his “FeeJee Mermaid” to the public. A grotesquely contorted monkey’s head and upper limbs sewn to the tail of a fish, the FeeJee Mermaid inspired vigorous audience banter and newspaper debate over how much Barnum’s assertions of authenticity could be believed. He followed it with “What Is It?,” alternatively called “The Nondescript.” The What Is It? was really a black man in a hairy costume, but Barnum presented him as a possible “missing link” between humanity and the animal world. A wide array of visitors to the exhibit leapt into the debate over whether he was real or fake and what it meant either way.

  In general, Barnum’s exhibits succeeded less by gulling the masses than by inviting them to speculate on the truth
and fiction of the displays. He regularly invented scientific testimony to “verify” his exhibits, which he published alongside fake letters from nonexistent experts denouncing his frauds, all to cultivate controversy and expand his audience. He even published a comprehensive account of his humbugs in his own autobiography to provide the wondering crowds with ammunition against him.28

  Barnum’s invitation to debate and argue, and his unwillingness to condescend, were keys to his popularity. He overtly trusted the reasoning powers of everyday Americans, and their ability to come to their own conclusions about his displays. Visitors flocked to his American Museum in New York. There, they debated and argued over where the truth left off and fraud began. They propounded theories about how a given hoax was executed. They left feeling empowered by their own talents at discernment. Uncovering Barnum’s tricks was fundamentally a democratic experience. It made ordinary people feel like they were at least the equal of the journalists, scientists, and experts who foolishly endorsed the FeeJee Mermaid and other Barnum exhibits as real. It established them as competent to know the difference between reality and fakery, and therefore to succeed in the modern world, in public life, and in modern market capitalism.29

  Today, Barnum’s name is identified with falsehood, but his humbugs were more than lies. As Barnum and every other successful showman knew, a degree of truth was essential to the most successful deceptions. All of his hoaxes invited audiences to locate a deeper truth beneath the fake surface. In encouraging people to believe that there was a truth to be found, and that it was within their power to reveal it, Barnum’s humbugs were essentially optimistic. If the world was a sediment of fakery, it yet rested on bedrock truths, accessible to the common man.30

  Like Barnum, Hickok was fully aware of his audience’s doubts and even cultivated them in certain ways. His pose as dime novel hero was a self-evident ruse, combining popular symbols of frontier identity (buckskin, guns, knife, hat, horse) with fictional adventures (the closest he came to riding for the Pony Express was tending the horses at Rock Creek Station). These he combined with his real biography, and real hunting and fighting skills, to guide tourists and entertain them.

  Conditioned as we are to think of the nineteenth-century West as “real” and our memory of it as “myth,” it is easy to overlook how much the Kansas of young William Cody’s day presented observers with a tangled knot of perceptions and realities. If it seems surprising that Kansans like Hickok should be comfortable developing amusements that resonated with eastern cultural fascinations, we must keep in mind that the regional culture of the West was infused with at least as much anxiety about representation and reality as anyplace else in America. East and west, the expansion of cities and mounting dependence on cash markets provoked fascination with the dance of fake and real. The communities where Hickok worked his magic erupted from the Plains like volcanoes of commerce and seething humanity. In time, they would become well-ordered, middle-class bastions. But in the early days, when Hickok sauntered their streets and sidewalks, Leavenworth, Atchison, Abilene, Hays, Junction City, and others heaved with polyglot crowds of merchants, lawyers, fly-by-night doctors, teamsters, market hunters, and prostitutes. The weakness or even absence of town or state authorities, the inchoate social networks, and the mix of languages and races only made their money-hungry economies and cosmopolitan social mix all the more terrifying for the many newcomers who passed through them.31

  Outside these nascent metropolises, even in remote areas of mostly rural Kansas, cities and their markets reordered every aspect of daily life. Vanishing game, proliferating livestock, advancing ranks of wheat—all reflected the powerful forces of meat and grain markets in Chicago, St. Louis, and Denver. For those markets, hinterland settlers produced commodities like buffalo hides, beef, and grain, and on those same markets they depended for money, with which they bought goods like lamps, plows, seed, and nails through catalogues and mail-order houses. Western settlers were at least as sensitive as any other Americans to fraud in advertising, and possibly more so.32

  But the allure of frontier imposture like Hickok’s—and, for that matter, Cody’s—grew not only from developments in the region, but even more from more widely held perceptions and questions about it. By the 1860s, the populace had come to know the frontier as a deceptive mixture of representation and truth, a kind of gigantic artful deception, or a whole series of humbugs. Partly, this was because it was frequently a subject of hoaxes in the press. In 1844, T. B. Thorpe penned a series of sketches, “Letters from the Far West,” in which he pretended to be a member of Sir William Drummond Stewart’s hunting party exploring the northern Rockies. In fact, Thorpe was a newspaper editor in Louisiana who composed all of his dispatches from thin air. Although he loaded them with tall tales, sly jokes, and puns, newspapers across the country ran his letters as serious correspondence. 33 Other varieties of western hoaxes abounded, and not all were in good fun. Fraudulent reports of mineral strikes, rich soil, and mild climate proliferated, all intended to inflate the stock of bogus mining companies, disingenuous land speculators, and railroad corporations.34

  Hoaxes and frauds were often elaborate variations on the tall tale, a form of artful deception which was the most popular and enduring means of representing the West. Although not unique to the United States, the American tall tale achieved an attraction and a currency unmatched elsewhere, and by the 1830s—the same decade that Barnum began to stage his hoaxes almost as tall tales made real—Americans could claim it as a national art form.35 Tall tales were not unique to the frontier. But because they played on the ignorance of their audience, and because they frequently exploited unfamiliar natural settings and animals, they tended to feature frontier and backcountry locales. Thus, the southwestern frontier of Arkansas, Tennessee, and Louisiana spawned many early tall tales of Davy Crockett, Mike Fink, and others.36

  In the course of the nineteenth century, the locus of the tall tale moved west, across the Mississippi, with the expanding fur trade and the frontier of settlement. Mountain men provided fonts of entertaining tales for eastern audiences beginning in the 1830s. The West was ideal for this form of entertainment, in part because its distinctive and remote geography often meant that seemingly outrageous elements of stories could prove true. When Jim Bridger described the remote northern Rockies as a place of steaming geysers and boiling pools, the editor of the Kansas City Journal refused to publish the story for fear it would reveal him as a dupe of the notorious tale spinner. Years later, he apologized to Bridger when it became apparent that at least that feature of his Yellowstone accounts was true.37 So there was similar willingness to countenance if not quite believe mountain men’s colorful accounts of petrified forests, prairie fires that could outrun a horse, and buffalo herds stretching from one horizon to the other. Audiences enjoyed these tales as a kind of performance: fur trapper Joe Meek once paid passage on a steamboat by charging passengers to hear his entertaining stories of the Oregon country.38

  The frontier Hickok and Cody grew up hearing about, and which tourists went to Kansas looking for, was not just a region, or a place, but a subject in which fact and fiction had been so thoroughly mixed that the very idea of the Far West suggested deception, some of it entertaining. Both Hickok and Cody had roots in the Old Northwest (today’s northern Midwest), the region that provided most of the emigrants who made their way along the Overland Trail to California and Oregon in the 1840s and 1850s.39 The gold rush generated a torrent of fantastic, but sometimes half-true, tales of fist-sized gold nuggets, a climate so mild it was impossible to die in, and a stupendously fertile land where it never snowed. But already the Far West was a region that had to be seen to be understood, a locus of the fabulous and the monstrous. When Hickok and Cody were boys, legends of the circus permeated every rural hamlet, and none were so entrancing as the stories of gigantic beasts with noses that could lift a man’s hat from his head or spray a crowd with water. Rural folk were so intrigued that many abandoned work whenever the bi
g top came to town, paying hard-earned money to examine the legendary animals for themselves. By 1849, stories of the gold rush sounded so much like circus legends that journeying west came to be known as “seeing the elephant.”40

  Consequently, that migration west generated a library of trail narratives, in which people who otherwise never kept journals or wrote letters archived their adventures for posterity. By the end of the 1850s, these made up a new genre of American literature, emigrants’ own true tales of discovering the “real” West and its many correspondences with or differences from popular images in emigrant guidebooks (many of which were highly dubious), dime novels, newspaper accounts, and rumor. Through these narratives, and throughout the popular understanding of the West itself, coursed a powerful theme of democratic exploration, less of the trail itself—which was well marked even before the gold rush—than of the spaces between western reality and eastern fantasy.

  Of course, in the West as in the East, there were real risks which made the discernment of fantasy and reality more than a game. To many emigrants, the trails west led through cholera, Indian attacks, and financial collapse, not to mention loneliness. When the promoter Lansford Hastings assumed the guise of a trail guide, the Donner Party swallowed his bait, and took his “shortcut” across the desert south of the Great Salt Lake. Those who survived endured a cannibal winter in the Sierra Nevada before they ever made it to Sacramento.41

  According to William Cody, his own father weighed the stories of California riches and decided they came up short. Discussions about what to believe and what to dismiss in the many California accounts swirled through young Will’s trailside upbringing.42 But if the Donner horror and other, less spectacular failures underscored the importance of discerning fakery from authenticity in the West, it also made the line between them even more a subject for legitimate entertainment. By the time Cody was a child and Hickok was a teenager, the region was understood to have a genuine, spectacular nature, looming beneath layers of cultural fraud and hype, like an elephant beneath a giant canvas tent.