Louis S. Warren Read online

  William Cody created the persona of Buffalo Bill not as a western man alone, but as a man who grew up connecting East and West, the Far West and the States, frontier and home. It was California and the Far West that harbored the youthful manliness and wild horse spirit that so entranced the young boy, and journeying out of that West came familial reunion and adulation. In his mind, the trail to the Far West was the path to manhood, and lost family, too. In his memory of his youth, the trails betokened his own ideal future. In his memory, the Wild West show in some sense came to him from over that far horizon.

  William Cody’s 1879 autobiography did not recount his childhood so much as reinvent it. Much more than a memoir of real events, the book mixed truth and fiction, to cast the child Will Cody as the protagonist of an American myth. The boy came up through hard times by dint of his own energy, hard work, and good luck and great connections. He grew up holding together the nation with the Pony Express, fighting for its families by battling the Mormons. If these were lies, they were skillfully told ones, and there was a method to them. They appealed to his audience, but, just as important, they retained and embellished a genuine aspect of his childhood struggle to defend his family. At eleven years old, he was the eldest surviving male in a family blasted by the border wars, lurching toward poverty, afflicted with the violence of their enemies.

  The desperate effort to protect the Cody family from the maelstrom which engulfed them was a burden that passed from Isaac and Mary, neither of whom lived to see its conclusion, to their eldest children, Julia—who was twenty and married when her mother died—and William, who was a mere seventeen.

  In recalling the weight of that load, the grown-up William Cody never dwelt on its darkness. He was innately optimistic, a characteristic which served him well in show business. But to understand him, his biography, and the many lies he told about both, we need only recall the boy who rose from a sickbed, leapt to the back of his pony, and outran border ruffians to meet his father at Grasshopper Falls. One of the reasons we may believe this story is because of details Cody left out, which emerged long after, from other sources. When Buffalo Bill told the story in The Life of Buffalo Bill in 1879, he said he got away from his pursuers and found his father, having “arrived in ample time to inform him of the approach of his old enemies.”91 He left out details his sister provided: his stop at the neighbor’s, the horse covered with vomit, being put to bed by his concerned friend, and the fact that his father turned out not to be in danger. William Cody left out the panic, the illness, his own weakness. He left out the terror.

  The Kansas border wars brought terror for many families, and we can only wonder how many boys and girls rode fast horses to warn parents of impending doom. What were they thinking, during these races to save family from destruction? They likely feared falling from the back of the galloping horse at every bump in the road or hidden hole in the fields across which they made their dark and dangerous journeys. Did they fear that they would die? Perhaps they did not want to remember. Perhaps, like William Cody, they wanted to forget the terror, and to remember something else. When he thought of himself on a horse, he wanted to be like his cousin: a genuine western man who mastered this most powerful beast with the natural skill that came from being a westerner. The loss of fathers wreaked havoc on family after family in eastern Kansas in the 1850s, despite the best efforts of their loved ones to protect them. Thus the Wild West show, for all its colorful posters and glamorous Pony Express mythology, has in its origin this genuine scene of heroism: a darkling Kansas meadow and a winding road, the hoofbeats of a galloping horse, a child clinging to its back with a sob of fear in his throat, and terrible loss on his horizon.

  CAREFUL READERS will notice something else about Cody’s very tall boyhood tales. His autobiography is remarkably truthful until the death of his father, whereupon he launches into his Mormon War adventure. In rapid succession come all the tales of prospecting, Indian fighting, and the Pony Express. After the death of his father, Cody turns our eyes west, distracting us from the dark, briefer tale of another journey he soon took, to the east and the south. By the late 1870s, when Cody sat down to write his autobiography, slavery had been consigned to history. It was no longer a national issue, the way the future of Indians and the West still was. Cody was a preternaturally talented reader of cultural longings, and so he downplayed his participation in the Civil War and its bloody Kansas prelude as southern, part of the past, in favor of advancing himself as a product of the West, the region of the nation’s future. If his imaginary boyhood West was so golden, it was in part because it hid from public view, and perhaps from his own mind, the sense of desperation, loss, and the longing for revenge which consumed him upon the death of his father.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Attack on the Settler’s Cabin

  THE SETTLER RETURNED from his hunt. His wife stepped out the door to greet him. A shout in the near distance. Turning, the settler confronted an Indian racing toward the house, dazzling and fierce in his feathers and war paint. Raising his rifle, the hunter fired and saw the man topple into the dust. An outburst of cries and screams erupted from nearby, and suddenly, the lonesome cabin became the center of a swirling mass of mounted Indian warriors, guns blazing. The settler and his wife retreated through the door, their children helping to load and fire guns through the windows. But the Indians were too many. They came ever closer to the cabin. The war cries were terrifying, the roar of guns and smoke filled the air. They were even closer now. The destruction of the tiny frontier home was only a moment away.

  But suddenly—another yell, and the Indians now turned to face the massed guns of a long-haired Buffalo Bill Cody and an entourage of whooping, shooting cowboys! A fierce fight ensued. Indians and cowboys dropped from saddles, their bodies thudding into the dust. But finally, the last of the Indians rode out of sight. As the settler family emerged from the cabin to thank the scout and his cowboy militia, another sound rolled over the home, a roar, as the audience applauded, stamped their feet, and stood.

  FOR MOST OF the Wild West show’s long life, the climactic finale of the drama was the “Attack on the Settler’s Cabin.” Figuratively, that lightning-quick courier of the Pony Express and all the other horsemen who charged around the arena, from the drivers of the Deadwood Stage to the families on the wagon train, were bound for the cabin that appeared in the show’s final act. They fought Indians and yelled and raced in circles, on their way to this mock family home.

  The image of home salvation reinforced the most persistent claim of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show: that Buffalo Bill Cody was the savior of the settler family. The cabin rescue finale was not the only family scene in the show. White families also rode in the wagon train which trundled into the arena, and which was then attacked by Indians, who were, of course, driven off by Buffalo Bill. There was the oddly humorous and elegant scene in which Buffalo Bill, the cowboys, and the show’s cowgirls performed a Virginia reel on horseback, a tableau which suggested that settler men and women could join for courting and marriage even on the rough-and-tumble frontier. The family theme ran through acts from which Cody was absent, too. Annie Oakley spent sixteen years with the show, performing as its star shooter, and everybody knew that she was married to Frank Butler, the man who held her targets. They were a handsome, wholesome couple. The fact that she fired a gun at targets in his hands, over and over, without ever so much as grazing him, made them seem somehow weird proof of the marital covenant’s protection. Much of the time, the settler’s cabin stood in the arena from the show’s beginning, positioned slightly toward one end, so that all of the other show acts swirled around it. The audience could tell that the home was where the action would culminate.1

  Cody cultivated the connection between Buffalo Bill and home defense for his entire public career. It was a major component of his theatrical performances, which began in 1872, and as we have seen, it was a consistent thread in the autobiography of 1879. In one of the book’s yarns about the
Civil War, the spy William Cody protects the home of a Missouri secessionist from being plundered by Union soldiers, an action which left him “happy in the thought that I had done a good deed, and with no regrets that I had saved from pillage and destruction the home and property of a confederate and his family.”2 The story was undoubtedly fictional (as we shall see), but it suggests that for Cody, family defense even trumped wartime enmity. Such a code of honor no doubt appealed to northern and southern readers alike, longing as they were for national reunion.

  Cody did not invent family defense as an entertainment attraction—he merely perfected it. The “Settler’s Cabin” finale of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show seems to have been implemented by Nate Salsbury after he became the show’s managing partner in 1884. Even then, it was hardly new. White family defense was a consistent motif in popular literature, art, and entertainment throughout the life of the republic. Myriad writers, dramatists, and artists portrayed Indian war as the necessary precursor to family salvation. In inscribing a frontier line between domestic order and savagery, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West made Cody himself into a chief bulwark of the American family. In a sense, the arc of Buffalo Bill’s life touched earth at one end with the speeding pony, at the other with the family home.

  Despite the fact that he never actually drove an Indian war party away from anybody’s home, Cody assumed the role of the white family’s defender with the natural grace that comes from experience and conviction. If he was not the first to portray frontier warfare as the fight for domestic bliss, his commitment to it reflected some belief in the essential reality of the scene. Indeed, home salvation was much on his mind as a boy.

  But the frontiersmen of myth are not domesticated. They straddle the line between civilization and savagery. In his actual life, if Cody was defender of the home, he could also be its assailant. As a teenager, he found that staving off family destruction meant earning money, a challenge which required him to leave his own home repeatedly and for extended periods. In the early 1860s, he was inspired by fellow Kansans who combined the hunt for money with the quest for revenge.

  THROUGHOUT the late 1850s, many Free Kansans longed for vengeance against their tormentors in Missouri. When the Civil War erupted on April 12, 1861, they got their chance. In the absence of a strong occupation by either army, the border of Kansas and Missouri exploded in a vast paramilitary conflagration, as competing bands of Union jayhawkers and secessionist bushwhackers embarked on wars of pillage, rapine, and murder. Jayhawker and bushwhacker alike rousted their enemies from their cabins at night and dispensed beatings, mutilations, hangings, and shootings. They stole, savaged, and ruined.3

  And they burned homes. George Caleb Bingham, a Unionist, described the devastating progress of a leading anti-slavery regiment, the Seventh Kansas Volunteer Cavalry, better known as Jennison’s Jayhawkers, on their raid from Kansas to Missouri in 1861. Their “entire route from Independence to Westpoint may be traced by the ruins of the dwellings of our citizens, which were first pillaged and then burned without discrimination or mercy. As they were generally constructed of wood, they are now but heaps of ashes, above which the tall chimneys remain in their solitude.” In 1862, Jennison’s regiment fell on the town of Dayton, Missouri, and burned forty-six of forty-seven homes. When they reached the partially burned town of Morristown, they burned the rest. One eyewitness, awed by the horror they inflicted near Kingsville, remembered: “I counted one evening, while standing on Brushy Knob, one hundred and sixty houses on fire.”4

  The Bleeding Kansas years had seen house burnings, too, but the increasing frequency and scale of home destruction makes it hard to overstate the impact of the Civil War on settlers along the Kansas-Missouri line. Throughout the United States, and more so on the western border, the premier social institution was the family, and the premier economic, educational, and social welfare establishment was the family home. In a society where federal, state, and local governments were weak, where educational institutions were rudimentary, where a multiplicity of churches competed for the attention of minority churchgoers, the family home was the chief organizing unit. The home was where children were conceived and delivered, where much of their education took place, where they and their parents produced most of the family’s wealth, and where they relaxed and enjoyed their lives and one another. As they grew, children would move into homes of their own, and in those homes they would care for aged parents as well as their own progeny. The home thus enfolded the present and future of the family that created it.5

  All wars destroy families and homes. In the American South, the Civil War would turn on the destruction of cities and the ravaging of rural plantations, and in the process many thousands of homes were damaged or ruined. But the absence of other institutions across much of Kansas made the destruction of homes, and the families they contained, even more poignant and devastating.

  One of the ironies of the guerrilla war in Kansas and Missouri was that in firing the homes of their enemies, and in the most extreme cases killing or driving away their families altogether, partisans removed the one institution which constrained boys and men from extended guerrilla forays. With no families to protect, and no family farms to tend, young men were free— or driven—to pursue revenge. Fierce raids by one band of partisans thus gave rise to more partisans in opposition. “Now,” one guerrilla concluded, “when you find a dozen, twentyfive, fifty, or one hundred men whose lives have come together in this way, you can understand how they come to be terrors.”6

  Will Cody was fifteen years old in 1861. As far as he and his family were concerned, pro-slavery partisans had murdered Isaac. For years, they had threatened his mother, his sisters, and his little brother, Charlie. And as Kansas jayhawkers took the war to Missouri on their own terms, he rode with them.

  By his own account, in 1861, he took up with a gang of horse thieves bent on avenging the losses of Free Kansas settlers by stealing from their pro-slavery neighbors. He left this crowd after his mother objected. 7

  But then, in 1862, he “became one of the red legged scouts,” a paramilitary unit dedicated, at least by their own reckoning, to the defense of Kansas, and whose name was derived from the red leather garters they wore to distinguish themselves. The Red Legs did not keep lists of members, or any other records. Boys and men joined and departed as they wished. Cody says he remained with the Red Legs until the spring of 1863. As he recounted, “our field of operations was confined mostly to the Arkansas country and southwestern Missouri. We had many a lively skirmish with the bushwhackers and Younger brothers, and when we were not hunting them, we were generally employed in carrying dispatches between Forts Dodge, Gibson, Leavenworth, and other posts.”8

  Given the fictional nature of his western tales, we must be careful in accepting his claims about the border war. But several clues suggest there is some truth to this account. First, he barely mentions this period at all, choosing not to mythologize it beyond “many a lively skirmish” with the likes of the Younger brothers. He takes little opportunity to embellish what could have been a highly colored narrative.

  Second, his sister Julia’s memoir confirms his extensive forays with the Red Legs. Unlike the Pony Express stories, which she summarizes in two sentences with no new detail, and in contrast to other adventures where she simply quotes him at length, she offers far more detail on his Red Leg days than he does. Thus, she writes that he was out with “the Red Legged Scouts” throughout much of late 1861, and that, as their mother fell ill again, “he stayed home that winter and went to school most of the time,” occasionally leaving “for several days” when “the Scouts sent for him to go out on a Scouting Tour.” The association between William Cody and the Red Legs rings of something other than pure fiction.9

  Biographers typically dismiss these experiences as incidental. But Cody’s affiliation with a band guilty of some of the region’s most brutal persecutions suggests a dark counterweight to his gleaming boyhood tales of Pony Express heroism. Elvira Scott,
of Miami, Missouri, might have seen the sixteen-year-old Will Cody. If so, she was not favorably impressed. The Red Legs “were about the lowest, most desperate looking specimens of humanity it has ever been my lot to witness.” Another Missourian described the settler exodus for St. Louis as the Red Legs raided into the countryside. “The roads are lined with movers driven away from thare homes by Red Legs… . The Red Legs are desolating the country, they have no respect for any person’s political opinions.”10 Red Leg depredations grew so extreme, their exactions of property and lives from innocent civilians so consistent and terrifying, that the provisional governor of Missouri begged President Lincoln to restrain them.11

  There are some intriguing hints that Cody was with the Red Legs on some of their forays. Some of the most wrenching testimony about Red Leg savagery comes from the region of Lexington, Missouri, where carriage maker Willard Mendenhall wrote that in the spring of 1862, the Red Legs were so uncontrolled, “they appear to be a band of murderers and robers,” burning homes and pillaging Unionist and secessionist alike.12 Was Cody with them? Throughout his adult life, he stood out. Tall, handsome, and with a pronounced sense of style and timing, he was recognizable from an early age, and it may be that Lexington residents noticed him that spring. After the war, in 1866, while traveling aboard a Missouri River steamboat out of St. Louis, Cody recalled, “There happened to be on board the boat an excursion party from Lexington, Missouri, and those comprising it seemed to shun me, for some reason which I could not account for.” When another passenger advised, “They say that you are one of the Kansas jayhawkers, and one of Jennison’s house-burners”—victims of pro-Union guerrillas often lumped their persecutors together as “Jennison’s” soldiers—Cody confirmed that he “was in Kansas during the border ruffian war.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he mused, “Perhaps these people know who I am….”13