by Enss, Chris
Ecstatic that her parents’ union had withstood many trials and troubles, Irma made plans to celebrate the couple’s forty-fifth wedding anniversary. A great deal had happened since Louisa and William’s reconciliation.
The anniversary festivities were held over a two-day period at the Codys’ ranch in North Platte. The twenty-six guests, including Louisa’s divorce attorney and his wife, were treated to a seven-course meal served at a lavishly set table with fresh flowers, cut glass, and silver. “I have forgotten all our tribulations,” William told their friends, “and remember only the good in our union.” When reflecting on Louisa’s past unpleasant behavior toward guests at Scout’s Rest Ranch, he said that there had been “much misunderstanding. But all is forgiven.”11
A month after the anniversary party, William began the farewell tour of his Wild West show. He would again be gone from Louisa for long periods of time. She was used to the lifestyle and made no issue of his going. “Now our marriage had a few bad patches,” he recalled years later, “and these are public record and no more needs to be said of them. But I want to tell you that no man was more blessed in his wedlock than I and I have the fondest regard for Lulu.”12
William’s later years were spent negotiating peace between his sisters more so than between himself and Louisa. May, Helen, and Julia were jealous not only of one another at times but also of Louisa and Irma, as well as the men and women in Cody’s life whom he tried to help financially. When the infighting and malicious talk about whatever was bothering them became too much, William, as usual, would turn to Julia for help and a sympathetic ear. In a letter to Julia in October 1905, he expressed his exasperation with his sister’s behavior. He wrote,
Julia Dear, I can’t stand it. Nellie no sooner gets back to Cody. And listens to gossip, then jumps on me with a ten page letter accusing me of everything vile. Says I have left you with a mortgaged house on your old shoulders. Will you please give her the facts, before she tells it all over town. She says I spend thousands of dollars more on others than I do on my sisters.13
Before Irma helped her parents reconcile, Louisa complained to her youngest daughter that William spent much more money on his sisters than he did on his wife and children. Irma disagreed and championed her father’s giving nature to both her mother and her aunts. Irma kept William apprised of the disparaging talk whenever she went to see him. He listened and then encouraged his daughter to “ignore the lot of them.” Buffalo Bill looked forward to being with Irma. Often she would meet him at the train depot to welcome him home. He would put his arm around her, and they would walk side by side talking until they reached their final destination.14
As her father got older, Irma worried about his declining health. William suffered from inflammation of the joints and was constantly uncomfortable. In May 1910 he announced his plans to retire and enjoy some of the fruits of his labor. However, he was not ready to give up the spotlight until the winter of 1916. At the age of sixty-nine, he was exhausted and in extreme pain from acute arthritis. He had to be helped in and out of his saddle before and after each performance. His last show was on November 11, 1916, at Portsmouth, Virginia. When the program ended, the crowd gave the tearful Buffalo Bill Cody a ten-minute standing ovation.
Shortly after his final public ride, William headed to Colorado to visit his sister May. No sooner had he arrived than he became seriously ill. Telegrams were quickly sent to Louisa, Irma, Fred, and Julia summoning them to his bedside. The December 17, 1916, edition of the San Francisco Examiner claimed that Buffalo Bill was suffering from a general breakdown. Within a few days his health briefly improved. “You can’t kill the old scout,” William told his physician whenever his condition started to get better.15
His family was so convinced he was on his way to a full recovery that they returned to their homes. A few weeks later they rushed back to Denver after receiving word that William had had a relapse. He was then taken to the Glenwood Springs resort in the hope that treatment at the facility might help him get better, but his condition didn’t change.
In her autobiography, Louisa recalled how hard William fought to stay alive and how he comforted her when she thought the end was near. “He laughed at my tears, he patted my cheek, and strove to assemble again the old, booming voice. But it was weak and now breaking,” she noted. “‘Don’t worry, Momma,’ he said time after time. ‘I’m going to be all right. The doctor says I’m going to die, does he? Well, I’m pretty much alive just now, ain’t I. I’ve still got my boots on. I’ll be all right.’”16
According to Irma, when the doctor told William his life was ebbing, “he accepted his fate like a stoic.” He told Julia to “let the Elks and Masons take charge of the funeral.” He then made arrangements with his relatives regarding his business affairs, urging them to continue his work.17
On January 9, 1917, William slipped into a coma. He died the following morning from acute cardiac trouble, hypertension, and kidney failure. News of Buffalo Bill’s passing echoed around the globe. His wife and daughter were showered with condolences from kings, military leaders, and politicians. Historians paid tribute to William in newspapers and referred to him as “the finest specimen of young manhood in the West.”18 Reporters at Hearst Magazine called Buffalo Bill the “last of the vanished Wild West’s heroes.” In a series of articles about the showman, Hearst Magazine editors noted that with William’s passing “disappeared the one great vivid personality which remained as a living link between the present generations and the courageous founders of that now rich and civilized American empire that was the ‘Wild West.’”19
The days leading to William’s funeral were a haze for his family and close friends. Before being buried at Lookout Mountain in Denver, his body lay in state at the capitol building. Throngs of sorrowful fans passed by to view Buffalo Bill and pay respects to their idol. Louisa and Julia disagreed about where William’s remains were to rest. Julia insisted that he had picked Cedar Mountain in Cody as his favored spot to be buried, and his will confirmed that wish. Louisa said that William had changed his mind and asked her to bury him in Colorado. “It’s pretty up there,” Louisa wrote he told her on his deathbed. “I want to be buried up there instead of Wyoming.”20
The road to the site in Colorado was snow-covered, and it was six months before William’s grave could be dug. Thousands of mourners followed the flag-draped casket up to the mountain grave the day of his funeral. Among the tearful grievers were six unidentified women, rumored to have been romantically involved with Buffalo Bill.21
William made provisions in his will for Julia, May, and their families (Helen had preceded him in death) and for Irma and her family, but the bulk of his estate, valued at more than $65,000, went to Louisa.
Louisa returned to Wyoming with Irma, Fred, and their three children after the memorial service. Irma and her husband managed the hotel William had built in Cody and also helped to care for his other properties there. In October 1918 the couple both came down with the flu and died within four days of each other. Irma was thirty-four years old. Heartbroken, Louisa assumed the responsibility of raising her grandchildren. She lamented the loss of her family in her autobiography, published in 1919. “I face the sunset,” she observed. “My children are gone…. I am alone, my life lived, my hands folded… . It will not be long now until I see the fading of the sunset in my own little world, until the time shall come when I am with the children I loved, and the man I loved—on the trail beyond.”22
Mrs. William Cody passed away on October 20, 1921, from heart disease. Louisa wanted to be buried with Buffalo Bill, but William’s sister told the Denver Post that the request “could not be realized.”
“It would be necessary to blast the grave out of solid rock,” May Decker shared with reporters. “This could not be done without great damage to Colonel Cody’s burial place.” Louisa’s attorney helped make it possible for her to be buried in the grave with William without harming the site. On November 1, 1921, her body was pla
ced above the concrete layer that covered William’s coffin.23
William was seventy years old when he died. Louisa was seventy-eight. Their turbulent marriage lasted more than fifty years.
NOTES
Introduction
1. Joy Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000), 36.
2. William F. Cody, The Adventures of Buffalo Bill (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1904), 139.
3. Nellie Snyder Yost, Buffalo Bill: His Family, Friends, Fame, Failures, and Fortunes (Chicago: Sage Books, 1979), 99.
4. Cody v. Cody deposition, District County of Sheridan County, Wyoming, February–April 1904, 11.
5. Julia Cody Goodman and Elizabeth Leonard, Buffalo Bill: King of the Old West (New York: Library Publishers, 1955), 142.
6. Larry McMurtry, The Colonel and Little Missie (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 110–111; New York Times, October 30, 1898; Yost, Buffalo Bill, 99.
7. Don Russell, The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill Cody (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979), 258.
8. William F. Cody, An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (New York: Cosmopolitan Book, 1920), 5–6.
9. Ibid., 15.
10. Ibid., 118.
11. Yost, Buffalo Bill, 71.
12. Ibid.
ONE: Man of the Family
1. William F. Cody, The Adventures of Buffalo Bill (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1904), 120; Helen Cody Wetmore, Last of the Great Scouts (Chicago: Duluth Press, 1899), 58–59.
2. Julia Cody Goodman and Elizabeth Leonard, Buffalo Bill: King of the Old West (New York: Library Publishers, 1955), 75; Cody, The Adventures of Buffalo Bill, 122.
3. Helen Cody Wetmore, Last of the Great Scouts (Chicago: Duluth Press Publishing, 1899), xiii.
4. Goodman and Leonard, Buffalo Bill, 38.
5. Wetmore, Last of the Great Scouts, 3.
6. Cody, The Adventures of Buffalo Bill, 101.
7. William F. Cody, An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (New York: Cosmopolitan Book, 1920), 6; Goodman and Leonard, Buffalo Bill, 73.
8. Adolph Regli, The Real Book about Buffalo Bill (New York: Garden City Books, 1952), 30; Goodman and Leonard, Buffalo Bill, 307.
9. Wetmore, Last of the Great Scouts, 11.
10. Cody, An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill, 15.
11. Wetmore, Last of the Great Scouts, 40–43.
12. Cody, An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill, 29.
13. Wetmore, Last of the Great Scouts, 47.
14. Ibid., 101.
15. Don Russell, The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1979), 17.
16. Buffalo Bill Historical Center McCracken Research Library, MS6, 1B, Box 1, Folder 5.
17. Ibid.
18. “Buffalo Bill Cody,” Wikipedia, www.wikipedia.com.
19. Nellie Snyder Yost, Buffalo Bill: His Family, Friends, Fame, Failures, and Fortunes (Chicago: Sage Books, 1979), 226.
20. Ibid., 43.
21. Wetmore, Last of the Great Scouts, 175.
22. Ibid., 123.
23. Goodman and Leonard, Buffalo Bill, 138.
24. Ibid., 139; Louisa Cody and Courtney Ryley Cooper, Memories of Buffalo Bill (New York: D. Appleton, 1919), 36.
25. Goodman and Leonard, Buffalo Bill, 138–139.
26. Wetmore, Last of the Great Scouts, 132.
TWO: The Courtship of Louisa
1. Joy Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000), 18–19.
2. Helen Cody Wetmore, Last of the Great Scouts (Chicago: Duluth Press Publishing, 1899), 122.
3. William F. Cody, An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (New York: Cosmopolitan Book, 1920), 90–91.
4. “Louisa Frederici,” Arnold Historical Society, www.arnoldhistorical.org, 2–4.
5. Wetmore, Last of the Great Scouts, 122.
6. Nellie Snyder Yost, Buffalo Bill: His Family, Friends, Fame, Failures, and Fortunes (Chicago: Sage Books, 1979), 10–11; Louisa Cody and Courtney Ryley Cooper, Memories of Buffalo Bill (New York: D. Appleton, 1919), 34.
7. Cody and Cooper, Memories of Buffalo Bill, 5.
8. Ibid., 9–11; Adolph Regli, The Real Book about Buffalo Bill (New York: Garden City Books, 1952), 124–125.
9. Julia Cody Goodman and Elizabeth Leonard, Buffalo Bill: King of the Old West (New York: Library Publishers, 1955), 137.
10. Cody, An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill, 94.
11. Ibid., 95.
12. Ibid., 91–100; Wetmore, Last of the Great Scouts, 134.
13. Cody and Cooper, Memories of Buffalo Bill, 42–44.
14. Regli, The Real Book about Buffalo Bill, 125–126.
15. Cody, An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill, 99–101.
16. Ibid., 104.
17. Ibid., 105.
18. Cody and Cooper, Memories of Buffalo Bill, 67–68.
THREE: Husband, Father, Scout, and Actor
1. Nellie Snyder Yost, Buffalo Bill: His Family, Friends, Fame, Failures, and Fortunes (Chicago: Sage Books, 1979), 18.
2. Louisa Cody and Courtney Ryley Cooper, Memories of Buffalo Bill (New York: D. Appleton, 1919), 155–157.
3. William F. Cody, An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (New York: Cosmopolitan Book, 1920), 137–140; Adolph Regli, The Real Book about Buffalo Bill (New York: Garden City Books, 1952), 141; Yost, Buffalo Bill, 4.
4. Julia Cody Goodman and Elizabeth Leonard, Buffalo Bill: King of the Old West (New York: Library Publishers, 1955), 188; William Cody, The Adventures of Buffalo Bill (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1904), 135.
5. Regli, The Real Book about Buffalo Bill, 160.
6. Yost, Buffalo Bill, 40.
7. Cody and Cooper, Memories of Buffalo Bill, 196–205.
8. Ibid., 160–164.
9. Goodman and Leonard, Buffalo Bill, 195–196; Yost, Buffalo Bill, 25; William F. Cody, Buffalo Bill’s Life Story (New York: Cosmopolitan Book, 1920), 159.
10. Jay Monaghan, The Great Rascal: The Life and Adventures of Ned Buntline (New York: Bantam Book, 1953), 4.
11. Yost, Buffalo Bill, 45.
12. Cody and Cooper, Memories of Buffalo Bill, 207.
13. Henry E. Davies and Paul A. Hutton, Ten Days on the Plains (Dallas: Southern Methodist University, 1985), 25–26.
14. Cody and Cooper, Memories of Buffalo Bill, 218.
15. Don Russell, The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill Cody (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979), 182.
16. Cody and Cooper, Memories of Buffalo Bill, 221.
17. Ibid., 232.
18. Ibid., 231.
FOUR: Life in the Limelight
1. Helen Cody Wetmore, Last of the Great Scouts (Chicago: Duluth Press Publishing, 1899), 211.
2. Ibid., 211.
3. Buffalo Bill Historical Center McCraken Research Library, MS6, IB, Box 1, Folder 5.
4. Louisa Cody and Courtney Ryley Cooper, Memories of Buffalo Bill (New York: D. Appleton, 1919), 261–264.
5. Julia Cody Goodman and Elizabeth Leonard, Buffalo Bill: King of the Old West (New York: Library Publishers, 1955), 226.
6. Cody v. Cody deposition, District County of Sheridan County, Wyoming, February–April 1904, 29.
7. William F. Cody, The Story of the Wild West: Buffalo Bill’s Autobiography with Campfire Chats (Waynesboro, TN: Historical Publication, 1888), 614.
8. Buffalo Bill Historical Center McCraken Research Library, MS6, IB, Box 1, Folder 5.
9. Cody, The Story of the Wild West: Buffalo Bill’s Autobiography with Campfire Chats, 652; Cody and Cooper, Memories of Buffalo Bill, 251–252.
10. Cody v. Cody deposition, 3.
11. Ibid., 7.
12. Buffalo Bill Historical Center McCraken Research Library, MS6, IB, Box 1, Folder 5.
13. Cody and Cooper, Memories of Buffalo Bill, 267–270.
14. Adolph Regli, The Real Book about Buffalo Bill (New York: Garden City Books, 1952), 182.
15. Cody v. Cody deposition, 34.
16. Cody and Cooper, Memories of Buffalo B
ill, 280.
17. Ibid., 281.
18. Cody v. Cody deposition, 13.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 81.
21. Buffalo Bill Historical Center McCraken Research Library, MS6, IB, Box 1, Folder 5.
22. Cody, William F. Buffalo Bill the Famous Hunter.
23. Letter to Julia from William Cody Albany, New York, March 9, 1882.
24. Buffalo Bill Historical Center McCraken Research Library, MS6, IB, Box 1, Folder 6.
25. North Platte Telegraph, June 7, 1952; Nellie Snyder Yost, Buffalo Bill: His Family, Friends, Fame, Failures, and Fortunes (Chicago: Sage Books, 1979), 43.
26. Cody and Cooper, Memories of Buffalo Bill, 290.
27. Ibid.
28. Letter to Julia and Al from William Cody, Youngstown, Ohio, September 24, 1883.
29. Goodman and Leonard, Buffalo Bill, 237-239.
30. Wetmore, Last of the Great Scouts, 180.
FIVE: The Dear Favorite
1. Letter from William F. Cody to Mollie Moses, McCraken Research Library, MS6, IB, Box 1, 1886.
2. The Evansville (Ind.) Press, June 11, 1927.
3. Nellie Snyder Yost, Buffalo Bill: His Family, Friends, Fame, Failures, and Fortunes (Chicago: Sage Books, 1979), 141.
4. Ibid.
5. The Evansville (Ind.) Press, June 11, 1927.
6. Letter from William F. Cody to Mollie Moses, McCraken Research Library, MS6, IB, Box 1, November 1885.
7. Ibid., April 1886.
8. Ibid., March 1886.
9. Ibid., April 1886.
10. The Evansville (Ind.) Press, June 11, 1927.
11. Letter from William F. Cody to Mollie Moses, McCraken Research Library, MS6, Series IB, Box 1, November 1885.
