by David Fisher
In addition to the Indian attack on the Deadwood stage—and Cody actually had purchased the old Deadwood stage for this scene—the show included, among many other entertainments, pioneers defending their homestead against an Indian attack; a stage or train robbery; Indians attacking a wagon train; races between Pony Express riders and between an Indian on foot and a pony; buffalo hunting; displays of roping and riding, bulldogging and sharpshooting; and even a sad reenactment of General Custer’s Last Stand. Buffalo Bill and his cast of hundreds of “authentic Red Indians” brought the Old West to life for tens of thousands of people and, in so doing, made himself the most famous American in the whole world.
The attempted robbery of the original Deadwood stage was a highlight of the show, and Cody would invite local dignitaries to participate as passengers.
While most people loved the show, few of them ever wondered how accurate it was—or whether Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley had ever played a real role in the Old West. Were those two legendary figures true survivors of a time gone by, or were they simply entertainers earning a fine living from the exploitation of a myth? Ironically, Buffalo Bill Cody is probably remembered more for the amazing shows he created than for his very real accomplishments riding the ranges of the West.
After a parade down Fifth Avenue, the Wild West Show settled into Madison Square Garden for the winter of 1886. As more than five thousand spectators—including General Sherman—watched on opening night, “One big bull elk forgot his cue, [and] sauntered slowly down the arena, inspecting the pretty girls in the boxes with critical stares and gazing at the rest of the spectators in a tired way.”
William Cody was born in rural Iowa in 1846 to educated parents. When he was seven years old, Isaac and Mary Ann Cody sold their farm and moved to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, arriving in the middle of the raging debate over slavery. In that part of the state, Isaac Cody’s antislavery sentiments were not popular, and eventually he was stabbed while giving an impassioned speech. He died a few years later while trying to bring antislavery settlers from Ohio into the state, leaving his family close to ruin. To support them, young Bill Cody took an assortment of jobs, including “boy extra” on wagon trains, teamster, bull whacker on cattle drives, and, finally, army scout. How he developed his renowned tracking and shooting skills isn’t known.
As he wrote in his autobiography, Buffalo Bill’s Own Story, his first encounter with Indians occurred while he was scouting for the army. Soldiers were trying to quash a threatened Mormon rebellion in Salt Lake City. “Presently the moon rose,” he wrote, “dead ahead of me; and painted boldly across its face was the figure of an Indian. He wore this war-bonnet of the Sioux, at his shoulder was a rifle pointed at someone in the river-bottom 30 feet below; in another second he would drop one of my friends. I raised my old muzzle-loader and fired. The figure collapsed, tumbled down the bank and landed with a splash in the water…. So began my career as an Indian fighter.”
Almost as if in preparation for the spectacular shows he would eventually produce, Cody had a range of real-life experiences in most of the situations his performers would later replicate. When out trapping with a friend, he had slipped and broken his leg; his friend left to get help to bring him home, and Cody was discovered by a band of Indians, who spared his life only because he was just a “papoose,” as he heard them describe him, and because he had previously met their leader, Chief Rain-in-the-Face. On another hunt, he ran across a band of murderous outlaws and was forced to shoot one of them to make his escape.
Bill Cody was only thirteen years old when he headed west to mine for gold but instead signed on with the Pony Express. After building and tending stations, he became one of the youngest riders on that trail—or, as he later would portray it, a lone figure dashing across the stormy prairies carrying the mail! In his autobiography, he claimed to have made the longest Pony Express journey ever, 322 miles round-trip. He also recalled, “Being jumped by a band of Sioux Indians … but it fortunately happened I was mounted on the fleetest horse belonging to the Express company…. Being cut off from retreat back to Horse Shoe, I put spurs to my horse, and lying flat on his back, kept straight for Sweetwater.”
It was while working as a rider that he began to gain fame as an Indian fighter. At one point, the Indians had become so troublesome that all service had to stop, so Cody joined Wild Bill Hickok and twenty or more other men to look for a horse herd that had been stolen. They found the Indians, who had “never before been followed into their own country by white men,” camped by a river. Led by Hickok, they attacked, capturing not just their own horses but more than a hundred Indian ponies.
How many of these tales told by Cody in his bestselling autobiography are accurate will never be known, because so much is impossible to verify. But when it was originally published in 1879, his biographers believed that most of it was true, and none of the people he depicted ever contradicted his version of events.
At the beginning of the Civil War, he rode with Chandler’s Jayhawkers, an abolitionist militia that he joined happily to “retaliate upon the Missourians for the brutal manner in which they had treated and robbed my family.” He awoke one day and found himself enlisted in the Seventh Kansas Cavalry, although he claimed no memory of exactly how that happened. His most notable service was acting as a courier for Hickok, who was operating as a spy within the Confederate army, gathering important intelligence that affected the battles in Missouri.
After the war, Bill Cody continued scouting for the army, serving in ’67 as a guide for Brevet Major General George Custer, and later fighting the Plains tribes himself in many death-defying encounters. During this tour of duty, he took part in sixteen battles, including the 1869 fight against the Cheyennes at Summit Springs, Colorado. He fancied himself an expert Indian fighter, and in his autobiography he sometimes described braves he had killed as “good Indians.” The irony of that statement would be evident several years later. As his fame spread on the Plains, the army assigned him to work with Custer, guiding wealthy dignitaries on western hunting expeditions, mostly Europeans such as Grand Duke Alexis of Russia, who wanted the excitement of seeing a real wild Indian. For his service, in 1872 he became one of only four civilian scouts ever awarded the Medal of Honor, which, although not yet the rarely awarded medal it would become, was even then held in great esteem and given only to those who served with honor and valor.
In the late 1860s, he took up a challenge from a renowned scout and buffalo hunter named Billy Comstock to see which of them could kill the most buffalo in eight hours. This was another area of his expertise: In addition to scouting, he earned his living supplying buffalo to feed the crews building the Kansas Pacific Railway—a lot of buffalo. He once claimed he’d killed 4,280 head in seventeen months. The wager with Comstock was five hundred dollars. More than a hundred spectators turned out to see the contest. Using Lucretia, as he affectionately named his breech-loading Springfield rifle, he killed 69 to Comstock’s 46 and, in addition to winning the bet, became known from that day forward as the one and only Buffalo Bill.
By the time he had acquired that nickname, a young woman named Phoebe Ann Cates was already astounding people with her uncanny marksmanship. Born in a rural Ohio cabin in 1860, she often said, “I was eight years old when I made my first shot,” describing shooting a squirrel in the head to preserve its meat for the stew pot. At the time, ladies of any age were not known for their marksmanship; in fact, most of them didn’t even shoot guns. Although “Annie” apparently could perform all the standard “womanly” tasks, such as cooking, sewing, and embroidering, she also could outshoot pretty much any man. As a teenager, she supported her family by selling game she had hunted and trapped to local hotels and restaurants, and she claimed she had earned enough to pay off the mortgage on the family farm.
While she was still a very young woman, one of her regular customers, enterprising Cincinnati hotel owner Jack Frost, arranged a one-hundred-dollar betting match between Frank E. Butler,
the star and owner of the Baughman & Butler traveling marksmen show, and five-foot-tall Annie Cates. Through twenty-four rounds of live-bird trapshooting, they matched each other shot for shot, but after he missed his twenty-fifth shot, she successfully hit the bird and won the match. Rather than being upset about losing to a young girl, Frank Butler fell in love with her. Within a year, she had become the star of Butler’s show and, at some point soon after, also became his wife. Their marriage lasted fifty years. It’s generally accepted that she adopted the name Oakley from the Cincinnati neighborhood in which they briefly lived.
Annie Oakley at work in 1892
Frank Butler understood the appeal of a small, lovely, and very feminine woman who could outshoot any he-man who challenged her, and he essentially retired to manage her career. Billing her as “Little Sure Shot,” he promoted her as the sharpest shooter in the world, “the peerless wing and rifle shot”—and routinely risked his life to prove it: Holding a lit cigarette between his lips, he would let her shoot it out of his mouth. Using a rifle, a shotgun, and a handgun, she could extinguish a candle at thirty paces, split a playing card facing her sideways from ninety feet away, hit dimes tossed into the air, and riddle dropped playing cards with numerous shots before they hit the ground.
For several years, they toured the new vaudeville circuit in an act that included their dog, who sat patiently and still and allowed Annie to shoot an apple off his head. In 1885, she accepted an offer to join the new Buffalo Bill’s Wild West extravaganza, and within a year had become the second most popular performer in the show, second only to Buffalo Bill himself.
Although popular fiction plots of the day often turned on fortuitous and unexpected meetings, such was exactly the case when Bill Cody met Edward Judson in 1869. Cody had been ordered to scout for an expedition hunting a band of Sioux that had attacked Union Pacific workers near O’Fallon’s Station in Nebraska and was told Judson would be riding along. Judson turned out to be an extraordinarily eccentric character, at the time becoming quite famous under the pseudonym Ned Buntline. Buntline was a writer, journalist, and publicist, a man known for delivering passionate temperance lectures—after which he would often go out and celebrate by getting drunk. It was Buntline who introduced Bill Cody to the art of selling the West and introduced Buffalo Bill to the world. Buntline understood that Americans were thrilled by the hair-raising stories of cowboys and Indians in the Old West and set out to profit from it. After meeting Cody and hearing his stories, Buntline wrote an adventure serial for Street and Smith’s New York Weekly entitled “Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men.” The popularity of that story convinced Buntline to write and publish the first of dozens of dime novels featuring Cody’s exploits: Buffalo Bill, The Scouts of the Plains; or, Red Deviltry as It Is. These action-packed adventure stories of a heroic Buffalo Bill defending his life and his honor against the most evil villains of the West became tremendously popular, turning Cody into a national hero. Taking advantage of this fame, Buntline convinced Cody to star in a rousing play he had written and was producing entitled The Scouts of the Plains. “There’s money in it,” Cody reported being told by Buntline, “and you will prove a big card, as your character is a novelty on stage.”
Ned Buntline’s 1872 show set the stage for the creation of the western myth. Although the Chicago Times called it a “combination of incongruous drama, execrable acting, renowned performers, mixed audience, intolerable stench, scalping, blood and thunder,” audiences loved it.
Cody decided, “A fortune is what we’re after, and we’ll at least give the wheel a turn or two to see what luck we have.” Starring Cody, Texas Jack Omohundro, a young Italian actress playing an Indian maiden, and eventually Wild Bill Hickok, the play toured eastern cities for years. As Cody described it, “[T]here were between forty and fifty ‘supers’ dressed as Indians…. We blazed away at each other with blank cartridges … We would kill them all off in one act, but they would come up again ready for business in the next.”
What the play lacked in dramatic conventions, it made up for in exuberance. “An extraordinary production,” wrote the Boston Journal, “with more wild Indians, scalping knives and gun powder to the square inch than any drama ever before heard of.” The Norfolk Journal reported that “one of the largest audiences ever assembled within [Opera House] walls” saw “the crowning piece of the night … which excited juveniles to the wildest demonstrations of delight … whenever Texas Jack and Buffalo Bill appeared on stage the audience cheered …”
Buffalo Bill was already America’s first matinee idol when he added to his legend by killing Cheyenne chief Yellow Hair and claiming, “The first scalp for Custer!”
A different type of entertainment apparently was taking place backstage as men accustomed to a rougher type of living adjusted to show business. There were stories of all-night card games, brawls, wrecked furniture, and the occasional arrest. But for Cody, the lines between reality and theater truly became blurred when the army called him into service to scout for the Fifth Cavalry in the Sioux Wars after his friend, Colonel George Custer, was killed and his troops massacred at Little Bighorn.
A legendary story Bill Cody told in his memoirs perfectly illustrated how he straddled the line between real life and entertainment: By mid-July 1876, the Fifth Cavalry had been chasing the Cheyennes for more than a week, intent on avenging Custer’s death. When Cody awoke on the morning of July 17, he sensed there would be a fight that day. So he dressed for the battle carefully, putting on the scouting costume he wore in Buntline’s show: a red silk shirt with billowing sleeves and decorative silver buttons, flared black pants with gold cross braiding embroidered on the thighs and held in place by a broad leather belt with a large rectangular metal buckle, a well-worn leather vest, comfortable boots, and a sombrero-like brown hat with the brim pushed up in front.
At daybreak, the Fifth Cavalry finally spotted the Cheyennes, who were getting ready to attack two couriers. Cody led fifteen men to cut them off. Then the Indian chief, who later was identified as Yellow Hair, “sang out to me, in his own tongue, ‘I know you Pa-he-haska; if you want to fight, come ahead and fight me.’” They raced toward each other; the chief’s shot missed, but Cody’s shot struck the Indian’s horse and it went down. An instant later, Cody’s horse stepped in a gopher hole and stumbled. Cody fell off but scrambled to his feet; he was about twenty paces from the chief. They fired again: “My usual luck did not desert me on this occasion, for his bullet missed me, while mine struck him in the breast.” Cody was on top of him in an instant: “Jerking his war bonnet off, I scientifically scalped him in about five seconds…. I swung the Indian chieftain’s top-knot and bonnet in the air and shouted—'The first scalp for Custer!’”
How much of what he wrote was accurate and how much was entertainment has been debated almost since that time, although there is no doubt that Chief Yellow Hair was killed in that battle. What also became clear is that Buffalo Bill Cody had successfully made the transition from performance to performer. And when the two overlapped, it was even better. Naturally, when Cody returned to the stage at the end of that campaign, this scene was incorporated into a show entitled Buffalo Bill’s First Scalp for Custer. That show, as Cody admitted, “[a]fforded us ample opportunity to give a noisy, rattling, gunpowder entertainment, and to present a succession of scenes in the late Indian war.”
For Cody, this brought a whole new meaning to the western concept of being “on a stage.” After becoming comfortable in front of audiences, Cody struck off on his own, organizing “dramatic combinations,” as he referred to them, while also appearing on the vaudeville circuit to spread the legend of Buffalo Bill. These shows often introduced genuine frontier characters such as Wild Bill Hickok to the stage, as well as real Indians in their actual war bonnets, fancy shooting and roping, and even some horse tricks. There was no shortage anywhere in the country of people wanting to experience even a small taste of Old West authenticity, and his stage shows proved very successful.<
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In 1883, Buffalo Bill decided to create a new type of entertainment, a Wild West show that would be bigger and more action-packed than anything anyone had previously done. As he later remembered, “I conceived the idea of organizing a large company of Indians, cowboys, Mexican vaqueros, famous riders and expert lasso throwers, with accessories of stage coach, emigrant wagons, bucking horses and a herd of buffalos, with which to give a realistic entertainment of wild life on the plains.” It would be more like a circus than a play, performed outdoors with many individual scenes and exhibitions rather than following a single story line. It was to be a highly stylized dramatization of the settling of the West.
The first such extravaganza was presented as part of a Fourth of July celebration in North Platte, Nebraska, entitled Wild West, Rocky Mountain and Prairie Exhibition. The success of that event led him to create Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. The three-hour-long show thrilled audiences, and Cody proved to be quite a creative showman. He tried for three years to hire his former adversary, the great Sioux chief Sitting Bull. Initially the government refused to allow it, insisting that the Sioux stay on the Pine Ridge reservation rather than “visiting places where they would naturally come in contact with evil associates and degrading immoralities.” Finally, the secretary of the interior approved the request in 1885. Less than a decade after defeating Custer at Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull would endure being taunted and booed by the same audiences that also paid him well to sign photographs of himself afterward.
That was the same year that Annie Oakley joined the troupe, performing tricks such as sighting a target in a mirror and shooting over her shoulder. Although by this time there were other female sharpshooters, Annie’s conservative and feminine style set her apart. Women loved watching her best men in contests—and do so in a very ladylike fashion.
