Launched in 1883, the Wild West—minus the word “show”—was a touring extravaganza that crystallized the frontier experience through a parade of moments and acts that had come to signify American history. It was cooked up by Cody, along with two partners. He was its figurehead and driving force. Already a major celebrity who was shuttling back and forth between the frontier (where he was known for his exploits) and Broadway (where he reenacted them), he provided employment for cowboys and Indians who were soon to be locked out of time itself. This almost instant theater—born of a history that did not even span a single century—was magic, a mesmerizing spectacle that was lie and truth, fable and news, a thing that inscribed the American story for the ages. But the magic behind the magic was horses, as Cody made a point of saying from the very beginning. Such deference was in the show’s founding literature and programs; the presentation was essentially an equine drama, for without the flying manes and tails of the national saga, the show would not go on. To that end, Cody hired the premier centaurs of the era—Native American warriors who embodied the spirit of freedom with their painted faces and feathers astride fast-stepping painted ponies. By 1884, the Wild West was on its way to becoming the premier frontier spectacle of its time—of all time—and it was only fitting that sooner or later, for many reasons, Sitting Bull would join Buffalo Bill on the mythology road.
But there were others who wanted Sitting Bull for their enterprises as well, all manner of impresarios and clerks of one religion or another seeking Sitting Bull’s services. For instance, officials at the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions in Washington wanted to take Sitting Bull on tour to raise money for the missions. McLaughlin didn’t like the idea, and would have preferred Buffalo Bill’s request, but it was too late in the touring season. Meanwhile, a group of McLaughlin’s friends in St. Paul had been hoping to hire Sitting Bull for a tour of the East. Sitting Bull adopted a hard-line bargaining position, holding out for “big money” and letting McLaughlin know that he was “worth untold fortunes.” Weeks later, the major agreed to Sitting Bull’s demands, which also included bringing along more of his people.
The entourage was called the “Sitting Bull Combination,” and in addition to the chief, there were eight Hunkpapas and two interpreters. On September 2, 1884, they left, embarking on a tour of twenty-five cities between Minneapolis and New York. It wrapped up on October 25, but the turnout everywhere was disappointing. McLaughlin was now convinced that only Buffalo Bill would make such a tour a grand success.
Possibly encouraged by the major, Cody wired the secretary of the interior the following spring. “Sitting Bull has expressed a desire to travel with me,” he said, “and requests me to ask your permission for himself and seven of his tribe. I will treat him well and pay him a good salary. The agent at Fort Yates approves the idea.” The request was refused. According to a response from the commissioner of Indian Affairs, the Indians should be busy planting crops and not “roving through the country exhibiting themselves and visiting places where they would naturally come in contact with evil associates and degrading immoralities.” At the time, such a concern was not necessarily a disingenuous excuse to keep Indians on the reservation. Actors and performers are today’s immortals, but in the nineteenth century “show folk” were disdained in many quarters, viewed as grifters and madmen and crooks, and this attitude launched a circuit of reformers and propelled political careers. The Indian Affairs authorities wanted to quash circuses and keep Native Americans on the straight and narrow; how else could they survive in a culture that had no place for their ways? Of course, such campaigns did not stop people from wanting to see novelty acts and death-defying performers, especially if cowboys and Indians and trick shooters and horses were involved, and later, many Native Americans wanted to join the Wild West and hit the road, earning a fair wage from the wasichu who honored his contracts while replicating a world which was vanishing. Buffalo Bill continued his campaign, getting letters of recommendation from General William Tecumseh Sherman and Colonel Eugene Asa Carr, former foes of Sitting Bull. Finally consent was given.
Two weeks later, on June 6, 1885, self-anointed “Major” John M. Burke, general manager of the Wild West show, arrived at Fort Yates. The show was already on the road, and he wanted to hasten the arrangements. After all, Sitting Bull was the man everyone wanted to see, and the sooner he could join the show, the more money to be made for all concerned. The contract was explained and signed in McLaughlin’s office. Sitting Bull would be paid $50 per week, with a bonus of $125 and two weeks’ salary in advance. Five other Indians would each receive $25 per month. And, agreeing to a request from Sitting Bull, Burke added a clause regarding additional fees for promotional material. “Sitting Bull is to have sole right to sell his own Photographs and Autographs,” it said. By Monday, Burke and the Sitting Bull party headed to the train station in Mandan, Dakota Territory, and boarded the “vapor horse.” They joined up with the show on the following Friday, greeted by throngs as Sitting Bull stepped off the train in a war bonnet with forty eagle feathers and an embroidered buckskin tunic. Coincidentally, this first stop on the chief’s new path was a place whose name was resonant. It was Buffalo, New York, and within hours, Sitting Bull was part of a grand reenactment of a vanished era, hoping for a meeting with the Great Father, who was now Grover Cleveland.
CHAPTER TWO
In Which the Wild West Is Born—and Dies and Is Resurrected from the Bottom of the Mississippi River
In Europe, he was known as “Nature’s Nobleman,” a frontier self-sufficient with the sophistication of Western civilization; in America, he was “King of the Old West”—a title he deserved. He was a hunter, scout, shooter, rider, warrior, teller of tall tales, and man of adventure par excellence. His experiences in city and plain rendered him a kind of wise man, and presidents and generals sought his advice. His friends included Frederic Remington and Mark Twain and Pawnee chiefs; broncbusters who could drink him under the table and might have even been better riders; archdukes from foreign lands and ranch cooks who needed a job. He was open to all, he had no airs. What you saw was what you got, even if what you saw was sometimes a mirage. “He was the simplest of men,” as Annie Oakley would say at the end of his life, “as comfortable with cowboys as with kings.”
Everyone wants in on a success and superstar Buffalo Bill was surrounded by many who claimed to have helped him invent himself, said they had thought of the Wild West show, or suggested that he head the Wild West—or some combination of the foregoing. Like other superstars, and of course like all of us, he had plenty of help along the way. He could not have been Buffalo Bill without it. But it’s not likely that anyone else could have been a repository of so many rivers, at a certain time and a certain place, and reflected those currents back to his comrades in a way that was affirming, uplifting, majestic even. Yet he was hardly a humble man; he was a fountain of charisma and charm with a personality that was much like the frontier that shaped him—big, exciting, dangerous, with a heart that was elusive and wild.
On a personal level, such a man is beyond reach. Many claimed a piece of him, yet few if any had one. Certainly, he had human yearnings, with a family and children and homes that he loved being in when he was there, having built and maintained two substantial ranches in Wyoming and Nebraska. Yet he was a man of huge appetites and the settled life did not fulfill them.
“My restless, roaming spirit,” he later wrote, “would not allow me to remain at home very long.” He was not a solitary traveler and he had a retinue of friends, partners, colleagues, cast members, and a number of women around him at any given time. Some of his female friends were close companions, and many came to his funeral, where his widow may have wondered or perhaps known who these figures were, having not just heard the rumors of his affairs but witnessed his behavior for a long time. A party in Omaha during the winter of 1877 is an illustration of the scrum of female adoration through which Cody’s wife would have to navigate for access. A farewell
celebration for a pre–Wild West theatrical troupe was under way, and “elegantly dressed, excited guests lined the hallway of a refined hotel,” as Chris Enss wrote in The Many Loves of Buffalo Bill. “Waiters in tails and white gloves and carrying trays of champagne-filled glasses weaved around the congregation, as entertainers, businessmen and women, cattle barons, and politicians helped themselves to the abundance of wine and toasted one another’s good fortune.”
When the thirty-one-year-old Cody entered, guests turned their attention to the powerful force in their midst, applauding wildly as he made his way through the crowd. Everything about him was riveting. He was six feet one with dark, curly, shoulder-length hair. He had a mustache and goatee and wore a tuxedo-style waistcoat, vest, and perfectly pressed trousers. He liked the attention, although did not live for it, and that characteristic lent him an even more attractive air, confirming that he was a bad boy, after all, a rogue at heart, headed back to the wilderness as soon as the party was over. For now, everyone wanted to be near him, including “beautiful women in taffeta gowns and lace bonnets” who angled for proximity. When one of them slipped her arm into the crook of his, he did not mind. Soon, Enss continued, the crowd moved into the main suite and Cody regaled them with tales of his life, hitting the high points that had already been and would again be recounted in anecdotes and plays and biographies for as long as the republic endures. As he spoke, his female admirers paid rapt attention, and then his wife, Louisa, entered, not with fanfare and apparently he did not acknowledge her—or if he did, it was not noted by any who made a record of the event. She faded into the crowd as he continued telling his stories, then picked up a glass of wine and chatted here and there with a guest.
Like any longtime partner, she had heard the stories many times; possibly, upon occasion, they added to his allure. Soon, as Enss recounted, the party wound down and people began to leave, almost everyone except the actresses who had surrounded Cody. When it was time for them to go, they kissed him on the cheek, and then, with Louisa watching, he returned the kisses. For the first time that evening, she pushed through the remaining guests and approached her husband. She chastised him as partygoers grew silent and embarrassed under her heated words; after the exchange with Cody, she stormed out. Cody did not follow her, but watched and then said his goodbyes to the few remaining guests, wishing them well. After the party, man and wife headed home to North Platte and their Scout’s Rest Ranch in silence.
They had fallen in love when they were young and much had happened since their wedding celebration on board the steamship Morning Star years earlier, when the handsome man in buckskin and fringe waltzed his bride, “a comely St. Louis girl of French descent” as he once described her, across the dining room floor. “My dear Lulu,” he had written during their courtship, “I know you will forgive me for calling you this—because you will always be Lulu to me, just as I will be glad if I may always be Willie to you.”
Years later, Cody the superstar, the most desirable man and foremost ruffian of the era, recalled the evening in Omaha, expressing puzzlement at his wife’s reaction. “I do not think most wives would have felt a little angry to know and hear her husband in an adjoining room on Sunday morning, drinking beer and kissing theatrical girls of his company,” he wrote. “I think they would have been rather proud of a husband who had six or seven months work with a party of people who were in his employ, to know and feel that they were on a kindly footing.”
Of course, such was not Louisa’s way, nor did she approve of other aspects of Cody’s life, such as his gambling, one more thing that took Cody away, involving one more crowd of friends and hangers-on to get through in order to reach her husband. Whether on the road or at home, there was often something under way—card games, theater, public events, things and people who needed Cody and to which and to whom he felt an obligation. Over the years, it was all too much to keep up with, too much shuffling and reshuffling of the deck, and toward the end of his life, when things began to fall apart, he indulged his impulses to an even greater extent, trying to save things and keep up appearances, investing unwisely, in big ways—gambling well beyond the poker table, in real estate, mines, and other enterprises. By 1913, the Wild West had gone bankrupt and everything—horses, buffalo, cattle, stagecoaches, tipis—was turned over to creditors. Cody’s powerful friends—“the rulers of republics and mighty potentates of foreign lands,” as one newspaper put it—did not come to his aid. In the end, like everyone, he was down to a few good friends, red man and white man alike. A thing that most anguished them was the fact that Cody’s horses would be sold off. They all knew that without the horse, on foot and looking inglorious, they were diminished. Along with the country’s newspapers, they rallied around the sale of Cody’s beloved Isham, a horse he had ridden since it was given to him years earlier. “BUFFALO BILL MUST SACRIFICE FAMOUS HORSE ON AUCTION BLOCK,” screamed the headlines in August of that year. “Isham belongs to the company,” Cody said, holding back tears, as he talked to reporters who had gathered. “We were together for a long time, and we know each other better than brothers. . . . I would not want to even estimate the number of shots that I have fired from Isham’s back. I do know that he has taken as much interest in my exhibitions as I have. And at any time I scored more misses than I was entitled to make, Isham showed his sympathy by his looks and actions. And when I made full scores, he would prance off the grounds like a conquering hero.”
A few days later, an auctioneer took the podium at the Overland Park arena in Denver. As he offered Isham, many in the packed house choked up. He then explained that Cody could not save him due to insufficient means and announced that a man from Nebraska had come “to buy this faithful animal for the purpose of presenting him to his owner.” Carlo Miles, an Indian aide to Buffalo Bill, rode into the arena leading Isham. The crowd fell silent. “Ten dollars,” the Nebraska man called, opening the bidding.
“Twenty dollars,” called the Indian. Unbeknownst to Cody, each bidder was planning to give Isham back to him, but none knew that each was bidding for the same reason. Other bids came quickly, almost simultaneously—twenty-five dollars, thirty-five, fifty. Carlo Miles called out, “Seventy-five dollars.” “Eighty dollars,” called someone else, then a hundred dollars from the man from Nebraska—Colonel C. J. Bills as it turned out, an old friend who had fought with Cody in the Indian wars. “I would sooner lose my life than see Buffalo Bill lose that white horse,” he had told a reporter before the sale. “It doesn’t make any difference who bids, or how many want the horse. I am going to buy it and the next minute turn it over to my old friend. I know how he loves the animal, and I know how I love Colonel Cody. It would hurt me even worse than it would him to see the horse fall into the hands of others.”
Miles upped the bid to $110. And so the bidding continued, and finally Miles started to cry, not having received word as to what Colonel Bills was planning and concerned because he couldn’t go much higher than the current bid of $150. “If the man who buys that horse don’t give him back to Colonel Cody, I’ll steal the horse tonight and take it to him,” he said, and he swore an oath. Isham went to Bills, and then Bills turned him over to Cy Compton, a Wild West cowboy who had cared for the horse for years. Compton sat down and wept. The show had folded but its lifeblood—horse and rider—had been preserved. As for Buffalo Bill, there is no mention of him in coverage of the auction. Most likely he had decided not to attend.
What he made of this matter, or many other matters involving his inner workings, we do not know. The fact that he teared up while talking to reporters about the possible loss of Isham tells us much. When another of his favorite horses, Charlie Joe, fell ill at sea upon return from the Wild West’s triumphant presentation to Queen Victoria and her court, Cody was bereft. He did everything he could to try to save the ailing steed, spending hours with him belowdecks as Charlie continued to falter. When the horse died, the crew took him to the main deck, wrapped him in a canvas shroud, and covered him with an
American flag. He lay in state for a day, and everyone recounted their stories of the horse. When it was time, Cody stood alone near Charlie and uttered a prayer. “Old fellow, your journeys are over . . . obedient to my call, gladly you bore your burden on. . . . Willing speed, tireless courage . . . you have never failed me. Ah Charlie, old fellow, I have had many friends, but few of whom I could say that. . . . I loved you as you loved me. Men tell me you have no soul; but if there is a heaven and scouts can enter there, I’ll wait at the gate for you, old friend.”
At eight o’clock that evening, candles were lit and with all hands and members of the Wild West assembled, the band played “Auld Lang Syne.” Charlie was lowered into the depths.
There is nothing sadder than the cowboy who fights off tears, the frontiersman who is overcome by the thing he cannot bear. But when it came to people, Cody’s reminscences or writings or statements are not as fraught. After all, he was often billed as the King of the Old West, and his best friend was his trusty and beloved steed—of which he had many over the years. While he was certainly more talkative than the stereotypical cowboy who said only what was needed, going way beyond “Yes, ma’am” and “No, ma’am” and “Wait for me,” behind his urge to tell tales and engage an audience, he was true to the form. There was not much second-guessing or self-doubt or hints of pain or regret—except within letters to women he was courting or loved or with whom he was infatuated, such as Annie Oakley, who starred in his show for many years. Some of his comments to reporters about Sitting Bull and Native Americans also laid bare pangs of remorse and occasionally something bordering on outrage, but he could also make disparaging remarks about them that were indicative of the era.
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