Of course horses were important to the Pony Express, and Cody often spoke of his mounts. Years later, he recounted an episode that sums up the glory of his life’s path:
One day, when I had nothing else to do, I saddled up an extra Pony Express horse, and arming myself with a good rifle and a pair of revolvers, struck out for the foothills of Laramie Peak for a bear hunt. Riding carelessly along, and breathing the cool and bracing autumn air which came down from the mountains, I felt as only a man can feel who is roaming over the prairies of the far West, well armed and mounted on a fleet and gallant steed. The perfect freedom he enjoys is in itself a refreshing stimulant to the mind as well as the body. Such indeed were my feelings on this beautiful day, as I rode up the valley of the Horseshoe.
There’s always a point, or several, at which a person passes from merely human to legend. Certainly, for William Cody, acquiring the name Buffalo Bill was elemental. But first he had to earn the name. After his career with the Pony Express, Cody was chief of army scouts for the Fifth Cavalry, “mastering the accomplishment of riding bareback and leaping off and on his horse while the animal was galloping at full speed,” reports Agnes Wright Spring in Buffalo Bill and His Horses. In 1866, he met the woman he would marry, Louisa Frederici, through a runaway horse. “More than once,” wrote his sister Helen Cody Wetmore, “while out for a morning canter, Will had remarked a young woman of attractive face and figure, who sat her horse with the grace of Diana Vernon.” Vernon was a character in the popular book Rob Roy by Walter Scott, and an accomplished rider. “Will desired to establish an acquaintance with the young lady, but as none of his friends knew her, he found it impossible. At length, a chance came. Her bridle-rein broke one morning; there was a runaway, a rescue, and then acquaintance was easy.”
A year later, there came a new form of employment—the railroad was coming through, and he began hunting buffalo to feed construction crews who were building the Kansas Pacific. One of many whom the writer Mari Sandoz referred to as “the portentous men of ’67,” he followed on the heels of prolific hunters such as Wild Bill Hickok and Charley Reynolds. “Cody had killed buffaloes for the railroad the summer before,” Sandoz wrote, “and he knew how it should be done. He hired [a fellow named] Tennis, an experienced plainsman who had hunted the Republican and Smoky Hill region for several years. There were five more men, and each man furnished his own blankets, grub enough for two months, and his arms, as well as two horses, one for packing. Old timers like Tennis would not be hampered. ‘Indians ain’t never slowed down by wheels,’ he said, gnawing off a chew of tobacco, ‘an if you ain’t got no army to stand ’em off you better keep to legs—horses’ or yours.’ ” Cody’s crew would outfit at Fort Hays, heading west with their pack horses and camping on streams. “They didn’t use Cody’s fine showy method of shooting buffaloes from a running horse as he did for visiting celebrities and sportsmen,” Sandoz wrote. “That called for years of practice and would require a large relay of fast horses, day in and out—enough to tempt the best Sioux and Cheyenne raiders. Tennis taught the men how to ride close in to a herd, hobble the horses and creep up against the wind, usually without stampeding the buffaloes until they had several fat young cows down. . . . The buffaloes were not skinned but they were bled like beeves and gutted of all but the heart and liver, ready for the haulers who followed close.”
As the owner of the hunting outfit, Cody presided over the business from a saloon at Hays. Ever mindful of presentation, “he had a special table,” Sandoz wrote, “conspicuously placed to set off his fringed buckskin, the fine belly-tan hat and his flowing yellow hair for the easterners: speculators, railroad promoters, hide buyers, and the sportsmen seeking new experiences and new trophies, as well as the gamblers, gunmen, road agents and the ladies at Drum’s.” On the not-so-frequent occasion that he joined the hunt, he rode a horse named Brigham, after the Mormon leader Brigham Young, purchased from a Ute Indian. Cody often said Brigham was the best horse he ever had for chasing buffalo, referring to him as “King Buffalo Killer.” Riding Brigham, he wiped out buffalo by the hundreds.
Eighteen months after Cody began working for the railroad, he boasted that he had killed 4,280 buffalo. Around this time, people started calling him Buffalo Bill—a shadow version of the names accorded Native Americans for whom the buffalo was an ally, pathway to the Creator, font of rebirth if bearing a coat that was white, source of sustenance and shelter and clothing and warmth, symbol of strength and endurance. On January 11, 1868, the Leavenworth Daily Conservative reported that “Bill Cody and Brigham started on a hunt Saturday afternoon, and came in Tuesday. The result was nineteen buffalo. Bill brought in over four thousand pounds of meat, which he sold for seven cents per pound, making about $100 per day for his time out.”
While Cody’s reputation as an effective hunter was flourishing, a man named William Comstock also became known as Buffalo Bill due to his voracious hunting. To determine “the owner” of the name, they had a contest to see who could kill more buffalo. Here is how Buffalo Bill himself described the grim dance of death and the role of Brigham:
Comstock and I dashed into the herd, followed by the referees. The buffaloes separated; Comstock took the left bunch and I the right. My great forte in killing buffaloes from horseback was to get them circling by riding my horse at the head of the herd, shooting the leaders, thus crowding their followers to the left, till they would finally circle round and round. On this morning the buffaloes were very accommodating, and I soon had them running in a beautiful circle, when I dropped them, thick and fast, until I had killed thirty eight; which finished my run. Comstock began shooting at the rear of the herd, which he was chasing, and they kept straight on. He succeeded, however, in killing twenty-three, while mine lay close together. I had “nursed” my buffaloes, as a billiard player does the balls when he makes a big run.
After eight hours of shooting, Cody won—69 to 46. Then he removed Brigham’s saddle and bridle and rode bareback into the herd. As a parting flourish, he began firing again, now using his breech-loading .50-caliber Springfield, which he called “Lucretia Borgia,” after the famous, beautiful, and deadly woman of the Renaissance. Cody went on to kill an additional thirteen animals with the rifle that has become one of the most well-known firearms in American history.
To understand the blood purge that was unfolding on the Great Plains, we must look past numbers and ammunition categories and nicknames for people and guns. Throughout American history, greed and lust has led to wildlife extermination, including birds whose feathers looked good in hats; beaver and bear for their pelts; wolves and bobcats because they were in the way; and all manner of other creatures disappeared from their lands because we’re bored, we’re hungry, we need to make way for roads and rails and stores, and in our free country we can do what we want. Alas, for the buffalo, it offered not just a beautiful hide, but its end was the Indians’ end, as stated in government policy and as Native Americans such as the Cheyenne chief Yellow Wolf predicted after observing the wasichu as far back as 1846. He had even tried to hire an army herder to teach the Cheyenne to grow the white man’s cattle, according to Mari Sandoz, so the Indians need not die when the buffalo vanished. “His prediction received only laughter,” she noted, “and now he was dead, killed in the Sand Creek fight in 1864”—a most brutal massacre in which a chief named Black Kettle and his tribe were mowed down and mutilated after the chief raised an American flag in a gesture of peace.
And so the assaults unfolded. “The hide boom only lasted a dozen years before the buffalo ran out,” wrote Steven Rinella in American Buffalo. There were probably about fifty million buffalo on the range when the pursuits began, consisting of four great herds—the Republican, the Arkansas, the Texas, and the Yellowstone, but the exact number is not known; the buffalo seemed endless and the idea that an animal could be completely “hunted out” was not known or considered, except to some of those who had lived with the buffalo for generations. “The first big hunting p
ush was in the vicinity of Dodge City,” wrote Rinella.
In 1871, the hide hunters killed so many animals so close to town that residents complained about the stench of rotting carcasses. That winter, a half-million buffalo hides were shipped out of Dodge. The hunters spread out from there, organizing their hunts along the east-flowing rivers of the Great Plains. They hunted out the Republican River, near the Nebraska-Kansas line. Along the south fork of the Platte River, hundreds of buffalo hunters lined fifty miles of riverbank and used fires to keep the buffalo from getting to the water at night. In four daytime periods, they gunned down fifty thousand of the thirst-crazed animals. . . . By 1878, there weren’t enough buffalo on the southern plains to warrant the chase.
Generally the animal parts were left where the bodies were felled, and when stripped down by wind and weather and hungry creatures, all that remained was a pile of bones on the Great Plains, adding to the mountains that were stacking up across the land, later transformed into porcelain as fine bone china or fertilizer for farms, a complete rendering of the far-flung and mighty animal from sovereign creature to cash within a span of two decades. “Many Indians and even some breeds and white men who had lived close to the great herds a long time refused to believe that these multitudes had been all killed off by hunters,” Sandoz wrote. As an old Hudson’s Bay Company employee said at the time, “Man never could have exterminated them; they went back into the earth from whence they came.”
When it was over, “the portentous men of ’67” whose livelihood depended on the lord of the plains were out of a job. Buffalo Bill himself had not spent much time acquiring the name which would make him a superstar. By 1868, the Kansas Pacific suspended work, and his most valuable possession had to go: he raffled off Brigham, who spent the rest of his life on the speed-and-endurance-contest circuit. Soon Bill resumed his scouting duties for the army and it wasn’t long before he met the writer Ned Buntline, who was trolling the West for material. By then, Buffalo Bill had invented himself as a man who had ridden fast and fought Indians and bears and had a way with guns, and even helped the army during the Civil War, but it was Ned Buntline, another adventurer with a flair for promotion, who immortalized Cody.
Buntline was born in 1823 in upstate New York. His original name was Edward Zane Carroll Judson, and somewhere along the way he adopted a Mark Twain–style moniker, which invoked a steamship reference in his surname, and became a writer, like Twain. But he was more like Cody than Twain, and to a degree more like Cody than Cody—minus the looks, charisma, and frontier gravitas—participating in much of the historic turmoil of the era, and surviving an array of cataclysmic events including a hanging and jail time.
Buntline ran away from home as a young teenager and fought in the Seminole wars; then he returned to the East Coast, where he picked up the pen and began spinning tales. In 1845, he launched Ned Buntline’s Own, a magazine that published his sensational stories about pirates, outlaws, and frontier romance. In 1846, he was lynched—and lived to tell that story. It seems that the wandering scribe had fallen in love with the teenage wife of an acquaintance in Nashville. Their affair angered her husband. A duel ensued and Buntline killed the man. As a consequence he was tried for murder. During the trial, his girlfriend’s brother shot and wounded Buntline, who ran into the streets, where an angry mob roped and hoisted him to a tree. But he was cut down by rescuers while still alive and he left town with a new tale—just the kind of thing that would delight patrons of New York bars and gossip salons.
In Manhattan, the notorious fellow soon became embroiled in politics, joining the Know Nothing Party, which among other things advocated for nationwide abstinence; oddly (in that regard), he would later hitch his wagon to Buffalo Bill—a man who was no stranger to firewater and saloons. Buntline also became a key figure in a now bizarre moment that was emblematic of its era, the Shakespeare riots of 1849, which pitted the acting styles of two famous actors, Edwin Forrest (American) against William Charles Macready (British), in violent class warfare involving a serious question of the day: how should the classic playwright Shakespeare be performed in the start-up land of America?
Behind that question was another one, which went to the heart of the national identity via New York: “Shall Americans or English rule this city?” This query was posed on flyers that were nailed to barroom walls all over town, and interested parties were told to attend Macready’s upcoming performance of Hamlet and unleash havoc. Ten thousand people converged, lining the streets and bombarding the theater with rocks and stones, while at the same time engaging in running battles with the police. Inside the theater, the show went on, with Macready finishing his scenes as beatings unfolded just beyond the entrance. Among those taking part in the assault was Ned Buntline, later arrested, tried, and convicted of riot-related crimes, including attempted murder. After his release from jail, he saw the dispute as a way to further increase his notoriety, and also have a hearty answer to the question posed by the theater riots. It was America first and out with the Brits—a statement Cody himself later made more elegantly in a triumphant performance of his Wild West show before Queen Victoria and her court in London, during which he led his mounted procession to Her Majesty’s feet, carrying the American flag, and bowing with his horse.
Amid all of the tumult of the era, Buntline continued writing, penning hundreds of short novels, earning the nickname “Father of the Dime Novel,” and blazing the trail for many others from Owen Wister to Zane Grey to Louis L’Amour. Yet in terms of sheer word count and impact, Buntline’s literary output perhaps remains unmatched considering that such tales influenced many young boys to hit the trail and reinvent themselves where the buffalo roamed. When he himself finally headed westward and met Buffalo Bill, the pair of self-promoters formed a natural partnership. Buntline clearly recognized that there was much to be gained. While the men had a lot in common, Cody possessed certain attributes that Buntline lacked. Both figures may have been larger than life, but Cody was actually large in stature. And his feats were associated with the West, which was different from hanging out with Seminole Indians, or even surviving a lynch mob. Cody had battled those who were portrayed as the demons of the era, recognizable figures of menace in war paint and animal skins and streaming rivers of feathers, facing them down in man-to-man combat, and, like many a great warrior, absorbing some of their characteristics along the way. His life itself was a kind of frontier victory dance, or as Buntline put it, he was “a compendium of clichés.” And thus was a literary alliance born.
After his westward journey, Buntline returned to New York and penned the serial Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men for New York Weekly. The serial included epic tales of buffalo massacres and battles with Indians, and Buntline kept churning out the episodes, capturing the fancy of both high- and lowbrow readers across the land. Capitalizing on the popularity of Cody’s dramatized adventures, Buntline went on to write The Scouts of the Prairie, a play that opened on Broadway in 1872. It starred Buntline and famous scout Texas Jack Omohundro as themselves. It also featured Buffalo Bill, who periodically dropped in to play himself as well, literally “just in from the Indian wars.” The critics loved him, and he appeared in the play for eleven seasons.
In 1876, as Sitting Bull was heading for the arms of the Grandmother after the victory at the Little Bighorn, the nation’s centennial was unfolding in Philadelphia—a grand event that signified the American march. In a moment of great fanfare, President U. S. Grant flipped the switch on the Corliss steam engine, and it has rolled ever since. Across the fairway, another feat of technology was unveiled: the telephone. Giving it a whirl, none other than the emperor of Brazil put his ear to the speaker, and Alexander Graham Bell delivered a message. Of all the things he could have uttered, of all the written texts and narratives that had been passed down through the ages, it was Hamlet’s soliloquy, which he read in its entirety—quite possibly as Sitting Bull was crossing the Medicine Line.
“To be, or not to be,”
Bell intoned, “that is the question . . .
Whether ’tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
the Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to die . . .”
“I am looking to the North for my life,” Sitting Bull told the Canadians in his own echo of the speech, and inventor Bell concluded the moment on the strange new contraption. “My God, it talks,” said the emperor from Brazil.
Meanwhile, another American was hatching a plan that would soon make him a key player in the Wild West saga as headlined by Buffalo Bill. This was Nate Salsbury, actor, entrepreneur, impresario. The world was awash with traveling show folk, and while he was trekking through Australia with his theater company, Salsbury’s Troubadours, he became engaged in a heated argument with a circus agent from Iowa over whether the jockeys of Australia were better than those in other nations. The agent disagreed, and this propelled Salsbury into a patriotic challenge. They argued until the dinner gong sounded, but Salsbury couldn’t shake the question. “Before I went to sleep,” he later wrote, “I had mapped out a show that would be constituted of elements that had never been employed in the history of the show business.” He realized that various circus managers had tried to reproduce the equestrian culture of the Great Plains with professional riders, “but they never had the real thing.” Pondering the idea over the years, Salsbury became convinced that such a presentation needed a famous headliner. The answer: William F. Cody. His reasoning was that Ned Buntline had written Cody into the history of the Great Plains, dripping from the writer’s pen as a hero. Consequently, Cody was known “in the uttermost parts of the earth as a showman.” Yet according to Salsbury, but for the humility of another man, it might have been otherwise. Buntline had first tried to boost Major Frank North (later, a member of Cody’s show), but “being a real hero,” North rejected the idea and, in a fateful act, pointed him toward Cody during a visit to an encampment in the Great Plains. He was asleep under a wagon. “Between story and the stage,” Salsbury wrote, “Cody became a very popular man with a certain class of the public and was notorious enough for my purpose.”
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