This Old Bill

by Loren D. Estleman

  The procession up the mountain is long, jammed with automobiles like black iron beetles with ticking engines and the tall, square rocking boxes of horse-drawn circus wagons. It isn't the first for Cody. In the bitter January cold a similar parade accompanied the casket from the rotunda of the state capitol (where thousands had filed past the showman's bier to the litany of a silk-hatted master of ceremonies: "Step lively, folks; big crowd behind") to the lodge, led by a squadron of infantry, a regimental band, and an aging white horse identified by the newspaper as McKinley, Cody's last mount. But it wasn't McKinley, just an old horse procured from a local stable at the last minute. This pilgrimage, like the first, includes Boy Scouts in uniform and wearing the yellow neckerchief inspired by Buffalo Bill, brothers of the deceased's own Elks' Lodge, dozing Civil War veterans and Spanish-American War volunteers with graying hair and paunches, Shriners, and members of the Showman's League of America among the estimated twenty-five thousand mourners, some of whom as children rooted for Buffalo Bill in his carefully choreographed duel with Yellow Hand and race to foil the robbers of the Deadwood coach. Tammen's publicists have been advertising the event for days and the reading public has not disappointed them.

  In the spring cool of the shaded mountain, the family and friends of the deceased repair to their folding chairs and campstools while the soldiers in dress khaki are barked through precision maneuvers and the onlookers scramble for positions that will enable them to see into the tent and the waiting vault—an activity that in itself takes more than an hour despite the organizational abilities of circus veterans supervising the operation. The band plays Custer's "Garry Owen," that whirling, crashing mock march that spelled doom for Black Kettle at the Washita and saw the bold 7th off on its fateful trek to the valley of the Little Big Horn. A quartet sings Cody's favorite hymn, "Tenting Tonight on the Old Camp Ground." Dignitaries he didn't know deliver speeches, one of them a call to arms against Germany in the European war.

  As the hours wear on, spectators who have brought flasks and bottles to the obsequies sneak off to relieve bursting bladders into the undergrowth. The ammonia smell sparks a small flurry of lifted handkerchiefs and hurried exits among the women. Some of the males admire the black-netted ankles of the six women dressed in elegant mourning weeping on campstools by the casket; Cody's old girlfriends, come to have their pictures taken and their names mentioned in the press. Louisa Cody, seated in the front row, never looks their way.

  The final speech sputters to a patriotic close. The first line of infantrymen takes two steps forward. Their rifles rattle. Eleven shots crackle against the wall of the Rockies. The wind snatches away the blue smoke.

  "Brigadier General William F. Cody, Buffalo Bill, rests in a tomb splendid," writes the correspondent for the Denver Post that day. "Human hands today placed him on the crest of Lookout Mountain, on the dividing line between the wild and the tame…"

  I was stuck between floors once on the perpendicular railway.

  "…There in the light of the setting sun are the memories of his achievements."

  Write it up that way then. Cody killed the chief.

  "There to the east, where the first gray dawn sets the wheels of commerce in motion; there lies a city, a dream come true! . . ."

  We're laying out a city on the west bank of Big Creek and reserving corner lots for ourselves. I figure if we sell them for two fifty each we'll be sitting on two hundred and fifty thousand easy.

  ". . . The 25,000 citizens who saw them press the earth over the sleeping form of Pahaska, the trailblazer, this afternoon were touched by the romance, the thrill of it all. . . ."

  If you want a fellow to fit that bill, you'll find him over there under that wagon.

  "… No President could have been more honored by the presence of thousands. . ."

  "Your mother is convinced you'll be President someday… .

  "… Pahaska, farewell!"

  By nightfall the last mourner has left, leaving behind an uneven pavement of paper, cigar butts, broken glass, and trampled plants. The tent is folded away and returned to the caretaker's shed in the churchyard from which it was borrowed, the folding chairs and stools to Denver Lodge No. 17, BPOE. Tomorrow fresh sod will be laid on the mound of raw earth covering the vault. Deer and rabbits come around to inspect the invasion site, lick the candy wrappers, and sniff at the acrid stuff in the discarded bottles. Then they too depart.

  Encouraged by its proprietors, the Post speculates what sort of inscription should be placed on the monument to be erected over the tomb.

  "'Property of H. H. Tammen,'" suggests a wag from the Contests section.

  BOOK THREE

  1883-1917

  THE COLONEL

  "I have been spreading it ever since."

  —William F. Cody, 1898

  Chapter Eleven

  Posters large enough to cover pastures and small enough to fold and put in a pocket, plastered on barns and silos and telegraph poles and the brick walls of banks, splashing yellow and red everywhere and lending town and country the look of false autumn.

  THE ONLY REAL NOVELTY OF THE CENTURY! THE AMUSEMENT TRIUMPH OF THE AGE. THE ROMANTIC WEST BROUGHT EAST IN REALITY. EVERYTHING GENUINE.. A YEAR'S VISIT WEST IN THREE HOURS. ACTUAL SCENES IN THE NATION'S PROGRESS TO DELIGHT, PLEASE, GRATIFY, CHAIN, AND INTEREST THE VISITOR... AN EQUINE DRAMATIC EXPOSITION ON GRASS OR UNDER CANVAS OF THE ADVANTAGES OF FRONTIERSMEN AND COWBOYS! NO GILDING, NO HUMBUG, NO FREAKS.

  At the bottom an endorsement, signed in facsimile by the Honorable William F. Cody: "A true rescript of life on the frontier as I know it to be, and which no fictitious pen can describe."

  In Chicago the first Sunday, buggies and traps funneled into the streets bordering the West Side Driving Park, disgorging forty thousand eager spectators between noon and four o'clock, ladies' flowered hats blossoming in a field of derbies. Boys in pomade and knickers chased squealing girls in ribbons and pinafores between and around adult legs. Pickpockets, scalpers, and peddlers worked their way through the press at the gates, the last hawking souvenir tomahawks and programs and copies of Buffalo Bill's autobiography. Uniformed city policemen briefed by Nate Salsbury confiscated the wares of peddlers not sanctioned by the exhibition and ran them off with their nightsticks. The shrill of their whistles splintered the Sabbath peace.

  The week before the opening had been an organized man's nightmare, the final few hectic moments before a theater curtain's rise multiplied by a thousand and spread out over days. Salsbury had listened to, and politely refused, a stem request by a pince-nez-wearing delegate from the Chicago Reform Alliance to abandon the Sunday performances. The fellow had huffed from there directly to the office of Mayor Carter Harrison, who explained that if he withdrew the Wild West's license, he would also have to close every theater in the city on Sunday. An impatient buffalo bull had battered its way through the side of a cattle car in the railroad yard before it could be unloaded, breaking its neck and forcing one of the cowboys Will had hired to drive the livestock to shoot it. When Alliance members picketed the entrances to the park, Con Groner, a former cowboy and North Platte sheriff with a reputation for settling points with gunplay, had suggested "busting a few caps," but Salsbury had dispersed the protesters by handing out free passes to the weekday performances.

  For this and other reasons, not the least of which was his partner's propensity to hire old pards for jobs wholly unsuited to them—one, Bob Haslam, a friend from Pony Express days, had set the company back hundreds of dollars when he rented an empty lot in New Orleans that quickly became a lake under the heavy rains and forced Will to lease the race track for the exhibition—Salsbury had assumed veto power over all the frontiersman's personnel decisions. The dapper manager recalled Will's story of how he had come to engage Bronco Bill Irving's services:

  "Where were you born?" he had asked the cowboy.

  "Near Kit Bullard's mill, on Big Pigeon."

  "Religious parents, I suppose?"

  "Yes."
/>   "What is your denomination?"

  "My what?"

  "Your denomination."

  "Er, Smith & Wesson."

  The anecdote, which seldom failed to elicit a chuckle from listeners, made Salsbury shudder. He had offered his imagination and ability to conjure money out of tight purses to Will at the end of his first two disastrous seasons, when he had found the star dead drunk in a plug hat and thousands of dollars in debt, with a written provision that Will would avoid liquor on the job. The scout, scratching his flamboyant signature across the bottom, had muttered, "I put my mark to a paper like this when I was twelve." But he had promised to stop drinking and assured Salsbury: "Your pard will be himself, and on deck all the time." The show's new manager had said something flattering and folded away the pledge in his wallet.

  He had begun by pruning deadwood. His experience as a comic in vaudeville had taught him that most people in the show business were drawn there less by a need to display their minimal talents than by the prospect of easy money; very little dross escaped his first glance and none at all the second. The only problem among those who hung on Will's buckskins was where to start.

  Arizona John Burke—Salsbury could never quite bring himself to call the fat blowhard "Major"—was an exception to the rule, a canny publicist who was quick to recognize the same virtue in the men he chose to assist him in the massively important enterprise of informing people of the show's existence. He had hired Prentiss Ingraham at the start of the new season on the basis of his hundreds of dime novels, a third of which dealt with Buffalo Bill. The novelist, a soft-spoken Briton who unlike his employer seldom talked about himself, had once written thirty-five thousand words in one eighteen-hour period while a boy kept him supplied with freshly dipped pens. His prose filled the columns of every local newspaper for weeks before the Wild West's scheduled appearance, and his storytelling talent found its way into all the souvenir pamphlets sold in the grandstand during performances. With his efforts and those of an uninhibited staff of poster artists whose bold, sweeping reds and brilliant yellows affixed hordes of painted savages and valiant frontiersmen to every vertical surface for miles around, a person had to be blind and friendless not to know that America's National Entertainment was coming to town.

  Will led the grand entry into the arena, an arresting figure in white Stetson, bleached doeskins, and mirror-finish black boots to his knees, astride Old Charlie, a magnificent half-bred Kentucky stallion on which he had once ridden a hundred miles in nine hours and forty-five minutes on a bet that he could not do it in ten. Behind him, high-stepping to the strains of "The Girl I Left Behind Me" from musicians wearing the uniform of Custer's regimental band, rode the Indians in feathers and paint, scouts in buckskin, John Nelson driving the Deadwood coach, Bronco Bill, "Cowboy King" Buck Taylor, ex-Sheriff Con Groner, young Johnny Baker, Frank Butler and Annie Oakley, and dozens of supers, from vaqueros in black and silver mounted on swift little mustangs to cowboys in Stetsons and woolly chaps straddling big American studs. The procession circled inside the bleachers while the applause swelled and receded and then peaked, threatening to drown the flatulent tubas and insolent flutes, the famous leader sweeping off his big hat as if to scoop up the noise for later consumption.

  The applause slid down behind the last rider to exit and died on a crackle. An island of silence, and then a small young woman in a pleated skirt and hat with a curled brim entered with twin Colts on her hips, followed by a young man in a Western-cut suit carrying a rifle and a leather pouch. From the pouch he drew a blue glass ball, and after a walk around the arena, holding it aloft for all to see, he looked at the woman and launched the sphere underhand into the air. She drew one of the Colts, cocking it in the same motion, took aim quickly, and fired just as the ball reached the top of its trajectory. It burst glitteringly. Polite applause started, only to be lost under more gunfire as two more balls were launched, then three, then five. When one revolver was empty she holstered it and drew its mate without missing a beat or a target. Sunlight twinkled on fine blue dust drifting down.

  Gradually, as the audience grew accustomed to the reports, Annie increased the charges and then switched to the rifle. As her range lengthened and the feats crowded incredible, the applause became sincere, and when she split a playing card at forty paces with her back to the target and a hand mirror in front of her, the cheers nudged the white clouds sliding overhead and the seats swayed under pounding feet. She joined hands with Butler and curtsied, her accolade buffeting her ears like a hot wind. Will, watching from behind the bleachers, shouted to cotton-bearded John Nelson, mounting the Deadwood coach, that he'd heaps rather send him into a real Cheyenne massacre than ask him to follow Little Missy.

  But the Indian attack on the coach had the audience rooting wildly for the driver with his exploding whip and powerful lungs and its valiant defender firing blanks from a rifle at the pursuing band. When the rocking vehicle glowed with red fire, suggesting that its occupants were roasting alive, there was the kind of eerie stillness that sets in only when twenty thousand tongues are paralyzed. At this point Arizona John scanned the rapt faces closely. A woman had collapsed from the suspense at Louisville, but he hadn't learned about it until it was too late to interview her, and he was loath to pass up the opportunity a second time. But Chicago bred stouter stock; when the scouts arrived to drive away the savages and rescue the passengers, relieving the tension, he said, "Shit," and went back into a huddle with Prentiss Ingraham over a new biography they were concocting for Annie Oakley. With the exception of Buffalo Bill's, the publicist had yet to find a life that wouldn't benefit from a little extra juice.

  "Whoop 'er up there, Jim!" urged the tough West Siders, laughing at the Pawnee war dance. "Dosey do!"

  Said Salsbury, "They're not impressed."

  Will grunted. "I'd admire to see how loud they'd laugh when one of those painted faces stuck itself through their wagon sheet some night on the South Platte."

  Johnny Baker's marksmanship, brought along by Will and remarkable for a lad, sparked appreciative applause, but the crowd had seen far more spectacular stunts performed by a mere girl and looked to their programs for the next act. The pageant showing life in an Indian camp gave them a chance to rest eardrums ringing with gunfire. Then a buffalo hunt, the braves donning robes and horns to infiltrate the herd, then yelping and shrieking and turning the great dumb beasts with their lances until they had a proper surround, the earth growling under the drumming hoofs before they turned them over to trained cowboys who drove them out of the arena toward the corrals.

  The climax, recreating Buffalo Bill's desperate duel with Yellow Hand, was played out in tense pantomime, broken only by grunts and blows as the star and a formidable Cheyenne from the Powder River reservation lunged at each other and grappled, their wicked knives catching the sun. The collective sigh that went up when Will pretended to thrust his blade into the Indian's rib cage and his opponent gasped and buckled was like a sudden break in the weather. Then he bent over the body of his vanquished foe, and as he came up with the victim's warbonnet in one hand and his "scalp" in the other, the band jumped in with a victory sting that blew the audience to its feet, beating palms and shouting.

  Again the grand parade, Indians and cavalrymen who had died in the arena resurrecting themselves to join their fellow performers. At last the star claimed the grounds alone for a bellowed "Hail and farewell!" and with a final wave of his hat cantered back the way he had come under a brassy canopy thrown up by the band.

  As the spectators filed out to take advantage of the souvenir items for sale in the smaller tents, Salsbury moved among them smoking a cigar and inhaling superlatives. But for a moderate nod to the vices, this pastime was his main diversion, and his wife's one rival. On this occasion he found it more satisfying than at any other entertainment with which he had been involved, and almost as satisfying as the sound of Jule Keene counting the take in the treasury tent.

  Between shows Will and Arizona John Bur
ke invited the Chicago press to a beef barbecue in the arena. The derbied journalists squatted on the ground with the Indians and walked around gnawing great black greasy hunks in their fingers while the sweet aroma mingled with the manure stench that overlay the exhibition grounds and Bronco Bill rode a steer borrowed from the Union Stock Yards between the grandstands, whooping and sending reporters diving for cover under the seats and trestle tables holding up champagne buckets and kegs of foaming beer.

  "Make certain you write 'Buffalo Bill's Wild West,' the whole name at all times," a cigar-chomping Burke advised a pale young man with a pubic moustache writing furiously in a pad. "It's copyrighted. The Wild West has gone generic and fallen in with some hard company."

  "Speaking of Doc Carver," said Will, approaching with his entourage and Nate Salsbury, "I hear the Evil Spirit of the Plains is touring the Southeast, mostly on borrowed steam from our brief partnership."

  "That peacock." Salsbury, who in Eastern togs stood out from the group in long hair and buckskins, had spent all spring and most of the previous fall expunging all trace of the trick-shooting dentist whose irresponsible arrogance had come near to aborting the show in its first season.

  "We showed a sixty-thousand-dollar loss last season," the star told the reporter, "but we'll not be in the red long. We've been turning them away since Louisville."

  "How do you respond to P. T. Barnum's charge that you stole the idea for the show from him?" asked the young man.