The Colonel and Little Missie

by Larry McMurtry

  Much research has been expended on this elusive first kill, all of it inconclusive. Most commentators, like Cody’s reputable if perhaps mildly credulous biographer Don Russell, give Cody the benefit of the doubt, on the grounds that he was an essentially truthful man. Even if his accounts of the events do not tally, point by point, with what historical evidence exists, Don Russell and other students of Cody’s career like to think that their hero wasn’t just a big liar. In their view, when Cody recounts an incident in his early life, something of the sort had probably occurred.

  I am less confident of Cody’s accuracy as a historian of himself, and as we go through the episodes, I’ll make my doubts known. One reason I’m skeptical is that in later times, when there were witnesses to some of these events, Cody’s version rarely tallies with what others report. When you examine the accounts carefully Cody soon begins to seem like a spinner of colorful yarns, many of which reflect well on his behavior. This, among autobiographers, is common, of course; many people who report on themselves scatter a few seeds of truth in the rich soil of exaggeration. Buffalo Bill was hardly alone in this regard. Even the mostly scrupulous Annie Oakley was not above lopping six years off her official age when Cody suddenly presented her with a teenage rival, the sharpshooter Lillian Smith.

  2

  WILLIAM FREDERICK CODY was born in Iowa in 1846, but his parents—Isaac Cody and Mary Ann Laycock Cody—moved to Kansas as soon as it became a territory, settling in the Salt Creek Valley, near Fort Leavenworth.

  It should be mentioned here that for at least ten years before the Civil War, and another ten years after it, Kansas and Missouri were probably the most dangerous places in America—places where neighbor often fought neighbor and brother brother. The trouble was slavery: it was in Kansas and Missouri that passions over slaveholding were the most intense; they didn’t call it “Bleeding Kansas” for nothing. Guerrilla activity, vigilantism, and homegrown militias flourished and fought. In these parts the Civil War lasted something like twenty years, rather than four. As late as 1875 the outlaw Jesse James—who was a warrior from early youth—was complaining that fewer and fewer people seemed to be in the mood to fight Yankees anymore.

  My own grandparents William Jefferson and Louisa Francis McMurtry were farming in western Missouri when the Civil War ended—for a few more years they nourished the hope that the violence would finally abate, but it didn’t. In the 1870s, not willing to raise their children amid such risks, they moved to Texas. Theirs was a common story.

  Isaac Cody, Bill’s father, was not an abolitionist—he was willing to let those who had slaves keep their slaves—only his preference was that no settlers would bring slaves to Kansas, which he hoped to see remain all white. In the eyes of his neighbors this wasn’t enough: they saw it as just abolitionism watered down.

  In 1854, when young Bill was eight, Isaac Cody was swept, much against his will, into a heated political rally and forced to declare himself, which he was attempting to do when an enraged proslavery neighbor rushed forward and stabbed him. The assailant’s name was Charlie Dunn; he worked at the time for Cody’s brother Elijah. He was not arrested, though he did lose his job.

  Isaac Cody recovered from his wound and, for three more years, led what would seem to have been a fairly active life. He cleared fields, he surveyed, and he was a very hardworking member of the first territorial legislature. Nonetheless, when he died in 1857, the family attributed his demise to the stab wound he had received from Charlie Dunn.

  Alive, Isaac Cody managed to make a pretty good living for his family; but his death brought them close to destitution. Fortunately Mary Cody had friends in Leavenworth, and Bill Cody, then eleven, was a vigorous, able, appealing young man, who soon, with his mother’s help, found work as a mounted messenger for the freighting firm of Majors and Russell (later Russell, Majors, and Waddell), the firm that—only three years later—would create one of the most glamorous of Western enterprises, the Pony Express.

  Bill Cody in time became much the most famous of Pony Express riders; he kept a Pony Express act in his Wild West shows for more than thirty years, the only act to last anywhere near that long, but his first job was considerably more mundane. Mounted on a mule, he carried messages from the freight yard to the telegraph offices in Leavenworth, a distance of about three miles. So efficient was young Billy at hustling these messages back and forth that his superiors finally warned him that the messages were not so urgent that he needed to wear out his mule.

  It was from these three-mile deliveries that young Bill Cody rose, in a natural sequence, to being a drover, cowboy, herdsman, teamster, helping to move livestock or freight from one location to another—this mostly meant delivering beef on the hoof to sometimes distant army posts. He was eleven at the time.

  Before I proceed to the vexed question of the first Indian killed, I should call attention to the fact that in the 1850s and 1860s it was perfectly normal for rural youths to be expected to do a man’s work at the age of eleven or twelve. All my eight rancher uncles were gone from home and self-supporting at that age. My father, the stay-at-home, had just turned twelve when he was sent off with a small herd of cattle to a market about twenty-five miles away, where he was to sell the cattle and hurry home with the money. He did this without giving it much thought—in the context of the times it was a perfectly normal task. Not to have accomplished it smoothly would have resulted in diminished prospects.

  In fact, even at the ages of seven or eight Cody and his sisters were frequently sent considerable distances—fifteen miles, say—to bring home livestock that had strayed from the immediate premises.

  At the age of ten, I myself was once set the task of bringing in the milk cows to the headquarters of a large ranch in New Mexico of which my uncle was foreman. The milk cows, as it happened, were plainly visible on the vast, distant plain—at least they were visible to everyone except my myopic self. I rode more than half an hour in the direction of these invisible milk cows but I just couldn’t see them. My uncle concluded that I must be going blind—he impatiently loped past me and brought in the cows.

  From such humiliations I concluded that I probably would not have lasted long in frontier life.

  3

  NOW let’s look at the killing of William Frederick Cody’s first Indian, which occurred—if it occurred at all—during a cattle drive along the South Platte River in 1857. The cattle belonged to Majors and Russell, and the drive was supervised by Frank and Bill McCarthy. At noon one day Indians—but which Indians?—managed to stampede the herd and kill three cowboys (although cowboys were not yet called that). The McCarthy brothers rallied their men and took cover in a slough which wound its way to the South Platte. They didn’t stop the herd when night fell; what cattle the Indians hadn’t run off in daylight they might attempt to run off at night. Fortunately the high banks of the river, when they reached it, gave good cover. Young Bill Cody was at the rear of the drive, in charge of the slower cattle (later, they would be called drags). Here is the story in Cody’s own words:

  I, being the youngest and smallest of the party, became somewhat tired, and without noticing it I had fallen behind the others quite some little distance. It was about ten o’clock and we were keeping very quiet and hugging close to the bank when I happened to look up to the moonlight sky and saw the plumed head of an Indian peeping over the bank. Instead of hurrying ahead and alarming the men in a quiet way, I instantly aimed my gun at his head and fired. The report rang out sharp and loud in the night air; and was immediately followed by an Indian whoop; the next moment about six feet of dead Indian came tumbling down into the river. I was not only overcome with astonishment, but was badly scared, as I could hardly realize what I had done. I expected to see the whole force of Indians come down upon us. While I was standing there thus bewildered, the men who had heard the shot and the war whoop and had seen the Indian take a tumble, came rushing back.

  “Who fired that shot?” cried Frank McCarthy.

  �
��I did,” replied I rather proudly, as my confidence returned and I saw the men coming up.

  “Yes, and little Billy has killed an Indian stone dead—too dead to skin,” said one of the men.

  Cody later claimed that when he got back to Leavenworth, he was interviewed by a reporter, probably from the Leavenworth Times, and found his name in print as “the youngest Indian slayer on the plains.”

  Though many have looked, no such report has been found, in that paper or any other, but then a feature of many of Cody’s stories is that they have no very exact time line. Such a claim could have shown up in some small newspaper a year earlier or a year later, maybe. But his best biographer, Don Russell, looked and looked and failed to find it. He admits that the evidence is inconclusive but decides to take Cody’s word for it on the ground that he was broadly truthful.

  In some respects Cody was a truthful man; he makes no effort, for example, to whitewash his disreputable jayhawking activities during the first years of the Civil War. He was an out-and-out horse thief, whose political motivation was slight at best. But by the 1870s, when the autobiography appeared, Cody’s fortune had come to depend on his ability to romanticize his career as a scout and Indian fighter. It is perhaps foolish, considering the loose journalistic standards of the times, to apply very severe critical methods to what in the main is promotional, ghostwritten autobiography; but one has to start somewhere.

  The passage quoted is accompanied in the book by a dark, grainy illustration in which a frontiersman who looks much older than eleven stands in shallow water and fires upward at a startled Indian who wears a bit of a headdress and also a necklace of claws. The illustrator was True Williams, a prolific artist who also illustrated Tom Sawyer and Roughing It. The Indian looks as if he could be Mohawk, or Huron, or Every Indian. One of the things that bothers me about the passage is the generic nature of the term “Indian” which Cody uses in this passage and throughout the autobiography generally.

  Mountain men, plainsmen, trappers, miners, soldiers, surveyors—indeed everyone who concerned himself with the developing West—usually were very tribe-specific when describing their adventures with Indians. Kit Carson knew he was chasing Apaches when he tried to rescue Mrs. White. He knew he was fighting Navahos when, later in his career, he drove the Navaho out of their homelands and sent them on the Long Walk.

  Later in his own career Cody was certainly tribe-specific about the Indians he fought, or those he employed. He knew Sitting Bull was Sioux; he knew Yellow Hair was Cheyenne. But in the autobiography Indians are often just Indians, which is troubling. Surely it would have been a concern of the McCarthy brothers, who were responsible for both men and cattle. Were they being attacked by Osage, Southern Cheyenne, Pawnee, Kickapoo? Someone in the party would have known—after all, the Indians had killed three of them.

  This Indian, though killed, managed to emit a whoop—then “about six feet of dead Indian came tumbling down into the river.” This startled boy somehow had time to calculate the man’s height, in a river and by moonlight. More doubt.

  Then Frank McCarthy and some of the men come rushing back and Cody’s confidence rises.

  “Yes, and little Billy has killed an Indian stone dead—too dead to skin,” said one of the men.

  By “skin” one assumes he meant “scalp,” another puzzler. Most Indians dead enough to allow themselves to be scalped would presumably be stone dead. What if this Indian was just playing possum? At night, and in the water, how sound was the helpful drover’s examination? Why wouldn’t they have scalped him?

  This passage has been reprinted innumerable times, with only minor embellishments. Many scholars doubt it ever happened, regarding it as a yarn that somehow got embedded in our national folklore, neither provable nor disprovable. It’s not likely, now, that we’ll ever know one way or the other, and Cody’s coyness about the episode in later life hardly strengthens a tendency to believe him. When asked about his first Indian kill he would usually laugh and say something like, “That Indian’s tied to me like a tin can to a dog’s tail.” He never quite suggested that it was untrue, and why would he? It was the creation myth of the legend of Buffalo Bill, Indian fighter.

  4

  BEFORE I address the second major trope—Cody’s prominence as a rider with the Pony Express—it might be well to consider the curious turn he made in his career: from Indian killer to the Indian’s friend. In his years as a showman he probably employed more Indians than all the other shows put together. He paid a healthy price in the form of bonds, too. Sometimes a bond of $10,000 got him one hundred Indians, while at other times it only got him thirty. He continued to hire Indians over the protests of the Department of the Interior and the commissioner of Indian Affairs, who didn’t at all like the fact that Indians were becoming show business stars—as Sitting Bull, Red Shirt, and a few others did. Moreover, the Indians he employed liked him and let it be known that he treated them well. When the first Indian protective agencies were formed, Cody was more than once accused of mistreating Indians on his European tours, but the Indians themselves hurried to refute these charges. Two or three Indians had died en route, but the Indians pointed out that they had been sick before they left and would have died anyway. Cody took ninety-seven Indians to Queen Victoria’s Jubilee and got home with most of them, though not, in all cases, immediately. Black Elk, the sage-to-be, somehow got stranded in Manchester, made it to Paris, lived with a French family, and was sent home by Cody when the show played Paris a year later.

  Sitting Bull, despite his strong admiration for Annie Oakley, left the Wild West after one season but it was not because he disliked Cody. What he didn’t like was the hustle and chatter and noise of the white people’s cities—that and their strange lack of concern for the poor. It is not likely that Cody or anyone else was really sorry to see Sitting Bull go. Cody described him as “peevish,” one of the great showman’s few understatements.

  Yet a twist occurred, and a big one, in Cody’s career. In showbiz he was first promoted as an Indian killer, and he garnered huge publicity for having killed, or claimed that he killed, two particular Indians, the Sioux Tall Bull and the Cheyenne Yellow Hair, though it is far from certain that he killed either one.

  Whatever the true body count—it’s never likely to be established—Cody was never an Indian hater, as so many of his contemporaries were. He was not moved to kill Indians, but merely to avoid being killed by them. In his young years as a plainsman—from 1857 to well after the Civil War—he worked in places where there were plenty of Indians, and at this time they were far from being a conquered people. Various biographers estimate that Cody was in fifteen or sixteen skirmishes with Indians in his life, and one or two real campaigns, the longest of them culminating in the Battle of Summit Springs, in which Tall Bull was killed. Cody was an able plainsman and a good—though not an exceptional—rifle shot. Fighting as often as he did, it might be wrong to claim that he had never killed an Indian, but the kills, if there were any, are very hard to pin down—and Cody himself was no help because he was always vague about dates and other facts of his own history. It’s probable that he shot an Indian or two but it’s unlikely that he killed many. His own word is unreliable, but we know from various sources much about his character and it doesn’t seem that he was violent in any of his relations. It is not evident that any of the old combatants who worked in his Wild West shows had ever considered Cody a serious opponent, in the sense that Custer was a serious opponent, or Crazy Horse. Many of the Indians he had hired had had ample opportunity to size up warriors—few seem to have considered Cody to be much of one.

  Once the necessary promotional work had been done and William F. Cody established as the star of stars, he rarely bragged about his Indian killing, and if he did talk about it, it was usually to repeat once again the particulars of the “duel” with Yellow Hair. This set piece was reenacted in many forms, including a movie. The duel with Yellow Hair was, with the Pony Express, the most enduring of all Cody
’s tropes—it was what would now be called a signature scene.

  But showbiz apart, there is every evidence that Bill Cody liked Indians. At the very end, once he essentially belonged to Harry Tammen, he may have liked them better than he liked white people.

  5

  I HAVE already written that rich people, even royals, just seemed to like Bill Cody. The same might be said of bad people—even the notoriously violent Joseph “Alf” Slade, Cody’s boss when he rode for the Pony Express, just seemed to like the kid. Here’s Cody’s account of their first meeting, when Cody showed up looking for a job:

  Among the first persons I saw after dismounting from my horse was Slade. I walked up to him and presented Mr. Russell’s letter, which he hastily opened and read. With a sweeping glance of his eye he took my measure from head to foot and then said:

  “My boy, you are far too young for a pony express rider. It takes men for that business.”

  “I rode two months last year on Bill Trotter’s division, sir, and filled the bill then; and I think I am better able to ride now.”

  “What! Are you the boy that was riding there and was called the youngest rider on the road?”

  “I am the same boy,” I replied, confident now that everything was all right for me.

  “I have heard of you before. You are a year or two older now, and I think you can stand it. I’ll give you a trial anyhow, and if you weaken you can come back to Horseshoe Station and tend to stock.”