The Colonel and Little Missie

by Larry McMurtry

  That ended our first interview. The next day he assigned me duty on the road from Red Buttes on the North Platte to the Three Crossings on the Sweetwater, a distance of 76 miles, and I began riding at once. It was a long piece of road, but I was equal to the undertaking; and soon after had an opportunity to exhibit my power of endurance as a pony express rider.

  One day I galloped into Three Crossings, my home station. I found that the rider who had expected to take the trip on my arrival, had got into a drunken row the night before and been killed; and that there was no one to fill his place. I did not hesitate for a moment to undertake an extra ride of 85 miles to Rocky Ridge, and I arrived at the latter place on time. I then turned and rode back to Red Buttes, my starting place, accomplishing on the round trip a distance of 322 miles.

  Slade heard of this feat of mine and one day as he was passing on a coach sang out to me: “My boy, you’re a brick and no mistake.”

  Slade, though rough at times and always a dangerous character—having killed many a man—was always kind to me. During the two years I worked for him as pony express rider and stage driver, he never spoke an angry word to me.

  This passage, like the killing of the first Indian, is central to the rapidly swelling legend of Buffalo Bill.

  Alf Slade, who never said an unkind word to Cody, seems to have poured hot lead into everybody else. To say that his temper was capricious was akin to saying that Sitting Bull was peevish. Alf Slade is thought to have killed about twenty-six men. If particularly incensed, as he was in at least one case, he might take the trouble to remove his victim’s ears, one of which he used as a watch fob. Slade was finally hung by vigilantes in Silver City, Montana—yet he happily sang out a commendation to young Cody.

  * * *

  Holding that exceptional piece of luck on Cody’s part in mind, I should take a moment to consider the brief day of the Pony Express itself. Cody’s biographer Don Russell correctly remarks that some sort of mounted delivery system was an old, not a new, thing. If we are to believe Marco Polo, Kublai Khan had some sort of pony express.

  Nor was the Pony Express, founded by the firm of Russell, Majors, and Waddell, unique in America in Cody’s youth. John Butterfield, whose firm is still in business, pioneered a kind of Big Bend route that nearly touched the Mexican border before curling through the Arizona desert to San Diego. With good luck a letter might be delivered to the West Coast within three or four weeks. However, there were many splendid opportunities for bad luck to happen, in which case the mail never arrived.

  Russell, Majors, and Waddell initiated their Pony Express runs in April of 1860—the run started in St. Joseph, Missouri, and edged across country to Sacramento, California. To say that it was hazardous would be to understate. When in full operation the route consisted of 190 stations, five hundred horses, and about eighty riders.

  Did Russell, Majors, and Waddell seriously expect to make a profit from this curious venture? Probably not. They were successful freight haulers, transporting freight to various forts or anywhere else, depending on the whim of the client. No doubt they were looking to expand—in particular, to lock up some juicy government contracts. The Pony Express might be effective advertising—at least it might if things went well for a few months. The number of forts in the West was ever increasing—or at least they were until 1868, when Red Cloud and his allies forced the evacuation of three Wyoming forts, all of which had been unwisely situated in the Sioux holy lands.

  Russell, Majors, and Waddell probably hoped that the Pony Express—a romantic endeavor if there ever was one—would be excellent advertising, but this seemed to have been a misjudgment on their part. The Pony Express went largely unnoticed at the time. Their young and essentially minor employee Bill Cody in later years reaped many times more publicity from his tour with the Pony Express than did the enterprise itself. He used it as an emblematic element in his shows for over three decades, keeping alive the memory of this short-lived venture for millions who had never heard of it while it was actually in operation.

  To this day we lack a fully adequate history of this famous venture—and again, Cody indirectly profited from this lack; many of the details of his Pony Express career can neither be refuted nor confirmed, because of poor documentation.

  There are plenty of skeptics who don’t believe that Bill Cody rode with the Pony Express at all. One argument against him is the condition that Alf Slade mentioned: Cody’s youth. He was only fourteen when the Pony Express runs were initiated, and not quite sixteen when they ended.

  Had Cody showed up cold and asked for a job with a company where no one knew him, the age factor might indeed have been decisive. But such was not the case: Cody had already been riding for Russell, Majors, and Waddell for three years; he was known to be an able hand and had already undertaken several cattle-driving expeditions for the firm which were only marginally less dangerous than the Pony Express. In 1860 he was a proven, reliable plainsman whose horsemanship no one doubted.

  Still, absolute proof that Cody rode with the Pony Express is elusive. Don Russell manages to find a snatch of testimony that convinces him, though it doesn’t convince me. It’s a comment from the wealthy Chicago contractor Edward Ayer, the man who formed the wonderful Native American collection now at the Newberry Library in Chicago:

  About six or seven years ago I attended a reception and dinner party given by all the diplomats of Paris to Buffalo Bill. I said it wasn’t necessary to introduce me to Bill Cody; that I had crossed the plains in 1860, and he was riding by our train about a month, and would give us the news in a loud voice as he rushed by, so that we became much attached to him. At the reception Bill wouldn’t let me get out of his sight, thereby disarranging the seating plan at the banquet.

  That snatch is from Edward Ayer’s privately printed journal. It seems a very curious passage, to me. Where was the train going, that a Pony Express rider could rush along beside it for about a month? Pony Express runs were not straight runs beside a train track. Why would Cody, isolated as he was in remote places, have “news” that a Chicago businessman wouldn’t have? And how would Cody become so familiar with Ayer, whom he had only glimpsed through a train window, that he could recognize him at a banquet in Paris two and a half decades later?

  I don’t think Ayer’s comment proves anything at all about Buffalo Bill and the Pony Express, but I am inclined to think he did ride with it, since that would merely have been a more or less natural extension of a job he already had.

  The first rider out of St. Joseph may have been Bob Haslam, whom Cody would later employ in his Wild West shows—in fact he went on to employ a surprising number of prairie characters he had known in his years on the plains.

  On literary grounds, too, I’m inclined to think that Cody’s Pony Express work was real, if possibly exaggerated. The passages about Pony Express work are much less theatrically written than the passages about Indian fights or Indian killing. There’s less conflation, more of a feel that Cody might have written this part himself.

  The 322-mile ride he claimed—that’s about the distance from Los Angeles to Phoenix—is thought to be the third-longest made during the brief, eighteen-month life of the Pony Express. The longest ride, 384 miles, was made by Bob Haslam, who lived to re-create it in many arenas. The second-longest, 330 miles, was made by one Howard Egan. Cody, at 322 miles, comes in third. He seems to have once thought he made a 384-mile ride, and one of his sisters clings to that figure, but it resulted from a clear miscalculation of his routes. Arithmetic was never one of the great scout’s strong suits.

  The Pony Express per se was in business from April of 1860 until November of 1861. The owners knew they were racing the telegraph, and the telegraph soon beat them: The two coasts were linked in November of 1860—the singing wires, as the Indians called them, had come to stay.

  Buffalo Bill’s 322-mile ride took twenty-two hours and was accomplished with the help of twenty-one horses, which suggests that he got about an hour’s hard
work out of each horse.

  Most writing about the Pony Express emphasizes how hard the work was on the riders, but little has been written about the horses that made the enterprise possible. Initially the stations had been twenty-five miles apart, but it was soon lowered to about half that distance—too few horses were able to go hard for twenty-five miles. (Some Indians were said to be able to get fifty to seventy-five miles out of a horse, after which, probably, they ate the exhausted animal—this too is probably an exaggeration.)

  Cody often mentions his mounts, a few of whose names have come down to us. When some Indians jumped him near Horse Creek on one ride he mentions that he was mounted on “a roan California horse, the fleetest steed I had.” Agnes Wright Spring has produced a pamphlet about Cody’s horses, the most famous of which was his buffalo-shooting horse Brigham. Two other horses from his scouting days were Buckskin Joe and Charlie. Buckskin Joe eventually went blind, presumably from having to carry Cody nearly two hundred miles on one ride. Isham was the most famous of the show horses. Harry Tammen callously sold Isham at the sheriff’s sale, along with the rest of Cody’s livestock, but some friends bought the old horse back and presented him to the old rider.

  I mention the horses because, clearly, Cody’s horsemanship, and his judgment about the speed and staying power of his mounts, was essential to his survival.

  The otherwise vicious and homicidal Alf Slade took such a shine to young Cody that he decided to keep him at his own station and only use him as a kind of supernumerary rider—a curious word to come out of the mouth of such a rough old sort, but that’s the word Cody reports.

  Life at Horseshoe Station being comparatively easy, Cody one day decides to venture out on a bear hunt—or as he puts it:

  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.

  The day continues beautiful and eventually turns into night without Cody having stirred up any bears. What he locates, instead, is a meadow with fifteen or twenty horses grazing in it. Prudence might have suggested to the young man that he turn and skedaddle, but he chooses to investigate and soon finds himself in a den of horse thieves, encamped in a kind of cave. Some of the men he recognizes as having been discharged from a freighting company he is familiar with. Cody soon realizes he is in a tight spot; he has left his horse some distance away and offers to leave his rifle with the men while he recovers the animal. The ruffians are happy to take the rifle but have no intention of leaving Cody any chance to escape. Two men go with him to fetch the horse, one in front of him and one behind. The men had not bothered to search him and do not know about the two pistols. As they are leading his horse up to the meadow Cody manages to drop a sage hen he had killed earlier in the day. When the man behind him stops to pick it up Cody whacks him hard with the pistol and turns just in time to shoot the man ahead of him, killing him dead. Then he flees into some rocky foothill country—his horse has to be abandoned but he makes good his escape.

  Now, Cody had many narrow escapes in his career on the prairies. Even as early as nine he was forced to flee a group of thugs calling themselves the Border Ruffians, a primitive, violently proslavery vigilante group who wanted to do violence to young Billy because he was the son of a man they considered to be an abolitionist.

  Always, though, young Cody just escapes—almost as the hero might do at the end of a movie serial. The Border Ruffians he manages to outrun until he reaches the home of friends, leaving his pursuers to retreat empty-handed.

  All of Cody’s pursuers, whether white or Indian, from the mid-fifties on to the late seventies, are forced to retreat empty-handed. Cody always has a better horse, or knows the country better; he keeps a cool head and manages to escape.

  He admitted to being scared when he shot the first Indian, and he was no doubt not happy to have stumbled into the cave of the horse thieves—if he did—but the evidence suggests that Cody really did keep an uncommonly cool head, and this despite the fact that he was frequently drunk. Cody’s drinking I’ll discuss a little later, but his ability to either outrun or else hide from people who were pursuing him with deadly intent manifests itself often in his book. In most cases the reader is not inclined to doubt him. Plenty of people traveling those prairies did get chased in those times; working as Cody did, where and when he did, meant that rapid flight was more or less part of his job skills.

  The den-of-thieves incident reads very dime-novel-like, but its main significance, if it happened, is that it marked the only time in his life when Cody claims to have killed a white man.

  As if suspecting that some readers might want to verify such a claim, he goes on to mention that Alf Slade and a well-armed group followed him back to the site—the horses and the horse thieves were gone but there was a fresh grave in the meadow, presumably the final resting place of the man Cody shot.

  In the autobiography, only a page or two earlier, there is an amusing illustration of Alf Slade summarily gunning down a stagecoach driver who had managed to offend him. Alf Slade always felt free to dispense his own justice, as did the vigilantes in Montana when they hung him.

  Apart from the fact that his job with the Pony Express required Cody to ride farther and faster than he would normally have done, it didn’t really change the customary pattern of his life very much. He would likely have been somewhere on the central plains of the West, riding horses, scouting, hunting, delivering messages for some military man—maybe General Carr or General Sheridan—or some hauling company.

  One of his more ballsy efforts was his successful attempt to get the Sioux chief Spotted Tail (uncle of Crazy Horse) to come south and put on a little show—sham fighting, real killing of buffalo from horseback with bow and arrow, some dancing—as entertainment for the grand duke Alexis on his much-publicized visit. Though Spotted Tail himself was friendly to whites, plenty of his young warriors were much less so and would have been glad to take Cody’s scalp had they run into him on his way north. Yet Cody got away with his rather daring infiltration and the Sioux came and did their bit to entertain a nobleman from a country they had never heard of.

  Cody was active, he was able, he was trusted by both the army and the freight companies, and he accepted several courier jobs in country dangerous enough that most men might have declined the assignment. All through his youth and young manhood he worked mostly alone, breathing the cool free air of the prairies.

  It was when first youth had passed, and the plains life became less and less free, that Cody, like many another plainsman, trapper, or meat hunter of his generation, came to realize that he would soon have to find another way to make a living. What Bill Cody recognized, more acutely than most of his contemporaries, was that all most Americans would know of the great adventure of the American West was whatever he could bring to them in his Wild West shows; he also figured out that a nearly ideal place to start would be the Pony Express—after all, what would be more appealing than the sight of the racing riders of the Pony Express? As a business, it hadn’t worked out, but as a spectacle it thrilled audiences everywhere.

  6

  TWO things young Bill Cody had very little use for were practical soldiering and politics. His father, Isaac, had been quite political, with a good attendance record in the fledgling territorial legislature, but it is hard to find anything in Cody’s autobiography or his various interviews that could be considered a political statement. He soldiered, usually rather listlessly and in a ragtag way, with the Seventh Kansas and, somewhat later, with the Fifth C
avalry and one or two other units. Real military fervor, of the sort Sherman had, or Custer, was simply absent from Cody’s makeup. In 1889 he was made a brigadier general—this was when he was invited by General Miles to take a hand in the Ghost Dance troubles, an invitation that, perhaps foolishly, was reversed before Cody ever reached Sitting Bull’s camp; but he preferred the title of Colonel, a rank he never officially held. It seems he simply awarded it to himself when he realized that his pay equaled a colonel’s pay: so why couldn’t he have the rank?

  The terrible Civil War, a war that was ripping the nation apart, didn’t seem to much excite Cody, one way or another. His prejudices and his loyalties were essentially local. He had promised his mother that he wouldn’t enlist while she was alive, and he kept his promise, though he did some irregular scouting during the early years of the war. Mary Laycock Cody died in 1863.

  Among Cody’s strong and specific prejudices was a dislike of Missourians, whom he blamed for the death of his father. Becoming a Jayhawker—Kansans of a rough nature who stole horses from Confederates and sometimes sold them to the Unionists and other times just sold them. Rougher even than the Jayhawkers were the Red Legged Scouts, so called because their leggings were made from a red sheepskin popular with shoemakers in those days. The Red Legged Scouts were mainly just thieves and murderers, as young Bill Cody soon realized. He blamed his involvement on drunkenness, which he was much given to in those days. James Butler (later Wild Bill) Hickok became friendly with Cody around this time and even stayed as a guest in the hotel the Cody family was attempting to run in the Salt Creek Valley. Cody and Hickok were to remain buddies throughout the Civil War and afterward. Hickok eventually became a Union spy but at first he was, like Cody, not much excited by the war.

  It may be that Cody and Hickok’s rather lackadaisical attitude toward the war was due to their lack of proximity to the real action. Near the end of the war, in 1864, Cody occasionally did get drawn into some fairly sharp action near Independence, Missouri. Later in life, when in a tale-telling mood, he claimed to have been in a scouting party that captured Major General John Sappington Marmaduke near the Marais des Cygnes River, the so-called Swamp of the Swans, where the great tundra swans come, an area beloved by birdwatchers today. According to Cody he and General Marmaduke shared lunch and a bottle of whiskey.