The Colonel and Little Missie

by Larry McMurtry

  It was General Custer’s message about the Black Hills gold that once more, and for the last time, set the high plains ablaze.

  12

  FOR at least a decade after the Civil War it seemed that every military man west of the Mississippi was either actively pursuing Indians with the intent to kill them or else sitting under a tent painfully hacking out treaties with them, most of which would be broken within weeks, if not sooner.

  The writer Alex Shoumatoff has estimated that the U.S. government has broken something like 474 treaties with the native peoples, plenty of which were made and broken during the sixties and seventies of the nineteenth century.

  These powwows and treaty-making sessions seem to have frustrated everyone who took part in them, one reason being the language difficulties involved. (Exactly the same difficulties are plaguing coalition soldiers right now in Iraq. Reliable translators from Arabic are proving hard to find.) Few Native American leaders spoke much English, and even fewer of the military negotiators spoke more than a few words of any native language, the consequence being that after a powwow both sides went home without really understanding what they had agreed to. And in any case the government abided by these treaties only to the extent that was convenient.

  One especially inconvenient treaty was the one made at the end of the 1860s, giving the Sioux peoples their holy Black Hills in perpetuity, with no whites allowed to be within the sacred area.

  General Custer’s discovery of gold in these same Black Hills caused one of the most abrupt about-faces in the shameful history of our treaty making and breaking. Perpetuity turned out to be less than five years, after which the greedy Americans tried to buy the land they had so recently surrendered.

  General Crook, no fool, advised the Indians to take the money, since nothing could be more obvious than that the whites would anyway soon be taking the land.

  The most dramatic years of plains warfare were from 1867 to 1877, that is, from the launching of the Hancock expedition to the surrender of Crazy Horse in May of 1877. Many treaties were made during this decade, mainly because the army did not yet have the manpower to simply overrun the Indians.

  Buffalo Bill Cody was in the neighborhood of some of these powwows but the solemnities of oratory and negotiation seem to have held little appeal for him, though later he would do a fair amount of powwowing when he began to hire Indians for his Wild West shows.

  Without anyone at first exactly being aware of it, show business began to slyly extend itself out into prairie life. In the beginning this took the form of scouts with colorful monikers, names that might look good on posters or marquees. Besides the guide-turned-showman Texas Jack Omohundro, there were at least two other Texas Jacks, one of whom was hung in Oklahoma for a variety of crimes. There was also a multiplicity of California Joes and, of course, a veritable plethora of Buffalo Bills.

  In 1911 or thereabouts Cody was taken to task by a retired hunter named William Mathewson, who insisted that he was the first to be called Buffalo Bill, and that Cody knew it. Cody probably didn’t know it but he cheerfully agreed that he had not been the first hunter to be called Buffalo Bill. Later he met Mathewson, saw that he was down on his luck, helped him recover a cherished rifle he had been forced to sell, and quietly settled some of his debts. He and Will Mathewson became good friends.

  This was the Cody people loved—many similar stories exist.

  One of the first organized showbiz buffalo hunts seems to have occurred somewhere east of Sheridan, Kansas. The hunt featured two Buffalo Bills, Cody and a part-Cheyenne hunter named William Comstock, who occasionally found himself on the wrong side of the law.

  Some doubt that this first show hunt ever took place; the best evidence seems to be archaeological, in the form of a dump containing many beer and champagne bottles. The biographer Courtney Ryley Cooper had a poster advertising the contest, but its authenticity is questionable. A special train holding one hundred spectators chugged out from St. Louis to watch the shooting. Cody claimed to have shot sixty-nine buffalo that day, to Comstock’s forty-six. As an additional nicety, which anticipated the showman that he soon would be, Cody managed to kill the final buffalo of the day right in front of the ladies, some of whom may have fainted. Louisa Cody says that the hunt did happen.

  Soon after this event or nonevent Cody was part of a group sent to round up deserters from General Hancock’s big force. Some of the deserters may simply have been soldiers who got hopelessly lost. Theodore David, a reporter for Harper’s Weekly, happened to be along on this strange excursion, and it was Wild Bill Hickok, not Buffalo Bill Cody, whose dandyism most stirred the reporter’s ire:

  . . . in his usual array Wild Bill could have gained unquestioned admittance to the floor of most fancy dress balls of metropolitan cities. When we ordinary mortals were hustling for a clean pair of socks, as prospective limit of change in wearing apparel, I have seen Wild Bill appear in an immaculate boiled shirt, with collar and cuffs to match—a sleeveless Zouave jacket of startling scarlet, slashed with black velvet . . . the French calfskin . . . boots fitted admirably and were polished as if the individual wearing them had recently vacated an Italian’s throne on a sidestreet near Broadway . . . the long wavey hair that fell in masses from a convenient sombrero, was glossy from a recent anointment of some heavily perfumed mixture.

  Bill Cody probably read that description of his old friend and learned from it. As much as Hickok he wanted to impress and usually managed to display a casual elegance that, on closer inspection, may not have been so casual—but he never quite slipped over to full dandyism, in the manner of his friend. The reason he didn’t was because he had still to sell himself as a workingman of the West, a humble scout, a man who might have to take a hand and drive a stagecoach at any time.

  Wild Bill Hickok may have learned from Cody too. One of his bolder experiments, before he made that fatal trip to Deadwood, was to organize that buffalo shoot at Niagara Falls.

  13

  BEFORE plunging into the dense ambiguities of Cody’s two most controversial Indian fights—the Battle of Summit Springs and the “duel” with Yellow Hair—it might be well to finish with the white-hunter phase of Buffalo Bill Cody’s career. There is also one lesser Indian fight that is worth mentioning because of the strong element of the theatrical that is apt to be present in any anecdote in which Bill Cody actually claims to have killed an Indian.

  In this case, while in pursuit of horse thieves, Cody claims to have killed two Indians with one shot—not impossible, since the two were fleeing on the same horse. This action occurred near the North Platte. Cody then claims that he took the two Indians’ warbonnets and gave them to the daughters of General Augur. Warbonnets on men, so surprised that they had to flee on the same horse? Warbonnets, when the Indians were merely out to steal horses? Of course, assuming they had their warbonnets with them, Cody could have scavenged them from the raiders’ camp.

  I raise the question because this is by no means the last time warbonnets occur in Cody’s narrative. From here on out virtually every Indian he pursues or claims to have killed is equipped with a warbonnet—though it is usually thought that warbonnets, expensive to produce, might mostly be reserved for formal or ceremonial occasions, such as powwows or ritual dances.

  We will keep our eye on warbonnets as we proceed through the final years of Cody’s career as a scout.

  Later, it seems, there was disagreement as to which general should reap the glory for this chase with horse thieves. What comes clear in the debate is that some military had become acutely jealous of William F. Cody, who was now widely thought of as Sheridan’s pet.

  With the exception of the grand duke Alexis, most of the hunt organizing Cody did was for rich and influential men who happened to be cronies of Phil Sheridan. James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald was among them, as well as at least two members of the prominent Jerome family, the family which produced the famous Jenny Jerome, Winston Churchill’s mother. Bennett was almost as
quick as Buntline to recognize Cody’s high marketability—it was not long before Cody was summoned to New York, where he was feted by the famous editor and others.

  Meanwhile more than one train carload of bankers, financiers, and magnates of various stripes came to Kansas to be stimulated for a day or two while eating buffalo ribs, drinking a lot of champagne, and occasionally shooting off guns.

  It might be noted that these mostly half-assed American sportsmen had been preceded on the teeming hunting grounds of the West by several serious hunters from Europe—in particular, from England. The Scotsman William Drummond Stewart hoped to start a large game park in Scotland filled with Western animals. Even before Stewart, Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied had been up the Missouri, hunting for science rather than for sport. Drummond Stewart took the artist Alfred Jacob Miller with him; the prince of Wied had taken Karl Bodmer; and the enterprising George Catlin took himself: he headed upriver in 1832 on the first steamboat that went. It’s because of Miller that we know what the mountain men looked like, while both Catlin and Bodmer left us vivid portraits of many members of the Missouri River tribes in their years of glory, before smallpox and other white man’s diseases began to decimate them.

  The earl of Dunraven always wanted to establish a large game park, but his was to be in America, not England. He acquired some sixty thousand acres of Colorado, in the Estes Park region, for this purpose, but before the game could be protected the Indians had to agree to stop eating it—the earl’s diplomacy was not equal to this task.

  Cody himself guided Sir John Watts Garland, an Englishman who liked hunting so much that he established a line of hunting camps, complete with dogs and keepers, to which he returned every year to refresh himself with a little shooting. Sir John seemed less interested in buffalo than in elk, an animal that took some careful stalking.

  Some of the English were the opposite of conservationists: they came for slaughter and more slaughter. A fittingly named Englishman, St. George Gore, is said to have killed at least twenty-five hundred buffalo, to the disgust of Jim Bridger and others.

  Cody also briefly guided the famous pioneering paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh, who ventured out often from his citadel at Yale.

  The duck hunt recently enjoyed by Vice President Cheney and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is exactly the sort of well-planned excursion that Cody was good at managing. Shouldn’t busy and prominent men be allowed to shoot guns and drink whiskey in their own company now and then?

  As Don Russell points out, royals of any stamp were rare in America in the nineteenth century. When one promised to show up—even if the royal was only a third son, as was the case with the grand duke Alexis, not exactly the sharpest knife in the Romanov drawer—big attention needed to be paid, and America was eager to pay it. The Russian royal fleet took a long time getting across the pond, but eventually, in the fall of 1871, it showed up.

  Cody was at this time still chief of scouts of the Fifth Cavalry, which was about to depart for Arizona to deal with the elusive and troublesome Apaches; but a letter from General Sheridan arrived just in time to keep Cody from leaving. He was to find buffalo for the grand duke—a promising hunting site some forty miles west of Fort McPherson was soon selected, and what came to be called Camp Alexis was hastily constructed.

  Cody was probably pleased with being awarded this plum, but he may have been less pleased when he found out that Alexis was particularly eager to see some wild Indians while he was on this hunt.

  The royal hunt was to take place early in 1872, a time when it would not have been hard to find plenty of wild Indians—the catch was that they might just want to behave like what they were, wild Indians. The war for the great plains was still very much a going thing: Fetterman and his eighty men had been wiped out only a few years before the grand duke’s visit, and one of the duke’s hunting partners, George Armstrong Custer, would be wiped out a few years after their hunt. Every army officer knew that if invited to do a war dance, the young braves might forget that they were actors and do some fine scalping while they had the chance.

  Since nobody wanted to say no to a grand duke, a chief had to be chosen and asked if he and some of his warriors would mind providing some entertainment for this important person from across the seas.

  The military powers decided on Spotted Tail, the more or less cooperative leader of the Brulé Sioux. Spotted Tail had been to Washington and was well aware of how the cookie was likely to crumble, where his people were concerned. He was at the time hunting buffalo on the Republican River, where Cody, traveling alone, found him and persuaded him to oblige General Sheridan, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.

  It wasn’t too much trouble. Spotted Tail (who was eventually killed by one of his own people) showed up right on time and put on a splendid show—very probably it was this event that convinced Cody it would not be impossible to use Indians in the Wild West shows. The war dance was most effective and a particularly skilled hunter named Two Lances much pleased the grand duke by shooting an arrow completely through a running buffalo.

  General Custer, as was his wont, flirted with one of Spotted Tail’s comely daughters, neither the first nor the last flirtation Custer pursued with good-looking native women.

  Matthew Brady, pioneering photojournalist, showed up and took everybody’s picture.

  The grand duke Alexis, a rather stolid youth, had a passionate interest in firearms but an almost total absence of skill when it came to using them. Alexis had visited the Smith & Wesson factory on his way west—he was eager to drop a buffalo with one of his new pistols and proceeded to empty two six-shooters at a buffalo standing some twenty feet away; the twelve bullets went somewhere, but the buffalo was unfazed.

  Reluctantly the grand duke gave up the revolver but allowed Cody to loan him his famous buffalo rifle, Lucretia Borgia (a breech-loading Springfield), as well as his best buffalo horse, Buckskin Joe, which swiftly carried the grand duke to within a yard or two of a buffalo. Lucretia Borgia spoke and the buffalo fell over, much to the relief of everyone involved. Champagne flowed, as it was to do later in the day when the grand duke brought down a buffalo cow. On the way back to camp Cody treated the grand duke to a stagecoach ride, another proto-act which later proved popular in London, where Cody once got four kings into the Deadwood stage.

  The grand duke gave Cody a fur coat and some cuff links—but the main thing he gave him was something to think about. The hunt was just one more rich man’s frolic, but the fact that the Indians had agreed to provide entertainment, and had provided entertainment, was, at the time, a singular thing. Cody may not have immediately connected it with his own future, but he didn’t forget it, either. Within a decade’s time some of the Indians who had entertained the grand duke Alexis found that they had nothing better to do than to let Pahaska put them in a show.

  Cody himself, once the grand duke departed, found that his management of this tame hunt reaped a huge amount of publicity, all of it favorable to himself. With the Fifth Cavalry gone west there was not much for him to do, so he accepted James Gordon Bennett’s invitation and went to New York, after which visit—though he continued to go back to the plains—his life was never to be quite the same.

  14

  IT is perhaps best to step back a year from these high-profile hunts to the somewhat inconclusive prairie campaigns of 1869–1870, spin-offs to General Hancock’s expensive but largely futile expedition. Cody was still chief of scouts of the Fifth Cavalry, but at the reduced pay of $75 a month; he was briefly stationed at Fort Lyon in eastern Colorado. It was to Fort Lyon that Black Kettle carried his wounded wife after the Sand Creek Massacre. There were plenty of Indians to fight—during one brief skirmish Cody received one of his very rare wounds: his hat was shot off and his scalp creased, producing a heavy blood flow. Cody kept on fighting, a fact that impressed General Carr so much that he awarded him a bonus of $100.

  The so-called Battle of Summit Springs, in which the Cheyenne leader Tall Bul
l and a number of his dog soldiers were apparently killed, was perhaps the most confusing of Cody’s many confusing fracasses. As many as twenty versions of this conflict exist, half of those emanating, over a period of some sixty years, from one informant—Luther North, brother of Major Frank North, who may or may not have killed Tall Bull himself. At the time of the battle Frank North was the organizer and leader of a group of Pawnee scouts. (Later Frank North was to partner with Cody, both in the cattle business and the Wild West shows.)

  The confusions produced by this battle result from the fact that the trail along which the cavalry was pursuing the main band of Cheyenne split at some point. Cody and some of the troop proceeded along what seemed to be the main trail and eventually arrived at the Cheyennes’ main camp, while Frank North, his brother, and some of the Pawnee scouts followed a smaller trail and eventually encountered a small force of Indians in a ravine. One of these Indians may have been Tall Bull. Frank North tricked this Indian into showing his head, at which moment he shot him. Only later, after talking with the Pawnee scouts, did he conclude that the dead Indian was Tall Bull.

  Cody’s version, appearing in various editions of his autobiography, is at first glance simpler. As battle raged in the large village Cody saw an Indian on a magnificent bay horse; he promptly shot the Indian and claimed the horse, which later proved the swiftest in all Nebraska, winning Cody many races. In Luther North’s version, or one of them, this splendid horse is cream-colored; in even later versions the horse becomes a gray. One version mentions that the horse had received a stab wound.

  Then, in the Cody version, the dead Indian’s wife begins to wail and he learns that he has killed her husband, Tall Bull. In the course of the battle this same woman had herself dispatched one of the two white captives the troop had been hoping to rescue. The victim was a Mrs. Alderdice, brained with a tomahawk and buried at the scene. The other captive, a Mrs. Weichel, though wounded, survived the battle and married the hospital orderly who tended her at Fort Sedgwick.