The Colonel and Little Missie

by Larry McMurtry

  3

  THOSE who knew Buffalo Bill Cody well must have been a little shocked, if they were privy to the announcement of this first farewell tour, to discover that he intended to live out his days as a rancher and a gentleman farmer. Up to this point in time Cody had never exhibited the slightest interest in farming, gentlemanly or otherwise—and, if possible, had showed even less interest in ranching. His few statements about cowboy life in the autobiography are less than glowing, although by the time the book came out (1879) Cody was a rancher, if not a very enthusiastic one.

  In fact, he went into the cattle business with Major Frank North, whose brother Luther so long and vehemently disputed Cody’s never-too-insistent claim to have killed Tall Bull.

  In 1877 neither Bill Cody nor Frank North owned a ranch, at least not in the accepted sense of the word. The large concerns, mostly British or Scottish, which began to acquire ranches in Wyoming and Montana operated on a very vast scale—though seldom profitably. Most of these enterprises were syndicates—they lost money steadily until they gave up; like plenty of high plains ranchers, many were ruined by the terrible winter of 1885–1886.

  The notion that Cody would be a “gentleman farmer” will appear, to anyone who has spent time in North Platte, Nebraska, to be about as ludicrous as some of Ned Buntline’s temperance speeches. In 1877 much of Nebraska was open range, owned merely by the U.S. government. Land agents had begun to appear—the writer Mari Sandoz’s famous father, Old Jules, was one of them—but naturally, the land agents were trying to sell the most appealing land, perhaps land watered by a spring or creek. Certainly at this time no one was trying to sell the Nebraska sand hills, or much rather bleak land north of the North Platte. Only a cracked land agent would have tried to sell the sand hills first.

  In 1877 Cody and North went to Ogallala and purchased about fifteen hundred head of cattle, which they duly branded and drove north, to a promisingly grassy piece of acreage on the South Fork of the Dismal River. I have often thought that the Dismal River must be one of the most aptly named streams in our land; by horse it was about a day’s ride north of North Platte—by car it can be reached from that city in about an hour.

  Cody may, for a while, have attempted to convince himself that he liked cowboying, but in fact he and Frank North had hardly got the herd settled in up along the South Fork when Cody took himself off to the Red Cloud agency to recruit more show Indians for his next tour.

  Why would he have liked ranch life in northern Nebraska, where there was a scarcity of female company and even saloons were few and far between? Also, it was already fairly obvious that the great American open range was about to become a thing of the past. The government might allow each family 160 acres, but 160 acres along the Dismal River would hardly support fifteen hundred head of cattle, much less the ten thousand that Cody had bragged about. Fortunately Cody and North managed to cash out just in time, selling the operation in 1882 for something like $75,000.

  Bill Cody, the showman, was not entirely wasting his time with all those bovines. He noticed that cowboys were always competing with one another in roping contests or bronco-riding contests. Cody quickly concluded that if these ranch competitions could be organized, people might pay to see them. If such competitions could be linked to some patriotic theme or occasion, then lots of people might pay to see them. His own dislike of cowboying did not keep him from appreciating the skill of these young riders and ropers.

  Probably Cody’s central insight as an impresario was that it was always a good idea to link patriotism to performance. The Wild West, as it evolved under his leadership, was always, however crudely, a pageant of American life—and particularly that part of it that had involved the settling of the American West.

  Cody’s notion—even as he and Frank North were selling their cattle business—was to organize and promote a big cowboy competition in North Platte to celebrate the Fourth of July.

  Where Wild West shows were concerned, Cody eventually had the best that were ever staged, but it’s not clear that he had the first. Many troupes had, for some time, been wandering around America, most of them half circus and half Wild West show. Cody perfected the show and made it internationally viable as a form of entertainment, but several people were fumbling with the idea of converting the Wild West into entertainment.

  Rodeo is a different matter. There had been informal ranch contests as long as there had been ranches, but few of these attracted more than local attention. Cody at once organized a rodeo that set the standard for what would become a very popular sport.

  His rodeo was called the Old Glory Blow Out and was held in North Platte on the Fourth of July 1882. Cody had hoped to get as many as one hundred entrants in the contests; but as the time approached, he soon found that he had closer to one thousand. So popular was this first event that for a few days the great central plains became virtually depopulated: everybody seemed to be rushing to North Platte.

  One reason this first rodeo was held in North Platte was because the city boasted a racetrack with a sturdy fence around it. Had Cody lacked a fenced arena, a good many spectators could easily have been trampled.

  Rodeo caught on quickly. The very next year the town of Pecos, Texas, had a Fourth of July rodeo—Prescott, Arizona, and many other communities soon followed suit. Nowadays there is hardly a town in the West, large or small, that doesn’t attempt to stage an annual rodeo. As a boy of nine I rode in the first rodeo in my hometown of Archer City, Texas—the community’s sixtieth rodeo has just taken place, and all this because Buffalo Bill Cody, long ago in Nebraska, recognized that cowboys and the skills they practiced were an interesting part of the American experience. Ever since, rodeo has brought a bit of color to small-town life.

  It was far from being one of Bill Cody’s worst ideas.

  4

  I’VE said earlier that Buffalo Bill, in his mellow moods, while not exactly making light of his own achievements, didn’t normally exaggerate them either—not unless he was lending himself to a promotion. He was as relaxed about his not very impressive career as an actor as he had been about those various skirmishes with Indians that, in his view, just didn’t amount to much. He knew that the prairie-and-campfire melodramas he starred in with Texas Jack Omohundro and his wife, the “peerless Morlacchi,” didn’t amount to much, where theater was concerned.

  But his Wild West shows, once hammered into workable form, did amount to something—they were the source of Cody’s extraordinary celebrity, which, in his day, was not exceeded by anyone in the world. Celebrity did amount to much—Cody was one of the first performers to truly acquire superstardom.

  Even in the innocence of the late nineteenth century celebrity seldom happened unless some effort was made. Queen Victoria was a celebrity because she was a queen; her fellow monarch Franz Josef was a celebrity not so much because he ruled an empire but because he had married—not happily—the most beautiful woman in Europe, the empress Elizabeth.

  But Cody was not a royal; his origins were humble. He was an extraordinary horseman and, from his youth, a very handsome man. Looks and horsemanship combined to give him his start. Early on, as we have seen, even when he was doing fairly mundane work as a scout or hunter, he had a sense of image. When he had his first promotional photograph made, Matthew Brady took it—and was to take many, many more. In this first promotional photograph Cody is in scout’s buckskins and is leaning on a rifle, probably his buffalo gun Lucretia Borgia. Joy Kasson’s fine book shows how careful Cody was about his own iconography—he realized at once that his fortune depended on his looking the part of a Western frontiersman. He and his colleagues then evolved a complex outdoor operation in which national memory and popular history combined to form a visually and emotionally satisfying panorama. Photographs, posters, and book illustrations all had their job to do—before Cody was done, in 1917, many thousands of images of him had been seen by audiences in America and Western Europe. They are still being seen at Euro Disney.

 
The first of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows from which at least some continuity can be traced was held in Omaha in 1883; the last, as I have mentioned, was in Chicago in 1916, which means that for about thirty years the onetime scout William F. Cody was engaged in putting on shows: indoor shows when a sports palace was available, outdoor shows when necessary. Many performers had their hour and departed. Annie Oakley performed with Cody for sixteen seasons but afterward exercised her talents in other forums.

  In this thirty years of organizing large groups of people into workable teams and troupes, many managers, part managers, owners, half owners, banks, lawyers, accountants, and press agents devoted much energy to making sense of Bill Cody’s tangled affairs. Most failed. His assets were threatened with seizure more than once, but since buffalo and Indians were among the assets, seizing them usually turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. Cody and Doc Carver once flipped a coin to determine who got what when they ended their brief, contentious partnership. Cody got the Deadwood stage.

  It is not my intention in this book to chart the comings and goings of the many financial players involved. Sarah Blackstone has published two fine books on the business life of Buffalo Bill Cody. Her Buckskins, Bullets, and Business cannot be bettered as a study of the purely financial history of the Wild West shows.

  Nor do I intend to plod through Cody’s thirty-two seasons as a showman, describing the splendors and miseries of each.

  What might be useful, though, is an annotated listing of the major characters who were involved with Cody and the shows. Many were once famous, and Cody and Annie Oakley are still famous; but most of these gifted or not so gifted folks are now just forgotten players from a bygone era. Giuseppina Morlacchi was a very beautiful woman who perhaps did bring the cancan to America, but the only book about herself and her husband, Texas Jack Omohundro, was published fifty years ago. One will find little trace of her today. The same can be said for Doc Carver, Pawnee Bill, and many others.

  Buffalo Bill did manage to get his shows off the ground at the right time, just when outdoor spectacles became popular. The Ring-ling Brothers started their circus only a year later—at one time the Ringlings were part owners of Cody’s show.

  It should be emphasized that Cody did not advertise his spectacle as a “show.” It was Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, which meant that in his mind it was history—our history—and not just a collection of sharpshooters, trick riders, and the like. It was not, in his mind, a circus, although it contained many elements taken from the circus. What Cody wanted were tropes such as the attack on the Deadwood stage, or a battle between settlers and Indians, or himself taking the first scalp for Custer.

  Cody’s vision prevailed and is prevailing still, somewhere or other. When my county attained its centennial year, in 1980, the pageant put on every night for two weeks in our small rodeo arena was pure Cody.

  All serious commentators on Cody’s career agree on one thing: his shows succeeded—as, for example, did the TV miniseries of my own novel Lonesome Dove (125 million viewers)—because of the immense, worldwide appetite for anything pretending to portray life in the old West. In our time a Frenchman named George Fronval has published at least six hundred Western novelettes, and even in distant Norway there’s a writer, named Kjell Halbing, who has produced more than sixty.

  The thing to remember about this appetite for Westerns and the West is that the millions who possess it are entirely uncritical. They’ll take anything in buckskins, literally. The Karl May cult in Germany has not even begun to slow down, although May died in 1912 and was himself never west of Buffalo. Indeed, as I discovered with Lonesome Dove, it is really impossible to get people to look at the West critically—they just refuse. The director John Ford is said to have decreed that if you have to choose between the truth and the legend, print the legend. From my experience I’d say that there’s really no choice: for most readers and viewers it’s the legend or nothing.

  It seems that Bill Cody figured this out instinctively at the very beginning of his career. The Old Glory Blow Out in North Platte, plus the success of his various melodramas, which he knew to be terrible, combined to give him the necessary clue.

  So, banking on his good looks and his horsemanship, he made it happen.

  In the next few chapters I’ll look at some of the people who either helped him make it happen or else got in his way.

  5

  ONE aspect of late-nineteenth-century performance that has long since gone the way of the passenger pigeon was the endurance shoot, in which contestants fired thousands of bullets or pellets at a variety of targets, including live pigeons. Some blame these shoots for the extinction of the passenger pigeons; the popularity of squab at high-end restaurants was another factor in the passenger pigeon’s fade, along with habitat destruction, mass hunts, and the like. (The term “stool pigeon” derives from these stupendous all-day shoots. The stool pigeon was a decoy bird tethered to a stool or fence post.)

  By the time of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West the endurance shooters mainly shot at glass balls, trap-thrown, or wooden blocks. Captain Adam Bogardus, who shot with Cody’s show on some occasions, had a hand in the invention of the skeet trap; he also may have been the first marathon shooter to use the Ligowsky clay pigeons, an invention which in time regularized skeet shooting, a sport that once enjoyed a much greater popularity than it does today. Annie Oakley and her husband, Frank Butler, ran a high-end skeet club after they had left Cody’s show.

  These endurance shoots were popular everywhere. Doc Carver did particularly well in the Hoboken area, where there were many German shooting clubs. It was not a sport for those with little stamina. In Brooklyn on one occasion Doc Carver broke 5,500 glass balls out of 6,211 thrown. Doc Carver and his opponents, of course, had loaders. Annie Oakley, on one occasion and perhaps one occasion only, shot 5,000 clay pigeons in a day, loading her own guns. She broke 4,772 or thereabouts.

  The real problem in these endurance shoots, as Doc Carver testified, was eyestrain, the result of so much squinting. After the 6,000-ball shoot in Brooklyn, Carver had to go to bed with a cloth over his eyes for two days. Although he did more than anyone else to popularize these shoots, he was not, as he often claimed, the absolute top marathon shooter of his day—the title probably belonged to one Adolph Topperwein, who committed only nine misses out of 72,500 balls thrown.

  On the other hand, Doc Carver made his living as a competitive shooter for almost half a century, taking on all comers in advertised shoots in America, Europe, and Australia. He probably shot more shots, most of which hit their targets, than any competitive shooter of his day.

  W. F. Carver and W. F. Cody had been rivals to some degree since their buffalo-hunting days. They ran into one another in New Haven in 1883 and immediately decided to put on a Wild West show together. Carver claimed that he already had a Wild West show and merely invited Cody to come in as an act of generosity. The reader should be warned that absolutely everything that Cody and Carver said about one another, in the course of a rivalry that lasted at least four decades, should be taken with a large grain of salt. When speaking of one another, neither is to be believed.

  What is true is that the first show operated by Cody and Carver was the same show that opened in Omaha in May of 1883. It boasted a title that many would consider cumbersome: “The Wild West, W. F. Cody and W. F. Carver’s Rocky Mountain and Prairie Exhibition.” Carver wanted to get in the phrase “Golden West,” a locution he was fond of and later used in his independent productions.

  Like many first efforts the show did not go off seamlessly. A number of Omaha dignitaries, including the mayor, were invited to ride in the Deadwood stage while it came under mock attack from a party of Pawnees. The Pawnees had been recruited by Frank North. As soon as the Indians started whooping and hollering, the mules panicked and made several bouncy circuits of the arena before they could be stopped. This indignity so angered the mayor of Omaha that he had to be restrained from attacking Cody physica
lly.

  Doc Carver was six years older than Bill Cody, but outlived him by a decade, perhaps because he didn’t drink as heavily—which is not to imply that he was actually reluctant to bend the elbow. He was born in Illinois and, like Cody, was on his own at an early age. He was a teamster for a time, did some scouting, fought in several skirmishes with Indians, and like Cody, was a professional buffalo hunter. He was probably a better overall marksman than Cody; when shooting competitions began to be popular he soon figured out that shooting at glass balls or tossed coins was a lot easier than the demanding life of the frontier.

  Carver was not as good-looking as Cody, nor was he as immediately acceptable to rich people—though, in time, he acquired polish and was not far behind Cody when it came to seducing, socially, the rich and the royal. He was practically the only one of Cody’s close rivals who developed a real animus against him, the basis for which may have been mostly financial. From the time of that first show in Omaha the two could never agree about how much one partner owed the other. Carver claimed that Cody originally agreed to put in $27,000 but instead stayed drunk most of the summer and never put in a cent. Cody’s bankers, though not denying that Cody had a tendency to go on what he called “toots,” claimed that the financial situation was the other way around. They insisted that Carver didn’t put in a cent, either—yet somehow the show got mounted, and expensively, too. For the next several years the two showmen made various legal lunges at one another, most of them inconclusive. Cody may have offered to flip a coin to settle the matter, but Carver was not charmed by the gamble. Coins were flipped, perhaps, and Cody did surrender $10,000 at one point, while keeping possession of the Deadwood stage.