The Colonel and Little Missie

by Larry McMurtry

  Doc Carver billed himself as the “Spirit Gun of the West,” whatever that means, but many who worked with him called him the “Evil Spirit of the West.” Though never quite as famous as Cody, he was famous enough and industrious enough to eventually get bookings on three continents. His temper, to say the least, was uncertain. Once, at Coney Island, he broke his rifle over his horse’s head; similar flare-ups were frequent. Still, most of his performers seemed to like him, and tolerate his outbursts, but the idealized fame that Cody won eluded the Spirit Gun—even though he won hundreds of shooting competitions. Cody won none.

  Among Carver’s partners was Cody’s friend the poet-scout Jack Crawford (the father, perhaps, of cowboy poetry). Carver was awarded almost as many medals and prizes as Cody—he ended up with a wagonload of fancy guns. He bragged about these trophies but they didn’t soothe his restless spirit much. He married and acquired a ranch in California but that didn’t soothe his restless spirit either. Within weeks he would be back to mounting shows. When Cody took his troupe to Europe in 1887 Carver was not far behind. Occasionally, to the annoyance of both, they would show up in the same European city at the same time. This happened in Hamburg in 1890. Since the two troupes hated, or professed to hate, one another, the citizenry of that stout German city were, for a time, terrified, at least in the opinion of a reporter for the New York World: “Hamburg is filled with a howling mob of Indians and cowboys who are awaiting the chance to scalp one another. As soon as Cody’s bills are posted, Carver’s assistants come along and tear them down.”

  It may be that, in the long run, Carver did better in Europe than Cody because he traveled with a smaller, more manageable troupe. Cody took ninety-seven Indians and lots of white performers, not to mention an extensive crew, when he first went to England, in 1887. Carver got by with twenty Indians and a few other acts. His ace in the hole was his own shooting. It always seemed to please crowds, though not as much as Annie Oakley’s shooting pleased crowds.

  Carver took his troupe to places such as St. Petersburg and Australia, where Cody had never worked up to going. Russia was not easy to get into but Carver applied to Ulysses S. Grant himself; Grant got the players in under a kind of blanket visa.

  Despite his fits and frequent surliness, Carver was a man of considerable principle. When he reached Australia he was appalled to discover that beautiful parrots and ibises were being destroyed in planned shoots; he loudly spoke against the practice. In San Francisco he attacked the local merchants for their too frequent use of wooden Indians, which he considered an insult to the real Indians, members of a noble race, that he himself had just brought around the world.

  Doc Carver survived and kept shooting. He outlived another sharpshooter, Annie Oakley, by a year. He remained to the end his own man, although to continue to compete in the cutthroat world of road shows he had to constantly scramble to develop new acts.

  Toward the end Doc Carver’s acts became more like boardwalk attractions. He invested in some diving horses and even a diving elk. A female daredevil rode the horses off a forty-foot platform into a fourteen-foot tank, which certainly took guts on the part of the daredevils.

  The elk, so far as I can discover, dove alone.

  6

  JOHN Y. NELSON, whose Sioux name was Cha Sha Sha Opogeo, was one of the few plainsmen to stay on good terms with Wild Bill Hickok, Doc Carver, and Buffalo Bill Cody (a moody triumvirate), though John Y. Nelson himself was a man of uncertain temperament. He sometimes sustained deadly feuds for decades. His status among the Sioux was especially high because he was married to Red Cloud’s daughter, who eventually bore him a vast brood, which he insisted on traveling with despite various impresarios’ reluctance. His most conspicuous physical attribute was a magnificent full beard. Perhaps it was the beard that attracted photographers—John Y. Nelson appears in many photos.

  Nelson worked for both Carver and Cody but the appearance that contributed most to his fame occurred in London. On the night that four kings rode in the Deadwood stage, John Y. Nelson, with his bushy beard and his inscrutable manner, rode shotgun. There is a famous photograph of the four not unapprehensive kings sitting in the stagecoach and of John Y. Nelson, equipped with shotgun, inscrutably observing it all. The kings were of Austria, Denmark, Saxony, and Greece. What John Y. Nelson may have been inscrutably considering was whether the Deadwood stage—a vehicle that had careened around too many arenas, chased by too many Indians, for too long—would fall apart, with all those nobs inside it. The kings themselves did not impress him.

  The show’s manager, Nate Salsbury, who firmly held the line on expenses, had failed either to purchase a new stagecoach or to have the existing one repaired.

  But Cody, taking no chances, drove the stage himself. Judging from other photographs, Cody seems pretty tense. Perhaps he was remembering the runaway in Omaha, and his near fistfight with the outraged mayor. Still, having four kings in the stagecoach plus the Prince of Wales, who sat on the driver’s seat with Cody and John Y. Nelson, was thumping good publicity. Major Burke, the press agent, was of course ecstatic.

  John Y. Nelson stayed with Cody through many tours and many vicissitudes. In group pictures of the troupe he is usually seen in the front row, seated with his wife and many lively children. Without his beard he would have closely resembled the Italian peasant whose shack is nearly shaken to pieces by the close passage of trains, in Sergio Leone’s For a Few Dollars More.

  7

  WHEN Cody and Carver and their soon-to-be rival Gordon Lillie (Pawnee Bill) began to drift into the performing life at the beginning of the 1880s, it was in part because, behind them to the west, the frontier as they had known it was closing. They were vigorous men with an abundance of frontier skills which were rapidly becoming obsolete. Railroads girdled the continent; and the telegraph, the singing wires, carried messages a lot quicker than anything Russell, Majors, and Waddell could have devised. In distant Arizona the Apache wars continued but otherwise the native warriors of the plains and forests were no longer a threat.

  Cody, Carver, and Lillie all had wives, but none of them could be described as well domesticated. They were vagabonds and soldiers of fortune. What did they do now? What would their model be?

  When Bill Cody set out on his “farewell tour” to California he described himself as a theatrical star—perhaps it was Major Burke who supplied the term. At this point in time what we now call the star system—mainly just a method of financing shows of one kind or another—was not well advanced. But in Cody’s case the description was not unfair. If any retired scout and part-time actor could be called a star, it was he. Thanks to the dime novels and more or less constant press coverage he was much better known than any of the other frontierless frontiersmen.

  The one true superstar in the theatrical world in this time was Sarah Bernhardt (Henriette-Rosine Bernard), who, from her base at the Théâtre Français, made frequent appearances both in England and in New York. Even losing a leg didn’t stop the Divine Sarah—she continued to work and outlived Cody by six years.

  When, in 1883, Nate Salsbury signed a partnership contract with Bill Cody and the then-reigning sharpshooter, Captain Adam Bogardus, to form an entity called “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West—America’s National Entertainment,” it is doubtful that he expected Cody’s fame to so completely eclipse his own (and Bogardus’s too, of course). In the theatrical world of that time there was a fair sprinkling of stars, one of whom was Nate Salsbury himself. General William Tecumseh Sherman remembered the young Nate Salsbury, aged perhaps sixteen, delivering an uplifting version of “Oh! Susanna,” at an impromptu entertainment during the difficult Georgia campaign. Nate survived a period at the dreadful Andersonville prison and briefly pursued the study of law before devoting himself permanently to the theater.

  Nate Salsbury was not ungifted, either as actor or playwright. He rose to be leading man at a theater in Chicago, but soon left to form his own troupe, which he called the Troubadours, a troupe he kept t
ogether for about a dozen years. Like Doc Carver he even took his actors to Australia. His specialty was light farces, one of which, Patchwork, achieved an eighteen-month run. Another, called The Brook, played successfully for about five years.

  Thus, when he made his contract with Cody, it was star joining star; and as a longtime man of the theater, Salsbury’s skills were much sharper and his experience much broader than Cody’s. Also, when necessary, he could write. Cody, despite the flamboyance of his autobiography, really couldn’t.

  In our day we have many superstars to choose from, but in Cody’s day they were thin on the ground and at first no one—certainly not Nate Salsbury—was willing to consider Cody a superstar. He was not the Divine Sarah.

  Major Burke, whom Salsbury regarded as a necessary evil—somebody had to hustle up publicity in order to get out the crowds—might call Cody a star but to Salsbury, at first, the man remained a tall, frequently drunk, former scout. Gordon Lillie, who became the manager of the show at one point, did like Major Burke, or at least approved of the job he did.

  The more complicated question is whether Salsbury really liked Cody, or whether one star’s envy of another star’s immense success colored their relationship almost from the first. It quickly became apparent to Salsbury and everyone else that the tall former scout was going to be a very big star indeed.

  Nate Salsbury wrote a memoir, but in his lifetime made no attempt to publish it. Some of it saw magazine publication many years after all the principals were dead. It was a jaundiced memoir, though rarely really mean. Salsbury may have been the first to see that Cody was becoming dependent on the adulation of the very people who were bleeding him financially; he also made a real effort to get control of Cody’s drinking, which was heavy. When Salsbury finally got Cody to agree to limit his intake to one drink a day Cody foiled him by securing a tankard that held at least a quart of whiskey. Cody, from his jayhawking days on, made no secret of his fondness for drink. Once, in apologizing to the poet-scout Jack Crawford for being so slow to answer an inquiry, he excused himself thusly: “I was on a hell of a toot and I seldom attend to anything except hoof her up when I am that way.”

  Others dispute the stories of Cody’s excessive drinking. It was obvious that he enjoyed his liquor but he usually managed to show up sober when the occasion was serious enough to demand it.

  Nate Salsbury possessed excellent managerial skills, and he, of course, had a stake in the success of the Wild West too. At first he applied his skills to the task of keeping the company solvent, until Cody’s extraordinary charisma kicked in, first nationwide and, eventually, worldwide.

  The reader will remember that it was Salsbury who, in only a few minutes that day in Louisville, recognized Annie Oakley’s star quality and ordered all those posters. He was thus midwife to the birth of our first huge superstars, Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley. Salsbury was probably as surprised as anybody at how broad their celebrity became.

  Nate Salsbury probably had enough of a performer’s ego to be a little sour when Cody put him so wholly in the shade; he couldn’t resist sniping at Cody a bit, but whatever jealousy he felt did not destroy his judgment or his showmanship. Though his name appeared as proprietor on all programs, he was not required to merge his troupe with Cody’s or to be with the Wild West for every performance. In fact he was performing in Denver when the first of many calamities overtook the Wild West. The troupe was on a steamboat headed down the Mississippi to New Orleans when the boat hit another steamer and sank. The crew, the troupe, and most of the horses survived, but the elk and the buffalo, Captain Bogardus’s guns, and many props went to the bottom. Salsbury was about to step onto a stage in Denver when he received a succinct telegram from Cody: “Outfit at bottom of river, what do you advise?”

  According to Don Russell the coolheaded Nate Salsbury merely asked the conductor to repeat the overture while he scribbled a telegram to Cody saying, “Go to New Orleans, reorganize, and open on your date.”

  Cody did manage to reorganize and to open on his date, but otherwise, their run at the New Orleans Exposition was one of the low points of Cody’s career. It rained for forty-four days, during which the Wild West doggedly performed, but to very poor turnouts. The shipwreck, the rain, and other difficulties left the Wild West $60,000 in the red; there were other difficulties too. Frank North, Cody’s old friend, was seriously injured when a girth broke; he died in the spring, by which time it is unlikely either North or Cody really knew or really cared which of them killed Tall Bull.

  The Sells Circus was in New Orleans at the same time as the Wild West—occasionally the bored performers would visit back and forth, one of them a small woman from Ohio who called herself Annie Oakley. Not long afterward, she had her famous audition in Louisville.

  Cody left New Orleans vowing to go on a drunk that would really be a drunk. Probably he kept this vow, but when and where and with whom is not recorded.

  8

  WE are not through with Nate Salsbury and the management of the Wild West, a long involvement with a few breaks in it. Like some presidents, Cody was a man of overflowing, at times overpowering, energies. He quickly wore people down, his wife, Louisa, among them. Much as she complained about her Billy’s absences, when he did show up he was likely to have a mob with him, a mob that would likely have taxed the patience of any wife.

  Salsbury too probably had periods of Cody fatigue. Sometimes he needed a breather, and went his own way for a while. Still, he had a clear mandate to manage everything: salaries, personnel, transport. It was he who set the order in which performers appeared. But when Cody was around it became impossible to maintain a clear separation of powers. Cody regarded it as his show; he could not resist meddling in everything: particularly personnel. To the end of his days, almost, he insisted on employing numerous former scouts or old army men whom he had known in frontier times: Frank North, Bob Haslam, John Y. Nelson were among this group but there were many others. Cody’s incessant meddling no doubt irritated Salsbury and led to his occasional disappearances—though he took care never to be out of reach of the telegraph. Nowadays he would have bristled with cell phones. His instant response to the sinking of the steamboat is indicative of his capacity to maintain some measure of oversight.

  Even though the first two seasons lost money it was clear that the show would draw plenty of customers once certain operational problems had been dealt with. By the third season, 1885, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West made a profit. This was the year that Annie Oakley joined the troupe.

  Another benefit Salsbury derived from his little absences was that he would not have to be irked by the fulsome behavior of the press agent, Major Burke. Veterans with long memories recalled that Burke himself had once been a performer who called himself Arizona John. One reason Salsbury came to dislike Burke was because the press agent absolutely worshiped Cody. He was puppylike in his need for Cody’s approval, which, mostly, he had. With the troupe in America Burke mostly stayed on top of his tasks, which mainly involved tooting Cody’s horn to a lot of editors, journalists, and advertising men.

  Once the troupe began to travel about Europe, however, opportunities for mismanagement were sharply increased. Sometimes Burke lost his interpreter, the result being that the Wild West ship might dock, or train arrive, with no one there to help them unload.

  One such arrival occurred in Naples. Burke was nowhere to be seen, there was no one there to help load, and the bemused Italians merely gaped at them. When Burke did show up, drenched in sweat and very anxious, Cody promptly fired him, and fired him in the thunderous tones he summoned when he lost his temper.

  Salsbury was enjoying a vacation in London when this telegram reached him, its author being Major Burke: “My scalp hangs in the tepee of Pahaska at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. Please send me money to take me back to the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.”

  Before Salsbury could even figure out what the ruckus was about, Cody’s fit passed, and as Louisa Cody says in her b
ook, “the god and his admirer were arm in arm once more.”

  The god and his admirer? Louisa was not exaggerating when she labels Burke’s feeling for Cody as being little short of idolatry; her book, Memories of Buffalo Bill, contains the most generous appraisal we have of the gregarious Major Burke.

  Lulu Cody’s book is an odd but not unreadable production. She mentions very few of the troupers: mainly just Cody, Burke, and the young sharpshooter Johnny Baker. Nate Salsbury—she spells it “Salisbury”—comes in for a few cautious mentions. Probably Lulu suspected that Salsbury didn’t worship Cody—a sin in her book—although she herself was far from worshipful where Bill Cody was concerned.

  Virtually the only woman mentioned in Memories of Buffalo Bill was Mlle. Morlacchi, the premiere danseuse and wife of Texas Jack Omohundro. The reason Mlle. Morlacchi came in for so much mention was that Major Burke had a mad but hopeless crush on her. Lulu Cody happens to have been the person Major Burke chose to confide in, while in the grip of this hopeless passion. The position of confidante appealed to Lulu, as it does to most women; she and Major Burke spent a good deal of time together, talking about nothing else. In fact the premiere danseuse and the tall scout were happily married, leaving Major Burke to nurse his longing in vain.

  An odd aspect of Lulu Cody’s memoir is that it is a free-flowing time line, with very few dates given. Now we’re in Leavenworth, or Hays City, or Rochester, or North Platte; it’s hard to say on a given page whether the Codys had been married two years or twenty. Lulu definitely remembers opening the box and finding Yellow Hair’s smelly scalp in it. When Bill comes home and regales the girls with a colorful account of his famous “duel,” which, in this telling, was a knife fight pure and simple, Lulu displays no doubt.