The Honorable Cody

by Richard S. Wheeler

  It troubled me so much that I set out to put matters right in this memoir. How long did I ride for the Pony Express? Was I really only fourteen? I have been in so many places, held so many positions, that they are a kaleidoscope of images and memories and scents and sounds. I have done my best in previous memoirs, when I was closer to events and my memory was sound, and I am inclined to let it go at that.

  There is a reason: little by little a public image has built up that embodies more than just me. People have invested something in this fellow they call Buffalo Bill, and for each person it’s a little different. One sees me as the essence of a young nation whose people are pushing west; others see me as a person straight out of history, one who really experienced the Indian wars, who rode with the cavalry and braved arrows and lances. Others see me almost the way they see Uncle Sam, a sort of universal figure that symbolizes this young republic all over the world. So, after much pondering, I’ve decided to leave matters alone. Blast if I can tell the difference between the public Bill and the private Bill nowadays. This will no longer be a memoir to correct errors and straighten up a long and complex life, but a series of reflections on what it has meant to become this man called Buffalo Bill who rides out onto the arena grounds upon a white horse.

  It troubles me that some people think that the real Cody is the youth who worked for various frontier companies and the army, while the later Cody is wholly a figment of the imagination of John Burke and others. It’s as if my show business accomplishments, such as putting together the most successful arena show in the world, don’t count; or developing acts that electrify audiences don’t count. But I am the same man. I am both the young scout who fought the Indians and the showman. But there is the odd feeling that theater is illusory and therefore what I did later in life counts for nothing. I don’t mind. If people think only my youth is genuine, and the showman is a poseur, then it just goes to show that I’ve staged some mighty successful shows, and my illusions of the frontier which I achieved with a few actors and buffalo and a troupe of Sioux, were magical.

  I thought, too, that a man whose accomplishments are genuine, who did indeed scout for the cavalry and all the rest, scarcely needs any more introduction. I did these things and that should be enough.

  Chapter 12

  Major Gordon W. Lillie

  So Cody is dead. I am saddened. It must have been sheer heartache that sandpapered him down. There were parts of him he just couldn’t get under control and those are what destroyed him and nearly destroyed me.

  My grief is genuine and runs deep. I feel that way in spite of the bitterness that lingers in me whenever I hear his name. Were it not for William Cody I would not be who I am, would not have met my dear May, would not have entered into my own business. It’s true that once we became partners, producing the Two Bills show, as the combined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Pawnee Bill’s Far East came to be called a few years ago, I found I had a mustang by the tail and I was drawn into the show’s involuntary bankruptcy along with Cody entirely because of Cody’s utter inability to handle money. I knew all about that weakness of his before we cut the deal, but went ahead and partnered with him, so I have only myself to blame.

  But unlike old Bison William, I had invested wisely and now live in comfort with May. He threw his boodle into a bum tungsten mine in Arizona, as if he knew a thing or two about mining, while we bought prime agricultural land near Pawnee, Oklahoma, and invested in other solid enterprises too, including our bank.

  But enough of that. I owe everything to Cody in a way that few people would ever understand. For it was he who lighted in me the passion for the great American West and that flame never died the rest of my life.

  It happened in this way: his early stage show, The Scouts of the Plains, showed up in Bloomington, Illinois, where I was growing up. My father was a Scot from Quebec; my mother the daughter of a Boston banker. I went to that show and saw Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, and Texas Jack Omohundro, the three of them sporting more hair than a girls’ chorus, all of them duded up in big western hats, fringed buckskins, and gaudy boots. The thing is, they were expending black powder and enjoying themselves.

  That did it. I had the fever. I was a chunky kid, short but solid and tough, with dreams of boots and a high-crowned sombrero. When my father’s mill burnt we resettled in Kansas and suddenly there I was in cow country, surrounded by drovers who had come up the Texas trails. I started life as a school teacher, but nothing that sedate could ever satisfy my rage for the west, and I soon took off, the vision of those three wild men burning in my brain.

  I got into big trouble in Wichita, when I tried to prevent a Texas cowboy named Braden from pounding on an Indian he was bullying. Braden challenged me to a fight and there was little I could do but borrow a revolver and shoot it out. I killed him, but the coroner’s jury decided it was justified. I lit out of that town, scared witless, wanting no part of anything like that again. I was still in my teens. I ended up at Pawnee Agency in Indian Territory, mastered their tongue and listened to their elders, grew to love them as if they were my own people, and got the name Pawnee Bill, which stuck.

  I spent a year with the Pawnees and made lifelong friends there. Later, when Cody hired a bunch for his Wild West, I went along as translator and guide for those old friends, and that’s how I got to know Cody and also how I came to be widely known as Pawnee Bill.

  That was also how I met May Manning. She had come to the show and was gazing raptly at the cowboys and Indians when I saw her. It was love at first sight. Predestined. I swear to it. One glance and I was lassoed. I began a campaign to win her. It wasn’t easy. She was a Quaker, a Philadelphia society gal attending Smith College, and her parents didn’t want some wild western cowboy and shepherd of Pawnees courting their daughter. But I shot letters to her, some of which her parents intercepted and burnt, and soon won her. Eventually I won the reluctant consent of her parents. You can call that a love story that never ended and it grows more miraculous each day of my life.

  We got ourselves legally hogtied and roped on that fateful day of August 31, 1886 and immediately we caught a train west, honeymooning in a Pullman, which I recommend for all newlyweds. In a sense, old Cody had godfathered the union, for it was his show that had drawn me to the life on the boundless plains, and his Wild West that carried me to Philadelphia and the performance that enraptured her and resulted in our meeting.

  It was a rough life for May here in Indian Territory but she took to it. After a year she gave birth to a ten-pound boy who lived only a few weeks. Worse, she was torn up and needed surgery, and the result was that she could have no more children, a blow to both of us.

  But May is made of marvelous stuff and next I knew she had thrown herself into living the life of a ranch woman, learning everything I could teach her about horses, riding, shooting, roping, as well as all the lore of our Pawnee friends. She turned into a phenomenal shot. Years later, May Manning Lillie became the star of my own Wild West, her sharpshooting just as fine as Annie Oakley’s. Her audiences loved her and she was the always the biggest hit of Pawnee Bill’s Wild West, and you can bet your boots I was so in love with her I couldn’t even express it.

  I loved her then, love her even more now, and marvel at the courage with which that Philadelphia society girl turned herself into an authentic Wild West star who knew ranching and cattle and rifles and horses better than anyone else in our show. And behind all of that, amazingly, was old Bison William, whose own magic drew us into his orbit.

  I launched Pawnee Bill’s Wild West in 1888 with some acts I always thought were better than Cody’s. I had Indians from several tribes: Pawnees, Kiowas, Comanches, Kaws, and Wichitas. I had Mexicans, Texas cowboys, and the “Princess of the Prairie,” May Lillie. I even had Annie Oakley for a while after she left Cody. We didn’t do well that year but I kept trying, and also mastering the demanding art of keeping a road show profitable. I figured I had to offer something different, something new, and not just an imitatio
n of Cody’s Wild West. By 1893 my show had become Pawnee Bill’s Historical Wild West, Mexican Hippodrome, Indian Museum and Grand Fireworks Exhibition. Now that was a mouthful! I had three hundred people on my ledgers, and two hundred horses, and “beauteous, dashing, daring and laughing Western girls who ride better than any other women in the world.”

  Well, that brought them through the gates, all right. We toured Europe, got into trouble in Belgium, got some new financing, and went on, always evolving the show in ways that made it different from the Cody show.

  Meanwhile, I had gotten active in the big push to open up the Indian Territory to white settlement and was at the forefront of that shebang. When the Cherokee Outlet was opened in 1893, that’s when I bought some prime prairie from the Pawnees, land that even now is our anchor, our home, the place where May and I built a big bungalow, started our own herd of buffalo in order to preserve the animal from extinction, and ran a large-scale goat farm.

  But we were always in the long shadow of Buffalo Bill. Not Barnum, not Bailey, not the Ringlings, not the Sells Brothers, were his equal. His own show went through various phases. Salsbury died, John Bailey began to manage it, and his circus expertise helped keep it afloat, at least when he could keep Cody's spending on ice. But that name, Buffalo Bill, on thousands of broadsheets plastered on barns, on the covers of hundreds of dime novels, that name was such a draw that the Wild West remained the king of the western road shows.

  And there he was in each performance, riding out on his white horse, that long hair somehow romantic and reminiscent of a wilder past. I’m a stocky sort, not the sort of man who can become an international demigod. But we made out, playing smaller towns Cody overlooked, putting on a grand exhibition and then loading the show onto the flat cars and boxcars and some antique coaches once again, much the way Cody’s Wild West did.

  We crossed paths now and then and always had a friendly visit over a bourbon and splash. I might tell him that New England was poor turf for any Wild West, or that Kalamazoo was a great spot for the ticket window, or that Albany would be highly profitable if it didn’t rain, which it often did. He listened, found my experience to be accurate and correct, and thanked me for the counsel. At the end of each season we returned to our havens, North Platte for Cody and Pawnee, Oklahoma, for May and me.

  Cody really wrecked himself between seasons. I heard stories about him: drinker, womanizer, prodigal spender. They were all true to some extent though Cody usually contained his famous binges until off-season or when the show had a few days off. The women were always something whispered about but that was all true, too. Whatever had happened to his marriage with Louisa, it turned into perpetual winter, a collision of icebergs, frost and long black night. There were usually some very delectable young ladies hanging onto his buckskins. But you know something? Those came after the deep freeze, not before.

  It was 1908 when Buffalo Bill and I began to talk about combining. He was unhappy with the Bailey heirs, who owned a third of his show inherited from John Bailey. And they were unhappy with him, with his spending, and with his publicist Major Burke, who was perceived as being costly and ineffectual. Bailey’s widow and her lawyers hadn’t the faintest idea how valuable John Burke had always been and how well he generated publicity, and Cody flat-out refused to get rid of him.

  There were other issues too, but the upshot was that the Bailey interests wanted to sell out and I was the logical person to sell to, which is why I started some serious talks with Bison William at a time we were touring New England. I thought I might do it but the moment May heard about it she was dead set against the deal.

  “Gordon, please don’t! Cody’s notorious. You know how he spends. You know how he drinks. And the women, my God, the women!”

  “That’s rumor.”

  “You may think so,” she retorted.

  “That name, Buffalo Bill, still earns a fortune for anyone connected with it,” I said. “Even badly run, that show coins money. With a little discipline it could put a gold mine to shame. I could buy a third of that show from the Bailey interests for only fifty thousand. Think of it! A third of the Wild West!”

  But May was not persuaded. As the days went by, and I didn’t budge, her own opposition rooted deep. Then came the ultimatum:

  “Gordon, if you combine with Buffalo Bill, then I’m quitting the show and I won’t change my mind about it,” she said. “You can find some other lady sharpshooter.”

  “But May!”

  “He’ll ruin us. Don’t do it, Gordon. I’ve nothing against the man; it’s just that it’s bad business. Nothing slows him down. Don’t you remember Katherine Clemmons? What she cost him?”

  I remembered. The British actress had milked Colonel Cody for fifty thousand, or so it was said.

  Oh, boy.

  I knew May would make good her threat. She had wanted to spend time at the Bungalow, making her new home all the more richly appointed than ever. It was filled with great western art commissioned from such as Charles Schreyvogel and H. H. Cross. We had spent seventy-five thousand building it, and two hundred thousand more furnishing it.

  I decided not to heed her. There was never a rift between us but we flat out didn’t agree on the Wild West. And now, at Cody’s death, I am thinking she is smarter than I by a long shot. She always was.

  (From the memoir of Colonel William. F. Cody)

  If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, than I am truly flattered. Over the years, there were several Wild Wests floating about the country, vainly competing with the Buffalo Bill Wild West. These were usually dog-and-pony affairs, two-or-three boxcar shows with a few boozy cowboys, a few vaqueros gifted with the reata, some swayback horses, a few mangy Mexican longhorns, along with some cranky sharpshooter with a ruby-lipped assistant in tight skirts.

  They were actually more rodeo than Wild West show, and of course they hit the small burgs rather than the big cities, threw up their bleachers on vacant lots and were out of the town by the next dawn, just ahead of the bill collectors. But I always thought of them as a benefit to me by keeping the Wild West before the public. Occasionally I hired talent from one or another show and put it into mine. Usually I had to remind them to behave themselves. We never tolerated loose conduct in all the years I owned my show. That was not true of most of the Wild Wests touring the country.

  None of these imitations was more successful than the Pawnee Bill show, and of course it sprang from my own. Gordon Lillie, who styled himself Pawnee Bill, actually learned the trade in my show, when he came to us as interpreter for the Pawnees we hired. Eventually he and his bride started up their own show. It was a dandy, big enough to require a dozen boxcars and coaches, full of Pawnees and vaqueros who could lasso anything, especially women, and did. He could move two or three hundred people around just as well as we could.

  We may have been rivals in a sense, but we were friends and when our paths crossed he never hesitated to let us know what places welcomed us, and what people sat on their hands. Just try staging a Wild West in Hartford or Wilmington, and see what it will get you. Eventually, when the Bailey heirs wished to sell out, Lillie bought their interests. I encouraged the deal. The Bailey heirs were brimming with complaints about my management and I welcomed Lillie, who knew how to run a Wild West show from the ground up.

  He had the good sense to see that he would have to be second bill; my larger and more famous show would top the ticket, and my name would lead the publicity. For some reason never divulged to me, his wife abandoned her sharpshooting act at the time we merged and I regretted it because we had never found a suitable replacement for Annie Oakley.

  My old friend Gordon had a fine business sense, and the Two Bills show prospered, allowing me to sink more cash into developing my Arizona tungsten mine, which showed more and more promise. I thought things were rolling along pretty smoothly in spite of some rainy periods. But then Gordon asked me for twenty thousand to winter the stock, and I didn’t have it and had to borrow it.
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br />   Suffice it to say that I think the world of Gordon Lillie, and wish him every success, and believe he is the finest road-show man in the country. What makes him especially fine is this: he never held a grudge. When the sun sets on the days of the Wild West, Pawnee Bill will be right up there, one of the biggest stars in the heavens.

  Chapter 13

  Katherine Clemmons Gould

  He’s gone. Oh, dear. I wonder how I feel about that. I suppose time will tell, but I don’t know whether I trust my feelings very much, and in any case I must not let Howard know that I have given it the slightest attention. I'll see what I should feel. Of course I’m an actress and I know about things that are kept from the public, and I know that when he wasn’t wearing his fringed buckskins costume he was just like any other man only more so.

  I met Mr. William F. Cody in London at a Mayfair party, and saw at once he was a force of nature. There he was, this slim and lithe American from the frontier, though on this occasion he was attired in gentleman’s black from Seville Row. But not all the black worsted in the world could conceal his origins, the great cascade of brown hair tumbling about his shoulders, the goatee, the predatory eye. He sent a shiver through me. I had never been in the presence of such raw virility.

  I watched him from afar of course, not being properly introduced. It had only been the briefest while since his Wild West opened in Earl’s Court, but already he was the rage of London, getting richer by the hour, and I envied him. Why could I not be the rage of London too?