The Honorable Cody

by Richard S. Wheeler

  I’ll never forget the time in 1907 when her husband, Howard Gould, rich son of the financier, tried to defeat her suit for divorce. He sent a lawyer over to the show to offer Will fifty thousand dollars if he would testify to her relationship with him. That was a fortune and a welcome one just then, when Will was hurting financially.

  It is said that every man has a price and Gould thought that Will Cody’s price was fifty thousand dollars.

  But Will Cody did what a good man must do. “Get the hell out of my tent,” he roared.

  And then, because we shared all things, he told me about it. And ever since, I have admired him all the more.

  (From the memoir of Colonel William F. Cody)

  By the mid-1870s I was enjoying some success as an actor and the Buffalo Bill Combination was bringing me a good income. We moved to Rochester, New York, a good place for us to put down roots while I continued my dual life as scout and showman.

  After the 1875 campaign in the West, I organized my own outfit, the Buffalo Bill Combination, and we set out to bring “The Scouts of the Plains” to various locales on the East Coast. I had my usual cast with me, Texas Jack, Major Burke, and Madame Morlacchi. At Springfield, Massachusetts, one April night I received a telegram just before the show. My little boy Kit, whom we had named after the greatest of all scouts, Christopher Carson, was gravely ill of scarlet fever. With great foreboding, I played out that first act, explained my emergency to our audience, turned my part over to Major Burke, and caught the nine o’clock train, traveling through the long night, the rattle of the wheels on the rail accompanying my anxious heart.

  I arrived in Rochester in time to find my fevered little boy, Kit, still alive and aware of me, but even as I held him in my arms, Kit died. I could barely endure it. One moment alive, the next moment forever gone. God took his own back to Himself. With the heaviest of hearts, we buried Kit in a plot we had acquired in the Mount Hope Cemetery there. My son was only five years old. It was one of the bleakest moments of my life.

  It was soon to be followed by another. My dear daughter Orra Maude died of a fever at age eleven, breaking my heart. This happened in 1883, the very first year of my Wild West, and sadly we buried her in our plot in Rochester beside her little brother. I stood there, looking at those two mounds of earth, seeing my dearest ones forever gone. Poor Lulu was deranged by the loss and blamed me for it, as if somehow I had destroyed my own daughter. The whole train ride east was a nightmare with my wife making a scene whenever she could manage it. “This is God's punishment on you for being an actor!” she cried. “When will you stop? After he takes another child?” So grief was mixed with mortification, and I wondered whether the marriage was worth it.

  But there was still more to come. When Arta died in 1904, still a young woman and newly married after losing her first husband, Lulu blamed Arta’s death on me, told me I had been a bad father, and staged terrible public scenes along the way as we rode to Rochester to bury her beside Kit and Orra. By her way of thinking, I had caused the death of three of our children. I was carrying as much burden as a man can, grieving for my girl and absorbing the public outbursts of my deranged wife.

  Arta had always sided with her mother, who lost no opportunity to alienate my daughter from me, and then her sudden death drove Lulu to make terrible accusations. Lulu said I had caused Arta such heartbreak that it had killed her. This after a month or so of happiness with her new husband on the West Coast. I found myself disheartened by all that, and aching to be free of a woman who imagined I would destroy my own beloved child. I do not know what inspired Lulu’s tantrums but I know that her disapproval of my show, and my life, ran deeper than ever, and she believed I had not given her a respectable household. Not only did she accuse me, she also blamed my sisters. Anyone who bore the name Cody, it seemed, was the object of her terrible caterwauling. I grew weary of it.

  That left, among the children I had sired, only Irma, who still lives and who enjoys my company, and whose mind has not been poisoned by her mother’s propaganda. One in four; the other dear souls are awaiting the time, not long now, when their old father will once again behold their fresh young faces and eager smiles in the next world. I had seen my children to their graves. I often wondered what was left.

  My sisters, God favor them, came to my aid, comforting me in my loss, insulating me from Lulu when I needed them, nurturing my battered soul when I was pondering those accusations that Louisa had spread so freely and maliciously. There was no one else, except the young man who had become a part of my family, Johnny Baker. I owe him my sanity.

  Chapter 16

  Gene Fowler

  It’s all about money, at least for those who saw the colonel as a milch cow. Now take Harry Tammen up there in the Red Room of the Post two floors above me, arguing with himself about the most decorous and dignified way by which the late Honorable Cody could repay his alleged debts to the proprietors of this gaudy rag.

  I can almost read Tammen’s mind: one part of him wishes to plant the old boy on Lookout Mountain where he will balloon the local economy for fifty years. The other part of Tammen, and I might say the loftier part, would like to see Cody mummified, planted in a glass-walled coffin and displayed at sideshows around the world for two-bits a peek: Step right in, folks, and see the real Buffalo Bill Cody, pay your respects to the great scout... just twenty-five cents, all of which will go to the children’s milk and diphtheria fund, an enterprise Buffalo Bill himself founded on behalf of the children of the world.

  For years now, Harry Tammen has been envious of that entrepreneurial fellow in Montana, A. W. Miles, who was exhibiting the alleged petrified carcass of Thomas Francis Meagher, the Irish patriot and Civil War hero, at county fairs and side shows and stuffing his pockets full of Liberty Head dimes in the process.

  The petrified Meagher got himself toured throughout Montana. In Butte, the mining town so rich in Irish, long lines formed to see the fallen hero transformed into a stone mummy by the hand of God. Miles saw the winning ways of it and shipped the petrified hero off to Madison Square Garden and other major ports where there were large populations of Irish, doing a fine cash business wherever he took the petrified Meagher.

  Miles, a department store man and nephew of General Miles, even had the exhibit certified by a doctor to be that of a man exactly the size and shape of Meagher, who vanished into the Missouri River in 1867 and, it is alleged, turned into rock when his body snagged over a mineral spring whose salts swiftly replaced his body parts.

  Harry Tammen was envious. A petrified hero. What better way to get rich? He wanted a petrified hero for the Sells-Floto Circus and sideshow. But a mummified Buffalo Bill would be better by far. Cody dead is a gold mine. Tammen has probably calculated that he could exhibit Cody from one end of the country to the other, probably at the rate of 200,000 people a year, at two bits each, for a tidy gross of fifty thousand per annum. Cody’s mummified remains ought to be good for a few decades, anyway.

  Tammen is sure to do the right thing.

  I’m not so sure that Louisa Cody would be eager to return the colonel to show business. She’s even more interested in moolah than Tammen, which is saying a lot, and might be planning other destinies for the late colonel.

  I admire Louisa for turning a bad marriage into a bonanza. You have to give her credit. She’s got more money than the entire Cody clan put together, and she got it with a little blackmail. Fork over, Will, or face exposure in the public press, something that would be bad for business. So Cody deeded this and deeded that, a house one time, pasture land the next, irrigated land the next, and now Louisa squats like a baroness over a great estate. And maybe that was the right thing to do, given her husband’s spendthrift ways. Still, Cody did all the work, exhausted himself keeping his shows going, and was the man who coined the profits while she did nothing but scheme how to euchre him out of it. Life ain’t fair.

  The lady added nice little fillips to the whole scenario. Like tantrums in public places.
For instance, that time when she hied herself to Chicago unannounced while the Colonel and the Wild West were playing the Columbian Exposition for all it was worth. When she asked where Mr. Cody was residing she was informed by some hotel rummy that Mr. and Mrs. Cody were staying at such and such an address. Oh, indeed! They were, were they? She didn’t find any Mrs. Cody lurking there at the moment but it was a dandy excuse for a rampage, and she proceeded to bust up the rental boudoir, smashing mirrors, ripping drapes, whacking furniture, and having a fine old time. The Colonel paid for it, but not a bit gladly. That cost him a whole lot of moolah. And of course Louisa got another chunk of real estate out of it.

  The Colonel’s current soubrette about that time, Katherine Clemmons, was starring in a play called A Lady of Venice, which Cody had underwritten to the tune of fifty thousand simoleons. All that subsidizing by Daddy Moneybags didn’t do her any good. The show croaked, along with Miss Clemmons’ shaky career. I heard tell that after that he had his fill of gorgeous young actresses and headed west to hunt bear, or whatever he was itching to kill. And poor rebuffed Miss Clemmons, playing second fiddle to a bear, never forgave him. The beast! No longer supporting her career! Unspeakable!

  Then there was the time that the real Mrs. Cody, on the snoop, arrived in New York City once again unannounced and checked into the Astoria. She had mastered that trick and knew how to milk it for all it was worth. This time, when she phoned his room at the Hoffman House, a silky voice answered, and Louisa knew exactly whose voice it was: Bessie Bell. Actually, I have it that the lady’s name was Bessie Isbell. She had joined the show in the 1890s in the East and by 1900 had become its press agent. She sure knew how to press the Colonel at any rate. She had grown up in Washington, D.C. and had never seen the West, but that didn’t slow her any. She was good at whatever she was working at, including working her boss. Or maybe he was working her. One never quite knows.

  In any case, this called for another tantrum, and Louisa was up to it, performing riot and mayhem upon her hotel room at the Astoria, paying her compliments to the mirrors, the bed and chairs, the drapes, the sheets, the marble, and anything else that might bend under the might of her wrath. Once again poor old Cody shelled out, this time about half of the remaining farmland at North Platte, and Louisa sashayed triumphantly westward, richer by far.

  The game worked pretty well, I think. But it wasn’t a happy life, and still isn’t. She’s pretty much alone now, having alienated everyone around her. If Louisa Cody ever managed to befriend herself, she might have a few moments of peace.

  I remember Johnny Baker told me about hanging around Scout’s Rest while Cody entertained assorted nabobs and dignitaries. He found her eating alone in the kitchen one time, because Cody’s guests were all male and she would have been out of place. She had smiled and offered Johnny a meal.

  Here's the odd thing. In spite of all that, in her own way she loved Cody. If she could have had the marriage she wanted, he would have been at her hearth and working as some respectable accountant or shoe salesman or sewing machine drummer in St. Louis, raising their children in quiet domesticity.

  I know how she felt and still feels. There were times when the warring couple got back together, and one could see the pleasure in her face. The bulge-eyed anger slipped away and she found peace just being with her man. Late in life, when old Cody was sinking every spare penny into his Campo Bonito tungsten mine in Oracle, Arizona, and losing a half million clams in the process, she sometimes accompanied him out there to a country inn, The Mountain View, close to where the tunneling was going on, and one could find her reading contentedly on the veranda, enjoying the Arizona sun, while foolish old Cody was getting himself deeper and deeper into a business he knew absolutely nothing about.

  They did find and mine some tungsten ore, which had traces of gold and other minerals in it, hoping to capitalize on the electric light bulb business that consumed tungsten, but it never was a paying proposition and by the time old Cody cashed in, he had sunk his last bucks down that rat hole.

  He had a penchant for that; it wasn’t the first time he’d been skinned, which is one reason Louisa latched onto his property. If she didn’t they would soon slide down one or another of his bottomless pits.

  No, I don’t think of Louisa as a wronged woman. I think of her as a rigid one, who couldn’t adapt as her husband found a new life and large opportunity. Her thinking never progressed beyond a yearning for a simple domesticity with doilies on the horsehair furniture, and she hadn’t the gifts to cope with the great changes thrust upon her.

  I contrast her sometimes to Frank Butler, Annie Oakley’s husband, who was a fine sharpshooter in his own right; that’s how they met, in a contest when she bested him at his own game. He saw her potential and he shifted his whole life, moving away from his own sharpshooting act, away from top billing as a star, to one of managing, encouraging, supporting, and loving his bride. In all their years together, they have been a happy couple, forming a partnership that is as strong today as it was when they first found each other.

  The Butlers were always a pair, always governed their conduct by the old rules of moderation, and because the pair of them rose out of deepest poverty, they always set money aside and prepared for leaner times and darker days. What a contrast they make to Buffalo Bill and Louisa, he prodigal and adventuresome and delighted with nearly every soul he met, she so rigid and unbending and judgmental. And in the end, Cody suffered even more than she; he was the loneliest man in the Republic.

  (From the memoir of Colonel William F. Cody)

  With the start of each show season I would invite my dear and beloved Louisa to join me on the tour, but I always knew what her answer would be. No, she would stay by the hearth and tend to domestic affairs wherever we had settled, such as Rochester or North Platte. She loved her big home in Nebraska, and the familiar kitchen where she made tea, and her own comfortable bed.

  There could be no transforming that homebody into someone more adventuresome. For Louisa, it was risqué even to attend the theater much less participate in it. I imagine if she were ever to write down all the people in my shows she thought were dissipated, she would fill a ledger. Louisa is a good and virtuous woman and even now I admire her strength of character.

  Life for me would have been much happier if she had joined me on the road. We could have rambled together, enjoying a whistle-stop life. But it was not to be. She preferred the comforting silences of North Platte. So I would once again take to the road all alone, sorrowing that my dear Lulu wouldn't be with me. The show would move out, I would not see her for months at a time, and I would subsist in my tent all alone. During the periods she felt estranged she would not even write but would communicate through third parties. I want it recorded that I never failed to support her and she never suffered a day’s want.

  Having said she would sit out the season in the Welcome Wigwam, she would occasionally arrive for a cheerful visit while I was on the road. The prospect of these visits delighted me but I wished she would let me know in advance of her arrival so I might have prepared for her amiable company. There would she be in someplace unexpected, Chicago, New York, Kansas City, and she always was eager to see her very own Bill and renew our domestic life. She would rent hotel rooms from the Atlantic to the Pacific looking for a moment with old Bill and hoping for a sweet reunion. It was always grand to see her even if the visit was unexpected. But during these conjugal visits she would soon have her fill of show business and then, filled with her unique virtue, she would return quietly to North Platte and settle in for the duration of the season, leaving me alone again.

  I am a scout. I have wandered the western prairies alert for ambush. I have scouted each defile, each ridge, each ford of every stream, always wary of ambush, and because I remained alert I escaped numerous attempts by Cheyenne and Sioux to lift my topknot. But I never managed to foresee Louisa's wifely visits. She had a keen sense of where I was, where I would be, and what company I might be entertaining
. It's a pity, because she wasn't quite used to hurly-burly daily life of show business or the friendly intimacy of people on the road. So, occasionally, she imagined things that weren't true, and turned perfectly innocent circumstances into something darker. I try always to be a model husband. I wanted her to have the consolation of my fortune since she has steadfastly denied herself the company of my good friends. I have gladly given her most of my Nebraska real estate. It hasn't been easy, and I have shorted myself of a decent retirement income out of my earnest wish to give all that I could afford to dear old Lulu and my daughters. From the bottom of my heart, I am glad that she is well fixed.

  There were some moments when we didn't quite see eye to eye, but we've always reconciled. Or maybe like river boulders, we have been worn smooth by each other. Sometimes I think she actually enjoys my friends these days. She’s been courteous to Nelson Miles, but of course he is not a showman and all he has done is run the United States Army. But I yearn for the moment when my dear Lulu greets Annie Oakley with a warm clasp of the hands, light in her eyes, and welcomes the gifted sharpshooter into the Welcome Wigwam.

  It will never happen, and that is the sorrow of my days.