Carr’s board of inquiry, appointed on the spot, came up with the statistics: fifty-two Cheyenne killed, seventeen women and children captured, along with seventy-five lodges, 274 horses and 144 mules. The army also confiscated fifty-six rifles, twenty-two revolvers, and numerous bows and arrows. The village had plenty of powder.
I remember that evening with Cody in the Irma hotel very well because it touched upon something that has puzzled and plagued me all my life. Cody’s detractors never let it alone. Ever since the fight and even into these times they have belittled his role in it and ignored what General Carr and the Fifth Cavalry’s own officers had to say.
There is something about war that inspires the malice of lesser men toward those who acted bravely. The armed services are rife with it. Let a man succeed where others fail, let him prove valiant in the field, let him come up with the winning strategy, and next thing, he has skulking opponents who want to hack him down. There’s an undercurrent in the army, officers good at hating, that works against our best men. I think, as I reflect back over the years, that Cody handled all this with exceptional grace, far more grace than many an officer I know.
For one thing, he regarded bravery in battle as the routine, or ordinary thing, not the exceptional, and in my many talks with him he was almost dismissive of his deeds, as if he were doing no more than the expected. But they were always more than the expected and that was why he found himself chief of scouts. I don’t know that he ever replied at length to those accusations that he had embroidered his role in the battle of Summit Springs or wasn’t even there for the fight. He didn’t need to. It was as if he knew the truth, and didn’t much care whether anyone else knew it. I, of course, had the benefit of Carr’s own acute recollections, and I had talked to various others who fought that fight, and it all came down to Cody: there, indeed, was a man.
(From the memoir of Colonel William F. Cody)
It was all about a nag. Early in the battle of Summit Springs I saw a Cheyenne warrior slip off a way and attempt to form some resistance.
That fellow was sitting the handsomest horse I’d seen in years, a beautiful and disciplined light colored horse, gold with a darker mane and tail. He probably would be called a buckskin, but I could never quite put a name to the color of that animal. It moved gracefully in the bright sun, obedient to its master’s slightest whim, sending shocks of pure admiration through me. I had never in my life been so smitten by a horse.
I wanted that mount. I’ve always wanted fine horses. All my life I’ve thought of little but horses and consider myself an experienced horseman. As early as the Civil War, when I was with Hickok, I was learning everything he knew about horses, which was plenty. We even raced one together and took a licking, but somehow the itch for horseflesh got transferred from Wild Bill to me, and never left.
Well, I saw a way to get that horse the Indian was sitting on, because there was a gulch stringing that way where I could slip along until I could get a shot at him. Meanwhile the village was in chaos; Carr’s cavalry and North’s Pawnee Scouts were making swift work of the Cheyenne.
So I edged up that gulch until I was pretty close, and then shot the warrior out of the saddle. I didn’t know until later that it was Chief Tall Bull himself. The horse sidled away and I didn’t get it but a sergeant did, and turned it over to me. He had seen me shoot Mr. Chief and knew it was my prize, not the army’s.
Well, that was some horse. It stood there wild-eyed until I calmed it down, and I could see it was built for speed and that it was the finest animal in that camp. I called him Tall Bull in honor of his former owner, and rode him around, liking everything about him. Tall Bull’s widow saw me on the horse and began to wail, and I told her that Mr. Tall Bull had gone to the spirit land.
I fed that golden horse some grain and rode him in some easy matches and watched him run away from the pack without half trying. I discovered I had a racing horse, maybe the best racing horse in Nebraska, and after that I took him around to fairs and I made plenty of money in match races, winning so often that no one would run a nag against Tall Bull. That gold-colored horse cleaned up, and I pocketed a lot of cash, especially for an army scout. I hung on to Tall Bull for quite some while and then sold him to a doctor for a fancy price.
Actually, I’ve raced horses all my life. One of my best early nags was a buffalo runner called Brigham, which I used during my buffalo hunting days. It could outrun any buffalo. I matched him in plenty of races and usually won, and added coin to my income pretty regularly. Later, in my Wild West, I had several fine white horses, such as Isham and McKinley, each one carefully examined and purchased by myself because I didn’t trust anyone else to do it. I spent much of my free time in North Platte looking over horses which people brought to me hoping to get a high price for them.
I never lost interest in the racing but found less and less chance for it as the years rolled by. But my white show horses became a trademark of the Wild West. If anyone wants to put a marker on my grave that would truly mean something to me, let it say that I was a horseman.
Chapter 30
Julia Cody Goodman
We built Scout’s Rest for Will; he turned the project over to Al and me and made us managers of his North Platte farms. We had been farming in Kansas and I sure was reluctant to head so far west, but Will certainly had a way of persuading his sisters, and I succumbed. Al was always eager; the pay and opportunity would be good.
So we built Scout’s Rest in 1885 and tried to avoid Louisa over in the Welcome Wigwam, knowing she would meddle any way she could. She resented Will’s affection for us but didn’t know what to do about it except make trouble.
My husband, Al Goodman, was experienced and we soon turned Will’s holdings into a profitable farm, with ample fenced pasture, acres of grain, and some ditch irrigation that my brother and a partner financed. Of course some of the show stock was grown there, or at least wintered there, and we were responsible for it. I don’t recollect that Will ever complained about the way we managed the farm, and if Al hadn’t taken so sick we wouldn’t have suffered the troubles from Louisa. Al was so good at it that Scout’s Rest became a model of modern agriculture.
Whatever Will wanted, Al turned into reality. When Will wanted a huge barn to winter some of his show stock, Al raised it. We ran 125 blooded cattle, Herefords, Angus and Shorthorns. In time, we had broken enough prairie to raise 1,200 acres of corn, a hundred of alfalfa, fifty of broomcorn, and we had also converted one of the farms Will bought up into an oat field. We sometimes employed thirty men.
All this Al handled with such success that it was the one investment that Will could count on. I think if it weren’t for my dear Al, William F. Cody would never have become the great showman he was. My sisters rather worship Will but I never did. Of course I saw more of him in his unguarded moments than they did and I knew his faults. But even the worst of Will Cody was a thousand times better than the best of Louisa Cody. Or his daughters, for that matter.
Will pretty much went along with Al’s construction plans, but he wanted more veranda, ten feet on each side, and we gave it to him. No sooner was it done than he began using Scout’s Rest as a place to entertain half the world. He fell into a routine: when the show wound up for the season and went into its winter hibernation, he would invite the cast westward for a party and the revels would run for months, as Wild West people were replaced by railroad tycoons, politicians, army officers, actors, and captains of industry.
Al and I were always welcome but never as servants, and so we mixed with all these nabobs, whose principal occupation was drinking away the winter while gazing over golden stubble-fields, and studying distant herds of cattle or buffalo or horses. Occasionally they went on a hunt. When these simple hours palled, there was always North Platte a few minutes away, with assorted saloons to entertain his guests. Al and I avoided the saloons; we were still managing the farms, making sure stock got hayed, our help got paid, and so on, whether or not Will was there with his us
ual retinue. Not even in the fallow seasons can a farm be left to itself.
It was during those stretches when my brother was at home that I came to know him better than my sisters did. He was unwinding from the show season, sampling spirits and relaxing, always in a most decorous manner that contrasts with the gossip I’ve heard about him all these years. His idea of a holiday was to sip his way through it, putting on a pleasant glow, engaging in bonhomie with his friends, sometimes planning mischief or a joke or a sudden charity.
I learned then that Will was a man’s man, and had little contact with women socially, though of course he treated his sisters with great affection. I could never even pass by him without some warm salutation or an introduction to one or another of his cronies. But the plain reality was that virtually all his guests were males. The rare woman, such as Annie Oakley, was either ignored or treated so sentimentally that she was placed in a sort of isolation ward, as if she had some infectious disease. Annie and her husband, Frank Butler, usually came for a brief stay, never drank a drop, and left early, as if the visit was a duty rather than a pleasure. With Scout’s Rest only a mile or so from the Union Pacific, and a station right there to receive company, it was easy for anyone, anywhere, to drop off an express train, which always stopped at Will’s behest, and be taken by carriage to Scout’s Rest.
So the rooms of the big old house would bulge with tycoons and politicians, and still more would be housed in various North Platte hotels which made their living off of my brother. But none of them ever stayed at the Welcome Wigwam, which had become Louisa’s turf, closed even to her husband.
Will had a formidable liquor cabinet and it was Al’s and my responsibility to see that it was well stocked. No guest could name a drink that Will could not immediately supply. Often he mixed them himself, knowing the formula for every cocktail and ardent spirits ever invented.
All those men! I grew used to it. Wherever I went, there they would be, usually in shirtsleeves, and without their cravats. They played poker, smoked big black cigars, sipped bourbon or rye, occasionally settled into a creaking wicker chair on the veranda when the weather permitted, laughed, sliced ham from a haunch, told stories meant for men’s ears, and fell silent when I or some other woman invaded their sanctuary.
Will was obviously a great host, making sure everyone was well provided, yet leaving his guests to their own devices. He was always at the center of a circle of storytellers and yarners reliving the past season or commenting on the women of Boston, or the virtues of Southern women. They didn’t seek women’s company at Scout’s Rest but they never stopped gossiping about my sex.
There were so many of them. I could scarcely keep track of who was there, who wasn’t, who wandered into North Platte, who needed a barber or a clothier, who needed tickets to somewhere. Half of them were noted men, but I scarcely noticed.
In a way, I pitied poor Louisa over there in the Welcome Wigwam, pining away. Sometimes she did venture over to Scout’s Rest, where Will simply ignored her. There she was, his wife, wandering through those rooms, unintroduced. If Will did notice her, he set her to distributing drinks or food. Did she sit at his table? Never. Will and his guests caroused at the long, heavy dinner table, while Louisa served, or gulped down food in the kitchen along with the women of North Platte who were hired for the occasion. I saw her there many times, her face a study of despair, rebuffed by Will, angry at him, bitter and yet submissive, a person plainly unwanted like some ghost or specter, floating around Scout’s Rest. Mostly she irritated me, but in those pathetic moments the person who truly angered me was my own brother.
That was a marriage made in Hades.
But when all is said and done, I think the fault was mostly hers. She had every chance to enjoy his life with him, couldn’t bring herself to do it, and turned bitter. When Al took sick and was so poorly we couldn’t manage the farms, Louisa moved in like a shark, and pressured Will into hiring their daughter Alta and her husband, Horton Boal, to run the ranch. So Al and I moved back to Kansas and our own farm. That was in eighteen and ninety- one. I suppose it was a relief, if only to be free of Louisa’s meddling and disapproving of everything.
Poor Will! The Boals knew nothing about managing that large and modern farm, and next Will knew, it was bleeding red ink and Will faced the task of firing his own daughter and son-in-law, over Louisa’s enraged objections. Whenever I think of Louisa, so smug about money, so ready to blame Will for every financial blunder, insisting that the Boals stay on and run the North Platte farms into the ground, I can only shake my head.
Al improved a little though he was never well again, and in time we were invited back to Scout’s Rest, where we occupied the manager’s quarters once again and oversaw the big house and the fields. But Al slowly failed and the burden became so heavy we couldn’t continue. I think half the reason he failed was that we had to cope with Louisa, over there in her own house, finding ways to fault us and blame Will for anything and everything that went wrong.
Al died in 1901 and I’ve been a widow since then. I devoted my life to helping my brother. He needed a loyal family beside him and not some carping woman.
Well, ours was a family with troubles. I have come to realize that Will bore his troubles with courage. He lost most of his children, had a miserable marriage, and yet was always caring enough of his wife to keep Louisa comfortable. When the Welcome Wigwam burned down, my brother promptly bought her a fine home in North Platte. She didn’t deserve a thing as far as I am concerned. I am sorry to think such harsh thoughts, especially because in some ways she was only trying to find some sort of life she and Will could share, but now, with Will in his grave, I anger whenever I think of her.
The last straw was selling out to that Harry Tammen. Will Cody no more wanted to be buried in Denver than in Timbuktu. I only hope that poor Will’s ghost doesn’t have to endure Louisa buried beside him. His heart, at the end, was in Cody, Wyoming, and there, in all his boyish innocence, he believe he would find eternal rest. Far from his wife.
(From the memoir of Colonel William F. Cody)
In younger years I dreamed of a paradise out there in central Nebraska where the prairie grasses grew as they always had and no plow had cut the sod. I loved the sand-hill country, spare and unsettled, lonely and grand, wild with nodding flowers in the spring. I remembered it from my days as a scout at Fort McPherson. It was country I rode across, country whose ridges I employed to study the surrounding land, watch cloud shadows scrape the hills, and see the black dots of buffalo grazing slowly under a great bowl of blue.
I dreamed of a place close to the Platte River, that great artery draining water out of the Rockies to enrich and fertilize the sweeping valley that carried the river eastward. When money from my enterprises allowed, I bought acreage there, some of it virgin prairie, some of it good bottoms that others had turned into fine grainfields. There was I at home, happy and comfortable, at ease with man and nature.
This land would not only nurture my soul but would earn me an income if I used it well. It was great pasture land where generations of buffalo had trod, grazing the rich shortgrass that anchored the sandy slopes. So I caused to be built a great place of refuge I named the Welcome Wigwam, for that reflected not only the recent history of that area, Pawnee country but home to several other roving tribes, but also my desire to welcome guests to my lodge, share good times, enjoy the hunt, shed the cares of the workaday world. I proceeded according to plan, acquired the acreage in pieces, built the home lodge, and put Lulu in it with our daughters, there to grow up in a healthy place, invigorating air, well protected by ranch hands and town people.
But the dream went sour. I don’t quite know how. Lulu didn’t like it there though she came to call it home. She didn’t like anywhere else, either, except maybe the neighborhood of St. Louis where she grew up. She didn’t like the people of North Platte, who were certainly a rough crowd of cowboys and railroad men, with very few women among them. She didn’t like the prairie. She
didn’t like the friends I brought there. And then by one means or another, she turned the holdings into her private possessions. While I was on the road I would send her from time to time some funds with instructions to buy this or that piece of land adjacent to what we had. She did, but put it all in her own name, and eventually to my utter amazement I discovered that I really didn’t own much of our holdings in North Platte. She did, and she used that as a lever to tell me who would be employed, who would manage, who would be allowed on the place.
By various means not worthy of attention here she continued to acquire more of the North Platte holdings, and eventually a rift between us made me realize I must build another home and give her and the girls her own. So I engaged my sister and her husband to build Scout’s Rest nearby, supposing that would resolve the trouble. Little did I grasp that Lulu considered the management of that place to be her prerogative as well. She knew nothing of livestock raising or irrigation or plowing and farming and harvesting yet was not shy about imposing her will.
I had thought that truly, Scout’s Rest would be the paradise I had envisioned, the one which I had funded by so many seasons of grueling work on the road. I invited guests there, hoping to recover the lifelong dream, only to be thwarted at every turn, for I scarcely owned the land under me. I finally grasped a truth. For me to have my own home in the West where I might grow old in contentment, I must move. I must abandon the North Platte paradise to her and start over.
I did so, scarcely telling her about the bright new place of dreams my business colleagues named after me in Wyoming. By then, with the Wild West not so profitable, I was hard pressed but we plunged ahead. I built up the TE Ranch and bought its neighbors. We installed a mighty irrigation system. I built Pahaska Teepee, my hunting haven close to Yellowstone Park, and I erected the Irma Hotel, a fine hostelry right there in Wyoming wilderness. I got the railroad to run a branch up to our new town. I both employed and financed my sisters, all widowed by the early part of this century, and ere long they were running the local paper and my hotel, and I had found some small corner of paradise after all. Many was the guest I entertained at the ranch or the hotel or the lodge.
The Honorable Cody Page 23
