Louis S. Warren

by Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody;the Wild West Show

  Julia Cody’s memoirs offer some correctives to her brother’s fantasies, but she was understandably reluctant to contradict him. In many cases, neither sibling was entirely truthful. Reading these two accounts against one another, and weighing them against the handful of other evidence we can muster, we begin to discern real events of his childhood under the quilting of fiction which covered them.

  William Cody, hero of the Indian wars, did outrun murderous enemies as a boy. But they were not Indians. He did carry messages, but not the U.S. mail. He had his first taste of combat as a very young man, but when he first sighted down a rifle barrel at a man, it was likely not at any Sioux or Cheyenne. The West of the boy William Cody was riven by war on families, in which homes burned, and families were threatened, scattered, or worse. War defined his life from the time he was eight until he was about thirty. And in war he learned, above all else, the vulnerability of family and home.

  William Frederick Cody was born near Leclaire, Iowa, on February 26, 1846. His father, Isaac Cody, had been born in Canada and at the age of seventeen had settled in Ohio with his parents and siblings. He was already a widower when he met and married Mary Laycock in Cincinnati in 1840. Soon after, the couple, with Isaac’s daughter from an earlier marriage, Martha, moved to Iowa in search of new opportunities. William Cody was the third child of Isaac and Mary, having been preceded by a brother, Sam, in 1841, and a sister, Julia, in 1843. By 1853, there were seven children at home, including the two brothers and a total of five sisters: Martha, Julia, Eliza Alice, Laura Ella (often called Helen), and Mary Hannah, called May.16 In Iowa, Isaac Cody managed large farms for absentee owners, and ran a stage business between Davenport and Chicago. The children recalled their father as a traveling man who returned home between trips ferrying passengers across the wide prairie. Sometimes the young Codys stood on the riverbank, watching as Isaac’s brightly colored wagon passed by on its way to or from Chicago. The constant search for new opportunities led Isaac to consider joining the gold rush to California. He changed his mind when he heard tales of woe from returning emigrants and was unable to finance the trip.17 Instead, he and Mary Cody settled on a move to Kansas Territory. Their decision may have been motivated in part by the death of their eldest son, Sam, crushed beneath a bucking mare in 1853, at the age of twelve.

  Thus, William Cody’s earliest memories entwined family and westward expansion. The Codys ventured to Kansas in 1854, even before Congress opened the territory for settlement. They were comparatively well-off, and they stood out from other immigrants. Julia Cody remembered that the family had “as nice an outfit as ever came acrost to Kansas Territory.” There were two wagons, a large four-horse outfit filled with family belongings and a smaller two-horse carriage to convey the family. There were two extra horses, and a hired man to assist Mr. Cody in the driving. The family “did not camp as most Emigrants did,” but stopped each night “at the best Hotels,” where maids helped put the Cody children to bed. 18

  The streams and grassy hills of eastern Kansas seemingly promised a bright future for the Codys. The family located a verdant claim in the Salt Creek Valley, where the children would have many days of gathering wild berries and herding livestock across meadows. True, there was a political cloud on the horizon. Congress had dodged the controversial issue of slavery in Kansas by leaving it to local settlers to decide the issue for their own state. But for the Codys, it was easy to overlook the looming threat of the slavery conflict, at least for the time being.

  In many respects, Isaac Cody was a traditional American frontiersman. An experienced surveyor, he was both a settler and a land speculator. In December 1854, he joined several other emigrants in founding the town of Grasshopper Falls (eventually renamed Valley Falls). He spent much time helping newly settled families locate farmlands near the new town site, and in assisting his partners in the construction of a mill.19 By 1855, there were over 8,500 new settlers in eastern Kansas. Over 90,000 more would arrive by 1861. With Grasshopper Falls drawing ever more residents who would pay to use the mill of which Isaac was part owner, the Cody family’s future looked bright indeed.20

  Then the storm burst. Isaac Cody was a Free Soil Democrat, holding that neither slavery nor black people should be allowed in Kansas. It was soon clear that his family was going to have trouble with their pro-slavery neighbors. Almost immediately after their arrival, Isaac Cody attended a community meeting, at which he joined his neighbors in creating the Salt Creek Squatters Association. Such associations were a tradition in newly settled areas, where they adjudicated claim disputes, often shoring up claims of prior arrivals against interlopers or claim jumpers.21

  But pro-slavery settlers dominated the Salt Creek Squatters Association. Even though Isaac Cody was a member of the thirteen-man “vigilance” committee that was appointed to enforce the will of the association, he chafed at the resolutions which the group passed at their first meeting, announcing that in the event of disputes, they would not uphold the claims of anti-slavery settlers. In other words, the Salt Creek Squatters Association existed to guarantee the claims of pro-slavery immigrants against anti-slavery or “Free State” rivals.22

  The Codys’ pro-slavery neighbors had strong ties to kindred spirits in the neighboring slave state of Missouri, and they held meetings which drew like-minded crowds. On July 4, 1854, they hosted an Independence Day gathering and invited many of the local Cherokee, Delaware, and Kickapoo Indians, as well as pro-slavery settlers. Julia Cody remembered this as a festive meeting, at which the whites had a long banquet table, with Independence Day addresses, and the Indians “gave their war dances, Horse or Pony races, played at their different Games, and it was the most wonderful Picnic I ever seen.”23

  Eleven-year-old Julia and eight-year-old Will apparently did not remember, or did not notice, the political heat in the air. The meeting had been advertised in pro-slavery quarters as a “General Territorial Convention.” It was well attended by Missourians, and it made Isaac and Mary Cody nervous about their future in the Salt Creek Valley. The Indians who so entertained Julia and William Cody likely held their own views on the disposition of slavery in Kansas. Many of them were displaced from the East themselves, and there were many slaveholders among the Cherokees, who had been driven out of Georgia and Tennessee only a generation before. The Civil War would fracture Indian communities as badly as it did those of whites. Independence Day invitations to local Indians may have been an attempt to bring them over to the pro-slavery side. In any case, the theatrics of their dances distracted the children from the gathering neighborhood tensions. 24

  By September, the Salt Creek Squatters Association was denouncing the activities of abolitionists, and questioning whether the Cody family could be allowed to stay in Salt Creek. On September 18, 1854, at a meeting to adjudicate a claim dispute in which Cody was involved, a pro-slavery agitator named Charles Dunn sank a knife in Isaac Cody’s side.25

  The pro-slavery press exulted in the violence. “A Mr. Cody, a noisy abolitionist, living near Salt Creek, in Kansas Territory, was severely stabbed, while in a dispute about a claim with Mr. Dunn, on Monday last week. Cody is severely hurt, but not enough it is feared to cause his death. The settlers on Salt Creek regret that his wound is not more dangerous, and all sustain Mr. Dunn in the course he took.”26

  The traumatized family raced Isaac Cody to his brother Elijah’s, across the border in Weston, Missouri. Julia recalled that the family felt “terribul,” and that eight-year-old Will wept and called out, “I wish I was a man; I would just love to kill all of those Bad men that want to kill my Father, and I will when I get big.” The knife had grazed Isaac’s lung. Three weeks passed before he could move about. As Julia remembered, he “was never strong from that day, just able to get around; had to ride as he could not walk any distance.”27

  The stabbing of Isaac coincided with a regional surge in violence over the slavery issue. William Cody later recalled that his father “shed the first blood in the cause” of a fr
ee Kansas, and that with that stabbing came “the beginning of the Kansas troubles.”28 “From that time the Border War began,” wrote Julia, with pro-slavery partisans pouring “into the Territory by the Hundreds” from Missouri.29

  Unlike the official violence of the Civil War, with its huge armies under government command, the so-called Bleeding Kansas troubles brought unofficial, paramilitary violence between Free Kansas partisans and advocates of slavery, most of them from Missouri. Both sides perpetrated atrocities. But prior to 1858, when anti-slavery forces consolidated control, pro-slavery Missourians held the upper hand, with frequent raids into Kansas to intimidate and murder anti-slavery settlers.30

  The Cody home was only one of many to suffer their wrath. Death threats against Isaac Cody began the minute he returned home after the stabbing, and continued for the next two years. One night, “a body of armed men, mounted on horses, rode up to our house and surrounded it,” wrote William Cody. Isaac escaped by dressing in Mary’s clothes and passing between the murderous horsemen on his way out into the cornfield, where he hid for days before escaping to Leavenworth.31

  Throughout the Bleeding Kansas period, attacking homes was the primary method of waging war. Threats against Isaac were joined by violence against home and farm. In the spring of 1855, the family cut and stacked tons of hay to sell to the army post at Leavenworth. Before Isaac could move the hay, pro-slavery neighbors torched it. Isaac Cody wept, and his daughter Julia was still sorrowful as she recalled the event, many years later. “In less than one hour the 3,000 Ton of Hay was in a Blaze. All we could do was look at it.”32

  Pro-slavery raiders also stole family livestock, especially their horses, without which settlers could not ride for help, escape the next onslaught, or get to work at neighboring farms or towns. When a pro-slavery party visited the Cody house in 1855, Isaac evaded them again. But they took nine-year-old Will’s horse, Prince: “The loss of my faithful pony nearly broke my heart and bankrupted me in business, as I had nothing to ride.” 33 Julia Cody remembered that when they stole her horse, “I was left without anything to ride for the cows, or to go to the store, or anything. We felt all broke up… .” The raiders stole some of Isaac Cody’s best horses as well, “and they stole all of Father’s machinery, such as [the] mowing machine, rakes, and everything.” They even “took our small wagon and Plow.”34 As at the Codys’, so throughout eastern Kansas. Raiders from both sides burned businesses, destroyed farm fields, and broke down fences and barns.

  The region’s violence grew most extreme after mid-1856, when pro-slavery “border ruffians” from Missouri plundered the town of Lawrence, killing one man and looting shops by the score. Several nights later, an abolitionist mob led by John Brown and two of his sons knocked at the doors of a small pro-slavery settlement on Pottawatomie Creek. Taking five men out of their homes, ignoring the pleas of their desperate families, Brown’s party shot, stabbed, and dismembered their victims.35

  John Brown sought slavery’s abolition. The Codys, like most Kansas settlers, wanted only a ban on slavery in Kansas. Nonetheless, pro-slavery forces lumped them all together as “abolitionists,” and they suffered fearsome retribution for Brown’s raid. The Cody family’s sense of vulnerability during this time of terror was compounded by Isaac Cody’s frequent lengthy absences. Like many Kansas men, he moved from place to place, not daring to return to his family for fear of being murdered. When he did come home, he often brought Free State crowds with him. The Cody home became the site of Free Kansas rallies, complete with speeches by visiting Free Soil candidates, angering the pro-slavery neighbors all the more. An election in 1855 gave control of the first territorial legislature to pro-slavery settlers. Free State voters, infuriated by blatant fraud and intimidation at the polls, refused to recognize the territorial government and elected their own legislature, which met at Topeka to petition the U.S. Congress for admission to the Union as a free state. Isaac Cody won a seat in the Topeka legislature, railing against the armies of drunken “Pukes” who were stealing Kansas elections by arriving en masse from Missouri and casting votes as Kansas residents. He may have been an agent to recruit settlers for the Free State cause in Kansas. His town of Grasshopper Falls was a center of Free State activity.36

  Isaac Cody’s absence required the family to make their way without him much of the time, and to contemplate the terrifying possibility of losing him forever. A family that lost its primary breadwinner easily slipped into poverty, and there was no social safety net beyond the goodwill of neighbors, whom the Codys understandably mistrusted. All the while, the open hostility of pro-slavery factions reinforced the family’s constant sense of impending destruction. As Will Cody put it in his autobiography many years later, “We were almost daily visited by some of the pro-slavery men, who helped themselves to anything they saw fit, and frequently compelled my mother and sisters to cook for them, and to otherwise submit to a great deal of bad treatment.” And always, there were more threats against the life of Isaac Cody. “Hardly a day passed without some of them inquiring ‘where the old man was,’ saying they would kill him on sight.”37

  On the rare occasions when they saw him, the family’s fears for him only grew. Julia Cody recalled that “whenever Father came home he had to come in after Dusk and leave before it was light.” Weakness and illness, which the family attributed to his wound, often compelled his return. At such times, Julia wrote, “we had to be on the watch all the time….”38 Once, when Isaac Cody was sick and confined to bed upstairs, Will and Julia stood guard over their father with a gun and an ax as a murderous pro-slavery partisan sat in their kitchen. Mary Cody prepared the man a meal, all the while claiming her husband had last been heard from at Topeka. The man sharpened his knife on a whetstone, vowing to kill that “damned abolitionist husband” of hers.39

  In many other ways, the Cody children made extraordinary sacrifices and took horrifying chances. In the summer of 1856, a friendly neighbor brought word that men were waiting to ambush Isaac Cody on his return from Grasshopper Falls. Children rarely became targets in the border troubles, and even during the most violent periods, Will and Julia traveled thirty miles or more on horseback to move cattle or run family errands. Ten-year-old Will Cody was in bed with influenza when his mother received news of the plot to kill Isaac. The boy arose and clambered onto a horse. Taking a letter from his mother warning Isaac not to return in the near future, he set out for Grasshopper Falls. He made it eight miles, to Stranger Creek, when he noticed he was being pursued by a group of horsemen. As he later recounted the incident, one of the men said, “That is the damned abolitionist boy. Let’s go for him.”40

  The boy put his heels to his horse, and for nine more miles the men chased the sick and terrified child. He finally reined up at the home of a family friend named Hewitt. The would-be assassins turned and fled. The boy told the man what had happened, and expressed his desire to continue to Grasshopper Falls. Hewitt feared the horse would die without rest, and he was concerned for Will Cody, too. The animal was covered in lather, and flecked with the boy’s vomit.

  Fortuitously, Hewitt himself had just returned from Grasshopper Falls. He had spoken to Isaac Cody, who told him that he would not be returning home for a few more days. Hewitt put the boy to bed. When he awoke, Will Cody insisted on carrying the message to Isaac anyway. It was a rare opportunity to spend two weeks with his father, who was among friends at Grasshopper Falls, notably the Free State militia of the militant Jim Lane.41

  Isaac Cody’s condition soon worsened again. To recuperate in safety, he traveled to Ohio, where he visited with relatives. After returning from this trip he was followed by many new emigrants. Being a “locator,” a man who could read survey lines and claim locations for settlers, his home was a beacon for new arrivals. Numbers of them could be found there at any time, sometimes seated at the kitchen table, their tents pitched in the front yard.42 In this small but very noticeable way, the westward expansion of the United States moved through the home o
f Isaac Cody. Amidst the swirling violence which threatened to demolish that home, he remained its link both to the money they needed and to the expanding West. Patriarch of the family, founder of the town of Grasshopper Falls, Isaac Cody was both a family bulwark and the center of a rapidly expanding Free Kansas community.

  Then, in the spring of 1857, Isaac Cody fell ill again, and finally died.43 For William and Julia Cody, his passing was a catastrophe. Both children mention his death only briefly, as if it was too painful a memory to explain. Financially, the loss was devastating. Martha, Isaac’s daughter by his first marriage, had married and moved out. But Isaac’s death left Mary Cody to fend for herself, young Will, four girls, and another son, Charles, who was but an infant.

  The economic trial was complicated by the region’s rising tensions. Although some historians estimate that only a hundred Kansans died as a direct result of the slavery fight, the violence went far beyond simple murder. Beatings and death threats were pervasive. Not far from the Cody claim was the base of the Kickapoo Rangers, a paramilitary gang hell-bent on driving Free Soil settlers from eastern Kansas, and whose members included Charles Dunn, their father’s attacker.44

  Amidst the continuing fury of this unofficial war, Mary Cody faced what was probably the greatest challenge of her life. Like other young widows, she was constrained by a society that required a woman of good reputation to work at home. Farm women made sizable contributions to their families’ economic well-being, but they did not usually take up wage labor. Such activities were for lower-class women, or women of dubious reputation. As Julia recalled, “Now Brother Willie and I would get out together and plan what he must do to help take care of Mother and the 3 sisters and little brother Charlie….” 45 William was barely eleven, but he was the only male capable of outdoor work. He became the family’s primary wage earner.