Louis S. Warren

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

  William Cody and his family soon followed Rome’s other settlers, pulling down their buildings, carting the expensive lumber over to Hays, and rebuilding. For a few weeks he and Louisa again tried to run a hotel in Hays. But his diminished prospects only made their quarrels worse. By fall of 1867, she had taken the baby and gone. This time, she did not go to Leavenworth. She moved back to St. Louis, and into her parents’ house. 38

  Rome joined the burgeoning ranks of Kansas ghost towns, which included a Monticello, a Paris, and a Berlin, whose names reflected the grandiose visions of their would-be founders.39 As Cody watched his little family recede into the distance, he had lost not only his town, but the flesh and blood of his settler’s cabin.

  BUFFALO BILL’S WILD WEST show would position Cody as the quintessential frontiersman who had “passed through every stage of frontier life.” The notion that the frontier developed in “stages” was never more explicit than in the show’s first indoor appearance, in 1886. During the summer, Cody and his managing partner, Nate Salsbury, hired Steele Mackaye, a renowned New York dramatist, as stage director for the Madison Square Garden appearances, and charged him with designing an indoor presentation. Mackaye billed it as “A History of American Civilization.” He organized it into a series of epochs, each more advanced than the last. The “First Epoch” was “The Primeval Forest.” It was followed by “Second Epoch. The Prairie,” “Third Epoch. The Cattle Ranch,” and finally, “Fourth Epoch. The Mining Camp,” during which Cody’s stage town blew away.40

  According to Steele Mackaye’s son, Percy, the Wild West show was a formless extravaganza before the great playwright got his hands on it, “the performances, though delightfully fresh and vibrant, were still very sketchy and disjointed, wholly lacking in dramatic form.” To address this deficiency, Steele Mackaye invented the separate “epochs” and their sequence. The passage of the frontier to ever higher stages of civilization presaged the most famous theory of western development, put forward in the historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” In a paper delivered to a gathering of historians at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (while Buffalo Bill’s Wild West appeared nearby), Turner argued that Americans passed through stages of social evolution on the frontier, from hunter, to herder, to farmer, and then to urban industry and commerce.41 Although the details of Mackaye’s “epochs” differed somewhat from Turner’s stages, they were in remarkable concordance. Percy Mackaye was convinced that such sophisticated ideas could not have occurred to William Cody, rustic frontiersman that he was. Writing in 1927, he declared, “The outstanding dramatic ideas embodied” in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West “were Steele Mackaye’s ideas.”42

  The notion that any grand theories of progress embedded in the Wild West show originated with well-read publicists, not the Wild West showman, echoes through many Cody biographies. But, in fact, settlers usually perceived events on the Great Plains as expressions of stages in the advancement of civilization, to which their own lives were more or less tied. In this respect, Cody’s hunting and town-building each had a symbolic importance, and were not separate occupations so much as the beginning and ending of a single story. In 1886, Mackaye’s ideas on the subject of stages of development (to say nothing of Turner’s in 1893) were only recent derivatives of very old and widely popular political thought. For at least a century, philosophers and popular writers in Europe and America had theorized that all societies advanced through stages of subsistence, and usually these included at least four: hunting, pastoralism, agriculture, and commerce, the last being characterized by peaceful towns and cities. Each stage was a necessary step, and it prepared the ground for the stage that followed. Frontiersmen who stalked wild game represented the first chapter in a progressive narrative of history yet to unfold. Clearing the land of wild animals was a precursor to abundant farm fields and the rise of towns. Hunting was the beginning of the story of civilization.43

  Such theories had special resonance in the West because they corresponded—or seemed to correspond—to the visible world. In the minds of a great many travelers and commentators, the trail from frontier to metropole led through all phases of civilization. Thomas Jefferson opined that a traveler journeying from the Rocky Mountains to the East Coast would discover, in successive stages, Indian hunters with “no law but that of nature,” then Indians who were “in the pastoral state, raising domestic animals, to supply the defects of hunting.” Continuing eastward, the traveler would come upon “semi-barbarous citizens” of the United States, followed by “gradual shades of improving man until he would reach his most … improved state, in our seaport towns.” Such a journey, Jefferson concluded, “is equivalent to a survey, in time, of the progress of man from the infancy of creation to the present day.”44 Numerous other writers agreed. To travel from frontier to town was to journey through time, along the road of progress.

  To live between frontier and town, and to bring about the creation of settlements on the Plains, was to partake of progress, to make history. The Codys did not spend long evenings poring over Jefferson or other four-stages theorists. But they were highly attuned to the need for land clearing as a prelude to settlement. The prosperity of the settled East, and indeed of Louisa’s own Missouri, had been wrought from wilderness only through the eradication of wildlife and the felling of forests. Partly for this reason, Plains settlers routinely shot every living animal that was not privately owned, training their guns not only on marketable buffalo, elk, and deer, or on vermin wolves and hawks, but also on inedible and unsalable jackrabbits, badgers, porcupines, sparrows, and chickadees.45 By the 1860s, in popular accounts of every locality, Americans narrated their history as progress through wildlife destruction, the westward march of civilization marked by elimination of game.46

  In this connection, market hunting was a central feature of the popular ideology of progress. By converting bison to cash, buffalo hunters simultaneously made a civilized commodity out of savage nature, took bison from Indians, and cleared the grassland for domesticated livestock and the next stage of civilization. The ascendance of pastoralism was unmistakable in the vast herds of Texas cattle lowing their way to Kansas railroad depots. Cattle would eventually give way to crops. Homesteaders were already staking out farms along the railway. Surveyors predicted that Kansas would soon become “the great wheat-producing region of the world.” 47 As a market hunter, Cody’s work assumed mythic proportions as a nearly ritual passage for his society.

  From the fall of 1867 through most of 1868, Cody hunted buffalo.48 He was well-known as “Buffalo Bill” by this time, and the Hays City Advance mentioned his hunting exploits occasionally, such as the day in January 1868 when he brought in the carcasses of nineteen animals. Selling the meat at seven cents per pound, he earned $100 per day. 49 He also continued to hunt buffalo for Goddard Bros. until the railroad reached Sheridan.

  Killing buffalo and marketing them were some of the most familiar practices in the entire country. Indians had been hunting buffalo, and trading robes, meat, jerky, and other goods to one another, for nine thousand years. Among Americans, there had been a sizable market for buffalo tongues and robes since the 1840s, when Indian hunters brought these commodities to trading posts, from which they were shipped down the Mississippi River to St. Louis and New Orleans. In 1850 alone, some 100,000 buffalo robes passed through St. Louis.50

  Before the Civil War, rot and insect infestation kept many robes from reaching more distant consumers. But the extension of the railroad onto the prairies of Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas made it possible to bring smoked buffalo tongues and robes to eastern markets with less fear of spoilage, ushering in a revolution which would destroy the last of the great herds, and most of the Indian social customs and traditions which had grown up around them. In the cities and towns of the United States, consumers bundled themselves into buffalo coats and covered their laps with woolly buffalo robes as they set out by sleigh or wagon in
frosty winters. The prices for meat and robes in the cities were augmented by the new markets at the army forts and in towns like Hays (and the more ephemeral ones, like Rome) that were rising rapidly across the Plains. Later, in the early 1870s, tanneries would perfect a method for turning buffalo skins into quality leather, touching off the last great surge of bison hunting. But until then, bison hides were only useful when they came from winter coats.51 For this reason, Cody’s market hunting was particularly intensive during the cold months.

  In the Wild West show, Cody reenacted a buffalo hunt that featured himself with several cowboys and Indians, all on horseback, firing blank cartridges at a small herd of buffalo wheeling around the arena. There are no eyewitness accounts of Cody’s market hunting, but our knowledge of the industry suggests his hunting trips differed considerably from this scene. For one thing, hunting required a support staff of nonhunters, including skinners and butchers. When he was a meat hunter for the UPED, Cody took along a butcher, who drove a wagon to carry the meat. He likely shared the proceeds with a small camp staff throughout his market hunting forays in the late 1860s.52

  But more significantly, market hunters rarely, if ever, hunted on horseback. It was hard to aim from a moving horse, and other factors made it pointless to try. Buffalo have a superb sense of smell. They have difficulty seeing people on foot, but no trouble seeing horses. Their sense of hearing is acute. A man on horseback was too prominent to get near a herd without the animals thundering into the distance. For this reason, Indian hunters on horseback attacked herds from all sides simultaneously.

  Bison herd defenses had several holes, though, which market hunters exploited. The sharp sound of a rifle did not signify a threat unless it was accompanied by the cry of another bison in pain or distress. So most market hunters hid from their quarry by approaching from downwind, then sitting or lying prone. Aiming a large-caliber rifle, sometimes mounted on a tripod for accuracy, they gunned first for the lead cow, the dominant animal in the herd. If their marksmanship was good, the bullet shredded the animal’s heart, and she dropped to the ground without making a sound. The herd stayed put or, if another cow moved out to lead the herd, the hunter then killed her. In a short time, the animals would be confused. They stood still, or milled around. The hunter could fire away until the herd moved out of range, which might not be until most of them were dead.53

  Felling buffalo after buffalo in this way was called a “stand.” Most American market hunters were young men, and most of them probably ventured onto the buffalo grounds for brief stints in the fall, during the seasonal lull in farm or ranch work. Their marksmanship was usually inadequate to effect a stand, and the herds were wary enough that the hunters had great difficulty getting close enough to make a kill. After two or three weeks, they might return with only a dozen hides, or less.54

  Still, in the many Great Plains stands of the late 1860s, sizable parts of herds vanished in the space of hours. Legendary market hunters were known to kill upward of eighty animals in a single day, sitting in one spot. But skinners could process only so many animals before the carcasses spoiled, so most killed no more than thirty. In any case, when the shooting was done, the butchers took over. Cody’s butcher removed the back legs and hump. Some took the tongue. Since Cody did a good deal of hunting in the winter of 1867–68, we may presume that he and his butcher also took skins to sell for robes. Once the wagon was full or the quota was met, they returned to camp, leaving the carrion to rot or be eaten by scavengers.55

  Like that of his fellow market hunters, Cody’s buffalo hunting was oriented more toward volume than style, and he likely hunted the animals on foot. His favorite gun for buffalo hunting was a reconditioned .50-caliber rifle that could kill a buffalo at six hundred yards, a Springfield “needle gun” (so named because its new technology of the firing pin reminded early shooters of a needle). Market hunters preferred the gun for its accuracy and its heavy ball, which could render a wounded bison incapable of charging, something hunters on foot had reason to be concerned about.56 Cody himself calculated that he killed 4,280 buffalo in his eighteen months as a market hunter. Figuring that he had a total of 360 working days in this period, he would have needed to kill fewer than twelve buffalo a day to reach that number. If anything, his total is likely low. Later hide hunters, in the early 1870s, would kill as many in a couple of months.57

  Modern Americans rarely honor these buffalo hunters, who are commonly remembered as greedy, lowbrow, filthy, and stupid (nowhere more so than in Larry McMurtry’s novel Anything for Billy, where gangs of drooling hide hunters populate the town of Greasy Corners, New Mexico).58 But in 1867, market hunters were somewhat respected. They cleared the land for farmers, and, like fur trappers before them, buffalo hunters were expectant capitalists. They risked their own guns, ammunition, wagons, and other gear—to say nothing of wagering their lives against Indian attack—in anticipation of profit. In many places, they bought their supplies on credit from meat-and-hide dealers in nearby towns, in hopes that their success would allow them to pay off the loan and have something left over. From the ranks of buffalo hunters would come any number of town founders, bankers, and other respectable businessmen. When the Hays City Advance hailed William Cody’s market hunting, it reflected a regional and national approbation of hunters as small businessmen.59

  And yet, Louisa lost faith. Even if buffalo hunting retained some respectability as a suitable pursuit for a young man, William Cody’s fall from town founder to simple buffalo hunter left his wife unhappy. She “made little of my efforts to succeed in life,” William Cody remembered long after. She said “that I was a failure and something like that; and we had our little disagreements again. When everything was going all right and I was selling lots of [town] lots,” in Rome, “we seemed to get along pretty well; but when things were different and I wasn’t getting along very well, things were the other way and we could not get along so well.”60

  In public, Louisa never admitted to any unhappiness in this early period of their marriage. But something caused her to leave. If the couple’s personal, intimate conflicts are beyond our knowledge, it seems likely that at least some of her discontent stemmed from her husband’s occupation. Frontier hunters played a role in the drama of civilization, but there was a profound difference between men who hunted to create the institutions of civilization—farms, schools, churches, businesses, and towns—and those who hunted to the exclusion of other work. The former were upwardly mobile, their hunting a phase of life which passed with the frontier itself, leaving them established and settled as farmers, merchants, or other businessmen. Traditionally, the latter were low-class, borderline renegades. To Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, such men “appear to be no better than carnivorous animals of a superior rank, living on the flesh of wild animals, when they can catch them.” The temptations of wilderness indolence overwhelmed their better natures. “Once hunters,” he warned, “farewell to the plow. The chase renders them ferocious, gloomy, and unsociable.” 61

  Similar views appeared in the writings of James Fenimore Cooper and a host of other frontier observers. In this sense, Cody did not simply move into another line of work when he lost his town and turned to buffalo hunting. He slipped backward along the path of civilization. He was no longer a town builder. At best, he was merely a clearer of land for other town builders. All of the respectability that attached to buffalo hunting depended upon its being a temporary pursuit. But Cody seemed uninterested in the more permanent occupations he might have taken up. He seems to have abhorred the thought of farming. He claimed no homestead.

  Of course, in reality, Cody was not going back in time. For all the rhetoric of civilization’s beginnings among primitive hunters who blazed a path for herdsmen and farmers, buffalo hunters were modern men who relied on the railroad, as well as a host of industrial products, including guns and knives. Cody did not subsist on the meat he shot. He lived on his pay from Goddard Brothers, which, at $500 per month, was the largest salary he e
arned in the 1860s. This would not have been possible without the presence of a corporate sponsor, in this case the UPED. The subsequent careers of Cody’s cohorts in the killing fields of the Great Plains may have been less colorful than his, but they were just as modern. Carl Hendricks left Sweden for Kansas in 1870. There he hunted buffalo for a year, then moved on to take up work in a New England steel-wire mill.62 Bat Masterson was a market hunter in Kansas, gunning for buffalo only a few years after Cody. He became most famous for his career as a gunfighter and lawman, but eventually moved into industrialized publishing. He was a New York sportswriter when he died.63 Wyatt Earp and Bill Tilghman became legends of frontier law enforcement. Both began as buffalo hunters and ended up in filmmaking, where they sought to mythologize their lives after the example of Buffalo Bill.64

  But even in its most modern context, the respectability of buffalo hunting was always tenuous. To see white hunters decimating the great herds reassured most Americans about the forward march of progress. But progress seemed so necessary in part because just beneath the surface lay a more complicated and sometimes frightening possibility. Buffalo hunting required absence from the domesticating influence of home, an institution which was disturbingly ephemeral on the frontier anyway. The passions of lonely men, without the restraining and civilizing influence of women, could find unseemly and dangerous outlets on the open prairie. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, American fur trappers (who assumed the same mythic place as initiators of civilization that other hunters did) frequently married into Indian families. Their reasons were as complex as can be imagined, ranging from romantic love and desire for companionship, to ambition for political alliances with powerful Indian families—to say nothing of the help with the processing of furs which Indian women provided.