After the Civil War, Kansas and the West developed in ways that further heightened public sensitivity to its many deceptions. Despite the Bleeding Kansas violence, between 1854 and 1865, 142,000 settlers arrived in Kansas. In the next fifteen years, they were joined by 850,000 more. 43 These massive displacements and their concomitant revolutionary changes were announced by a deluge of paper, as presses churned out notices of western opportunities real and fraudulent. Hyperbolic land speculation generated an ocean of advertising: real estate posters; multicolored land titles; maps accurate, fantastic, and many shades between; bird’s-eye views of western towns, many of which would never approach their depicted size and many others which never existed at all. Railroad companies and their agents distributed pamphlets in most languages across every state and most European countries. They promised fertile soil with plentiful water, but dumped gullible emigrants on vast and arid grassland, many miles from markets or towns. Dishonest brokers sold claims they did not own, described one parcel to buyers and sold them another, or sold the same parcel to numerous customers before skipping town. Deceptions about land made up only one layer of endemic fraud on the frontier, where any number of “honest men” could sell an aspiring immigrant a lucrative mining claim, a paying saloon, even a bridge. Settlers had their own share of tricks. After 1862, the federal government deeded 285 million acres to homesteaders. Half their claims were fraudulent, backed by false identities, fake improvements, or worse. 44
By the time William Cody was watching Hickok’s imposture in Hays, the West not only possessed a heightened anxiety about fakery and a white-hot market for artful deceptions. In the popular mind the West was an artful deception, a place to be explored with the same methods, and often the same level of enjoyment, as any humbug. In ways long underappreciated by historians, frontier ideology reinforced popular eagerness to play this game. After all, the border between settlement and wilderness was not only the meeting point of civilization and savagery. It was also where the West— whatever that was—met the printing press, the artist’s canvas, and the lithograph machine. The frontier was the junction of American craft and manufacturing (Artifice) and frontier material (Nature). In detecting for themselves the truth about Hickok, and later Cody, tourists sought to trace a frontier line that ran, shifting and inscrutable, between the Fake and the Real.45
Barnum himself recognized the inherent value of the frontier line in this regard. Like the FeeJee Mermaid’s conjunction of fish and primate, the best hoaxes befuddled normative boundaries, and the mythic line between civilization and savagery expressed almost every kind of normative boundary there was.46 The entertainer staged several western attractions, including a buffalo hunt in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1843, but none of them approached the popularity of Joice Heth or the FeeJee Mermaid, perhaps because Barnum was too much the sharp Yankee to be credible as a presenter of frontier wonders.47
Hickok, on the other hand, was an authentic frontiersman, who could track and shoot like few others. Informed by dime novel fictions into which his own life was inscribed, he appropriated popular symbols (those guns, that long hair, and the buckskin and moccasins). All of these had been symbolic of “frontierness” in popular imagination at least since James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking sagas, which in turn were inspired by biographies of Daniel Boone and mountain man lore. Long hair and deerskin garments implied connections to untamed nature, wild animals, and Indians, and the getup was so outdated in post–Civil War Kansas that he stood out. Hickok alternated his leather outfit with fashionable dress shirts and pointed boots, as if the ability to exchange buckskin for fine clothing symbolized the frontiersman’s essential civility (while simultaneously it naturalized urban menswear, thereby legitimating many urban readers and tourists as potential frontiersmen). Facility with firearms represented the mastery of technology, particularly the machinery of violence through which an enervated white race could be regenerated.48
Hickok sharpened his attraction with genuine feats of pistolcraft like those in the Nichols article. Tourist witnesses recounted Hickok’s cool skill: hitting a dime edge-on, driving a cork through the neck of a bottle with a bullet, shooting through a chicken’s throat without breaking a bone. 49 To the delight of many observers, Wild Bill practiced pistol shooting frequently on the outskirts of whichever town he happened to be in. 50 However good a shot he actually was—and his willingness to shoot for an audience suggests he must have been at least fairly good—posing as a marksman allowed Hickok to assume the mythical hero’s clarity of vision and apply the most modern technology to raw frontier nature. It allowed him to be avatar of the encounter between wilderness and civilization, assert his authority as a lawman, and advertise his services as hunting guide and scout, all at the same time.
Working from his bedrock authenticity as a guide, marksman, and lawman, Hickok’s style of tourist entertainment included careful crafting of the tall tale. References to these stories are ubiquitous, and although none of the tales themselves survive, reportedly his personal adventures could entrance a circle of visitors for an hour or more. If we assume that he drew from the well of western standards, we can picture him as he spins out his story for a rapt audience (with Cody among them more than once) before ceasing his narration abruptly, leaving himself surrounded, disarmed, and facing imminent death.
After a breathless pause, some greenhorn would feed him the inevitable question: “How did you escape?”
Taking a breath, Hickok would drawl, “I didn’t.” Another pause. “I was killed.”
This kind of leg pulling (a classic mountain man joke) served as fair warning that he was not strictly honest. His biography reinforced that message, especially in his consistent public claims of having been a spy. Spies were of necessity liars, and their ability to change appearance and identity fascinated Americans during and after the Civil War.51 As one Union spy explained in his 1866 autobiography, espionage “requires an accomplished liar.” That is, not a “habitual liar,” but one who “can successfully practice decep tion.”52 For audiences, the allure of the spy figure was partly in the challenge he posed to their faculties of discernment. In no small measure, the claim to have been a spy called into question the veracity of the storyteller, for if he was indeed “an accomplished liar,” how could the audience know if he was telling the truth or not?
In important ways, scouting underscored similar messages. Although scouts today are recalled as authentic wilderness figures, through the Civil War they bore a close relationship to spies. Indian scouts were often called spies, because they not only tracked enemy warriors but could creep close enough to listen in on their conversations.53 Scouts for Union and Confederate forces also were spies, donning enemy uniform or civilian garb to reconnoiter the territory or plant misinformation. Both Hickok and Cody fought along the bloody Kansas-Missouri line. There, the Red Legs and their bushwhacker opponents often took on the guises of one another. Scouting, deception, imposture: these dubious pursuits went hand in hand. Thus, the occupations converged in Hickok’s life. Thus, William Cody, seeking to memorialize himself as the West’s greatest scout in 1879, fictionalized assignments as a Civil War spy (and Hickok associate) for his artfully deceptive autobiography.
The scout figure had other sources of popular resonance, which we shall explore in the next chapter. But for now we may observe that scouts were not only repositories of knowledge about the wilderness and the enemy, but also spies who were masters of deception and intrigue. Dime novels were jammed with scouts in part because they were marginal, rural people who dominated the story’s action, constantly masquerading and changing identities. In this sense, they were both nostalgic icons of a vanishing frontier America and profoundly modern figures whose talents at imposture empowered them to dominate the city, something they frequently did in the dime novels which proliferated toward century’s end.
These literary and cultural trends coalesced around Hickok and many others. To be sure, not every scout who found himself repr
esented in the popular press enjoyed the experience. In 1858, Kit Carson guided an army detachment to the camp of a Jicarilla Apache raiding party in hopes of rescuing a captive emigrant, one Mrs. White. The Apaches escaped, and Mrs. White was found dead soon after. But Carson was most troubled by something that turned up in her belongings: “We found a book in the camp, the first of the kind I had ever seen, in which I was represented as a great hero, slaying Indians by the hundred.” Carson could only ponder the tragic elements of this misrepresentation: “I have often thought that Mrs. White must have read it, and knowing that I lived near-by, must have prayed for my appearance in order that she might be saved.”54
Carson, ever a private man, refused to cultivate a public. Others thought trying to make dime novel fantasies into reality was distasteful or outlandish. But the expansion of the press and the extension of the railroad gave many others the chance to assume the pose of frontier hero, and playing to the cultural longings of tourists was pervasive in Kansas by the mid-1860s. One journalist reported his 1867 encounter with a Kansas railroad conductor who, like Hickok, “had much experience in life on the plains.” Appropriating symbols of frontier identity, the conductor “always had a rifle by his side and pistols, either about his waist, or where he could conveniently put his hands upon them.” Like Hickok, he was “an excellent shot,” and he freely mingled experience and imposture, challenging his audience to separate the two. “Indeed, so marvelous were his stories that he was listened to with evident incredulity.”55
In similar ways, different figures combined elements of frontier identity with real life to create powerful attractions in many railroad towns. Custer’s abilities in this regard were so formidable that we will have to explore them at length below. But so too did any number of other men and women. Prior to the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, most tourists and correspondents appear to have been drawn along the line of the Kansas Pacific, through central Kansas on the path to Denver, the center of a lavish gold strike and a vigorous mining community. Travelers could get to the city and return with ease, even before the railroad was complete. Moreover, the cattle towns which served as northern terminuses of various Texas cattle trails lay along the Kansas Pacific. The “KP” thus rolled through the most visible “progressive” landscape in the West, where the “wilderness” was giving way to pasture and mine, and the advent of farmers was imminent. Here, Wild Bill Hickok, William Cody, and other men, including Bat Masterson, plied the line as self-made embodiments of frontier myth.
After 1869, the focus of press attention shifted to the more northerly, newly completed transcontinental line, and so did those men and women who crafted frontier impostures of their own. Hickok, along with Charles “Colorado Charlie” Utter, Moses “California Joe” Milner, and Martha “Calamity Jane” Cannary, moved to the vicinity of Cheyenne, a major stop on the Union Pacific. Eastern reporters venturing to Cheyenne might disembark first at North Platte, Nebraska, where, by 1870, they would find John “Texas Jack” Omohundro, William “Doc” Carver, John Y. Nelson, Charles “Dashing Charlie” Emmett, Charles “The White Chief” Belden, and, of course, William “Buffalo Bill” Cody. All of these men gravitated to this locale in part because of its proximity to the railroad, which guaranteed the flow of writers and tourists who were their partners in formulating public personas. Each of them cultivated journalists and writers who descended from the train. Not coincidentally, every single one of these figures appeared in dime novels, and with the exception of Belden, who was murdered in 1870, all of them went on to careers on the stage and in show business before 1880. Many of them saw their cachet as guides and raconteurs enhanced as a result, and in varying degrees each made a career of appearing before audiences who thrilled at the chance to see the legend, and evaluate its validity for themselves.56
Frontier imposture of this order replicated itself in newly opened frontiers throughout the 1870s. The Black Hills were Hickok’s last stop on his show of heroic life in progress; in addition to Calamity Jane, James “Captain Jack” Crawford, and other personalities whose achievements were at least as theatrical as real, the region sported ranks of men and boys who were adept at playing the role of frontier hero for tourists. Frontier imposture was an art form that drew heavily on literary fiction, with real people taking on language and shaping (or fabricating) their biographies from fictional stories, and vice versa. But where real people like Hickok inspired the fictions through the 1860s, by the mid-1870s the flow from history to fiction had reversed. Deadwood, South Dakota, became home base for the fictional “Deadwood Dick,” protagonist in a raft of dime novels after 1874. Over the next twenty years, at least three men claimed to have been the “real” Deadwood Dick, and such figures, who adopted the identities of fictional westerners from popular novels, became legion.57
By the 1860s, no region could match the West as a venue for the staging of attractions and the invention of personas that appealed to popular desires and begged audiences to separate them from reality. The best-known literary treatment of the West in this period, Mark Twain’s Roughing It, purports to be a factual memoir of a western tour, but it employs so many jokes, tall tales, and fabrications that it challenges the most analytical reader. Published in 1872, it was inspired by Twain’s travels in the region between 1861 and 1865. In other words, it was a product of the same West that gave us Wild Bill Hickok and William Cody. Just as Twain rhapsodized about the Pony Express, by 1866 Hickok was telling tourists that he had ridden the pony, a lie which William Cody grafted on to his own life story in 1874. Between the literary adventures of America’s greatest nineteenth-century writer and the supposed feats of her “real” western heroes there was a vigorous interchange of symbols, fictions, narrative devices, and outright lies.58
The tourists who gathered around Hickok usually came away with a sense that there was some amount of truth entangled with their fantasy West. Something enormous, real, and natural hung in the air when Hickok entered a room and began to tell his tales. Did you see the elephant? Those who met Hickok could say yes. Relatively few Americans would be able to move to the frontier, or to play any role in the great project of annexing the West. But many could travel there over a few days, for a break from work or to survey the opportunities for a farm or a business. Seeking out western characters like Hickok and deciding how much truth was tangled in magazine fictions and in dime novel lore about them were more accessible than almost any other frontier experiences. It is not too much to say that speculating and arguing about figures like Wild Bill Hickok was the frontier experience most available to the American public.
By all accounts, Hickok made his presence known whereever he went. His impact on Cody was profound. From an early age, Hickok was a mentor to Cody, who as a young man claimed Wild Bill as a cousin.59 By the late 1860s, when both were in Hays, they both wore long hair, and dressed so similarly—buckskin, colorful shirts, and wide sombreros—that even people who knew them both would on occasion mistake one for the other in their memories. Both handed out small, calling card photographs of their long-haired selves to tourists and other potential clients.60 The younger man sensed that Hickok was getting opportunities he did not have, and he was right. Hickok was already a favorite of General William Tecumseh Sherman. By 1867, he no longer sought work as a scout; it sought him. Those droves of tourists around him had paid train fare for the thrill. Many of them paid for his guiding services, too. Being a guide required shepherding a flock of greenhorns while posing as the frontiersman that dime novels and Harper’s Monthly taught them to expect, but for a man with the right temperament, it was not difficult. Hickok had found a way to manipulate the national press, the army officer class, and even the tourist public to his own ends. Cody wanted the same.
But Hickok’s imposture was a work in progress, and in many ways he eventually proved inferior to Cody at playing the frontiersman of public longing. His violence was problematic, his ascent to dime novel stardom and public renown strewn with the bod
ies of his opponents, and his imposture too anti-Southern, too sectionalist for a nation aching to heal the wounds of the Civil War.61 We shall revisit these limitations when we come to the beginnings of William Cody’s stage career, a moment when he linked his name publicly to Wild Bill’s before he and his old friend became show business rivals and finally parted ways.
In the meantime, Hickok embodied certain elements of the frontier myth that Cody needed and wanted for his own. His early attempts to tie himself to the Hickok legend as Wild Bill’s cousin in the 1860s began a decade-long effort to selectively entwine the myth of Buffalo Bill with the legend of Wild Bill. Cody retold many of Hickok’s tales as his own adventures. As we have seen, both men claimed to have ridden for the Pony Express, and to have been Civil War spies.
Cody made this enthusiastic borrowing of Hickok’s material somewhat more credible by inserting himself alongside Hickok in these tales, as if to protect himself against the charge of trying to substitute himself for Wild Bill. But the result was just that. When Ned Buntline arrived on the Plains in the summer of 1869, he was looking for Wild Bill Hickok, or perhaps Frank North, another legendary scout. Buntline was eager to write a novel about a real-life frontier hero. But North hated publicity, and Hickok was in a churlish mood. Cody, on the other hand, was gregarious and funny, regaling the writer with stories. Since he was claiming Hickok as a blood relative at the time, it seems likely that some of those stories informed the plot of Buntline’s novel, in which Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill ride across the prairies as brothers in arms.62
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