His fame arrived just in time. After 1869, with the southern Cheyenne defeated and the northern Indians not yet confronted, major hostilities diminished in Kansas. Cody’s arrival in the public eye would have been much harder had he begun service as a scout any later.
After Summit Springs, his commanders took the unusual step of keeping him on the payroll even without a mission for him to perform. Carr cashiered all his other scouts. But rather than let Cody go completely, he named him chief herder for Fort McPherson’s livestock, and continued to pay him at a higher, scout wage of $75 a month.119
Importantly, Cody’s starring role as a guide in the campaign that rescued Maria Weichell brought him victory in his private campaign to reunite the Cody family. Soon after the fight at Summit Springs, he persuaded Louisa and baby Arta to move in with him again, since he “was then in a position to take care of them. My salary was not only a good one from the United States Government but I had a share of all the captured stock—captured horses or captured property from the enemy.” He also sent for two of his sisters, Helen and May. The Cody family would stay together at Fort McPherson for the next three years.120
In many ways, the war in which he fought resembled the border bloodletting of his boyhood in Kansas. Just as Red Legs and bushwhackers burned homes, so, too, did Indians burn farms and the army burn Cheyenne and Sioux lodges. As Cody himself had done in Kansas and Missouri as a teenager, Indian boys and young men fought a vain war in defense of those homes. As the Fifth Cavalry and the Pawnee scouts thundered toward the Cheyenne that day in July 1869, the first Cheyenne to see them was a fifteen-year-old boy tending the village horse herd. With the deftness of a man many years his senior, he turned the herd and drove it right into the village, where the horses provided means of escape for those few who were not killed or captured. The boy had a horse and could have run, but he turned at the village perimeter and made his stand against the Pawnees, who quickly killed him. Years later, Luther North still remembered the boy’s courage: “No braver man ever lived than that fifteen-year-old boy.”121
North, and no doubt Cody, too, saw in such young men the heroic counterparts of themselves, young men who sacrificed all to defend hearth and home. But if Indian warriors and army scouts were not that different (and in some cases they were one and the same), Cody reassured officers because he made it easy to ignore Indians, and to avoid thinking about how familiar their heroism looked, or what that meant for the army’s often-unsavory conquest mission.
The struggle for home was central to U.S. Army life, too, and it defined day-to-day social relations in ways that divided officers and enlisted men. At western forts, officers’ wives generally constituted a small outpost of middle-class sensibility, fashion, and femininity, with cotillions, teas, dinner parties, and other social engagements that distinguished officer society from that of lower-class enlisted men, fewer of whom were married and whose wives were usually post laundresses or otherwise working class. The presence of a genteel white family in a sense marked the class divide between officers and the men they commanded, who were typically excluded from the vibrant officers’ social scene.122
The presence of Cody’s family ultimately gave him a powerful class connection to army officers. He and Louisa were entitled to free government housing on a par with officers’ quarters. But Cody did not put his family in those dreary lodgings. Instead, with newfound riches burning a hole in his pocket and anxious to persuade Louisa to stay with him this time, he ordered the construction of a small house. Modest as it was, it was no rude cabin, and as it took shape it announced the Cody family’s arrival among the fort’s middle class. It had a picket fence, frame windows, and inside, a carpet. 123 In St. Louis, a sign reading “Louisa Frederici, Dressmaker” had hung in front of the Frederici home. Louisa brought the old sign to Fort McPherson, crossed out “Frederici,” wrote in “Cody,” and put it proudly in front of her new house. The extra money she earned from taking in sewing would help the little family make ends meet. Three-year-old Arta soon had a new brother, Kit Carson Cody, born on November 26, 1870. A well-heeled southern lady who had recently settled near Fort McPherson occasionally slept over at the Cody home, darning rugs with Louisa, whom she found “quite pleasant in her manner,” her home all the more inviting for her “two charming little children.” 124
FRONTIER THEATRICS
Partly because he had now secured middle-class status at the fort, in subsequent years army officers found it ever easier to utilize Cody not just for his considerable skills as scout but as a symbol of their own valor. Our story becomes more tangled here, because after 1869 Cody’s military exploits quickly became conflated with his press reputation as a hunter and scout, and with his theatrical career, which began in 1872. Nonetheless, a brief overview suggests how useful Cody became for the army command after the battle of Summit Springs, and how much their patronage reinforced his credibility as a real frontier hero.
In 1869 and for the decade thereafter, officers authenticated Cody’s imposture through recommending him to eastern financiers and politicians on hunting excursions, in encouraging and assisting him in planning his first trips to the East, and in decorating him with a Medal of Honor, in 1872. The battle that brought Cody the medal was a small, nameless skirmish, which occurred when he led a detachment of the Third Cavalry to the camp of about a dozen Minneconjou Sioux horse raiders. Cody guided the party “with such skill that he approached the Indian Camp within fifty yards before he was noticed,” reported the commander, Captain Charles Meinhold. “The Indians fired immediately upon Mr. Cody and Seargeant Foley. Mr. Cody killed one indian, two others ran towards the main command and were killed.”
Cody then noticed a party of six Sioux racing downriver. Captain Meinhold related: “I at once sent Lieutenant Lawson with Mr. Cody and fifteen men in pursuit.” With Cody at the front, the party gained on the Sioux until they cut loose two stolen horses, but the warriors escaped. Meinhold commended a number of his soldiers, including two of his sergeants, and one Private William Strayer, “who bravely closed in upon an Indian while he was fired at several times, and wounded him.” Summarizing Cody’s contribution, Meinhold noted that “Mr. William Cody’s reputation for bravery and skill as a guide is so well established that I need not say anything else but that he acted in his usual manner.”
Authors who have never faced enemy fire should not discount the heroism of those who have. But as real as Cody’s courage was, and as skillful as he was at horseback warfare, this expedition was no masterwork of guiding. In Meinhold’s words: “The country I have marched over is so well known that I omit to furnish a map.”125
More, we have to recall that by this time Cody’s “reputation for bravery and skill” was inflated through Ned Buntline’s King of Border Men and other press accounts. In 1870, six months after Buntline’s story appeared, the New York Times reported one of Buffalo Bill’s recent encounters with Indians who had taken stock from Fort McPherson. According to the correspondent, a company of cavalry from the fort “started in pursuit, without rations, not even stopping for breakfast.” After “a hard chase of over sixty miles across a difficult country,” the soldiers surprised the Indians, killing three, and recaptured all the stock. “Buffalo Bill was with the party and distinguished himself as usual.”126 In October 1871, newspapers gave wide coverage to a hunting party hosted by General Phil Sheridan, which included prominent New York publishers August Belmont and James Gordon Bennett, and which was guided by Buffalo Bill. 127 The New York Herald again hailed “the genial and daring Buffalo Bill,” a “hero of the Plains,” in January 1872, when he guided for the hunt of the Grand Duke Alexis of Russia and Phil Sheridan. By April 1872, when Cody set out with the Third Cavalry in pursuit of the Minneconjou Sioux, it was virtually impossible to separate the man’s “real” talents from his reputation in the media.128 To some degree, army commanders found in Cody a means to reflect elusive fame and glory onto themselves. Just having him along on a campaign almost guarante
ed enthusiastic press coverage.
Upon receiving Meinhold’s report, Colonel J. J. Reynolds, commander of the Third Cavalry, submitted the names of the two commended sergeants—Vokes and Foley—along with those of Private William Strayer and scout William Cody for Congressional Medals of Honor. He forwarded the recommendation to General Phil Sheridan, who approved it, as did civilian officials in Washington. In May, all four men received the Medal of Honor.129
If the award seems excessive in light of the small battle, this is in part because the Medal of Honor meant something quite different in 1872 than it does today. Conceived during the Civil War as a means of rewarding valor in the Union cause, until 1918 it was the only medal the army dispensed. Valor was not an exclusive requirement. Men who displayed “soldierly qualities,” such as following orders, also received it. Thus, Sergeant Leroy Vokes, who rode with Cody against the Sioux that day, received the Medal of Honor because, in Meinhold’s words, “his prompt, intelligent, and cheerful obedience to my orders aided me essentially.” The medal bore little of the aura it has today. There was no great ritual attached to it. Honorees received it in the mail, not in a White House ceremony. By 1869, the medal was so widely faked that many were reluctant to claim it.130 (This helps explain why Cody rarely mentioned it, even in his Wild West show publicity.) Moreover, the award was perfectly in keeping with the army command’s increasing resort to Cody as a symbol of their own heroism.
In subsequent years, Cody’s presence not only elevated his commanders in the eyes of the public, but in the eyes of their troopers as well. Cody began his stage career in 1872, but he scouted for the army twice thereafter. The first time was in 1874, when he rode alongside several dozen Pawnee scouts during an uneventful campaign into the Big Horn Mountains in today’s Wyoming. The expedition proved to be so minor that the commanding officer all but forgot it in his memoirs, and even at the time it paled in comparison to Custer’s highly publicized march of that summer, through the Black Hills, where he confirmed the presence of gold on the Great Sioux Reservation and touched off the Indian war that finally got him killed. Cody nonetheless inflated the importance of his own activities as best he could. “The command will number nearly as many men as General Custers and be commanded by Col. Mills we are going in to one of the worst Indian countrys on the plains,” wrote Cody to friends in the East. But the tour through the Big Horn Mountains encountered no Indians, and by September the expedition had returned to base, where it was dissolved.131
More famous was Cody’s last venture with the cavalry, in 1876, as war with the Sioux and Cheyenne commenced again. That summer, Carr requested Cody’s appointment as scout. Cody departed his stage show in Taunton, Massachusetts, and headed out to Wyoming Territory, where he rendezvoused with the Fifth Cavalry. Some in the army doubted that the theatrical star could be of any real assistance. Perhaps Carr was betting that Cody’s pose would convince the soldiers of their own invulnerability. If so, he was right. Upon seeing Carr and Cody together, “all the boys in the regiment,” wrote one trooper, “exchanged confidences and expressed themselves to the effect that with such a leader and scout they could get away with all the Sitting Bulls and Crazy Horses, in the Sioux tribe.”132
Cody’s effectiveness as a scout was undeniable, but his usefulness owed as much to his symbolic value as to his material abilities at tracking and fighting. His artful imposture as white Indian continued to hinge on his ability to ride close enough to Indian scouts—whom he knew how to trust when commanders and soldiers did not—to claim credit for their accomplishments, while he remained unquestionably white in the eyes of civilians and the army. All this helped to make him a potent antidote to fears of low-class scout decadence. One correspondent described the cadre of scouts riding with the Fifth Cavalry, which included a large number of mixed-bloods. “As a class, these men have rather a bad reputation—most of them being dangerous and good-for-nothing rascals, who take to their risky business because it pays well.” Among this dubious company, one man stood out. “Cody, however, is an exception, and stands high in the estimation of those he serves.”133
The Fifth Cavalry received word that up to eight hundred Cheyenne had left the Red Cloud Agency at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, to reinforce Crazy Horse to the north. The command set out to intercept them. On July 7, a cable informed commanders that Custer and five companies of the Seventh Cavalry had fallen at the Little Big Horn River, 150 miles to the northwest. Bent on stopping any more Cheyenne from joining the Sioux who had vanquished Custer, the Fifth continued their march to the east. Finally, on July 17, the Fifth engaged a small party of Cheyenne on Warbonnet Creek (on today’s border between Wyoming and Nebraska). The Indians retreated to the reservation almost immediately, in a running skirmish during which no more than three Cheyenne (and possibly only one) were killed.
This small fight became famous around the world, ultimately, because during the engagement Buffalo Bill Cody, dressed in a stage costume of black velvet slashed with scarlet and trimmed with silver buttons, shot and scalped a Cheyenne subchief named Yellow Hair (mistranslated as “Yellow Hand”). The most reliable account suggests that Cody and his opponent met while Cody was on his way to warn two couriers about a potential ambush. He and Yellow Hair encountered each other suddenly, by accident, and the two men fired simultaneously. But that fall, Cody commissioned a stage play based on the event, The Red Right Hand, or First Scalp for Custer, in which he and the Cheyenne squared off in a ritualized duel to the death. In 1879, he drafted his own account of the battle in his autobiography, and he was careful to make it correspond to the play’s fantasy face-off. According to Cody, on July 17, while scouting for the Fifth, he spied “a large party of Indians.” As he watched, a small detachment of Cheyenne, unaware that hundreds of Fifth Cavalry soldiers were secreted behind a nearby ridge, dashed out to ambush two army couriers who were coming up the valley. Cody and a group of soldiers cut them off. “A running fight lasted several minutes, during which we drove the enemy some little distance and killed three of their number. The rest,” he recalled, “rode off towards the main body, which had come into plain sight, and halted, upon seeing the skirmish that was going on.”
Cody never explained why a “large party of Indians” looking to fight soldiers would stop cold upon seeing a half-dozen soldiers and one bizarrely dressed scout pursuing their kith and kin. But, as he told it, at this point the fleeing Indians suddenly turned to fight. “One of the Indians, who was handsomely decorated with all the ornaments usually worn by a war chief when engaged in a fight, sang out to me, in his own tongue: “ ‘I know you Pa-he-haska, if you want to fight, come ahead and fight with me.’ ” The two men charged each other between observant ranks of Cheyenne and Americans, like two knights on a medieval battlefield. They fired simultaneously, Cody’s bullet killing the Cheyenne’s horse, but his own horse going down at the same moment as it stepped in a prairie dog hole. The men stood and fired at each other again. Yellow Hair missed. Cody did not. “Jerking his warbonnet off, I scientifically scalped him in about five seconds.” The Indians, “not less than two hundred of them,” now raced to kill Cody, but the soldiers charged them. “As the soldiers came up I swung the Indian chieftain’s top-knot and bonnet in the air, and shouted: ‘The first scalp for Custer.’ ” 134
In Cody’s highly fictionalized tale, he again dons the mask of the white Indian, pretending (as he did in the case of Tall Bull’s killing) to be a white man who understood the language of the Cheyenne, a knight errant who bested them in individual, chivalric contests to which they foolishly challenged him, and who was so notorious among them as to have a Cheyenne name. The fact that Cody wore a stage costume during his real killing and scalping of a Cheyenne man suggests how much he continued to experiment with concocting a persona that closely approximated popular fantasies of Indian fighters.
In reality, the Northern Cheyenne had never faced Cody on the battlefield and likely would not have known him if they had. In 1930, a curious writer sou
ght out Beaver Heart, a Northern Cheyenne warrior who had been at Warbonnet Creek, where he saw his friend Yellow Hair fall. “I have heard the story as related by him regarding the fight, and that fact that Yellow Hair challenged him,” said Beaver Heart. “This is not true. Buffalo Bill, whoever he was, could not talk Cheyenne, and Yellow Hair could not talk English or Sioux, and I do not know how these two people could talk to each other.”135
But Cody’s battlefield theatrics and subsequent embellishment of them did more than enhance his own celebrity. They also inflated the significance of a skirmish so minor that other officers, notably General George Crook, accused the commanding officer of wasting army resources for seeking it out. Crook had ordered General Wesley Merritt to bring his forces north so their combined forces could pursue the Lakota who had pummeled Custer’s Seventh Cavalry almost to oblivion. And what was the reason for the Fifth’s delay? Cody claimed to have seen “a large party of Indians” that day on the Warbonnet. Army partisans wrote (and have written ever since) that eight hundred Cheyenne had broken from their reservation and headed north. But there were only about two hundred Cheyenne on that reservation to begin with, and only a portion of those had left. Nobody at Warbonnet Creek ever saw more than about thirty warriors on July 17. Merritt reported seeing only seven, all of whom fled when more than four hundred soldiers of the Fifth Cavalry roared into the valley on the heels of Cody and the small detachment he accompanied. Merritt, a Civil War veteran who had never fought Indians, was thrilled with his one-sided “victory.” But General Eugene Carr, who had been in blazing battles where his command was nearly overrun by Cheyenne, thought the fight on the Warbonnet hardly worth the name. “Wish I could make such a one on such small material,” he grumbled to his wife. “There were not over 30 Indians in sight at any time and we had over 400 men. There were a few sacks of flour destroyed, three Indians killed, 12 ponies captured and a few went back to the Agency.” 136
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