Louis S. Warren

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

  Buffalo hunting was fun for people who were good at it. But beyond their own recreation, Cody and Custer each had other distinct reasons for devoting so much time to it. Cody guided hunters to make a living; Custer did it to enhance his image and to cultivate connections among financiers, politicians, and journalists. In part, the similarities between Custer and Cody could be expected insofar as they sought to fill the same mythic space, the white Indian guide, avatar of wilderness for gentleman hunters. In this respect, as in others, they were competitors, and Cody remained in the Boy General’s shadow. Custer’s magazine articles and his memoirs circulated among the army brass. Cody may have read them, but he did not yet possess the skills or the connections to publish his own. Custer, no doubt, was aware of Cody’s scouting and hunting exploits. But in his early days Cody’s most celebrated hunting parties could not match Custer’s. In the summer of 1869, while Cody awaited publication of the first pulp press story about himself, Custer guided a hunting party of two aristocrats from England, 150 tourists from Cleveland, and at least two reporters from the New York Times and the Ohio State Journal. Spectacular as this hunt was, it was also typical of Custer’s self-presentation. To the accompaniment of the regimental band playing “Garryowen”—the very music which signaled a Seventh Cavalry charge on Indian villages—the huge party sallied forth in wagons and carriages, fifteen miles from Fort Hays. “What a party it was!” recalled one participant, a young woman. In her literary sketch, Custer appears as the sportsman’s ideal, a white Indian in full costume: “Custer, ahead, was seen to rise in his saddle, with his long hair flying in the wind, his heavily fringed buckskin suit matching the color of his hair. He gave the Indian war-whoop—every horse and dog understood it meant a dash—a run at full gallop.”45

  It was only one of many such Custer forays. In November 1869, Custer guided fifty hunters—various politicians and wealthy industrialists from Michigan, some Seventh Cavalry officers, and a reporter from the Detroit Post—in a cavalcade of eight wagons, three ambulances, and numerous extra horses, again accompanied by the Seventh Cavalry band. Wrote Custer: “One of the gentlemen remarked that the scene reminded him of events described as belonging to the feudal ages, when marshaling his retainers some ancient Baron marched forth to battle or the chase.” 46

  As Custer obviously understood, guiding for buffalo hunts was a form of showmanship. This fact was never better illustrated than when P. T. Barnum, America’s greatest showman, and the impresario of the first staged buffalo hunt in New Jersey twenty-seven years before, arrived at Fort Hays for a real hunt with Custer in the summer of 1870. The officer “received us like princes,” wrote Barnum. “He fitted out a company of fifty cavalry, furnishing us with horses, arms, and ammunition.”47 (If he did not also provide the Seventh Cavalry band, perhaps they were out with another party.)

  Years later, after Custer died, Cody made the army officer and hunter-hero into a touchstone of his own career. As we have seen, Cody took the “first scalp for Custer” after the battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876. He staged the scene repeatedly in his theatrical career and, later, in the Wild West show, sometimes with a reenactment of “Custer’s Last Fight” as a prelude. He shored up his Custer act by speaking glowingly of the fallen general in interviews. And in his 1879 autobiography he explained that his friendship with the martyr of the Little Big Horn went back to 1867, when “I had my first ride with the dashing and gallant Custer,” whom he guided through a sixty-five-mile stretch between Fort Ellsworth and Fort Larned. Custer was so impressed with the young scout’s abilities that he promised to “find something for me to do” if ever Cody needed work. “This was the beginning of my acquaintance with General Custer, whom I always admired as a man and as an officer.” 48

  But the Custer-Cody friendship was as imaginary as the Comstock match hunt. Cody competed against other hunters, but not against Comstock. He had friendships with army officers, but not with Custer. Although Custer did journey in July 1867 along the route between Ellsworth and Larned, where Cody claimed to be his guide, he went opposite the direction that Cody remembered, and Cody was not along. In fact, there is no record of William Cody ever scouting for Custer. He and Custer shared a patron in General Philip Sheridan, and their paths crossed at Fort Hays, where the Seventh Cavalry was often stationed and where Cody lived between 1867 and 1869. But the only documented meeting between these two men occurred at a Nebraska buffalo hunt, in 1872, a highly publicized, glamorous expedition concocted by General Sheridan for the entertainment of Russia’s visiting Grand Duke Alexis.

  That Custer and Cody did not renew their acquaintance after 1872 may reflect that each was too much of a showman to tolerate the other’s company for long. But there were likely other reasons. Custer was the most controversial officer on the Plains. A West Point graduate whose full-gallop charge into Confederate General J. E. B. Stuart’s “Invincibles” at Gettysburg routed the South’s most famous cavalry regiment, Custer was a Civil War hero. He underscored his martial valor with a showy bearing. His insistence on carrying a medieval battlefield standard, on camping atop high ridges with campfires blazing, and on such frivolities as a regimental band made him hard to miss. The press loved him, and superiors rewarded him by brevetting him (that is, accelerating his promotion until the war was over) to the rank of major general, the youngest in the Union army, in 1863.49

  Although his courage was real enough, his self-aggrandizing theatrics served him ill on the Plains. Arriving in Kansas in 1866, he took the Seventh Cavalry on extended fruitless expeditions which the Cheyenne and Sioux easily evaded. In 1867, during a misguided search for Indians in conditions so harsh that dogs died of exhaustion, he found himself powerless to stem the outflow of deserters, thirty-four of whom departed in one day. In frustration, he ordered summary executions of those he caught. Junior officers apprehended several troopers and indeed shot them, killing one. Soon after, Custer’s wife arrived in Kansas; setting out to reach her, he force-marched troops on a 155-mile journey in 55 hours. Soldiers’ mounts broke down, and when they did, Custer ordered their riders left behind. Sioux warriors caught up with them, killing one and wounding another, before help arrived.50

  Not surprisingly, Custer was court-martialed for these offenses, and found guilty of violating orders and of abandoning his troops to the enemy. He was suspended from duty for one year, without pay. But in 1868, Sheridan recalled him for the winter campaign, during which he attacked the Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle’s village on the Washita River, achieving the army’s biggest victory of the Plains campaigns to that point.51

  Victory on the Washita secured his reputation among admirers. But it failed to mollify his critics. Some charged Custer with attacking the wrong village. Black Kettle was a peace advocate who had survived the Sand Creek Massacre four years before, and the Cheyenne horse thieves Custer was pursuing came from a different band.52 If that was not enough, the stain of troop abandonment was renewed. During the battle, a subordinate officer, Captain Joel Elliott, led a detachment of eighteen men into a pocket of Cheyenne and Arapaho resistance. As Custer left the Washita, junior officers urged a search for Elliott, but Custer refused to order one. Elliott, of course, was killed, with all his men.53

  These issues alone would have made Custer a subject of arguments. But there was more. After the Washita, various officers selected concubines from the captives. In this adventure, they were led by Custer, who took a beautiful Cheyenne woman named Monahsetah as his mistress. Various sources, both Cheyenne and American, claim that she had a child by Custer. The shakiness of Custer’s marriage was already the stuff of camp gossip. (Rumor had it that notorious “death march” to Fort Hays in 1867 was occasioned by news that Libbie was behaving inappropriately with another officer at Fort Riley. Whether the tale was true or not, the couple was separated during the Christmas season of 1869.) The officer’s affair with a Cheyenne captive was widely known among fellow officers—and scouts, too—and fanned the flames of controversy around him.54


  William Cody worked and lived in Hays when Custer was posted there. He was at the epicenter of the ongoing Custer uproar, and even if he dismissed most of the criticism, it is unlikely he could overlook all the complaints about Custer’s vanity, pettiness, and cruelty. Custer ordered poor troopers to have half their heads shaved as a mark of disgrace, or ordered them flogged, or threw them into the deep circular pit he used as a guardhouse in Hays, for offenses as minor as leaving camp for forty-five minutes to buy a tin of fruit (which soldiers frequently did to fend off rampant scurvy). 55

  Custer was a hero to the nation after he died, in part through Cody’s adept stitching of the Custer legend onto his own entertainment. But while he lived, George Custer was a polarizing figure. During Cody’s career as an army scout, it was almost impossible to know Custer and not take a position in the many disputes which seemed to blow about him like so many tornadoes. The divisions he created in an already deeply divided army were unmistakable. “He is the most complete example of a petty tyrant that I have ever seen,” wrote one of his junior officers in 1867. 56 General Eugene Carr, who commanded the Fifth Cavalry and gave Cody his first commendation for superlative service in 1869, also disliked George Custer.57

  All of which explains why Cody wanted so little to do with Custer while he lived. Whether or not he could tolerate Custer’s arrogance, Cody seldom saw a political fight worth getting involved in unless it directly affected his own well-being. He blamed bushwhacker cruelty for his family’s misery in eastern Kansas but, at times, he also suggested that his father’s own outspokenness needlessly provoked his enemies. Recalling Isaac Cody’s stabbing in 1856, Cody remembered, “My father’s indiscreet speech at Rively’s brought upon our family all of the misfortunes and difficulties which from that time befell us.”58 The violence that followed Wild Bill Hickok, Cody’s mentor in frontier imposture, as he publicly challenged lawbreakers to test his mettle, made him another prime exemplar of the perils awaiting the pugnaciously outspoken.

  Although Cody flirted with politics, he lived his entire adult life trying to steer clear of the era’s fierce partisan battles, which extended from the slavery struggles of his boyhood, through the infamous “stolen election” of 1876, and on to the bitter struggles between Democrats and Republicans at almost every level of government that continued until 1900. In many ways, Cody crafted his public persona to transcend such divides, or at least to ignore them. Indian fighting, as we have seen, inspired debates over what was just and whether the army should be deployed to fight or not. Custer galvanized partisans on all sides of such questions. Cody was not an officer, not a commander, and therefore not accountable for army decisions (another aspect of scouting that served his purposes). As the entrepreneurial white Indian, fighter against savagery, and killer of wild animals, he symbolized processes of “land clearing” which were so fundamental to the entire political and economic system that they inspired much less argument than “current events” like the gold standard, the tariff, or army corruption.

  For his part, Custer himself not only encouraged Cody to keep his distance, but resented Cody’s rise to fame and obstructed it when he could. The only mention of Cody in any Custer correspondence was a derisive reference to the fun Custer and his brother had in tormenting their brother-in-law, Lieutenant James Calhoun, by suggesting that he attempt a stage career like Buffalo Bill’s under the theatrical name “Antelope Jim.” 59 His most obvious tactic for impugning Cody was to remain silent about Buffalo Bill in the press, while he extolled rival scouts as the “real” heroes of the Plains, at the very moment that Cody was entering the public eye. Custer’s jabs were so effective that Cody felt compelled to counter them years after Custer died.

  It was just this concern that led Cody, in 1879, to cast the long-dead William Comstock as his legendary opponent in the buffalo-killing contest that never happened. William Comstock once had the makings of a potential media star, like Wild Bill Hickok. In 1868, reporter Theodore R. Davis presented Comstock as a skilled guide and buffalo hunter in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, the same middle-class journal that had launched Hickok to national fame the year before.60 But whatever promise he had was cut short when a Cheyenne attacker killed him later that year. Had he lived, his celebrity would likely not have approached Cody’s. He was devoted to Cheyenne culture (his nickname, “Medicine Bill,” reflected his eager embrace of Cheyenne “medicine”), spoke fluent Cheyenne, and lived among them. The Cheyenne who killed him likely saw him as a turncoat for his service as a scout for the Seventh Cavalry in 1867.61

  But Custer exploited Comstock’s demise, turning him into the greatest scout the Plains had ever seen. Given that the officer set about this project at the very moment that Cody was ascending to national fame, it is hard to believe it was not a conscious strategy. Custer’s account appeared first in the respected Galaxy magazine in the early 1870s, and was republished in 1874, in his best-selling memoir, My Life on the Plains. The West Point graduate, Civil War hero, and famous Indian fighter left no superlative unturned in pumping the reputation of the dead-and-unchallengeable Comstock, all at the expense of unnamed scout pretenders. “Comstock was the favorite and best known scout on the central plains,” claimed Custer. He was also the ideal white Indian. “No Indian knew the country more thoroughly than did Comstock. He was perfectly familiar with every divide, watercourse, and strip of timber for hundreds of miles in either direction. He knew the dress and peculiarities of every Indian tribe, and spoke the languages of many of them. Perfect in horsemanship, fearless in manner, a splendid hunter, and a gentleman by instinct, as modest and unassuming as he was brave,” he was, concluded Custer, “the superior of all men who were scouts by profession with whom I had any experience.”62

  Cody, on the other hand, never appeared in any of Custer’s voluminous accounts. My Life on the Plains appeared two years into Cody’s stage career, with his reputation ever more inflated by theatrical reviews and testimonials from his army commanders (but not Custer). In his memoirs, Custer reveled in the company of Comstock and other scouts, including Wild Bill Hickok—“then as now, the most famous scout on the Plains,” and “one of the most perfect types of physical manhood I ever saw.” He regaled readers with tales of the colorful Moses “California Joe” Milner, and the “squaw man” Ben Clark.63 But he made not one mention of Cody.

  After Custer’s martyrdom on the banks of the Little Big Horn in 1876, his published effusions about Comstock (and his silence about Buffalo Bill Cody) represented a potential problem for Buffalo Bill, whose claim to fame as the premier scout hero could be challenged by any of the thousands who read Custer’s best seller.

  Cody vanquished this threat in a number of ways, including his timely, very theatrical, and brilliantly astute (if bloodthirsty) grab at “the first scalp for Custer” in 1876. But a more subtle maneuver came three years later, when he invented a hunting competition, which looked on paper like any number that were reported in the memoirs of officers and in the press, and in which he positioned the late Will Comstock as a loser. This simple fabrication, inserted in an autobiography which contained a mixture of truth and falsehood so complex that few could detect the difference, was insurance against any continuing threat from Comstock’s reputation, or Custer’s slight.

  THE VIGOROUS COMPETITION between Cody and Custer suggests how much buffalo hunting was a realm of commerce and theater, in which the best guides packaged a whole range of signal “frontier experiences” for their clients. The most popular guides provided keys not only to game but to the mystique of wilderness, which they embodied. Of course, where Cody’s reputation as a white Indian who was certifiably white facilitated his appeal as an army scout, it complemented his career as a hunting guide. White men who were sports, after all, wanted to believe not only that Buffalo Bill was the greatest guide and hunter of all time, but that he represented their own potential for hunting prowess and frontier mastery.

  In the 1860s, many sportsmen utilized army conne
ctions so they could ride with the U.S. Cavalry, whose commanders were eager—within limits— to cultivate good relations with influential voters and financiers, and who often saw killing buffalo as an indirect way of fighting Indians. Many sport hunters turned to Phil Sheridan, who commanded all the forts west of the Missouri River, for advice about where to hunt and which guide to hire. In turn, he frequently referred them to Cody. The confluence of wealthy hunters, army officers, and frontier scouts gave Cody some of his first press among a social elite he came to admire and which he sought to join. Indeed, Cody’s reputation as a hunter and guide grew in concert with his reputation as an Indian fighter, partly because of reports that began to filter through army hunting circles about his skills and his helpful demeanor.

  Thus, one year after the Summit Spring fight, in the summer of 1870, General Carr hosted a half-dozen tourist hunters from England and Syracuse, New York, on a buffalo hunting trip into the Republican River country. Along with a trooper escort went scouts William Cody and Luther North. Later, in December, Cody, Luther North, and Frank North guided for a combined army-civilian hunting party which included James W. Wadsworth, a New York congressman, a number of railroad dignitaries, and several officers from Fort McPherson.64

  A steady stream of sport hunters kept officers and guides busy, at Fort McPherson and elsewhere, for much of the 1870s. There were sport hunters from nearby Omaha in September 1872. Later, Sheridan himself invited the Earl of Dunraven to hunt buffalo, guided by Cody and Texas Jack Omohundro. George Bird Grinnell went hunting with Omohundro and the North brothers in the summer of 1872.65

  Such outings became so common, and constituted such a drag on thinly stretched military resources, that they emerged as a subject of complaint among post commanders, particularly those in better hunting grounds. Modern readers might assume that army families most dreaded news of Indian hostility. But in 1870, wrote Libbie Custer, she and her husband, George, would “tremble at every dispatch for fear it announces buffalo hunters.”66 Requests for guides and protection were hard for officers to refuse. Many of the businessmen who wanted them were Union army veterans, with personal connections to powerful generals and politicians. Supporting their recreation was a way of earning their support for better army funding in the continuing wrangle between the War Department and other branches of the federal government.67