For his part, the private developer made money by investing in an irrigation system and selling permanent water rights to the same settlers for up to $15 per acre. Once the water rights were sold, the settlers assumed ownership of the ditch and the irrigation system, which they maintained. The capitalist who financed the development could then retire, rich and happy. 71 At least, that was the idea.
As much as it appealed to William Cody, to his partners, and to Wyoming’s political leadership, the law proved such a poor vehicle for settling the Big Horn Basin and other places that Congress drafted succeeding legislation within a decade. The overwhelming fact which the Shoshone partners could never overcome was the expense of irrigation works. The Cody Canal was no small ditch. Four feet deep, twenty-one feet wide at the bottom, and broadening to thirty feet at the top, the completed canal would run over twelve miles from headgate to townsite. There, it would branch into more than fifty miles of lateral channels (which the company also had to excavate), spreading water over almost 20,000 acres. Early estimates of construction costs ran to $200,000.72 In the end, the Cody Canal cost much more, and it took years to finish (even after Elwood Mead and others pronounced it “substantially complete”). Workers were hard to find, and excavation ceased completely when the ground froze in the long, often subzero winters. In 1897, water trickled into the canal from the Shoshone River and began rushing toward the settlement, a promising moment indeed. But when the water was within a mile and a half of the townsite, the bank blew out, and the water poured into the breach, forcing closure of the canal until the leak was fixed. Cold weather prevented repairs until the following year. Even then, engineers were flummoxed by the high gypsum content of the soil, which made it especially porous, leading to more washouts which they tried to rectify by working straw and hay into the ground. For years afterward, the washout would plague canal operators.73
Even when the canal operated, the water froze in winter, and settlers went back to hauling water from the river again. Delays like this were mortal to the interests of investors, who were hoping for a return on their outlays within a few years but who watched as years passed and ditch construction took ever more of their capital.
Settlers were the key to profits, of course. But obstacles prevented the town from becoming a popular emigrant destination. The remoteness of the Big Horn Basin, especially before the railroad was complete, meant that farmers in the basin had no ready market for crops. Water rights were expensive. In the beginning, the company sold them for $10 per acre. Even a forty-acre farm would cost $400 for water rights, plus $20 for the land—a year’s wages for the average American laborer.74 Although the price was payable over five years, the costs of farm making in Cody remained substantial. A 160-acre farm cost nearly $2,000 before interest. And, for those who dared to stake their farm on the Cody Canal, an entire year would pass before a crop matured. Ideally the town could provide a business nexus for service industries. But few craftsmen could support themselves without the elusive settlers. Because it required heavy cash investment up front, Cody town was no safety valve.
In 1896, the Shoshone Irrigation Company contracted with emigration agents (businessmen who took a commission from town builders for recruiting emigrants to settle on their lands). They succeeded in bringing a group of seven families from Illinois to begin the new town. By the end of the summer, only one of these families remained, the rest having been intimidated by the bleak setting, the poor prospects for the canal’s completion, and local ranchers whose cattle ravaged their gardens and whose cowboys maligned and frightened them.75
The Shoshone Irrigation Company hired a staff member of their own, D. H. Elliott, to recruit more emigrants. He spent months corresponding with the Swedish Association and other emigrant mutual aid societies, trying to entice immigrants to the town site. Touting the advantages of reclaimed desert as a tonic for the ailments of industrialism, he even approached the famous socialist, Eugene Debs. The leader of the Social Democratic Party had announced a “Social Democracy Colonization scheme,” a model community where the unemployed could work the land while they waited for jobs. Elliott depicted Big Horn County as the socialists’ promised land. “The Big Horn is a new county, very evenly divided, as is also the State of Wyoming, politically, hence, with a very few colonists they could have the balance of power, politically, if they so desired.” Cody approved the idea. Shoshone Irrigation Company partners were so desperate to settle the town that even the virulently antiradical Salsbury endorsed it.76
But the Social Democrats decided a socialist Wyoming was not in the cards, and ignored the invitation. The company went back to recruiting more conventional settlers. By the end of 1897, the partners had fired Elliott to cut expenses.77
To say settlers were slow in coming is not to say there was no interest. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West broadcast the opportunities of Cody far and wide. Out in Wyoming, George Beck was inundated with letters from prospective settlers. Howard Martin of Monmouth, Illinois, wrote as “a prospective homeseaker of the far wist,” requesting information about “inducements that your Co. has to offer or any and all information pertaining to the country its people climate and if the well water is any part of it alcoli [sic].” C. M. Stewart of Brattleboro, Vermont, wanted to know “if we can take homesteds now,” under the Carey Act, “that will be watered by your canal.” C. L. Goodwin of Sutton Creek, Pennsylvania, requested “all the information a homeseeker would wish to know,” regarding “lands you have for sale … water rights, least number of acres you sell … What is the least number of acres a man can farm of irrigated canal in Wyoming and make a living.”78 If the stacks of letters that arrived in the Big Horn Basin are any indication, would-be settlers seemed to come mostly from other rural areas and small towns. Few wrote from cities. Most knew a thing or two about farming. They asked how soon the frost came, how long the snow lasted, how high the elevation was. Many who were not farmers asked if they could find work making bricks, operating a creamery, or practicing law. Hundreds wrote. Few came.
The town site’s remoteness and the reluctance of settlers made company partners as vulnerable to the whims of railroad bosses as any other town founders in the West. Not long before his death, William Cody alleged that he had persuaded the Burlington & Missouri River Railroad to build a line south from Montana, and “if it had not been for me there would not be a mile of railroad in the Big Horn Basin today.”79 In fact, the Burlington & Missouri began planning a transcontinental route past Yellowstone National Park early in the 1890s. The eastern approach to the park, along the Shoshone River, was a likely route. Company representatives toured with Beck and Cody along the river as early as 1895, and there were rumors in the press that the B&M—not Buffalo Bill—would build the town that year.80
But, in typical railway fashion, the railroad let others bear the expense of building the town, then extorted their cut. Once the town site was under way, B&M officials announced they would build a spur line to Cody from Toluca, Montana. Cody knew railroads, and the approach of the B&M was both a heartening sign and an uncomfortable reminder of his losses to the Kansas Pacific at his town of Rome in 1867. He wrote to Beck: “Did it ever strike you that we have got to keep our eyes peeled or the B&M might make Cody howl like the K & P made my town of Rome howl?” During a trip to Omaha, the general manager of the railroad, George Holdredge, “said he wanted to talk with me when I got their this fall, but he did not say what about.” Cody was certain they wanted town land. “RR are out for the stuff— and I know from experience what they can do. Are we going to be prepared to act liberally with them? For it’s going to come to a showdown pretty soon.”81
He was right. Soon after their tracks began extending up the Shoshone River, the B&M let it be known that the line would stop miles short of Cody town—unless the Shoshone Irrigation Company handed over half the town lots. William Cody and his partners obliged.82 That November, the railroad arrived—although there was no railroad bridge across the river, and travelers
had to walk or find other transport the last mile and a half of the journey.
The completion of the rail line consummated the town founding. Shortly before the first train steamed into Cody, the town incorporated, with a population of 550 (the count was probably inflated).83 Six years after he began his efforts, Cody’s namesake town remained smaller than Buffalo Bill’s Wild West traveling camp. Even with the railroad, it was still less well developed than the Wild West show, too. The Shoshone Irrigation Company had promised a town waterworks. But two years after the railroad spur opened, residents were still paying a door-to-door delivery service twentyfive cents a barrel for their water.84 By 1905, of the 25,000 acres segregated for settlement along the Cody Canal, only 6,500 acres were actually irrigated. In 1907, officials finally judged the Cody Canal satisfactory, allowing the Shoshone Irrigation Company to cede responsibility for the canal to the community. But the list of unhappy settlers was long. By 1910, the litany of canal washouts, flooded fields, and other broken promises left the Shoshone Irrigation Company with a checkered past. Cody and his partners had been sued at least twenty-six times.85
The settlers of Cody were overwhelmingly middle class, and they expressed their aspirations to gentility with literary societies, church socials, and, beginning in 1901, meetings of the Cody Club, a gentleman’s organization that served as the de facto chamber of commerce.86 William Cody himself wore a white coat and tails to the grand opening of the Irma Hotel in 1902. “Most of the gentlemen were in evening dress, and a great many handsome and costly toilets were worn by the ladies present,” wrote a local journalist.87
But a glimpse of the town even years later suggests that for many, such gestures only padded the settlement’s rough edges. Nana Haight, a New Yorker and the wife of a pastor, arrived in Cody in 1910. She grew to like many things about her neighbors and the community, but on her arrival she could not hide her disappointment.
It has only 1000 inhabitants and is fully two miles away from the railroad station; hardly a tree and mostly one story buildings, wooden sidewalks, and a few lights at night. My heart sank when the bus brought us down across a swiftly running river, up a steep hill to the town… . Such winds as we have. The children pass our house going to school and go along backing up slowly against the wind. However, they blow home quickly… . There is one block with shops on one side and ten saloons on the other. Only two stores that seem to keep everything: paint, drygoods, groceries, and all kinds of goods for hunting. Two butcher shops with terrible meat, tough as shoe leather. Also, a drugstore and two banks, and a few odd stationery, candy, and cigar stores. The tailor is on the other side of the street amidst the saloons, so I have to brave it if I go there. No one ever knows when some man will be suddenly thrown out on the street from one of the saloons. 88
The spare, undomesticated appearance of the settlement notwithstanding, William Cody’s venture in the Big Horn Basin became the focus of his efforts like nothing else since the creation of the Wild West show. To say Cody himself took a strong personal interest in the affairs of the town is a considerable understatement. He became its primary advocate and patrician. After 1901, he began spending each winter at his new ranch, the TE (a brand he bought from friend Mike Russell), on the remote reaches of the South Fork of the Shoshone River, where he built a small house with a white picket fence. From there he soldiered through snow to reassure settlers. Residents remembered that he would “call on families who had established homes along the canal. He always had words of encouragement and complimented them on the splendid homes they had started and improvements they had made.” Other times, residents met him driving his buggy along the road. He “would stop to visit with all whom he met, asking how they were getting along and the type of ranching or farming they were doing.” Some recalled that his free-spending visits provided the settlement’s major source of cash. 89
He spent most of each year on the road with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. But to judge by his behavior, he saw the town as another show in need of his hands-on direction. Unable to distinguish tasks he should delegate from duties he could not, he wrote hundreds of letters criticizing almost everything about Beck’s operation in the town. He complained about heavy expenses and the lack of news from Beck. He insisted on knowing how much money was paid to the company and how it was spent. “This is discouraging,” he wrote upon hearing that a new mail route would bypass the town. “Had I been informed of a proposal of this kind I think I could have brought influence to bear.” He was full of suggestions—and demands—about the kinds of buildings in the town. “Of course we must have an office building. And while about it, it ought to be big enough to serve as a hotel this winter.” 90 And he was especially bitter over the many ditch failures. “It was neglect and carelessness that the water should be allowed to wash out the new canal,” he lectured Beck in 1898.91
Cody, Wyoming, c. 1905. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.
Such close attention was typical of Cody’s business manner. But if it brought him success in show business, it did him little good in the town business. His show made profits, albeit unevenly. The town did not. “I am doing my best to raise money,” he wrote Beck. “I tell you it keeps me sweating blood but no use getting discouraged. [I]f you can only protect our name and credit, I will say thank God.”92 Failure to complete the canal in a timely fashion could be disastrous. Officials “will make an unfavorable report of our canal if something substancial is not done,” he warned Beck.93 The result of cumulative poor assessments would be the loss of their segregation, and their investment.
Despite the town’s halting development, Cody hoped it would yet provide him means to retire from show business. In 1903, he journeyed with the Wild West show to England again. Ticket sales were nowhere near what they had been on earlier European tours, and Cody spent long days sitting in his private railroad car. “I am going to get out of this business that is just wearing the life out of me,” he wrote his sisters. “[T]here is such a nervous strain continualy. And the thing has got on to my nerves. And this must be my last summer.”94 He was too tired much of the time even to be convivial. “I do not go to hotels any more for I haven’t the strength to be even talked to. The only ray of pleasure I have is when I get to thinking of dear old TE [Ranch] and the rest I am going to get there.”95
By this time, it was becoming abundantly clear that Cody and his various partners in the Big Horn Basin had vastly underestimated the cost of irrigation. The Cody-Salsbury plan to irrigate 60,000 acres north of the Shoshone River proved much too expensive even for the most successful of showmen. When Cody and Salsbury commissioned an engineer’s estimate of the costs, which included irrigating lands north of the town and providing the town waterworks, even the cheapest alternatives were estimated at a staggering $742,000.96 Even if they sold water rights to every acre at the highest price the law allowed, their profits would amount to only $158,000, and that only if there were no other expenses along the way: no lawsuits for flooded fields or washed-out headgates, no recruitment of settlers or advertising. By 1901, it should have been clear: irrigation did not pay.
And yet Cody continued to pour money and effort into developing the Cody-Salsbury segregation. Part of the reason was that he had an eye on the Mormons, who had developed irrigation systems not only in Utah but downstream on the Shoshone River, at the town of Lovell. Since arriving in 1900, a small Mormon colony had succeeded in building a town and began eyeing nearby parcels for an expansion. First in their sights was the Cody-Salsbury segregation across the Shoshone River, which they claimed should be returned to the public domain because Cody and Salsbury had yet to deliver the water they promised. Cody, who had faced off against imaginary Mormons in his stage plays, now spent considerable effort keeping his segregation from falling into their hands.97
But if their expanding horizons made him suspect there was potential for more cash in irrigating the desert, he drew the wrong conclusions. Mormon irrigators had a critical resource—communal labor—w
hich Cody town did not. Farmers in Cody wanted the ditch dug for them; Mormons dug their own, collectively, as part of a greater spiritual effort to reclaim the wilderness. They were not fixated on how much money the ditches could make. They were, rather, bound by a spirit of collective religion.
Distracted by the Mormons, Cody appears not to have realized that his own frustrations in the irrigation business mirrored those of other capitalists. From 1894 to 1923, only one in twenty Carey Act projects made a profit. Ditch investments across the arid West paid so poorly that few investors could be found. Private funding of western settlement all but evaporated.
In 1902, Congress sought to remedy the shortcomings of the Carey Act with the Newlands Reclamation Act, a law that dramatically remade the landscape of western irrigation. Overnight, digging and financing large-scale irrigation works became a federal responsibility, administered through a new agency, the U.S. Reclamation Service.98
The Cody-Salsbury segregation was ideal for a large-scale irrigation project, and officials from the new agency were after it almost as soon as they had offices to work from. A dam across the Shoshone River would allow them to build a canal across the high northern bench and water a huge tract of land for settlers. Cody himself had made the same assessment, but he was unable to find the funding he needed, and the financial resources of the Reclamation Service far outstripped his. Where he scrambled to raise money in the tens of thousands of dollars, the government planned a network of dams, tunnels, canals, and laterals, and within months had appropriated $2.25 million for the project.99
Giving up the segregation was not easy. But as William Cody saw it, if the cards fell right, the government takeover would not hurt his interests. The irrigation works were a very expensive means to an end: making desert into arable, valuable land. He had other prospects on the north side of the Shoshone, including another townsite. As things stood, it was worthless. If the government brought water, though, he could make a tidy sum selling lots. He would not have water rights to sell, but having all those rights to sell along the Cody Canal had not made him a dime. The trick was to get somebody else to pay the high overhead of building and maintaining the canals. The water, when it came, would turn his desert land to gold. Salsbury and Cody ceded their segregation.
Louis S. Warren Page 69
