To understand why his suit for divorce went so wrong, we have to understand how central his image as a family man had remained to the Wild West show. To complete the narrative of frontier settlement, show programs emphasized not just his abilities as Indian fighter and hunter, but his accomplishments as a progressive pioneer, who not only conquered the West but domesticated it. His earliest show programs had featured pictures of his comfortable home in North Platte, where he had settled “to enjoy its fruits and minister to the wants and advancements of the domestic circle with which he is blessed.” 10 Cody expanded on this image in the 1893 program, by compressing a pair of images on one page, with a poem sandwiched between them. At the top of the page was an image of a savage frontier, a pen-and-ink sketch of Buffalo Bill “Lassoing Wild Horses on the Platte in the Old Days.” Below was a photograph of cattle grazing peacefully in front of the Victorian home and a barn clearly labeled “Scout’s Rest Ranch,” with the caption “ ‘Buffalo Bill’s’ Home and Horse Ranch on the Old Fighting Ground of the Pawnee and Sioux.”
The narrative sequence was clear, from top to bottom: the progress from frontier to pastoral countryside, from war to peace, and even from open space to domestic space, had been made possible by Buffalo Bill.
The march of civilization is made all the more apparent in the movement from pen-and-ink illustration at the top to photograph at the bottom, and in the transformed nature in the two scenes. The animals in the bottom image do not need lassoing: they graze peacefully, and they even face the same direction, right, like words on the page. Perhaps the most salient component of the bottom image is Buffalo Bill’s house, slightly to the left. It is a remarkable Gilded Age middle-class home, planted in the Nebraska prairie in front of a row of trees. Audiences would not need any prompting to associate this elegant home with a wife. The message was clear: by subduing the frontier, Buffalo Bill made homes possible. And he made it possible to keep women—or better, wives—inside them.
Midpage, between the two images, is a telling poem, “Lines Inspired on Witnessing the Prairie Chief Caressing His Baby Daughter, Little Irma Cody”:
Only a baby’s fingers patting a brawny cheek,
Only a laughing dimple in the chin so soft and sleek,
Only a cooing babble, only a frightened tear,
But it makes a man both brave and kind
To have them ever near.
The hand that seemed so harsh and cruel,
Nerved by a righteous hate
As it cleft the heart of Yellow Hand,
In revenge of Custer’s fate,
Has the tender touch of a woman,
As rifle and knife laid by,
He coos and tosses the baby,
Darling “apple of his eye.”
Thus the prairie centaur featured in the top illustration, the vengeful slayer of “Yellow Hand,” has been domesticated by the daughter—and the wife who provided her—in the bottom image. In a limited way, the frontier hero has become a paragon of the new, suburban “masculine domesticity,” which situated men in closer proximity to family and home than in previous generations.11
So audiences were astonished to read in major newspapers, in the early months of 1904, that after thirty-eight years of marriage, Buffalo Bill Cody was suing his wife for divorce. The family, however, was not surprised. The 1890s had been no kinder to the Cody marriage than any of the previous decades. In 1893, while he was showing in Chicago, Louisa made a surprise visit to the house where she had heard that he was living with Katherine Clemmons. She did not find Clemmons. Louisa tore the place to pieces. Upon her return to North Platte, she told her staff, “I cleaned out the house.”12
Cody’s image hinged on his being a domesticator of the frontier (top) through the establishment of the family home (bottom), particularly at the Scout’s Rest Ranch—where Louisa refused to live. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West 1893 Program, author’s collection.
In 1898, she went to New York and took a room at the Astoria. She called her husband at the Hoffman House, where the phone was answered by a press agent named Bess Isbell. This time, she upended her own room, and William Cody paid the bill.13
Mistresses aside, their most constant bone of contention was his Scout’s Rest Ranch, over which she struggled to gain control, although she refused to live in it. Under pressure from Louisa, William Cody’s sister Julia and her husband, Al Goodman, had vacated the premises in 1891, so that Arta and her husband, Horton Boal, could manage the property. Although Goodman returned to manage it again in 1894, he left for good in 1899.14 Goodman and the other managers and foremen of the ranch took their orders from William Cody, but all of them complained of interference, even hostility, from his wife, who constantly countermanded Cody’s orders and imposed demands of her own. As time passed, there may have been confusion about who was in charge. William Cody corresponded with ranch managers and continued to give them advice about how to handle the ranch. “I sent out … one of my old dining room tents,” he wrote one of them, “to cover the [hay]stacks with … to keep the exposed stack from getting wet.” 15 He advised them on confrontations with Louisa right up to the time he filed the divorce petition. But in 1900, soon after Al Goodman left, he handed the ranch over to Louisa with a oneline, unpunctuated message: “The ranch is yours take it run it to suit yourself.”16 He returned home to North Platte for a brief Christmas break in 1901. After that, he ceased his visits to the town or to Louisa.17
William Cody’s petition for divorce rested on two complaints. First, he made the stunning accusation that Louisa had many times threatened to poison him. Second, and more banal, was the charge that she had driven him “from his former home in North Platte, Nebraska, and has at divers times refused” to let him “bring his friends and guests” to that home. At times when he did, Louisa “would make it so unpleasant for him and his guests they were forced to leave.” His married life was “unbearable and intolerable” in these conditions.18
The nation’s newspapers quickly cast the drama as a tongue-in-cheek Wild West show. “Intrenched in a legal fastness and surrounded by a band of brave attorneys, who know every byepath [ sic] of the Wyoming divorce laws, the hero of the thrillers of two generations started today to fight his way to marital freedom,” wrote one reporter. On the other side, “Mrs. Cody, surrounded by another brave band of attorneys, is determined to fight to the last ditch, for she asserts the colonel wants the divorce only in order to marry another woman.” 19
The newspaper narrative turned the celebrity divorce trial into entertainment. But understanding how William Cody understood his marriage and his life, and why he lost this case, requires examining a very different story. The divorce trial was in a sense a battle of narratives, and William Cody’s charges told a familiar and popular tale. For all the tensions over money and property that checkered their marriage, the heart of his case was the sensational allegation of the poison threat. Wild West show programs had long scripted Buffalo Bill’s home, especially Scout’s Rest Ranch, as the domesticated triumph of the frontiersman. The poison charge emplotted both Codys into a quite different drama, one in which an evil woman lured her husband to provide home and wealth, and then poisoned him to gain control of the property.
This was, indeed, the plot of Lucretia Borgia, a popular melodrama in the nineteenth century, and one which so appealed to William Cody that by the late 1860s he had named his favorite buffalo rifle after the treacherous title character. Whether or not he was aware of the similarities between his accusations and the play, the old showman’s complaint resonated with the dark side of the domestic dream, the nightmare of the deceiving woman who strikes out from the heart of the home where the man believes he is safest. As various scholars have observed, this narrative is a mythic trope as old as the home itself, and a powerful undercurrent running against the popular enthusiasm for home and domesticity in the late nineteenth century. 20
William Cody’s first attempt at divorce, more than twenty years before, had halted when li
ttle Orra Cody suddenly died. Nothing would stop this one from proceeding, but the couple’s bitterness was compounded by another tragedy. Weeks after William Cody filed the petition, daughter Arta suddenly died of “organic trouble.” Her life had become a tragedy in itself. Her first husband, Horton Boal, committed suicide in 1902, leaving her with two infant children. She remarried in January 1904, at a small Denver wedding which her father attended. Her new husband, Dr. Charles Thorp, worked as a surgeon for the Northern Pacific railroad. But within a month, she was dead.21
With the heartbroken parents locked in a court battle, the funeral was a disaster. Upon hearing of Arta’s sudden death, William Cody sent a telegram to Louisa, asking to put “personal differences” aside while they buried their daughter.22 Louisa herself may have been attempting a reconciliation at the time Arta died. Arta’s two children had been visiting Louisa when Arta sent word that she was very ill and was about to have surgery, from which she did not expect to recover. Louisa and the children immediately began journeying to Arta’s home in Spokane. She had resented the Cody sisters for many years, but in Denver she asked her husband’s youngest sister, May Cody Bradford, to come along and help her, and she may have intended the invitation as a gesture to her husband.
But now, at the Bradford house in Denver, devastated by the telegram announcing Arta’s death, Louisa was further hurt and infuriated by her husband’s message. She refused to reconcile merely for the duration of the funeral. According to May Cody Bradford, she wanted to send a telegram accusing William Cody of murdering their daughter by breaking her heart with the divorce petition. Relatives persuaded her to soften her language.23 William Cody, on his way to meet the family funeral procession in Omaha, received a message telling him his wife believed he “broke Arta’s heart. Suit entered under false accusation.” Louisa would accept no temporary reconciliation. “Never for only a while, forever or not at all.”24
The couple met in Omaha and did not speak, as they made their way with Arta’s body to Chicago and on to its last resting place in Rochester, New York. The procession was tearful and tense. They rode in separate rooms of the sleeper car. As it became clear he would not attempt a reconciliation with her, Louisa threatened to “denounce him as Arta’s murderer from the grave of his dead child.”25
But she was silent as she put her first daughter in the ground, beside the graves of Kit and Orra Cody. At the conclusion of the funeral, William Cody left for New York City. As he left, he turned to his old friend Frank Powell and asked him to see if Louisa was open to a reconciliation. According to Powell, a man for whom Louisa had only contempt, she refused. She made her way back to Nebraska, still accompanied by her sister-in-law. Stopping over in Chicago, she raged at William Cody, shook her fist at his sister, and swore, “I will bring you Codys down so low the dogs won’t bark at you.”26
The divorce trial did not begin until almost a year after Arta’s death, by which time William Cody had added two more complaints to his petition. The first was that Louisa refused to sign mortgages, which made it impossible for him to carry on his business. The final charge was that she had subjected him to “extreme cruelty” in charging him with Arta Cody’s murder. 27 Testimony was made in depositions, many of them in open court in Cheyenne, before an audience of some three hundred “women, cowboys, and officers from Fort Russell,” according to the press.28 At the close of proceedings, the judge would render his decision.
The opening testimony by William Cody was actually made in a deposition the year before, in which he told the court of his long, unhappy marriage to Louisa—of his fights with her from their earliest days, his venture to “the end of the line” to escape his unhappy home, her discontent with his buffalo hunting and her disappointment in him upon the failure of his town of Rome. She disliked his life in the theater, was jealous of friendly actresses, and was always critical of him. “My home was made disagreeable to such an extent that I am ashamed to say … that I chose the saloons and the wine cup at times in preference.”29 In recent years, matters had become worse. “Well, kiss it goodbye, that’s gone,” she taunted him every time she signed a mortgage to provide cash for the Wild West show. Finally, she “refused to sign her name to any piece of paper at all for me.” He had outstanding mortgages he could not pay, and other properties he needed to sell. But “as she will not sign any papers, I find myself unable to conduct my affairs in a businesslike manner.” 30
The allegations of poisoning began to seem almost credible as his witnesses painted a picture of Louisa’s generally toxic personality. One seamstress who had worked for Louisa Cody related that she openly disdained her husband. 31 Another, Florence Parker, the daughter of a ranch manager who had departed because of Louisa’s constant interference, said that Louise had bragged of beating Irma Cody with a buggy whip and burning her with a match, that she consulted fortune-tellers about her husband “to get power over him so she could get possession of his wealth,” that she drank frequently, that “very vulgar” speech was “the most prominent part of her conversation,” that she often said she hated her husband, and that she killed his prize greyhound dogs with poison-laced crackers. 32
Mrs. John Boyer, the wife of another ranch foreman and manager, who lived at Scout’s Rest for nine years, said that on her first meeting with Louisa Cody, the wife of America’s most famous showman complained that her husband “had ladies traveling with him, or women rather, that made him unloyal to her,” and that he was “immoral with any woman that he met.” Over subsequent years, “she told me all.” 33 Mrs. Boyer said the woman used “such bad language” in her own home “that ladies could not stay there.” She drank heavily—“toddies,” wine, and “beer by the case.” In years past, “she used to take a drink the first thing in the morning,” and when she drank, “you could smell it on her.” She refused to entertain his guests, ladies and gentlemen alike, and she accused her husband’s friends of stealing household trinkets. The Boyers hired a housemaid, a young woman who had a baby out of wedlock, to work in their quarters at Scout’s Rest. Louisa Cody showed up to demand they fire the maid. Mrs. Boyer refused. Louisa “spit in the baby’s face,” and accused Mrs. Boyer “of keeping that girl in the house for my husband’s use.” Mrs. Boyer seized Mrs. Cody by the throat and pushed her bodily out the front door. 34
Mrs. Boyer’s testimony was the heart of the poisoning evidence. She recounted how Louisa had bought a concoction called “Dragon’s Blood” from a gypsy camp near North Platte and put it in his coffee. Concerned that it would do him harm, “I switched the cups,” Mrs. Boyer recalled, “and it made her sick.”35
One day when William Cody was intoxicated in their home, Louisa Cody told Mrs. Boyer, “I will rule Cody or ruin him.” She called him to the top of the stairs and handed him a cup of tea, saying, “Willie, drink this it will do you good.” He drank it, then lurched toward the bathroom door and collapsed, vomiting as he fell. “You are a drunken brute,” Louisa told him. Some of the hired men put him to bed and called the doctor. “The girl that was working there, Katie Burke, said ‘She will surely kill him this time for she has worked on this tea all day.’ ” Mrs. Boyer claimed that she had confronted Louisa Cody, and been told that nobody would believe her if she said anything. On other occasions Louisa told her that the potion would make him “so weak that she could get him to sign papers” and “she wanted him to make his ranch over to her.”36
Mrs. Boyer saw Louisa slip more of the potion into a bottle of whiskey on the buffet in their home, just before a banquet honoring her husband. Then she set about “nagging and jawing first about one thing and then another and he said ‘Oh Mamma, hush,’ and he went over and grabbed the bottle and took a drink and said ‘The only way a man can stand you is to drink.’ ” By the time he rose to speak at the banquet, he was practically incoherent. Moments later, he collapsed at the table, whereupon he was bodily carried from the room.37
Cody’s banquet speech, or rather his failure to give a coherent speech, became a
central moment in the trial narrative. Other witnesses, including his sister May, said that he had complained his legs were numb, and that he felt worse than he ever had in his life, moments before he fainted. 38 Outside, with his stomach in agony, he walked to Guy Laing’s saloon, where he climbed onto a billiard table and lay facedown, gripping the railings on both side “in a way as to relieve the agony in my stomach.” Half an hour later, he stood up, went to his carriage, and went home. 39
As riveting as the story of Louisa the Poisoner was for the public, Cody had not reckoned with the powerful countermythology of the home and the domestic order which his show had been entwined with, and in many ways reinforced, for a generation. Very quickly, his wife’s attorneys cast William Cody as an aggressor against his own home. Throughout the trial, Louisa Cody exploited the public’s fascination with homemaking as salve to the deleterious influence of nomadism. She played the role of a loyal wife aggrieved by a befuddled, peripatetic husband, whose drinking, infidelities, and unsteady business hand became primary exhibits in the case against him.
The strategy of Louisa’s lawyers was to depict the Cody household as loving, warm, and generally happy. In this story of the Cody marriage, William Cody appeared as an affectionate and kind man, but with an unfortunate thirst for alcohol and unrestrained lusts for women. Only through his marriage to Louisa Cody could his anarchic energies and unsavory appetites be contained.
Her attorneys built this case from the most respectable materials. Her witnesses were largely North Platte’s middle-class professionals, including bankers, doctors, and lawyers. “She always conducted herself as a loving wife,” testified local attorney Beach “Judge” Hinman. “I have never known there to be the least friction between the two.” 40 Edith Colvin, who stayed at the Cody household for five weeks in the fall and winter of 1901, described how Louisa headed up a crowd of people who welcomed her husband at the train station when he returned for Christmas, bearing gifts—steel purses and a cut-glass serving set—for his wife and daughters. Their home was decorated with his image in paintings and busts and photographs. She called him “Willie.” He called her “Mamma.” During Christmas dinner, he treated her “very nicely, indeed.” 41
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