Others noted that Cody had seemed perfectly happy in 1901, the last time he had been in North Platte. He had discussed plans to build a Masonic temple for the town. He never made any suggestion that he was planning to leave. He ceased to return after that year. Many wondered why.42
Still others described Louisa Cody’s behavior toward guests as “uniformly courteous,” and her conduct toward her husband as “never anything but proper.” She was an excellent hostess. “She was always very fully occupied in entertaining his guests. I never heard her say an unkind word to him, or manifest any ill-feeling of any description at any time.” Her reputation as wife and mother was “beyond reproach.” Another “never saw anything” to indicate trouble and bad feeling. Friends of three decades, including the Grand Master of Nebraska Masons, Frank Bullard, described her as a teetotaler, and the contention that she used “vulgar, obscene, and profane language” was “ridiculous. I never heard of such a thing… . I never heard her use a word that even approached that.” 43
Dr. E. B. Warner, fourth-term mayor of North Platte and delegate to the 1892 National Republican Convention, had known the Codys for twentyfive years. He told the court that Louisa Cody was “perfectly ladylike; an ideal hostess,” and a loving wife and mother.44 Said Mrs. W. H. Turpie, a friend of Irma’s who was a neighbor of the Codys for several years, “It always seemed to me that she simply idolized him; as much as she could any person. She was very much wrapped up in him, and doing everything for his pleasure, as far as I could see… .”45 Another neighbor who visited often with Louisa testified that Louisa once showed her a newspaper report of her husband’s infidelities, but even then, she never said a word against him.46
In the strategy of Louisa’s attorneys, the public face of the marriage was what mattered. If marriage was by definition a public institution, the foundation of home and civil society, then the judge would have to accept its public face as evidence of how well it ordered the chaotic life of the showman. If a marriage looked happy, it must be happy.
Louisa’s attorneys also illuminated the challenges facing the wife and domesticator, by painting William Cody as dissolute and unable to function on his own. Most of the witnesses on this point were longtime friends of both Codys. They proved to be not only enthusiastic in defense of his wife, but so eager to fulminate against Buffalo Bill that one detects a sense of aggrievedness on their part, as if the disgrace of the scandal was only the latest of the old showman’s many offenses. Their bewilderment over his abandonment of their town for Cody, Wyoming, apparently added to a popular resentment at being dragged into his marital troubles. To judge by their testimony, they felt their affection for Buffalo Bill was poorly repaid with this self-serving trial. They hit back hard, and their harshest attack was their testimony about Cody’s drinking.
Alcohol and its control were major social and political issues in the nineteenth century. To temperance advocates, alcohol was the despoiler of the home, an evil force that corrupted men, broke their marriages, ruined their talents, and left their children destitute. Drink was savagery in a bottle.
Indeed, temperance advocates deployed the symbol of the home and womanly domesticity in much the same way as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West did. As we have seen, Cody himself touted his show camp as a temperance community (although even heavy drinking was not unusual when the cast was out on the town) in order to appeal to the respectable middle class. In the minds of many, the home needed to be protected from alcohol, but a faithful wife and a warm domicile were also the best defense against a man’s alcohol abuse. Women dominated temperance campaigns, and they depicted the fight to control alcohol as an expression of women’s domesticating influence over the public spaces which men traditionally controlled, especially saloons. They were particularly powerful in the West. Carry Nation began chopping her way to glory in 1900 by attacking Kansas saloons with her hatchet. Less spectacularly, campaigns to ban alcohol were often led by, and corresponded with the rising power of, middle-class women. Thus the nation banned alcoholic beverages with the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, and empowered women with the right to vote in the Nineteenth Amendment of 1921.47
The control of alcohol and its influence thus spoke to the containment of savagery and to anxieties about the home which were central to Cody’s show and his myth. Charges of habitual drunkenness struck at the heart of his public persona, and he defended himself vigorously. He testified that drinking never interfered with his business, and moreover that he had quit drinking in 1901. He may have. “Oh but I am enjoying this trip—More than I ever did any before,” he wrote a friend that year, “because I am not drinking. Everything looks bright and prosperous.” Two months later he was still abstaining. In New York, pulling together his show for another season, he was “feeling like new money. [H]ead clear all the time… . My prospects never looked brighter.”48 Charles Wayland Towne, a journalist who went hunting with Cody and several of the showman’s old drinking partners in 1903, reported that Cody had become a teetotaler on orders from his doctor.49
Whether or not Cody had been on the wagon since 1901, residents of North Platte had not seen him since that year, and they had many stories to tell about Cody’s drinking from earlier days. “I have seen him frequently when I thought he was very much under the influence of liquor,” both “in h[i]s own home and on the streets,” said Frank Bullard.50 William Cody’s attorney told Bullard that Cody did not drink during his show season. Bullard shrugged. “He generally waited until he got here to get drunk.” 51 A. F. Streitz, the town druggist, concluded that Cody “has been a hard drinker during his stay in North Platte during these years.” Streitz had seen Cody intoxicated “many times,” and in fact “the first time I met him in North Platte he was intoxicated.”52 C. M. Newton, a merchant who had known the Codys for fifteen years, said he had seen Cody drunk in public many times. William Cody’s attorneys suggested that their client was polite and kind even when drunk:
Q: He always conducted himself gentlemanly, did he not, during the times he was drunk, on the streets?
A: I think at some times he did not act like a gentleman.
Q: What caused you to think so?
A: I think he was too much intoxicated.53
Louisa Cody’s lawyers proved adept at dredging up old acquaintances to testify about his prior habits. Such people were legion in the Platte country. One recalled events two decades before, when William Cody would make his “headquarters” in Dave Perry’s bar, a known resort of prostitutes. When William Cody’s lawyers attempted to mitigate the remark by asking if all saloons did not have prostitutes at the time, the witness, Patrick McEvoy, disagreed. Perry’s saloon, he pointed out, “was the only saloon in North Platte that allowed women to go into them.” The witness was careful to point out that he had never seen Cody with any of these shady women—but he stayed there most days and much of the night, too. “He would be unable to walk, and the boys would have to haul him in a carry-all, or hack, to take him home.”54 One local cowboy turned up to recall Cody bringing wagons of liquor to the Dismal River roundup when he was part owner of the Cody-North Ranch in the Sand Hills.55 Still another claimed, “I saw him lying drunk myself right at the store building of Mr. Burke’s,” near Fort McPherson. Even while he had a wife and baby at the fort, he frequented a bordello near Cottonwood Canyon which “stood on a high knoll, and you could not help seeing him.”56
In this telling, the story of William Cody was of a man who may or may not have been drinking during his show season, but was unable to stop when he was at home. Ira Bare, editor of a North Platte newspaper, who had known the Codys for more than twenty-three years, concluded “as a rule, when the Colonel drank, he kept on drinking … during his presence here, he was more or less under the influence of liquor… . I do remember instances when he did not drink, but not often.”57
How much of these stories was true and how much produced by the alchemy of resentment and memory is impossible to say. The self-deprecating humor of his autobiograp
hy, in which he often recalled having too much “tanglefoot,” buying drink for his detachment and forgetting to buy food, and scouting hostile territory with brandy-filled canteens, suggest either heavy drinking, or playful derision of the era’s potent temperance movement, or both.
But however true or false the testimony about Cody’s drunkenness was, the stories reflected the barely concealed antitheatricalism of North Platte, a middle-class Nebraska town which had always been uneasy with William Cody’s brand of show business patricianism. Charles Iddings, a prominent mill owner and businessman in North Platte, said that whatever shortcomings of temperament or manners Louisa might have, she was simply more honorable, and credible, than her husband, because she was not in show business. While her husband traveled the world in pampered comfort, she stayed home:
She has not had the extensive travel, she has not mingled with the best people perhaps in the east and the old country. She has not had a press agent to dress up her little stories or to correct her little imperfections of speech. She simply stayed at home. She has not had a ladies maid to mix her drinks for her or fix her attire to best advantage. She has simply been a plain body, stayed at home and taken good care of the children and such property as she had there… . She has been at home most of the time during 23 years.58
The description of Louisa Cody as a “plain body” suggested she possessed democratic values of sincerity, modesty, and honesty, which William Cody—ornamented, showy, and extravagant—could not have. She was, said Beach Hinman, “a very industrious woman, and I do not know as I have noticed any extravagance in her living or dress.” She had a “certain amount of charge at all times over her ranch and farms. She went out and conducted the business of the farm, which was very extensive in later years.” Her habits were “exemplary beyond reproach.” Hinman had “never heard a mere hint of any source against her reputation or conduct.”59
In contrast, her husband’s style of living was not moral. When William Cody’s attorneys tried to put Hinman on the defensive by pointing out that the showman had taken his daughters with him when he traveled, Hinman demurred. “I guess Arta Cody was with him some of the time, but I don’t think the truck he had around with him did his daughters any good.”60 At one time, in Hinman’s presence, William Cody “got to ridiculing our Lord and Master, and I took exceptions to it….”61 In these accounts, Cody’s debauchery could be attributed equally to an absence of moral regulation along the frontier—which had long since passed into history but which yet coursed through his person—and to the urban theatrical corruptions in which he immersed himself. In fact, the two forces combined in his person, to create a figure who had lost his balance and fallen into the drunkenness and moral lassitude of the savage.
This drunkard, philanderer, and blasphemer was Louisa Cody’s husband, and she begged the court to allow her to remain his wife. “He always was kind to me when in North Platte,” said Louisa. “He drank a great deal, but he always was pleasant when he came home.” Testifying on her own behalf, between sobs, she denied every charge in the divorce petition. She recalled his last visit home, in 1901, when she arranged the Christmas welcome party for him. He seemed delighted. “He embraced me and kissed me,” she said. He left on Christmas night. He held her in his arms until the train was about to leave, then kissed her goodbye. That was the last time he had come home. She knew nothing of poisonings, of dragon’s blood, of having treated guests badly. Arta had been devastated by the divorce petition. Louisa’s attorneys submitted in evidence the last letter she received from her eldest daughter: “About Papa, oh why did he do it? My heart is just broken over it. I cannot find words to express how dreadfully I feel about it.”62
Louisa said she had been careful with mortgages only to protect him from their many creditors. She had certainly objected to some guests, but never to their faces. She wanted a reconciliation—if only he would retract the allegations of poisoning.63
William Cody’s case was not helped by the letters he wrote to her, which her attorneys submitted as evidence of his continuing affection. Reading the first of these letters into the record, her attorney stumbled over his crabbed handwriting. “Better let me read it,” interrupted William Cody. “That may be one I wrote on horseback.”
He read them all, as if he was playing in a drama. “The venerable showman carried off the role with easy grace and due regard to dramatic values,” reported the Chicago Tribune.64
The letters were indeed affectionate, but they also made a powerful case for Louisa’s virtues as a wife. The ideal wife of the Gilded Age stayed at home but was capable of assisting her husband in business. One of her witnesses testified that she was “a good business woman, better than the average,” and her husband’s correspondence substantiated this. 65 One of his letters reminded her of his $50,000 loss with his Canadian tour of 1885, the financial debacle of Ambrose Park in 1894, and the $10,000 lost in Black America in 1895, all as a prelude to explaining to her that his “share of the losses” for the 1900 season amounted to another $10,000. “I had a terrible blow this morning. I got all my printing bills in. Our printing was supposed to cost $60,000 a season, but this year it’s $80,000 so I have to pay… . This makes an unexpected loss to me of $20,000.” The show season a bust, he still had to pay half the expenses of sending the cast home and wintering the livestock. For this year, the expense of running Scout’s Rest Ranch would have to be paid with hay and grain sales. “Don’t you think it can be made to do it?” he asked her. Signing off as “Papa,” he scribbled a PS: “Wish you would read this letter and say nothing to any one.”66
As the ranch prospered, his reliance on her business abilities grew, and his letters expressed his gratitude.
Say you are getting right down to business—why I am delighted—I never believed you could run that big ranch… . But you seem to over come business troubles as well as a man who had been used to it—I am really proud of you as a business manager—Wish I had let you have the ranch years ago. May and June will be two busy months for you, then come on and make me a long visit.
With love
Papa67
Although he was loath to lose John Boyer as ranch manager, he supported Louisa when she demanded that Mrs. Boyer leave the ranch after the choking incident in the Boyer house.68 “I have turned the ranch over to Mrs. Cody and she is boss. You look to her for orders,” he told Boyer.69
By the end of the summer of 1901, the old showman could not have been more pleased with Louisa’s success at a job that had for years exhausted the men he hired. “Say you are relieving me of lots of worry and work, by running the ranch and you are making no fuss about it, as though it was nothing to do.” His letters were full of his hopes for Cody town and the Irma Hotel and a military college he hoped to found in the town. 70 He complimented her on her liberal food policy for hired men. He confided personal matters to her. “What makes me so poorly outside of the piles is, I have to[o] much on my mind, so many different interests to look after.” Thankfully, he had Louisa. “You have relieved me from the ranch worry—and that don’t give me a thought any more for you know more about it than I ever did.”71
Other witnesses substantiated that she had indeed mortgaged her own North Platte properties, which included three houses and four lots, to help him finance his show and other ventures. Moreover, she paid the mortgages from rents on properties she owned.72
The final blow to William Cody’s case, however, came in the testimony about his infidelities, which her attorneys skillfully dropped on the packed courtroom three days into the trial. Although the name of Katherine Clemmons had floated through press coverage, she split with William Cody in 1894, when the plays he financed for her reportedly lost $35,000. Soon after, Cody and a prominent “sport” named Fred May were in a fistfight in a Washington, D.C., restaurant over insults exchanged concerning the affair. Subsequently, Clemmons married Howard Gould, son of the notorious robber baron Jay Gould. The same year he filed for divorce, Buffalo Bill Cody filed a
$10,000 claim against Clemmons for money lost in supporting her show. 73
But now, the attention of the court, and the public, turned to William Cody’s newest lover, twenty-eight-year-old Bess Isbell, reportedly a press agent first hired by the Wild West show in 1899.74 Isbell seems to have been the woman who was the center of a Buffalo Bill faux pas during the 1903 show season in London. King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra knew Cody well, having ridden in the Deadwood stage during his debut season in London in 1887. They arrived in the show camp again near the end of its 1903 season, and all went well until the end of their visit. Another press agent, Dexter Fellows, recalled: “Just when we in the press department were congratulating ourselves upon the smoothness with which we had entertained our eminent guests, Bill committed a breach of etiquette which just about made us sick.” The royal party were leaving the camp when a young woman holding a large bundle of orchids stepped forward. Cody, “with all the nonchalance he could command, said: ‘Oh, Your Majesties, permit me to introduce Miss—— ——, my ward.’ ”
Because nobody is presented to kings and queens except by royal request, the queen turned away, refusing the orchids. Fellows was mortified. “Happily the newsmen present agreed to forget the incident.”75
But other witnesses to Cody’s affection for Isbell trundled forward, telling tales. John Clair, a former valet for the showman, told the court a sensational story of the affair that Buffalo Bill had carried on since Isbell joined the show. The showman and the lady took adjoining rooms on the road. In Sherman, Texas, Cody asked Clair to give him a rubdown in Isbell’s room, while Isbell watched, dressed only in “a sort of a kimona ladies generally wear I understand in their private boudoir.” They kissed often, but there were troubles between them. She asked to ride in the parade with Cody one day. He refused. She “sat down on the bed which [was] in Col. Cody’s tent and began to sob very bitterly.” In 1901, while Arta and Irma visited their father in Buffalo, New York, Clair said, Isbell went out to Cody, Wyoming, from where she sent frequent telegrams.76
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