Louis S. Warren

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

  HIS PRIVATE LIFE was solitary after the scandal of the divorce trial. The fate of Bess Isbell remains mysterious, although documents offer intriguing hints. In 1906, Isbell met Cody at the Hoffman House in New York. There she signed over her power of attorney to W. J. Walls, Cody’s lawyer in Wyoming, whom she instructed to sell her forty-acre ranch. After deducting expenses, Walls was to send the proceeds to her mother, Mrs. Julia Isbell, of the St. James Hotel, Denver. Why she wanted the money sent to her mother is not clear. But perhaps, as Cody had testified, she had tuberculosis. Whatever her fate, she disappeared from Cody’s life after 1906.45

  Cody was alone in 1910 when his daughter Irma, now living in North Platte with her husband and children, persuaded her father to visit the town that had turned against him at his divorce trial. Encouraged by reports from Louisa’s friends that she wanted to take him back, town newspapers looked forward eagerly to the return of the old scout. Once again greeted by a large crowd of well-wishers and the town band, Cody was delighted. “Almost one hundred of the best people were out to the ranch for a smoker,” he reported to his sisters. “Today at 2 p.m. the Commercial Club gives me a reception… . So you can see I am in the lime light again. And hardly know how to meet it.”

  News flashed along the wires that he and Louisa were reunited. But they were not. “I haven’t seen Lulu,” Cody wrote. Although Louisa had expressed her longing for a reconciliation to friends and family, when he tried to visit, she refused to come out of her bedroom. He knocked softly. He pleaded. But the door remained closed.46

  Sometime the following year, she relented. Evidence is thin and contradictory, but the family story is that he stopped in North Platte in July. Daughter Irma, her husband Fred Garlow, their children, and Arta’s orphaned children contrived to leave them alone in a room together. When they emerged, Louisa and William Cody were reconciled.47

  The Codys were not without resources. They still owned Scout’s Rest Ranch and Louisa’s house in North Platte, called the Welcome Wigwam. They owned the Irma Hotel and the TE Ranch in Wyoming. But the expenses of the Two Bills show were onerous. The partners were supposed to split the $40,000 cost of wintering livestock. Cody, desperate to raise his $20,000 share after a poor season in 1913, took a six-month loan from Henry Tammen, a shady impresario who owned the Sells-Floto Circus. Tammen also owned the sensationalist newspaper the Denver Post, which had reported lurid details of Cody’s divorce trial in screaming red headlines. Now it reported the loan and a supposed condition: Cody had agreed to a partnership with Tammen’s circus instead of with Pawnee Bill Lillie, beginning the next season.48

  Cody denied he had made any such agreement, but Lillie was furious. 49 Tammen would not likely have been able to enforce the condition even if Cody had agreed to it, since Cody could not unilaterally break his contract with his partner. But Tammen had another scheme for moving Lillie out of the picture. If he could not break the Cody-Lillie partnership, he would break the company.

  In 1913, when the show camp arrived in Denver, days from Tammen’s deadline for repayment, the Two Bills were already faring poorly from rain and low attendance. The slick publisher had maneuvered a series of foreclosure suits into the courts, and the show was attached for payment of Cody’s $20,000 loan. The sheriff and his deputies arrived on the showgrounds, seized all cash on hand, and then sold all properties at auction. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was bankrupt.50

  Deprived of his own show, and now under salary to Tammen, Cody toured with the Sells-Floto Circus in 1914 and 1915. The circus had dirty tents and rotting ropes, and at one showing it was nearly flooded out of existence. Still, Cody’s life was not all bad. His salary was sizable: $100 a day, plus 40 percent of receipts over $3,000. He rode on horseback to introduce the show, but forsook his shooting acts. He had a private car on the train, a cook, a porter, and a carriage driver. Louisa traveled with him for free. “She has enjoyed the trip immensely,” he wrote to sister Julia.51 Years later, one fellow circus performer recalled, “He kept pretty much to himself in his private dressing tent. Had a certain amount of dignity about him that I admired. Was a handsome man for his age and still looked wonderful on a horse.”52

  The misadventure with Tammen was compounded by Cody’s foray into filmmaking, in which he secured the backing of Tammen and Tammen’s partner, Frederick G. Bonfils, in the creation of “The Col. W. F. Cody (‘Buffalo Bill’) Historical Pictures Co.” Given the significance of the Wild West for formulating western myth and the spectacle of “moving pictures,” making films seemed to many a fitting culmination for Cody’s latter years. Cody envisioned a movie, The Last Indian War, that was educational and authentic, and thereby secured permission for it from both the army and the Department of Interior, which retained authority over Indians. He then set about gathering actual participants from the Plains campaigns and a slew of younger actors and extras to make his one and only motion picture.

  Much of Cody’s initial success in the filming came from his friendships with Indians, which he tended carefully. Back in 1909, there had been a flash of the discontent he occasionally encountered at Pine Ridge after one of the show contingent, Good Lance, fell sick and was left in a hospital in Garden City, Kansas, where he died. The tribal council (which included some Indians who had formerly performed with the show) sent a letter to the White House, demanding Wild West shows, including Buffalo Bill’s, be banned from hiring Indians. At least some of their anger stemmed from the failure to return Good Lance’s body. “We want that dead body to be sen[t] back over here,” wrote the council. “So we want him [Buffalo Bill] to do as what the Oglala Council wanted.”53

  For decades, Indians and others who died on tour were buried near their place of death. But in 1913, contracts for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Pawnee Bill’s Far East Combined included a new clause, stipulating that in case an Indian employee died on tour, Cody and Lillie would “make all arrangements and pay all expenses incident to the preparation of the body for burial and transportation of the body to Pine Ridge Agency.”54

  Cody followed on this gesture, the next year, as he began hiring Indians for his film. He hurried to pay back wages owed to those Indians who had been on the lot in Denver the day the sheriff seized the cash box. Since the cast could not be paid until the bankruptcy was settled, Lakotas with the show, like everyone else that year, had gone home without their salaries. So, while filming at Pine Ridge, Cody secured a personal loan and paid some $1,300 in wages to his former employees. Lizzie Sitting Eagle, Alice Running Horse, Peter Stands Up, Ghost Dog, Iron Cloud, and many others received their back wages, as well as small sums for the support of young children who had been with the show in 1913.55

  His support from the army secured for Cody the services of retired General Nelson A. Miles and three troops of cavalry. Filming began in September 1913. Cody soon expanded the project, from The Last Indian War, about the Ghost Dance tragedy, which he had never before reenacted, to The Indian Wars, including two battles, Summit Springs and Warbonnet Creek (where he scalped Yellow Hair), that were standards of the Wild West show. 56

  Cody played his moment as film producer for all it was worth. Now he was not only appearing in the film itself. He also heightened the film’s authenticity by making himself the arbitrator between hostile forces, telling interviewers from film magazines that the Indians were fearful of the army and that he had talked them out of using live ammunition for the reenactment of the Wounded Knee massacre.57

  These fictional tales titillated the public, but other attempts at authenticity were more costly and less effective. Miles insisted on reenacting central scenes in places where they actually occurred, forcing a fifty-mile trek out to the Badlands in freezing weather. Cody, who recognized a budget-busting production when he saw one, argued bitterly with the old general about the Badlands filming and other details, to the point that it reportedly ended their friendship.58

  Ultimately, the film fared poorly at the box office, leading many to speculate that hidden fo
rces conspired to destroy it. Chauncey Yellow Robe, a Lakota who differed with most of his Pine Ridge contemporaries on the usefulness of Wild West shows, denounced Cody and Miles for debasing the sacred burial ground at Wounded Knee “for their own cheap glory.” 59 There were rumors of a protest against the film by the tribal council, although it never materialized. Because the release of the film was delayed in Washington (where the army had to approve it for release, as a condition of using real troops in the film), there have been rumors for many years that the film was suppressed, perhaps because the massacre at Wounded Knee was too “realistic” to reflect well on the army, or perhaps because authorities in the Office of Indian Affairs disapproved of the final product.60

  For all these rumors, it is unlikely the film offended a public once again fond of their army, as World War I raged in Europe. Wounded Knee stands as a black mark on American history, and the dark reputation of the event kept Cody from staging its reenactment during his Wild West show years. But the film evaded this problem by eliminating the massacre altogether, showing no women and children among the bodies in the ravine.

  In fact, evidence suggests the film failed for other reasons which are both more conventional and more revealing. In order to secure permission to hire Indians, Cody promised that his film would also illustrate “the advance of the Indians under modern conditions.”61 So, with the battle scenes over, the audience watched clips of Indians in school and performing standard farm and business tasks. The Wild West show had never ended with such an anticlimax (which was, of course, why Indian office functionaries so disliked it). The western was still young, but it was already a popular genre, and The Indian Wars was no western. Audiences were less than thrilled by the story’s prosaic culmination. The authentic, primitive racial energies that spectators usually identified in Indians were erased in a denouement where the Indians became much like people in the audience. Watching Indians resist vanishing was exciting. Watching them after they had symbolically vanished was dull. Cody had turned his narrative over to the Office of Indian Affairs, and their achievement was to bore the public with a didactic lesson in Indian assimilation.

  William F. and Louisa Cody, c. 1915. They traveled together in his later show days. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.

  The tedious plot was one factor which undermined the film’s appeal. Another was that film was a less than ideal medium for Buffalo Bill Cody. The dispute between Cody and Miles over how best to achieve authentic scenes reminds us of Cody’s arena successes and suggests why film worked poorly as a vehicle for his own myth. He had pioneered an art form in which he danced across the line between fake and real, emerging from painted backdrops and then disappearing back into them, surrounding himself with frontier relics and fakery, real frontier people and actors dressed up like them, and begging audiences to separate the two.

  Early filmmakers often constructed narratives about real historical figures. Marshall Bill Tilghman, of Oklahoma, made films about his exploits starring himself. To enhance the middle-class appeal of his movies, he toured with them and lectured boys in the audience to stay away from crime. Likewise, Cody toured with The Indian Wars for three weeks in 1916, once appearing onstage with Sioux warriors.62 But Cody was so aged by this time that he appeared less the frontier hero and more the grizzled Plains veteran. He was still interesting. But film was not as effective a form for testing the borders of truth and fiction, simply because it did not allow him to step out of the projection the way that arena performance did. Film worked best when it deployed scenery, lighting, props, and physical types to cue audiences, not necessarily when it showed “real” people on a flat screen.

  Unfortunately the film remains a mystery, because the nitrate stock on which it was recorded disintegrated over time. Only a few fragments of it are known to exist.

  As he waited for the film to debut, Cody endured more trouble with Tammen. After Cody had toured with the Sells-Floto Circus for two years, Tammen told him his debt was paid, then reneged and told him he still owed $20,000 and that he would have to pay it back with his salary. Cody wrote an old friend, “This man is driving me crazy. I can easily kill him but as I avoided killing in the bad days I don’t want to kill him. But if there is no justice left I will.”63

  When Tammen arrived in Lawrence, Kansas, to meet with Cody, he was afraid to go into the old scout’s tent. When he finally did, they had a tense conversation, the upshot of which was that Cody agreed to finish the 1915 season with Sells-Floto. Tammen refused to cancel the loan, but he agreed to stop taking payments out of Cody’s salary. At the end of the season, Cody was without employment for the first time since entering show business. 64

  Not to be deterred, he scrambled to put together a new show. Tammen claimed ownership of the name “Buffalo Bill’s Original Wild West,” so Cody combined with the 101 Ranch in Oklahoma to create the “Buffalo Bill (Himself) Pageant of Military Preparedness and 101 Ranch Wild West.” He enjoyed the year. His nephew, William Cody Bradford, toured as his assistant. Cody rode in the saddle again, shattering amber balls with his rifle from horseback as he had in days gone by.

  Even now he struggled for the ambivalent middle ground. The country was fiercely divided on the subject of American neutrality. Military preparedness was a conservative slogan of those who favored U.S. intervention in World War I, on the side of Britain and France. When the new show played Chicago, home to thousands of German Americans, the proprietors changed the show’s name to “Chicago ShanKive and RoundUp.” (“ShanKive” was said to be an “Indian word” for “good time.”) The event, which resembled a rodeo and featured bulldogging by the likes of legendary black cowboy Bill Pickett, was a huge success.

  Outside of Chicago, the show reverted to its Wild West format, with Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus, New Mexico, as its crowning spectacle. 65

  The show closed in November. Cody was not feeling well. He arrived in Denver on November 17, “sick with a bad cold and played out from the long hard season,” according to his nephew. He stayed with his sister May for two weeks, then returned to the TE Ranch, where he hoped to recuperate. He continued to fail, and he returned to Denver to seek medical help in the middle of December. His health “was up and down all the time,” recalled Bradford. To the end, he put on a show. “He did not want the papers to get a hold of the news and publish his sickness.”

  Cody went to Glenwood Springs, hoping a mineral bath would restore his health. But he returned four days later, none the better. He died January 10, 1917. Louisa was with him, as well as his sister May and her family. Johnny Baker, his longtime assistant and virtual foster son, raced from the East where he had been trying to raise money for the next season’s show, but arrived too late to say farewell. Six weeks after Cody died, his longtime press agent, John Burke, also passed.

  Cody left instructions to have himself buried on a hill overlooking the town of Cody, but Henry Tammen offered to pay for a funeral if the burial occurred in Denver. Some say Louisa took the publisher’s offer to revenge herself on the town of Cody, which she resented like one of her husband’s mistresses. Others say she had no money to bury him. In any case, the following June, William Cody was interred in a hole blasted into the summit of Lookout Mountain, overlooking the city of Denver and the Great Plains beyond, as a gigantic crowd of journalists, tourists, and sightseers looked on.

  STILL HE RIDES, across our imagined horizon. In the years since his death, he has become, like so many other symbols, detached from his original context, a free-floating icon that may be, and has been, attached to different causes and ideologies. But this process was evident long before he died. By the time 1916 rolled around, Cody had been a theater and arena performer for forty-four years. His face and image, printed on innumerable posters, programs, and other show ephemera, were ubiquitous. He may have been the most photographed man of the period, and although the currency of the Cody face kept him in the public eye, it had a dark side. A person who has been through a historic event, whethe
r a fight on the Plains, the march on Washington of 1963, or September 11, has more historical meaning and authority than has a mere drawing or photograph of that person or event. Reproduced images of authentic people cannot have the authority of real people. A mechanical reproduction, like a photograph, can be put to practically any use its owner can devise, as somber art or decoration, framed portrait or place mat.

  Thus, when images of people or landscapes are mass-produced and widely distributed, the authority of the real is devalued. The face, the hair, the pose become symbols with meanings to spectators, but in the process they are often divorced from the history of the person or their setting. Americans who savored the proximity of the Wild West show’s real frontier heroes confronted a paradox. They placed images of Cody and his Wild West show in bedrooms, living rooms, and hallways to bring them closer, to claim some element of their frontier authenticity for themselves. But in substituting copies for the unique people and things in the show, and redistributing them in a private arrangement with private meanings, they diminished the power of the very history and tradition which Cody and other real people conveyed. 66 Many of the fans who bought souvenir photographs, books, and programs, to say nothing of Buffalo Bill toy guns, board games, puzzles, tin whistles, dime novels, buttons, and postcards, knew him more from this show business flotsam than from his arena performances. Inevitably, as his fame mounted, he lost authenticity.67

  In this sense, William Cody fomented a mountain of representations of his own face and story to draw a following, then represented himself before crowds who came to watch. The show was not just an adventure of the hinterland. It was a heroic stand of the original against the dead hand of the copy. Cody’s optimistic, forthright confrontation with the artifice of modernity, in day-to-day life and in the painted, landscaped, eye-tricking arena which resembled the frontier but whose deceptions evoked the city, made him both the premier symbol of the natural frontier and a hero of artifice among the most modern people on earth. Reproducing his own image and selling it widely was a means of reminding audiences of his importance. But it also meant that by his last decade, the vast majority of his audiences knew him only as a showman with a putative link to the frontier. His ability to generate a flood tide of self-promotion helped ensure his renown. Then it washed him away, like a faded poster in the rain.