The peculiarities of Cody’s story, as a popular celebrity who hailed from the frontier West, so confound show business stereotypes that many have suspected, or believed, that he must have been the creation of somebody else. The debate over whether he was a frontiersman or a showman has continued in every Cody biography since he died. But as we have seen, during Cody’s life, even as he advanced to ever greater successes, many rivals and partners, from Doc Carver to Nate Salsbury, argued that Cody did not fashion his own success. Against these imputations, Cody partisans, then and now, have maintained that he was a genuine frontier hero who stumbled into fame, an innocent abroad in the world of modern amusements.
But as I have argued throughout this book, neither of these positions illuminates the vibrant culture of artful deception and imposture that characterized nineteenth-century American culture and especially that of the Far West where Cody came of age. True, he was influenced and shaped by many people and forces, but he was neither a simple creation of publicists and press agents, nor was he a lifelong ingenue. In his rise to fame and his long tenure as America’s premier showman, his own vision, talents, and burning ambition played the largest role. Hailing from a West that was practically a borderland between real and fake, full of charlatans posing as heroes and of everyday people invited to assume heroic poses, Cody learned the allure of that tense space between authentic and copy, regeneration and degeneration.
Americans imbued that space with a story about the ascent of civilization, and that narrative was so pervasive that settlers easily adopted it as their own, making themselves the protagonists of upward development, from hunting, to ranching, to farming, and commerce. Following that story, and claiming to live it, made Cody’s show resonate with public desires, even as audiences might question how real it actually was. Was he a frontiersman or a showman? Clearly, he was both.
In the end, we might say that Cody was partly a trickster, a boundary-crossing figure who appears in the myths of many cultures. Tricksters are usually clowns, monsters, ogres, or spirits. As various scholars have observed, they violate sensual taboos, and societies venerate them partly for the vicarious pleasure they provide. They also destroy old institutions and codes as they erect new ones. P. T. Barnum’s biographer, Neil Harris, calls Barnum a trickster because of the ways he loosened the grip of elite knowledge and encouraged Americans to enjoy their own powers of discernment. In elevating western history to a respectable show, in allowing Americans to believe that their frontier fantasies were not only real but embodied in his person, and in providing a means for Americans to accept frontier stories as an art form that was as respectable as any European play, Cody did much to destroy older notions of art and performance, and to usher in a new national mythology for the coming American century.
But tricksters are so dangerous they must be contained in the realm of myth and story. As flesh and blood, Cody could not remain a trickster. The failure of his suit for divorce was, among other things, a signal that he could not violate taboos with impunity. At the end of the day, he had to drape his life in standard morals.68 Louisa Cody died in 1921, shortly after completing her own memoir of her marriage, a deceptive if not artful book in which she recalled no bitterness, no mistresses, only a warm and loving marriage to the man she helped invent the Wild West show. 69
Many have accepted Cody’s publicity that eulogized him as, in his sister’s words, “the Last of the Great Scouts.” By this estimation, there could be no more like Cody, because the frontier had passed. While he lived, seeing his show became ever more imperative for those who would witness the fading West.
But if the death of William Cody and his generation of Lakota warriors, American fighters, and scouts severed historical connections between modern America and the frontier of history, there was still another, perhaps more powerful reason why there could be no more quite like Buffalo Bill. This was the demise of the story of progress itself. Indian war was never universally accepted among Americans even while it was going on. But progress, the rise of technology over nature and of settlement over the wild, seemed inevitable. Almost until the year of Cody’s death, it was yet possible to believe that western industrial society was the apogee of human development, the beginnings of a more peaceful, humane world, and even to fantasize that one person could embody its promise.
But the twentieth century was not kind to the story of progress. The trenches of World War I brimmed with blood, and the holocausts of World War II and the nuclear anxieties that followed made it hard to believe that technology was an unimpeachable wonder and moral boon. The dream of Buffalo Bill’s America, a frontier nation launched from Nature into the bright future of the Machine, suddenly seemed quaint and naive.
And yet, there remained one way in which Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show would find enduring resonance, down to the present day. Americans have relegated Indian fighting to that dark space reserved for troubled memories and moral qualms, as they should. (And Cody himself seems to have felt the same way about it, at some points in his latter years even denying he ever killed Yellow Hair. “Bunk! Pure bunk! For all I know Yellow Hand died of old age.”70)
But while the Wild West show was created to tell a story of the Indian wars, its show community itself has long since become Buffalo Bill’s myth, a symbolically inclusive congregation that seems to define some bright and optimistic moment in our collective past. If it was a traveling company town, a corporate workforce on the road that subsumed polyglot America under the ruling management of white men, there was a sense among its cast that they were part of something more. The many adventures of its optimistic and forward-looking cowboys, Indians, cowgirls, gauchos, vaqueros, and others stand out as something so surprising, so energetic and benign, that Americans and the world cannot help but find in them some resonance of a modern American promise.
In 1971, the entertainer Montie Montana, Jr., resurrected Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, vowing to imbue “the small fry with the spirit of the Old West as their Grandparents knew it.” When the show played Los Angeles, Harry Webb, a cowboy who had ridden in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West from 1909 to 1911, was seated in the stands. Webb was astonished at the “fine replica” Montana had assembled. “With a lump the size of an egg in our throat we dug a fist in our eyes and listened to the exact salutation we had heard hundreds of times as Buffalo Bill addressed his audience and introduced his Congress of Rough Riders of the World.” Webb laughed and cheered with the sports arena crowd at the bronc riding, the Indian attack on the Deadwood stage, the saloon fight of the cowboys, the wooing of an Indian maiden by her warrior lover, and the trick roping and bullwhip acts.
But as much as Webb wished the new show would succeed, he could not help noticing the absences and gaps in this reenactment of a reenactment.
No longer are there great spreads of canvas, [a] football-[field] sized arena, horse tent housing hundreds of arena and baggage stock and the half acre dining tent. Also, the huge ranges and steam boilers (that poured forth the aroma of breakfasts even before being trundled off a fifty car train …) were missing. Nor is there the chant of stake drivers as a circle of sledge hammers sunk hundreds of tent stakes in the earth. The old ballyhoo around concessions and the shouts of venders are also missing with this new Buffalo Bill Show. Nor will its Indians have their Sunday feasts of dog-stew on the show lot as of old. These scenes are gone forever. 71
As a community that developed a history of its own, the Wild West camp has long since become the larger and more enduring of Cody’s legacies. Even the continuing success of Cody, Wyoming, now home to eight thousand people and the remarkable Buffalo Bill Historical Center (which houses five state-of-the-art museums), cannot compare to the continuing fame of William Cody’s traveling company town. In the decades since Cody’s death, that “little tented city” has continued to fascinate the public long after Buffalo Bill’s Indian war exploits and the scalping of Yellow Hair faded into obscurity.
As we have seen, William Cody remains a r
espected figure among Lakota people, some of whom remember him as a good employer who provided opportunities which did not long outlive him. Pine Ridge remains one of America’s poorest communities. Although movies hired genuine Indian actors in the early days of Hollywood, film producers soon discovered that it was easier and cheaper to hire non-Indians to play Indian roles.72 Since then, Indian actors have waged a long and not unsuccessful struggle to win back their place in Indian performance. In doing so, they carry on the fight of Lakotas like Standing Bear, No Neck, Black Heart, and Calls the Name, who allied with Cody to fend off the Indian Service in the 1880s and ’90s.
As much as I have been able to explore the participation of Indians and cowboys and cowgirls in this show, I have attempted to open up what I see as the often unnoticed power of commodified performance—show business— as a means to adopt and adapt otherwise pernicious myths. Indians, immigrants, firstgeneration Americans, and native-born whites all flocked to Cody’s show camp, each with a powerful economic and social rationale for doing so. Although the Wild West show’s ideology was oppressive in its cultural messages of womanly domesticity and Indian subjugation, we have seen over and over again how performing it brought liberation, or something like it, to Standing Bear, Adele Von Ohl Parker, George Johnson, Annie Oakley, Broncho Charlie Miller, and a host of others.
The willingness of so many diverse peoples to attach themselves to Cody’s show validates his early recognition that frontier myth had about it much ambiguity, the necessary precondition for its mass appeal. Cody himself abhorred personal conflict and partisan fights. He found in politically vague frontier symbols a means to avoid the fierce political contests of his day. In recent decades, conservatives have appropriated western symbols for their political ends. In 1986, Wyoming’s congressional delegation joined a campaign to have Cody’s Congressional Medal of Honor restored to him, something that they achieved in 1989. A primary player in the effort was a taciturn Republican congressman named Dick Cheney, a fact which speaks volumes about the rightward tilt of the Cody legacy in recent years.
Yet during Cody’s life, the western myth was the province of no party. As we have seen, conservatives, reformers, and radicals alike found reasons to embrace his show. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was aimed at the broad middle class in ways that allowed audiences to enjoy the amusement without taking sides on the contentious issues it called to mind. By being a show about history, in an age when Americans believed their history followed a course that was largely predetermined, the sense of inevitability allowed them to remain ambivalent about American cruelties, and to celebrate American success, without any consternation about their confidence in the nation, or lack of it.
The amusement both appealed to the mass public and helped to cement it as a public, and in so doing, helped create modern America as a functioning political whole. But the costs of this imposture to William Cody himself were considerable. If embodying the frontier myth gave him a continuing hold on America’s imagination, it made him peculiarly vulnerable to its narrative constraints as his life continued. Perhaps if he had been merely another businessman or a vaudeville star, his divorce case would have collapsed anyway. But to be a frontiersman and a showman at the same time was to walk a border between dark and light, a kind of lifelong high-wire act that in some sense kept the public on edge. To attack the domestic hearth at the center of the ideology of civilization was to change sides in the war on savagery, to court public condemnation. These were risks he intuited but only half understood. As we have seen, from the army officers who warily appraised their guides in the Indian wars, to Cody’s personal acquaintances and partners such as Bram Stoker, Nate Salsbury, and Louisa Frederici Cody, the scout projected a continuing tension between hero and renegade, the figure who ventured over the frontier line to do battle with the darkness, and returned either unstained by it and heroic, or secretly corrupted and malevolent.
The implications of this argument are many, but one important lesson to be drawn, I think, concerns the widespread popular ambivalence about the frontier in the late nineteenth century. For many years now, historians have explained frontier myth, and especially William Cody’s brand of it, as an unswervingly triumphalist story. We live in an anxious age, and it would be foolish to assert that the nineteenth century was not more confident than our own in many respects. But if there is one thing William Cody’s biography teaches us, it is that the nineteenth century was characterized by doubts about frontier conquest, racial degeneracy, the industrial order, and the failure of the western farm landscape to generate the wealth and security that the story of progress had promised. To construe frontier expansion as a moment of supreme confidence untarnished by reflection or hesitation is to ignore all the dark fears that underlay it.
William Cody could be as defensive and egotistical as any celebrity, but at his apogee he embodied the westward-moving, industrially modern American, who was both optimistic and ambivalent. To be sure, his cheeriness was palpable. He believed fervently in capitalism as his best bet for making lots of money (a bet he seemed to lose consistently). But his simultaneous devotion to Indian friends whose relatives he fought on the Plains, to industrial might and middle-class smallholders, to rural virtue and the ribald world of stage and arena, all suggest his lifelong straddling act, a remarkable unwillingness to choose sides and a talent for creating dramatic spectacle that made it possible for him to avoid doing so.
In so many ways, the show about the triumphant fixity of the settler was Cody’s way of calling attention to himself and avoiding the need to settle in one place. Like western film, which allowed generations to believe a frontier promise long after the frontier closed, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West generated such powerful mythic images that one could be forgiven for thinking they were real. Cody did not believe all the lies he told, but he did believe in the West as a region that foretold America’s bright future. No matter the dismal failures of his town canal systems, the bankruptcy of his mines, the expense of his ranches. The show became his most powerful token of the real West. Much more than a means of telling his story, it became the story. So long as it went on, not only did his life continue, but the story of the West continued, and the drama of onward, upward achievement continued with it.
One author recounts that when Cody’s doctor told the showman he had thirty-six hours to live, Cody turned to his brother-in-law, Lew Decker, with a deck of cards, and shrugged off the news. “Let’s forget about it and play High Five.”73
But his nephew, William Cody Bradford, suggests a less sure-footed ending, and one more telling. The doctors had done all they could, and Cody lay dying at his sister May’s house in Denver. Johnny Baker was away in the East, looking for money for the next season’s show. As if to announce one last time the seamless weave of his life and his show, and his determination to make the story of the West continue, during his last three days, as uremic poisoning sapped his vitality, he returned in his mind to his private railroad car, and imagined he was once more headed to a showground just down the road:
He would send for John Baker and lay down on the bed just as he did in his car and he would have his chair at the head of his bed. He would imagine that he was on the road with his show. He would ask me where we were and what time it was when we got in. He would lay in bed and smoke and read the paper. In fact he lived his life over again. He done just as he did when he was on the road with the show.74
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS
AHC American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming
BBDC Buffalo Bill and Dr. Carver Wild West, Rocky Mountain, and Prairie Exhibition Program 1883 (Hartford, Connecticut: Calhoun Printing)
BBHC McCracken Library, Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming
BBM Buffalo Bill Museum, Golden, Colorado
BBWW Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
CC Cody v. Cody, Civil Case 970, Sheridan County District Court, Wyoming State Archives, Cheyenne, Wyoming
CHS Colorado Historical Society
DPL Denver Public Library, Denver, Colorado
DPL-WHR Denver Public Library, Western History Room, Denver, Colorado
GAPR General Administrative Project of the Bureau of Reclamation, NARA-RMR, Denver, Colorado
JCG Julia Cody Goodman
JCGM Julia Cody Goodman memoirs
KSHS Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka, Kansas
NARA National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.
NARA-CPR National Archives and Records Administration, Central Plains Region, Kansas City, Missouri
NARA-RMR National Archives and Records Administration, Rocky Mountain Region, Denver, Colorado
NSHS Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln, Nebraska
NSP Nate Salsbury Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature (YCAL), Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
NSS Nate Salsbury Scrapbooks, W. F. Cody Collection, Western History Collection, Denver Public Library, Denver, Colorado
WFC William F. Cody
WFC testimony William F. Cody’s testimony in Cody v. Cody, Civil Case File 970, Folder 2, Wyoming State Archives, Cheyenne, Wyoming
WSA Wyoming State Archives, Cheyenne, Wyoming
YCAL Yale Collection of American Literature, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
Louis S. Warren Page 77
