Louis S. Warren

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

  80. Donald C. Biggs, The Pony Express: Creation of the Legend (San Francisco: privately printed, 1956), 16–17, quote from 17.

  81. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 30.

  82. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 30.

  83. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 30–37.

  84. For the circus in California and the Pacific, see John Culhane, The American Circus: An Illustrated History (New York: Henry Holt, 1990), 80–81. For horses: Hubert Howe Bancroft, California Pastoral (San Francisco: The History Company, 1888), 336; Dan Flores, Horizontal Yellow: Nature and History in the Near Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 81–124.

  85. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 33.

  86. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 37.

  87. William Webb, Bu falo Land (Cincinnati and Chicago: E. Hannaford and Co., 1873), 149.

  88. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 135.

  89. Ned Buntline [E. Z. C. Judson], Bu falo Bill: The King of Border Men (1869; rprt. William Roba, Davenport, IA: Service Press, 1987).

  90. Sagala, Bu falo Bill, Actor, 110.

  91. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 46.

  CHAPTER TWO : THE ATTACK ON THE SETTLER’S CABIN

  1. See chapter 9.

  2. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 139.

  3. Thomas Goodrich, Black Flag: Guerrilla Warfare on the Western Border, 1861–65 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 6–7.

  4. Goodrich, Black Flag, 16, 24.

  5. John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 86; David P. Handlin, The American Home: Architecture and Society, 1815–1915 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1979), 4; David B. Danbom, The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900–1930 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1979), 9: “Economic exigencies and the American practice of individual land settlement conspired to make the family the preeminent social, economic, and educational institution of rural society.”

  6. Goodrich, Black Flag, frontispiece.

  7. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 126, 135.

  8. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 135.

  9. JCGM, 488–89.

  10. Quoted in Thomas Goodrich, Black Flag, 67–70. Mendenhall was recording events from May 1861. In his autobiography, Cody claimed to have joined them in the winter of 1862, but since most of the Red Leg forays occurred in the summer of 1862, he likely has confused dates and seasons, as he frequently did in his autobiography. Julia Cody recalls that her brother “stayed out all summer” with the Red Legs. JCGM, 488–89.

  11. Goodrich, Black Flag, 69.

  12. Goodrich, Black Flag, 69.

  13. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 144–45.

  14. Thomas Ewing, commander of the Eleventh Kansas Volunteers, singled out the Red Legs as especially virulent examples of certain Kansans who were “stealing themselves rich in the name of liberty,” and “giving respectability to robbery when committed on any whom they declare disloyal.” Ewing threatened to meet them “with a rough hand.” General James Blunt, the Union officer in charge of Kansas in 1863, ordered the Ninth Kansas Volunteers into western Missouri, with the stated purpose of fighting the Red Legs as well as the bushwhackers. (Captain Tough, whom Cody claimed as his commander, had close ties to Blunt.) Albert Castel, A Frontier State at War: Kansas, 1861–1865 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958), 111–13, 137, 214–15.

  15. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 19–21; Faragher, Sugar Creek, 96–99, 199–204, argues that the market penetration of western farming prior to 1850 was slow and uneven.

  16. JCGM, 479.

  17. JCGM, 490.

  18. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 125–27.

  19. The affidavits are in Box 1, Folder 18, William F. Cody Collection, MS 6 Series I:A., BBHC.

  20. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 127.

  21. Goodrich, Black Flag and War to the Knife: Bleeding Kansas, 1854–1861 (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1998); Stephen Z. Starr, Jennison’s Jayhawkers: A Civil War Cavalry Regiment and Its Commander (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 96–118; T. J. Stiles, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).

  22. JCGM, 489.

  23. Goodrich, Black Flag, 114.

  24. Quoted in Joseph G. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill: The Life and Adventures of James Butler Hickok, 2nd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974), 26.

  25. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 135.

  26. Ibid.

  27. See the copies of muster rolls in Box 1/17, William Cody Collection, MS 6, Series I:A, BBHC; also Starr, Jennison’s Jayhawkers, 356.

  28. Charlie Cody’s death in JCGM, 491; quote from Goodrich, Black Flag, 160.

  29. George Miller, quoted in Goodrich, Black Flag, 160.

  30. Samuel McKee, quoted in Goodrich, Black Flag, 162.

  CHAPTER THREE : THE VILLAGE… THE CYCLONE

  1. Scene announcement is in BBWW 1886 programs, M Cody Programs, Folder 2, DPL; quote from “Buffalo Bill in Drama,” New York Times, Nov. 25, 1886, p. 5.

  2. Quote from BBWW 1893 program, p. 4.

  3. Lew Parker, Odd People I Have Met, (n.p., n.d.), 37–39.

  4. Percy MacKaye, Epoch: The Life of Steele Mackaye, 2 vols. (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927), 2:78–79.

  5. Parker, Odd People I Have Met, 39; BBWW 1887 program, M Cody Programs, Folder 2, DPL.

  6. BBWW 1907 Program (Buffalo, NY: Courier, 1907).

  7. “Prosperous Kansas,” New York Times, Nov. 13, 1869, p. 4.

  8. John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 120–23, 241–45; William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1996); Gunther Barth, Instant Cities: Urbanization and the Rise of San Francisco and Denver (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). For Iowa towns see John W. Reps, Cities of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century Images of Urban Development (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994), 238–53.

  9. Albert D. Richardson, Beyond the Mississippi (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Co., 1867), 57–60.

  10. JCGM, 461.

  11. John Hoyt Williams, A Great and Shining Road: The Epic Story of the Transcontinental Railroad(New York: Times Books, 1988), 69–70.

  12. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 141–42.

  13. Louisa Frederici Cody and Courtney Riley Cooper, Memories of Bu falo Bill, by His Wife (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1919), 1–28; William Cody’s memory of his mother-in-law is in his divorce testimony, WFC testimony, March 23, 1904, 2, Folder 2, Cody v. Cody, Civil Case 970, Sheridan County District Court, Wyoming State Archives, Cheyenne, WY; hereafter WFC testimony.

  14. See WFC testimony; also, Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 144.

  15. I infer her desire for a husband in business from the implications of Cody’s divorce testimony, and from Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 144: “Having promised my wife that I would abandon the plains, I rented a hotel in the Salt Creek Valley… .”

  16. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 145; WFC testimony, 2.

  17. Russell, Lives and Legends, 78; Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 145.

  18. WFC testimony, 4.

  19. Russell, Lives and Legends, 77–78, 84; Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 145.

  20. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 127.

  21. “Prosperous Kansas,” New York Times, Nov. 13, 1869, p. 4.

  22. John H. Putnam, “A Trip to the End of the Union Pacific in 1868,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 13, no. 3 (Aug. 1944): 196–203, at 198.

  23. WFC testimony, 3.

  24. Hauling goods and dugout is in Russell, Lives and Legends, 78; liquor is in Joseph G. Rosa and Robin May, Bu falo Bill and His Wild West: A Pictorial Biography (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989), 16.

  25. Rosa and May, Bu falo Bill and His Wild West, 17–18.

  26. The English traveler likely met Buffalo Bill Cramer, a local settler. Russell, L
ives and Legends,90–91.

  27. Rosa and May, Bu falo Bill and His Wild West, 12; Russell, Lives and Legends, 84–85; Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 149–50.

  28. For Cody choosing name, see WFC testimony.

  29. Samuel Bowles, Our New West (Hartford, CT: Hartford Publishing Co., 1869), 50.

  30. “In the East, the railroads are built for the towns; on the border they build the towns.” Richardson, Beyond the Mississippi, 571.

  31. Quiett, They Built the West, 85.

  32. William A. Bell, New Tracks in North America (New York: Scribner, Welford & Co., 1870), 18.

  33. Quiett, They Built the West, 82–91.

  34. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 150, says two hundred homes, but his divorce testimony of many years later gives the more credible figure of thirty houses. WFC testimony, 4.

  35. WFC testimony, 5.

  36. WFC testimony, 5. See also the quote from the Hays City Sentinel, Jan. 16, 1877, which states that Cody was a local buffalo hunter throughout 1867–68, in Rosa and May, Bu falo Bill and His Wild West, 17–18. Cody’s biographers have followed Don Russell’s lead in making Cody a hunter for the Kansas Pacific only after the failure of his town-building scheme. Russell argued that Cody said eighteen months when he meant eight. He and others have been loath to accept Cody’s claims to have been employed as a market hunter in 1867, since the need to deliver twelve buffalo a day would pretty much eliminate any chance that Cody could have been a scout and guide for the army that year. Russell, Lives and Legends, 88–89; Rosa and May, Bu falo Bill and His Wild West, 17–18. But there can be no doubt Cody hunted buffalo for Goddard Brothers while he promoted the town of Rome. Cody himself recalled that town building and buffalo hunting were contemporaneous, both in his divorce testimony of 1904 and in his autobiography, where he lets slip that he hunted for Goddard Brothers for eighteen months before the railroad ceased construction in May 1868. Cody repeated the eighteen months figure to journalists, too. See Edward Aveling, An American Journey (New York: John W. Lovell, 1887), 152. This would mean that he had to be working for Goddard Brothers for all of 1867. How could he have scouted for the army in the same year? The solution to the puzzle is simple: he didn’t. The dubious claims of his autobiography aside, there is no evidence that he worked for the military in Kansas until late in 1868.

  37. All Cody quotes that follow regarding the town of Rome are in WFC testimony, 4–6.

  38. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 152; WFC testimony.

  39. Daniel C. Fitzgerald, Faded Dreams: More Ghost Towns of Kansas (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), 49–51. Fitzgerald also mentions Arvonia (p. 69) and Kickapoo City (pp. 7–8).

  40. BBWW 1886 program.

  41. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Frontier in American History (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1920); see also Ann Fabian, “History for the Masses: Commercializing the Western Past,” in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, ed. William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin (New York: Norton, 1992), 223; White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill.”

  42. MacKaye, Epoch, 2:74, 77.

  43. Daniel Justin Herman, Hunting and the American Imagination (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 41–43; Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Je fersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 19–20.

  44. Quoted in Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 219.

  45. For a sample of settler enthusiasm for wildlife shooting, see Rolf Johnson, Happy as a Big Sunflower: Adventures in the West, 1876–1880, ed. Richard E. Jensen (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).

  46. Alan Taylor, “ ‘Wasty Ways’: Stories of American Settlement,” Environmental History 3, no. 3 (1998): 291–310.

  47. William Webb, Bu falo Land, (Cincinnati and Chicago: E. Hannaford and Co., 1873), 194; see also Theodore R. Davis, “The Buffalo Range,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 38, no. 224 (Jan. 1869): 147–63.

  48. Rosa and May, Bu falo Bill and His Wild West, 17–18.

  49. Russell, Lives and Legends, 89.

  50. David A. Dary, The Bu falo Book (1974; rprt. New York: Avon, 1975), 74, 77; Dan Flores, The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), 50–69.

  51. Dary, Bu falo Book, 74.

  52. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 161.

  53. Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 133. For sitting down, see Stanley Vestal, Queen of Cowtowns: Dodge City (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1952), 41.

  54. See, for example, Johnson, Happy as a Big Sunflower, 52–74.

  55. Vestal, Queen of Cowtowns, 41–44.

  56. Webb, Bu falo Land, 457–58; Dary, Bu falo Book, 99.

  57. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 162; Vestal, Queen of Cowtowns, 43–44. The three Clarkson brothers of Hays City killed 22,000 buffalo in brief hunting careers beginning in 1868. “The Matthew Clarkson Manuscripts,” ed. Rodney Staab, Kansas History 5, no. 4 (1982): 256–87.

  58. Elliott West, “Bison R Us: Images of Bison in American Culture,” MS in author’s possession.

  59. Vestal, Queen of Cowtowns; West, “Bison R Us.”

  60. WFC testimony.

  61. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782; rprt. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957), 42, 47.

  62. Carl Ludvig Hendricks, “Recollections of a Swedish Buffalo Hunter, 1871–1873,” Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly 32, no. 3 (1981): 190–204.

  63. Joseph W. Snell, ed., “Diary of a Dodge City Buffalo Hunter, 1872–1873,” Kansas HistoricalQuarterly 31, no. 4 (1965): 345–95.

  64. Gary L. Roberts, “William Matthew Tilghman, Jr.” and “Earp Brothers,” both in New Encyclopedia of the American West, ed. Howard R. Lamar (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 327–29, 1114; Glenn Shirley, Guardian of the Law: The Life and Times of William Matthew Tilghman (Austin, TX: Eakin Press, 1988); Casey Tefertiller, Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend (New York: John Wiley, 1997).

  65. In the 1870s, William Cody knew John Y. Nelson, Hank and Monte Clifford, Arthur Ruff, and Dick Seymour, all of whom lived with their Sioux wives in western Nebraska, where they hunted buffalo for the market. See Paul A. Hutton, “Introduction,” in Henry E. Davies, Ten Days on the Plains, ed. Paul A. Hutton (1872; Dallas, TX: DeGolyer Library, 1985), 166, n. 30.

  66. See Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670–1870 (Winnipeg: Watson and Dwyer, 1981); William R. Swagerty, “Marriage and Settlement Patterns of Rocky Mountain Trappers and Traders,” Western Historical Quarterly11 (April 1980): 159–80; John Mack Faragher, “The Custom of the Country: Cross-Cultural Marriage in the Far Western Fur Trade,” in Western Women: Their Land, Their Lives, ed. Lillian Schlissel, Vicki L. Ruiz, and Janice Monk (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 199–215.

  67. Dary, Bu falo Book, 88–92.

  68. Washington Irving, Astoria, quoted in Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land, 177.

  69. WFC testimony, 7.

  70. William A. Dobak, Fort Riley and Its Neighbors: Military Money and Economic Growth, 1853–1895 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). Among Cody’s associates at Fort McPherson were Charles McDonald and Isaac S. Boyer, both of whom profited from military contracts as post traders, and both of whom would parlay these contracts into lifelong careers as merchants and local politicians. McDonald would eventually become a prominent banker, on whom Cody relied for many of his Nebraska business dealings. On McDonald as banker, see Mrs. Charles Hendy, Sr., Folder 8, Civil Case 970, Cody v. Cody (hereafter CC), pp. 92–96; Yost, Bu falo Bill, 171. For Isaac Boyer, see Yost, Bu falo Bill, 6, 9, 23.

  71. Rosa and May, Bu falo Bill and His Wild West, 18; J. G.
Rosa, “J. B. Hickok, Deputy U.S. Marshal,” Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 2, no. 4 (Winter 1979): 239–40.

  CHAPTER FOUR: WITH THE PRINCE OF PISTOLEERS

  1. Ned Buntline (the pseudonym of E. Z. C. Judson), “Buffalo Bill: The King of Border Men,” appeared originally as a serial in the story paper The New York Weekly from Dec. 23, 1869, to March 3, 1870. It is reprinted as Ned Buntline, Buffalo Bill: The King of Border Men, ed. William Roba (Davenport, IA: Service Press, 1987).

  2. Dexter W. Fellows and Andrew A. Freeman, This Way to the Big Show: The Life of Dexter Fellows (New York: Viking Press, 1936), 33–34.

  3. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 70.

  4. The story of Hickok’s escape first appeared in George Ward Nichols, “Wild Bill,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 34, no. 201 (Feb. 1867): 273–85; Cody places himself at the scene in Life of Buffalo Bill, 139–40.

  5. BBWW 1895 program, p. 16, in Cody Collection, WH 72, Box 2, Folder 27, DPL-WHR.

  6. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 17, 34–52.

  7. JCGM, 484.

  8. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 34–52, 90–93, 103–206, 351–52.

  9. Nichols, “Wild Bill,” 274.

  10. Nichols, “Wild Bill,” 279, 285.

  11. Nichols, “Wild Bill.” The story was published in its entirety in Joseph G. Rosa, Wild Bill Hickok: The Man and His Myth (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), 215–40.

  12. Joseph G. Rosa, The West of Wild Bill Hickok (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982), 87–89.

  13. See Ena Raymonde Ballantine Journal, entry for March 6, 1873, MS 1730, Nebraska State Historical Society (hereafter NSHS), Lincoln, Nebraska.

  14. John H. Putnam, “A Trip to the End of the Union Pacific in 1868,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 13, no. 3 (Aug. 1944): 196–203, at 199.

  15. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 82–83, 106.

  16. Quoted in Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 83.

  17. Nichols, “Wild Bill,” 285.

  18. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 205.

  19. Rosa, West of Wild Bill Hickok, 77; also Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 107. Stanley’s 1867 account is reproduced in Henry M. Stanley, My Early Travels and Adventures in America and Asia (1895; rprt. London: Duckworth, 2001), 29–32, 118.