Louis S. Warren

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

  20. William Elsey Connelley, Wild Bill and His Era: The Life and Adventures of James Butler Hickok (New York: Press of the Pioneers, 1933), 18.

  21. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 84.

  22. Joseph G. McCoy, Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest (1874; rprt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 203–4.

  23. I follow the lead of Hillel Schwartz, who distinguishes “between imposture, the compulsive assumption of invented lives, and impersonation, the concerted assumption of another’s public identity.” Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 72.

  24. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 120, also 224–25.

  25. James F. Meline, Two Thousand Miles on Horseback. Santa Fe and Back (1867; rprt. Albuquerque, NM: Horn and Wallace, 1966), 17; also Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 92.

  26. Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1972), 77–89; Andie Tucher, Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 57; James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 73–81.

  27. Cook, Arts of Deception, 30–72, 163–255.

  28. Cook, Arts of Deception, 73–118; Harris, Humbug, 213.

  29. Tucher, Froth and Scum, 57.

  30. Harris, Humbug, 21–25, 62–67, 77, 167.

  31. See Henry Morton Stanley, My Early Travels and Adventures in America and Asia (1895; rprt. London: Duckworth, 2001), 114, 183–86; Robert Dykstra, The Cattle Towns (New York: Atheneum, 1976), 112–15.

  32. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); West, Contested Plains.

  33. Tall tales were a kind of game for the entertainment of an audience as Carolyn S. Brown explains them. As fictions narrated in the first person, they pretend to be true. At first, the audience believes the ruse, or pretends to, and the narrator designs and manipulates the story’s elements to heighten this perception, often by mingling realistic detail and experience with the story’s deceptions. Audience members who perceive the fictions— and this might be everyone in the room—often play along, acting as if they believe the narrator is truthful. As the story continues, it begins to challenge the listener with “comic outlandishness,” until the punch line or resolution, in which the storyteller makes his deception more or less obvious, undermining his own credibility and allowing the audience to laugh. Carolyn S. Brown, The Tall Tale in American Folklore and Literature (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), 58–59.

  34. See James H. Wilkins, ed., The Great Diamond Hoax and Other Stirring Incidents in the Life of Asbury Harpending (1915; rprt. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958).

  35. In southern Illinois during the era of Hickok’s boyhood, the legendary tall-tale narrator Abe Smith attracted hundreds of local people to his town on a given weekend, just waiting to hear his stories. Brown, Tall Tale, 37.

  36. Brown, Tall Tale, 10–11, 32.

  37. Brown, Tall Tale, 10.

  38. Stanley Vestal [Thomas Campbell], Joe Meek: The Merry Mountain Man (1952; rprt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), 292–93.

  39. John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 16.

  40. The term is ubiquitous in gold rush accounts, but see William H. Goetzmann and William N. Goetzmann, The West of the Imagination (New York: Norton, 1986), 131.

  41. “Donner Party,” in The New Encyclopedia of the American West, ed. Howard R. Lamar (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 316–17; also C. F. McGlashan, History of the Donner Party: A Tragedy of the Sierra, 2nd ed. (1880; rprt. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1947).

  42. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 18.

  43. The census of 1880 enumerates 996,096 Kansas settlers. James R. Shortridge, Peopling the Plains: Who Settled Where in Frontier Kansas (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 15, 72.

  44. Fred A. Shannon, The Farmer’s Last Frontier: Agriculture, 1860–1897 (1945; rprt. New York:, 1966), 74–75; David Emmons, The Garden in the Grassland: Boomer Literature of the Central Great Plains (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), 25–46, 99–127; Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, The American West: A New Interpretive History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 335–36; White, “ It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own,” 43–45.

  45. My use of Artifice vs. Nature and their relation to authenticity is inspired by Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 114–24. For further discussion of authenticity, see chapter 6.

  46. “Every single one of Barnum’s living curiosities was a liminal figure of some sort, a caricatured disruption of the normative boundaries between black and white (albino Negroes), male and female (bearded ladies), young and old (General Tom Thumb), man and animal (dog-faced boys), one self or two (Siamese twins).” Cook, Arts of Deception, 121.

  47. In London, in 1846, Barnum presented the “Wild Man of the Prairies,” an exhibit in which Hervey Leech, a black man from New Jersey, dressed up in a hairy costume, with Barnum claiming that he had been discovered living among Indians in “the wilds of California.” Cook, Arts of Deception, 133. The showman partnered with the West’s own menagerie man, Grizzly Adams, in 1860, as if to reprise some of the themes of his wild man exhibit. Playing on the West as a space for sexual revolution, he invited Brigham Young to become an exhibit in his museum in 1868. Harris, Humbug, 195.

  48. Indeed, perhaps no Hickok attribute was so pronounced, or so practiced, as his marksmanship. Guns had become such a vital symbol of the frontier that mastery of them was central to any white man’s frontier imposture. Guns were mass-produced technological wonders. Central features of the age of mechanical revolution, firearms went from cumbersome, handcrafted, single-shot instruments to lightweight, mass-produced repeaters during Hickok’s lifetime. Their hammers, triggers, chambers, pins, cogs, wheels, and other increasingly standardized parts were emblematic of the “American system” of manufactures, of which they were at the same time products, being made from machined parts, and cogent symbols, “producing” lead slugs—and death—through machinery of their own. The nineteenth century was an age of complex machines, marvels of engineering like the locomotive, the electrical generator, the sewing machine, and an astonishing array of mechanical reapers. Modern guns were at least as intricate as many other machines, but they were more portable, and they were affordable, too. The industrial and technological wizardry which both explained and rationalized the triumph of Anglo-Saxon America could be held in one hand. The frontiersman’s mastery of the gun not only empowered him to battle evil. It made him the bearer of civilization, the harbinger of progress. A natural man with a modern weapon, he symbolized America itself.

  49. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 339–40. Most of these tales were probably apocryphal, but Hickok and other railside showmen practiced shooting obsessively in the late 1860s and ’70s, to provide a vital element of machine authenticity to their frontier pose. As the railroads extended west, they enhanced the value of marksmanship and frontier imposture as a commodity in more remote locations. By the early 1870s, settlers in North Platte, Nebraska, could witness dozens of shooting competitions every week. See the Ena Raymonde Ballantine Journal, MS 1730, NSHS, especially entries for June 7 and July 26. My thanks to Elliott West for calling the Ballantine papers to my attention.

  50. According to Luther North, Frank North and Hickok “used to meet about twice a week and shoot at targets at John Talbot’s roadhouse between Cheyenne and Fort Russell and Talbot would shoot with them.” North claims that his brother Frank would usually come in first, Talbot second, and Hickok third. Luther North, Man of the Plains: Recollections of Luther North, 1856–1882, ed. Donald F. Danker (Linco
ln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 150–51.

  51. In 1863, P. T. Barnum’s American Museum—which included a lecture hall and performance space—featured a woman spy, identified only as Miss Cushman, a “prettily dressed” speaker who lectured briefly on her duties and then performed a series of quick changes “to show the power of military disguise.” Quote from Harris, Humbug, 168. Original source is George D. C. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 14 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927–1945), 7:57. Cushman was probably Pauline Cushman, who claimed to have been a spy. See Reneé M. Sentilles, Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity (New York: Cambridge, 2003), 169, n. 12.

  52. E. C. Downs, Four Years a Scout and Spy (Zanesville, OH: Hugh Dunne, 1866), 12, emphasis in original. For other examples of scouts in disguise, see Edward W. Eckert and J. Amato Nicholas, “ ‘A Long and Perilous Ride’: The Memoirs of William W. Averell,” part 1, Civil War Times Illustrated 16, no. 6 (1977): 22–30. For disguise in the border wars, see Nicholas P. Hardeman, “The Bloody Battle That Almost Happened: William Clarke Quantrill and Peter Hardeman on the Western Border,” Civil War History 23, no. 3: (1977): 251–58.

  53. See Milo Milton Quaife, ed., Kit Carson’s Autobiography (1926: rprt., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 152.

  54. Quaife, Kit Carson’s Autobiography, 135.

  55. DeBenneville Randolph Keim, Sheridan’s Troopers on the Borders: A Winter Campaign on the Plains (1870; rprt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 38.

  56. Also see chapter 7.

  57. Dan L. Thrapp, Encyclopedia of Frontier Biography, 3 vols. (Glendale: Arthur H. Clark, 1988), I: 281, 297, 385, 403; II: 880; III: 1105; Nat Love, The Life and Adventures of Nat Love: Better Known in the Cattle Country as Deadwood Dick (Los Angeles: A. P., 1907). By this time western imposture had become a semilegitimate art form. Cody, Hickok, and others had performed it on eastern stages. In the Black Hills, audiences bought tickets to see it performed in local theaters. In 1879, one traveler recorded meeting “a typical western boy” of “about 16” who looked the quintessential westerner in his “broad brimmed hat and blue woolen shirt.” His demeanor was authentic, too, since he “chewed tobacco, smoked, drank, and swore like a bullwhacker.” The boy claimed to have spent two years in the Black Hills, where he had been “a miner, muleskinner, bullwhacker, [and] cowboy song and dance boy in the theaters.” Like the men and women he was imitating, he had found a way to profit from this alleged life story, in part because its dubious claims were so entertaining. “He is sharp as a steel trap, and had not been with me more than two hours till he had told me over a hundred lies and borrowed half a dollar of me.” Johnson, Happy as a Big Sunflower, 168–69.

  58. Mark Twain, Roughing It (1872; rprt. New York: New American Library, 1962); Brown, Tall Tale, 89–107.

  59. William Webb, Buffalo Land (Cincinnati and Chicago: E. Hannaford and Co., 1873), 149.

  60. See Webb, Buffalo Land, 147.

  61. Hickok taunted his opponents, especially southerners, in letters to the press, and he killed several men in Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska. See Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 73–74, 147, 157, 248.

  62. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 243–44.

  63. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 245. “Wild Bill accuses Buffalo Bill of having given Ned Buntline incidents of his (Wild Bill’s) life, and claiming them as his (Buffalo Bill’s) own adventures.” Jefferson City (Missouri) People’s Tribune, Aug. 23, 1876.

  64. John Burke to Jack Crawford, March 5, 1877 [1878?], M Crawford, Box 1, DPL-WHR.

  65. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 156–57, 249.

  66. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 107.

  67. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 90–91; Cody made up the expedition in W. F. Cody, An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1920), 81–90; Robert Athearn writes of Sherman’s time in the West, and at Fort Riley, in William Tecumseh Sherman and the Settlement of the West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956), 46–47.

  CHAPTER FIVE: GUIDE AND SCOUT

  1. Major Armes of the Tenth Cavalry, Ups and Downs of an Army Officer (Washington, DC: By the author, 1900), 272. There is no official record of Cody scouting for the army until Sept.

  2. Elbert Huber to Don Russell, Aug. 7, 1953, W. F. Cody 201 File, RG 407, NARA.

  3. Russell, Lives and Legends, 104.

  4. “Scout,” The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 2677.

  5. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 188, 234–35, 289–91; D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923; rprt., New York: Penguin, 1977), 68–69; Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), 59–80. For a full discussion of the cultural and political implications of white Indianness in its manifold variations, see Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), esp. 11–12, 41–42.

  6. Smith, Virgin Land, 81–89.

  7. Slotkin, Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization (1985; rprt. New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 198–99.

  8. Russell, Lives and Legends, 480.

  9. Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and Clark (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 267–312; Frank R. Secoy, Changing Military Patterns on the Great Plains (Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin, 1953); Richard White, “The Winning of the West: The Expansion of the Western Sioux in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of American History 65, no. 2 (Sept. 1978): 319–43.

  10. Richard N. Ellis, “Introduction,” xiv–xv, in Cheyenne Dog Soldiers: A Ledgerbook History of Coups and Combat, ed. Jean Afton, David Fridtjof Halaas, Andrew E. Masich, and Richard N. Ellis (Niwot CO: Colorado Historical Society and University Press of Colorado, 1997).

  11. Eugene F. Ware, The Indian War of 1864 (1911; rprt. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1960), 114; Louis A. Holmes, Fort McPherson, Nebraska, Cottonwood, N.T.: Guardian of the Tracks and Trails (Lincoln, NE: Johnsen Publishing Co., 1963), 6.

  12. Figures from Joanna L. Stratton, Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 121.

  13. Secoy, Changing Military Patterns; Richard White, “Winning of the West,” 319–43; Preston Holder, The Hoe and the Horse on the Plains: A Study of Cultural Development Among North American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970); Andrew Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 31–122; Joseph Jablow, The Cheyenne in Plains Indian Trade Relations,1795–1840 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1950); West, Contested Plains.

  14. Keim, Sheridan’s Troopers on the Borders, 134.

  15. Custer, “On the Plains,” Turf, Field, and Farm, Jan. 4, 1868, in Nomad: George A. Custer in Turf, Field and Farm, ed. Brian W. Dippie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), 36–37.

  16. BBWW program 1887 (London: Allen, Scott, and Co., 1887), 29.

  17. Buffalo Bill and Doc Carver Wild West, Rocky Mountain, and Prairie Exhibition 1883 (Hartford, CT: Calhoun Printing Co., 1883), n.p.; BBWW 1893 program (Chicago: Blakely Printing Co., 1893), 6, 17.

  18. After his discharge from the Union army in September 1865, he was never a soldier again. Russell, Lives and Legends, 61; see also Cody’s military records file, MS 6 W. F. Cody, Series I:A, Box 1/17, BBHC.

  19. BBWW 1887 program (London: Allen, Scott & Co., 1887), 28. Russell, Lives and Legends, 326; for reprinting of the letter and the change of dates, see BBWW 1893 program, 16.

  20. Russell, Lives and Legends, 160.

  21. For a full discussion of Cody’s loss of the medal and its restoration in 1989, see Oliver Kennedy, Memo of Jan. 12, 1989, Old Military and Civil Records,
Case File of William F. Cody, Restoration of the Congressional Medal of Honor (NWTCB-94-Casefiles-AC88[10374]), NARA, Washington, D.C. The subject of Cody’s military record and the Medal of Honor has been exhaustively discussed and documented in 201 File for William Cody, RG 407, Box 219, 370/84/27/03, NARA, Washington, DC (see esp. Lutz Wahl to Richard J. Walsh, Feb. 6, 1928).

  22. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 271; WFC to “My Dear Friends in Rochester,” Aug. 9, 1872 [1874] MS 6, I:B, BBHC. The letter is dated 1872, but since Cody reports his assignment to the Big Horn Expedition of 1874, I have corrected the error in my citation. As chief of scouts for the Fifth Cavalry, a post he ascended to in 1868, Cody would have been entitled to a share of the horses and other property captured from enemy Sioux and Cheyenne. WFC testimony, March 23, 1904, p. 9.

  23. Russell, Lives and Legends, 103.

  24. Philip H. Sheridan, Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Webster & Company, 1888), 2:300–1.

  25. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 188–97.

  26. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 197; for mules in the army, see Robert Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1868–1891 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1973), 48; also Emmett M. Essin, Shave Tails and Bell Sharps: The History of the U.S. Army Mule (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1997).

  27. Sheridan, Personal Memoirs, 2:301.

  28. George E. Hyde, The Life of George Bent, Written from His Letters, ed. Savoie Lottinville (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 335–39; E. Adamson Hoebel, The Cheyennes: Indians of the Great Plains (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 72–73; West, Contested Plains, 198.

  29. George F. Price, Across the Continent with the Fifth Cavalry (1883; rprt. New York: Antiquarian Press, 1959), 131–33.

  30. Russell, Lives and Legends, 111.