Louis S. Warren

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

  31. Webb, Buffalo Land, 194.

  32. George A. Custer, My Life on the Plains, or Personal Experiences with Indians (1874; rprt. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 279.

  33. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 1–32.

  34. Stanley, My Early Travels and Adventures, 114, 183–86.

  35. Eugene A. Carr, “Memoirs of Brvt. Major General E. A. Carr,” typescript, n.d., p. 195, microfilm MS 2688, Reel 1, NSHS.

  36. Utley, Frontier Regulars, 65–67.

  37. Utley, Frontier Regulars, 11–14; also Robert Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin: George Armstrong Custer and the Western Military Frontier (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 103; soldiers usually had only partial uniforms—or none at all. See Utley, Frontier Regulars,77; also John F. Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac: The Big-Horn and Yellowstone Expedition(1890; rprt. Chicago: R. R. Donnelly & Sons, 1955), 249: “[A]nd as for the uniform the absence thereof is a leading characteristic of the service.”

  38. Sherry Smith, The View from Officers’ Row: Army Perceptions of Western Indians (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990), 2.

  39. Smith, View from Officers’ Row, 7–10; Knight, Life and Manners in the Frontier Army, 220–26; Utley, Frontier Regulars, 59–68. This alienation was traditional. Edward M. Coffman writes that up to 1860, all soldiers shared “the experience of being military men in a country which did not like soldiers and at a time when many also deplored the concept of professionalism in any field.” Edward M. Coffman, The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime, 1784–1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 103.

  40. Knight, Life and Manners in the Frontier Army, 76.

  41. Knight, Life and Manners in the Frontier Army, 80.

  42. Smith, View from Officer’s Row, 141. The army reinstituted brevet promotions in 1890.

  43. Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 103; Russell, Lives and Legends, 119–20; for jealousy, see Armes, Ups and Downs of an Army Officer, 333.

  44. For cold, see Armes, Ups and Downs of an Army Officer, 208.

  45. Custer, My Life on the Plains, 49.

  46. Among the sternest critics of the Indian wars army were Civil War veterans, who looked down on the struggling Plains campaigns as a series of ill-fought minor skirmishes. Nate Salsbury, Cody’s managing partner for many years in the Wild West show and a Union combat veteran, reflected his comrades’ consensus when he bitterly remarked that “as a private soldier during the Civil War, I smelled more powder in one afternoon at Chickamauga, than all the ‘Great Scouts’ that America has ever produced ever did in a lifetime.” Nate Salsbury Papers (henceforth cited as NSP), “Long Hair and a Plug Hat,” MS 17, Box 2/63, YCAL, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

  47. Utley, Frontier Regulars, 114–21; and Cavalier in Buckskin, 47–49.

  48. Utley, Frontier Regulars, 23. Custer’s regiment was plagued by desertion and low morale. Of the 963 enlisted men assigned to the Seventh Cavalry at Fort Riley, Kansas, in 1866, 80—nearly 10 percent—deserted in the next six months. Jeffrey D. Wert, Custer: The Controversial Life of George Armstrong Custer (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 233–36, 246–64; Evan S. Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 150–51.

  49. Coffman, Old Army, 339–48. Soldiers voted with their feet. Where fewer than one soldier in ten deserted in 1871, nearly one in three deserted the following year. For six months without pay, see Robert Utley, ed., Life in Custer’s Cavalry: Diaries and Letters of Albert and Jennie Barnitz, 1867–1868 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 128.

  50. Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 34–36, 62–97; Slotkin, Fatal Environment, 230–31; Smith, Virgin Land, 37–38. For contemporary references to Anglo-Saxonism see “The Loss of the Tasmanians,” New York Times, Jun. 12, 1869, p. 4; “What Anglo-Saxonism Is,” New York Times, Feb. 8, 1880, p. 7; Walt Whitman meditates on Aryan millennialism and westward expansion in his 1860 poem, “Facing West from California Shores,” in Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose, ed. John Kouwenhoven (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 92. See also Stuart Anderson, Race and Rapprochement: Anglo-Saxonism and Anglo-American Relations, 1895–1904 (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981), 1–70, esp. 39–45, 57–61. General Sherman referred to the Indian wars as “the Battle of Civilization.” G. W. Baird, A Report to the Citizens Concerning Certain Late Disturbances on the Western Frontier Involving Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Chief Joseph, and Geronimo (1891; rprt. Ashland, OR: Lewis Osborne, 1972), 21. In 1868, General Sherman could claim that his soldiers were fighting “enemies of our race and our civilization.” William T. Sherman to Philip Sheridan, Oct. 9, 1868, quoted in Utley, Frontier Regulars, 145.

  51. These were the Thirty-eighth, Thirty-ninth, Fortieth, and Forty-first infantries. Utley, Frontier Regulars, 25–26; Coffman, Old Army, 331; see also William H. Leckie and Shirley A. Leckie, The Buffalo Soldiers: A Narrative of the Black Cavalry in the West, rev. ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003); Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990 (New York: Norton, 1998), 164–91, esp. 165.

  52. Oliver Knight, Following the Indian Wars: The Story of the Newspaper Correspondents Among the Indian Campaigners (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960), 23.

  53. Custer, in Dippie, Nomad, 34; see also Coffman, Old Army, 330, 334. For the Irish in Custer’s Seventh in 1876, see Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 168.

  54. I am indebted to recent scholarship on whiteness and race for these insights and much of the discussion that follows. See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (New York: Verso, 1994); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Verso, 1990).

  55. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 53–55. Germans’ ethnic political organization also was a factor in leading some anxious Americans to denounce them for taking opportunities from “white” men. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 47.

  56. Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 86.

  57. Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 34–61.

  58. Arthur Comte de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races (1855), quoted in Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 44.

  59. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White; and Roediger, Wages of Whiteness.

  60. Coffman, Old Army, 332; quote from Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 120.

  61. Armes, Ups and Downs of an Army Officer, 288.

  62. Armes, Ups and Downs of an Army Officer, 247.

  63. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 158–60, 209.

  64. WFC testimony, March 23, 1904, p. 2.

  65. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Di ferent Color, 47.

  66. Knight, Life and Manners in the Frontier Army, 223–30. Frontier communities were almost as racially complex as the army. In 1865, more than 14,000 German, Irish, French, and English settlers lived in Kansas. Leavenworth was almost one-third German and Irish, and emigrants from both countries settled in considerable numbers along railroad routes. Over the next decade, they were joined by Russian, Austrian, German, Swedish, and Hungarian emigrants, so that between 15 and 20 percent of the frontier population was so ethnically distinctive as to appear “foreign” to native-born observers. Shortridge, Peopling the Plains, 30–33, 92–94.

  67. Colin G. Calloway, “Army Allies or Tribal Survival?,” in Legacy: New Perspectives on the Battle of
Little Big Horn, ed. Charles E. Rankin (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1996), 63–81. Fairfax Downey and Jacques Noel Jacobsen Jr., The Red/Bluecoats (Fort Collins, CO: Old Army Press, 1973), 193–94; Thomas W. Dunlay, Wolves for the Blue Soldiers: Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army, 1860–1890 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982).

  68. “The Indians—Col. Wyncoop’s Letter Resigning His Agency,” New York Times, Dec. 19, 1868, p. 3.

  69. For frontier race degeneracy, see Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country, 250; Stephen P. Knadler, “Francis Parkman’s Ethnography of the Brahmin Caste and the History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac,” American Literature 65, no. 2 (June 1993): 215–38, esp. 225. Even Francis Parkman’s mixed-blood trapper and guide, Henri Chatillon, was without “the restless energy of the Anglo-American.” Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail (1847; rprt. New York: Doubleday & Co., 1946), 11. Seminole men, of black, Indian, and white ancestry, frequently scouted for the all-black Ninth and Tenth cavalries (whom Cody also guided). Downey and Jacobsen, Red/Bluecoats, 193–94.

  70. “Mulatto,” Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary 1:1872.

  71. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race, 18.

  72. Richard Burton, The City of the Saints and Across the Rocky Mountains to California (1861; rprt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 89–90. Francis Parkman referred to mixed-bloods as “a mongrel race,” in a few of whom “might be seen the black snaky eye of the Indian half-breed.” Parkman, Oregon Trail, 61.

  73. Anxieties about frontier race mixing were prevalent long before Cody was born, but the abolition of slavery heightened them to a fever pitch after the Civil War. Warnings that the end of slavery would begin a slide into interracial sex and the birth of a mixed-race America gave rise to the term “miscegenation,” which was coined only in 1864, replacing the older term “amalgamation,” and reflecting the increasing emphasis on race mixing as the “miscasting” or “misbegetting” of people. The word derived from the Latin for “mixed race” but had deep resonances with “miscast,” or “misbegotten.” “Miscegenation,” Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, 1809. See also Gary B. Nash, “The Hidden History of Mestizo America,” Journal of American History 82, no. 3 (Dec. 1995): 943.

  74. Smith, Virgin Land, 177.

  75. Rosa, West of Wild Bill Hickok, 101.

  76. “Unfit amalgamation” is from Joseph G. McCoy, Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest (1874; rprt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 80. Others who used Mexicans as warnings about frontier race decay include Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast (1841; rprt. New York: Airmont Publishing Co., 1965), 136–37; Bancroft, California Pastoral, 263–65, 284.

  77. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 347, quoted in Joe DeBarthe, The Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard (1894; rprt. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958), 88.

  78. West, Contested Plains, 330; David Fritjof Halaas and Andrew E. Masich, Halfbreed: The Remarkable True Story of George Bent (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2004), 246–47; Stanley, My Early Travels and Adventures, 180.

  79. Halaas and Masich, Halfbreed, 221–22.

  80. Randolph B. Marcy, The Prairie Traveler (1859; rprt. Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, n.d.), 173. Custer believed that Indians were superior to even the best white frontiersman when it came to trailing, which was “peculiarly and undeniably an Indian accomplishment.” George A. Custer, “On the Plains,” Nov. 11, 1867, in Turf, Farm and Field, Nov. 23, 1867, in Dippie, Nomad, 28, 31.

  81. Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, 289, also 95–98, 114–16; Colin G. Calloway, “Neither White nor Red: White Renegades on the American Indian Frontier,” Western Historical Quarterly 17, no. 1 (Jan. 1986): 43–66; for an example of how the Boone/Girty, white Indian/renegade confrontation shaped American literature, see Robert Montgomery Bird, Nick of the Woods, or the Jibbenainosay (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and Blanchard, 1837). From the days of the Puritans, whites abducted by Indians showed a disturbing enthusiasm for Indian life, many of them refusing to return to white society even after they were free to do so. Indian captivity “cannot be, therefore, so bad as we generally conceive it to be,” wrote Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in 1782. “There must be in their social bond something singularly captivating, and far superior to anything boasted of among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians.” J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782; rprt. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957), 209. Literature on Indian captivity is gigantic. See Roy Harvey Pearce, “The Significance of the Captivity Narrative,” American Literature 19 (March 1947): 1–20; James Axtell, “The White Indians of Colonial America,” William and Mary Quarterly 32 (Jan. 1975): 55–88; Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, esp. 116–45; James Axtell, The InvasionWithin: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); June Namias, White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on American Frontiers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).

  82. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale (1851; rprt. New York: Penguin, 1992), 295.

  83. When Cheyenne warriors shouted insults “in plain English” in 1867, they raised suspicions among the Tenth Cavalry’s commanders that “many of our own race were with the enemy,” whose successes on the battlefield could be attributed to their being led by “the basest of white men, well drilled in war.” Armes, Ups and Downs of an Army Offices, 249, 252. See also Theodore R. Davis, “A Summer on the Plains,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 36 (Feb. 1868): 305–6; Stanley, My Early Travels and Adventures, 161.

  84. For Carr’s views on Hickok, see Rosa, The West of Wild Bill Hickok, 101. There is no biography of Frank North, but see George Bird Grinnell, Two Great Scouts and Their Pawnee Battalion (1928; rprt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973); Robert Bruce, The Fighting Norths and Pawnee Scouts (Lincoln, NE: n.p., 1932); Luther North, Man of the Plains: Recollections of Luther North, 1856–1882, ed. Donald F. Danker (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961); Frank North, “The Journal of an Indian Fighter: The 1869 Diary of Frank J. North,” ed. Donald F. Danker, Nebraska History 39, no. 2 (June 1958): 87–178.

  85. The story is almost certainly apocryphal, coming as it does from Nate Salsbury, in a particularly bitter memoir written around 1902. See “The Origin of the Wild West Show,” NSP, YCAL MSS 17, Box 1/63, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT; Walsh and Salsbury, Making of Buffalo Bill, 155–56.

  86. James T. King, War Eagle: A Life of General Eugene A. Carr (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), 276, n. 40; E. A. Carr, “The Combat on Beaver Creek,” Pearson’s Magazine (Aug. 1904): 188.

  87. Davis, “Summer on the Plains,” 303.

  88. DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 88, n. 4; Smith, View from Officers’ Row, 40, 83. Also Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 36.

  89. Richard I. Dodge, Plains of the Great West (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1877), 429.

  90. North, Man of the Plains, 121.

  91. Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac, 247. Cody, of course, implied that he figured this out on his own, after riding “ahead of the command about ten miles,” where he saw a “body of men” marching toward him, “that I at first believed to be the Indians of whom we were in pursuit.” Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 350.

  92. Carr, “Memoirs,” 30–31; George F. Price, Across the Continent with the Fifth Cavalry (1883; rprt. New York: Antiquarian Press, 1959), 133; Russell, Lives and Legends, 110.

  93. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 227.

  94. “Mongrels” is in Rosa, West of Wild Bill Hickok, 101.

  95. Russell, Lives and Legends, 114; Luke Cahill, “An Indian Campaign and Buffalo Hunting with ‘Buffalo Bill,’ ” Colorado Magazine, 4, no. 4 (Aug. 1927): 125–35.

  96. Cody,
Life of Buffalo Bill, 226–37; Rosa and May, Buffalo Bill and His Wild West, 28.

  97. WFC testimony, March 23, 1904.

  98. H. C. Bonnycastle to Chief, Personnel Division, OQMC, March 20, 1924, in William F. Cody, 201 File, RG 407, NARA, Washington, DC; Russell, Lives and Legends, 115.

  99. Keim, Sheridan’s Troopers on the Border, 150.

  100. Utley and Washburn, Indian Wars, 258; Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 110.

  101. Bvt. Maj. Gen. E. A. Carr to Bvt. Brig. Gen. Geo. D. Ruggles, May 22, 1869, and Adj. Gen. E. D. Townsend to Bvt. Maj. Gen. C. C. Augur, June 11, 1869, both in RG 533, U.S. Army Continental Command, Dept. of the Platte, Letters Recd. 1867–69, Microfilm Reel 7, NSHS; Russell, Lives and Legends, 122–24; King, War Eagle, 99; Rosa and May, Buffalo Bill and His Wild West, 29–30.

  102. The events leading up to the campaign may be found in James T. King, “The Republican River Expedition, June–July 1869,” pt. I, “On the March,” Nebraska History 41, no. 3 (Sept. 1960): 165–200, esp. 165–70; pt. II, “The Battle of Summit Springs,” Nebraska History 41, no. 4 (Dec. 1960): 281–99.

  103. King, “Republican River Expedition,” 170–75.

  104. Cody’s grocery wagon has been a bone of contention for biographers. Don Russell, believing crass mercantilism below the dignity of a hero-scout, argued that Cody never had such a wagon, and that it was the product of the jealousy of Luther North, whose resentment of Cody’s fame had grown to “a positive hatred” by the 1920s. Russell, Lives and Legends, 132, 151. But Luther North mentioned the wagon only once, in an account generally complimentary to Cody, though it was incorrect about Cody’s role in the battle of Summit Springs. North, Man of the Plains, 103. The vital evidence for Cody’s grocery wagon comes from his divorce trial, a quarter century before North wrote his memoirs. Eric Ericson explained the wagon and its business origins, in Eric Ericson testimony, Feb. 9, 1905, Folder 8, 21–30; May Cody, who lived with William and Louisa Cody in 1871, says that her brother had the title of “Field Settler Station” (possibly “field sutler”), as which “he furnished goods to the [a]rmy when they were out in the field… .” May Cody Bradford Testimony, Feb. 16–20, 1905, File 7–1, 117; William Cody himself claimed, “I had the concession from the commanding officer as a settler [sutler]” for troops in the field, “and I was at the time making a good deal of money out of my sutler store.” WFC testimony, March 5, 1905, Folder 13, 14–15, all in CC.