Many Loves of Buffalo Bill

by Enss, Chris

  Mollie and Buffalo Bill were to meet in St. Louis, a scheduled stop for the show. She was to come on board as a performer at that time. In an effort to make her feel welcome and show his affection, William purchased his lover a horse. The act endeared him to her even more.

  My Dear Mollie … I presume you are getting about ready to come to St. Louis. Wish you would start from home in time to arrive in St. Louis about the 2nd or 3rd of May. Go to the St. James Hotel if I ain’t there to meet you. I will be there any how by the 3rd. I have got you the white horse and a fine silver saddle. Suppose you have your habit. Will be glad to see you. With love, W.F.C.11

  Mollie’s days with the Wild West show were difficult. Adapting to the rigorous traveling schedule was hard to get used to, and riding her horse day after day left her stiff and sore. Eventually Mollie lost interest in the famous program and tired of trying to win over the heart of its general manager. One of the last letters she ever received from the famous scout convinced her that the timing wasn’t right for a permanent romance.

  I have two little girls living and have lost a little boy. My wife and I have separated but are not divorced yet. That’s what I meant by saying I am not yet a single man. No, dear, I’m not afraid to trust you with my secrets. You know all my family affairs. Little Pet, don’t think I’ve forgotten you if I don’t write oftener. I will write you whenever I can. With fond love, Will.12

  Mollie Moses returned to her home in Kentucky, where she fell into a life of poverty. She was forced to sell many of the mementos William gave her and live off the generosity of strangers in order to buy food. The two souvenirs she would never part with were the silver saddle and William’s picture. Historians speculate that the demise of her relationship with Buffalo Bill left her despondent and without a will to live.

  Within a few years of her parting with William, Mollie’s financial situation plummeted, and she was living in squalorlike conditions. Rodents shared her house with her—rats she called her pets. One evening her “pets” bit her severely, causing her to become ill. She eventually died of complications from the bites. She was forty-three years old.13

  SIXAway from Home

  No one wants to do right more than I do and I propose to lead an honest life.

  WILLIAM F. CODY (1901)

  Apetite, young reporter sat across from Buffalo Bill Cody in his dressing room on the grounds of Ambrose Park in Brooklyn, New York. She was mesmerized by his confident demeanor and well-groomed look. The shock of long hair under the enormous hat on his head was neatly coiffed, and the signature leather boots that extended to his knees were polished black. He was a formidable man with a disarming smile that might have put the woman at ease had she not been so star-struck. She jotted down key points in the exclusive interview he had granted the newspaper where she worked. The article ran in the New York Recorder on May 22, 1894, and emphasized the progressive attitude William had toward women’s roles in society.

  As the only boy in a family of five, he had personal experience with the versatility, drive, and strength of women. His outlook was considered controversial by most of his male counterparts. He felt that women should have the right to vote, form their own organizations, live alone without restrictions, and enjoy the same employment opportunities as men. He backed up his convictions by hiring some of the most talented horsewomen, lady sharpshooters, and actresses in the country to work in his Wild West show. The popularity of female acts such as Annie Oakley and Lillian Smith prompted William to add more women riders and ropers to the program. By doing this, he secured his position as a pioneer not only in the entertainment industry but also in the area of women’s issues.

  The reporter’s story, entitled “Colonel Cody Talks,” touched on William’s views about women and also tried to explain the reason women were inexplicably drawn to him. “Big men [like William Cody] are always gentle to women,” the newswoman wrote. “If he isn’t a pet with the women he ought to be.”1

  The New York Recorder article and those that followed, which were orchestrated by the Wild West show’s publicist, Major John Burke, helped generate ticket sales. The country was struggling to make it through a depression, and there was not a lot of money to spend on discretionary items such as entertainment. Consumers could choose between attending Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show or Ringling Brothers’ program. Women readers who pored over the newspaper reports about the “frontier hero” opted to attend William’s show.

  In September 1894 William took part in a new form of publicity that promised to increase ticket sales even more. Inventor Thomas Edison made a motion picture featuring Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and a handful of Native Americans from the show. The short recording included demonstrations of their riding and shooting skills and was the forerunner of western movies.2

  John Burke took full advantage of Edison’s finished work and showed the recording at nickelodeons in big cities. John’s dedication to promoting Buffalo Bill helped make the showman famous, but it placed an added strain on William’s marriage. “Major Burke could think of nothing else but Buffalo Bill,” Louisa wrote in her memoirs. “It was blind adoration.”3

  William was besieged by adoring fans everywhere he traveled. His followers included the queen of Belgium; the princesses of Germany, Prussia, and Wales; and Queen Victoria of England. During his tour of Europe in 1887, Queen Victoria invited the well-known showman and his entourage to perform at the golden jubilee celebration (a golden jubilee marks the fiftieth year of a monarch’s reign), and William was honored by the request. The show was held at one of London’s largest arenas, Earl’s Court Exhibition Grounds. The queen seldom left Buckingham Palace to attend such events; entertainment usually came to her. However, she was so captivated by William and his popularity that she left her home to see the Wild West show. The performance was a huge success. Queen Victoria was impressed with William’s troupe of entertainers, in particular the Sioux Indian leader Red Shirt. She thought Red Shirt was one of the most handsome men she had ever seen.4

  The queen invited William and several cast members of the Wild West show to the palace for tea and spoke of wanting to see the program again. She requested that a command performance be given, and William happily obliged. At the conclusion of the exhibition, she presented William with a signet ring. Newspapers in Europe reported on Queen Victoria and the royal family’s enthusiasm for Buffalo Bill and the extravagant gift she had given him. John Burke made sure American papers carried the articles. When Louisa read about the regard that Queen Victoria and Princess Alexandra had for William, she was jealous. She accused the women of paying her “husband improper attention.”5

  According to William, his marriage was on shaky ground when he left for his European tour in late March 1887. He maintained that their relationship suffered because of his wife’s irrational jealousy over the women he worked with. Louisa argued that his questionable behavior with female coworkers, show followers, and the like gave her plenty of reason to doubt his faithfulness. They did not correspond with each other at all the first year he was abroad. “I never wrote to her, nor did she write me,” William noted in his memoirs.6

  Louisa did write to Arta, who was overseas with her father. William was thrilled to have his daughter with him. The nineteen-year-old woman doted on him during the European tour, cleaning house for him and running errands. Four-year-old Irma stayed behind with Louisa at the homestead in North Platte. William wrote to his youngest child often.

  William constantly worried about the hardships his children had endured because of his troubled marriage. Over the years the girls had overheard several arguments between Louisa and him. On a few occasions when William would leave the house after a particularly loud disagreement, Arta went with him.7 In 1904 William admitted that she suffered for her faithfulness to him. Louisa often took the anger she had toward her husband out on their children. According to the Codys’ divorce records, Louisa would threaten the girls with bodily harm if they ever took their father’s side.
She warned Irma and Arta that she would pour scalding-hot water on anyone who defied her. “I think she could have been a much better mother in many respects,” William told the judge who presided over the divorce hearing. “Although I think she loved her children, she was irritable and cross and peevish with them and many times it was uncalled for.”8

  In February 1905 Mrs. John Boyer, the wife of the former manager of William’s North Platte properties, claimed that at times Louisa was cruel to Arta and Irma. Louisa had told the woman that “she had horsewhipped Irma and burned a scar in her face with a lighted match.” Mrs. C. P. Davis, a seamstress in the Cody home, admitted to being told about the beatings as well.9

  Louisa was resentful that William was consistently portrayed in books and magazines as a heroic figure, both on and off the wild plains. She felt that the various indiscretions he enjoyed with some of the women he met should be made public. She reasoned that if his fans and family knew he was a womanizer, it would have an adverse effect on his image and change his children’s inflated opinion of him.

  Because the rugged frontier settlements where the Codys lived had no schools, William sent Arta and Irma away to boarding school when they were old enough. However, Louisa didn’t allow them to stay at school. As soon as William left home on a hunting or military expedition, she would have the school’s staff send them home. “She didn’t allow them to remain there as she should have done,” William remembered in 1904. “My daughter Irma would have had a much better education if [Louisa] had allowed her to remain.”10

  Louisa’s bitterness over William’s long absences from home and his involvement with other women affected not only the children but also his friends and sisters, especially Julia and her family. For a while, Louisa managed the North Platte ranch by herself, but when the job became too much, William asked his brother-in-law Al Goodman to take over. Louisa took out her frustrations on Al. He kept William apprised of the difficult situation. “She is a strong woman,” William wrote Al in August 1891. “But don’t mind her—remember she is my wife—and let it go at that. [If] she gets cranky just laugh at it, she can’t help it.”11

  When Al and Julia weren’t around, Louisa bad-mouthed William to the Goodmans’ son, Ed. Ed wrote letters to his parents about her unkind behavior and the accusation about his being a gossip.

  I suppose Aunt Lue will do the same by me as she did with brother Will when he was through at North Platte…. She will turn the heart of Uncle Will against me if they make up again. As for me saying anything about Aunt Lue that is like a good many more stories; as I never mention their family troubles to anyone … until she came and told it herself and everyone knows it by now and they come to me to find out particulars but I do not tell them anything about it at all, but she told everyone.12

  Many people in William’s sphere of influence were aware that he and Louisa were not happily married. They knew that he liked to entertain many guests at the family’s ranch in between theatrical seasons and that he had a tendency to drink—at times, too much. According to the court records of their divorce hearing, whenever Louisa objected to William’s drinking, he would tell her, “Oh Momma, hush. The only way a man can stand you is to get drunk.”13

  Louisa wanted her husband to herself, but William was too generous with his siblings and their children, as well as noted cast members of the Wild West show, to deny them unlimited access to their home. Frustrated over the lack of private time with her husband and daughters, Louisa was often rude to visitors. William could not understand the reason for Louisa’s combative attitude, and the pair quarreled over her actions.14

  The Codys lived in two different homes when William was in Nebraska. Louisa stayed at their main house in North Platte with the children, and William lived one mile west of the home at Scout’s Rest Ranch. Whenever circumstances became unpleasant for him at the main house, he would retreat to the ranch.15

  When William and Louisa were getting along, they were quite affectionate and loving toward each other. Those times grew less frequent the longer they were married. Louisa repeatedly complained about William’s generosity.

  If anything should go wrong or that she thought I wasn’t doing the best in a business way, she complained of my giving so much money to different charitable institutions or for charity. My reply to that would be, that it was one way that I had of advertising myself before the public, to let it be known that I was a charitable man. The public would appreciate it and when I would go to their towns where they lived to play they would turn out and patronize my entertainment and we would realize more than what I was giving away.16

  William was more tolerant of Louisa’s faults than she was of his. However, he had little patience for one idiosyncrasy: her association with clairvoyants. She regularly consulted fortune-tellers or psychics who prophesied about her future with him. “I tried to tell her that they only done it for money,” William remembered in March 1904. “It was trickery and I didn’t want her believing it and I positively did not want my children to grow up or made to believe that a fortune teller or anyone else could look into the future and read what their destiny was to be.”17

  Louisa noted in her autobiography that although she and William had their struggles, she could remember being seriously upset with her husband only one time. She believed that she had always done her best to support him in his endeavors, no matter how far apart they might have been. She admitted to sharing his love for the West. “Like my husband, I wanted to be where the smoke did not hang in the atmosphere on gray days,” she wrote in her memoirs, “where the sun shone bright and keen and where life was as free as the air.”18

  Bound together by a common desire to conquer the frontier, the Codys endured each other’s company, adding to their landholdings and supporting their children in the process. Arta married Horton Boal on June 27, 1889. William was held up in Paris when they wed, and he missed the lavish ceremony. An outbreak of typhoid fever had shut down the city, and no one was allowed to leave.

  By the fall of 1890, William was reunited with his sisters (all of whom were married by then), wife, and children. Their time together was brief. “And hardly had he landed,” Louisa remarked in her autobiography, “when there came the call for him—the old call of the west, of the saddle and rifle. For the Indians had broken forth in their last campaign on the warpath.”19 Army commander General Nelson Miles asked William to talk with Chief Sitting Bull and try to negotiate the Sioux Indian’s surrender. Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull had become friends in 1885 when the chief toured with the Wild West show for four months. Before William was able to speak with him, though, the Indian leader was shot and killed by members of the Sioux police.

  Distressed by Sitting Bull’s death and the subsequent events at Wounded Knee, William returned to North Platte and quickly began organizing another trip overseas. Members of his troupe retreated to the Codys’ ranch to practice their acts and relax with William before embarking on the next European tour. Louisa was inhospitable and moody, but William encouraged guests to disregard anything hurtful she said or did. Before William left the country, Louisa managed to drive a wedge between Buffalo Bill and his sister Julia. Prodded by her mother, Arta asked her father to give her and her husband the job of taking care of the ranch. Julia and Al were deeply hurt when William terminated their duties and hired his daughter and son-in-law to take their place. The Goodmans moved out of the area to Kansas.20

  In late 1892 William and more than five hundred cast members sailed home from London after another successful European tour. The following spring Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show opened in Chicago. Twenty-five thousand people attended the program daily.21 Irma and Arta frequently visited their father during the six-month run of the show in the Windy City. Louisa periodically went with them but didn’t always let her husband know she was coming. Her surprise visit to William’s Chicago hotel room in early 1894 resulted in scandal for the showman. It was then that Louisa discovered the depth of his relationship with actres
s Katherine Clemmons.

  William met Katherine in London and saw great potential in her talent. The porcelain-skinned beauty dreamed of appearing onstage and eagerly accepted William’s offer to help finance her career. She traveled with him to Illinois to plan for her theatrical debut in America. The hotel they stayed at in Chicago listed them in the guest registry as man and wife. Louisa was furious when she arrived and learned what was going on. The Codys’ marriage survived the affair, and by February 1896 they were adding a new chapter to their tumultuous life together in Wyoming.

  William was a key player in the Bighorn Basin project, which included planning and helping to build the town of Cody and digging canals to irrigate the valley and make it prosperous. The Shoshone Valley Newspaper ran an article about the Codys and their plans for the territory. William and Louisa were civil to each other during the interview. The reporter saw no evidence that their union had experienced any strain. Not only did he write about how the pair were developing the area, but he also noted how warmly the two treated each other. Those closest to the Codys believed that the article must have been about two other people. As the newspaper story read,

  It has often been said that Louisa’s untiring efforts and unselfish devotion to Colonel Cody has enabled him to reach the highest rounds in the ladder of fame, and indeed we scarcely ever see a popular man where there is not the hand of a devoted wife or mother helping guide him on the road to greatness. Mrs. Cody is a lovely lady in every sense of the word. She is beautiful, too, of the darkest brunette type, and she is intellectual and kind hearted to all.22