Indeed, Root epitomized the American male’s rush from four legs to four wheels. “I do not like the smell of the stables, I do not like to be obliged to clean a horse every morning and I do not like to hitch one up in winter,” Root noted in his journal. “I dislike plodding around in the snow, handling an icy harness,” he wrote. “Perhaps I might have a warm stable—one that is always warm, like my auto-house; but I should not enjoy it even then. It takes time to hitch up a horse; but the auto is ready to start off in an instant. It is never tired; it gets there quicker than any horse can possibly do.”
All these developments spelled an epitaph for the cowboy. “You may stand ankle deep in the short grass of the uninhabited wilderness,” said one settler who witnessed the crush of new farmsteads. “Next month a train will glide over the waste and stop at some point where the railroad has decided to locate a town. Men, women and children will jump out, and their chattel will tumble out after them. From that moment the building begins.”
In 1885, at the National Cattle and Horse Growers Association convention in St. Louis, Professor E. H. Moore of Colorado warned that “it is plain to see that the days of ranges are numbered. As the Indian gave way to the pioneer, so must the cowboy go before the settler, and the rancher take the place of the ranger, until eight million acres of land now roamed for cattle shall teem with villages and model farms for the cultivation of refined cattle cared for—not by cowboys with revolvers—but by cowboys with brains.” A year later, in San Angelo in central Texas, the local Enterprise newspaper lamented “the decayed cowboy,” announcing that “his glory has departed” and wishing him a fond adieu: “Festive cuss, farewell!”
In 1887, the famed Civil War and Indian fighter General William Tecumseh Sherman wrote to his friend Buffalo Bill Cody at his Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York, where Cody was staying between Wild West shows, and spoke fondly of the days of cowboys and Indians and attacks upon the Deadwood stagecoaches. “Such things did occur in our days, but may never again,” he told Cody. He recalled the 9.5 million head of buffalo between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains just twenty years earlier, all now killed “for their meat, their skins and bones.… This seems like desecration, cruelty and murder, yet they have been replaced by twice as many cattle.… There were about 165,000 Pawnees, Sioux, Cheyennes, Kiowas and Arapahoes who depended on these buffaloes for their yearly food. They too are gone, and have been replaced by twice or thrice as many white men and women, who have made the earth to blossom as the rose, and who can be counted, taxed and governed by the laws of nature and civilization.… This change has been salutary, and will go on to the end,” Sherman wrote. Of the Old West, he noted with a sad finality: “This drama must end; days, years and centuries follow fast, even the drama of civilization must have an end.”
Buffalo Bill himself acknowledged that the West was playing out. In a June 1894 article for Cosmopolitan magazine, he conceded that “there is no longer any frontier. People live everywhere, all over the Rocky mountain region.”
Cody could even feel it under his feet. He remembered that the open range’s topsoil had been dry and loose: “It was possible to walk anywhere in that country, in the grass or out of it, at any time of the day or night, without wetting one’s moccasins.… You slept out in your blanket at any season of the year, and when you awoke in the morning it was as dry as when you lay down.” Now, he wrote, “heavy dews” fell, and those he blamed on progress. “I have a theory of my own to account for this phenomenon. The erection of wire-fences, which has unquestionably greatly increased the downfall of rain, has in the same way, by the attraction of electrical currents, brought about the dew.”
Both Sherman and Cody understood what they had lost. So did many others. For years the nation’s newspapers and magazines could sense the old life fading, and they chronicled its demise. Old-timers recalled their last buffalo hunt, their last wagon train, their last attack by outlaws or Indian raiders. In 1913, a motion picture crew set up at Pine Ridge Reservation with a cast of Oglala Lakota actors to film the massacre at Wounded Knee. Thus was born the cowboy movie, and it was fiction.
The Weekly Capital-Commonwealth in Topeka, Kansas, in 1889 headlined the obvious:
A Fading Race
A Frontier Feature Which Will Soon Be Seen No More
One of the most picturesque characters to be found in the story of American frontier life, the cowboy, will soon be seen no more. There will be great firms devoted to stock raising for many years to come, but the cowboy of the unfenced range has lost his occupation. The range has been covered first on one side and then on another by the flood tide of homesteaders, until there is no place left.…
The Frenchman Paul de Rousiers, traveling the country to study American life, wrote, “This time we definitely say good-bye to the West.… We shall no longer consider the part it plays in the productive activity of the United States.” Throughout the Midwest the talk was equally harsh. The Kansas City Times observed flatly, “The cowboy is not now what he used to be, and in 20 years the old-time rider will be a thing of the past.”
The Great Cowboy Race of 1893 caught the country’s imagination because it sought to dispel the notion of the vanishing frontiersman. Shortly before the riders galloped off, the Chicago Daily Tribune made note of what the cowboys were racing against: “Western Nebraska is not as it was a few years ago. The howl of the coyote has long given place to the whistle of the locomotive, and the prairie is no longer used for cattle grazing. Farmers have taken the place of cowboys, and only old-time cowboys remain.” But the paper reported that the defiant cowboy participants would race regardless. Doc Middleton would saddle up. Emmett Albright declared, “By thunder, I’ll be there on old Red Jacket, ready to show the boys where to stake out their horses as they come in.”
In 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau announced the closing of the American frontier. The bureau’s superintendent was Robert P. Porter, a journalist born in England who had come to America in his youth. He wrote for a newspaper in Chicago, engaged in Republican politics, and won entrée to President Benjamin Harrison. That brought Porter’s nomination to oversee the country’s eleventh census. The bureau then was a temporary assignment, with workers brought in every ten years to count heads.
“When I was appointed,” Porter later told Congress, “I had nothing but one clerk and a messenger, and a desk with some white paper on it.” He slowly built a staff, recruiting former agents from the last census, and in all he hired more than 2,500 employees. He sent them out into the cities and the towns and dispatched them to far corners of the vast and changing Western states.
They learned that fewer than two people per square mile lived in many sections of the West and that the number of American Indians had dropped by 150,000, or more than a third, over the past forty years. Porter and his team also determined that the frontier had been breached and the Pacific reached, and they decided that the Census Bureau would no longer track Western migration. By 1890, the bureau declared, “the unsettled area has been so broken by isolated bodies of settlements that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.” Western movement, the march across a continent, could no longer be measured. The frontier line no longer existed.
Those findings prompted historian Frederick Jackson Turner, in Chicago the summer of the cowboy race and the world’s fair, to mourn the frontier as well. “The frontier has gone,” he stated. “And with its going has closed the first period of American history.” What Turner saw as the significance of the frontier movement was what the immigrants themselves had realized. “They were part of the growing American consciousness of itself,” Turner said. The dream of the West had been lived.
Another historian, Emerson Hough, looked back twenty-five years after that summer of 1893 and the Great Cowboy Race. “The West has changed,” he wrote. “The curtain has dropped between us and its wild and stirring scenes. The old days are gone. The house dog sits on the hill where yesterday the coyote sang.” A lawyer and student of phil
osophy, writing in an age of airplanes and big cities and world war, Hough recognized that the pioneers’ struggles were over, the cowboy roundups ridden. “We had a frontier once,” he wrote. “It was our most priceless possession.” It showed “our fighting edge, our unconquerable resolution, our undying faith. There, for a time at least, we were Americans.”
The journalist Ray Stannard Baker would recall, in his American Chronicle autobiography, what he and his father, a bankrupt Michigan merchant, discovered after immigrating west. “He did not know, and neither did I as a boy, that we were living on the ‘last frontier,’ ” Baker wrote. “There was no longer anywhere in America, or indeed in the world, for the ambitious or the discontented to go for free land, free forests, free rivers, for free opportunity.”
Many of the “children of the West” knew this, too. They had pushed on and settled far away, seeking new adventures; when the Old West ended, much of the thrill went with it. “I sometimes wish I had stayed in Wyoming,” wrote Doris Bowker Bennett, an old woman in 1976, in a memoir of her youth. “I was born and grew up in Wyoming on the edge of the Old West’s last frontier, ‘the West of the authentic Cowboy.’ ” A niece of one of the riders in the Great Cowboy Race, she remembered that “in spite of the rigorous climate and absence of many conveniences, we had what most of the world has lost and some of the country had lost then—a simple world of space, clean air and water, relatively untouched nature, and a sense of community that gave us children security. Although I chose to satisfy my curiosity about the outside world, I am glad that I was born where I was at the time I was. I had a rich childhood.”
The old heroes had moved on, too; many, like Bennett, had left the West altogether. In 1887, Doc Holliday, a dentist turned gunslinger, was put to bed in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, suffering from tuberculosis. He was only thirty-six, and tickled to be dying with his boots off. General Philip “Little Phil” Sheridan, who had led many of the Indian campaigns and helped establish Yellowstone National Park, moved to Washington, D.C., and then to a summer cottage in Massachusetts, a world away from the Old West. There, in 1888, a life of heavy food and hard drinking caught up with him. Overweight and suffering a series of heart attacks, he was gone at fifty-seven. John Charles Frémont, the “Pathfinder” who had blazed the way west for the multitudes who followed, died in 1890 at his home on West Twenty-Fifth Street in New York. He was seventy-seven and had abandoned the frontier years ago. Even when appointed governor of the Arizona Territory, he chose not to move there and was forced to resign.
But some of the old heroes hung with it. As late as September 1907, a journalist for the Columbus Evening Dispatch in Ohio interviewed a famous visitor, a tall, silver-haired gentleman with a pale mustache and deep, searching eyes. He had brought with him his spectacular Wild West troupe of cowboys and Indians in full-dress ensembles, braves who faked the warpath and outlaws pretending to chase a Deadwood stagecoach.
“In all of my journeys,” Buffalo Bill Cody told her, “I have always found that the West is an undiscovered country, and very few have the slightest conception as to what our West really is.” At sixty-one, Buffalo Bill was not yet ready to give up the ghost of the Old West. He aimed to keep it alive, if only in his long-running Wild West show ring. There would always be one more curtain call, he hoped, one more gallop around the arena, one more time to aim and fire at clay pigeons.
“Busy? I’m always busy, but not so much that I cannot stop and talk to a newspaper woman,” he told the reporter. “I could tell you so much of my beloved West that your hair would curl without the aid of a curling iron. Yes, I killed Yellow Hand in single combat. Sorry I did it? Not for the moment. He was one of the most desperate of fighting Indians, the man who supplied buffalo meat to the laborers building the railroad across the continent. But he went with the rest of them on the warpath.”
The reporter thought Cody “particularly handsome.” He knew what he was talking about, she wrote; he spoke in “an emphatic manner.” And Buffalo Bill’s eyes blazed when he praised the glory that had been the Wild West. “Indians! Don’t say Indians to me,” he thundered. “No one knows them better than I. Their friendships, their treachery, their habits of living. There are good and bad ones, and I know the lot of them. Living with them or near them since boyhood leaves little to the imagination.”
Buffalo Bill leaned in toward the reporter. Like any clever promoter, he could be quite a salesman. “You are going to see the show? Yes? Well, let me tell you, it’s a true picture of the West.…”
Buffalo Bill Goes to the Fair
4
William Frederick Cody became “Buffalo Bill,” who became America’s first international celebrity. Born in Iowa, first set on a horse in Kansas, and let loose in Nebraska and the vast regions of the wide-open frontier, he embodied the young country’s drive for greatness. His was a life of hunting buffalo, battling Indians, and, as a showman, reincarnating the epic Western adventure. In slaying the young warrior Yellow Hand, also known as Yellow Hair or, to the Cheyenne, Heova’ehe, Cody claimed the first scalp for Custer after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. In his last days in bed in his sister’s home in Denver, his kidneys shutting down, he still dreamed of one more comeback in his Wild West career. The weary scout died reimagining the glory of his vanishing age.
A colossal figure in buckskin, on horseback or onstage, scoring record buffalo kills on the hunt or blasting clay pigeons in his show arena, Cody helped open the immigrant West and lived well past its closing. Touring Europe and its crowned heads in 1887, he stared in wonder as the British monarch Queen Victoria rose from her place of honor and saluted the U.S. flag streaming past her in his Wild West show. In the Chicago summer of 1893, he saw his show shatter all attendance expectations, often challenging the world’s fair next door, his gate receipts piling up with the thrill of cowboys racing a thousand miles toward his front steps.
Ninety years earlier, Thomas Jefferson had sent Lewis and Clark on their journey of exploration, predicting that it would take a hundred generations to tame and populate the West. Americans conquered it in fewer than five. And during that time Cody championed nearly every turn of the sweeping Western saga.
With his silver mane and far-seeing stare, Buffalo Bill Cody helped to win the West and preserve it as the old frontier life was dying out. (Nebraska State Historical Society)
At twenty-one, he adopted the name “Buffalo Bill” while providing meat for Kansas railroad laborers and claiming 4,280 buffalo kills during an eighteen-month contract. He debuted on the stage in 1873, a year before the first gold nuggets were chipped out of the Black Hills. A decade later, he staged an “Old Glory Blowout” to fete the Fourth of July; the event was so successful it morphed into dress rehearsals for his Wild West shows. And in 1887, Cody marched triumphant into Europe with his marquee Wild West show, while back home the last of the native tribes had been shoved onto the reservation and the West itself was disappearing.
His Wild West was a corporation, his life the Western panorama. Dime novels heralded his exploits, though most of them were mere pulp fiction: Cody fighting a border duel, Cody tracking outlaws in the desert, Cody having it out at the Last Chance mining camp near Flagstaff, Arizona. “Every eye watched Buffalo Bill as he pulled the trigger,” hyped one installment published in the summer of 1893. “All knew that he was a dead shot—a man who never missed a foe or game he fired upon.”
His promoters shrewdly fixed his high brow and his lantern jaw in the fawning spotlight, papering billboards in advance of his traveling show and seizing upon free publicity such as the Great Cowboy Race to pad his box office. They prepared themselves for any turn in the world of show business, even restocking his corrals if the unexpected suddenly tripped them up. When his caravan collided with a freight train in rural North Carolina at four in the morning, upending rail cars and killing 110 horses, Cody’s front men helped lift the show and its entourage back on track.
Boys thrilled to the click of his horses’ hooves,
and old men charmed by his theatrics relived their own dusty memories. Women’s hearts raced when his deep-set eyes lit up like flaming arrows. Known publicly as a family man, Cody nevertheless pursued his opportunities for recreation, including one very public liaison with the daughter-in-law of railroad baron Jay Gould, the one-time “wealthiest man in the world.” Cody’s attempts to leave his wife spilled nastily into the courts; they ended up costing much money and more heartbreak for both him and his long-suffering Louisa, “Lulu,” the mother of his four children. During the summer of 1893 in Chicago, Lulu made an unscheduled visit to see Bill, but she abruptly left town when told his hotel room already was occupied as “Mr. and Mrs. Cody’s suite.” For that indiscretion, Cody returned sheepishly to Nebraska at the end of the 1893 engagement and enthroned his unamused wife in the grandest mansion in North Platte, once owned by a silk merchant and featuring inlaid parquet floors and a sweeping staircase. The palace was dubbed the “Welcome Wigwam.”
Sometimes Buffalo Bill could be well ahead of his time. “What we want to do is give our women even more liberty than they have,” he said at the close of the first American century, endorsing an early cry for women’s equality. “Let them do any kind of work that they see fit, and if they do it as well as men, give them the same pay.” Other times he appeared well past his prime. “I have no future to look forward to,” he wrote his sister Julia, lamenting his failing marriage. “No happiness or even contentment.”
When not at his Scout’s Rest Ranch outside North Platte, appeasing his wife, making a payroll, or entertaining guests in hotel rooms, Cody would turn out in his show ring, galloping about the arena, facing down shrieking Indians on the warpath, and reveling in the drum roll of applauding grandstands. To Cody’s ears, the cheers soared like a frontier aria. If the real West was dead or dying, his Western circus was alive, with hands clapping, crowds hurrahing, feet stomping. A year after his record 1893 run in Chicago, he even stopped at Thomas Edison’s studio in New Jersey, and some of his Indian actors were filmed nearly naked and whooping it up as in the good old days. In one twenty-one-second flicker, they reenacted the famed Lakota Ghost Dance.
American Endurance Page 5