The writings of others in his circle, much of which was designed to promote him and some of which was borne of resentment or other unreliable seeds, betray little underlying feeling. But we do know that he was a man of action, and that tells us much, especially when the record is examined closely. He was also a man of his time, and in that regard he had a not uncommon rough-and-tumble childhood involving violence and bloodshed. He took it all in stride, and later he quelled his demons with lots of liquor—a fact of life during an era when self-reflection was hardly a social convention. Who can say how much the fog of whiskey shrouded his secret longings and wounds and fears? One way or another, in Cody’s later years, it was apparent that his demons were mighty, try as he would to right some very large wrongs.
Before the term was forever linked to his name, William F. Cody grew up in the Wild West. Once, he was a boy, not a superstar, not named for the animal that he would kill by the thousands (others, for the record, killed more), but just a boy who played with Indians on the Great Plains, perhaps even members of Sitting Bull’s extended tribe who would pass through territory near his home in Kansas as they followed the buffalo. So too, by his own account, did he kill an Indian in his youth (and others later), while he was employed as a wagon train hand. But of course he was not aware that the curtain would soon fall on their way of life—and that he would participate in that last act as well as try to preserve what came before. Once he was just a boy, who helped his struggling family eke out a living on the frontier, as many children of the era did, engaging in tasks and acts that would now violate every child labor law on the books. En route, he learned a keen sense of justice from his father, who became embroiled in the great abolitionist struggle of the day, ultimately speaking out against slavery—an act that would have consequences.
William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody was born near Le Claire, Iowa, on February 26, 1846. Although associated via name with the iconic animal which would later represent the West as the Department of the Interior symbol and on the nickel, Cody was first and foremost a horseman, one of the best of his era. Galloping steeds and the men who rode thunder were the driving force behind the Wild West show, which included few scenes of men on foot. Quite simply, horses were the defining part of Cody’s life, as they were for many in his time. Beyond that, although he and his future employee and friend Sitting Bull both carried the buffalo in their names, it would be through the horse—specifically a dramatic act initiated by Buffalo Bill—that their time together in the theater of the West would be finalized in the most haunting of ways.
Young William F. Cody learned and absorbed all aspects of horse culture in Le Claire, where his father, Isaac, managed large farms for absentee owners, including the six-hundred-acre farm known as Breckenridge Place, after a state senator. Isaac was contracted to survey it and build a large stone house in which he and his family could live. “Young Billy followed his father everywhere,” wrote his sister Julia Cody Goodman years later in one of several biographies of her brother. “To break the land, 25 separate plows were used, each drawn by a yoke of oxen, one driver to each team. Other men followed, dropping seed corn into the fresh furrows. Behind both crews rode Mr. Cody, with Billy perched on the saddle horn, watching the long line of ox teams creep slowly across the field—turning 25 ribbons of green earth downward. As the boy and his father rode back and forth, up and down, they could hear other men, all strong, sturdy, dependable German laborers, working in the quarry, getting stone for the new house.” Beyond the farm, another world called. There were thick forests, full of bears, wild hogs, deer, and wildcats, and young Will was enraptured, gazing wide-eyed “as wild deer raced down from the bluffs and skipped effortlessly over the fences” their father had built around the farm.
Life was a kind of wilderness school, and Will was a natural student, studying the woods and animals and how they moved on the land. But it was to horses that he seemed most drawn. In addition to managing farms, his father ran a stagecoach business between Davenport and Chicago. With his six siblings, Cody would stand on the riverbank and watch his father’s horse-drawn coach pass by—perhaps an early seed for a scene he would later re-create in his show in a much more dramatic fashion involving a famous stagecoach from Deadwood. Recalling his first experience as an equestrian, Cody later wrote that “Somehow or other I had managed to corner a horse near a fence, and had climbed on his back. The next moment the horse got his back up and hoisted me into the air. I fell violently to the ground, striking upon my side in such a way as to severely wrench and strain my arm, from the effects of which I did not recover for some time. I abandoned the art of horsemanship for a while.” A year later his father let William ride one of his horses.
In 1853, his oldest brother, Sam, who was twelve, was killed by a bucking mare. The family was devastated. According to some accounts, Will himself was involved in a violent incident of his own around this time, brawling with the class bully in the schoolyard in order to impress a girl, and finally slashing him in the leg with his Bowie knife. “I’ve been killed,” the fellow called out, but Cody the young hunter could tell that he wasn’t, and their schoolmates staunched the bleeding with rags. A teacher punished Cody with a hazel switch, and then he fled the scene, returning later with friends to confront the teacher and the bully. The frightened teacher dismissed the class and fled as well. Meanwhile, the girl for whom Cody had fought was said to be duly impressed, gazing longingly at him as she left with the class.
A year later, the Codys moved from the scene of their family tragedy to the Kansas Territory, declared open for settlement by Congress, with settlers permitted to vote up or down on the question of slavery. “Northern abolitionists hurried from Illinois to fight the pro-slavery Missourians rushing in from the South. They fought with gun and Bowie knife,” wrote Henry Blackman Sell and Victor Weybright in Buffalo Bill and the Wild West. Taken by their six horses—four pulling a wagon filled with the family’s goods and two pulling the stage that carried the family—they were among the earliest white settlers. A relative named Horace Billings continued Cody’s education in things equestrian, teaching him to ride a small, fast horse named Little Gray that the family had purchased along the way. “I made rapid advances in the art of horsemanship,” Cody later wrote. It was a skill the young man soon put to good use.
When the Codys arrived in Kansas, the territory was roiling with the question of slavery. “A brutal and quarrelsome breed of men had followed the Codys into the Salt Creek Valley, where they settled,” wrote Sell and Weybright. “ ‘If I had my way, I’d hang every Abolitionist!’ screamed an editor named Stringfellow from the Missouri side of the river. ‘And everyone born north of the Mason-Dixon line is an Abolitionist!’ At his behest a mob of horsemen rode into the valley and declared that slavery was ‘thereby instituted in the Territory of Kansas.’ ” Some locals announced that the state was ungovernable, like hell, and others vowed to wipe out abolitionist strongholds such as Lawrence. In 1856, the question of slavery exploded once again when “a pro-slavery mob swarmed into town, wrecking and burning the hotel and newspaper office” in Lawrence, Robert A. Carter noted in his book Buffalo Bill Cody. Three days later, John Brown led his infamous antislavery raid in which a band of abolitionists besieged pro-slavery settlers, dragging five of them from their homes and hacking them to death. This was a signpost on the way to the Civil War. Three weeks after that, a ripped-from-the-headlines drama called Osawatomie Brown (referring to John Brown) opened on Broadway. It was one of various presentations blazing the trail for Cody, the future stage attraction.
The heated scenes that played out over slavery in the Kansas Territory soon involved Cody’s father. Like many new settlers, Isaac Cody was against slavery, though he did not seem to make a point of it. But he had a reputation as a good public speaker, and one day, shortly after the family arrived, when he was riding past Rively’s Trading Post, the site of many a debate, he was dragooned into giving a speech against a resolution that sanctioned
slaveholding and outlawed abolitionists. “I believe in letting slavery remain as it now exists,” he said from atop a box amid the noisy crowd. He meant that it had no place in the Kansas Territory. “And I shall oppose its further extension. These are my sentiments, gentlemen, and let me tell you—”
“You black Abolitionist!” someone shouted. “Get off that box!” came another cry, and he was hauled down as someone pulled a Bowie knife and then he was stabbed twice in the chest.
In his first autobiography (there were several), published in 1879, Cody wrote that “his father shed the first blood in the cause of freedom in Kansas.” After the attack, a neighbor came to Isaac’s rescue, according to some accounts, and took him to a nearby cabin. In another account, written years later by Cody’s sister Helen Cody Wetmore, Will sprang to his father as he fell, “and turning to the murderous assailant, cried out in boyhood’s fury: ‘You have killed my father. When I’m a man, I’ll kill you.’ ” Then, supported by Will, “father dragged his way homeward, marking his tortured progress with a trail of blood.” Although this is one of various stories about Buffalo Bill that has been disputed, or recounted in several ways, its essence would seem to be accurate, which is to say that Cody’s father was indeed attacked as he proclaimed an anti-slavery position amid a pro-slavery crowd, given a newspaper article published in the apparently pro-slavery Democratic Platform of Liberty, Missouri, on September 28, 1854: “A Mr. Cody, a noisy abolitionist, living near Salt Creek, in Kansas Territory, was severely stabbed while in a dispute about a claim with a Mr. Dunn, on Monday week last. Cody is severely hurt, but not enough it is feared to cause his death. The settlers on Salt Creek regret that his wound is not more dangerous, and all sustain Mr. Dunn in the course he took. Abolitionists will yet find ‘Jordan a hard road to travel!’ ”
From then on, Isaac Cody’s house was a site of Free Kansas rallies, and the family was harassed by pro-slavery neighbors in nearby Missouri. But Isaac was determined to stake his claim in Kansas Territory, and in 1857 traveled east to recruit settlers for a colony he was building in Grasshopper Falls. “As a result,” Cody’s sister Helen later wrote, “our house overflowed, while the land about us was white with tents; but these melted away as one by one the families selected claims and put up cabins.” Perhaps this was a blueprint or inspiration for an aspect of Cody’s Wild West spectacle, serving as instruction for how to organize large numbers of people in the makings of a sprawling tent city. In any case, Isaac’s activities continued to agitate his enemies. “One night,” Will recalled later, “a body of armed men, mounted on horses, rode up to our house and surrounded it.” His father escaped by dressing in his wife’s clothes and making his way through a pack of mounted vigilantes, then hiding in a cornfield. Later, gangs from Missouri torched the Codys’ hay field and stole their horses, including Prince, a favored sorrel.
“The loss of my faithful pony nearly broke my heart,” Cody said later. Death threats against Isaac continued, and there were ongoing raids on the property. One night as ten-year-old Will lay in bed with the flu, his mother roused him and told him of a plot to kill his father. “The boy arose and clambered onto a horse,” Louis Warren reports in Buffalo Bill’s America. Cody carried a letter about the plot to his father, who was several hours away in Grasshopper Falls. After riding eight miles, young Cody realized he was being followed. “The boy put his heels to his horse, and for nine more miles the men chased the sick and terrified child,” Warren recounts. “He finally reined up at the home of a family friend . . . the would-be assassins turned and fled. . . . The animal was covered in lather, and flecked with the boy’s vomit.”
Shortly after this episode, Isaac returned home. A wave of scarlet fever and measles had broken out in the tent settlement on his property, due to overcrowding. While working with the new arrivals in the rain, Isaac Cody contracted pneumonia. Weak since the stabbing at the trading post, he soon died. It was 1857 and William Cody was ten years old. He had watched his father stand up to bullies and take an unpopular, even life-threatening, stand. Beyond that, he had tried to save him, riding hard across miles of rough terrain to head off his father’s assassins. Like many a frontier child, he was a crack shot and a good rider. “I thought these qualities might earn me a living,” Cody wrote in True Tales of the Plains many years later. “They did.” He became the principal breadwinner for a family of six—not so unusual for the offspring of hardscrabble frontier families. He would later provide employment for many who experienced a similar rugged upbringing.
After Cody’s father died, young Bill went to work herding cattle with a mule as a small mount. His next job was serving as an “extra” on a wagon train headed by a friend of Cody’s father, based out of Leavenworth. He earned good money and graduated from playing with Indians to killing one—or so he wrote. “The pay was $40 a month,” Cody recounted, “a fortune it seemed to me then. The work was the sort usually entrusted to a grown man, and it meant not only perpetual hustling, but a lot of danger as well. For the plains in those days were anything but free from Indians. This latter thought frightened even my brave mother. Boy-like, I was delighted at the idea.”
This job was essentially a tryout; if Cody did well, he would be hired on a permanent basis. As it turned out, Cody demonstrated that he was both a worthy hired hand and someone who would not shy away from life-or-death battle. The wagon train to which he was attached generally served the army and was usually a large one, with twenty-five wagons each carrying seven thousand pounds, each drawn by six yoke of oxen and guided by a bull-whacker, with loose cattle in tow. On Cody’s audition, the train was smaller, consisting of three wagons, and the men were driving a large herd to Fort Kearny for the use of Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston and his command, who were on their way to Salt Lake City to fight the Mormons. His experiences as a young boy helping his father drive the teams of oxen at Breckenridge Place would serve him well. As one of several extras, Cody’s duties “were to assist in driving and herding the cattle,” he reported in one of his autobiographies, “and to make myself generally useful when we pitched camp. It was a busy trip till we came to Plum Creek, thirty-five miles west of Fort Kearny. Though we always set guard, no Indians had appeared.”
But stopped for dinner one noon, Cody and his crew were “loafing on the grass, waiting for the pot to boil.” They heard a volley of shots and some bullets and arrows whistled by. At the first shot, everyone jumped, but three of the men immediately fell. Two bands of Indians were racing for Cody and the other hands. One band ran off the cattle and the other rushed the men. Briefly repelled, the Indians were joined by others, soon outnumbering the wagon hands eight or ten to one. “We bolted for the South Platte River with the savages at our heels,” Cody wrote, and then the men sheltered behind the banks, firing at the Indians. “I blazed away with the best of them,” Cody said, “but in the confusion no one could tell whether he or someone else dropped the man he fired at.”
To get to safety at Fort Kearny the men followed the Platte, staying hidden under the riverbanks. Knee-deep in water and quicksand, they began a thirty-five-mile march, keeping it up for half a day. “By nightfall,” Cody wrote, “my short legs wouldn’t keep up with the procession. I dropped back, little by little, still plodding on as fast as my aching feet could move. We thought we had given the Indians the slip, but I still lugged my rifle, a muzzle-loading ‘Mississippi Jaeger,’ and carried a slug and two buckshot to each charge.”
The moon had risen and Cody was trying to catch up with the rest of the men. Suddenly, against the moon and high above him on a riverbank, Cody spotted the head and war bonnet of a chief. His gun was leveled at Cody’s compadres, and they did not see him. Cody halted, aimed, locked on to a spot just below the feathers on the bonnet, and pulled the trigger. The report echoed from bank to bank, and the chief tumbled down over the edge, “rolling over like a shot rabbit,” Cody wrote, landing in the water. The Indians swarmed the bank, but the men drove them back. The following dawn, Cody a
nd the others limped into Fort Kearny. Some soldiers set out for the Indians, but the search was fruitless. Next to the wrecked and looted wagons, the men found the slashed and scalped bodies of their dead brothers.
It was a turning point; now Cody the boy was a warrior, and it was announced to all. “The proudest minute I’d ever known,” he wrote, “came when Frank McCarthy swung me up on his shoulder and announced to everyone in the barracks: ‘Boys, Billy’s downed his first Injun! And the kid couldn’t have made a prettier job of it if he’d been a thirty-year scout!’ ” It was an unofficial ritual, though not unlike the more formal one in which Sitting Bull’s prowess as a warrior was proclaimed by an uncle after a skirmish in which the young boy felled a member of a rival tribe.
Soon Cody would in fact become an army scout, but for now, one of his next jobs was riding for the Pony Express. He signed on at the age of fourteen. Certainly, his midnight ride to warn his father had prepared him for this part of his career. Later, it would become one of the key elements of the showman’s official biography, as well as of the Wild West show itself, although various investigators of Cody’s life have suggested that the Pony Express part of his story is exaggerated if not an outright lie. But his accounts have the ring of truth, unlike some of the more florid tales, and being a Pony Express rider (“Orphans Preferred”) was a likely vocation for someone with Cody’s background. After his stint as a pony-bound messenger, he later claimed that he made a 322-mile ride—the third longest in the history of the mail service. (The longest ride was 384 miles and was made by Bob Haslam, whom Buffalo Bill would later hire for his Wild West show, in the persona of “Pony Bob.”)
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