In 1882, Salsbury and his Troubadours appeared for a week at Haverly’s Theatre in Brooklyn. Cody was appearing in New York at the same time, and Salsbury arranged a meeting at a restaurant next to the theater. “Have you ever thought of going big?” Salsbury may have said, knowing that Cody had played out his real-life adventures in theater revues. “I mean very big—as in circus?”
“Yes, indeed, the thought has crossed my mind,” Cody may have replied.
“Well, my friend,” Salsbury went on, “you have packed the house in Delaware, Columbus, and even on Broadway. You have entertained archdukes on the prairie and won the admiration of generals and Presidents. You are a betting man. Don’t you think it’s time for a parlay here? Say, London town? With Queen Victoria and her court in the orchestra section?” Cody liked it, for he knew that the dime novel and his exploits were quite the thing in the Mother Country, and the following summer Salsbury traveled abroad for a look-see, and then returned with his assessment. The plan was most feasible, although it would require much thinking and organizing, and the men talked of the mechanics of such an extravaganza—all the cowboys and Indians they would hire (possibly Sitting Bull was mentioned, a most valuable asset; he had just been transferred to Standing Rock, and therefore might be available), the staff, acquiring the horses and other animals for the “Wild West” (in the original configuration, the term “show” was not attached). There would be much more than two of everything, dozens and dozens more, a Noah’s Ark of the West, and in the grand scheme it would bear the essence of the American myth, not because the men thought of it that way, but because that was the thing that came through.
Meanwhile, a few blocks away or perhaps around the corner, some other citizens were having their own Indian dreams. They too were meeting, perhaps over drinks and a meal, and they were wondering how to prevent the atrocities on the Plains, the assaults on natives, what they could do to save the tribes. “Well, we have Red Cloud and Gall,” someone may have added, for it was true; the well-known leaders had added their names to the new campaign for Indian rights. “It’s made a difference. Congressmen are listening. We have gotten some sympathetic coverage.” Everyone agreed and then someone may have pointed out how necessary it was to have a really big name and the conversation may have turned to Sitting Bull, because they were not unlike other wasichus in certain ways, and ever since he had surrendered, everyone wanted him for their openings, their ceremonies, their cause. And as these various parties conferred about their hopes and dreams for America and their own endeavors, into the harbor chugged a steamer from France, carrying the arm of the Statue of Liberty, soon to be fully erected in New York harbor at Bedloe’s Island. The arm was tall and heavy and it carried the flaming torch of freedom—the thing that was being extinguished for the aboriginals on the Great Plains even as it was coming into full flower for all of the arrivistes.
On May 19, 1883, Buffalo Bill launched his equine extravaganza in Omaha, Nebraska. Nate Salsbury was not involved—although that would soon change. The progenitor of the spectacle that Cody would take into history, it was called The Wild West, WF Cody and WF Carver’s Rocky Mountain and Prairie Exhibition. (Carver was a dentist and sharpshooter who briefly partnered with Cody until he left amid ongoing rancor due to a business dispute, and subsequently launched his own competitive dramas.) Interestingly, the title of the Wild West did not include the word show—it was not presented as something removed from the frontier, but rather as the Wild West itself. Anticipation of the event was keen, as this newspaper account of a dress rehearsal at Buffalo Bill’s Nebraska ranch chronicles:
In the afternoon in company with Mr. [James] McNulty and Hon. W. F. Cody we visited the germ of the great show which is to spring into existence the latter part of this month at Omaha and which will sweep all before it when once fairly started. . . . On a piece of level meadow land was pitched the tents for the men while the buffalo and a large number of horses were grazing in an adjoining pasture. A number of elk were expected in a day or two and men were engaged purchasing the most famous bucking horses that Nebraska afforded. “Buck” Taylor, who is to be one of the star riders of the combination, gave an exhibition on a wall-eyed calico horse that would astonish the effeminate easterners, and if he lives long enough the performance will be repeated for their benefit during the summer. Another wing of the show is getting under way at Omaha, where the Indians will join it, and about the 17th of the present month the western Nebraska wonder will give its opening exhibition at the state’s metropolis.
The actual production was a huge hit, although mules deranged the premiere, panicking while dignitaries in the Deadwood stage came under mock attack from a party of Pawnees. Once the kinks were worked out, Cody and his partner took the show on the road, staging it around the country. Attendance was spotty, and Cody was concerned; at heart he was a businessman and he wondered if he would be able to recoup the large investment he had made in his new endeavor. He was looking forward to a special presentation at the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans, in December of 1884. It would be easy for crowds to attend, he reasoned, as the city had a streetcar. He even planned a finale just for the event, a re-creation of the Battle of New Orleans in which he would play Andrew Jackson. “At least he had the hair,” Ned Sublette wrote in The Year Before the Flood, his book about Hurricane Katrina.
But as it happened, Cody’s plans were thwarted by a shipwreck and another historic flood. He had hired his old pal and cast member Pony Bob Haslam to make travel arrangements. In Cincinnati, Pony Bob secured a steamboat to carry the show down to Louisiana. But the job was above Pony Bob’s pay grade; at stops en route, the Wild West did not fare well, and the tour was losing money every day. “Near Rodney Landing, Mississippi, the showboat collided with another steamer and sank within an hour,” wrote Don Russell in The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill. Wagons, equipment, guns, and ammunition were lost, along with much of the ark’s precious cargo, including buffalo, donkeys, and an elk.
Over the years, as the show gained stature and a bigger cast of people and animals, there would be other, more catastrophic accidents and collisions. This time around, all of the horses were saved, and none of the show’s employees was injured or perished. But Cody was broke and had lost his way—and his production. The Wild West would miss its opening date at the Cotton Expo, and quite possibly the rest of the tour. He telegraphed his former co-conspirator Nate Salsbury, who was appearing with the Troubadors in Denver. “Outfit at bottom of river,” he said, “what do you advise?” As legend has it, Salsbury was about to take the stage and sing when Cody’s message arrived, and asked the orchestra leader to play the overture again so he could think about Cody’s question. “Go to New Orleans,” Salsbury replied, “reorganize, and open on your date.” He himself continued with his show, and so did Cody, rounding up herds of buffalo and elk, and wagons and other equipment within eight days, just in time for the opening.
But there came an Old Testament–style storm and it rained for forty-four days, never once stopping at showtime. The fairgrounds were a quagmire of mud, and one day only nine people bought tickets. A ticket seller wanted to cancel the show, but Cody rejected the idea. “If nine people came out here in all this rain to see us, we’ll go ahead,” he said. Yet in spite of the foul weather, the Daily Picayune praised the show, weighing in with a booster’s report: “The performers include Indians, Mexicans, cowboys and special marksmen and riders. Among the animals are a hundred horses, including all grades from the roughers to the bucking mustang. The entertainment . . . is a dime novel pictured by the heroes themselves. It is much to see Buffalo Bill riding and shooting with a grace and unerring air that belongs to no other.” All in all, the show was “exciting, interesting and of the highest order.”
That winter, the Wild West lost $60,000—no small sum at the time. The cast dispersed for the season, with some of the Indians heading home for spring plowing, and Cody himself planning to head off on a d
runk. “Just to change my luck,” he wrote to Salsbury, “I will paint a few towns red hot—but til then I am staunch and true—with my shoulder to the wheel.” Fortunately for Cody, all was not lost in New Orleans. One day an important figure materialized out of the floodwaters. This was Annie Oakley. She and her husband were in town with the Sells Brothers Circus, and they heard that the Wild West might have a job opening. After she demonstrated her skills, Cody hired her immediately. Together, she and Buffalo Bill would take the frontier spectacle to new heights of glamour and excitement. But that was just the beginning. Cody had been trying to recruit Sitting Bull for nearly two years, ever since his transfer to Standing Rock after his imprisonment at Fort Randall, thereby becoming “available.” Sitting Bull was the one man who could make the show into a guaranteed blockbuster—and the one Indian whose fame was as great as Buffalo Bill’s. Sitting Bull was not interested—until he saw Annie’s picture on postcards for the Wild West. He had never forgotten meeting her in St. Paul, Minnesota. Once he learned that Annie was part of Cody’s show, he was ready to entertain an offer from the wasichu who was also named for the buffalo.
In 1873, a circuit-riding physician and homesteader named Brewster Higley wrote a poem called “My Western Home.” It was published in a Kansas newspaper called The Pioneer. A year later a friend convinced Higley to turn it into a song. A fiddler was rounded up, a tune conceived, and as cowboys came through Kansas, they picked it up and carried it into history. Somewhere along the trail, it became known as “Home on the Range,” and today stands as an unofficial national anthem, with its sonorous refrain about the range as the place where the deer and antelope play, a discouraging word is rarely heard, and the skies are not cloudy all day. But it carried a darker truth, and it went like this:
The red man was pressed from this part of the West,
He’s likely no more to return
To the banks of Red River where seldom if ever
Their flickering campfires burn.
At some point, that verse disappeared. But it would be reenacted in the Wild West, where cowboys and Indians were running away together, accompanied by the traveling thunder of the American dreamtime.
CHAPTER THREE
In Which the Seventh Cavalry Is Defeated at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and Buffalo Bill Stars as Himself in “The Red Right Hand, or the First Scalp for Custer”
On April 20, 1876, two months before the Battle of the Little Bighorn would claim George Armstrong Custer and transform Sitting Bull into America’s Most Wanted Man, William Cody was about to go onstage in Springfield, Massachusetts. He was touring in a play called Life on the Border, along with his compadre J. B. Omohundro, whose cowboy role was “Texas Jack.” The theater company—“Cody’s Combination”—also included assorted ruffian and Native American characters. It would be several years before the officially designated Wild West show emerged, but this play, and others like it, had the hallmarks of the great spectacle to come, with Cody playing himself in an early re-creation of American life. In these touring productions, Cody and the cast were portraying events that had just happened, including shootouts, buffalo hunts with foreign dignitaries and prominent Americans, and battles with Indians. Although the players were usually critically panned—they weren’t acting, after all; they were just being themselves—this play and others like it were hugely popular. Audiences loved the rawness, the authenticity, and Cody himself had serious charisma—the kind that always fills a house, wherever it is and whatever is being presented.
As the curtain opened on the first scene on that night in Springfield, Cody was presented with a telegram from his wife, Louisa. His beloved son, Kit, Kit Carson Cody, named after the famous scout and friend of Buffalo Bill’s, had been diagnosed with scarlet fever. He did not have long to live. Cody finished the first act, and then rushed to catch the overnight train for his home, which was now in Rochester, New York.
“I found my little boy unable to speak,” Cody wrote of his six-year-old in his Autobiography, “but he seemed to recognize me and putting his little arms round my neck he tried to kiss me. We did everything in our power to save him.” But Kit died in his father’s arms and was soon buried in Mount Hope cemetery. A bereaved Cody missed the next performance in Worcester, where the local paper said that “Without Buffalo Bill, the play, which is not a high order in itself, is a poor affair.” He soon rejoined the tour for a final performance and bow in Wilmington, Delaware, still subdued and grieving.
Another drama—the Indian wars on the plains—was heating up and Cody was summoned by the Fifth Cavalry to reprise his longtime role as scout. It was something he generally did in the summers anyway, after his acting career began to take off, reserving theater performances for the colder months of the year when the plains were covered in ice and snow and it was preferable to be inside. But he was also happy to leave his domestic life. Being a husband and father were kind of adjunct roles for him, not that they didn’t take up significant time, and not that he didn’t love his children, and perhaps his wife in a certain way. Quite simply, he was not essentially sustained by that part of his life. Still, after his son died, he was so distraught that he did not feel up to performing. Comfort would be found in the wilderness, in action in it and on it, and there he went, retreating to the place he knew best, the terrain he himself played in as a boy and where later he found some of his best friends.
When looking at history, we tend to forget or are not aware of the fact that a particular luminary lives and thrives among a circuit of people—not just a list of names—and that these people are friends and acquaintances much as you or I would have today. For Cody, this circuit consisted of the well-known and the ordinary, white men and natives, artists and writers, kings and queens, generals, foot soldiers, trappers, hunters, miners, settlers, and all manner of frontier entrepreneurs and drifters. A particularly celebrated member of Cody’s circuit was Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, the Civil War hero known for his numerous charges on the battlefield, and now, at the height of the Indian wars, a figure both revered and reviled in his capacity as leader of the Seventh Cavalry under General Philip Sheridan, another celebrated Civil War figure.
Cody himself had served in the Civil War as a scout for the Union, first in campaigns against the Kiowa and Comanche who were “in the way” as the army advanced into Texas and New Mexico, and then later in the Seventh Kansas Cavalry, where he guided troops through swaths of Missouri and Tennessee. When the war was over, he continued his work as an army scout, based out of Fort Ellsworth, Kansas. It was during his years in that role that he met Custer, and the two men, along with General Sheridan, went on to host the most famous buffalo hunt of the era—and perhaps the most celebrated hunt in American history. It was because of the bonds formed during this hunt, especially between Cody and Custer, that Cody would go on to avenge Custer’s death at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Later, he incorporated the scene of vengeance into his Wild West program.
Thanks to newspapers, the burgeoning cult of celebrity worship, and an abiding American urge to leave civilization and go wild, organized buffalo hunts on the frontier were becoming de rigueur, especially if the pursuit was led by a wilderness icon such as Buffalo Bill. In 1871, Cody and Sheridan had hosted a much talked about hunt that was kind of the warm-up for a coming extravaganza. This first one, for East Coast bigwigs, came to be known as “The Millionaires’ Hunt.” It included prominent financiers, lawyers, reporters, and newspaper publishers. “One of the most glamorous hunting parties in the history of the Plains,” Louis Warren observed in his book Buffalo Bill’s America, “it expressed the confluence between the urban power elite of the East and Midwest, the U.S. army, and sport hunting on the Great Plains.” For the occasion, Buffalo Bill selected his clothing carefully. As Cody himself said in a kind of Twainesque way, it was “a nobby and high-toned outfit which I was to accompany.” With members of the party awaiting his arrival, he made a grand entrance from the Fort McPherson stagin
g grounds in Nebraska, sending at least one man into a linguistic reverie that today one might read in Vanity Fair runway coverage.
On the first morning, recounted Henry Davies, a district attorney from New York, Cody rode down on a white horse, dressed in a light buckskin suit, “trimmed along the seams with fringes of the same leather, his costume lighted by the crimson shirt worn under his open coat, a broad sombrero on his head, and carrying his rifle lightly in one hand, as his horse came toward us on an easy gallop.” Davies’ elaborate description of Cody’s attire was included in full accounts of the hunt, which were published around the country, adding to the flamboyant plainsman’s allure. It was almost a century after the thirteen colonies had thrust off the shackles of royalty, but America was developing its own. The cast included frontier icons, and Buffalo Bill would soon be the king. The hunting extravaganza that sent Cody into the stratosphere was the Royal Buffalo Hunt, so named for its star member, Grand Duke Alexis Alexandrovich, the fourth son of Russian Czar Alexander II. Wanting to leverage a business arrangement between America and Russia, and harboring a serious desire to meet Buffalo Bill and accompany him into the wild, the duke and his entourage had set sail for America in August of 1872; in September, he arrived at Falmouth, England, and from there was escorted by a Russian battle fleet to New York harbor. There he debarked in November with much fanfare. On the 21st of that month, he began a quintessential tour of America, attending a Thanksgiving service at the Russian chapel in downtown Manhattan, and in the following days went on a shopping spree with a stop at Tiffany’s. He then traveled to a host of other cities, including Springfield, Massachusetts, home of the Smith & Wesson factory, where he was presented with a pistol; Cleveland, Ohio, where he visited the iron mills of outlying Newburgh Heights; Buffalo, New York, to see Niagara Falls; and Washington, D.C., for a state dinner with President U. S. Grant. From there, he hopscotched around the continent, arriving by train in North Platte, Nebraska, in January of 1872, where he would live his dream, joining Buffalo Bill and other iconic Western figures on a buffalo hunt, including the famous military men Sheridan and Custer, now leading the war against the Indians of the Great Plains.
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