"It can't be done. It takes us days just to set up."
"That's what Barnum said, but I showed him how to scale down and take on a specially equipped circus train and doubled the circus's profits the first year."
"The Wild West is an historical event, not a circus. I'll not have it scaled down."
"I'm talking about padding, unnecessary duplication. Trick riders and trick shots, when we should be hiring performers who are both. And Will, have you ever in your life fired anyone? The publicity train alone is almost as long as the whole rest of the organization."
"That's Major Burke's department. Talk to Arizona John."
"Arizona John hates my guts. It will have to come from you."
"I'll not have him hate mine."
Bailey's spectacles reflected the scout's drawn features. "That's your trouble, Colonel. You're too decent for the show business."
Will walked in on Salsbury taking pills in his sleeping compartment and told him of the exchange.
"Hear him out, Colonel. He may have a point." The manager had taken to calling Will almost exclusively by his military title.
"You weren't there, Nate. He holds decency a fault."
"There are as many indecent successes as there are decent failures."
The scout left under a darker cloud than he had carried in with him. Bailey entered minutes later and presented his side of the argument.
"He has a skull as thick as a bull buffalo's and the business sense of a sixteen-year-old," Salsbury agreed. "For ten years I've been afraid to let him out of my sight, thinking he'll get in one of his generous moods and give those bloodsuckers he calls his pards shares in the show free gratis. I've spent hundreds of hours when I should have been working listening to his stories about Kit Carson and Wild Bill and all the rest and he's never told any of them the same way twice. I never know when he's giving me the straight of it. Now it's your turn, Jim. Why do you think I brought you in?"
"I assumed it was because you liked my ideas for improving the show."
"That's what I told the Colonel. I don't think he believed it any more than you do."
"You feel that way, why didn't you offer to sell me all of your interest instead of just half!"
"Because in spite of all our differences the Colonel and I are a prosperous match." He tunked the cork back in his pill bottle. "And because I like him. God help me, I like the silly prancing son of a bitch."
In this accelerated year of 1893 the Chicago World's Fair pulled in more people than had ever assembled in one spot in United States history. Their buggies and carriages invented the traffic jam on State Street and Michigan Boulevard, they hung out of trolleys and stood in the aisles of the Illinois Central, their combined weight strained the fresh construction of the elevated railway built just for them and threatened to swamp lake steamers paddling to and from the Loop. Fair organizers reported sadly that there wasn't room for the Wild West on the grounds. Rallying to the occasion, Salsbury leased a large empty lot across Sixty-third Street from the main entrance and had Arizona John announce that the show would be open seven days a week including Sundays, when the fair was closed. Between the end of April and the end of September, six million people came to boo the Indians and watch the glass balls burst.
"Ladies and gentlemen, permit me to introduce to you a congress of the rough riders of the world."
A magician's sweep of the great white Stetson, swelling ground, and then the charge of the feathered braves—Sioux, Arapahos, Pawnees, and Cheyennes aboard ponies painted bright as hobby horses, fresh-looking scalps braided into their manes and tails; behind them the black beards and fluttering pantaloons of the Cossacks on their great Arabs; Victoria's parade-dress lancers; Wilhelm's Potsdamer Reds in their plumed scarlet helmets and matching tunics; the U.S. Cavalry, slouch-hatted and gauntleted; Mexican vaqueros in black velvet and silver lace; American cowboys in chaps and kerchiefs; gauchos from the Argentine, whirling their deadly bolos; the clash and clatter of French cuirassiers in archaic breastplates; the loose order of the Texas Rangers under the Lone Star flag. Spectators punished their palms and unlimbered Kodaks to capture the event. The popular little black boxes bled color from the Pony Express recreation and petite Annie Oakley shattering her old sharp-shooting records, blurred the Sioux raid on the wagon train and the "Cowboy Fun" of the rodeo. In the smaller tents surrounding the big top, the fans bought autographed pictures and Prentiss Ingraham's Buffalo Bill dime novels—now selling for a quarter apiece—in case lots. Reporters fluttered around Arizona John and his six-foot Oglalas, pumping Chief Rain-in-the-Face for the details of how he killed George Custer's brother Tom at the Last Stand. "The white longhair's pup brother slap and kick me at guardhouse in Fort Lincoln. I wait. I take hair." He posed for pictures leaning on crutches.
Will held open house in his Chicago hotel. Johnny Baker, a man grown now, wearing the Cody uniform of shoulder-length hair and buckskins—"Johnny" only to Will, who when he looked at the other's lean frame and clean square jaw still saw an underfed boy holding a squirrel rifle—came with his new wife and stood by grinning while the old man spent an afternoon charming the young woman, who had come expecting a swaggering Indian killer with whiskey breath and came away in love with him. In the buggy on their way back to their own hotel, she went on about the scout's polished manners and the strikingly beautiful woman who had graced the opposite end of the table. "You didn't tell me he had such a young wife," she chided.
"He doesn't," said Johnny, and changed the subject.
The woman's name was Viola Katherine Clemmons. A British actress of small renown when they had met on the Wild West's second appearance in London, she was taller and trimmer than Louisa and wore her golden hair pressed into flat curls on either side of a careful part in the center. Will liked her soft accent and the way she listened to his stories with wide eyes and many innocent questions, demonstrating an interest that his wife had long since ceased to pretend. They had begun meeting in secret, but with the suitor's likeness plastered on every outside wall between Gravesend and Soho they had soon abandoned the grotesque charade, and photographs of the two attending the opera and theater, the old scout grinning as if at gunpoint as he helped her out of carriages and opened doors for her, appeared in newspapers throughout the empire. In spite of Arizona John's Herculean efforts to prevent it, rumors of the affair made their way across the ocean to Louisa. Will had accepted her shrill harangue upon his return, and in the boldness of his injured pride cabled Viola boat fare to America. When she complained that she had no work waiting for her there, he made contact with a New York theatrical agent and offered to back a play, any play, that would star Viola Katherine Clemmons. By his own reckoning he had spent in excess of fifty thousand dollars on properties for his new love.
In his haste to get back to the hotel and Viola, Will strode rapidly through camp, puffing a cigar and trailing reporters scrambling to match his pace and write in their pads at the same time.
"Is it true that when you met the Pope at the Vatican you offered him a spot with the Wild West?"
He steered them toward Nate Salsbury and the Bedouin horsemen the partners had brought back from the Mediterranean, and slipped away while Salsbury was showing off his studied Arabic with a tall chieftain in burnoose and beard. Twice visitors stopped the scout to have their pictures taken with Buffalo Bill. Just in time he spotted Arizona John heading his way with more reporters and ducked through the Indian camp, approaching his own tent from the rear. There he shook hands with the shiny-eyed children gathered around the entrance and invited them inside to touch Yellow Hand's scalp and examine his ornate Colts. The tent was always full of children, the boys all looking like Kit, dead these seventeen years.
Chapter Fifteen
"I'm obliged, Mr. Beck, but I had my fill of founding towns back in '68," Will said. George T. Beck shook his large pink head. "It won't be like that, Colonel. We anticipate a thriving resort trade from the hot springs nearby, so there would be nothing gain
ed from moving to another site even if we wanted to, which of course we wouldn't without notifying all our people. I have other investors interested in the irrigation project, including Mrs. Phoebe Apperson Hearst, mother of the New York newspaperman, and I am opening negotiations with the Burlington Railroad to build a branch line into town. I lack only fifty thousand dollars and a name like yours to get the show on the road, so to speak, heh-heh." The developer unsheathed prominent teeth in a premature ejaculation of a grin.
"What are you fixing to call the place, Mr. Beck?"
"Shoshone, after the river that will provide the water."
Will leveled off their glasses from the amber bottle on the desk in his study. "I like it," he said, raising his glass.
"Damned if I don't."
They started building at the foot of Carter Mountain in northwestern Wyoming in the spring of 1895. They laid out hundred-foot-wide streets for fire control, built a hundred and fifty miles, of sluices, threw up a commissary building for the graders and carpenters and a schoolhouse for their children. Will came to inspect the site, erected a cabin on the mountain, and wired Bill Goodman for ranch funds to buy more land in the vicinity. When Goodman explained that every cent was tied up in the operation of Scout's Rest, his brother-in-law asked Nate Salsbury for five thousand dollars.
"I don't know, Colonel," the manager demurred. "The residents aren't going to like having to pay a quarter a barrel to ship water down from the Shoshone River."
"That's just till we get the sluices working. The loam there is twenty-one-feet deep. Farmers will be able to stand out in the field and watch their crops grow. Tell you what, I'll sell everything I own to pay you if we fail to make money next summer."
Salsbury made out a bank draft for the requested amount. "I hope you're not planning to approach Bailey with the same offer," he warned, rocking a blotter over his signature. "He'll believe you."
The investors applied to Washington for a post office, but the Postmaster General, who had an existing office on the Shoshone Indian Reservation, vetoed the name. The partners put their heads together and made a happy decision. They called the town Cody.
Will sent for Louisa and Irma, who toured the sawdust-smelling city and the country beyond in an open carriage while the proud founder pointed out the site of the future Irma Hotel and the sulphur springs where Indians once bathed to rid themselves of evil spirits, and talked about the stagecoach stops he would construct along the road to Yellowstone National Park to house tourists. Louisa wasn't impressed.
"The only difference I see between this place and Rome, Kansas, is there are no savages," she said. "No red ones anyway."
"I was younger and dumber then, Mama. This time it will be me using the railroad instead of the other way around. The spur will go in along that ridge yonder."
"William, you're fifty years old. When will you grow up?" She and Irma left for North Platte the next morning.
The old scout's cabin was always full of guests who came to dip their pale bodies in the hot springs and hunt elk and bighorn sheep. One, an abrasive young Easterner with a barrel chest, beribboned spectacles, and an overwhelming energy to match Will's own, would bare his wealth of teeth in a friendly grimace as he wrung the other guests' hands, then proceed to lead the unfortunates assigned to his hunting party gasping up steep mountainsides and wading across swift-running streams and thrashing through dense undergrowth from first light to last, holding forth all the while on the virtues of the strenuous life. He would then stay up half the night drinking whiskey and discussing the ranch business and the growing trouble in Cuba with Will, retire for two hours, and be up again at dawn for another foray into the wilderness. Few of the survivors remembered his odd name, but their host called him Teedie and introduced him as the Police Commissioner of New York City. Nate Salsbury, now a full partner in the Cody project (albeit a reluctant one), stayed at the cabin only one night. When his partner and the neighboring Earl of Portsmouth tired of shooting playing cards out of each other's hands and started standing tin cans on their heads, the ailing manager of the Wild West chose to spend the remainder of his visit amid the comparative peace of the clattering hammers and creaking wagon springs in town.
Show members trooped in and out of the cabin between seasons. Annie Oakley and Frank Butler shot the heads off running squirrels in the surrounding woods. Johnny Baker showed off his two small daughters, much to the astonishment of Will and the delight of the childless markswoman, who had her picture taken with the girls. Viola Katherine Clemmons declined Will's invitation politely, wiring from Chicago that she was tied up in rehearsals for a play he was financing. He consoled himself with some of the women his hunting guests brought with them, brass-laughtered Denver sirens with hard faces behind the paint and southern belles in ruffles with honey voices and dollar signs in their eyes. Good times and whiskey flowed freely on Carter Mountain.
Not so water. The workers digging the sluices fought mosquitoes and each other and hacked their way through roots and broke their shovels against rock and cut up the construction gang's faces in the Cody saloon over the games and women in back. When gold was discovered in Alaska, many of them collected their pay for a stake and bought passage to San Francisco and points north. The manpower reserve dried up almost overnight. The developers asked the investors for more money with which to advertise for laborers and raise wages. Will was among the first to kick in with funds borrowed from Jim Bailey and from the banks against Welcome Wigwam and Scout's Rest.
Nate Salsbury kept out of it. On the advice of physicians he had cut his schedule in half, heaping most of the managerial responsibilities on Bailey, who was busy streamlining the show for one-night stands. Will took his mind off this blasphemy and his own problems of the heart by pouring more money into Cody. He bought land, advertised back East for customers, shipped in a printing press from Duluth and established the town's first newspaper, the Shoshone Valley News. Prospective buyers jammed the buggies and traps he placed at their disposal, thronged the bar six deep to "have one on Buffalo Bill"—and went home with their bank balances intact.
"The freeloaders always precede the serious investors," George T. Beck encouraged his famous partner in a letter that caught up with the Wild West in Brooklyn during the 1897 season. Will didn't answer.
The warship Maine blew up and sank in Havana Harbor just as rehearsals were getting under way for spring. When McKinley declared war against Spain and Will's old friend Teedie recruited some cowboys from the Wild West for a cavalry regiment he planned to lead to Santiago de Cuba, borrowing the name "Rough Riders," Arizona John persuaded his employer to issue a statement to the press that if the Army would place him in command of six hundred Sioux braves he would bring the war to a victorious conclusion within weeks. "It would be like getting back at Spain for '89," he pressed.
"All right, write out something and I'll sign her," said the Colonel distractedly, inspecting his loads. He forgot about the conversation by the end of the week.
"John! Arizona John!"
Young Dexter Fellows, an earnest-faced former journalist who had assumed much of the rheumatic Burke's publicity burden, hastened to the tent with the scout's head sticking out through the tent flap. "Get the major," Will snapped.
The publicist appeared moments later, puffing away in a gray flannel undershirt with the dickey and cuffs he wore in place of a shirt under his jackets. Will thrust the telegram under his nose.
WAR DEPARTMENT
WASHINGTON DC
COLONEL CODY:
DELIGHTED TO WELCOME YOUR EXPEDITIONARY FORCE CUBA STOP WHEN CAN YOU COME ACCEPT YOUR COMMISSION
GENERAL NELSON A. MILES
"Now what, John? I'm up to my ass in bookings and you got me drafted." He stuffed his paunch into a pair of canvas riding breeches and struggled to button them.
"I don't know." Burke reread the wire. "We did it when Wounded Knee was coming up and again when it looked like we might go back to war with Mexico, and Washington turned us
down both times."
"Get me out of it."
"I suppose I can tell the papers you're waiting for your orders or something."
"I don't care what you tell them. Get me out of it or I'll get you real major's clusters and take you with me."
Dewey took Manila and Roosevelt San Juan Hill while the hero of Warbonnet Creek was still sputtering and fuming for the papers about the criminal sluggishness in Washington, a strain he was playing yet when a battered and bloody Spain sued for peace. At the end of the tour, Will fled the reporters and Louisa for the TE Ranch, the new spread he was developing in the Big Horn Basin on the strength of a new Salsbury loan and a second mortgage on Scout's Rest obtained from a Cheyenne bank. Four hundred thousand acres of pasture fed several hundred head of Herefords and Black Angus—over the vociferous objections of Bill Goodman, who had advised him to maintain a sturdy core of Texas longhorns against another winter like the disastrous one of 1886-87. On Johnny Baker's first visit without his family, Will took him on an overnight tour.
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