Cody’s mandate, on this adventure, was to find the Indians, and with the help of the able Pawnee scouts, he did find them. Whether he had any idea who Tall Bull was is not clear: he shot an Indian because he wanted his horse—for the time being the matter of Tall Bull did not interest him.
Luther North, however, continued to be mildly obsessed with the killing of Tall Bull until at least 1929, when he issued the last of his nearly innumerable versions. He became obsessed with the need to correct the record and establish that his own brother, Frank North, had killed this important chief.
At first Frank North himself was no more invested than Cody in the killing of Tall Bull. He had tricked an Indian who was hiding in a ravine. The Indian fell dead. North, like Cody, may not have considered Tall Bull to be particularly important.
When asked by his importunate brother Luther why he didn’t correct the record, Frank North merely pointed out that Cody was in show business whereas he wasn’t.
Much later, perhaps because his brother wouldn’t let the matter fade, Frank North did develop a bias against Cody over the matter of Tall Bull. George Bird Grinnell, author of The Fighting Cheyenne, accepted Luther North’s version, or one of them, and included it in his book. But Frank North’s annoyance was temporary—for the rest of his life he worked with Cody amiably enough.
In Cody’s many versions of the conflict, the battle itself tends to slide around. At first Cody claimed he shot Tall Bull off the handsome bay from a distance of about thirty feet; this grew, in time, to “fully four hundred yards,” and again, a warbonnet finds its way into the story. It seems that in Cody’s memory of the old West the major Indians were as clothes conscious as he was himself. They all seemed to wear their warbonnets at all times, even at breakfast.*
The Tall Bull business became even more confusing when one of the many reprints of Cody’s book was in press. The copy the printer was working from proved to be missing several pages—unfortunately the pages had to do with the Battle of Summit Springs. Cody was in England when this problem was discovered. All the printer had to go on was an illustration from an earlier edition of the book. The illustration was called The Killing of Tall Bull. On his own initiative the printer scribbled in his version of what the Battle of Summit Springs must have been like. In his version the body count rises from fifty-two (itself probably an exaggeration) to six hundred. The book this version appears in is called The Story of the Wild West. Cody had little interest in reading about these old battles and was probably unaware of the vastly inflated body count. Whether he killed Tall Bull or not never greatly interested him. His primary job had been to find the Indians, and he found them, acquiring, as a bonus, an excellent racehorse (bay, cream-colored, or gray as it may be). Also he had helped free one of the two female captives. Most scholars agree that Tall Bull was killed that day, but who killed him will probably remain in dispute.
* The artist Charles Schreyvogel has a painting called The Summit Spring’s Rescue 1869 in which Cody is shown shooting an Indian warrior who killed Mrs. Alderdice. Paul Andrew Hutton, in his excellent study Phil Sheridan and His Army, says that Cody took no part in the rescue of the captives but believes that he did kill Tall Bull.
15
BILL CODY’S interests were eclectic. He was able to appreciate many things, among them the city of New York, about which he was soon as enthusiastic as he had been about the cool air and large freedoms of the prairies. He was a handsome addition to the great metropolitan scene—in no time he was receiving so many invitations that he got mixed up and missed an important dinner hosted by James Gordon Bennett.
One person he got little help from on this visit was Ned Buntline, who had troubles of his own, chief among them bigamy. Buntline was living with a fourth wife, while remaining imperfectly divorced from the first three, a costly situation in more ways than one.
The only thing Buffalo Bill didn’t like on this visit to New York was his own performance in Buffalo Bill: King of the Border Men, a role he found so terrifying that the few words he managed to mumble could not even be heard by the orchestra leader, a few feet away. Fortunately General Sheridan soon interrupted this period of internal stage fright; Cody was summoned back to Fort McPherson so abruptly that he forgot his trunk and was forced to plunge right into an Indian fight while still in evening dress—in my view an unlikely story, since there were not a few haberdasheries between New York City and Fort McPherson, in Nebraska.
According to Cody the reason the general wanted him back in such a hurry was an outbreak of horse thieves. Cody claims that he rode right up beside an Indian on a stolen horse and shot him in the head, a big deviation from his usual practice of aiming for the horse and not the man.
Not much that Cody said about this particular period, when he was trying to learn to lead a double life, now on the plains and now on the stage, can be taken literally. Much telescoping and probably much invention was involved. Cody thought the skirmish in which he shot the Indian in the head to be of little account, but, bizarrely, he got the Congressional Medal of Honor for it anyway, although the award was rescinded in 1916 since Cody had apparently been a civilian at the time of this fight.
Meanwhile, back in North Platte, Lulu was delivered of Orra Maude, their third child. The earl of Dunraven asked Cody to guide him on a hunt but Cody turned this attractive chore over to Texas Jack Omohundro, with whom he often worked.
Cody then ran for the state legislature and was elected, but charges of hanky-panky were raised and he never took his disputed seat. Instead, once Texas Jack was free the two of them went to Chicago and were soon on the stage. Cody even began to lose his stage fright—for the next ten years Cody would be back and forth between prairie and stage. Ned Buntline escaped all four of his wives and showed up in Chicago, where he first distinguished himself by taking part in an anti-German riot. Though he scribbled off many terrible plays both Cody and Omohundro kept him at arm’s length. Wild Bill Hickok tried the stage with Cody a few times but the stage lighting bothered his weak eyes; the same poor eyesight caused him to fire his blank bullets too close to the bare legs of the stage Indians, resulting in painful powder burns. It seems to me, contra Evan Connell, that Hickok, rather than Cody, was the real mixture of thespian and assassin. Hickok’s myopia suggests that in real fights his victims must have stood very close to hand. This was clearly the case in his famous fight with the McCandles brothers. One thing Cody and Hickok had in common was that their public images soon eclipsed anything resembling reality. They became legends in their own time, which was lucky in the case of the rising young showman Bill Cody, but was not so lucky in the case of James Butler Hickok.
16
THE death, in June of 1876, of General George Armstrong Custer and some 250 men of the famed Seventh Cavalry was a shock to the nation comparable in some ways to Pearl Harbor or 9/11. The scale may have been much smaller but the shock was still tremendous; like 9/11 the massacre at the Little Bighorn was completely unexpected. In fact, in his report for 1875, the commissioner for Indian Affairs stated that it was no longer probable that even five hundred belligerent warriors could ever again be mustered for a fight.
Obviously military intelligence was as imperfect in 1875 as it is today, since the very next summer an estimated ten thousand Indians assembled near the Little Bighorn, and, as Custer was shortly to discover, they were quite belligerent.
Once the shock had been absorbed by a confused nation, there arose, as was inevitable, a cry for punishment, but punishment was never to be conclusively administered because the ten thousand hostile tribespeople simply melted away into the prairies and the hills. The figure mentioned by the commissioner in his 1875 Report—five hundred—would now, indeed, have been hard to locate.
Cody had been fulfilling theatrical obligations in the East; he continued to fulfill them even though griefstricken by the death of his son, Kit Carson Cody. He ended his run with a benefit performance in Wilmington, Delaware, about two weeks before the Custer mass
acre and was already on his way west when the massacre occurred. Apparently the army intended to send Cody to scout for General George Crook, who was about to fight the taxing battle of the Rosebud, a week before the Little Bighorn.
Cody didn’t immediately make it to the Rosebud, although Crook could certainly have used him. Instead Cody joined his old company, the Fifth Cavalry, then commanded by General Merritt—the Fifth was generally charged with keeping peace at the populous Red Cloud agency, the one place where five hundred ready-and-willing warriors might have been found. The Red Cloud agency was northeast of Fort Laramie, across the Platte from Fort Robinson, where Crazy Horse would eventually be killed. By the time Cody reached his company it was the middle of July, about two weeks after the massacre.
Frightened, fearful of reprisals, lots of Indians did leave the Red Cloud agency during this confusing period, and neither General Merritt nor anyone else knew quite what to do about them.
On the night of July 16, the Fifth Cavalry camped near Hat Creek, sometimes called Warbonnet Creek, just northwest of the Red Cloud agency. On the morning of the seventeenth, Cody was out at dawn and he soon noted signs of restlessness in the big Cheyenne camp nearby. He approached a young signalman, Chris Madsen, and told him to signal General Merritt that the Cheyenne seemed to be preparing to move.
In fact a portion of the big Cheyenne party split off, in the hopes of intercepting two military messengers who were coming toward General Merritt’s camp, unaware of how much trouble they were about to find themselves in. Cody and a number of cavalrymen hurried to cut off the Cheyenne who were trying to cut off the messengers. Cody seems to have been dressed in a black velvet suit at the time, though upon reaching the bivouac he had been wearing immaculate white buckskins.
Here is Cody’s version—many times repeated and reenacted but not really embellished—of his “duel” with Wey-o-hei, or Yellow Hair (called Yellow Hand by Cody and almost everyone else):
We were about half a mile from General Merritt, and the Indians whom we were chasing suddenly turned on us, and another lively skirmish took place. One of the Indians, who was handsomely decorated with all the ornaments usually worn by a war chief when engaged in a fight, sang out to me in his own tongue: I know you, Pa-he-haska; if you want to fight come ahead and fight me.
The chief was riding his horse back and forth in front of his men, as if to banter me, and I concluded to accept the challenge. I galloped toward him for about fifty yards and he advanced to me about fifty yards, the same distance, both of us riding at full speed, and when we were only about thirty yards apart, I raised my rifle and fired; his horse fell to the ground, having been killed by my bullet.
At almost the same instant my own horse went down, he having stepped into a hole. The fall did not hurt me much and I instantly sprang to my feet. The Indian had also recovered himself, and we were both on foot, not twenty yards apart. We fired at each other simultaneously. My usual luck did not desert me, for his bullet missed me while mine struck him in the breast. He reeled and fell, but before he had fairly touched the ground I was upon him, knife in hand, and had driven the keen-edged weapon to the hilt in his heart. Jerking his warbonnet off, I scientifically scalped him in about five seconds . . .
The whole affair from beginning to end occupied but very little time.
As the soldiers came up I swung the Indian chieftain’s top knot and bonnet into the air and shouted: the first scalp for Custer!
Some of the other Cheyenne, seeing that Cody was alone, charged down at him, but the quick-thinking General Merritt already had reinforcements on the way, and anyhow, Cody had some cavalry with him when he set out to cut off the Cheyenne.
The novelist, mountaineer, military man, and longtime friend of Henry Adams, Clarence King, happened to be with the Fifth Cavalry that morning and was deeply impressed—intoxicated, even—with the glamour of the fighting Cheyenne. He may also have been literally intoxicated, which could have caused his enthusiasm for native color to rise to a fever pitch:
Savage warfare was never more beautiful than in you. On you come, your swift, agile ponies swinging down the winding ravine, the rising sun shining on your trailing warbonnets, on silver armlets, necklace, gorget; on brilliant painted shield and beaded leggin; on naked body and fearless face, stained most vivid vermilion. On you come, lance and rifle, pennon and feather glistening in the rare morning light, swaying in the wild grace of your peerless horsemanship; nearer, till I mark the very ornament on your leader’s shield.
Signalman Madsen probably had the best view of the Cody and Wey-o-hei fight, a view rather less Knights of the Round Table than Cody’s own:
Cody was riding a little in advance of his party and one of the Indians was preceding his group. I was standing on the butte where I had been stationed. It was some distance from the place where they met but I had an unobstructed view of all that happened. Through the powerful telescope furnished by the Signal Department the men did not appear to be more than 50 feet from me. From the manner in which both parties acted it was certain that both were surprised. Cody and the leading Indians appeared to be the only ones who did not become excited. The instant they were face to face their guns fired. It seemed almost like one shot. There was no conversation, no preliminary agreement as has been stated in some novels written by romantic scribes.
They met by accident and fired the minute they faced each other. Cody’s bullet went through the Indian’s leg and killed his pinto pony. The Indian’s bullet went wild. Cody’s horse stepped in a prairie dog hole and stumbled but was up in a moment. Cody jumped clear of his mount. Kneeling, he took deliberate aim and fired the second shot. An instant before Cody fired the Indian fired at him but missed. Cody’s bullet went through the Indian’s head and ended the battle. Cody went over to the fallen warrior Indian and neatly removed his scalp while the other soldiers gave chase to the Indian’s companions. There is no doubt about it, Buffalo Bill scalped this Indian who, it turned out, was a Cheyenne sub-chief called Yellow Hair.
Signalman Madsen, unlike Cody and everybody else, actually got Yellow Hair’s name right. The confident Madsen later took the trouble to poke no less than twenty-eight holes in Clarence King’s account of the skirmish. Yet another signalman, Sergeant John Powers, who was riding with a small wagon train at the time, further deromanticized Cody’s “duel” with Yellow Hair in a report which appeared in the Ellis County Star, a paper which thoroughly scooped both the New York Herald and the Chicago Times on this occasion. Here is Sergeant Powers’s version:
Three or four Indians started out on a run to cut off the dispatch bearers. They had not seen the command and were not aware that we were in the vicinity; but Bill Cody and his scouts were watching them . . . He then got around the Indians and when he felt sure of the couriers Cody raised up behind a little hill and shot the pony of one of the redskins. Then starting after his victim he soon had him killed and his scalp off . . .
The Indian killed by Buffalo Bill proved to be Yellow Hand, sub–war chief of the Southern Cheyenne.
The New York Herald asked Cody for a report on the incident and Cody persuaded King to file one—it was this account that Signalman Madsen poked twenty-eight holes in. When Clarence King was shown the clipping some fifty years later he disclaimed it.
Cody himself wrote Lulu the day after the fight, enclosing Yellow Hair’s scalp, warbonnet, whip, and guns. The Codys were then living in Buffalo, and Cody wanted these spoils of war exhibited in a local department store, to help advertise a Western melodrama he was committed to. These have long since migrated to the Cody museum in Cody, Wyoming. The “duel” aspects of the encounter have since grown in the telling, chiefly through elaborations in Cody’s sister’s books.
As the years passed several people challenged Cody’s claim to have killed Yellow Hair. One claim that has at least vague plausibility was made by the ubiquitous scout Baptiste “Little Bat” Garnier, a well-traveled plainsman who at one time was a friend of Crazy Horse. Little Ba
t was present that day but didn’t claim the kill himself; it was claimed for him by his son, Johnny Bat, who said that Cody had actually been challenged to a knife fight by Yellow Hair and was prepared to take up the challenge. Little Bat, being of the opinion that Cody would swiftly be cut to ribbons, got off his horse and shot the Indian.
A grislier variant of this claim surfaced in 1927—indeed, several of the wilder accounts did not appear until the late twenties, probably because by this time Cody had made a movie about his duel with Yellow Hair—it was called Indian Wars. The grisly version is that Little Bat had actually killed Yellow Hair a couple of days before at a buffalo wallow and had simply let him lie. Later, hearing that Cody wanted a scalp, Little Bat led Cody to the buffalo wallow and Cody then took the somewhat fragrant trophy—this strikes me as unlikely.
In 1929 Herbert Cody Blake, who sounds like a disgruntled relative, published an anti-Cody pamphlet called Blake’s Western Stories, in which five soldiers claiming to be present that day all testify that Cody did not kill Yellow Hair. Blake’s is a debunking polemic and the testimony came fifty-two years after the event.
Around this time (the twenties) several common soldiers showed up, all insisting that they had killed Yellow Hair. Most of these belated claimants do not appear in army registers; they seem to have just convinced themselves, after much brooding, that they probably killed the famous Indian.
Another report from the twenties mentions that Yellow Hair’s wife showed up at headquarters and cut off a finger, to show her distress.
In fact Yellow Hair had not been a famous Indian—he became famous with his death. Both Madsen and Powers identify him as a subchief. He seems merely to have been an alert lookout who quickly saw a chance to cut off the two messengers.
The Colonel and Little Missie Page 9