The Honorable Cody

by Richard S. Wheeler

  “He wanted to down a buffalo with a revolver, having been much taken with a Smith and Wesson he had gotten touring their plant back east. They called that model the Russian in his honor. Anyway, I thought that was going to be a pretty tall order, but I had a fine, fast mean-eyed scouting horse called Buckskin Joe, an animal that knew exactly how to close in on the flank of a buffalo I was running down, so I figured I’d put the prince, ah, duke, on that one and I’d follow along.

  “We got out to the herd all right, and I circled around behind so that we could ride up without scattering it, and I explained to this Russian, ‘Alexis, you just steer this horse right up beside, and pump a shot into the beast’s chest, behind his front legs, and you’ll drop him.’”

  Cody sipped and laughed. “You know, he tried mighty hard, but shooting a revolver’s trickier than it looks and after he had unloaded one revolver I rode up and handed him mine, and he unloaded that, and nothing was slowing any buffalo he ran beside.

  “So I said, Alexis, your honor, I think you should try my needle gun here, old ‘Lucretia,’ and just ride up and point it.

  Well, he did, and next I knew he had dropped a big bull, and a minute later the young fella was sitting on that carcass and whooping and carrying on. The ah—duke is it?—had got himself the first buffalo and after that the real hunt commenced.”

  And some hunt it was, too. Spotted Tail’s band danced like dervishes, showed the white men the true art of running down a buffalo and killing it with an arrow, and celebrated with great feasts of succulent buffalo steaks.

  The press was covering all this like flies on dead meat, and everything Cody did and said and everything the grand duke did and said was soon sailing east over the telegraph wires. The fact of it was that Cody made the hunt a success. Later on, Alexis shot several more buffalo and one of those killings was achieved with the duke’s Smith and Wesson. But it was Cody’s show, not the army’s, and I’ve always figured that the hunt he staged for the grand duke was the beginning of his Wild West even if he hadn’t yet conceived of the idea. That name, Buffalo Bill, had a certain jingle to it. The reporters knew it, and those wires out of that camp were all about Grand Duke Alexis and Buffalo Bill Cody.

  Sheridan told me the army brass scarcely got a mention. The place was so thick with generals and colonels that no reporter bothered to talk to any. Sheridan didn’t mind but some of his subordinate officers sure did. I’ve always had a chuckle about that, young Cody, stealing the show from all that brass.

  Actually, he did so well that Phil Sheridan offered him a lieutenant’s commission on the spot, figuring that a man like Cody was worth a lot more than a whole class of West Point shavetails, but Cody decided against it. I don’t blame him. As a top scout he was earning almost as much as a lieutenant, and he was his own man.

  “Colonel,” I asked one evening at one of his Wyoming hunts, “do you figure that’s when it all started? The Wild West? With that hunt? With Spotted Tail’s warriors scaring the wits out of the Russians?”

  Cody sipped and smiled, sipped again. “Well, it was sort of a dress rehearsal,” he said, “but I didn’t yet have the story.”

  “Story?”

  “There has to be a story, general. People need a story. What I was absorbing out there was the material, the things that interest lots of people everywhere, but I hadn’t put it together, not then, not at age twenty-five. It took the novelists and the theater people to show me what to do with the West.” He gestured grandly at the forested slopes leading toward Yellowstone Park. I would have just staged tableaux, fancy scenes.

  “It took Ned Buntline, whose name was Judson actually, and a writer and actor named Meader, and Ingraham, another writer, to put some drama into it. I would never have thought of staging an Indian attack on the Deadwood Stage or a settler’s cabin. I never would have thought of running buffalo around an arena, staging a hunt before thousands of people. That’s where those writer fellas came in.”

  He sipped.

  “Once I got the hang of inventing stories my future was assured. Everything has a story to it but you have to show the story. Like the races we run in the Wild West. We could just have a horse race but where’s the story? No, we race cowboys against Indians, whooping around those arenas, and there you have a simple story and the public loves it. You know what those writers do? They just invent big yarns and make them sound like God’s own truth.”

  He laughed, grandly, that silver-maned old showman, scout, entrepreneur, and yarn-spinner, and above all, elegant host.

  But I still like to date his later success to the time, in 1872, when he showed a Russian how to kill a buffalo.

  (From the memoir of Colonel William F. Cody)

  If it hadn’t been for Ned Buntline there might never have been a Wild West. I give credit to the man. Buntline, the dime novelist, showed up at Fort McPherson shortly after the Battle of Summit Springs, looking for material. Frank North, who distrusted the writer, pointed him my way. Legend has it that Buntline found me snoozing under a wagon, which is nonsense. I met this fellow in the mess hall and took him out on a hunt and a scout or two while he scribbled stuff in a notebook, and then he headed back east. I thought nothing of it. Buntline, whose name was actually E. Z. C. Judson, was a prolific author. He had fought in the Seminole War and knew a thing or two about the army and life in a bivouac. So I filled him full of yarns and then he jammed that bowler back on his head and caught the express eastward. I thought that was the last I’d see of him.

  Next I knew, this fellow had started publishing a serial novel in a New York paper, “Buffalo Bill: The King of Border Men—The Wildest, Truest Story I Ever Wrote,” in which the hero was a certain Buffalo Bill Cody. There were people in that yarn I didn’t even know including two sisters I’ve never met. Wild Bill Hickok made it, but Buntline had converted the name to Hitchcock.

  Well, that was pretty funny, but little did I know that Buntline was making my reputation, whether I wanted one or not. There I was in that story, turned into a Temperance man and the sole hero of the Battle of Summit Springs. I spent the next months telling my friends at the post that I never said it. This was about 1872, I guess, but I am bad on dates.

  Well, I knew some of those newspaper fellows back east, including James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald, who had been steered by General Sheridan in my direction for a festive hunt. I kept Bennett and his party in buffalo and booze, and everyone had a good time. Now, suddenly, I was invited back there by Bennett and Buntline, so I decided to go. Some scribbler named Meader had turned Buntline’s story into a play starring me, and I should come to see myself on stage.

  How could any scout not go? I had to get myself fitted out with a broadcloth suit of clothes in Chicago, but eventually I got to Gotham and they put me up at the Union Club. Louisa had just had a baby and I was out of work and I thought maybe I could conjure some cash out of all of this folderol. Well, those princely fellows back there wined and dined me and toasted the scout from Nebraska, and that was all grand but what I wanted was to see this theater show starring me.

  I wandered over to the Brevoort, where Ned Buntline and his third or fourth bride were camped, and there Buntline presented me with a fancy rifle that had been made to order for some nobleman who had not lived to use it. I looked that artillery over and pronounced that I would have to use rock salt as my load so the meat wouldn’t spoil before I got to it.

  I couldn’t imagine what all the fuss was about. Bennett began doing stories about me for the Herald, and August Belmont had me over for dinner. Finally, when I was about to hightail west, having enough of that stuff, Buntline took me to the Bowery Theater where I sat in his box and watched myself emote.

  Now there was a sight, I’ll tell you. There was I, Buffalo Bill, in a buckskin shirt being chased by savages so I crawled into a hollow log and then the warriors all decided to camp right there and built themselves a fire and plotted what they would do to the white men when they caught him. Then the hollow l
og started burning and this Cody fellow had to do something, so he pulled out his powderhorn, slipped out of the hollow log in the dark, and pitched it into the fire and blew up all those savages. Oh, my, how that audience howled and this Cody actor took a bow. But then they spotted me up there in the box and began cheering since I was the true article, and they wanted me to make a speech.

  Now I’ve faced Cheyennes and grizzlies and ice storms and rattlers and saintly mothers, but this was the worst thing I ever faced. When I finally reached that stage and stood in front of the hissing footlights, I just mumbled something or other that sounded like a thank you and beat a retreat. But they sure liked the scout from the plains. We watched the other two acts, pretty thrilling stuff, with powder smoke filling the Bowery, and then it was over, and next I knew, I was back in the steam cars headed for Nebraska.

  I didn’t have time to change clothes, being almost overdue for scouting duty at Fort McPherson so I rode in there wearing my tux and tails and boiled white shirt and silk stovepipe hat, and they never forgot it. I got the Medal of Honor a little later, but I never knew whether it was for some scouting or standing up on that stage of the Bowery Theater and actually talking to those folks. That was worth about three medals, I think. And that was the start of my show business life.

  Chapter 15

  Johnny Baker

  I knew Will Cody better than any other person alive, better than his wife, his daughters, his sisters, or his business associates. I knew things they didn’t know, sometimes because Will confided in me but mostly because I was close to him. I looked after the man who was virtually my father.

  When word reached my by wire that Will Cody was sinking I wasn’t surprised. I don’t know how he made it through that last season when he was failing so fast. At first I would lift him onto his white horse, and for a moment he would sit tall and proud and do the show, only to slump, exhausted, afterward when I helped him down. Then even that was too much and he appeared in a carriage, somehow still managing to sit proudly, straight-backed and young, until he drove out of the arena and then he all but collapsed. Sometimes, when I was looking after him those last months, I nearly wept.

  Word reached me in New York, and without wasting a moment I packed my valise and caught the first westbound express to Chicago and Denver. I remember sitting there in the Pullman, aching for the engineer to pour on the coal, tear up the records, race that bobbing and weaving train over the rails. There wasn’t anything more I could do. I don’t drink but I worked my way back to the saloon car and ordered a sarsaparilla and watched the rails recede and listened to the clack of the wheels.

  Will must have been riding beside me, for I felt his presence there. He would have set up drinks for everyone in the car and would have turned every stranger into a friend. But I rode alone, wanting so badly to get there to Denver in time.

  I didn’t make it. The trains were delayed and I missed a connection by five minutes and everything conspired to keep me away. When I got to May Decker’s house in the middle of the evening, he was gone. The bed was empty. Olinger’s had already picked him up.

  I felt the most terrible hollowness I had ever known.

  “Oh, Johnny, I wish you could have come sooner,” May said, as we stood in the empty bedroom where my best friend, my virtual father, my counselor, and my confidant, had slipped away.

  “I missed a train,” I said.

  “He died at noon,” she said.

  “Can I go see him?”

  She shook her head. “Louisa.”

  That’s all May said but it was enough. Louisa had captured Will’s body and made off with it as was her wifely prerogative. But it was not love that had moved her. She would exploit him dead or alive and her first act would be to keep Will’s own family and dearest friends away.

  “No visitation at Olinger’s?”

  May shook her head. “No. Not even we can pay our respects.”

  I choked back grief but also anger. Louisa would cloister Will from anyone in the Wild West, anyone but herself and her surviving daughter, Irma. Now she had her rag doll. She would possess him dead and pluck him from the show business she had despised. We could not say goodbye. I felt bereft. I knew that for the rest of my days I would feel bereft, that I could not say goodbye to the man who gave me my life.

  I grew up in North Platte and it was there that I met Colonel William F. Cody. When I was a boy he fascinated me, this man with an aura about him. I shyly offered to hold his horse. I dogged him wherever he went, and he took a shine to me, seeing in the star-struck boy an admirer. He enjoyed children and gathered them to him his entire life. Maybe I reminded him of his own boy, Christopher Carson Cody who died so young. I don’t know. But for years I could hardly wait for him to return to North Platte so I could see him again, peek into the saloons where he was entertaining friends, study those fringed buckskins, that trimmed beard, the easy way he sat, erect and attentive. He seemed so marvelous to me. I was a country boy and here was a man who had visited distant places I could scarcely imagine, big cities with tall buildings. He rode on trains, he talked with presidents.

  And then one day when I was older he took notice of me, maybe because I did everything I could think of to help him; held, watered, brushed, fed his horses, ran errands, hung around his Wild West, watched the rehearsals, studied the quick shots and the Wild Indians. All this I absorbed.

  “Why, you’re little Johnny, aren’t you?” he said. “Here now, you just go on in and watch, and tell ’em I said you could.”

  Then, I’ll never forget it, he let me join his show. I was practicing relentlessly with my rifles and revolvers and had become a marksman. I could pop those glass balls, maybe almost as sure as Annie Oakley, and maybe as good as the colonel himself. I knew horses and riding and roping too, and I knew how to care for livestock real good and how to doctor them, and do all the stuff that a boy on the frontier absorbs.

  But I was still just a kid, just a roustabout, so I kept working at the tricks, the shooting, the riding, the horse handling, and somehow Will Cody watched me and we talked through the evenings on the road while we played in cities bigger than I had ever imagined a city could be. I guess maybe I was some kind of pet, but no one minded. Will Cody had enough friendship in him to spread it around to a lot of people and maybe he gave me a little extra because I was from his hometown.

  Even Lulu, that’s what he called Mrs. Cody, liked me. I was always hanging around the Wigwam, or Scout’s Rest, running errands. If she wanted him home she would find me and tell me to go fetch him. I was too young to sense the tensions between them, too young to know what a mismatch they were or who was to blame. No one was to blame. They were just an awful couple who never should have married and I have never parceled out blame.

  But later, when I was in the show, billed as The Cowboy Kid and doing my trick shooting, and being a part of the whole stampede, I pretty well got it all figured out, and I didn’t blame Will for being what he was or seeking what happiness he could. I mostly just pitied her. By that time I was one of his show business people and she turned against me too even though we had been friendly once. Way back at the start, if she had accepted his life as a show man and taken part in it, everything would have been fine. Will liked her; he just couldn’t cope with her belief that show business wasn’t respectable.

  I wouldn’t want to be married to anyone like her. I have a sweet wife and a good marriage and my wife is no Lulu. We travel together sometimes. I ended up being Will’s arena manager, running the Two Bills show, and then managing his part of the Miller Brothers 101 and Wild West show this last year. I had been with him from the early days and stayed to the very end and ended up managing the whole outfit. I guess only two of us were with him the whole time, John Burke and me. All those years. If there was a Cody show anywhere we were in it, and pretty soon we were running it.

  Well, I waited in Denver to see what Lulu was going to do, along with Harry Tammen. Whatever they did I wasn’t going to like it. The
most rotten thing was throwing out Will Cody’s wish to be buried in Wyoming above the town he had founded. I knew that’s what he wanted; he had told me so when we sat in his tent, as we often did after a show, unwinding a little and thinking about times to come.

  I could hardly believe that Lulu would do that to Will, even though I knew Lulu would do anything hurtful to her husband, dead or alive. But she did. Next I knew, there was the Denver Post wheedling pennies from children to build a crypt for Will Cody on Lookout Mountain, where he could become a tourist attraction and fatten Denver’s economy. I spat when I read that. Tammen wouldn’t even let go of his dead slave. That was the way of it. We never got a word about arrangements from Will’s wife; we had to read in the Post where the funeral would be and what arrangements were being made. It was Lulu’s final revenge on Will and on every one of us who loved him and honored his memory.

  The funeral wasn’t so bad except for all those fraternal organizations running it, which would have gotten a belly laugh from Will. He had been given honorary memberships in most every brotherhood outfit ever formed, and now they were running the show, Masons and Elks and probably Odd Fellows and Moose too, for all I knew. I went, thinking it was a pretty good joke and Will Cody was probably off somewhere visiting with Sitting Bull or talking to his ma and pa, or kissing an actress or two. The funny thing about that whole shebang of a funeral was that Will wasn’t in it; nothing in it reflected on him. These were a lot of people showing the world that they had met the great showman.

  And there was Harry Tammen running the funeral as if it were the Sells-Floto Circus. And maybe it was. A few of us were really grieving but we weren’t running that show. We were sitting in the back seats wrestling with our grief.

  I sat there at that extravaganza, thinking how well I knew Will Cody, thinking how little all these Denver people knew him. Will was a lonely man and no one knew it but me. I sat there thinking of the women he loved, the women only I knew about because I always knew where he was and who he was with and how he felt about these women who were his solace and delight after his marriage turned to ash. None were there at that funeral. I didn’t expect any. But here and there, in England and France, in New York and big places like that, there were women who sighed and remembered, and thought about the man they had clasped to their hearts. None ever lasted, none was ever known, save perhaps Katherine Clemmons, whose closeness to Will became public knowledge even though he tried to hide it.