The Honorable Cody

by Richard S. Wheeler

  The duel with Yellow Hand became a staple in his various shows, so I suppose the colonel had a hand in creating the legend. And yet...I’m not at all sure of that. The old boy was actually pretty modest and inclined not to inflate the things he actually achieved. But the duel was good theater, man to man warfare, perfect for a stage setting, with all the supers standing around and watching. And I suspect the duel trumped the real event simply because it could be staged better.

  I’ve come to an odd conclusion. I think even if Buffalo Bill Cody didn’t exist, the nation would have produced something rather like him. This adolescent and pimply republic, brash and vulgar, has been looking for a way to depict itself, to dramatize its strengths, and Cody turned out to be the right donkey to pile that load upon. Maybe he cooperated with those who were turning him into something he never was; maybe not, at least not entirely. But what happened with the Yellow Hand story happened over and over in Cody’s life as publicists and dime novelists got hold of the naked fact and transformed it into something that would thrill every gawky boy in the country, as well as most acned adults.

  I count my employer, Harry Tammen, among them. He may see only the commercial value of Saint Bill, so many pounds of flesh equal so much profit, but he knows a legend when he sees one and that’s why he’s so determined not to let me damage the merchandise, as he put it, or tell the true story instead of reiterating the legend.

  Maybe the storied Buffalo Bill is better for the country after all. The old boy gives us ourselves by winning duels, riding for the Pony Express (when maybe he never did), winning whole wars for the army. Maybe Buffalo Bill, the invention of Major Burke and Prentiss Ingraham, and all the rest of those inflators, is closer to a certain truth about the United States than the live Cody ever was.

  I wonder which one I enjoy more. I think probably the real one, that prairie sailor with a girl in every port.

  (From a memoir of Colonel William F. Cody)

  That Yellow Hand business has been told so many ways, and staged so many other ways, that I can hardly tell what happened and what’s pure bunk. But I’ll say straight off it was a skirmish, not a joust.

  The story goes that I began some scientific scalping after I had dispatched Yellow Hand, but that is story only. When you’re out on the field and there are hostiles around, you don’t spend time kneeling over a defeated warrior sawing at his scalp. You make sure your rifle is charged, recover your horse, stay alert for any warriors closing on you, examine your back trail as well as the scenery to all sides, and only then, when you have secured yourself, do you consider taking some war honors.

  I ran my scalping knife in a circle, grabbed hold of that rich jet hair hanging freely, and gave a mighty tug. I did not, as legend has it, announce to all the universe that this was the first one for Custer. In fact, I never said it at all. My mates, once they collected around me, having rescued the couriers and driven off the hostiles, said it. By the time we got ourselves together, Merritt’s cavalry arrived and the scalp was generally admired. It was a fine one and worth keeping. I thought to send it to Louisa, but feared she might faint upon opening the package. So I kept it for a gift to someone else. I can’t even remember who I gave it to.

  But I do know that for our stage show we had two or three sewn up from dyed horsehair, and I would wave one or another of these around, scaring the ladies half witless when it tossed it offstage. And indeed, it proved useful to tell our audiences that I wore the very same red and black outfit I had worn during my fight with Yellow Hand. Anything to sell a ticket, I say. But I do try to tell the truth as far as it can be stretched without snapping.

  We incorporated the death of Yellow Hand not only into the plays offered by the Buffalo Bill Combination but also into the Wild West, and it never failed to captivate our audiences. Eventually the scoffers took hold of it and tried to make it just another fantasy from the long-haired old windbag called Cody. They did that more and more as the seasons passed. Sometimes envy was working; other times just rank skepticism. My foremost critic was Luther North, brother of the celebrated scout Frank North. I never knew what inspired Luther but I believe he will keep on whittling at Buffalo Bill for as long as he lives.

  I mind a little; I would like my life to be accurately recorded. But what life of any public man is free from distortion? I suppose the best that can happen is that the person under scrutiny have the chance to correct the record, which is what I’m doing now, scribbling down my memoir in my show tent each evening by the light of a bulls-eye lantern. I think somewhere, someone, will care. After I’m gone, these will be opened and given to historians and scholars who want to correct the record. That will please my wandering spirit.

  Chapter 20

  Louisa Frederici Cody

  Will was no good with money so I did the only thing possible, I took all of it from him that I could. If he had kept it I wouldn’t have any. His whole family doesn’t know a thing about money and he was the worst. It makes me mad.

  At one point he and his sisters were pumping money into a lawsuit to recover some land in downtown Cleveland they were claiming they owned. I warned them it would be a waste of money to pursue that case, and of course I was right.

  I also told him not to get into show business. It would turn out bad financially, and of course I was right. He died broke and in debt, with nothing to bequeath to me. Show business is nothing but a graveyard of fortunes because it is rooted in sin, and God punishes the sinful. But he wouldn’t pay me heed. I warned him tearfully that he was consorting with disgusting people, and all they think of is spending receipts to support their immoral conduct, and Will would find himself ruined if he went into that business. I pleaded, I warned, I told him he should do anything else but what good did it do? Did he ever listen to me, his wife? Never. His mind was made up and all I could do was sit and watch him ruin his life and mine.

  When he first started acting in those awful Buffalo Bill Combinations, he began to send me cash. “Lulu, put it into land at North Platte.” Or, “Lulu, build this house I’ve sketched, The Welcome Wigwam, just the way these plans are drawn up. And then move in.”

  I knew he wouldn’t last a season and I wanted the money to stay safe, so I took his cash and I bought the land and put it all in my own name. I built the Welcome Wigwam just as he wanted, and moved in with our children, but he didn’t have title to it, and he never knew that until later. That is what saved us from being driven out in the cold and snow every time he went broke, which was nearly every month of every show season. What a dreadful way to make money. He could have been a very good and respectable liveryman, the way he loved horses.

  I would have been very happy if he had been a sewing machine salesman or a coal and ice dealer. I could have held my head high and be assured that he and I lived a blessed life. I would have greeted him with a kiss at the door and would have had a hot dinner ready, and it would have been sweet. Was that too much to ask?

  The day came when he wanted money and asked me to sell some land, and then he discovered he didn’t own a thing and I wouldn’t sell a thing. Telling him that was one of the high points of my miserable life.

  “Will, it’s mine and you’re not getting it,” I said, and then watched him absorb that like a gas balloon deflating.

  He stared at me, thunderstruck. “But Lulu... I sent all that money.”

  “Yes, and you’ll never see it again.”

  “I thought we were building a homestead together.”

  I wouldn’t give an inch. “A homestead you would sell out, right from under me and our poor dear children, every time you wanted a spare dime for another of your reckless plunges.”

  He whirled away and I soon heard he was talking divorce with some lawyers, but I wouldn’t budge and I wouldn’t give him a divorce and I wouldn’t give him one acre back. If I did, he would just throw that away too, the way he did with that White Beaver, that quack Doctor Powell from Wisconsin who played in his Wild West. That awful man, Frank Powell, first s
howed up at Fort McPherson when we were there and he and Will took an instant liking to each other and remained friends the rest of their lives, though I can’t imagine why.

  White Beaver was part Seneca Indian, part white, and graduated from the Louisville Medical College, so he was a physician, too, if you didn’t look very hard. But a love affair went badly for him and he went on a two-month drunk, and the army got rid of him. He ended up in La Crosse, Wisconsin, operating White Beaver’s Medical and Surgical Institute, and then he talked Will into going into the patent medicine business. Next I knew Will was sinking money into the Yosemite Yarrow Cough Cream and Wonder Worker, and then another one, White Beaver’s Cough Cream and Great Lung Healer, fifty cents a bottle. I tried both and knew they would fail. All they did for me was give me a hangover and they failed to work any wonders. I wanted to improve my lungs which Will had worn out by not listening, but the quack medicines did no good.

  Then this smug fraud, who had such a hold on Will, conned him into investing in a big Mexican land scheme intended to colonize two and a half million acres down there. Will and this awful man agreed to supply five hundred colonists a year. Just like that. Well, you can guess where that ended up.

  And if that wasn’t bad enough, White Beaver and Will started a company that would make a substitute for coffee and whiskey called Panamalt, and thought they’d make a killing among the Mormons, who can’t have coffee or anything harder, poor dears, and you can guess where that ended up. They could hardly sell a bottle to any Latter Day Saint. That man had a hold on Will like a boa constrictor and there wasn’t anything I could do except snatch whatever he sent me from the show. Once I got it, Will never saw it again, and that was my salvation.

  It’s Will’s fault. He should have known better. White Beaver just hung around, ruining Will and leading him into perdition. He called himself The Surgeon Scout, and sometimes Fancy Frank, and sometimes The Mighty Medicine Man, but what I call him I would blush to say out loud.

  The worst of it came when he talked poor Will into investing in the Copper Giant Gold and Copper Company, in Grand Encampment, Wyoming. Four hundred thousand shares! It was a salted mine. Poor Will. In 1903 Will went to that place to see whether the company should be shut down, and that’s what he had to do. I don’t know much he lost that time thanks to White Beaver and his frauds.

  But did Will learn? Later on, he did the same thing, this time in Arizona, sinking a fortune into the tungsten mine there and getting nothing back. So is it any wonder, with a boneheaded man like that, that I took anything he gave me and put it into my name? How else could I protect my daughters from that fool?

  Well, when he found out he didn’t own The Welcome Wigwam he was wrathy with me and built another house, Scout’s Rest, outside of North Platte, and kept the title to it. But I knew I would get it sooner or later, and I did. I didn’t let him set a foot in the door of the Welcome Wigwam, not until he left show business and worked at an honest living, so he defied me and built his own house. He invited me to come there any time but I wouldn’t set foot in it. Of course he had to keep it away from my daughters, too, and he got his sister Julia to manage it along with her husband. Why couldn’t he give that business to his own daughters? I told Arta her father was the worst businessman the world had ever known, and she believed me all her wretched life. That’s why she died young; she knew the truth about her rotten father. I told Will so, too, right in the parlor car of the New York Central Railroad. He wasn’t very happy to hear it and I told him I would stand up publicly at her funeral and blame him for her short life. But I didn’t do it. I wish I had, but he bribed me with some more property, and that is all I get out of this miserable life.

  In the end, he betrayed me. Just because I wouldn’t let him stay in the Welcome Wigwam or come inside of my house in North Platte, that doesn’t mean he was justified in breaking his vows. I never broke my vows. I was faithful all my life. I wouldn’t even let him in my bedroom. But he just wanted to rove, so he did. It really had nothing to do with me; it was just his weakness of character and the natural evil in all males.

  He always had appetites he couldn’t control, and women were one of them. Little did I know about that when we were married or I never would have said yes. It’s an awful thing, knowing your husband is entertaining some other woman and doesn’t want you to know about it. I spent many lonely nights in the Welcome Wigwam, worse than the world will ever know about, so lonely and tearful I could not even tell my daughters about them. Not that they would understand. I kept them as innocent as I could. But I had friends spying for me and I always knew when Will was not being true, and I have suffered these hurts all my life. Whenever I go somewhere to see his show I dread what will happen.

  He began doing all sorts of things for his sisters in Cody, Wyoming, such as underwriting their houses, businesses, a hotel, a newspaper. That made me furious, especially since he owed me a living as his wife, and he should take care of his daughters first. So I raised Ned and refused to sign any papers and we had another blowup. Why that man puts his sisters ahead of me I don’t know. That’s the way he’s always been: the Codys first, and his own suffering daughters and his wife are lucky to get the crumbs.

  Then, to make matters even worse, he decided to divorce me. I have never been divorced in my life and never will because I give no cause for scandal, and so I fought it tooth and nail. That was in 1905, not so long ago, and he forced me to appear in court and to suffer one more embarrassment and outrage.

  And guess who testified against me? White Beaver Powell. He came and told the court all sorts of things that shouldn’t ever be told in public, and I felt vulnerable and pierced, and I think that quack should spend the rest of his days in hell.

  Will said I drank too much and that I used bad language, and I said Will drank too much and was involved with other women and kissed girls in his show. I knew that because I saw him do it right in front of me, and it didn’t even make him embarrassed. Then there was that awful testimony that I was trying to kill him with some powder or other but no one took it seriously.

  Finally the judge did a strange thing. He said he would give me the verdict if I withdrew my charges about his being with other women, especially Bessie Isbell and Katherine Clemmons, and I agreed, and the court decided in my favor. The testimony about his women was expunged from the record and he was not granted the divorce he wanted, and just to make it all the sweeter, he had to pay my court costs. So I got my revenge after all.

  We didn’t speak much after that, although there were always plots afoot to reconcile us, and once the girls even contrived to put us alone in a room together to talk things out. He had a charming way about him and tried, but I didn’t let him get very far. I knew exactly the sort of lustful man he was and kept my skirts away from him as best I could, living decently and quietly right in North Platte, where I had made a home even if it was a miserable home, after all that man did to me and my daughters. At least I outlived him.

  (From a memoir of Colonel William F. Cody)

  Things had come to such a pass in North Platte that I no longer considered it my home. It was like living inside a glacier. It didn’t matter that I resided at Scout’s Rest and Louisa nearby at the Welcome Wigwam; there wasn’t a thing I tried to do there that didn’t meet with complaint.

  I was weary of it and there were paradises all over the great west that had caught my eye. One of these was the Big Horn Valley in Wyoming, with the nearby Rockies watering it. It had first been brought to my attention by O. C. Marsh of Yale, the paleontologist who had dug up dinosaur bones in the vicinity. I liked what I saw. The Shoshone River could be dammed and would provide irrigation water for a vast area. There were handsome ranches there, including the TE, which I bought along with several others and turned into my home, which I could manage any way I chose because Lulu had no part of it and was living hundreds of miles away. I bought it and surrounding ranches, including the Carter, the Irma Lake, the Rock Creek and the Sweeney. I buil
t a comfortable hunting lodge up in the mountains, near Yellowstone Park, and called it Pahaska, and oh, it was good to have a haven of my own.

  With some fine fellows who joined me, we formed the Shoshone Land and Irrigation Company, started building the Cody Canal, and before I knew it, they had founded a new town called Cody. Imagine it. There was I, Colonel Cody, helping to build a town they named after me. I was pleased as punch. The Cody post office started operations in 1896 with Julia’s husband, Al Goodman, the postmaster. My sisters and their spouses swiftly gravitated to such a pleasant place, free at last from Lulu’s grasping and bickering. I don’t know what she thought of all this at her perch down on the plains, but it was pure relief for me to see a town rise and surrounding ranch and farm lands bloom the way my friends wanted them to.

  Later, work began on the Shoshone Dam, which proved to be the highest in the world at 328 feet, and held back a tremendous head of water for irrigation of vast areas of the basin below. I brought a herd of cattle up from Scout’s Rest, but only after another round of bickering with Louisa, who was determined to crowbar my new home into wreckage. She wouldn't even give me my cows.

  We got Teddy Roosevelt to promote a road from the town over to Yellowstone Park, and old four-eyes did it with his usual vigor, after dismissing all sorts of complaints that it couldn’t be done.

  I got a fellow named Colonel Peak to start up the Cody Enterprise, and I got Charles Perkins, president of the Burlington, to run a branch line up to Cody.