I commenced work on a grand hotel there, the Irma, named after my surviving daughter. I wanted a first-rate place even if there were too few people to fill the rooms. I wanted a “Cody” sort of hotel, with all the latest conveniences, spacious rooms, and a lobby that would impress the world. It was finished in 1902, and while it lost a lot of money at first I knew it would eventually come around as soon as motor cars could reach my town. Charles Schreyvogel’s great oil painting, “The Battle of Summit Springs,” dominated the lobby, memorializing my earlier life as a scout.
When we opened the hotel, we brought in a horde of newsmen from the east and popped the champagne corks. That was some party. I was fancied up in a white tie and tails. Charles Wayland Towne of the Boston Herald was on hand to record the event for easterners, and so was Colonel Edward Norris Wentworth, a literary man devoted to livestock news.
Old friends and new were there. Frank Powell showed up with a few valises of patent medicine, and I had more cowboys in chaps and boots than I could count, plus trappers and hunters and wild redmen shaking their gourds on the lawn.
After we opened the hotel, I took all those visiting firemen hunting up at the lodge, and the party rolled along for days with most of us playing poker instead of dropping elk. I insisted that the jackpots be donated to my sister May’s Denver charity, a home for young single ladies in urgent need. I never visited that place, of course, but I had it on May’s authority that our little contribution was most helpful.
Then Irma got herself engaged to Lieutenant Clarence Stott, but sad to say, her husband died soon after they were married. Later she married Fred Garlow. Little by little I gathered my family around. Julia, now a widow, managed the Irma Hotel, and my sister Helen Whetmore, also a widow, began to manage the newspaper, and May showed up later. Not only were my sisters on hand, but all sorts of nieces and nephews. The Codys were in Cody.
Cody was my home. I had built it up at some distance from Louisa. I intend to live out my days there and then rest in peace above the town, cradled by the western wilds.
Chapter 21
Lieutenant General Nelson Appleton Miles
How often, at our amiable hunting camps, Colonel Cody would settle back in a camp chair, sip a two-finger bourbon, and begin spinning yarns. He had that gift, that way of trotting out an anecdote that would gather our attention as we sipped sour mash and watched a pitch-pine fire gutter in the twilight. He might be surrounded by playwrights, novelists, generals, diplomats, shoe-shine boys, and camp cooks, but we were all the same to him.
I always listened closely to his recollections of life as a scout for the Fifth Cavalry because I knew the record, had read the files, and could probably describe his gallant service to the army more accurately than he could.
But what I was listening for most carefully was that subtle inflation that transforms a minor success into a major one, that massages a man’s pride and enhances his status in the world. I never heard it. Not once. He did embroider a little to poke fun at himself, but the big things, the ones that a man might boast about, he was oddly reticent to discuss. To the last day of his life he was a reticent man who let others tell about his legendary deeds.
Oh, he could embroider. He loved to talk about the time he visited the East Coast for the first time in 1871, after his great success guiding Grand Duke Alexis, third son of the Czar, through a successful buffalo hunt. That put him in such high esteem among all the nabobs that Cody was swiftly invited to New York to address various highfalutin' clubs and societies. The frontier scout accepted, rigged himself up in a boiled white shirt, a dark suit of clothes and black silk stovepipe hat gotten en route from a Chicago clothier, and headed for Gotham.
There in the bustling metropolis frontier scout Cody was the greenhorn who needed the guide, and it was provided. He made a great success of it, bantering those chaps sitting at linen-clad tables, and when the time came for him to return to duty he won a brief delay from General Sheridan and then raced west to join the Third Cavalry, which was launching its spring campaign against the hostiles of the high plains.
Now here's the fun. The way he tells it, he was in such a rush that when he got to Fort McPherson and found the cavalry in the field, he didn’t take time to change out of his glad rags but rode out for duty wearing his black swallowtail suit, and continued to wear it through the campaign. Now, that makes a fine story, but the gospel truth was that his trunk hadn’t caught up with him. I have often wondered whether he was wearing his black swallowtail when he won the Congressional Medal of Honor. That would have been an entertaining sight to see. Old Bill Cody would have enjoyed our thinking it. Performing acts of war while dressed like a politician at an inaugural made a pretty good yarn.
“There I was,” he would say, “dressed like an Eastern swell, french cuffs and starched collar, and off to war. Frank Thompson lent me his private car, which took me to Chicago. From there I was ordered to Omaha, where my bosom friends filled my stateroom with champagne and forgot to bring my trunk along. So there I was, at Fort McPherson, dressed like a bridegroom and hung over from the bubbly. Buffalo Chips White was waiting for me and all I could do was board Buckskin Joe in all my plumage and head for the regiment, my hair tucked under my stovepipe hat, my bowtie still wrapped around my scrawny neck, my cuff links still pinning my sleeves together. The boiled shirt grew a bit grimy but the rest of the outfit took to battle without complaint. I figure when you shoot someone,” said friend Cody with a wrinkle in his brow, “you may as well dress like a mortician.”
Well, maybe. But I find nothing in the record of what his commanders thought of his quaint attire.
Soon after he was reunited with the Third Cavalry under Colonel J. J. Reynolds, he was detailed to hunt down some Indians who had stolen horses from Fort McPherson’s horse pasture station a few miles from the post, killing some men and making off with a large number of valuable mounts. Reynolds assigned Company B, commanded by Captain Charles Meinhold and First Lieutenant Joseph Lawson to go after the culprits, Cody with them as guide and scout.
Nowhere in the army record does it say whether Cody was back in his buckskins. I rather fancy it’s a better story if we imagine him in his boiled white shirt and bowtie rather than in frontier garb. But I draw the line at the stovepipe hat. Whatever the case, he got into a scrap when they reached the south fork of the Loup River in Nebraska on April 26, 1872. That’s where the Indians had scattered. Cody was detailed to find them and he had a certain Sergeant Foley and six troopers with him. Cody found the Indians and the horses only a mile away and led Foley’s party with such cunning that they were fifty yards from the Indians when discovered. The Indians shot, missed, and Cody shot back, killing one. The Indians raced toward their horses across the creek. Cody, on Buckskin Joe, leapt the creek and took after them but the cavalry horses balked at the creek and wouldn’t follow Cody, who raced on alone, trading shots with the Indians. A one-man assault.
When the troop pulled up, the Indians fled. Cody and Lieutenant Lawson and fifteen men pursued them for miles but their jaded mounts wore out and the Indians escaped.
Meinhold’s report concluded with this: “Mr. William Cody’s reputation for bravery and skill as a guide is so well established that I need not say anything else but that he acted in his usual manner.”
And with that he was awarded this republic’s highest recognition, the Medal of Honor. I have puzzled over it. The report seems incomplete. But in fact he did singlehandedly pursue the Indian band after the cavalry mounts balked at the creek, and shot one off his horse. The man is the genuine article, even if the citation is a bit vague or abbreviated. But just a year ago, 1916, a benzene board (named after the dry-cleaning fluid) scrubbed it off the books, saying that Cody was a civilian and the award went only to military men. Cody never bragged of the medal, scarcely made it known, and probably was embarrassed by it. But it would suit me better if he had won it wearing a black dinner jacket and boiled white shirt. By God, that’s the way to wage war.<
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By the time he won that medal, Cody was something of a prodigy out there on the borders. Every commander wanted him; all the rest of the scouts, and some were formidable, knew they had met their match and then some. Many times have I heard the story about his long rides. He’s a legend, of course. Put any two or three frontier officers together for a toddy in the officers' clubs and sooner or later they would get around to Cody.
My esteemed friend and colleague, Brevet Major General Eugene Carr, loved to tell us about Cody and had a stock of stories that would consume an hour at table. In 1868 Cody guided General Hazen and his escort to Fort Zarah from Fort Larned, and was sent back alone through country crawling with hostile Kiowas. He was captured, told Chief Santanta he had been sent to round up cattle for the Kiowa, and then escaped with the Kiowa in hot pursuit. He made it, just barely, back to Larned, but was sent out at once to Fort Hayes, sixty-five miles distant, to tell General Sheridan that the Kiowas and Comanches were on the prowl.
When Sheridan received the news his first task was to inform other forts, especially Fort Dodge, ninety-five miles south of Hays.
But I’ll let Sheridan tell the story: “This too being a particularly dangerous route–- several couriers having been killed on it–- it was impossible to get one of the various ‘Petes,’ ‘Jacks,’ or ‘Jims,’ hanging around Hays City to take my communication. Cody, learning of the strait I was in, manfully came to the rescue, and proposed to make the trip to Dodge, though he had just finished his long and perilous trip from Larned. I gratefully accepted his offer, and after four or five hours’ rest he mounted a fresh horse and hastened on his journey, halting but once to rest on the way, and then only for an hour, the stop being made at Coon Creek, where he got another mount from a troop of Cavalry. At Dodge he took six hours’ sleep, and then continued on to his own post–- Fort Larned–- with more dispatches. After resting twelve hours at Larned he was again in the saddle with tidings for me at Fort Hayes, General Hazen sending him, this time, with word that the villages had fled to the south of the Arkansas. Thus in all Cody rode about 350 miles in less than sixty hours and such an exhibition of endurance and courage was more than enough to convince me that his services would be extremely valuable during the campaign, so I retained him at Fort Hayes till the battalion of the Fifth Cavalry arrived, and then made him chief of scouts for that regiment.”
I calculated later that the actual distance was 290 miles, but it didn’t alter a thing. It was a heroic feat. He was making 116 miles on horseback a day, a ride one can scarcely imagine.
There were other brave rides, other major feats of arms and war, other battles such as Summit Springs, where Cody proved to be invaluable; his knowledge of the enemy, of terrain, of rivers, of what the villages would do next, proving over and over to be priceless to us. He won us victories, saved us men and materiel, and hastened the subduing of the tribes on the plains, making a vast area safe for settlers to put down roots. Is it any wonder that the whole army of the United States, and especially its fine officers, honored William Cody, now grieves his loss, and will never forget his fabled service to his country?
I wonder now how long it will be before that memory is lost, or before his great service to the army will be overshadowed by his later life as a showman. The new century reels so swiftly ahead that young people with their flivvers scarcely know how it was to travel by horse across a virgin land without roads or bridges or inns or road signs.
And yet, the new century has given us a means of remembering. Will Cody was an old man by the time he and I restaged the Battle of Wounded Knee before motion picture cameras, but we did, and in a way, by God, he and I preserved the past as a gift to generations to come.
(From a memoir of Colonel William F. Cody)
Even as I pen these recollections in 1916, I have word that an army board has scrubbed away my Congressional Medal of Honor.
I suppose I can let go of it. I don’t know why I got it, because I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary to earn it. In fact, I’ve always ascribed the medal to a fluke. If a few cavalry horses hadn’t balked when it came to jumping a creek, leaving me to make a solo assault on the hostiles, I might never have been considered for the honor.
I was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor on May 22, 1872. It’s a handsome decoration, hung on blue silk ribbon, with the world Valor on it.
I never made much of it in my subsequent career in show business, thinking it would seem shameful to exploit it for commercial purposes. It was the nation's highest military honor, and I refused to let Major Burke or any other publicist cheapen it by putting it into the Wild West's promotions. And I didn't want the dime novelists to make anything of it either. The medal was my personal business. So most people didn’t know about it, and that is how I preferred it. Now it is gone, anyway, and it shows that my silence was nothing but good sense.
I did let the advance men say I was chief of scouts, and even that was a little exaggeration, because I was chief of scouts only for the Fifth Cavalry, not the whole army. Burke began calling me chief of scouts in publicity, and I thought it was true enough that I didn’t need to rescind it. But that’s how stories get built up, and I’d just as soon stay on the level.
But I’m getting long of tooth, and all the stories get mixed up in my addled mind. I started this memoir to straighten out everything, but I finally realized I can’t. And shouldn’t.
Chapter 22
Black Elk
Oh, the memories of Pahaska, the long-hair, Buffalo Bill. How my mind stirs as the images of him flood through me. Of all who walk the breast of the good earth, he is among those most favored.
When we four Lakota in the Wild West learned that the fire-boat had left without us and we were abandoned in the strange land called England, my heart failed me. So it was true. Those who passed over the Big Water would never return. And I surely would die before ever seeing my own good land again. I had three companions, all Lakota, and all of us were doomed to wander until our hearts failed. This strange cold place was called Manchester and we were suddenly alone and could not speak the tongue of these people or even make our needs known. The Wild West had gone across the sea.
I have the gift of visions, which come down and seize me at unexpected moments, but no vision came and I knew nothing of the future. There was only cloudiness and I felt down in my bones that I would have no more visions, for none had come to me on this side of the waters, and I could no longer be a seer.
I stared into the gray waters, aching to see the other side, where my people’s lands began, but I could see only the dark sea and the mist stretching to the horizon. Beyond, somewhere, was my mother and her lodge, and my brothers and sisters, but I could not see them and a great heaviness came over me.
Then, even as we stumbled away from the long pier where the fire-boat had been, we found two other Lakota who had also failed to reach the boat, and one could speak a few words of English. We were glad to see these brothers and especially glad to see the one who knew some words. He had news for us: there was another, smaller Wild West show called Mexican Joe playing in the big village called London, and if we went there on the iron road we might be hired for a dollar a day. That might at least put food in our bellies until we died, as we surely would, for no Lakota could live long so far from the soil that bore the moccasins of his people.
We put together the money we had in our pockets and found it was enough for us to buy passage on the iron road, and thus we rode south in the swaying carts until we reached London, where Buffalo Bill's Wild West had played so long. It was good to see familiar things again but our spirits were darkened because the mighty sea lay between us and our lodges.
There, indeed, was the show called Mexican Joe, and the English-speaker got us jobs for one dollar each day, and it was enough for the moment. Our bellies were not empty. It was not like the Wild West, but small, and no great man like Mr. Cody ruled over it. But it was a show and we could ride ponies and make mock war and para
de. They made costumes for us because we had none, but they were not like Lakota clothing and we smiled when we put on these strange things. But we received our coin each day of Grandmother's money, and sometimes we could even forget for a moment that the dark waters lay between us and our mothers and sisters and brothers and fathers.
This show was not happy like Cody’s and we made few friends; neither did anyone in it care about us. Still, we clung to it for our sustenance. The show went to Paris. I met a pretty girl there and exchanged a few words with her. I knew she liked me and I liked her, and we saw each other during our tour there. Then we went to Germany and that was still another tongue we did not know, a land with cheerful fat people, and then we went south to a place where a conical mountain smoked, a place I now know as Italy, full of skinny people, and played again near the volcano called Vesuvius, but we did not know the names of these things then.
All this while my heart sank in me, for my home was across the dark waters and I would never see it again, and all I wanted was to go back to the land where the moccasins of my people made prints in the dust. The Mexican Joe show returned to Paris and I left the show because my heart was failing me and I no longer cared to live. I had been away two winters and knew I could not endure a third. But the French girl, Therese, found me again and saw I was sick, and took me to her parents’ home and they fed me and soon I was better and stronger. Those days I wore white men’s suits but my black hair hung about my shoulders, and perhaps that alarmed some of those who saw me.
Then one eve when I was sitting in their parlor, a vision came and I fell over into dark sleep. I learned later they thought I had died. But instead, I was taken up upon a cloud, past the house where I was staying, up and away and over vast distances, past the Missouri River, and finally to my own country and I saw everything, the very lodge of my mother, and my father was there, and the lodges of my relatives and friends and the people. I saw how poor they were, half-starved, for they had not been given the food promised them by the wasichu agents, and they were all skeletal. But I saw it all from the cloud, each one of my people, each lodge and each field and tree, and this vision lasted a long time. And I feared I might fall off the cloud and perish, but I was lifted up and my heart was good. Then I was taken back through a black void, where I was afraid, and clung to the cloud while it carried me to the land of Paris. And then, suddenly, I opened my eyes and saw Therese and her mother and father above me.
The Honorable Cody Page 17