The Honorable Cody

by Richard S. Wheeler

“And Cody? He approved?”

  “Oh, he thought it was grand. He was so happy there were tears in his eyes. Of course he wanted to continue with us to pay off his debt, and we obliged him. He was salt of the earth, old Buffalo Bill, and like the old warhorse he was, he joined us for two seasons, adding his luster and illumination to our show. Of course I was grateful. My youthful dream had come true. I was in partnership with the greatest American. So print that.”

  I scribbled all that down.

  “He stayed only two years? Paid you off?”

  “Well, of course, he never did pay us off. He got a hundred clams a show and a percentage of the gate over a certain amount, which I raised slightly the second year.”

  “But he left.”

  “Oh, you know how old men are, Fowler. Don’t print this. Cody had a senile snit and threatened to walk out, so we let him go, graciously, I might add. We just ate our losses. I’m a charitable man. I wanted the old boy to be happy. He cost us a fortune, you know. Cost us a pile of legal fees, cost our printing plant some dead losses, cost the Post a lot of loss. Pure red ink. Bad financial judgment on my part. I wish I hadn't let sentiment get in the way of my business judgment.

  “He did this final season with the Miller Brothers, and frankly, I was glad he wasn’t with Sells-Floto, because they had to lift him into his carriage, prop him up on a horse. He wasn’t himself by then. Those ruthless Miller Brothers wore him down to nothing. They're a bad lot. If he’d stayed with us, we could have given him some rest, some time off. And he could have done a farewell tour with us, you know, he was always doing farewell tours, and we would have helped him do it. But this man I admired so much, this prince of the prairies, had taken to being a little brusque with me. I’m a sensitive man, Fowler, and I understood that Colonel Cody was chafing at our arrangements and it was time to show some nobility here and let him go. Never say that Harry Tammen is a hard man. Beneath the crust, I’m as tender as a good medium rare porterhouse.

  “But it’s not over. Here he is, safely locked away in a Denver mortuary while we build a noble edifice for him on Lookout Mountain. And when we get him up there, Fowler, he will repay his debt to us, year after year. We’re putting together a fine publicity booklet all about Cody’s life, which we’ll sell profitably up there and all over Denver, and thus we’ll immortalize the man who so happily entered in the Post’s family of businesses.”

  “A fitting end,” says I.

  (From Colonel William F. Cody’s memoir)

  I went out with Tammen’s Sells-Floto in 1914 and 1915 and both seasons were wet, with poor ticket sales and a host of other troubles. In 1914 my take was to be a hundred a day plus forty percent of the gate over three thousand dollars for each show. In 1915 I was to receive forty percent over thirty-one hundred dollars plus the hundred a show. That seemed all right to me; not a great wage, but I was not a young man.

  At the time Tammen auctioned off the Two Bills Show, as it was called, I asked him whether my debt was satisfied by the auction and he assured me it absolutely was. Swore it every which way. Later, when I reminded him of it, he said I was all wrong; that I hadn’t yet paid anything on it; not in 1914 or 1915, either. He said thieves and lawyers and all sorts of people had made off with the money and I still owed him the whole amount. I stood there in the Red Room, measuring all that, and I saw how it would go. He had me by the throat. I considered various options, including just walking away. I didn't do it; it's not in me to cheat anyone.

  Those seasons were hard and I stayed in my tent most of the time, avoiding the cold and wet. One consolation was a fine bandmaster who composed some airs especially for me, including “Passing of the Red Man.”

  My tungsten mine was not going to yield me a retirement though I kept hoping the ores would improve. Suddenly I was tired. I had finished 1915 in poor health, perhaps because I had never missed a performance rain or shine, and only a good rest at the TE ranch near Cody put me back on my feet. But there still loomed over me the problem of Tammen, who considered me to be private property. Oh, my tiddlywinks. In Kansas City I resolved it my own way, by letting word reach Tammen that I intended to shoot him on sight and was fully prepared to do it. I don’t miss. I thought he would make a good soprano. I'd raise his voice two octaves. That did the trick, and I was more or less free to fashion a life out of what was left of me, which wasn’t much.

  Now, don’t get me wrong. I think my old friend Harry Tammen is a fine fellow, a great entrepreneur who generously lent me money in a pinch, and I wouldn’t want anyone to make too much of any of this. I pride myself on getting along with everyone. All he needed was a little nudge. The problem is that he is surrounded by scoundrels. That whole Denver Post is a nest of vipers but that doesn’t affect my opinion of my friend Harry.

  After a lecture season in early 1916, pushing my Essanay film, I threw in with the Miller Brothers 101 Show, and have had a good season with them, spending my spare moments writing this final, complete and unvarnished memoir.

  The Miller Brothers show treats me kindly this 1916 season, and I look forward to a long and happy relationship with gents who truly love the historic West and the noble life of the rancher. But what I yearn for most is retirement. I’ve said my farewells to the public and it would be grand if I could return to Cody while I can enjoy my health, spend time at Pahaska Teepee and my TE ranch, look serenely over the hills and forests and fields, watch the elk from my window, entertain old friends and family, and smile at the blue skies.

  Chapter 27

  Gordon Lillie

  I’m taking some winter sun on the veranda of our big home on Blue Hawk Ridge, near Pawnee, Oklahoma. Our roots run deep here and this is where we will spend the rest of our days. From here I can see my rolling lands which stretch to the horizons. Yonder is my herd of buffalo, about sixty in all, which I built up to its present size and intend to keep. I dread the extinction of the noble bison and mean to prevent it if I can. There aren’t but a few, but these few have a right to this grass and this land for as long as I and my heirs shall live.

  May and I are comfortable. We have this good land and a stake in a bank. I was involved in the settlement of Indian Territory and profited from it. In the spring the fields will green up, the thick grasses will rise again to reach the sun, and my livestock will graze contentedly. It is a good place. May likes it here, maybe even more than I if that is possible.

  I have before me a photograph taken at the time we merged the shows in 1908. There he is, lean, hawkish, tall, goateed, his hair tumbling down his back, staring directly into the camera, gorgeously adorned in fringed buckskins, looking for all the world like one of the gods of a new America. And there am I, short, stocky, also attired in fancy buckskins, but somehow looking more like a whiskey drummer than an authentic scout out of the far west.

  I fought the destruction of our show with all the powers I possessed but I was no match for Harry Tammen’s sharks, Cody’s naïveté and recklessness, and the vultures that were circling. I sued Cody; Tammen sued me. By the time it was over I had no show, the stock had been sold off, and that was the end of Pawnee Bill. But not the end of Gordon Lillie.

  I went through some bad months there. May, God bless her, kept her mouth shut. No “I told you so” from her, and that’s why I love her as much as I do. We’re all right. We have a dozen business interests to pursue. And we’re close to the Miller brothers who bought up most of the stock and equipment. We like those Miller boys. They’re rough cobs but they're continuing a great tradition and nowadays they’re the biggest suppliers of stock and equipment for the movie makers who have discovered the American West and are putting it on celluloid.

  So I sit here in a chill sun, feeling all right, knowing May is inside the house, knowing that my wife and I are as close as two people can ever be. Cody’s gone now. There are still a few imitators on the road hitting the small towns, capitalizing on the show he and Nate Salsbury invented, thrilling folks with cowboy races, stampedes, a few flea-bitte
n buffalo, some wild Indians on their ponies howling across the arena, some fancy roping, some trick shooting, and maybe a cowboy chorus and band, making good loud music.

  More power to them. Maybe some day I’ll be sitting in a movie theater, watching people I helped to get started as they act out western stories, the very stories we staged day after day, in town after town, as our train steamed from one burg to the next and we set up everything all over again, and put on one more Wild West.

  The thing is, I feel indebted to Cody. He either invented or evolved those shows. Most everything his imitators and rivals did was old hat to Cody. When the Wild West seemed to slow down he and Salsbury turned it into the Congress of Rough Riders, and next thing anyone knew, there were Cossacks and Arabs and Mongolians racing around that arena, and if that wasn’t enough, spit-and-polish cavalry men from the best armies of the world, all doing their best to dazzle audiences with equestrian feats never before seen on earth. How could anyone beat that?

  Well, there’s this about it: horses are becoming extinct, and so is cavalry. What Cody and I and all the rest of the Wild West outfits are doing is preserving in amber a little bit of the past century, maybe catching something for future generations that would otherwise be forgotten. The day will come when everyone has a motor car, when tanks replace cavalry horses, and the world will forget the romance, the skill, the lore of the West. Some day there will be a tame West where the rivers are bridged and barb wire runs the boundaries, and tractors drag plows through grain fields. It’s coming, this tame West.

  So why do I think Cody’s important? He and I, we’re both just relics of dying days. That’s why people bought tickets to our shows; to remember, to see one last time the men and women and animals and skills and stories that are being swept aside by the bright new tame world.

  Even Cody will have only his fifteen minutes of fame. Right now, he’s probably the best known name in the world. More people have heard of Cody than any American president. If people in foreign lands were asked to name one American, most would say, Buffalo Bill Cody. But every day has it sunset. I cling to my quiet land, my ridge-top home, the sight of my kine grazing in green fields, the memories of train rides rocking the nights as we headed for the next town, the sweet quiet of the world as it was before motor cars, trucks, and traffic.

  It’s growing chill out here. Not much sun these winter months, but sometimes I linger in the lavender twilight and that’s when I remember my friend and mentor, my partner and the inspiration for my vocation.

  I have decided that I will remember him kindly. The faults that May warned me about were real and almost destroyed me even as they did destroy Cody, but in the last analysis, he was grand.

  I wonder how history will treat him. Will the world see him as just a gaudy showman dressed in buckskins? I hope not. He showed younger generations how the West was won, how America was made, not by politicians and statesmen but by ordinary people doing amazing things in order to put down roots in a bountiful new land.

  He brought to Europe and the world a portrait of America, brash, courageous, young and lusty. And that’s how I’d like to remember this nation, a country bubbling with youth and enthusiasm and maybe devil-may-care boldness. Even in old age, William Cody was a kind of a boy. Maybe I’m still a boy, too.

  (From the memoir of Colonel William F. Cody)

  Gordon Lillie once told me how it was that he became a part of the Wild West. It seems that as a boy he had watched my stage show in Illinois, when I had Omohundro and Hickok with me, and he was so smitten with the West that he followed that star the rest of his days.

  I smiled when he first told me. The Buffalo Bill Combination stage show, and the Wild West later, were really for boys. When I loaded all those kings into the Deadwood Stage in London, I did it for the boys inside of them. When I staged cowboy races and Indian fights and sharpshooting, it was for the boys in the audience even if those boys were men.

  The frontier was a marvelous place for boys, the perfect place to be a boy and to grow up to manhood. It was a hard place, but that made it all the better for boys. As I began to put my shows together and try new things, I only had to think back to my boyhood, and lo, I had a new scene or tableau or act. I was a boy riding horses for the Pony Express, dodging Indians, racing into stations, switching horses, and riding out again into new dangers. Now there’s a scene to light fires in a boy’s eyes.

  If I staged a scene where cowboys rode to the rescue of a homesteader who was besieged by Sioux, I was reaching into the very heart of every boy who ever dreamed of such things. So I appealed to little boys and big boys, and didn’t neglect girls too when I added Annie to the act. Girls had their own way of looking at frontier life and sometimes I could touch their hearts, but mostly the Wild West was for little boys with big imaginations. All sorts of boys, too. English boys, French boys, German boys, Italian boys, Irish boys, Mexican boys.

  They all loved horses and wild riding, they all loved races, they all loved competition, and later, when we added the Congress of Rough Riders, we entranced boys all over again, for what boy wouldn’t stare raptly at uniformed Cossacks thundering across the arena, or dragoons, or spit-and-polish British horse companies?

  I have often wondered whether my partners saw it. Did Nate Salsbury know what the secret was? Did he see the show as appealing to the boy in him? What about Bailey the circus man? Gordon Lillie did. He tells me he never forgot that stage show in Illinois, where we expended some black powder, rescued a few people in distress, and conquered the wild west. His family moved to the prairies and then he took off, the wild and aching boyish need to plunge into that bright mysterious land over the horizon driving him west. That’s how it was with me, too, that ache I felt in my young bosom for the wild and dangerous lands out there, farther than I could gaze, drawing me, tugging me, farther and farther from comfort and safety.

  So the Wild West caught something of the adventure of boys, and that is what brought millions of people to our ticket window. Women loved it too, though they didn’t see their girlhood dreams in it; they came because their husbands and sons were set aglow by the Wild West.

  Even as I grew old and saw the world changing before my eyes, with grangers plowing the prairies, and bridges spanning the streams, and railroads pushing ever deeper into that great wild place I loved, I knew there would always be generations of boys who ached to ride west, saddle broncs, chase buffalo, race horses, explore canyons never seen by Europeans, climb to highest ridges, look over a thousand square miles of prairie, sit around campfires and tell mighty yarns about horses and catamounts and Cheyenne and grizzlies, and watch the bright stars dip so low a boy could almost reach up and touch one.

  The boy has never died in me.

  Chapter 28

  Katherine Clemmons

  William kept inviting me to watch his show but of course I declined. I have never had the slightest interest in the barbaric west, and the only good thing I can say about it is that the Old West is vanishing and civilization is advancing.

  Once he wanted me to see his buffalo, and I traipsed along with him as he described all the difficulties he had shipping and feeding and doctoring them. They kept dying on the road or injuring themselves, and he had to keep a herd going in Nebraska to keep his show herd going. What was there to see? Nothing. They are big stupid animals, like various men I know, and the world will be better off when they are extinct.

  I liked William in a way. He was always affectionate and quite handsome and attentive. Especially that. I often caught him gazing raptly at me, moon eyes, and I always met his gaze with a smile that promised things. I have little dimples, and I know how to do a dimpled smile that acknowledged that I was being examined. He was the most naive male I had ever met, though. A boy, really, and always in a hurry. There was nothing, nothing at all, he didn't rush through. I learned how to slow Swift William. That was my private name for him.

  Sometimes I had to urge William into the tub before I would tolerate him
in my rooms, because he thought nothing of walking through fields of manure, or working up a sweat on a hot day or sitting in a canvas tent without so much as a pitcher and basin and towel. I introduced him to scented talcum powder and after that he was bearable.

  He often gave me tickets to his show, hoping I would come and bring others, but I always gave them away. No one wanted them, at least in my crowd. I don’t know why the Wild West was so popular. Certainly it wasn’t at all fashionable among artists and actors and authors. And I never heard of a professor who saw the show. A few politicians did, but never a classical pianist or a harpsichordist or a flautist. I don’t suppose you could have dragged Thomas Alva Edison to it. Poor William could barely write a coherent sentence and the notes I received from him were innocent of all punctuation, but he was unaware of that.

  But for all his faults, I still enjoyed him. He had divided womanhood into two classes, virgins and otherwise, and the former were like his mother and the latter were like, me. But then he called me Mama sometimes, and I never quite knew what was buzzing around in his noggin. Actually, I always preferred another sort of man, urbane, educated, aware of the world, but William would not take no, and I didn’t really mind saying yes. He was no actor, of course, but he was a great showman.

  I made it clear that my favors don’t come cheap, but of course I never put it that way. If he wished to be the bee gathering my pollen, he would need to show me what his honey was worth. So he did. One thing about William I liked. He never lied to me about Louisa. He told me he was married and would stay married, and that it was a most unhappy union because she cared nothing about his life, and she had found a way to dig into his pockets. And worse. She had shut her door. I pitied William then. How can a man bear that?

  I actually met her once in New York. That was the time we were staying at the Astoria. William had registered us as Mr. and Mrs. Cody. Unfortunately, that was when Louisa got it into her head to check up on her wayward man. When she asked the clerk where to find William, he said that Mr. and Mrs. Cody were registered in, whatever the suite was. Oh, my! She rented a room of her own and then wrecked it. If you have ever seen Louisa, you know what a wrecker she can be. Like a pair of draft horses. She did what she could to the room and then took the Otis elevator up to our suite, knocked on the door, barged in, and announced that he would pay. I pitied poor William. He stood there saying yes, Lulu, yes, Lulu, and not looking at all like a showman or the hero of the West, but like a boy. After she left I laughed but he just glared at me.