And Louisa stayed in North Platte, looking for ways to control what happened in Cody, too. When the Wigwam burned, I bought her a spacious home in town, wanting my wife to be comfortable regardless of our tribulations, and there she resided in steady discontent. But strapped as I was, I found my demi-paradise in Cody, and I call it home. Home at last.
Chapter 31
Gene Fowler
One of the things about the old boy that intrigued me was his titles, if titles they were. Most of the time he was Hon. William F. Cody. Sometime later he became Colonel Cody, and in a few cases, General Cody. Now there was a bowl of cherries.
I guess I figured his titles and ranks were pretty much the Kentucky variety but I was wrong. Then I thought the titles were the work of a dime novelist, maybe Prentiss Ingraham, but that didn't pan out either. Here's the straight of it, straight from my favorite bartender.
As a young man Cody was a justice of the peace. There’s not much record of what he did or how his rulings went but I suppose that made him an Honorable. At least the old boy thought so, and when he became a great showman that Honorable glued rather handsomely to the front end of his moniker. But the Colonel title is more interesting. During the Indian wars of 1876, the governor of Nebraska made old Bill a colonel of militia, so he did have a legitimate claim to the title. It beat being a Kentucky colonel, which was merely a courtesy title given to anyone who could serve a mint julep on his verandah.
Old Bill even got himself named a brigadier of the Nebraska Militia, and for a while there he was General Cody, right up there with General Miles, or General Custer, or General Sherman, or General Sheridan. That was tall corn, I’ll tell you, strutting that general stuff. But it didn't float. No sooner did he begin promoting himself and his theater shows as General Cody, than, you guessed it, a snicker would rise from the back rows or a horselaugh from the balcony or a snort from his fellow thespians, and it all got to be too much.
Cody voluntarily demoted himself an entire rank though his heart wasn’t in it. It was like pulling stripes off one’s arm. Given his druthers, the old boy would have liked to be called Field Marshal Cody or maybe Pope William the First and have someone kiss his ruby ring. But the hecklers won that round so the Honorable William retreated to Colonel and it was Colonel ever after. The actors called him Colonel, his family called him Will, his pals called him Colonel, and his wife called him Traitor. But he did like Colonel and even the Brits called him Colonel, a sure sign in that rank-happy land that the Honorable William had metamorphosed into a real colonel. It rather fit, I thought. He could jog into a room without a lot of bowing and scraping or saluting, and yet be a presence there. And colonel does have a nice ring to it.
A colonel, as everyone knows, is a competent and high-ranking fellow, more acquainted with the real world than any fat-bottomed general. Yes, a colonel is one who was in the middle of the fight, who could command men, summon money from safes, be entrusted with gold, get invited to fancy parties, and drink to excess without being overly scrutinized. Yes, there was much to be said for colonelcy for old Buffalo Bill.
It fit the whole publishing program, too. When the old boy settled into colonelcy, the dime novelists took over. Titles often alluded to the rank. Colonel Cody’s Fight with the Grizzly; Colonel Cody Rescues a Sioux Maiden. Colonel Cody’s Attack on the Tripoli Bandits. Stuff like that. Yes, indeed, a perfect word to drop into any title of any Street and Smith novel.
I hunted hard to see whether anyone called him reverend, or your holiness, but I never could get a whiff of it. The Right Reverend Buffalo Bill does have a ring to it and that must have tempted him a little. He always did a little preaching in his shows, admonishing young ‘uns to grow up straight and be a Western sort of fellow, but that’s as far as he went with sermons. I sort of wish that some press wizard had pinned it on him: The Right Reverend Mr. Cody.
I tried to find out once what his family, his cast, his pards, his North Platte pals, called him, and I never quite figured it out, except that Louisa probably called him Rat. No one called him Bill. There are too many Bills floating around, and it didn’t serve the man to be called Bill. And no one called him Buffalo, either. But like his pal, White Beaver Powell, Buffalo Bill surrounded himself with all the animal magnetism he could summon up. The West is full of animal monikers: Wild Horse Harry, Pony Jones, Rattlesnake Jake, Mule Ears Perry, Garter Snake Amos, Jackass Drew, Billy Goat Fabian, Horned Toad Percy, Badger Burke. Well, old Colonel Will was just going along with the game back when he coined his moniker.
The thing to know about the old boy was that he spent hours improving the way he presented himself to the world. He studied on it. He squinted at rivals. He devoured the fashion magazines. When the old boy was decked out in black suits, you can bet they were Brooks Brothers, or maybe Seville Row once he got a gander of London. When he fetched himself up in fringed buckskins, you can bet they weren’t sewn on the frontier. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had some French seamstresses poking needles through buckskin and then sewing on quills and beads.
Now, if you haven’t noticed the man’s boots, you haven’t looked closely. Cody, in his show attire—and when was he ever offstage?—well, he could squirm into a pair of boots a yard tall, boots that started with his big toe and ended up rubbing his nether parts. I don’t know how he walked in them. Just looking at him wearing those things makes me ache. And he must have hired a whole platoon of shoeshine boys just to keep his tall boots glowing. But no one ever saw him with a dirty boot on, and there is a great mystery because he lived in mud. Now I haven’t discovered who made his boots but they consumed two or three cows or ostriches per pair, and didn’t come cheap. I suppose there was a certain dash to them: My boots are longer than your boots. That sort of thing. I meant to ask him, but now he’s gone, and I’ll never see those yard-high boots rubbing his behind again.
I heard somewhere that he invented the western hat, the John B. Stetson that all those prairie dudes wear these days. Certain it is that he took a commonplace frontier item, a broad-brimmed chapeau, and turned it into something stylish. The old boy was never lacking in style and he could do things to a hat that made him the envy of every pimpled adolescent in Colorado. For the most part he wore broad-brimmed and high-crowned chapeaus, with a few dents around the peak, with a flirty flip of the brim just to give him a little appeal. The thing was, under these gray felt monsters a cascade of hair tumbled down around his shoulders, hairy hair, think and wavy, as if he were a contestant in a beauty contest. And you can bet that he had a dozen barbers performing tonsorial rites all over him every day.
Now take that goatee sprouting from his chin. It was trimmed to perfection, without an unruly strand. The tonsorial artists must have done him up daily because I never saw the man with one hair out of place, nor any stray stubble decorating his skinny face. The grayer he got, the better he looked. He first was brown-haired, which is a color devoid of distinction, but as he grayed he grew dashing, and by the time he cashed in, his white mane had turned him into a striking figure. He turned gray so fast that I sometimes wondered over the years whether he helped the process along just a bit, having discovered the power of a few seams in the facial flesh, and a white mane to give a man respectability and prowess.
In his younger years, you wouldn’t find any jewelry on him, except maybe a wedding ring when Louisa was around. But later, he sometimes wore gaudy stuff; headlight diamond stickpins, french cufflinks, woven gold watch fobs, stuff like that. He had pinky rings, Masonic rings, Elks and Moose and Odd Fellows rings, Knights Templar rings, and these he wore on occasion, being the diplomat that he was. A showman needs to carry around something that can be hocked in a hurry, and the Honorable Cody was never far from a pawn shop. But mostly his formal dress was discreet.
As he aged, his rough clothing vanished. Around Scout’s Rest he wore elegant open-collared shirts, often navy blue flannel, soft clean buckskins, shining boots innocent of barnyard debris. He had become the country gentleman, th
e suave magnifico of the large estate, and he left the stock feeding and manure shoveling to all those half-wits the Goodmans kept around to do the grubby work.
But after all, he entertained at home almost every day of his life when he wasn’t on the road. The parade of guests in and out of Scout’s Rest was exceeded only by the flocks of them alighting in Cody for a stay at the TE Ranch or the Irma Hotel, or a hunting expedition in which General Cody’s real function was to serve the booze and drop some dandy stories.
Oddly, Louisa’s dress paralleled his own. The richer they became, the more she kept seamstresses busy. But her attire was timid in the extreme, usually gray and ten years behind the fashion of the day, while Field Marshal Cody’s was ever more grand. I think he would have been happy, in his last days, to sport a whole chest full of medals and ribbons. I look in vain for all those ribbons and rosettes and gold medals drooping from his bosom. They belong there.
(From the memoir of Colonel William F. Cody)
As I reflect on the parlous condition of the American republic, I find myself focusing again and again on a pernicious swarm of sharpers who are a plague upon us all.
I refer of course to reporters. Now, I’ve known some splendid newsmen in my day, largely publishers such as James Gordon Bennett, whose ideal of service to the nation is beyond cavil. But down in the lower ranks of that vicious profession there are human vultures who use the noble presses of this nation for their villainous purposes, which are to tear down the reputations of men of achievement.
I see it constantly. Men I admire are vilified. Of course I’ve sampled a little of this journalistic bile myself, but it is not my purpose here to discuss those occasional stings. They are little more than mosquito bites. Instead, I wish to bring into question this whole class of reporters who roam like packs of wolves looking for prey. No man who has made is mark is exempt.
Let a man rise in business or politics and every private facet of his nature is found wanting. His dress is examined. His eating habits. His boot heels. His manners. His toilet. His charity. His grammar. His hair style. Let a man be a great inventor, a saint, a genius like Edison, and for his contributions to humanity he is examined, poked, prodded, and found to be really an inferior sort. This of course is largely envy. These wolf packs cannot bear the thought of greatness, of genius, of courage and honor, and so they turn themselves into debunkers and beginning the whittling and chipping and tarnishing by which they can cut better men down. Let a man find he is inept socially, or without skills or trades or commercial abilities or professional discipline or without imagination: he will inevitably become a reporter, the natural profession of the envious and hopeless, and begin the hunting and stalking by which those of that profession track down their game.
I have met my share of these journalistic misfits and observed how they hunt for flaws in other men, and if they can’t find flaws they do not hesitate to invent them But how will they sell papers, or advance in their gamey calling if they don’t turn in copy that creates sensations?
Now, if what they say about their betters is true, they might be called good reporters serving the public interest. But as everyone knows, truth is the least important goal in their sleazy life. What they want is revelation. They want the story that will topple kings, tumble prime ministers, demolish senators, send businessmen to jail, or hang the innocent, and thereby win themselves a raise or a bonus from their unscrupulous superiors, the smoke-stained editors in green eyeshades who hunt through the day’s news looking for fodder for the newsboy on the corner who peddles sensations.
Some cities are worse than others, and none are worse than Denver when it comes to blackening a man’s reputation. But there is always justice. Evil newsmen come to evil ends. They are caught in their lies and their careers end when no one believes anything they write.
I don’t associate with those low sorts.
These vile predators even examine the private lives of their victims, as if no man or woman were entitled to privacy. It is not a man’s public conduct that comes under scrutiny but his behavior in the bosom of his family and friends. Have these reporters no decency?
I suppose as long as there is greatness there will be detractors, and it is a mark of success to be sniped at and whittled down and debunked. Fortunately, those who know me see me as I truly am, and not as the tar-brush brigade would want me to appear.
I have done nothing in my entire life of which I am ashamed, or which I would consider less than proper, so with a clear gaze and a steely resolve, I ignore the newspaper rabble.
Chapter 32
Annie Oakley
I see things better now after so many years. In London, Frank and I didn’t fully grasp what was happening. It didn’t seem possible that Colonel Cody could be envious of me. He seemed so grand, so on top of the world, so secure when everyone from the Queen and the royal family to commoners throughout the London area applauded the Wild West.
I was so absorbed with Lillian Smith and the threat she posed that I didn’t quite realize that there were other things troubling the show, swimming like sharks just under the surface.
I smile now. Frank and I have enjoyed a happy retirement in New York and North Carolina. But there was a tension in London that finally cleaved the show apart, and much of it was because William Cody never came to grips with how he felt about women in his show. Or women in general, for that matter. I was the first woman of consequence to appear in the Wild West and that had been more the doing of Nate Salsbury than William Cody. It was Nate who saw me practice and hired me. If Will Cody had his druthers, the Wild West would have been all male except perhaps for a few extras, women in the wagon train, things like that. He wasn’t really comfortable with me. Especially my shooting. He could sit in my tent and watch me embroider; that was women’s work. But shooting was something else. I was infringing on his man’s world. I suspected it bothered him but I didn’t realize how much until many years later.
The reason Louisa didn’t travel with the show was that he didn’t really want her to. He wanted her at home. He envisioned her as the docile little homebody, raising the girls, content in her nest. That’s what women should do, should be. But there I was in his male world, more familiar with firearms than he, going where no women should tread. Will had a traditional vision of the roles of the sexes and the show was constantly challenging it. Men lived out in the world including the world of show business. Women should retire.
So, in spite of surface cordiality there was something else at work, an odd dark river of feeling undermining the show’s tranquility. He brought in Lillian Smith, the teen-aged prodigy, not because he needed her in the show–- he didn’t. But to make life more difficult for me. It was as if I had no right to be the star of the Wild West and the best way to prevent it was to bring in a rival, or an imitation.
He doted on her, but of course his relationship with that California teen-aged girl was perfectly proper. It was a father and daughter sort of thing. At first Frank and I spent many hours wondering why William Cody had hired Lillian. We had more than enough shooting acts: his own, Johnny Baker, mine. We had more shooters than we had places in the program for them. But he hired her. She was a westerner, familiar with horses, with ranching, with livestock; I was not.
But that doesn’t explain it, either. To this day I have no clear idea in my mind what he had in mind. But I did get to see the results, and as the show triumphed through that summer in London, and I received the best press, Cody turned cold, though always behind his veneer of civility. His vanity was bruised. He didn’t mind being bested by a male but being bested by a woman was beyond what he could endure.
Frank and I had worked out a contract with Nate Salsbury that permitted me to compete in shooting events, though not if an admission charge was levied. So long as these were clearly sporting contests and we didn’t compete against the Wild West we could pursue our careers as shooters. The British were avid shooters and were well organized into shooting clubs and societies, no
ne more important than the one at Wimbledon Downs, not far from Earl’s Court.
That club offered the toughest challenges, and drew the most avid shooters in all of England. And that’s where I began winning prizes, usually fifty pounds, which was a goodly sum and a nice addition to our show income. We welcomed the money and salted it away against bad times. I was always welcomed in those male precincts, shot in tough competition against male competitors, many of them peers or top-ranking military men, and I held my own, sometimes besting them.
But Will Cody never showed up there and the English press noticed it. The London newspapers had a way of getting right down to the bone and were saying that maybe the Wild West’s owner couldn’t compete even if little Annie Oakley could and did. William always read every press notice; nothing escaped him, including the comments about his absence from Wimbledon. He tried to ignore it but the English wouldn’t let it alone: how could his two female shooters show up in the best shooting contests in England, while Cody declined?
Lillian Smith saw a chance to embarrass me and began scouting Wimbledon Downs, seeing how the contests worked. Then at last she was ready and tried her hand at the one of the most difficult targets, the fast-moving iron deer that skittered through so swiftly one barely had a chance at a shot.
The worst of all shots was to hit one of those iron deer in the haunch, because that signified a wounded deer that would suffer and would have to be tracked down and killed. Better to miss entirely. So profound was this ethical and humane viewpoint that the club levied a steep fine upon anyone who put a bullet into the haunch of the target. Well, Miss Smith, who fancied herself a crack rifle shot, sashayed up to the firing line in a white cotton frock draped with a yellow sash. Upon her brown locks was a black plug hat, all of which set the gossips to buzzing. It wasn’t exactly the most elegant of costumes, especially for a haughty club like Wimbledon, and she set the women to tittering.
The Honorable Cody Page 24