From boyhood, then, William Cody was drawn into a commercial revolution that was sweeping the Plains, and which was impossible to ignore around Leavenworth. Kansas was a western territory, but it was no backwater. Most early settlements were trail towns, along migration routes where the ubiquitous travelers—emigrants, tourists, salesmen, surveyors, and soldiers, to name a few—created a lively commerce. Residents prospered by selling supplies by the trails. When trails shifted, townspeople on occasion jacked up whole towns and moved them on rollers to new settings where they could better exploit the trade of passing pioneers.46
Leavenworth, at the junction of the Missouri River and various routes west, was the biggest trail town of all. Some paths actually predated the town. Wagons carrying goods had been plying the Santa Fe Trail between Missouri and northern New Mexico since 1821. By 1855, $5 million in commerce was making its way along the Santa Fe Trail each year, and Leavenworth was only a short distance north of Independence, Missouri, the trail’s eastern terminus. 47 Still another trail wound west as handfuls of emigrants to Oregon, and more Mormons bound for Utah, began trundling up the Platte River road in the 1840s. Then, in California, in 1848, John Marshall reached for a glittering nugget in John Sutter’s mill race. In the next five years, some 165,000 people traveled this westerly route to seek their share of the gold rush.48
From the day in 1854 that Leavenworth was founded along the Platte River road to California, passersby dwarfed the resident population, and as migrations increased, so did the town’s economy. Between 1854 and 1860, 80,000 emigrants passed near or through Leavenworth on their way to California. 49 Many of them traveled in small groups from various points to the east, and then stopped in eastern Kansas, where they organized into wagon trains and waited for the spring grass to mature enough to feed the livestock on the Plains crossing. Julia Cody later recalled that when the Cody family arrived in the Salt Creek Valley of Kansas in 1854, “it was filled with Trains and cattle and mules running around. There must have been Hundreds of White covered wagons waiting there to make up their Trains and start West.” Little Will Cody “got just wild with Excitement” and said, “Oh, my, that is what I am going to do as soon as we get moved over here in this beautifull place.”50
The continual cavalcade through Leavenworth increased yet again, in even more dramatic fashion, with another gold strike, this time in Colorado, in 1858. Before then, there had been only the sparsest white settlement along the Platte River road, mostly at trading posts, where traders solicited Indian commerce in buffalo robes and beaver hide. Suddenly, in the spring of 1859 alone, over 100,000 emigrants headed to the Colorado mines. 51
California and Utah had been so far away that only the most valuable and nonperishable goods could be supplied overland. But Denver was only six hundred miles away, and as the center of the new emigration, it rapidly developed a consumer market which had to be provisioned by wagon. Teamsters drove more than 15 million pounds of goods to Denver in 1860. By 1866, over 100 million pounds of goods found their way to the Queen City of the Rockies, and much of it passed through the vicinity of Leavenworth.52
As important as supplying Denver was satisfying the wants and needs of emigrants. By 1860, there were primitive hotels along the entire route, so that one could journey from Leavenworth to Denver in virtually any kind of weather without ever sleeping under the stars. Road ranches, whiskey holes, and general provisioners sprung up along the main routes. From their adobe hovels, tents, or frame houses, these entrepreneurs offered a wide range of consumer commodities: wheel rims, ax handles, clothes, hats, matches, whiskey, horseshoes, tobacco, baking supplies, liniments, and more, all of which had to be hauled out to these trailside outposts on freight wagons. 53
So emigrant wagons and freight-hauling “prairie schooners” crowded onto the trails alongside a burgeoning form of passenger transport, stagecoaches. By 1857, stages already ran from Leavenworth north into Nebraska Territory along the Platte River, to Kearny and on to Laramie. Stimulated by the surge of emigrants to the Colorado goldfields, in 1859 Leavenworth’s premier transport capitalist, William Russell, joined up with a new partner and created the Leavenworth and Pikes Peak Express, running a faster, more direct route (it took about a week) between Leavenworth and Denver via the Smoky Hill River in western Kansas. Russell and his partners expended vast sums to lay out the route and build the twenty-seven stage stations needed along the way, and the new, more direct connection thrilled emigrants with its possibilities. In Denver, the arrival of the new company’s first stage on May 7 was greeted with all the joy that three hundred residents could muster. But their party at the foot of the Rockies was eclipsed by the huge celebration in Leavenworth when the stage returned on May 20. Banner headlines announcing the linkage to the Colorado mines were followed by two days of parades, dinners, and bloviating speeches.54
Kansas settlers could not ignore the prodigious expansion of Leavenworth’s freight and transport industry, especially Russell, Majors, and Waddell. The company was said to employ 6,000 teamsters and 45,000 oxen. One historian calls Russell, Majors, and Waddell “the Mayflower Van Line of their time,” and however many people they really employed, their facilities were awesome in 1859. That year, one traveler extolled their Leavenworth company yard: “Such acres of wagons! such pyramids of axeltrees! such herds of oxen! such regiments of drivers and employees!”55
These developments were not lost on the Cody family. Isaac had not only driven a stage between Chicago and Davenport, he also conducted various side businesses with Russell and Majors before his death.56 Leavenworth was only a few miles from the family home. Trains of two dozen or more freight wagons were a frequent impressive sight. Teams of up to twenty oxen hauled wagons, with iron-covered wheels as tall as a man, loaded with up to seven thousand pounds of goods. Each train was accompanied by a small herd of horses, necessary for herding the extra oxen. Prairie schooners dwarfed emigrant wagons. From miles away, their canvas-covered bows bulked over the horizon like the sails of a ship on the sea. The teamsters who drove these outfits swaggered beside the wagons, and their mastery of the long whips they cracked over the backs of animals, and of an extraordinary lexicon of profanity, made them both frightening and alluring to children who watched them pass. 57
Will Cody soon sought work in the industry. As Mary Cody rented out rooms in the family home to bring in cash, and Julia did “all of the heavy work” of milking and tending the farm, young Will Cody started out as an ox-team driver for a neighbor who was hauling his hay to Leavenworth for sale. The eleven-year-old boy earned a daily wage for several weeks, at the end of which he handed the money over to his mother. Soon after, he went to work as a messenger boy for Russell and Majors (shortly before it became Russell, Majors, and Waddell) carrying messages on horseback from their office in Leavenworth town to the telegraph office at Fort Leavenworth, three miles away.58
As difficult as this sorrowful time was for the family, none of the Cody children’s activities were unusual enough to distinguish them from their neighbors. Indeed, if most farm women worked out of their own homes in the 1850s, their children were often found in the rural workplace. From nine or ten (and sometimes younger), children hired out to other settlers to bring in the harvest, drive horses, or herd cattle or sheep, in exchange for cash or services. In frontier towns, children worked as bootblacks, newspaper salesmen, or clerks in town businesses. In these circumstances, sons and daughters who were not yet teenagers often lived miles from home for at least part of the year. Freighting outfits on well-established, well-protected trails sometimes hired boys as “cavallard” drivers, who tended the dozens of extra horses that traveled with them. There were dangers in such work, and adventure, too. Sometime in 1858, twelve-year-old Will Cody was a cavallard driver for a wagon train headed by John Willis, traveling along the Platte River road to Fort Laramie. Willis wrote to Cody in 1897, recalling “the time the Buffalo run through the train and stampeded the teams and you stoped the stampede.”59 But a
s exciting and dramatic as such events look to us, they were routine to nineteenth-century Americans. Indeed, Will Cody probably was not the only child employed at many of his jobs.60
Like Willis, many employers did not scruple to hire children even for dangerous labor. In eastern states, children were often maimed and killed at work in coal mines, steel factories, and cotton mills. Given the widespread reliance on child labor, and young Will Cody’s experience as a horse drover on the trail to Laramie, some of the other boyhood yarns in his autobiography might seem true. Could he have gone to the Mormon War, as he claimed? The story corresponds with historical events. There was indeed an 1857 expedition to supply the U.S. Army column sent to prevent a threatened Mormon rebellion. The column left from Leavenworth. Their wagons were captured by the Mormons and burned, just as Cody recalled, and the teamsters did endure a terrible winter at Fort Bridger while they waited for the snow to clear so they could return home.61 Could young Will Cody have been there?
The answer is no. In his account, Cody claimed to have made two separate trips to supply troops in Utah, the first with a herd of cattle that was stampeded by Indians, forcing him to return and begin the second in a wagon train later that summer. Military records show there was a cattle herd scattered by Indians, and a wagon train that followed it. But the same records indicate the cattle herd left Leavenworth only a week before the wagon train. Indians scattered the cattle after the wagons had set out. The boy could not have seen both the scattering of the herd and the beginning of the wagon train’s journey.62 Cody wrote that after the Mormons burned the wagons, he survived the winter with other members of the Utah Expedition at Fort Bridger, in today’s Wyoming, in the spring of 1858. But his sister Julia recalled him being in school with her that spring. When William Cody read this recollection in her memoirs, in 1911, he did not disagree. “Say that write up of yours was fine,” he wrote his sister. “You have a wonderful memory.”63
His autobiography next regaled his readers with an account of prospecting in Colorado in 1859. The story is impossible to substantiate, but he claimed to have rafted down the Platte River on his return, something that would have been next to impossible during the river’s low season. If he trapped furs in Kansas soon thereafter, as he claims, his account of meeting a Sioux war party in the winter of 1859–60 smacks of fantasy. In 1879, when this adventure first appeared in print, Custer had been dead for only three years, and Rain-in-the-Face was widely believed to be his killer (thanks to a poem on the subject by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow). If Cody’s story were true, its Rain-in-the-Face would have to have been the father of the alleged Custer assailant, but his name called up the potent Custer image, which was still fresh in the minds of Cody’s readers. This alone explains why Cody told the story. But could it be true? Not likely. The appearance of Rain-in-the-Face with a war party in deep snow at the dead of winter is highly improbable. At precisely such times, Plains Indians generally avoided long-distance travel and warfare. Snow and cold were too severe, and a man of Rain-in-the-Face’s stature was unlikely to lead any warriors who proposed such foolishness.
What truth is there to Cody’s teenage odyssey? As far as we can tell, he was indeed a boyhood teamster, who at the age of fourteen drove a wagon to Denver. In the summer of 1860, his uncle Elijah, a prominent merchant, moved there from Missouri. Nephew Will went along to drive a wagon of goods. We know this because Arthur “Pat” Patterson, a fifteen-year-old neighbor and friend of young Will Cody, went to Colorado on this very journey as a teamster, and both he and Cody would later recall having made that journey together. The boys waited out the winter in Denver. Will Cody needed money, and it seems likely he tried his hand at prospecting and possibly trapping, two common ways of making extra cash. Somehow, he broke his leg during the trip. He returned home with his friend Pat Patterson, in the summer or fall of 1860, not on a raft but by hiring himself out as a teamster again. 64
Cody’s Utah war and Rain-in-the-Face stories were fictions. So, too, were his Pony Express adventures. Cody claimed to have ridden for the Pony Express for two separate periods, the first in late 1859, out of Julesberg, Colorado. But none of the stations he lists as his stops correspond to stations on that section of the trail. The men he says hired him actually did work for the Pony Express, but they could not have hired him, because they either ranked too low on the corporate hierarchy or were not on that section of the Pony Express line during this time. More to the point, the Pony Express functioned for only eighteen months, beginning in April 1860. Nobody was a Pony Express rider in 1859.65
His second stretch as a pony rider, from summer 1860 until spring 1861, was allegedly along the Sweetwater Division, where Indian attacks forced a temporary closure of the line, and Cody says he went with Wild Bill Hickok’s raiding party to reclaim horses from the Sioux on Powder River. Some of the events Cody describes actually happened—but not to him. A station keeper along the transport line, at Gilbert’s Station, was killed, just as Cody recounts, but the killing happened in 1859, before the Pony Express began. There was an Indian attack on a stagecoach which did close down the line for six weeks, and the names of passenger casualties even correspond to the names in Cody’s account. But it did not happen until April 1862, long after the Pony Express was discontinued. Cody claimed that he joined Wild Bill Hickok’s retaliatory raid in 1861. But that year, Hickok was a stock tender at a station in faraway Rock Creek, eastern Nebraska, where he was recovering from an injury which prevented him from doing much of anything. 66
Cody’s pony tale begins to look ragged under investigation, and other eyewitnesses fail to curry it. Julia Cody wrote her memoirs in the early 1900s, when her brother’s Pony Express adventures were renowned around the world. She dismisses them with this summary: “he hired to go out and Ride the Pony Express, and he made the longest Ride of any of the others. They sayed he was the youngest one and the Lightest and swiftest rider, and seemed to understand the Country, and the Rouffians and how to handle them.” 67 That is all. No details to suggest he really rode for the Pony Express, not even a repetition of one of his stories.
There are three alleged eyewitnesses who claimed to have met Cody on his Pony Express route. One, Edward Ayer, a prominent collector of western Americana, told a story in the 1920s, about getting to know the boy rider during a month’s travel along the Platte River in 1860, as Ayer’s wagon train journeyed to California. But there are some problems in this story. The wagon route was on the north bank of the Platte; the Pony Express route on the south bank. Riders had deadlines and did not stop to chat. Not even the slowest oxen could keep a wagon train in one rider’s assigned section of the trail for a month.68
Another eyewitness, Charlie Becker, was a Pony Express rider who recalled meeting Cody both at Fort Bridger and then afterward as a Pony Express rider. But Becker, whose account was not recorded until sometime after 1900, recalls he and Cody became good friends and comrades, serving next to each other on the route for the entire year and a half the pony line was in existence. Even Cody himself wrote that he served in two different sections, and neither for very long. Like Ayer, Becker seems to have embroidered himself into Cody’s mythology, decades after the showman wrote his autobiography and long after he had become the embodiment of America’s frontier myth. 69
The third eyewitness is perhaps most revealing. In 1893, Cody paid Alexander Majors, the sole survivor of the Russell, Majors, and Waddell partnership, to write his autobiography. Cody’s press agent wrote a preface for it, and his ghostwriter took a hand in the work, too. The book, Seventy Years on the Frontier, went on sale at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show that summer, appearing alongside Cody’s own autobiography at the bookstall on the showgrounds in Chicago. Royalties went to Majors.
Cody sponsored the book out of kindness. Majors had been a friend of Isaac Cody’s. Not long after Isaac died, Mary Cody took her son Will to Majors’s office in Leavenworth, and asked a favor. Could he employ the boy? Majors looked at twelve-year-old Will Cody, a
nd he asked no questions—just gave him a job carrying dispatches along the three miles of road between the telegraph station and company offices in Leavenworth.
Now, in 1893, the old man was broke and alone. Cody offered him help. One might expect Majors would oblige Cody’s generosity by conjuring up some fabulous adventures for the young Buffalo Bill. But despite the fact that Cody hired Prentiss Ingraham, a voluble dime novelist, to ghostwrite for Majors, and even though Cody paid for the book’s publication, Majors was unable to recall any specific feats of Cody’s supposed Pony Express riding other than the ones that appear in Cody’s own 1879 autobiography.70
What was Cody doing if he was not riding the Pony Express in 1860 and 1861? Three other, independent accounts, one by his sister, one by a former teacher, and one actually by himself, all agree: he was in school. Julia wrote, and William Cody confirmed, that he was taught by Valentine Devinny, a teacher who later recalled Cody being a particularly determined ballplayer. Devinny moved to Leavenworth only in the fall of 1860, and left for Colorado sometime in 1862.
The first year Devinny taught at Leavenworth, the Pony Express had begun. The route started in Saint Joseph, Missouri, and passed through northeastern Kansas, to the north of Leavenworth. At the moment Mr. Devinny took up the chalk before a roomful of expectant pupils, young men were stationed at points across the Plains, waiting to carry the mail over trail sections that were seventy-five to a hundred miles long. Their rides were so punishing that they often arrived with blood flowing from noses and gums. Couriers slept on their horses; snow buried the trails. The few authentic accounts that survive describe the agony of forty-below winter blasts and horses (not to mention riders) on the verge of death. Pony Express riders did not take days off for school. William Cody could not have been in Devinny’s classroom and riding for the Pony Express at the same time.71
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