If young Will wasn’t on the Pony Express, why did no contemporaries debunk his fabulous story? What of his partner in the trapping expedition to Colorado, Dave Harrington? The feared John Slade? Wild Bill Hickok? Together they illustrate William Cody’s remarkable talent for choosing witnesses. For if they might once have deflated some of the celebrity’s more extravagant lies, by 1879, when the book appeared, it was impossible. They were all dead.
Cody’s childhood Mormon-and-Indian-fighting, prospecting, Pony Express–riding, Hickok-knowing, bullwhacking saga was the foundation of his mythic western persona. These glittering ornaments of western youth tied William Cody firmly to the expanding West of the pre–Civil War period, making him an “old-timer” rather than a greenhorn interloper, authenticating his stage performance as “Buffalo Bill” in 1879 and ever after.
But if we know he packed his childhood story with untruths, what do those fabrications tell us about him? About why he told the tales he did? About his rationale for making himself part of the largely forgotten Utah Expedition, and the failed business enterprise of the Pony Express?
Americans of Cody’s day were generally concerned about the survival of families in their rapidly changing country. As a performer in theatrical melodrama—a genre that fixated on threats to the family—Cody was profoundly aware that heroism in family defense had popular appeal. Given the constant ordeal of defending Isaac from his many enemies, it was even fitting that so many of Cody’s autobiographical fictions, from his Mormon War adventures to the Pony Express saga, reflect an ardent defense of family. From the 1840s until 1900, many Americans perceived polygamous Mormons as a threat to monogamous marriage. Novels and “historical” accounts portrayed them as liars, murderers, and, especially, as kidnappers of virgins to serve as concubines for lecherous church patriarchs. Prior to the Civil War, northern reformers labeled polygamy and slavery as “the twin relics of barbarism” which it was the duty of civilization to banish. In 1857, Mormon militiamen massacred a wagon train of emigrants at Mountain Meadows, in southern Utah. The event was shrouded in secrecy. The U.S. government did not achieve a conviction in the case until 1877, when they tried—and shot—the Mormon elder John D. Lee for masterminding the crime. 72
Lee’s sensational trial renewed America’s long-standing anti-Mormonism, and in 1877, Buffalo Bill took advantage of the furor by commissioning a new play, May Cody, or Lost and Won. In the drama, his sister May Cody was abducted by Mormons and rescued by Buffalo Bill. Two years later, as Cody wrote his life story for publication, he inscribed himself back into the 1857 Mormon War as a way of claiming the play as an authentic reflection of his real life, with the boy Will Cody facing off against the notoriously antimonogamy religious sect. The story in his autobiography was packed full of authentic details, and placed Indian attacks, cattle herds, and wagon trains in places that correspond with the historical record, so that biographers and historians have long concluded that Cody must have been on the Utah Expedition as a child.73
But if his story was so credible, it was because it illustrates William Cody’s remarkable talent for grafting details of other people’s tales onto his own. Cody was a gifted storyteller, and as such he knew that one of the most effective ways of making a fiction credible is to slather it in seemingly nonessential, truthful details. Repeated genuine details in a story pile up in the reader’s—or the listener’s—imagination, collectively whispering, “We are the real.” The technique is so widely used that the scholar Roland Barthes has given it a name: the “reality effect.”74
Cody learned the reality effect from other storytellers, and we shall see more in the chapters ahead about how he learned to construct his elaborate fictions. But for now, we may observe that as a messenger boy and drover for the West’s biggest transport firm and as a teenage teamster himself, fireside retellings of adventure on the western trails were a regular feature of his upbringing. His account of the Mormon War and the winter at Fort Bridger is remarkably similar to the one recounted by John Y. Nelson, an old trail guide, buffalo hunter, and teamster who also claimed to have been on the Utah Expedition and to have spent the same winter at Fort Bridger that Cody did. Nelson befriended Cody in the 1860s and toured with his dramatic troupe as translator for the two Sioux Indians who joined the theatrical show on its tours of the East and Midwest, beginning in 1877—the same year that Buffalo Bill’s anti-Mormon drama, May Cody, or Lost and Won, debuted.75
If the Mormon drama of Cody’s autobiography reflected popular anxieties about the sanctity of marriage, the Pony Express was an even more useful symbol. In American popular reckoning, the Pony Express assumed heroic stature for various reasons. The replacement of people by machines had been a familiar characteristic of American progress at least since the industrial looms of Lowell, Massachusetts, began to replace the weaver by the hearth in the 1810s, and it became increasingly evident throughout rural America as McCormick’s reapers began replacing family labor in the 1840s.76
Mechanization was both celebrated and condemned, but whatever one’s feelings on the advent of technology, it was increasingly inevitable as the nineteenth century wore on, even in frontier mail delivery. When the Pony Express began in 1860, westbound mail traveled by train to Saint Joseph, Missouri, where the tracks ended. There the letters passed to a waiting rider.
But at a rate of $5 per half-ounce, only the most urgent messages went by Pony Express. Regular correspondence went by ship or by creaking coach and wagon on a longer, more southerly route. Faster, more economical delivery would come with the transcontinental railroad, a development long anticipated, and long delayed by congressional fighting over proposed northern and southern routes.
With the departure of the South from Congress, workers would soon begin laying track west again. But long before they completed that job, another machine emerged to carry the most important correspondence between California and the eastern states: the telegraph. A line of poles connected by wire sprouted westward from Saint Joseph beginning the summer of 1861. The riders of the Pony Express were in a sense advance couriers for the train, but even more for the telegraph, the technology that replaced them with the completion of the transcontinental telegraph line in 1861, an achievement that finally destroyed whatever segment of the market remained for the messengers of Russell, Majors, and Waddell. Pony Express riders symbolized not only rugged strength and courage, but the anachronism of organic workers—animals and people—and their heroic endurance as they prepared the ground for the machine. The Sacramento Bee eulogized the pony soon after the last rider dismounted. “Thou wert the pioneer of a continent in the rapid transmission of intelligence between its peoples, and have dragged in your train the lightning itself, which, in good time, will be followed by steam communication by rail.”77 As the nineteenth century rolled on, ever more laborers were replaced by an ever wider array of machines, and the horseman as harbinger of technological revolution became ever more apt a symbol for Americans, especially in cities where the Wild West show played to packed stands.
But there was another, surprising reason behind the pony’s popularity, one which drew on Cody’s experience of boyhood even more directly: the Pony Express represented national unity, in profoundly familial terms. Many were the scribes who evoked the glories of western annexation prior to the war with Mexico, with John O’Sullivan’s call to “manifest destiny” being only the most famous. But in reality, the acquisition of the Far West blew the nation apart. The U.S.-Mexican War began the year William Cody was born and ended when he was two. Its most immediate result was the annexation of California and the Far West, but following fast on the heels of that event was the gathering storm over slavery in the new western territories, the fight which took Isaac Cody’s life and finally ended only at Appomattox in 1865.
As eastern states grappled over slavery in the West, the West itself became a site of profound familial loss. The gold rush began in 1848, and California’s stunning growth made it a state in 1850. But if stateho
od signified a legal and republican unity, California was very much a place apart, separated from the rest of the nation by 1,500 miles of plain and desert. Suddenly, east-west crossing of the nation required the ordeal of foreign travel. Whether one chose the sea route around the Cape of Good Hope, or a sea-and-land route through Mexico or Panama, or the Overland Trail through Indian country and the Mormon territories, alienation was unavoidable. Getting from one end of the United States to the other now meant sojourning among Mexicans, Catholics, polygamous Mormons, and half-naked or all-naked Indians, amid parching deserts, towering mountains, awesome storms, and wild, desolate country.
The journey was all the more fearful because, in most cases, the routes to California pulled families apart.78 Men went ahead intending to send for families or merely to return rich. Husbands and wives took their kids, pulled up stakes, and left their beloved extended kin behind. Letters took at least three weeks to travel the long stagecoach routes between California and eastern states. If they went by sea, they could go unread for six months.
By the mid-1850s, the growing threat of a southern secession made the chasm between California and her sister states seem all the more dangerous. Californians numbered half a million by that time, and they were most conscious of the urgent need for closer bonds with nation and family. In 1856, they presented the largest petition in the history of the United States Senate, 75,000 signatures on a memorial complaining, “We are now, as it were, a distant colony.” They requested a federally supported wagon road with army protection from the Mississippi Valley to their new home, so that distant families could join the multitudes of young men toiling in the mines and domesticate this distant, wild frontier.79
Thus, when they remembered the Pony Express, Americans—especially Californians—recalled it as a reassuring sign amid rumblings of civil war, as the entity that sealed the bond of union between West and East. To ride the Pony Express was to heal the nation’s troublesome rift, to bring desolate and broken families together through the fragile connection of correspondence. Cody never rode for the Pony Express, but it made sense that he wished he had. If the adventures he recounted were ones he had heard or read elsewhere, he claimed them as his own in part because he was still seeking to be the bearer of news that could save the family—just as he had sought to be when he climbed out of a sickbed to straddle a pony and ride to the rescue of his father.
The stature of the Pony Express increased through its association with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, where the union of man and horse headed west with the mail came to symbolize not only the last redoubt of organic labor before ascendant technology and the reunited family and nation, but also the grafting of the Far West onto America. The unruly, racially distinctive Indians, the mixed-blood Mexicans and perfidious Mormons, the savage, weird nature of the mysterious frontier with its vast herds of buffalo and rumored hot springs, deserts, unending prairie and endless sky—all of these were now joined to the republic. In no small way, the Pony Express rider embodied this hybrid conjunction of wilderness and civilization. The young white man barely in control of the beast beneath him represented America joined to the West’s untamed promise and peril. Thus, contemporaries hailed the Pony Express not only as a fast mail service, not just as a man on a horse, but as a horseman, and sometimes a hippogriff, a mythical beast with the body of a horse, the head of a lion, and the wings of an eagle. Most of all, though, as Donald C. Biggs has noted, descriptions of the Pony Express often fuse the rider and the horse, sometimes explicitly, sometimes by failing to mention the existence of a rider at all. “The image becomes more animal and rather less than human; what truly emerges is the centaur.” 80
Buffalo Bill Cody could not have explained all this. At least, he never did. But intuitively, he understood from a young age that the story of the Pony Express was about much more than delivering mail. Growing up beside the trail to California, he saw the nation moving west, and in his own front yard heard the lamentations of families sundered by emigration to Colorado and exotic, alluring, and faraway California.
One last, seldom-noticed story in his autobiography suggests his connection of the West and the longing for family reunion. Shortly before he staked his claim in Kansas, Isaac Cody took his son Will on a trip to trade with Kickapoo Indians, just inside Kansas Territory. For the eight-year-old boy, the trip not only provided a first glimpse of Indians, but also a chance meeting with a long-lost relative who proved to be the boy’s first showman mentor. While camped near the Indian agency (the headquarters of the government’s representative to the Kickapoos), father and son saw a herd of horses “approaching from the West, over the California trail,” driven by “seven or eight mounted men, wearing sombreros, and dressed in buckskin, with their lariats dangling from their saddles.”81 When one of the horse drovers ventured over to meet Mr. Cody, “my father called to me to come and see a genuine Western man; he was about six feet two inches tall, was well built, and had a light, springy and wiry step. He wore a broad-brimmed California hat, and was dressed in a complete suit of buckskin, beautifully trimmed and beaded.” After a cheerful reunion, the westerner assisted young Will in the breaking of the two ponies which Isaac had just bought from the Kickapoos. Then he demonstrated riding tricks which he claimed to have learned as a circus rider in Hawaii, and in California, where he had also been a “bocarro,” or vaquero, a Mexican cowboy.82
It sounds too good to be true, and perhaps it is, but both Julia and William Cody recalled that the stranger proved to be Horace Billings, a long-lost nephew of Isaac’s. Over the summer Billings took the boy with him on short trips out on the Plains to catch wild horses, which they sold for cash at the nearby military post. Billings departed for the Far West that fall.83
There is, in fact, nothing intrinsically incredible about William Cody’s colorful version of the story. In the early nineteenth century, young men did run away to sea. Hawaii was a major port of call. Many of the first immigrants to gold rush California came from the Hawaiian Islands. There were circuses that toured the goldfields and the Pacific in the 1840s and ’50s, and even if Billings had not been in a circus, many people in the West imitated circus riding tricks for amusement. Wild horses were endemic to California and the Southwest. Americans—and Mexicans, and Indians—did venture out to the Plains for horse-capturing, or “mustanging,” expeditions, either to capture and break horses, or to trade for Indian horses, which they then drove to the exploding markets of the midwestern frontier. The Santa Fe Trail, the most popular route for this trade, connected the Far Southwest to Saint Joseph, Missouri, and ran near the Kickapoo Indian agency. 84
But whether or not Billings was a real figure, Cody’s story about him suggests how he thought about the West as a place from which fatherly heroes emerged. The man’s mastery of horses reassured the young boy, whose older brother had died beneath a volatile mare the year before. When Little Gray, a troublesome horse, began to sprint for home, “Billings stood straight up on his back, and thus rode him into camp. As he passed us he jumped to the ground, allowed the horse to run to the full length of the lariat, when he threw him a complete somersault.”85
Cody’s memory of Billings was of a consummate horseman, a buckskin-clad showman, mentor, and father figure. “Everything that he did, I wanted to do,” recalled the theatrical star. “He was a sort of hero in my eyes, and I wished to follow in his footsteps.”86 Those footsteps led both westward and into show business.
The expedition to the Kickapoo Indian agency showed young Will Cody his first Indians, and also a white man who came out of the West over the California trail, having mastered Mexican horsecraft and wild horses, too. The most striking thing about Billings is how much he resembles the future Buffalo Bill Cody himself, a horseman from the West in finely beaded buckskin and a broad-brimmed hat, “six feet two inches tall,” and “well built” with a “light, springy and wiry step.”
THE FUTURE LAY WEST. And for the young man who turned his eyes that way after the Civil War
was over, the memory of Horace Billings, the glorious man who rode out of the West, made it seem a wonderful place indeed. In William Cody’s memory, some harbinger of his own future self rode to him across the Plains from California that summer. Isaac Cody would never come home again. But in William Cody’s mind, the western trails brought absent father figures back to the family.
When Cody recounted his life story in future years, he told himself into those trails. In 1867, he had the first of several encounters with writer and railroad agent William Webb. In 1873, Webb published a description of Cody as a man who crossed the Plains “twice as a teamster, while a mere boy, and has spent the greater part of his life on it since.” 87 The story was true. Cody traveled from Leavenworth to Denver when he was fourteen. He made another trip to Denver in 1863, and raced back to be with his dying mother.88 He told Webb nothing about the Pony Express.
Two years after Webb’s first meeting with Cody, the dime novelist Ned Buntline toured the West and met William Cody, then an army scout. The two men plied each other with drink and western yarns. Buntline soon published the first version of Cody’s life story. It was highly fictionalized, but had many real elements of Cody’s life, including fights with Charles Dunn and other bushwhackers, and a friendship with Wild Bill Hickok. But it contained nary a mention of the Pony Express.89
Cody’s fame as a hunting guide and dramatic actor made him the subject of many newspaper interviews in the early 1870s. But he never said anything about being in the Pony Express until 1874. He had been a stage star for a year and a half when he suddenly blurted out to a newspaperman that he “rode the pony express route from St. Jo to San Francisco” in 1860. By the end of the month, he was announcing himself as the “ first rider who started on the route.”90
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