Louis S. Warren

by Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody;the Wild West Show

  The Red Legs were unsalaried guerrillas. They supported themselves through the theft and sale of their victims’ belongings. Indeed, Red Legs often chose targets for their property, not their politics. Pro-Union settlers frequently complained that jayhawkers, and the Red Legs in particular, stole their property as if they were secessionists. But there was little to be done. No lawmen dared stop them. During the Civil War, the towns of Leavenworth and Lawrence served as Red Leg entrepôts, where they auctioned stolen goods with impunity, in the open street.14

  Looting and sale of goods reflected the hunger for cash not just of the Red Legs, but of Kansans generally. Modern nostalgia for subsistence farmers has created a powerful mythology of settler independence, but in reality, by 1850 almost all westerners were entangled in market relations to some degree. Isaac Cody’s stints as stagecoach owner, salaried farm manager, mill owner, land speculator, and hay contractor for the army suggest a dedication less to raising crops than to raising cash. His farm was just one of many businesses he ran. The farm equipment stolen from his home by bushwhackers included modern technological implements, such as the plow, mow, and hay rake, all of which were bought with specie. Like other rural families, the Codys produced some food for the family table, but increasingly they required cash to buy new farm technology which allowed them to cultivate larger parcels, grow more surplus crops, and buy more consumer goods. Kansas during the Civil War was home to a people always in need of money, and the Cody family, which had been comparatively well off, perhaps needed it more than most.15

  Indeed, the moneymaking ethic so prevalent on the Kansas frontier seems to have been especially strong among the Cody children, particularly Julia and Will. As Julia put it, “I don’t think there ever was 2 children that had more Responsibility than we did.”16 The absence of Isaac Cody’s income left them with a large and ever present need for money to provide for their young siblings, and the insistence on making money above other needs could extend to the most intimate family relations. In 1862, Julia Cody decided to marry. In her conversations with husband-to-be Al Goodman, she said, “I would tell him to let’s Talk Business, not love for my marrying was a Business Proposition….”17

  The allure of the Red Legs for a boy in need of money was considerable. The shreds of evidence for the teenage William Cody’s activities in this period suggest that he, like the Red Legs, “confiscated” property for commercial gain. He “took it for granted that as Missouri was a slave state the inhabitants must all be secessionists, and therefore our enemies.” Since he had “a longing and revengeful desire to retaliate upon the Missourians for the brutal manner in which they had treated and robbed my family,” stealing Missouri horses was a way of “getting back our own, or the equivalent, from the Missourians.”18

  Cody mingled his stolen Missouri horses with others closer to home. In May of 1862—during the very period in which William Cody says he was with the Red Legs—Mary Cody returned at least two horses to the Union army’s Third Wisconsin Cavalry, near Leavenworth. According to her sworn affidavit, the horses were found to have strayed from the post, and they were brought to her by son William Cody. Military authorities demanded to know where he was. “Absent,” she told them. Mary Cody visited the fort twice for this purpose, and for her trouble was paid a $2 bounty on each horse.19 Was William Cody merely returning loose horses he rounded up? Did he confiscate them from a secessionist who had stolen them in the first place? Or was he, like so many Red Legs, stealing horses from Unionist and secessionist alike, and making a little money by returning them for the bounty? Did he hand them over to his mother so she could protect him from suspicion? Was his mother, who disapproved of his jayhawking, returning stolen horses he had left in her care? If he was not stealing horses, why did Mary Cody refuse to reveal her son’s whereabouts? Eventually, Union army patrols pursued jayhawkers and Red Legs because their thieving lowered regional support for the anti-slavery cause. Cody recalled that his first forays into horse theft ended when “government officials” finally “put detectives upon our track, and several of the party were arrested.” Were those officials pursuing the band because they stole government horses? 20

  Whoever the victims of his thievery were, Cody was now fatherless and adrift in a world where targeted violence—anti-slavery or pro-slavery— easily spread into general violence against anybody who had property or was in the way. Among the partisans along the Kansas-Missouri border were any number of criminals who worked both sides of the conflict, robbing and killing secessionist and Unionist alike. Whether he served as partisan or mostly as an observer, Cody rode through the same social chaos that spawned the James, Dalton, and Younger brothers of future outlaw infamy, not to mention bloody Confederate murderers like William Quantrill, William “Bloody Bill” Anderson, and, on the other side, the insatiably murderous Union partisan, Charles “Doc” Jennison.21

  The temptation to borrow a few Union horses and return them for the money must have been considerable. We cannot know if Cody burned houses, as some Missourians alleged, but he rode with men who did. And however he did it, he made money. As his sister Julia recalled of his time with the Red Legs, “the money that Willie Brought Home and gave to Mother was a big help.”22

  Mimicking the pattern set by Isaac Cody, and in keeping with practices of many men of fighting age during the war, young Will Cody was frequently abroad for prolonged periods. The long period of violence imposed such severe strain on the civil order that child rearing and family bonds generally were difficult to achieve or sustain. The gangs of armed men who roamed the countryside were renowned for drunkenness and debauchery in Kansas towns. White and black refugees from Missouri, and anti-slavery Indians routed out of Indian territory to the south, poured into the towns of Leavenworth, Lawrence, and Atchison, contributing to a profound sense of social disorder and anomie. The refugees included or attracted large numbers of prostitutes, vagrants, pickpockets, and thieves. Soldiers and settlers walked the streets among teamsters, steamboat sailors, Mexican traders, Indians, fugitive slaves, and any number of outlaws and killers who styled themselves Free State militiamen, many of whom packed the towns’ numerous saloons, bordellos, and gambling halls.23 The relentless violence of this society shocked even enthusiastic brawlers like James Butler Hickok, later known as Wild Bill, who wrote to his sister from Kansas in 1858, “You dont [k]no[w] what a Country this is for drinking and fighting … this is no place for women and children….” 24

  In Leavenworth and elsewhere, bands of men wearing red leather garters were a frequent, intimidating sight on the streets. Cody’s prosaic, brief descriptions of town visits during his Red Leg days have an undercurrent of menace. “Whenever we were in Leavenworth we had a festive time. We usually attended all the balls in full force, and ‘ran things’ to suit ourselves.”25 Whether he was actually a Red Leg or not, he knew Leavenworth and its wartime dissipation intimately.

  In November 1863, William Cody returned home to tend his ailing mother, but soon thereafter Mary Cody died. William Cody was bereft. In his autobiography, he recalled taking himself back to Leavenworth for two months, during which time he became “a very ‘hard case,’ ” drinking himself to the point of “dissipation” in the town’s unsavory wartime society. The loss of his mother, “whom I had so tenderly loved,” meant another severing of family bonds. The alienation was complete when he awoke one morning, “after having been under the influence of bad whisky,” and found himself a soldier in the Seventh Kansas Volunteer Cavalry, the regiment better known as Jennison’s Jayhawkers. 26

  Cody’s career with the Seventh Kansas was remarkable for its lack of distinction. The regiment fought mostly in the Old Southwest, helping to crush Nathan Bedford Forrest in Mississippi and General Sterling Price in Missouri. His service record reveals almost nothing of his duties during this time, although the Seventh Kansas Volunteers saw fierce combat at Tupelo, and Cody must have been there. He later claimed he was a scout and a spy, and that he renewed his acquaintance wit
h Wild Bill Hickok while both were spying. We should remain doubtful of these tales. For one thing, they are mere copies of stories that were widely circulated about Hickok at the time. For another, spying and scouting seem unlikely postings for Cody, a soldier who—according to official records—was ordered to serve as a hospital orderly in January 1865, and who four weeks later took up a cushy post as messenger for an office of the Freedmen’s Bureau in St. Louis.27

  The heroism of protecting family must have seemed all the more important to him by war’s end, when he journeyed back to his own family in Kansas. His little brother, Charlie, was sick, and the boy died in October 1865. The family’s sadness only accented the sorrow visited on the region by the recent conflict. The fearsome war on the home which had absorbed Cody’s energies had also engulfed the countryside. There were so few people across the once thickly populated farmlands of Missouri that much of the state was silent. One traveler recorded a journey from one town to another in which he “did not pass one house,” and in truth, “there was neither town nor village” to be found in the entire county. The population of another county had sunk to six families.28 In western Missouri, one returning exile recounted that “for miles and miles, we saw nothing but lone chimneys to mark the spots where happy homes stood. It seemed like a vast cemetery— not a living thing to break the silence.”29 On the Kansas side of the line, the scene was much the same. When they remembered the war, the people of Kansas and Missouri would be horrified not just by the violence, the vengefulness of the partisans, or the destruction of property. As one journalist reflected, this “most alarming picture of war that can be painted” was the consequence of “the frightful spirit of hate and revenge” with which partisans continually hunted one another, “resulting in the most fearful loss and breaking up of family ties.”30

  The war on the family home was the definitive experience of William Cody’s young life. In it, he was, like so many others, both victim and perpetrator. The man who experienced real war on a home front as casualty and victor would spend most of his adult life trying to become a builder of family and community, and representing himself as the savior of the white family home. The Wild West show cut a swath through American entertainments for three decades beginning in the 1880s, and most of its audience were northerners and urbanites who did not live in Kansas or the South. They did not lose homes in the Civil War. Their sense of vulnerability about home and family had many other sources, from exploding slums in America’s cities to labor unrest that came close to insurrection. William Cody understood those anxieties intuitively, and he knew that his simulated attack on a settler’s cabin gave them a sense of participation in the show’s drama.

  Buffalo Bill Cody himself never drove Indians away from a cabin. But he had certainly defended a home from savage attack, and longed to wage war on the homes of his enemies from his earliest days.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Village … The Cyclone

  THE DESTRUCTION OF a frontier town by the forces of hostile nature first appeared in the Wild West show’s 1886 season, in Madison Square Garden. The expectant crowd sat before a mining camp with a row of army tents. “Thunder is crashing and light[n]ing flashing,” wrote a reviewer. “Suddenly comes a roar, the tents sway and then are leveled, several dummies are whirled wildly in midair, and the curtain drops on what is supposed to be the terrific destruction of a camp by a cyclone.”1

  The scene evoked the contest between savage nature and “the advance of civilization,” which was the Wild West show’s main plot. 2 The mock natural disaster—a kind of “Attack on the Settler’s Cabin” writ large—was heavy on mechanical special effects. To simulate a tornado, managers dug a trench to a steam generator across Twenty-seventh Street. The generator turned four six-foot-tall industrial fans inside the showplace, which produced a heavy wind—“the first time on record,” wrote the stage manager, that “real wind was used as an effect.” 3 Stagehands gathered a mountain of leaves and brush from city parks and roadsides, and poured wagonloads of debris in front of the fans, which blew it across the stage, visually accenting the gusts.4 Of course, in the outdoor arenas where the show usually appeared, these preparations were impossible. So the scene of town destruction was reserved for the comparatively rare indoor venues with suitable infrastructure, the industrial machinery behind the spectacle suggesting the advanced stage of civilization which the town represented. In 1887, in Manchester, England, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West moved indoors for the winter, and the town destruction—before a gale measured at over fifty miles per hour— became the show finale, with “legitimate wind effects by the Blackman Air Propeller.” 5 In 1907, again at Madison Square Garden, the mountain village collapsed again, this time under an avalanche whose staging remains a mystery. 6

  AT LEAST SINCE John Winthrop invoked the “city on a hill,” town building had expressed America’s frontier progress. In keeping with this tradition, the Wild West show’s towns were the figurative culmination of westward-marching civilization. Cody grew up with such notions, which were widespread on the Plains by the time the Civil War came to a close. When a train pulled into Sheridan, Kansas, in November 1869, a correspondent on board described the new town as “an apparition of civilization amid the solitudes of the Great American Desert.”7

  In fact, despite popular ideas of towns as the endgame of western development, urbanization went hand in hand with frontier expansion. In the transient world of the Far West, to found a town made one a creator of the fixed institutions of governance, domesticity, and capital. The trade and rising real estate prices of towns made them a short path to wealth and respectability for lucky founders. Even in eighteenth-century Kentucky, Daniel Boone, that paragon of frontiersmen and hunters, had joined partners in creating the town of Boonesborough. He never made any money from it, but by the 1850s the founders of such frontier towns as Des Moines, Davenport, and Moline, to say nothing of Chicago, were respected, and sometimes wealthy.8

  William Cody’s exposure to frontier horsemanship, hunting, and Indian fighting fit our modern notions of frontier life, but it comes as something of a surprise to learn this backcountry man came of age amid fervent urbanization. In Kansas, hysteria for town-founding rose and fell with each pulse in the river of emigrants. As the Cody family joined other settlers there in 1854, speculators were founding no fewer than fourteen towns along the steamboat route of the Missouri River, and others farther inland. So eagerly did speculators like Isaac Cody lay out plans for settlements like Grasshopper Falls that humorists warned some land should be reserved for farming “before the whole Territory should be divided into city lots.” Kansas emigrants had such faith in town futures that beautifully colored printed deeds to properties in towns-yet-to-exist served as money. According to one observer, shares in cities consisting of a shack or two “sold readily for a hundred dollars.” The flutter of land certificates and the clink of gold coin attracted poor men in droves. “Young men who never before owned fifty dollars at once, a few weeks after reaching Kansas possessed full pockets, with town shares by the score.” Isaac Cody’s speculation in some town was practically a foregone conclusion. After all, even “servant girls speculated in town lots.”9

  The town of Grasshopper Falls was a success. But William Cody’s father seems to have known that most town-promotion schemes in the West failed. Competition for emigrant traffic was fierce. Of the fourteen would-be metropolises established along the Missouri River in Kansas, only three survived. Isaac Cody did not let his success run away with him. He even refused an invitation to invest in the new town of Leavenworth.10

  Not surprisingly, after the Civil War, as hundreds of thousands of new emigrants poured into the state, town creation was much on the minds of Kansas settlers. But now it was complicated by the technology of the railroad. Boosters had been calling for a transcontinental railroad since the 1830s. In 1861, after the South’s departure from Congress finally broke the political logjam over the transcontinental route, the Union Pacific R
ailroad received the contract to lay the tracks from Omaha to the West. Other railroad financiers, led by the western surveyor-hero John C. Frémont, broke ground on a railroad to connect Saint Joseph, Missouri, to Denver by building a direct route through central Kansas. They began at Leavenworth in 1863 and, anticipating a buyout by the larger line to the north, they called their road the Union Pacific Eastern Division, or the UPED (later it would be called the Kansas Pacific).11

  Of course, settlers followed the rails. Once the well-watered eastern edge of the state was behind them, they entered a more arid, threatening land. Rainfall was relatively sparse. The rolling hills and streams gave way to flatter, short-grass plains, with fewer sources of water, vast herds of buffalo, and large numbers of Indians who were often less than pleased at this invasion of their homelands. In defiance of Indians and the weird Plains environment, towns sprouted along the rails at Ellsworth, Hays, Junction City, and other places.

  In the immediate aftermath of the war, William Cody followed those same rail lines on a path that led him both to create a family for himself—his own settler’s cabin—and to attempt ensconcing them in a new community of his own design, a town by the railroad. His little family was a shaky proposition, and his domestic life was not helped by the sudden collapse of his village. In a strange foreshadowing of the staged destruction of the Wild West show, the failure of his town looked like a natural disaster. But it was industrial might, not hostile nature, that destroyed it.

  Twenty years later, the Wild West show functioned as a kind of traveling community, and its success was a product of the many railroads which allowed its props, its dozens of animals, and its hundreds of people to move from town to town. Just as railroads brought Cody’s show to city lots, they carried audiences from the surrounding countryside, usually at special rates negotiated by Cody and his agents. Later, just before the twentieth century began, Cody would turn again to the creation of a more conventional town, this time in arid Wyoming. There, one of the first steps he took was to secure railroad support for his settlement. William Cody learned the need for alliances with railroads, and he did it during the late 1860s, as a consequence of his first attempt to create a frontier community. Here, the entrepreneurial William Cody learned a hard lesson in the power of corporations and the new railroads. It stayed with him all his life.