When Cody wrote his own autobiography in 1879, he validated the fiction by making himself the protégé of Hickok. In some of the book’s more fanciful sections, Wild Bill champions young Buffalo Bill during his fictitious adventures in the Mormon War and in his imaginary fights with Indians on the Pony Express. Cody even recapitulated Nichols’s account of Hickok’s feats as a Union spy, and added himself as an observer and minor participant in the action (which he certainly was not). He included an entire chapter about Wild Bill’s killing of Dave Tutt in Springfield, Missouri, an event which also featured prominently in the Nichols article, without ever inserting himself in the story, as if including this tale of the code duello somehow conveyed its chivalrous legacy to Cody (who was on detached service in St. Louis, courting Louisa, and probably visiting the theater, when the killing occurred). In 1861 Hickok had been in a shoot-out with Jake McCanles and his family. Cody wrote up the killing of Jake McCanles and his “gang” as if it were a sad but inevitable coda to the Civil War rather than an ugly personal dispute over a local woman, all to link himself to Hickok’s ability to use violence in defense of honor.
Cody’s eager borrowing from the Hickok story was part of his overall technique of sculpting his own persona from the myths that surrounded him. During the early 1870s, when the two men appeared in stage plays about frontier life, their rivalry increased. Cody’s mirroring of Hickok’s biography irritated the older man, who grew to resent the acolyte’s appropriation of his myth. 63 But Hickok was murdered in 1876, and by 1879, his legend was practically a Cody vehicle. Cody’s stage publicist, John Burke, tended to the deceased Hickok’s reputation, and defended him in the press, because the two scouts were so closely linked in the popular mind that to allow bad press about Hickok would ill betide Cody.64 By 1879, in his own autobiography, Cody could claim Hickok as a mythic brother, and by telling some Wild Bill stories (the duel with Tutt) and eliding others (his killing of a Seventh Cavalry soldier in a brawl, which forced his departure from Hays in 1870), Cody contained the meaning of the Hickok myth and wrapped it around himself like a cape.65
To this day, visitors to the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, will on occasion exclaim, “Wow, a whole museum for Wild Bill!” The confusion of Buffalo Bill with Wild Bill was Cody’s intention from the late 1860s onward. Its endurance is partly a testament to Cody’s effectiveness, which was so pronounced that people could be unaware they were different people even when they were both alive. Wild Bill Hickok left Buffalo Bill’s stage show after a brief series of joint appearances in 1873 and 1874. Months afterward, Cody was still advertising the performances of Wild Bill—and as long as they had Buffalo Bill to look at, critics seldom noticed the gunfighter’s absence.66 During the 1887 shows of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, in London, General Sherman received Cody’s request for a testimonial, to be used in the publicity for the Wild West show, and wrote back that Cody had “guided me honestly and faithfully, in 1865–66, from Fort Riley to Kearny, in Kansas and Nebraska.”
Sherman was mistaken. His guide on that trip was Hickok. Cody, not to be put off by a small error of fact, published the testimonial. In later editions of his autobiography, he concocted a whole expedition to go with it.67
Cody’s willingness to deceive his audiences may have exceeded Hickok’s. The younger man certainly proved more successful at that end of the business than his early mentor ever had. But the development of Buffalo Bill from frontier Kansan to transatlantic media phenomenon was in some ways dependent on the prior emergence of Wild Bill, who blazed much of the early path for him but whose violence made him a more questionable figure than Cody ever was. By blurring the line between Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok, and obscuring their differences, Cody used his predecessor in frontier imposture to concoct a multilayered public deception and amusement. Audiences and writers who enjoyed debating whether Cody was frontiersman or showman could revel in the chaos of symbols and stories that poured from the merger of the men’s exploits. Did Wild Bill invent the Wild West show? Did he really know Buffalo Bill? Buffalo Bill—wasn’t he a lawman? Did he kill somebody— an ex-Confederate? A Union soldier? In a gunfight? The real distinctions between the men made Cody the more palatable figure, and his publicists skillfully illuminated those distinctions as the need arose. But after Cody died, only the most devoted fans and scholars knew where Wild Bill and Buffalo Bill diverged—and to them would go the consummate pleasure (mine) of explicating these linked figures to curious audiences of their own (you).
Homage to the Master Showman. William Cody, right, meets with his sister, May Cody Decker, and hotel manager Lew Decker in Cody’s office at the Irma Hotel, Cody, Wyoming, c. 1910. On the back wall, in the upper right corner of the photograph, hangs a picture of P. T. Barnum. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.
As a young man constructing a public persona, Cody trailed Wild Bill Hickok, reading his sign, aping his moves. He learned from Hickok how to embody not just the balancing of technology and nature that met along the frontier line, but the debate over what was real and what was fake, what was truth and what was fiction, which consumed nearly all discussions of the frontier and the Far West, and modern America, too. By taking such serious questions and turning them into entertainment, Wild Bill was a model for the younger man, who began to carve out his own space as a frontiersman and entertainment figure alongside Hickok, in Hays, in 1868.
CHAPTER FIVE
Guide and Scout
WILLIAM CODY avoided a law enforcement career. But in other ways, his foray into frontier imposture would resemble Hickok’s, combining real violence with a self-conscious pose that grafted popular symbols of the frontiersman—especially buckskin, long hair, and modern weapons—to the demanding career of an army scout.
With Louisa no longer on his horizon, he returned to west Kansas alone and searched for work around the forts. Following Hickok’s example, he turned to guiding and scouting. In August 1868, Cody served as guide and hunter to the U.S. Tenth Cavalry, a segregated black unit, and his white commanding officer reported that Cody “gets $60 per month and a splendid mule to ride, and is one of the most contented and happy men I ever met.” 1 Later that year, in September, he offered his services to the army again. This time he was resacking forage for army livestock at Fort Larned, for $30 per month.2 Within a week, on the strength of his reputation as a hunter and hunting guide, he had been promoted to scout at $75 per month.3
Today, frontier scouts are mythic figures, in no small measure because Buffalo Bill Cody dedicated his career to securing their place in American history. But even in 1867, the term “scout” was resonant with meanings far beyond the duties of the job. As early as the sixteenth century, soldiers detailed to reconnoiter enemy territory were called scouts, from the Middle French escouter, “to listen.”4
Conditioned by generations of Indian conflict, Americans conflated the heroic scout and the “white Indian,” a white man who adopted Indian woodcraft and fighting methods, combined them with a heart that remained true to the cause of civilization, and contained all within a white, civilized body.5 If Indians embodied Nature and Europeans embodied Culture, the white Indian embodied the proper, virtuous mixing of both. He was the essence of American identity. In popular culture, especially in the prolific dime novels which entertained the mass of American readers, frontier scouts from the fictional Hawkeye and Seth Jones to the historical (or historically based) Kit Carson made the American white Indian and scout one of the most popular of protagonists, even before the Civil War.6
Throughout its history, the U.S. military utilized different kinds of scouts to serve different needs. Colonial militia units like Roger’s Rangers and later militiamen of the republic, like Daniel Boone, became legendary for their ability to fight Indians with Indian methods. In the 1850s and ’60s, Kit Carson joined the ranks of these earlier frontier Indian fighters. 7 But white Indian scouts, if they existed, had limited usefulness outside of the Indian wars. Officers struggled to ke
ep scouts under military command and discipline. During the Civil War, the union army generally kept scouting assignments within the ranks of professional soldiers, who took on scout duty as today’s soldiers make reconnaissance patrols.
But the U.S. Army found the Great Plains such a confusing and forbidding environment that commanders sought local men to perform a variety of functions that were subsumed under the term “scouting.” They were not necessarily knowledgeable about Indians. Scouts were often mere couriers, who carried orders between distant posts. Other duties including guiding troops from one place to another, tracking Indians, hunting game for officers and men as the need arose, and reconnoitering territory. From 1868 until 1872, William Cody made his living by scouting for the army in pursuit of Indians, and guiding tourists and army officers on buffalo hunts. His success at these occupations brought him considerable financial reward, and reunion with Louisa and Arta, who returned to him in 1869. The gathering of his respectable wife and family at Fort McPherson, Nebraska, was no trivial event. As we shall see, the context of his white family made his white Indian act respectable, and helped launch him to fame exceeding that of any other scout.
The veracity of Cody’s Indian fighting exploits preoccupied critics and reviewers while he was alive, and it has intrigued historians ever since. In 1960, historian Don Russell published what remains the most comprehensive examination of Cody’s career as scout, The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill. Russell’s method of evaluating Cody’s accomplishments was seductively simple. After examining the reports, correspondence, and public statements of Cody’s commanding officers, Russell concluded that Cody was a superlative scout who actually did perform most of the exploits he later claimed. In fact, he was so modest that he downplayed his achievements. “In an age that is skeptical of heroism,” concluded Russell, “anyone who does bother to find out what William F. Cody really amounted to may turn up a record that is impressive in its universal acclaim from a wide variety of sources as well as in its lack of any hint that he ever faltered or blundered.”8
To be sure, William Cody was an excellent tracker and hunter, and he proved an exceptionally able fighter in the running skirmishes which typified the Plains wars. But Russell’s biography of Cody ignores the scout’s social context, with the result that he fails to see how badly Cody’s commanders wanted, even needed, to find a hero in the person of Buffalo Bill, and how hard Cody worked to accommodate them. Cody’s success as guide flowed in part from his early, almost preternatural sense that it was far more than a job. The occupation was infused with such powerful symbolic meanings that it provided him a kind of stage or arena in which to construct a persona, to master a frontier imposture, akin to Hickok’s. To grasp his transformation from private man to public figure in the Indian wars and on the hunting grounds, we must understand how his pose reassured, and sometimes amused, army officers, the men who became his chief cultural patrons in the early days of his show career. And for that, we must explore how confusing, even terrifying, the Great Plains was for the Americans who confronted it after the Civil War.
INDIANS SOLDIERS AND SCOUTS
The army came to the Plains, of course, to fight Indians. But America’s advance onto the Plains was only one of several overlapping expansions by distinct peoples. The acquisition of horses and the advent of American and European markets for buffalo robes drew various once-horticultural Indians from their woodland and mountain homes onto the Great Plains after 1700. Among these were the Lakota, commonly known as the western Sioux. By 1867, they had been occupying an ever-larger swath of the northern and central Plains for a century and a half. As they did so, they forced aside older Plains inhabitants, such as the horticultural Arikara, Hidatsa, Mandan, and Pawnee, as well as eastern Indians who relocated to Kansas in the nineteenth century, such as the Delaware, Osage, and Cherokee. Nomadic peoples benefited from the differential fallout of the great diseases that swept Indian villages away in this period. As the more sedentary, horticultural peoples reeled from smallpox, measles, and other Eurasian maladies to which they had no resistance, nomads were more widely dispersed, so less prone to all-out catastrophe. 9
Arapaho and Cheyenne joined the Lakota in their expansionist thrust. They, too, left settled villages in today’s Minnesota to seize the buffalo hunting grounds to the south and west over the course of the nineteenth century. On the southern Plains, Comanche and Kiowa made analogous moves, venturing from homelands in the West out onto the plains of Texas and Kansas. Nomads were not united. The Lakota and Cheyenne, for example, contested access to the buffalo herds with other, newly nomadic groups such as the Crow and the Shoshone. But by 1840, many of the nomads—Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Kiowa—had allied with one another, to combat their common enemies among their beleaguered Plains predecessors.
American expansion into Nebraska and Kansas followed fast on the nomads’ triumph. U.S. emigrants venturing to the California and Colorado mines and settlers taking up lands along the route of the emigrant trails and railroads sliced through the heart of their homeland. As early as 1853, authorities reported that Cheyenne were starving because settlers and emigrants had driven away game and the latter’s livestock had eaten forage for the former’s horses.10 In 1862, a Sioux warrior, Shan-tag-a-lisk, told an army officer that settler oxen and mules had long since demolished the range along the main emigrant route west. “Your young men and your freighters have driven all the game out, or killed it, so we find nothing in the Platte valley.”11
Not surprisingly, there was fighting between U.S. forces and the Sioux-Cheyenne alliance by the mid-1850s, which increased in the 1860s, with periodic efforts to make peace. In 1864, a Colorado volunteer militia fell on a peaceful Cheyenne village at Sand Creek, massacring hundreds of men, women, and children. The Plains erupted. Kansas frontier settlements, where aspiring farmers plowed up the buffalo grass and planted fields, were beset by Indian war parties. Out on the sparsely forested Plains, settlers’ cabins were often made of sod bricks. These “soddies” were more and more often the target of Indian raids, and between 1865 and 1867, some two hundred settlers and untold numbers of Indians died in these clashes. Another two hundred Americans perished in fights with Sioux and Cheyenne in 1868. 12 In prominent cases, Indian raiders abducted settler women and children, as either hostages, slaves, or potential adoptees. Some women captives became wives, and captors adopted children as their own. By the time Cody took up scouting for the army, the Sioux and Cheyenne, along with the Comanche, Kiowa, and Arapaho, constituted the most fearsome horse warriors the American military had ever faced.13 The war on the Plains destroyed soddies and tipis and the loving inhabitants of both. Like the earlier war in Cody’s life, this one was also, above all, a war against the family home.
IN THE ARMY, scouts became necessary because the soldiers who came to fight the Plains Indians so easily got lost in the strange grassland. The land looked flat. But the mostly treeless expanse actually sloped gradually from east to west, a rolling territory coursed with coulees, or gulleys, which hid streambeds and broken, winding canyons. Seemingly straight paths veered subtly in directions which could lead a party far afield. Few experiences were more frightening than searching for enemy Indians and becoming lost on the Plains in a thunderstorm or a blizzard. Army guides navigated the Plains by following watersheds between places, staying on the higher ridges of this deceptive terrain. “The swell in the surface, which constitutes the main water shed, is termed the ‘divide,’ ” wrote one journalist. “To know the ‘divide’ and how to follow it constitutes the highest art of the guide.”14
Generally, that art’s chief practitioners were local hunters and traders. Some could read the land well enough to warn troops at what point along the trail an attack was likely to come. Long experience gave local guides facility at discerning distant creatures from the way they moved, a welcome talent since the light of the Plains projected mirages and a thousand other tricks of the eye. In the distance, buffalo looked like horses
, which could be mistaken for Indians, who were hard to distinguish from soldiers. In 1867, two unguided detachments of the same U.S. cavalry regiment watched each other suspiciously and at length, each mistaking the other for Indians. They avoided a skirmish only at the very last moment.15
Cody earned his military reputation by guiding troops and fighting alongside them during these campaigns. By 1869, he was a well-known Indian fighter whose name was appearing in the popular press. He received the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1872. During his Wild West show career, his programs reprinted a torrent of praise from military officers, among whom numbered many good friends. General Wesley Merritt wrote, “He was cool and capable when surrounded by dangers, and his reports were always free from exaggeration.” Major General W. H. Emory wrote that Cody had been “chief guide and hunter” to his command on the North Platte, “and he performed all his duties with marked excellence.”
The most sterling accolades came from General Eugene A. Carr, who had worked with “a great many guides, scouts, trailers, and hunters,” and judged Cody “king of them all.”16 Mr. Cody, he wrote, “seemed never to tire, and was always ready to go, in the darkest night, or the worst weather.” His eyesight was “better than a good field-glass; he is the best trailer I ever heard of, and the best judge of the ‘lay of the country.’ … In a fight, Mr. Cody is never noisy, obstreperous or excited.” He was “always in the right place, and his information was always valuable and reliable.”17 By 1887, he was claiming the rank of colonel, and for the rest of his life, friends and associates referred to him as “Colonel Cody.”
The militarization of Buffalo Bill’s reputation was so complete that it obscured a central fact of Cody’s career: for all his military glory, Cody was never in the army during the Indian wars.18 His colonelcy came as an honorary appointment to the Nebraska state militia—the predecessor to the national guard—in 1887, long after the Indian wars were over. The rank was bestowed upon him by John Thayer, the governor of Nebraska, who awarded it at Cody’s request, as the entertainer sought to professionalize his ambiguous military record just before his Wild West show embarked for London. (For his part, Thayer was only too happy to appoint Buffalo Bill to his “honorary” staff, as an advertisement for Nebraska.) Although Cody was initially forthright about the commission (he printed it in the 1887 show program), by the early 1890s he had changed its date to 1867 to provide his earlier scouting adventures a professional veneer.19
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