Louis S. Warren

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

  But scouts like Cody were civilians, not soldiers. They were private contractors, who sold their services as guides and messengers to the army, usually on a job-by-job basis. At times, this was a distinction without a difference. In combat, hunkering down in a buffalo wallow with bullets zinging overhead amidst the smell of sweat and fear, scouts were expected to fight and had to obey their ranking officers like any trooper. During the 1860s, Cody fought in nine pitched battles, more than most full-fledged soldiers.20

  But in day-to-day life, scouts were outside the hierarchy of command which defines military life, politics, and culture. Thus, many years later, just before he died, the army stripped Cody of his Congressional Medal of Honor on the grounds that he had been a civilian scout in 1872 when he won this most coveted award for enlisted men or officers.21

  The contrast between the working conditions of soldiers and scouts explains why Cody took care to avoid becoming a soldier. As he discovered during his undistinguished career as a private in the Union army in 1864–65, troopers were all but invisible to their commanders, endured paltry and irregular salaries, and had no freedom to take up other occupations. Scouts, on the other hand, reported directly to officers. Their pay varied with experience, skill, and the needs of the army, but Cody started out at $75 a month, four times the pay of an army private. Favorite scouts might stay on the payroll indefinitely. This could bring more tangible benefits. For Cody, being a scout enhanced his availability to serve as a paid hunting guide for visiting tourists and for officers. In short, being a scout offered Cody a chance to cross the class divide that separated mostly educated, middle-class army officers from working-class soldiers.

  The financial advantages of this position were augmented by the predatory entrepreneurialism of scouting, which gave it a resemblance to jayhawking. During the 1860s and ’70s, he often made gifts of booty, conferring war bonnets and other Indian curios on admirers and visitors, and selling captured horses for extra cash. Writing to friends in the East in 1874, Cody would apprise them of his latest scouting assignment, advising them to “look for those Indian trophys if we have luck enough to capture an Indian village,” and promising to “send those buffalo tongues from here tomorrow.”22

  Scouts had more latitude in their private lives, too. On patrol, their actions were constrained by the officer in charge of the expedition. But back at the fort, they could carouse as they liked. They could run other businesses. They did not have to live in the barracks, or even at the post. Soldiers who bolted from the ranks were pursued by army detectives—many of them scouts. But outside of combat, scouts could quit when they wanted. In short, being a scout entitled Cody to a military salary and a position where his talents could come to the notice of the military establishment, while it gave him the freedom to pursue other business ventures, and paid him to ride across the Plains in search of game when he was not looking for Indians.

  All these characteristics of the job suited Cody. Where he had consistently failed to attract notice from his commanders during his Civil War years, he soon came to the attention of officers as a scout. His willingness to make long rides through perilous country quickly impressed the commanding general, the Civil War hero Philip Sheridan. Sheridan met Cody when he rode into Fort Hays one day in 1868, bearing dispatches from Fort Larned, sixty-five miles away. The messages informed Sheridan that Comanches and Kiowas were preparing to leave the vicinity of Larned, probably to make war on nearby settlements.23

  On reading this news, Sheridan sought a courier to take urgent orders to Fort Dodge, ninety-five miles south, for troops to intercept the Kiowas and Comanches. The only men who could perform such duty were local volunteers who knew the country, but as Sheridan recalled in his memoirs, it was hard to find one. The trail to Dodge was “a particularly dangerous route— several couriers having been killed on it,” and it proved “impossible to get one of the various ‘Petes,’ ‘Jacks,’ or ‘Jims’ hanging around Hays City to take my communication.” But Cody “manfully came to the rescue” and volunteered, despite having just ridden sixty-five miles from Larned. Upon reaching Dodge, he did not rest, but pressed on again, carrying more dispatches back to Fort Larned, completing a run of 350 miles in a total of sixty hours.24

  Cody’s recollection of the ride suggests his Plains savvy and other qualities which contributed to his success, while revealing crucial aspects of scout subculture. Like many of the best scouts, he opted to travel at night to decrease the chances of being seen by Indians. Beginning at Larned, “after eating a lunch and filling a canteen with brandy,” he tied one end of a leather thong to his belt, and the other to his mount’s bridle. When his horse stepped in a prairie dog hole and Cody fell off several miles along the route, the thong kept the animal close at hand. The scout rode all night to Hays, nearly meeting with disaster when he accidentally stumbled into an Indian village along the way. After resting for two hours at the Perry House in Hays City, Cody accepted Sheridan’s offer of “a reward of several hundred dollars” for riding on to Fort Dodge, but first asked for more rest. “It was not much of a rest, however, that I got, for I went over to Hays City again and had ‘a time with the boys,’ ” before pressing on to Dodge, and then to Larned.25

  Although Buffalo Bill always rode a beautiful horse in the show arena, on the Plains scouts often eschewed horses, because most army mounts were not accustomed to Plains grasses and needed more frequent feeding with hay and oats for long rides. The typical mount of the Plains scout was a mule, an animal with more endurance than the horse. But mules were also notoriously stubborn, and scouts despised them. Thus, on this last leg of his journey, Cody wrote, his mule ran away from him as he was taking a drink at a stream. The animal continued on to Larned, “and kept up a little jog trot just ahead of me, but would not let me come up to him, although I tried it again and again… . Mile after mile I kept on after that mule, and every once in a while I indulged in strong language respecting the whole mule fraternity.” In sight of Fort Larned, just before dawn, with the danger of Indian attack now remote, Cody opened fire on the recalcitrant animal. “I continued to pour lead into him until I had him completely laid out. Like the great majority of government mules, he was a tough one to kill, and he clung to life with all the tenaciousness of his obstinate nature. He was, without doubt, the toughest and meanest mule I ever saw, and he died hard.”26

  Cody’s recounting was full of verve and color and probably half-true at best, but his tale of hard drinking, hard work, and little sleep suggests the titanic energy, and the equally large appetite for drink and good times, which were nearly lifelong traits. Among scouts, nighttime travel, objectionable mules, entrepreneurial zeal, hard liquor, and conviviality were all part and parcel of day-to-day existence. Some of these scout characteristics, particularly the lively party scene, gave commanders fits. But guides and couriers like Cody, who rode hundreds of miles through Indian country on little or no sleep in return for cash bonuses, were indispensable. As Sheridan remembered Cody’s legendary ride, “such an exhibition of endurance and courage was more than enough to convince me that his services would be extremely valuable in the campaign.” His faith in Cody’s prowess was such that he appointed Cody to the position of chief of scouts for the Fifth Cavalry.27

  Chief of scouts was not a military rank, and it was less a command position than a promise to ask Cody’s advice in hiring other scouts and to retain his services in preference to others. His responsibilities took him all over Kansas for the next year, and he saw combat often. In the fall of 1868, Cody accompanied the Fifth Cavalry from Fort Hays north, to the tributaries of the Republican River called Beaver Creek and Prairie Dog Creek. The Fifth was soon in battle when a band of Cheyenne Dog Men under the noted chief Tall Bull attacked. The Dog Men earned their name from the legendary practice of select warriors, who demonstrated their refusal to retreat by dismounting in the midst of battle and plunging into the ground a stake, to which the warrior was tied by an ornamented buffalo-hide sash, the “dog
rope.” From this position he could not retreat unless another Dog Man pulled the stake and whipped him—“like a dog”—to drive him from battle.28 Cody was out with a detachment and missed this first fight, but the soldiers and Cody subsequently pursued the Dog Men in a series of running fights across Beaver Creek and north into Nebraska. The number of Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapaho warriors increased to around five hundred as the moving battle continued through the next week. Then the Indians turned back south again. They scattered, and Cody and the troops lost them at the end of October.29

  The battalion then moved to Fort Wallace, where Cody helped fend off a Cheyenne attack while out with a hunting party, before moving on to Fort Lyon in Colorado, where they arrived in late November 1868.30

  CODY HAD ALREADY proved himself a good scout. But was he ever good enough to merit the river of military accolades that flowed through his show programs? If not, why would the military command take such an interest in furthering Cody’s show business career? In fact, military commanders who later trumpeted Cody’s skills initially proved skeptical, precisely because he was already a showman, self-consciously playing to popular fantasies of white scouts in ways that sometimes grated on officers. Commanders of the Plains army regarded scouts with deep and abiding suspicion. Following the high divides was indeed an art form. But the men who sold their services as guides often showed more talent for the art of deception. In the words of one travel writer, the Great Plains was “infested with numberless charlatans, blazing with all sorts of hunting and fighting titles, and ready at the rustle of greenbacks to act as guides through a land they know nothing about.” 31 Some were just plain cowardly, like the “ ‘Petes,’ ‘Jacks,’ or ‘Jims’ hanging around Hays City” who refused to carry Sheridan’s dispatches. Others were merely incompetent. “Any person who has had much to do with expeditions in Indian country knows how many and how frequent are the applications made to the commanding officer to obtain employment as scouts or guides,” wrote George Custer. “Probably one in fifty of the applicants is worthy of attention.”32

  Officers had less authority over the civilians than over soldiers, and were correspondingly reluctant to trust them. In other ways, the pervasive skepticism about frontier guides was a reflection of broader cultural anxieties, some of which sprang from surprisingly urban sources. Specifically, the fear that a fake guide might be posing as an “authentic” tracker to take a client’s money and lead him into danger made scouts the rural counterparts of a renowned product of urban decadence, the confidence man. The figure of the confidence man was the bête noire of American moralists for much of the nineteenth century, and although he is normally considered an urban figure, he was a paradoxically prominent symbol lurking in the background of Cody’s rise to fame on the Plains.

  As the Industrial Revolution enticed and compelled millions of young, rural Americans to move to the city in the nineteenth century, fearful authors penned guidebooks and etiquette manuals warning of savvy criminals who waited at city railroad stations to entrap hale farm youths and blushing country maidens. Advice literature frequently referred to these social predators, who persuaded the naive newcomers of their good intentions, then led them down the darkest alleys of the urban wilderness into gambling, alcoholism, prostitution, and death. In popular accounts, the modus operandi of these malefactors was to convince their victims that their intentions were sincere, to gain their confidence. Thus they came to be known as “confidence men,” or, in the vernacular, con artists, and their reputed blandishments defined the writings of urban reformers for much of the nineteenth century. 33

  In later decades Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show drew crowds by persuading audiences that the heroic Plains scout would not take their money under false pretenses. William Cody stood in sharp contrast to the con men who ran the tawdry circuses, lewd burlesques, and other immoral entertainments. As the rustic frontiersman new to the city, he seemed the opposite of the confidence man. Instead, Buffalo Bill was a real westerner who provided a rollicking good show of frontier virtue for urban families.

  Publicists played a role in constructing this image, but Cody himself intuited the urban fear of confidence men, and how to heighten and assuage it simultaneously, from the very earliest days of his scouting career on the Great Plains. Fear of the con man became the context for Cody’s ascent in officer esteem to the position of trustworthy scout, and his exposure to it provided him an education in audience longings, because in the end, the divergent processes of urbanization and frontier settlement provoked closely related anxieties. The frontier, like the city, was where young Americans went to make their fortunes. Thus, after the Civil War, the West proved to be, like New York City, Boston, and Chicago, the destination for hundreds of thousands of disparate emigrants from various rural regions of the country and the world. In frontier Kansas, as in any American metropolis, these immigrants alighted from the railroad. Usually, their first stop was in one of the booming towns, most of which were bereft of extended families, established social networks, or institutions, and rife with “unseemly” mixing of races, unregulated markets, urban decadence, and violence. Kansas cow towns inspired as much reformist zeal as the slums of Gotham. Amidst their confusing mix of German, Irish, Mexican, Jewish, and Yankee residents “bent on debauchery and dissipation,” observed one commentator, prostitutes walked the streets with derringers, “monstrous creatures undeserving the name of women.” The violence—or threat of violence—was breathtaking. “I verily believe there are men here who would murder a fellow-creature for five dollars.”34

  In these small, scary towns, aspiring frontier guides waited by the train to meet prospective clients, especially tourists and land speculators, whom they approached with promises to lead them to scenic attractions or the best parcels in safety for a most reasonable fee. Small wonder that fearful commentators should think them confidence men who could swindle and debase greenhorns. Small wonder, too, that the figure of the trustworthy frontier scout should ascend to new heights of public appeal.

  Cody learned from Hickok’s imposture, which exploited these fears masterfully. Waiting at the train platform, Wild Bill was renowned as a man who could protect the tourist or the emigrant from both the violent town and the savage frontier, and his appearance so approached the ideal of the white Indian that tourists could enjoy a debate over how real the pose was. Cody learned to play to the fears and hopes of soldiers and tourists in similar ways. Photos from the late 1860s and early 1870s show him in the costume of the white Indian: buckskin, rifle, and long dark hair. He was about six feet tall and very handsome. Like Hickok, his appearance as a guide borrowed so heavily from fictional representations of the profession that the people who followed him invariably wondered how much they should believe his act.

  Thus, when Brevet Major General Eugene Carr first encountered William Cody, in October of 1868, he had his doubts. Carr arrived on the Plains to assume command of the Fifth Cavalry that month, and Cody met him at the train station. “I was loading my baggage when attracted by a man in buckskin, with [a] broad-brimmed hat, sitting on a horse on some rising ground not far from the station,” recalled the officer. “There were so many so-called scouts who masqueraded around the railroad stations, mostly fakes and long-bow story tellers to tenderfeet, I thought to myself: ‘There is one of those confounded scouts posing.’ ”35

  As Carr discovered, Cody possessed very real skills as tracker, fighter, and buffalo hunter. Nonetheless, these were but the grit of truth in the cement of his artful deception, which combined genuine mastery of martial skills with a costume and manner that invited soldiers and settlers to indulge their fantasies of heroic white scouts. Long before he ever set foot on a stage, Cody was playing a role that was both deadly real—killing Cheyenne and Sioux Indians and harrying them from their homes—and presenting himself in ways that reassured, and thereby entertained, a larger public about the heroism of American conquest. The combination of Indian fighter and man who looked like an imaginary Indi
an fighter invited new acquaintances, like General Carr, to ask the same question that audiences would ask for the rest of Cody’s life: Is he an entertainer? Or is he an Indian fighter? In the end, guiding offered a means to be both, and it set his feet on the path to much wider showmanship and fame.

  But Cody’s white Indian pose disguised the superficiality of his knowledge of Indians, which was restricted to a familiarity with their fighting techniques and their standard travel routes, since many of their paths were utilized by frontier settlers and market hunters. He never learned to speak any Indian language. At this point, he had no Indian friends. In fact, he knew next to nothing about what we would call Indian culture. Many other scouts had far more knowledge of the Plains and its inhabitants than Cody did.

  But the army’s interest in Cody’s career was based on much larger, ideological considerations than how much he actually “knew Indians.” His pose, when combined with his not inconsiderable tracking and fighting skills, reassured the officers he guided in subtle, powerful ways. If he looked like a hero out of a novel by James Fenimore Cooper (or one of Cooper’s many dime novel imitators), his abilities seemed to validate those novels as projections of larger truths about frontier conquest and Americans. If that was the case, then the American conquest of Indians was inevitable. And on that score, in 1867 and ’68 army men needed all the reassurance they could get. For them, the heroic Buffalo Bill was a boon to the troubled reputation and miserable condition of the U.S. Army in the Indian wars.