Louis S. Warren
Page 17
SCOUT HERO OF’ 69
Following Cody’s progress through the campaigns of 1868–69 is difficult, because army documents seldom record the achievements or even the presence of civilian scouts. Most of the testimony to Cody’s valor came years later, after he was a famous showman. Nonetheless, sifting the sources carefully we can see how he negotiated the complex multiracial terrain of the army scout’s world, and how he began to position himself as the deliverer of an anxious white officer class from a racially corrosive frontier. In the fall of 1868, the Fifth Cavalry joined Sheridan’s winter offensive. The general hoped to catch Indian warriors in their winter camps and destroy their horses, stores of food, and weapons, leaving them unable to mount an offensive when warm weather returned. The most notable event of this campaign was Custer’s attack on Black Kettle’s band of Cheyenne at the Washita River. While Custer and the Seventh Cavalry journeyed to the Washita, Cody guided General Carr and seven troops of Fifth Cavalry from Fort Lyon, in eastern Colorado, southward to the North Canadian River, in western Indian Territory (today’s Oklahoma). The seventy-five supply wagons of the Fifth Cavalry were vital support for General William Penrose’s Third Cavalry, which had ventured out earlier with scant provisions and was now enduring frigid winter conditions. Tracking through thick snow and freezing cold, Cody led Carr to the Third Cavalry. Upon hearing from straggling soldiers that Penrose’s troops were near starvation, Carr ordered Cody ahead with two troops of cavalry and fifty pack mules. Despite fierce cold and still more snow, Cody located the Penrose command on Paloduro Creek, where the Third Cavalry—with Wild Bill Hickok among its scouts—had been on quarter rations for two weeks, and two hundred horses and mules had perished from exhaustion and lack of food.92
As much as Cody contributed to Carr’s success that fall, at times he displayed the very characteristics of distracting entrepreneurialism, conviviality, and combativeness that troubled commanders where scouts were concerned. The racially mixed crowd of scouts, only nominally under military authority, could be as explosive as the troopers. After leading Carr to Penrose’s command, Cody teamed up with Hickok and persuaded a Mexican wagonmaster on a passing beer train to advance them his cargo in exchange for a share of the profits. The two scouts sold the beer “to our boys in pint cups, and as the weather was very cold we warmed the beer by putting the ends of our picket-pins heated red-hot into the cups. The result,” recalled Cody, “was one of the biggest beer jollifications I ever had the misfortune to attend.” A subsequent spree resulted in a brawl between white scouts, led by Hickok and Cody, and the Mexican and Mexican American scouts, notably the Autubees brothers. Cody said the fight was a result of “a feud” between the “fifteen Mexicans” scouting for Penrose scouts and the white scouts, led by himself.93 Indeed, the instigation for the fight hinted at the simmering white resentment of degenerate race mingling. Fists flew after Hickok called the Autobees brothers a bunch of “mongrels.” 94
Carr had no intention of letting the scouts repeat the episode. He sent Cody and Hickok to scout for a five-hundred-man detachment marching into the Texas Panhandle in search of Indians. They found none. By the end of the campaign, the troops were suffering from scurvy, and Cody was dispatched to hunt fresh meat. With twenty wagons in tow, Cody searched four days for buffalo before sighting a herd. Stampeding them into a snow-choked arroyo, he killed fifty-five. The next day, he killed forty-one more. In the following two days, he nearly doubled this total again. His shoulder was beaten black and blue by the kick of his rifle, and swollen so badly that he needed help to get his coat on. In February 1869, Cody returned to Fort Lyon with the Fifth Cavalry.95
At the end of the campaign, as other scouts were paid off and sent on their way, Carr retained Cody’s services. The scout requested a leave to visit his wife in St. Louis, and Carr agreed.96
The visit with Louisa went well. Cody later said it was because he was not there long enough to fight with her.97 But there may have been other reasons for the couple’s placidity, among them Cody’s recent ascension to the respectable wage of $125 per month.98
If his pay increase reflected his success in fighting the Cheyenne, the rapprochement between William and Louisa Cody coincidentally resonated with a primary aim of the Indian wars, to shore up American families threatened by the Indian destruction of their homes, and the abduction of settlers, especially women and children. Even if no white women had been abducted, Americans so imagined Indian men as rapists that the ideology of captive redemption would have motivated hostilities anyway. But enough settlers were abducted by Indians in the combat theater that in the public eye the multihued, squabbling army and its equally diverse, contentious scouts were ironically arrayed in an ongoing defense of white womanhood.
Thus, at the Washita, Custer sought to redeem from Cheyenne captivity one Mrs. Blynn, who was killed in the onslaught.99 Subsequently, as the war continued through the spring of 1869, the army secured the release of several white women from Indian captivity. George Custer finally caught up with a large contingent of Dog Men, in March 1869, at Sweetwater Creek. After opening negotiations with a number of chiefs, Custer took three of them hostage. He had learned that two white women captives, Anna Morgan and one Mrs. White, were in the village. Custer announced that unless they were returned, and unless all 260 lodges went to the reservation south of the Arkansas River, he would hang the hostages. Ultimately, the Indians handed over the white women, and agreed to go to the reservation. 100
Meanwhile, farther north, Cody’s star continued its rise, in another effort at captive redemption. In May 1869, the Fifth Cavalry moved to Fort McPherson, in Nebraska. Along the way, the regiment fought two skirmishes against Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, with Cody earning extraordinary praise from General Eugene Carr for his tracking and marksmanship, as well as his bravery. According to Carr’s report, Cody “displayed great skill in following” the trail, and also “deserves great credit for his fighting in both engagements, his marksmanship being very conspicuous.” In June, the secretary of war himself approved Carr’s request for a $100 bonus for Cody to honor his service.101
The coming battle would be the largest and, militarily, the most consequential of his life. In May of 1869, Cody marched with a battalion of the Fifth Cavalry from Fort Lyon, Colorado, to new headquarters at Fort McPherson, Nebraska. On the way, he saw more fighting at Beaver Creek. The Dog Men were out in force that month. Joined by at least three bands of Sioux and by various Arapaho warriors and their families, they warred across northern Kansas, attacking a crew on the Kansas Pacific, destroying homesteads, killing settlers, and finally carrying off two German immigrant women, Mrs. Maria Weichell and Mrs. Susanna Alderdice, who was abducted with her baby. Although many children, women, and sometimes men were adopted by the Cheyenne after abduction, murder of captives was permissible and even standard when they were in flight from the army. A Cheyenne warrior strangled the Alderdice infant shortly after the abduction. Tall Bull and other leaders of those Dog Men now decided to break for the north. In the Powder River country of Wyoming, they hoped, they would find allies among the Northern Cheyenne and Sioux, and respite from army patrols. Sheridan, knowing that the Dog Men were headed north, sent Carr and the Fifth Cavalry in pursuit.102
The Republican River expedition, as it became known, was the largest in the history of Fort McPherson, and amid the unwieldy, contentious mixture of officers, soldiers, white scouts, Indian scouts and auxiliaries, civilian teamsters, wagons, mules, and horses, we get a glimpse of young Cody, chief of scouts, his abilities as Indian fighter and his significance as a symbol for a beleaguered army. We sense, too, how the campaign to turn the weird assemblage of peoples into a unified force through pageantry, drill, and celebration later inspired his development of multiracial traveling amusements.
At fewer than 400 men, the expedition was small for the challenge of fighting the Dog Men. Numerical shortcomings made it ever more dependent on Indian knowledge, guidance, and fighting power: 150 Pawnee sc
outs, under the nominal command of translator and scout Frank North and his brother, Luther, set out alongside the expedition. Trundling after the command was a heavily overloaded supply train, driven by civilian teamsters. The day before the expedition departed, the Fifth Cavalry paraded at the fort, performing mock charges with sabers glinting in the sun. The Pawnee scouts matched their display, borrowing full dress uniforms and making some mock charges of their own, as if to declare their alliance—and equality—with the U.S. Army.
The formal pageantry over, the Pawnees spent the night in war dances and traditional recitation of personal battle histories. Together, all of these preliminaries were a Wild West show in their own right, with an appreciative audience, too: soldiers and their families, as well as other residents of the fort and dozens of teamsters, all turned out to watch. The next day, under regimental flags and to the accompaniment of the regimental band, this motley assemblage officially known as the Fifth Cavalry—but actually the Fifth Cavalry plus many Pawnees, some white scouts, and a lot of civilians— headed out. Cody, the North brothers, and the Pawnee scouts led the way. 103
On this journey, as on others, Cody exercised his customary entrepreneurship, as well as the chaotic social latitude of the typical scout. Along with two other civilians, he invested in a wagon of tinned goods to sell to soldiers, and it lumbered along with the other fifty or so wagons which carried the command’s provisions. Financially, the venture failed. At least Cody never paid his partner, Eric Ericson, for his share of the investment, something Ericson resented for years afterward.104
Keeping order among his scouts would trouble General Carr on this journey as on others. A few nights before the expedition departed, Cody was drinking at the California Exchange Keg House in North Platte, and ended up getting the worst of a fistfight with the saloonkeeper, Dave Perry, a friend with whom Cody subsequently reconciled.105 On the first night of the march, he and Luther North left the command for a private dinner at Cody’s house, back at the fort. A storm broke out on their return, and they were unable to find their way back to the command in the lightning. “Well, we are fine scouts,” commented Cody, “lost within three miles of the fort.” They had to wait till dawn to find their way back to Carr’s troops. Only their good fortune prevented the regiment from needing their services in the meantime.106
For Cody, numerous encounters with Cheyenne and Sioux parties began the next week, and the scout’s autonomy agitated Carr. A week out, a Sioux raiding party tried to stampede the army mule herd and thereby strand the supply train. Officers were too stunned to give orders. The scouts did not wait for them. Cody leapt onto his horse and pounded after the raiding party, with scouts Frank and Luther North and dozens of Pawnee auxiliaries right behind him. They soon passed Cody, whose mount was exhausted. Cody caught up with them as they recovered the mules, and two of the Pawnees killed two of the retreating Sioux. The scout party continued the pursuit, in vain, until after dark. When they returned, Carr was furious. Luring soldiers away from the main command was a standard Sioux tactic. Captain William Fetterman had fallen for the trick just three years before, at Fort Phil Kearny, in Wyoming Territory, and he had perished with his entire command of eighty-one men. Careful not to offend Cody, Frank North, or the Pawnees, Carr vented his fury on Luther North, the youngest and most dispensable of the scouts.107
Although the command followed the trail of a large village to the North Fork of the Solomon River the next day, the Cheyenne scattered and even the Pawnees could not pick up the trail. For the next ten days, Carr’s command wandered through the valley of the Republican River, searching for Indians.108
After several more brief skirmishes, Carr ordered a forced march across the Sand Hills to catch up to the retreating Cheyenne. Moving rapidly through abandoned Cheyenne campsites along the way, the command was soon approaching its limits. Grass gave way to yucca and cactus. There was no wood for fires. The horses were exhausted. Selecting only those men whose mounts were still fit for duty—244 cavalry, 50 Pawnee scouts, the North brothers, and William Cody—Carr set out at dawn on July 11 with rations for three days. If they did not find the Cheyenne in that time, the Dog Men would escape.109
Cody later wrote that on Carr’s order he handpicked “five or six of the best Pawnees,” with whom he found the Dog Men’s camp. But regimental records credit the Pawnee scouts, not Cody: “The Pawnees with General Carr’s column soon reported an Indian village near ‘judging from signs.’ Ten minutes later the Indian village was discovered.” Cody’s eagerness to receive credit for the discovery was in keeping with his artful claim to supreme scouting abilities for the rest of his career. But, if the account does not say who first saw the village, all battlefield reports credit the Pawnees for their scouting and fighting; none so much as mentions Cody.110
Galloping together in three parallel columns, double file, Carr’s command roared into a valley thick with Cheyenne tipis. Although the Pawnee horses were in poorer condition than the cavalry mounts, the Pawnees actually arrived among the Cheyenne lodges first. In a reflection of how much the army depended on Indian scouts and allies to win the Plains wars, Maria Weichell, the only captive to survive the fight, feared she was being rescued from the Cheyenne only to become the captive of other Indians.111
The battle was quick. Tall Bull was killed, the Dog Men crushed. By 1879, Cody was claiming that he shot Tall Bull himself, after seeing him “riding a large bay horse, and giving orders to his men in his own language —which I could occasionally understand.” Cody recounted how he dashed into a ravine and shot Tall Bull from hiding, then retrieved the splendid horse he was riding. After the battle, he wrote, when he found Tall Bull’s wife weeping, “I informed her that henceforth I should call the gallant steed ‘Tall Bull,’ in honor of her husband.” During his Wild West show days, Cody’s programs included a pen-and-ink drawing of himself closing in mounted combat with Tall Bull and stabbing him in the chest. Later, cover illustrations showed him shooting Tall Bull off his horse, from a ravine.112 His stature as the white Indian who tracked down and killed this Plains nemesis grew in the following decades, slathered in realistic detail and his real participation in the battle where the Dog Man fell.113
Of course, Cody’s account was fanciful. He did not understand Cheyenne, and none of his versions of Tall Bull’s demise square with numerous other accounts. After the battle, General Carr interviewed one of Tall Bull’s wives. She told him that as the attack began, the chief told his family to escape. “The wife begged him to escape with her, but he shut his ears.” He killed his horse (as a sign, like the dog rope, that he would not retreat), and she saw him killed in the fighting.
Other sources suggest truth to this account. Luther North made the dubious claim that his brother, Frank North, shot Tall Bull. But he also recounts the Dog Man was shooting from cover, on foot, in a ravine, at the time he was killed. A Cheyenne painting places Tall Bull on foot, in a ravine, being shot by the Pawnees. For their part, the Pawnees said that it was impossible to tell who killed Tall Bull, because so many men were shooting at him—in a ravine.114
In truth, it is doubtful anybody could tell who shot whom amidst the chaos and the howling wind, which was blowing so hard that the Cheyenne did not hear the thunderous cavalry charge until the soldiers were fifty yards from the village. Whoever brought about Tall Bull’s death, the capture of his village was a resounding success for the army. For the Dog Men, it was the final catastrophe.115
Cody scouted for the Fifth Cavalry several more times that fall, and in one engagement he and Frank North found themselves cut off and in need of rescue by the troups.116 But these were relatively minor encounters. The 1869 battle of Summit Springs was the largest battle of the Indian wars in which Cody took part. Absent his participation, and his decades-long mythologizing of the event in the Wild West show, it likely would have been a footnote in Plains history, as most Indian battles were. More immediately, Cody’s participation and his flashy self-presentation allowed him to ca
tch the attention of visiting dime novelist Ned Buntline, who was at Fort Sedgewick, in Colorado, looking for a scout to write a story about, when the Fifth returned from Summit Springs. Buntline’s real name was Edward Z. C. Judson, and he was rumored to be the highest-paid author in America. Six months later, Buntline published the first-ever Buffalo Bill dime novel, BuffaloBill: The King of Border Men, in the story paper New York Weekly.
The story had nothing to do with the Summit Springs campaign. It was a romance of Cody’s life, and Buntline took the precaution of including “Wild Bill Hitchcock” and several other characters from Hickok’s well-known adventures to make Cody’s character recognizable as a heroic frontier scout. The plot, in which Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill rescue Will Cody’s mother and sisters from white renegades and their Indian allies, bore little resemblance to any of Cody’s experiences. It did, however, express popular anxieties about frontier renegades, which permeated urban and frontier communities alike and which formed much of the backdrop to Cody’s rise to prominence as a trustworthy, loyal white scout for the troubled army.117
Cody’s fame as a dime novel hero enhanced his attraction as a hunting guide, and thereafter journalists resorted to romantic, dime novel language to describe him. The genre of serial fiction typically inserted real people, many drawn from newspaper accounts of current events, into fictional plots. Audiences could wonder how much was true and how much was fake in Buntline’s “true” story of the western hero, but as much as dime novels resembled artful deceptions, they were properly understood as a form of entertainment journalism, akin to today’s television “docudramas.” Buffalo Bill Cody’s public debut was in a lowbrow story magazine, not the venerable Harper’s New Monthly, but for all that he was now a press phenomenon.118