Louis S. Warren

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

  But, like his Pony Express fictions, the fabricated Cody-Comstock buffalo duel tells us almost as much about Cody as any real episode could. His consistent depiction of himself as a flashy horseback hunter reflects his grasp of hunting ideology common to people who would fill the seats at his show years later. Where hide and meat hunters bragged about their “stands,” speed and mobility made mounted buffalo hunting a highly attractive symbol for a very different circle of hunters known as sportsmen, or “sports.” Market hunters gauged their skills in volume, sports valued style over substance. In this respect, Cody’s tales reflect his exposure to the ethos of sport hunting and of the hunting guide, a new occupation which he took up with great vigor during his days as an army scout, and which played a large role in his self-development as a showman.

  From the Daniel Boone of history to the Natty Bumppo of James Fenimore Cooper, the white Indian, noble and natural, was a hunter par excellence. His facility with killing wild beasts was at once a seminal, regenerative bond with his native terrain and a mark of his belonging to the past, the time before progress, before farms and cities and commerce.14 Like Indians and wild animals, the white Indian would vanish into history as livestock and farms spread over the country. Cody’s effort to embody this figure required his crafting of a hunter image specifically to entertain a small but increasingly devoted public, who valued proximity to the white Indian as insurance against their alienation from nature in a rapidly industrializing America. In an important sense, guiding the hunt provided Cody another stage, on which he made a show of merging the figure of the hunter, the agent of American history, with the avatar of American wilderness.

  HAVING CEASED SHOOTING buffalo for the Kansas Pacific in 1868, Cody’s hunting thereafter was devoted almost exclusively to recreation and the cultivation of tourism. The golden spike that connected the Union Pacific to the Central Pacific, and the East to the West, was not driven until 1869. But as we have seen, tourists ventured west even before that. By 1867, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of tourists heading to frontier Kansas on the rail line, paying their $10 fare to see the West. Some were wealthy. Most were solidly middle class. They slept in baggage cars, or in their stiff seats, and in cheap boardinghouses when they could find them. They scanned the horizon for Indians—usually in vain—and they stumbled off the train, bleary-eyed and wondering at the bleak and trashy cow towns.

  Already, travel writers lamented the way that tourism had desecrated “many a lovely spot” with “the sandwich-papers, orange-peel, and broken bottles of former devotees.” For the public that felt likewise, the West was a beacon.15 These tourists, like those before and after, were in pursuit of the authentic and the natural, searching out signs of “the frontier,” the “real West.”16 In Hays and other towns, a whole industry of guiding, provisioning, and meeting the aesthetic demands of excursionists soon emerged. Tourists not only invited local men like Hickok and Cody to strike convincing western poses; they also shaped popular understandings of the natural world. In 1872, Congress legislated the creation of Yellowstone National Park in northwest Wyoming, largely at the insistence of the Northern Pacific Railroad’s director, Jay Cooke, who saw in the place a magnificent attraction for tourists (who would, of course, buy tickets on his trains to get there, and accommodation at the hotel he built there).17

  The unmistakable cultural power of tourists in creating natural attractions extended to hunting. These visitors expected the West to resemble the one they saw in the numerous popular paintings of the period, and which they read about in dime novels, memoirs, and reports of earlier western excursionists, and in newspapers. In some sense, then, the “real West” was where one shot at buffalo. So as trains raced alongside buffalo herds, hundreds of guns blazed from the windows. Surprisingly few animals might fall in such an episode, but one tourist noted that when one old bull collapsed within sight of the tracks, the locomotive wailed to a halt, “and men, women, and children tumbled from the train and joined in the pursuit.” They climbed atop the carcass, led cheers for the president and the railroad, and, in this case, pulled the old bull on board the train as a kind of mascot. 18 They behaved much like the party of Ohio excursionists who ventured out with George Custer in 1869 and clipped locks of hair (which they jokingly compared to scalps) from a fallen buffalo, as souvenirs of their frontier experience.19

  Not surprisingly, railroads advertised buffalo hunts as an inducement to the tourist trade as early as 1868.20 The following year, a Topeka journalist commented, “Persons from the east are stopping off here every day, hoping to get a chance to immortalize their names by killing buffalo.”21 Trains stopped frequently to allow passengers from Topeka, Omaha, or points east to blast away at the buffalo, while trainmen installed extra cowcatchers on the back of the train to keep at bay the longhorn cattle which milled up to, and even onto, the platform at Abilene and other towns. The replacement of hunting by pastoralism, the march of civilization, was under way. In part, tourists went west to participate in it.22

  Many fantasized about longer hunting excursions, and for wealthier hunters, full-fledged expeditions were popular. As we have seen, by the 1860s, hunting animals for hides and pelts had only a tenuous acceptability, as a petty-capitalist endeavor for upwardly mobile white men. But meanwhile, other kinds of hunting, especially for recreation, had acquired a new kind of legitimacy as a leisure pursuit. Beginning in the 1830s, and accelerating through the century, industrialization, urbanization, and the growth of the market system created a large, managerial middle class and a smaller upper class of white men who were increasingly self-conscious about their own urbanity and privilege, and about their vulnerability to systems of banking, finance, and salaried living. Where their fathers, or grandfathers, had been independent farmers, they depended on a strange and—as the era’s repeated financial panics reminded them—unreliable system of commerce, trade, and cash. At the same time, surging immigration of Irish, German, and other foreign laborers swelled city tenements to bursting. Managers and technicians of the new economy supervised these rough workers, whose alien characteristics and strenuous labor underscored managers’ fears about losing touch with farm, field, and forest, the traditional sources of masculinity. For these middle-and upper-class men of the cities, then, an increasingly attractive, powerful antidote to urban decadence was to reconnect with traditional American landscapes and activities, to claim a bond of their own with the American earth, with indigenous Nature.23

  As an “invented tradition,” a revamped practice that conformed to popular ideas of history without actually resembling it too closely, hunting was just the ticket.24 The problem was that game, especially big game, had long since disappeared from the farm country outside of the middle-class bastions of Chicago, New York, and other cities. Today’s abundant deer herds reflect a century of wildlife management and forest stewardship. But in the 1870s, in the East, deer could be found only in the remote Adirondacks and a few other mountain redoubts. So, seizing the image of the frontier hunter as an icon of self-reliance, staving off their fears about being dependent on salaries and dividends and not on nature, and eager to identify themselves with some fundamentally American, ritualized experience to naturalize themselves against the alien classes of immigrant workers who toiled in their factories, wealthy sport hunters from midwestern settlements, and even wealthier ones from the East, followed the game west.

  Here their longings intersected with another cultural phenomenon: the emergent appreciation of the Great Plains as a distinctively American landscape. The vast grassland between the Mississippi and the Rockies, along with its buffalo herds and the Indians who hunted them, became popular symbols of American nature and American exceptionalism not long after Lewis and Clark returned with the first official descriptions of the region in 1807.25 In their ongoing quest to express American natural virtue as an antidote to European corruption, American artists began producing images of Indians killing buffalo from horseback sometime around 1820, and they became
a staple of popular press illustration after 1840. 26

  In fact, very few whites hunted buffalo for most of these years, since few of them lived near enough to the prairies to do so. But there were other ways the public absorbed the potent symbolism of the Plains. In 1832, after seventeen years in Europe, Washington Irving “re-naturalized” himself with a Plains buffalo hunt. The same year, painter George Catlin ventured up the Missouri River to record scenes of Indian life. So, too, did the Bavarian explorer-naturalist Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, with the Swiss artist Karl Bodmer in tow. In 1837, British aristocrat Sir William Drummond Stewart made a similar journey, hiring the American painter Alfred Jacob Miller to document the trek. From these forays emerged some of the most powerful, formative literary and visual images of American nature. The canvases of Catlin, Bodmer, and Miller fueled the fantasies of the increasingly urban and denatured middle classes with their vast herds of bison, the footloose hunters who pursued them, and the Edenic Great Plains stretching beneath the open sky. The images were widely admired, reproduced, and imitated. The bison, America’s iconic game animal, was the symbol of wild nature in general. Killing them was not only the first stage in the great march of civilization westward, and therefore necessary; by the mid-nineteenth century it became a fundamentally natural and uniquely American experience, too.

  The popular appeal of these images was such that urban showmen soon exploited them. P. T. Barnum staged his mock buffalo hunt in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1843, and at least one circus owner attempted it in 1856. 27 By the time of the California gold rush in 1849, public longing to assume the pose of the renatured American who killed buffalo from horseback was so pervasive that overland emigrants, most of whom were from areas where game was long extinct and hunting but a memory, eagerly anticipated it. Leaping to their horses at the first sight of buffalo, emigrant men chased pell-mell after the herds, guns blazing, even though these forays more often ended with injured hunters than with meat in camp.28

  SHOOTING BUFFALO FROM the train was a cheaper option, but it failed to satisfy the core cultural longings for mounted buffalo hunting. William Cody became adept at delivering the mounted hunting experience, for the right amount of money. Even before he became an army scout, his reputation among railroad personnel and other local luminaries garnered him some of the nascent guiding business with wealthier hunters. He guided the railroad agent William Webb on a hunt in 1867, and in 1868 he shepherded wealthy St. Louis sports on a hunt out of Hays.29

  His frontier imposture took shape as he watched these aspiring nimrods attempt their own. They did not hunt like market hunters. To their minds, proper hunting was recreational. Those who hunted for a living, who labored at it, were rude and uncivilized, like Indians. Sport hunters as a group claimed superiority in part by elevating more difficult, less productive techniques of hunting over customary practices of lower-class subsistence and market gunners, whom sports reviled as “game hogs” and “pot hunters.” Thus, in these very years, to hunt deer with torches, and just about every other form of night hunting, came to be excoriated as “unsporting.” So, too, were “hounding” deer, “ground swatting” birds instead of shooting them on the wing, and any kind of fishing that did not require a rod and reel. By 1900, the codification of these often contradictory and implicit rules in the nation’s law books ensured that as hunting became a highly charged, symbolic pastime for elites and the middle class, it also became a means to wrap their commercial and political power in the cloak of nature.30

  Most historians place the epicenter of the sport hunting craze in eastern cities at the end of the nineteenth century. But Cody was exposed to it earlier than that, in Kansas, and it had a pronounced effect on how he presented his hunting exploits to the broader public. If he did not intuit the elite preference for shooting buffalo from horseback from popular images of it, he had certainly learned it by the time his town of Rome failed. William Webb, the railroad agent who wrecked the town right after its founder took him hunting, had strong views on the subject of buffalo killing. Webb’s account of his Plains tour appeared in 1873, and in it he not only praised Buffalo Bill as “altogether the best guide I ever saw,” but also explained to his readers that “horseback hunting” was the “only legitimate way” of taking buffalo. There was, indeed, “little genuine sport” in “stalking” the animals on foot, a practice that “holds the same relation to horseback hunting that ‘hand line’ fishing does to that with the rod and reel … or that killing birds on the ground does to wing-shooting.”31

  Even earlier, in 1868, another writer explained proper buffalo hunting to the public in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Hunting buffalo from horseback was the method “usually adopted by our cavalry officers and the best hunters among the frontiersmen,” while stalking was the domain of “colored infantry troops” and “a kind of pot-hunting, that is not entitled to the name of sport.” 32 Even Indian hunters were not true sportsmen, for “hunting buffalo is to the Indian a labor rather than a pastime.”33

  But for tourists and guides, the problem with assuming the guise of the mythic mounted buffalo hunter was that it was so exceedingly difficult. Shooting a buffalo from the back of a running horse was considerably more challenging than it looked, requiring practice, one sportsman noted, “to enable one to hit anything smaller than a mammoth.” Inexperienced hunters, unable to steady the weapon, fired most of their bullets—sometimes all of them—into the ground or the sky.34 Among such company, the safest place to be, remarked one guide, “was nearest the buffalo.” 35

  The buffalo’s strength and power compounded the dangers. The animals could switch directions at full speed. They could stop dead from a full run, hook their horns into a horse and topple it, then gore the hunter, who might already be wounded from the fall or from being trampled by other animals. Second Lieutenant George Armes summarized a typical hunt in 1866: “Sergeant Miller shot his horse through the head during the excitement, and six or eight of the horses fell, and some ran away with their riders.” 36 George Custer, astride his wife’s favorite horse, pursued his first buffalo for several miles across the prairie only to have the animal turn on him suddenly. Just as Custer fired his pistol, his mount reared, and Custer blew the horse’s brains out. The bison turned and trotted away, leaving the Boy General stranded and lost in the middle of Kansas. During his first year on the Plains, he killed two more horses the same way.37

  Obviously, the cultural importance of hunting from horseback outweighed its effectiveness at killing bison, even as practitioners discovered how hard it was. Their persistence in the sport suggests the strength of sports’ attachment to the charged symbolic tableau, the setting of the Great Plains, the quarry of the buffalo, and the mounted hunter, a semiotic triad that simultaneously evoked Plains Indians and implied their decline before an ascendant class (and race) of American sport hunters with modern weapons. Substituting their vacationing selves for laboring Indian men, and the revolver and the rifle for bows and arrows, they transformed the popular iconography of Plains buffalo hunters into a symbol of elite power (thus, buffalo killing was a leisure pursuit) which was at once industrial—thus the gun—and sprung full-blown from nature, from the boundless grassland, and the horse.

  Among army officers, from whom Cody learned much about public longings for the white Indian, these social concerns of America’s elite were both echoed and pronounced. Like captains of industry who sought to shore up their authority over ranks of immigrant workers, captains of the army commanded ranks of immigrant, black, and working-class soldiers. They underscored their native origins and their natural authority over their troops by hunting buffalo and antelope from horseback. Army policy encouraged mounted hunting excursions as practice for combat against Indians. Hunting helped soldiers to learn the lay of the land, and officers who wanted brief leaves for hunting could often get them if they agreed to draw maps of the country they crossed when they got back.38 Officers could frequently be seen charging into bison herds with pistols blaz
ing.39 They competed against one another to see who could kill the most buffalo in a day, and they often sought out hunting guides, like Cody, to help them find the game, kill it, and butcher it.40

  The traditional mystique of buffalo hunting was decades old by this time. But after the Civil War, it achieved a new purchase in popular imagination in no small measure through the efforts of the very army officer with whom Cody’s legend would one day become most entangled: Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer. A bona fide Civil War hero and Indian fighter, Custer was also an avid hunter who, like Hickok, became a tourist attraction in his own right as the railroad advanced across the Plains. In the summer of 1869, when his Seventh Cavalry was stationed at Fort Hays, literally hundreds of people stepped off the train to gawk at his house, shake his hand, or ask him for hunting advice.

  Never one to discount the importance of fans, Custer became a celebrity guide for wealthy tourists and other officers, affecting the long hair and buckskin clothing of the frontier hero. At the same time, his literary abilities made him an accomplished author. From 1867 to 1875, under the pen name “Nomad” (his white Indian identity), he wrote columns on his hunting exploits and Indian fights for Turf, Field, and Farm, a sportsman’s magazine. 41 By expounding on the attractions of buffalo hunting in print, he helped keep a steady stream of tourist hunters flowing west. To Custer, buffalo hunting was “the most exciting of all American sports.”42 In fact, as a “true, manly sport, buffalo hunting, par excellence, stands at the head of the list.” Requiring horsemanship, courage, and skill in firearms, it necessitated “a combination of all the attributes necessary in other modes of hunting.”43 And it provided an ersatz army experience for civilian men. In the end, there was “nothing so nearly resembling a cavalry charge as a buffalo chase.”44