Cody in 1873–74, as he dressed for scouting missions and guided hunts. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.
Apparently, Cody saw guiding as a two-pronged business. On the one hand, a guide had to lead his clients to game. He did everything he could to see they bagged their fill of Plains buffalo, antelope, elk, and deer. 68
But on the other hand, the guide had to be able to bundle a host of other experiences and deliver them in a particular manner. The ideal buffalo hunting guide was an expert not just in finding buffalo but in killing them—in the prescribed manner, of course. Whether he was fashioning his image to the needs of his audience, or indulging cultural longings he shared with other middle-class men of his era, or both, Cody achieved prowess as a mounted hunter that was astonishing, even to the most skilled Plains hunters. In 1870 Luther North, a scout whose resentment of Cody’s fame verged on open hostility, watched him kill sixteen buffalo with sixteen shots from the back of a skittish horse, awing an audience of sports. The episode may have been the source for Cody’s story of killing thirty-six buffalo (and, later, forty-eight) in one run. According to North, Cody was never known for being a pistol shot, and his marksmanship on foot was only good. But “on horseback he was in a class by himself,” his “exhibition” of buffalo killing “the most remarkable I ever saw.”69 North had many friends among the Pawnees, whose language he spoke fluently. According to him, Pawnee hunters, who killed buffalo all their lives and who knew a great hunter when they saw one, also witnessed Cody’s string of sixteen kills. To them, wrote North, “his buffalo killing was miraculous.”70
In addition to providing the spectacle and experience of the mounted hunt, the ideal Plains hunt included at least some manifestation, or sign, of Indians. For many, buffalo hunting was a kind of standin for Indian killing. Tourists spoke of buffalo “tribes” and took “scalps” from their hides, and as they embarked on hunting expeditions, they sometimes hoped aloud for a chance to fight Indians, or at least to see them, so they could tell the story on their return.71
Such longings were expressions of a common, complex American desire. The proximity of Indians was potentially dangerous, but paradoxically, even as the war on the Plains unfolded, tourists were entranced by them. Over most of the United States, the experience of meeting Indians had retreated from daily life into the dim mists of history. As it did so, Americans became even more drawn to encounters with Indians, who come to stand for something more than just other people. By the early part of the nineteenth century, they were markers of American identity. For the broad middle class, by the 1860s, Indians already embodied the presence of history and authentic nature; they signified freedom from the artifice of modern industrialism, the market, and the city.
Few tourists ever fought Indians, and judging by their actions, they did not need a skirmish to authenticate their frontier experience. General Carr often requested the services of the Pawnee scouts on hunting expeditions to provide both protection from the enemy and the companionship of authentic Indians. But he was not the first to exploit their performance capabilities. In 1866, the Union Pacific railroad hired the first battalion of Pawnee auxiliaries, under the command of white frontiersman Frank North, to defend railroad workers from Sioux and Cheyenne raiding parties. The proximity of the Pawnees to the railroad soon brought them into the tourist business. That year, a party of eminent politicians, journalists, and financiers journeyed to the hundredth meridian, courtesy of the Union Pacific’s directors, in celebration of the company’s successes. This carefully arranged tour included not only a real, miles-long prairie fire set by excursion managers, but displays of Pawnee war dances, a mock fight between Indians (with some of the Pawnee dressed as Sioux), and a mock Indian attack (again by the Pawnees) on the excursion party itself as they camped outside of Colville, Nebraska.72
It is hardly surprising that with experience like this to their credit, many Pawnees would join the Wild West show less than two decades later.73 For the hundredth meridian excursion was, of course, a show, stage-managed to connect the powerful audience with a sequence of attractions: Indian war dances, battles, an Indian attack, and a prairie fire, all as a kind of primitive counterpoint to the railroad itself, the paragon of technological mastery and the advancement of civilization. Set against the railroad, the attractions suggested a story about the progress of civilization from ancient savagery in the wilderness to modern machines and manufactured comfort. Silas Seymour, who organized the tour, was not by profession a showman. He was an engineer. But cultural longings for prairie fires and Indians as savage signifiers were so pervasive that he had no trouble imagining that his party would enjoy them.
William Cody was nowhere near the Union Pacific line in 1866. He probably did not know about Seymour’s show. But he did know about the desires and longings of American tourists on the frontier, for guides and hosts played to them across Kansas and Nebraska. Perhaps he heard about another hunting expedition by some Union Pacific executives in 1867, during which Traveling Bear, a Pawnee scout who accompanied the party, impressed the crowd by shooting an arrow right through a buffalo.74 Riding with the North brothers and the Pawnees in the late 1860s and the 1870s, Cody had many opportunities to absorb the importance of Indians to sport hunters.
But Indians were not always available or willing to accompany sports, and when they were, guides who hired them had to share the compensation. Also, although proximity to Indians potentially accorded “white Indianness” to guides, recruiting them required more expertise than Cody actually had—thus, Carr’s hunt in 1870 depended on the assistance of the Norths. Guides, in other words, were entertainers who delivered the trappings, or aura, of Indianness for their clients. Cody learned, as had other guides, to provide a “safer,” cheaper Indian context through his own ostensible expertise in what today we would call Indian culture, a knowledge he conveyed in camp stories.
The few fragments we have of Cody’s oral performances suggest that in circles of light around Plains campfires, with audiences of city dudes, he began crafting tales which later appeared in his autobiography and in his lifelong performance of Buffalo Bill’s Indian adventures in the press and in the arena. The campfire light focused attention on him as a narrator, creating a kind of open-air auditorium for tall tales, in the performance of which lay seeds of his entire career. Where Hickok’s tales urged audiences to debate how much he could be believed, Cody’s method was more subtle. His mingling of truth and fiction was so artful that his stories were less obviously fictional than Hickok’s. He followed accounts of Indian ambushes with advice about how to avoid Indian attack. “When you are alone, and a party of Indians are discovered, never let them approach you. If in the saddle, and escape or concealment is impossible, dismount, and motion them back with your gun.” Such advice—running or hiding is preferable to fighting—was sensible, and seemingly down-to-earth. But at the same time, he exploited his fund of Plains lore by recounting battles fought by other people as well as himself, making himself the hero of more fights than he had seen. “Bill was the hero of many Indian battles,” wrote one excursionist Cody guided in the late 1860s. He “had fought savages in all ways and at all hours, on horseback and on foot, at night and in daytime alike.”75
Just as important as the content of his stories was his artful self-presentation, his attention to props and setting, which was unsurpassed. As one hunter wrote, “Bill was dressed in a buckskin suit, trimmed with fur, and wore a black slouch hat, his long hair hanging in ringlets down his shoulders.” His stories of “hunting experiences since he was old enough to ride a horse—for Bill was born and brought up on the Plains—are truly wonderful to hear related, as they are, around our blazing camp fires, and in the presence of all the paraphernalia of frontier life upon the Plains.” 76 Between the sun-splashed grassland, across which he chased and shot buffalo looking for all the world like the fantasy hunter out of a painting or a novel, and the flickering circles of campfire light where his audience sat spellbound by his s
tories, Cody found a stage for an ongoing performance. Here he invented the character of Buffalo Bill, and much of his heroic life story. His open-air show invited clients to project their fantasies onto him, to partake of frontier nature through him, to revel in the inevitable progress he and they together represented: sports and guide united, clearers of the land, savoring the fast-retreating wilderness, rooting themselves in it, even as they swept it away.77
THE SOCIAL CHALLENGES of guiding sharpened Cody’s development of the hunt spectacle. Guided hunts were exercises in manly bonding, and when they carried off their performance, guides’ mystique conveyed a kind of natural aristocracy, a fraternity of hunters, beyond class boundaries. Ideally, the artificial ranks and false privileges of urban life melted away in the wilderness.
But guides walked a fine line between courteous assistance and fawning subservience. They were, after all, hired hands, employees of their clients, who could be condescending and snide. To humiliate a guide was to challenge or discount his wilderness expertise. As such, it was a threat to the entire experience of the hunt. With the hardships of all-day rides and the frustrations of buffalo hunting so common among novices, short tempers abounded. One rude client in a party could undermine the theater of the guided hunt.
At the same time, guides had limited options for responding. They were expected to command their surroundings through displays of wilderness knowledge and hunting prowess, but without making their clients look bad. This was not easy. Many sports could not ride well (some not at all) and many more barely knew one end of a rifle from the other. Since they were on vacation, they expected an enjoyable outing. A guide protected his reputation, and his guiding business, by maintaining both his own superiority as wilderness master and the illusion of fraternal brotherhood among the hunters, and the latter could be as tricky as the former.
The most valuable tool guides had for reining in condescension was the practical joke. By humoring the rest of the party at the expense of its most offensive member, the guide could display his own savvy, while returning the sneering sport to his proper place as a dude, without challenging the class hierarchy.78 “Cody had all the frontiersman’s fondness for practical jokes,” wrote one client, who related how the guide instructed one visiting sport to ride through rank grass in pursuit of a buffalo. As a result, the man smelled so bad the party made him ride downwind.79
But the most impressive joke was the staged Indian attack, which pushed tourists’ longing for “Indian experience” to the very limit, while it reinforced the standing of the guide as white Indian and master of ceremonies on the Great Plains stage. Custer and Cody both resorted to this ruse. In some cases, members of the hunting party in Indian disguise carried off the joke, but Cody’s pranks sometimes featured real Indians. 80 In 1871, Cody arranged for the Pawnee scouts to form a mock war party, which “ambushed” himself and a client, one Mr. McCarthy, on whom Cody had been “wishing for several days to play a joke.” The Indians raced down a creekbed toward the guide and his client, whooping and shouting, but the attack was more convincing than Cody intended. “ ‘McCarthy, shall we dismount and fight, or run?’ said I.” McCarthy, though, “did not wait to reply, but wheeling his horse, started at full speed down the creek, losing his hat and dropping his gun; away he went, never once looking back to see if he was being pursued.” Cody rode after him, trying to explain the joke, but to no avail. McCarthy reached camp first. By the time Cody arrived, General Carr was already dispatching the hunt’s trooper escort in pursuit of the phantom enemy.81
For sports, such tricks underscored how much the party was in the hands of the guide. It made them feel vulnerable, but at the same time reassured them that their guide not only knew the country, but in some ways he commanded it. Their fear revealed their inability to read the signs of real and fake which the guide had mastered so convincingly. In laughing off the humiliation, they shored up their dignity and announced their acceptance of the guide’s mastery.
By the early 1870s, Cody developed a guiding style which merged showmanship and hunting in a close weave, which was never more apparent than in his service to General Philip Sheridan’s hunting party in September of 1871. The very large and very public hunting party marked a culmination of Cody’s guiding career to that date, and in the ways that Cody manipulated his own image we can see his appreciation of the needs of his audience, and his ability to shape his performance to those needs.
Sheridan’s party included a group of financiers, lawyers, and newspapermen, among them Henry Davies, an assistant district attorney general for southern New York; James Gordon Bennett, Jr., the editor of the fashionable New York Herald; Lawrence Jerome and Leonard Jerome, newspaper-owners-turned-financiers and New York City social lions; Carroll Livingston, a prominent member of the New York Stock Exchange; John G. Heckscher, a New York businessman; Charles Lane Fitzhugh, one of Sheridan’s officers who had recently resigned to become a prominent businessman in Pittsburgh; M. Edward Rogers, a Philadelphia businessman; and John Schuyler Crosby, scion of an eminent New York family. The party also included prominent Chicagoans, including Samuel Johnson, whose Pine Street mansion was a chief gathering place for that city’s young bachelors; Anson Stager, superintendent of the Central Division of the Western Union Telegraph Company and a close friend of Sheridan’s; and Charles L. Wilson, owner of the Chicago Evening Herald.82 One of the most glamorous hunting parties in the history of the Plains, it expressed the confluence between the urban power elite of the East and Midwest, the U.S. Army, and sport hunting on the Great Plains, providing fertile context for Cody’s exploration of American culture and political power.
Cody recalled considering his costume carefully. As it was “a nobby and high-toned outfit which I was to accompany, I determined to put on a little style myself.”83 One of the hunters called him “the most striking feature” of the camp’s “exciting and attractive” picture that first morning. Riding down from the fort on a white horse, he was, Henry Davies recalled, “Dressed in a suit of light buckskin, trimmed along the seams with fringes of the same leather, his costume lighted by the crimson shirt worn under his open coat, a broad sombrero on his head, and carrying his rifle lightly in one hand, as his horse came toward us on an easy gallop, he realized to perfection the bold hunter and gallant sportsman of the plains.”84
With his rifle in one hand and mounted on his snowy white horse, he was not just a guide to sportsmen, but an icon of sportsmen, the buckskin-clad, rifle-toting, mounted buffalo hunter, an updated version of Leatherstocking, and perhaps a more pastoral edition of Hickok. If Cody’s entrée was a token of showmanship, it was in keeping with the whole expedition, which was imbued with ceremony, performance, and show. A hundred cavalry escorted the hunters, hauling sixteen wagons of provisions, and three four-horse ambulances for the guns and any hunters who grew weary.85 Around the campfire at night, Cody told stories about Indians and hunting and acted as judge in the kangaroo court the party held for their entertainment. 86 And, just as important, Cody rode among a buffalo herd and killed an animal from horseback.87 His skills found a friendly audience. Hugh Davies called him “our guide, philosopher and friend, Buffalo Bill.”88
Cody’s performance in this hunt was in fact his dress rehearsal for a bigger performance, as guide to the hunting party of the visiting Russian Grand Duke Alexis in 1872. Cody partisans usually consider this hunting party a precursor to his Wild West show and an early moment of stardom on a public stage. He met the grand duke on his arrival at North Platte on the Union Pacific, where one columnist’s florid description echoes the dime novel language which had catapulted Cody to celebrity after his appearance in Ned Buntline’s tale in 1869. “He was seated on a spanking charger, and with his long hair and spangled buckskin suit he appeared in his true character of one feared and beloved by all for miles around. White men and the barbarous Indians are alike moved by his presence, and none of them dare do aught in word or deed contrary to the rules of law and civilization.” 89 Cody ro
de in advance of the party on their fifty-mile ride to camp at Red Willow Creek: twelve wall tents, festooned with flags. Dinners were banquets with a wide array of game, wines, and champagne.90 To provide the requisite presence of Indians, Sheridan asked Cody to visit the camp of Brulé Sioux Chief Spotted Tail, inviting him and his warriors to hunt with Sheridan, Custer, and the Grand Duke. Spotted Tail accepted.
Other than relaying the invitation, Cody’s only duty was to find buffalo, and once he had accomplished that, there was precious little else for him to do. This was Sheridan’s show, and Custer was his star. Throughout, Cody was in Custer’s shadow. In the description of one columnist, the general “appeared in his well-known frontier buckskin hunting costume.” And Cody? “Buffalo Bill’s dress was something similar to Custer’s.” Alexis, Custer, and Cody ventured out from the camp together on the first morning, attracting “the attention and admiration of every one.” But it soon became clear that Custer was the primary guide for Alexis. Cody was but an auxiliary. When Cody located buffalo, “the Duke and Custer charged together,” leaving the young guide on the sidelines.91
He remained there, by order or by his own preference, for the rest of the hunt. When the party moved out again the next morning, they paused for a photograph in front of the camp, “with the Grand Duke, General Sheridan, and General Custer at the head,” followed by the Russian party, American officers and soldiers, and Spotted Tail with his Brulés. There was no mention of Cody.92
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