Sheridan dispatched Cody to find buffalo on the hunt’s second day—but it was Custer who found them. “Sheridan gave orders that only the Grand Duke and Custer should ride in advance of himself” as they charged the herd, so the Grand Duke would have first choice of buffalo. The grand duke and Custer together pursued a buffalo cow, which the grand duke killed. With the herd disbanded, Alexis and Custer rode off together again, on a fruitless hunt for more.93
That night the Indians performed a dance for the grand duke. Custer flirted brazenly with Spotted Tail’s sixteen-year-old daughter (Crazy Horse’s cousin). There was a smoke and an exchange of gifts between Sheridan, the grand duke, and Spotted Tail, witnessed by all the party’s dignitaries— although press accounts again fail to mention Cody. The next morning, as the grand duke departed for North Platte, he requested photographs of Cody, and of Custer in his buckskin hunting costume. Cody led the party back to the railway station, where he left them.94 The grand duke had other adventures, charging more herds of buffalo, alongside the redoubtable Custer, as the train proceeded through Colorado. He shot buffalo from the train, again with Custer, as they returned through Kansas. 95
Insofar as Cody figured in the grand duke’s hunt, he was a bit player. When Custer and the grand duke had their pictures taken in wilderness hunting garb against a painted forest backdrop in a photographic studio, Cody was nowhere to be seen. Years later, when the martyred Custer was a legend, Cody’s exile to the margins of this hunt still smarted. For a palliative, he fabricated a publicity photo. He spliced himself into the image of Custer and the grand duke, making the mythic duo into a triumvirate that included Buffalo Bill Cody.96
The maneuver suggests the deeper truth of Cody’s tangential place among the power elite of the U.S. Army and the major iconic figures in American culture. For all his success, by early 1872, he was still a minor figure, hero of a trash novel, hunting guide, and an occasional scout for the army against an enemy which had largely retreated to the reservations, and whose ultimate defeat now looked more inevitable than ever.
If he was to continue profiting from his position as the white Indian, he would have to make a bold move. Fortunately, another option presented itself. As the hunt with Alexis ended, “General Sheridan took occasion to remind me of an invitation to visit New York which I had received from some of the gentlemen who accompanied the General on the hunt from Fort McPherson to Hays City, in September of the previous year.” By February 1872, Cody was bound for New York City, and bigger things.97
PART TWO
CHAPTER SEVEN
Theater Star
EARLY IN 1872, Fred G. Maeder, a prominent New York playwright, adapted Ned Buntline’s Buffalo Bill dime novel for the stage. Buffalo Bill premiered at a working-class haven, the Bowery Theater, in February 1872, starring a noted melodrama actor, J. B. Studley, in the title role. The premiere coincided with Cody’s visit to New York. As Cody told it, “I was curious to see how I would look when represented by some one else, and of course I was present on the opening night, a private box having been reserved for me.” During the play, Studley stepped out of character to announce that Cody was in the theater. “The audience, upon learning that the real ‘Buffalo Bill’ was present, gave several cheers between the acts, and I was called on to come out on the stage and make a speech.” Cody relented, “and the next moment I found myself standing behind the footlights and in front of an audience for the first time in my life.” Not knowing what to say, “I made a desperate effort, and a few words escaped me, but what they were I could not for the life of me tell, nor could any one else in the house.” 1
In a sense, there were two performances that night. In the first, J. B. Studley played Buffalo Bill. In the second, and no less significant, the real Buffalo Bill played the frontier rustic who confronts his own representation in the metropolis. He was following an American tradition, established decades earlier by none other than Davy Crockett. A Tennessean who self-consciously appropriated the symbols of Daniel Boone’s myth on his way to a congressional seat in 1827, Crockett had a tall-tale-telling, homespun persona that was a distinctive touch in official Washington, and he became a national celebrity. His political and social trajectory inspired James Kirk Paulding’s play, The Lion of the West, in which a thinly disguised parody of Crockett named Nimrod Wildfire repeatedly outwits an English snob. Intended as a lampoon of Crockett, the play was received as a celebration of his authenticity and sincerity. After beginning his political career as a hero to Democrats, Crockett soon fell out with Andrew Jackson over the congressman’s opposition to the Cherokee removal. In 1831, in the midst of his public feud with the president, Crockett himself attended a performance of The Lion of the West in Washington, D.C. His presence authenticated the fictional portrayal, and bound the audience’s entertainment to frontier history and an ongoing political struggle for the soul of the republic. Allegedly he bowed from his box to the delight of a vocal crowd.2 Subsequently, The Lion of the West was rewritten various times, with one version called The Kentuckian, or, a Visit to New York.3 Thus, even before Crockett’s apotheosis at the Alamo, he was a national figure who fused frontier politics, national identity, and popular entertainment. If nobody invoked Crockett at the New York opening of Buffalo Bill, it is hard to believe that old theater hands like Buntline and the renowned dramatist Fred Maeder were unaware of the parallels to Crockett’s 1831 appearance—and harder still to believe that Buntline in particular was not manipulating the evening to reenact it. Subsequently, the novelist took Cody to Philadelphia to meet with his newly founded Patriotic Order of the Sons of America, a nativist organization for whom Buntline hoped Cody would be a symbol.4
In any case, Cody’s attendance at the city theater both announced his arrival in the metropolis and, paradoxically, authenticated him—Crockett-like—as a frontiersman.5 Perhaps with the Tennessean in mind, he toyed with the idea of a political career afterward. A Democrat like his father, he was appointed justice of the peace for a brief tenure at Fort McPherson in 1871. Not long after his return from New York, friends nominated him for a seat in the Nebraska legislature, and he was a candidate in the 1872 elections. In his autobiography and show programs, Cody claimed he won that race, but resigned the seat to go on the stage. In fact, although initial returns showed him winning, the official tally made him a loser by forty-two votes. 6
This supposed election to the legislature became the source of his title “Honorable,” which he emblazoned across his posters and show programs—“The Honorable William F. Cody”—for the rest of his career. His imagined electoral victory placed him in the pantheon of American frontiersmen who rose to civic leadership. If white men were distinguished from savages by their capacity for self-governance, then the humble white frontiersman who rose to elective office was proof both of American upward mobility and of the governing capacity of whiteness itself. Cody’s fake political biography, in this sense, placed him alongside other frontiersmen with more substantial political accomplishments, including not only Crockett, but Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and even George Washington—all figures to whom Cody would compare himself late in life.7
But as we have seen, Cody had little time for politics. It was the stage that entranced him. Standing before that sea of faces, Cody issued his tongue-tied greeting, bowed, and “beat a hasty retreat into one of the cañons of the stage.”8 Those “cañons of the stage” would become his next frontier, as he ventured onto the boards to play himself before large and mostly enthusiastic audiences.
Resonating with a range of cultural traditions and shifts, the comic story of Cody’s dramatic career probably entertained as many people as his plays ever did. The audacious leap to the stage by a man with no theatrical training appealed to a public which still preferred innate talent, or natural genius, to educated skill. Just as they preferred the militiaman to the professional soldier, in the theater they loved watching the amateur dramatist upstage professional actors. At the same time, as we shall see,
the spectacle of Buffalo Bill Cody playing himself also attracted audiences fascinated with copies, mimicry, and theatrical self-presentation, as expressions of industrialism and middle-class imitations of elite culture, and of the increasing acceptability of imposture in everyday social relations.
The catalytic intersection of Cody’s career with these arteries of popular culture began during his visit to New York, and continued in the months afterward, as Buntline importuned Cody to come back to the East and play the role of Buffalo Bill on the stage. Finally, Cody agreed. In the fall of 1872, he left Fort McPherson for Chicago, in the company of his friend and fellow army scout John Burwell “Texas Jack” Omohundro, a Cody acolyte whose ambitious frontier imposture (he began scouting at Cody’s instigation after arriving in Nebraska in 1869) made him even more eager than his mentor to attempt a theatrical career. Buntline was disappointed when the scouts arrived without the genuine Pawnee Indians he had been promoting. For their part, the scouts were horrified to discover that Buntline had not yet written the play in which they were to appear five nights hence. So, too, was the owner of the theater who had agreed to host their show, and after he backed out, Buntline contracted to rent the theater for a week, at a price of $600. As Cody recalled it, Buntline then took them to a hotel, where he sat down to write. Four hours later, he “jumped up from the table, and enthusiastically shouted ‘Hurrah for the Scouts of the Plains!’ That’s the name of the play. The work is done. Hurrah!”9
Buntline directed Cody and Omohundro to “do your level best to have this dead-letter perfect for the rehearsal” the next morning. Doubting that they could learn the lines in less than six months, “we studied hard for an hour or two, but finally gave it up as a bad job, although we had succeeded in committing a small portion to memory.” When Buntline dropped by to hear Cody’s recitation, the scout “began ‘spouting’ what I had learned, but was interrupted by Buntline: ‘Tut! Tut! You’re not saying it right. You must stop at the cue.’
“ ‘Cue! What the mischief do you mean by the cue? I never saw any cue except in a billiard room.’ ”10
When the play opened four days later, General Sheridan and a phalanx of Chicago’s upper crust came to see it, along with rows of mechanics and other laboring men. In the drama, Buntline, as Cale Durg, an old trapper, enters the stage accompanied by his friends Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack. In the first act, they face off against Indians, played by forty or fifty “supernumeraries,” or “supers,” today known as extras. Blasting away with pistols at the supers, they rescue the heroine of the piece, Cale Durg’s ward, a virtuous white woman known as Hazel Eye. In act 2, Mormon Ben, a Latter-day Saint with fifty wives, covets Hazel Eye for his fifty-first. To this end, he schemes with his henchmen, Carl Pretzel, a German, Phelim O’Laugherty, an Irishman constantly in need of a drink, and Sly Mike. All of these were standard melodrama types, the ethnic parody a product of the city’s ethnic and racial tension. Immigrants Pretzel and O’Laugherty are enemies of the home and domestic order, like polygamous Mormons and the Indians in act
1. When Mormon Ben makes off with Hazel Eye, the Indians attack him and recapture her. Shortly before she is to be burned at the stake, her hands are untied by the good Indian maiden, Dove Eye (played by the famous dancer Giuseppina Morlacchi; one critic described Dove Eye as “the beautiful Indian maiden with an Italian accent and a weakness for scouts”), and she is rescued by Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack, who enter shouting, “Death to the Redskins!” and blast away until all are dead. So the action continues, with evil white men (Sly Mike), derelict immigrants (Pretzel and O’Laugherty), and white men so evil their whiteness is questionable (Mormon Ben), allying with bad Indians to steal the beautiful white woman, only to be laid low by the white, native-born scouts’ voluminous gunfire in almost every act. Ultimately, of course, evil is vanquished, Buffalo Bill has Hazel Eye in his arms, and the curtain comes down.11
Plays about frontier history were very popular in the 1870s. These included upmarket productions like Horizon, Across the Continent, and Frank Mayo’s Davy Crockett, all of which were hailed as true American art. 12 But in the case of Buntline’s bloody, action-packed spectacle, the reviewers were condescending when they were not dismissive. Cody recalled one who remarked that “if Buntline had actually spent four hours in writing that play, it was difficult for any one to see what he had been doing all that time.”13 Others noted the woodenness of the frontiersmen, the mostly working-class audience, and the imponderable plot, all brought together by the appearance of the famous dime novelist and the famous scout. “Such a combination of incongruous drama, execrable acting, renowned performers, mixed audience, intolerable stanch, scalping, blood and thunder, is not likely to be vouchsafed to a city a second time, even Chicago.”14
The company toured the Midwest and Northeast the rest of the winter, playing to packed houses. The following year, Cody and Omohundro split with Buntline, and launched out on their own. Omohundro and Morlacchi married in the fall of 1873, and by the following year they had broken away from Cody to form their own theatrical company.
Cody persevered without them. His theatrical company, soon called the Buffalo Bill Combination, toured through the next decade. Consistently, he played the role of Buffalo Bill in frontier melodramas where the unifying theme was the liberation of a virtuous woman from savage captivity and her restoration to her home and family. His popularity was gigantic. So was his monetary reward. In 1880, he took home profits of $50,000. More, Buffalo Bill’s stage career introduced him to formal show business, and was in turn the stage from which he launched his much larger, more complex outdoor spectacle, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.15
Cody’s fun, of course, entailed tremendous labors on his part, and on the part of his family. Within weeks after Cody’s departure from North Platte in the fall of 1872, Louisa joined him in St. Louis, where Scouts of the Prairie was appearing. She traveled with him throughout the rest of the season, trundling along with their three children: daughter Arta, now six; son Kit Carson, who turned two on the road; and another daughter, Orra Maude, only three months old that fall.16
During the following year, the Cody family relocated to be nearer the theater circuit, moving to a new home in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where William Cody had cousins. But Louisa disliked West Chester. During his divorce trial, William Cody explained that his relatives “were on the Quaker order and she didn’t like their quiet ways, and she was not friendly with them.”17 So Louisa and the children continued to travel with the show. In the fall of 1873, family and theatrical combination set out on the road again, wife and children traveling along with Cody until March of 1874. That month, when the show reached Rochester, New York, Louisa seemed to like the town. “We decided that there would be the best place to take up our residence, as the town was centrally located and I would be more apt to be at Rochester than I would be in most any other town.” 18
Ultimately, the family home again became tangential to Cody’s stage orbit. Tragedy struck in 1876, when fiveyear-old Kit died of scarlet fever, moments after William Cody arrived home from his show in New York. One wonders if the pain of losing their only boy motivated the Codys to return West. In 1878, Louisa took Arta and Orra back to North Platte, where Will Cody had bought them a house in the now substantial town of stores, churches, farms, and businesses. Stage drama would continue to be Cody’s major occupation through 1883, when he initiated the Wild West show, an entertainment self-consciously modeled on the Plains and for which North Platte would be a central base and point of departure. By that time, he was the leading actor of frontier melodramas and a wealthy man.
IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY and in popular memory, the encounter between mime and man, the actor playing Buffalo Bill and the real Buffalo Bill, became the central narrative moment of Cody’s first New York tour. His theatrics amused crowds partly by calling attention to the uncanny resemblance between the romantic images of him created by writers and actors (Art) and his real self (Nature) and inviting the
m to separate the two if they could. In this respect, his stage career was a new departure in his now customary, artful juxtaposition of original and copy, a western scout who looked suspiciously similar to his many representations in the popular press.
Audiences in New York, the capital of American theater, first encountered Cody as the “King of Border Men,” in Ned Buntline’s serialized story in the New York Weekly, in December 1869. Any impulse to dismiss him as a simple fiction was complicated by his appearance in New York Times coverage of minor Indian skirmishes in 1870, and then again in reports of the extravagant hunting trips of General Sheridan in 1871, and probably in other news stories which have since been lost.19
Cody’s press reputation was continuing to grow at the very moment that he stepped into New York society. Sometime in 1872 or 1873, William E. Webb’s memoir and western travel guide, Buffalo Land, arrived on book-seller shelves (Webb was the division agent for the Kansas Pacific Railroad who had forced Cody’s town of Rome into oblivion). Although Buffalo Bill appears only briefly in the book, he ambles across Webb’s pages (as across Buntline’s) alongside the not-quite-imaginary Wild Bill Hickok, with the author praising Cody as “spare and wiry in figure, admirably versed in plain lore, and altogether the best guide I ever saw.”20
Cody’s rise to fame was partly a function of the changing mass press. He arrived in the popular eye as newspaper editors hit on the technique of manufacturing news rather than merely reporting it. The master of this strategy was James Gordon Bennett, Jr., publisher of the New York Herald, who was a member of Sheridan’s hunting expedition in 1871, and who that very year sent a former Indian war reporter named Henry Morton Stanley to Africa in search of the “missing” Dr. Livingstone. In the hands of Bennett and his imitators, wilderness scouts, guides, explorers, and explorer-journalists were all manifestations of the white vanguard, conveying civilization to dark and savage places. Readers devoured press accounts in which adventurous journalists themselves increasingly became the subject of “news.” Reports of Stanley’s adventures in Africa, in fact, covered columns of print right alongside coverage of the Grand Duke Alexis’s hunt the following year. For the rest of his life, Buffalo Bill Cody served as a useful story for any writer with a deadline. Not coincidentally, Bennett was one of those who invited Cody to New York and hosted him on his arrival. He had an uncanny nose for a story.21
Louis S. Warren Page 23