Louis S. Warren

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

  But as he approached the end of his life, most of William Cody’s energy, and most of his cash, too, went into colonizing the great West. In a sense, creating community was a consistent project of his life. He was the son of a town founder, with an attempt at town founding in his own past, and the founder of the exemplary “little tented city” that sprang up in showgrounds on both sides of the Atlantic. The theory of civilization, with its advance from savagery to settlement, practically dictated that the culmination of his lifelong efforts should be a lasting town, with homes and families. With his large, but fluctuating, show profits he tried to make North Platte his own. He founded the town’s Buffalo Bill Hook and Ladder Company in 1889. In 1894, he bought expensive uniforms for the town band. (Each member’s flashy getup included a huge rosette, worn on the left breast, with Buffalo Bill’s face on it.)26 In partnership with his neighbor, Isaac Dillon, Cody ordered a ditch excavated from the North Platte River to his four-thousand-acre spread, then announced he would divide the property and colonize it with five hundred land-hungry Quakers from Philadelphia.27

  Most of these projects, including the coffee company and the colonization plan, collapsed in the depression of 1893. Even if they had not, all the civic gifts in the world could not change the fact that North Platte would never bear his image the way he wanted. A patrician, even a philanthropist, he might be. But town founder, never. For the old scout to secure his legacy, and establish civilization in his wake, he would need to make a bolder move.

  ACCORDING TO GEORGE BECK, who became Cody’s partner in the new town-founding project, Buffalo Bill came late to the game. Beck first scouted a new town site at the foot of Cedar Mountain, in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin, sometime in the early 1890s. From the beginning, he planned to irrigate the land with water from the Stinking Water River, which flowed through it. Among those who accompanied him on his early expeditions was Elwood Mead, state engineer of Wyoming and a prominent irrigation expert, whom Beck had retained as a private consultant. It was an eventful trip. Beck and several of the party got lost and spent the night in the cabin of a lone settler. Mead and Beck surveyed the land and “ran a line of levels” at various places to determine the feasibility of irrigation. Soon after, Mead officially changed the river’s name from the Stinking Water to the Shoshone, to make the project more appealing to settlers.28

  Accompanying Beck and Mead was Horton Boal, friend of Beck and husband of Arta Cody. As Beck remembered it, William Cody heard about the trip from Boal, and “came to me very anxious to get in” on the townsite plan. Beck and his partner, a Sheridan banker named H. C. Alger, “concluded to let Cody in for the reason that at the time he was probably the best advertised man in the world, and we thought that might be of some advantage.” They organized the Shoshone Irrigation Company, with Beck serving as secretary and manager, Alger as treasurer, and the world’s most famous frontiersman, Buffalo Bill himself, as its president.29

  Beck chose “Shoshone” as the name of their first town, but the U.S. postmaster rejected it for being too similar to the existing address of Shoshone Agency, on the Shoshone Reservation, in the nearby Wind River Mountains. The partners submitted a new name, “Cody,” at William Cody’s insistence, and with Beck and the others persuaded that it could help advertise the settlement. (Had the postmaster rejected that name, they had designated another choice: Chicago.)30

  Happy to be founding a town that bore his name, William Cody soon recruited more partners, especially showmen and magnates of print advertising. Nate Salsbury became a partner. At his suggestion, Cody approached George Bleistein, a Buffalo, New York, businessman who had made a fortune as a printer, particularly of posters for circuses and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Along with two other entrepreneurs from New York, Bleistein contributed tens of thousands of dollars to the enterprise.

  For all that, as far as we can tell Cody himself put the most cash into this effort. For the better part of a decade, a river of money ran from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West to the Big Horn Basin, scraping canals between river and settlers, building dams and headgates, erecting pumps, office buildings, stores, and liveries.

  From the helm of a show about imperial glory, “The World’s Largest Arenic Exhibition,” Cody was thrilled with the imperial prospect of his town-building venture. The Big Horn Basin was “an empire of itself,” he wrote. Where Beck planned to found one town, Cody’s ambitions were much larger.31 He envisioned vast networks of irrigation ditches filled with sparkling water, lined with eager settlers who would spread it on verdant fields, and pump it into their thirsty towns, paying the Shoshone Irrigation Company for every drop. The West’s most famous irrigated town, Greeley, Colorado, “ain’t a potato patch” to the acres that Cody and his partners would make their own. “When one stops to think that all of Utah cultivates only 240,000 acres and the cities and towns there is in Utah—how many towns can we lay off and own on our 300,000 acres?” he asked a friend.

  In 1897, Cody persuaded Salsbury to partner with him in an additional concern, claiming a vast 60,000-acre swath on the north side of the Shoshone River, opposite the Cody town site and extending many miles to the east. Across this entire area the two showmen hoped to establish farms and towns which would be served by a different canal, running along the north side, and which William Cody intended to build just as soon as the town of Cody was well under way.

  For now, “the key note to all” was the roughly 28,000-acre spread on which the Shoshone Irrigation Company was building Cody town “at the forks of the Shoshone River,” where “the great sulphur springs which we own” would be a health resort and prime tourist attraction. It was “the greatest land deal ever,” and a fitting retirement, too. “We will all have a big farm of our own that will … support us in our old age and we can lay under the trees and swap lies.” 32 Culmination to Buffalo Bill’s long career as the great domesticator, the town would be a permanent tribute to the man whose show finished with a brief, climactic act of settlement. He would be wealthy, retired, and the revered founder of real civilization.

  As Beck and the other partners had anticipated, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West proved a great advertisement. The securing of the settler’s cabin, which had long been the show climax, was now recapitulated with real-life domesticity for sale in the town of Cody, where audiences could find not only land, ranches, and farms, but also homes. “Irrigated Homes in the Big Horn Basin,” the “Greatest Agricultural Valley in the West, NOW OPEN to the Settler and HomeSeeker,” blared a full-page ad in the 1896 Wild West show program. “Homes in the Big Horn Basin” became the advertising refrain, and the following year, the pitch assured the crowds that these homes sat in bountiful fields. An arrangement of pumpkins, corn, and sheaves of wheat bore the label “Specimen of Products of Irrigated Lands— Cody Canal,” and another featured a wagon train trundling along a fulsome riverbank, with the caption “Cody Irrigation Canal, Big Horn Basin, Wy., 1897.”33

  A program article explained that this was where Buffalo Bill himself recreated in the off-season, in a land that fended off the debilitating anxieties and neurasthenia of the cities. “The settler’s cabin and the stockman’s ranch houses and corrals” had replaced “the cone-shaped tepees” of an earlier time. “But the air that fills men’s lungs with health, their brains with noble thoughts, and their veins with new life, still remains.” The air was “so pure, so sweet and so bracing, that it intoxicates when poor, weak, cramped, damp, decayed, smoke-shrivelled lungs are distended by it.”34

  Audiences in 1901 could find the same promises on the back cover of their show programs, as if Buffalo Bill’s settlement were where the show actually ended. “Shoshone Irrigation Company Owners of the Cody Canal Has Water Ready for Thousands of Acres of Good Lands.” Show spectators could read the official-looking endorsement letter from Elwood Mead, identified as the state engineer of Wyoming (and carefully not identified as paid consultant to the company): “I know of no place in this country which offers to prudent and industrious
farmers greater assurances of material prosperity and physical comfort than the Big Horn Basin.” The country was “equally well adapted to the purposes of the stock raiser, grain grower, fruit raiser, or market gardener.” Mead told the crowds from Bay City, Michigan, to Opelika, Alabama, that “the Cody Canal takes its water supply from one of the largest rivers in the West, and reclaims some of the best land in the State. The completed portion is well and substantially built with an ample capacity to water all the land below it.”35

  Of course, advertising went beyond show programs. Even before any settlers arrived, Cody himself had established the town’s first newspaper, the Shoshone News (with John Burke as temporary editor), to advertise the basin’s potential. By 1899 he had imported a new editor, J. H. Peake, to run the new paper, the Cody Enterprise. In the Enterprise, and in his Minnesota paper, the Duluth Press, he took out large ads, promising land and water, with a drawing of Buffalo Bill welcoming readers to a verdant mountain valley, where they could find “Titles to Homes Perfect.”36 Cody spoke often of the town in interviews with overseas newspapers. “I am making canals for irrigation purposes, opening mines, and acting as agent for the Government in granting concessions to prospective settlers,” he told an English reporter in 1903. 37

  Indeed, the town became the new center of William Cody’s continuing, almost manic entrepreneurialism. In addition to newspapers, he founded a livery stable, began gold mines and coal mines, and drilled oil wells. In 1902, he opened the elegant Irma Hotel, named for his youngest daughter, with a remarkable collection of western paintings and fine furnishings in a granite building whose design and construction (at a reputed cost of $80,000) he supervised closely. “I am very anxious of getting the concession of putting on an automobile and horse stage line from Cody into the Yellowstone Park,” he wrote the state’s governor in 1903.38 Not satisfied with a stage line, he built two hotels along the route.39

  Many of his efforts failed. Gold, coal, and oil deposits were rapidly exhausted or proved so minute as to be not worth extracting. Nevertheless, as these businesses and the settlement progressed, they, and especially the town itself, increasingly became subjects of the Wild West show. The Burlington & Missouri River Railroad reached the town in 1901. Beginning about this time, a coterie of Cody residents (or people who claimed to be Cody residents) carried a banner, “Cody Delegation of Boosters from Buffalo Bill’s Home Town,” in the show parade and in the grand entrance into the arena. When the emigrant wagon train trundled before the stands, their canvases read “Take the Burlington Route to the Big Horn Basin,” as if to suggest that spectators did not need to endure an Indian attack to participate in the continuing settlement and domestication of the frontier.40 The ads for the irrigated tracts awaiting the “homeseeker” pointed the way out of the arena and the city. Spectators longing to escape urban threats or their declining prospects in eastern and midwestern farms heard a consistent message: take the train to Cody town, and home.

  As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, shifting cultural currents made the “Attack on the Settler’s Cabin” and these promises of real western homes ever more resonant for show audiences, and the role of real-life “home builder” even more attractive to William Cody. Public anxieties about the survival of the home and family, and public veneration of home builders, today’s “developers,” grew more pronounced as the frontier closed, as urbanization maintained its rapid pace, and as depression made Americans painfully aware of the uncertainties of the new industrial economy. The home continued to be the bedrock of American civilization, and those who built them were great citizens indeed. As one commentator put it, “Home building is the best business in the world. The home is the seat of the happiness and the sheet anchor of free government. In the family fireside is planted deep the flag of this republic. Those who broaden the domain of homes are the true patriots and our greatest men.” 41

  With their bucolic advertisements and their remote western location, the homes for sale in the Big Horn Basin were decidedly “country homes,” the most desirable of all homes. In the popular imagination, country homes included the more elegant city suburbs. They were not necessarily farms. Rather, they were situated somewhat ambiguously in what scholar Leo Marx has called a “middle landscape” between remote hinterland and decadent city. They fused modern technology of the city—ready water, electricity, and telephones—with rural virtue. The country home was, in the words of one anxious proponent, “the safe anchored foundation of the Republic,” the “fountain-head of purity and strength,” which “will nourish and sustain this nation forever.”42 As the cities erupted in polyglot confusion, the destiny of the white middle class could be secured in these rustic dwellings, nestled in an agrarian empire surrounding the cities, at once supporting them with their produce, and containing them with their virtue.43

  Advertising for Cody’s country home empire masked the hard road ahead for the Shoshone Irrigation Company and the town’s early settlers. By 1895, when the company began work in earnest, the West’s most arable and desirable land had long since been taken. The swath of Big Horn Basin claimed by the partners was not a blank slate or a showgrounds on which settlement could be projected. It was a real place, with real nature, and that nature did not go easy on pastoral dreams.

  Travelers to the company’s town site, especially before the railroad reached the town in 1901, had to struggle first with its remoteness. The Big Horn Basin lay behind the formidable Wind River Mountains to the south and the Big Horn range to the east, with the high country of the Continental Divide to the west. Red Lodge, the nearest settlement where supplies could be had, was an arduous two-day wagon ride north, in Montana. (Early surveyors recommended that the region be attached to the state of Montana rather than Wyoming.)44 Even after the Burlington & Missouri completed its 120-mile spur line from Toluca, Montana, to Cody, the ride from Chicago or other points east was long and tiresome.45

  Reaching the area was nowhere near as difficult as farming it, however. The Big Horn Basin was a sandy sagebrush flat. The center of it was the driest area in Wyoming, garnering less than six inches of rain per year. An early government surveyor, who saw the basin fifteen years before Beck did, concluded that it appeared “very desolate, except along the valleys” of the Big Horn River tributaries. From the basin’s western side, where the company laid out its town site, these tributaries, including the Shoshone River, flowed east into the Big Horn River. The larger river flowed north out of the basin’s belly, joined by the Little Big Horn River in Montana and finally pouring into the Missouri River over a hundred miles away. 46

  The Shoshone River was sizable, and like other streams and rivers noted by that early surveyor it was fringed “with cotton-woods and narrow, grassy bottoms.” But the water was sulfurous (thus its early name, the Stinking Water), and even this rather pungent riparian oasis was eroded deep into the valley floor. The unwillingness of water to run uphill made simple irrigation ditches inadequate for watering the sagebrush-covered benches that jutted up hundreds of feet from the riverbanks and made up most of the basin’s real estate. To bring water to the town site, partners had to contract for a canal that began miles upriver and tracked around a mountain to the lower flats where the town was located.

  Finally, even if a steady supply of water could be secured, the climate provided other obstacles. The altitude, four thousand feet, meant early frosts and late snows. Basin winters were not the coldest in Wyoming, but with extremes of thirty degrees below zero, they were cold enough to dissuade most farmers. In the summer, on the other hand, the Big Horn Basin was often the hottest place in all of Wyoming. Winter and summer alike, as the sun warmed the basin floor, heated air rose upward, drawing cold air out of the highlands to the west. A cooling draft can lighten the burden of summer heat, but emigrants were rocked by these unpredictable gusts, which reached sixty miles per hour. Most early visitors found the basin bleak. An early encampment of miners had ventured to the Big Horn Basin in 1870, but
they soon departed. In 1895, other than a few cowboys and ranchers on open-range cattle outfits, almost nobody resided in the basin permanently.

  The challenges to settling this place with middle-class homeowners were huge. In 1895, George Beck drew up a map to aid him in the work of laying out the first town site. One day, he put the map down, weighted it with a rock, and walked over to talk with his engineer, C. E. Hayden, who was working a few hundred yards away. While they spoke, “a summer whirl wind came along and picked the map up and started it heavenward,” Beck later recalled. “Hayden and I followed it as far as we could but it kept going and we concluded our map was recorded in Abraham’s bosom.”47

  So the environment of the Big Horn Basin threatened to carry away the tidy visions of town planners. Cody himself would expend vast effort, and a vast fortune, to hold the ordered grids of his towns against the basin’s uncooperative nature. As much as it fired him in its early days, and as often as he touted its glories in show programs and press interviews, the project posed a fierce challenge to his business acumen, testing his sense of personal and national destiny. Indeed, only a major shift in government policy toward the arid West would guarantee the settlement’s success. In doing so, it relieved William Cody of his town site’s burdens. But it also stripped his dreams away.

  THE TOWN BUSINESS required extensive advertising, and not a little deception. Thus, in 1896, Cody and Beck fought hard to make their new town, which was little more than a land office, the county seat of the new Big Horn County. Success would guarantee the town a county courthouse and the aura of permanence. After that, both investor capital and settlers would be easier to recruit.