Louis S. Warren
Page 75
In any case, it was peculiarly fitting that the show which claimed to tell the nation’s history and the biography of its star and creator ceased to include the “Settler’s Cabin” tableau shortly after he made a public, and losing, attack on his own marriage. Even more fitting that the man who had inscribed his life into western myth, and the myth that he reenacted back into his real life, in a sense sought to abandon the old climactic home defense, for a departure into the wilderness. As movies began to find their way into popular consciousness, Cody sought to inscribe what would become the primary denouement of western film into his real life.
THE ABANDONMENT OF the “Settler’s Cabin” paralleled his alienation from Louisa and his domestic circle, but it also corresponded with the final failure of his town-founding dreams. The town of Cody had broken free of him with the completion of the money-losing Cody Canal. But back in 1904, the railroad had given him a half interest in the town of Ralston, thirty-five miles east of Cody and on the other side of the Shoshone River, to persuade him to cede the Cody-Salsbury segregation. As soon as the Reclamation Service built its canal, this swath of dry basin soil would become town lots. Although he would have to split the profits with the railroad, Cody anticipated a handsome profit.12
But water for the site was slow in coming. Cody wrote dozens of anxious letters from the road, admonishing officials to begin construction of the canal, and to prevent downstream settlements, especially the Mormons at Lovell, from siphoning off water and decreasing the attractions of the north side canal for the government.13
With the railroad as his partner and the government promising to build a canal, he was all but certain the town site would flourish. But shortly after the Reclamation Service took over the irrigation project, Ralston’s prospects suddenly dimmed, as government authorities began to plan a new town at the site of their headquarters, midway between the railroad town sites of Ralston and Garland.
Rumors of the town’s creation preceded the actual staking out of its grid by some years, and Buffalo Bill worked Wyoming’s congressional delegation and the governor’s office to stop its construction, out of fear it would diminish Ralston’s prospects. Initially, the Reclamation Service denied any plans for a permanent settlement.14
Not satisfied with the explanations that he was getting and worried by the rumors of a town, Buffalo Bill himself wrote an appeal to President Theodore Roosevelt to request his help in relocating the government’s town elsewhere, lest “the old pioneer” again meet with hardship. 15
But Roosevelt was reluctant to interfere with a government agency. In 1908, the Reclamation Service announced they would begin selling town lots at Camp Colter, which would soon bear the name of Powell (named for the great western surveyor and irrigation advocate, John Wesley Powell). The new town’s proximity meant few settlers would be tempted to Ralston. Railroad officials objected. They had anticipated that the Burlington & Missouri—not the government—would be building towns on the new project.16
But the most vehement denunciations came from William Cody, who roared his objections in a small flood of letters. He had given up his segregation on the north side of the Shoshone River at great personal expense. “No one at that time had any idea that the Great National Government was going into the townsite business, and if the agents of the National Government contemplated the laying out of a town they did not mention it.” Moreover, they had implied the opposite. “They gave me to understand that Ralston should be the townsite and a town should be established there and … I perhaps would be able to make back from the sale of town lots some of the money which I had expended on that North Side proposition… .”17
He pleaded his case as the agent of progress, the man who opened the Big Horn Basin to settlement and who deserved better. The region was a wilderness when he found it, peopled only by a few backward ranchers. “They discouraged the advancement of civilization. They tried to discourage every new home builder whom I brought into the country … and in fact discouraged them to such an extent that they would leave the country and the first settlers whom I got to farm and remain I had to keep at my own expense for a year or two, furnishing them teams, farming implements, provisions, etc., until they raised a crop.”18
He claimed that he and his partners “had to keep lawyers employed at Cheyenne continually to formulate laws under which the Carey Act could be handled.” They gave the river a new name to attract settlers, and hired engineers to make the canals possible, and Cody himself persuaded the railroad’s president to build a line into the basin (a claim which was at best overstated, as we have seen). He brought English investors in 1903, and then asked them to leave so the government could develop the north side. Had he been allowed to proceed back then, the entire project would have been completed by now. He had spent something like $20,000 on the north side, and he had given up a lucrative partnership with his English capitalists, too. “This project has cost me a fortune, besides years of labor and anxiety saying nothing of hard work, but that is what the pioneer generally gets.” 19
Cody had a point. The federal government built no towns on the railroads. What right had the Reclamation Service to build towns that would compete with his?
But inside the offices of the Reclamation Service, the situation looked very different. What right had the government to stand in the way of settlers who wanted a town at Powell? By 1909, the government had spent over $3 million of the public treasury on the Shoshone project.20 As an arm of a democratic government, the office was more constrained to side with settlers than railroads and other town builders had been. Cody presented this closing battle of his long career as a fight between an old frontiersman and usurping bureaucrats like Henry Savage, the supervising engineer of the Reclamation Service at Powell, who was “determined to deprive me of any benefits arising from the sale of lots in the town of Ralston,” and who “forces all people to accept lands near Powell …”21
But in reality, Cody’s plans for Ralston were not undone by Savage or anyone else in the government. If anyone was to blame for the failure of his last townsite speculation, it was the middle-class settlers of Powell, who wanted a town near the tidy government offices of the officials who provided their water. As Henry Savage pointed out, settlers were spending a lot of money on Reclamation Service water, about $35 per acre. Having a town closer to their homes—at Powell—would keep their other costs down, “and the question to be decided is whether the proceeds from the townsite should go to the benefit of settlers who produce the value, or to others,” like William Cody.22
In fact, settlers demanded the sale of lots in Powell. Authorities merely gave them what they wanted. “We believe that creditable business houses would be erected here immediately if title to the land could be acquired,” wrote these home seekers in a petition to the Reclamation Service, “and we believe that it would greatly encourage prospective settlers if the town were put upon a sure basis….”23 At the opening auction of Powell property on May 25, 1909, settlers bought twenty-six lots. “Several business houses have been erected since the sale and others are in course of construction,” wrote one observer at the end of 1909. “A bank and the usual lines of staple businesses are represented, as well as the principal professions. A commercial club has been organized by the business men to promote the interests of the town. Schools and churches had been established before the opening of the town site and continue in a flourishing condition.” 24 Nobody prevented these middle-class, entrepreneurial people from moving to Ralston. They simply refused to go. The government did not betray the old scout. In a sense, his audience did.
In so many ways, their decision reflected the broader trend of middle-class politics. Clashes between monopoly capital and organized labor had so agitated the Gilded Age that by 1900 most Americans believed the partisans needed restraint. Theodore Roosevelt’s administration and the two administrations that followed gave it to them, in a form of governance that defined a new age, the Progressive Era.
From 1900
to roughly 1918, reformers and government regulators attacked corporate excess and market irregularities with a host of new commissions, boards, and agencies. In the West, federal agencies, from the Bureau of Reclamation to the U.S. Forest Service, regulated access to resources to guarantee abundance and prevent the clear-cuts, land swindles, and range wars of an earlier day. 25 Railroads still built towns in the West, but on federal reclamation projects, they had far less sway than they had had on the plains of Kansas when they ruined Cody’s town of Rome. The day of the railroad town was not yet done. But as Cody’s losses in the Big Horn Basin showed, the day of the government town had arrived.
There were powerful economic reasons for Cody’s financial failure in the Big Horn Basin. The Reclamation Service had resources no private capitalist could match, and along with a host of other federal agencies, they reshaped the West into the U.S. region built more than any other on federal dollars. Although reclamation projects seldom met expectations, and disappointments soon turned the agency from building country homes to building huge dams for urban reservoirs, Reclamation Service officials were wildly successful compared to the private capitalists who preceded them. In the next six decades, the federal government spent $6 billion on western irrigation projects for farms and cities, bringing unprecedented material wealth and new possibilities to places like the Big Horn Basin, planting small middle-class settlements like Cody and Powell where only wind-whipped sagebrush had grown.26
Buffalo Bill’s townsite dreams sprang from an earlier American West, in eastern Kansas, where well-watered valleys allowed speculative capitalists like Isaac Cody to found towns without subsidies. William Cody came of age in a West where corporations like the Union Pacific received federal subsidies in the form of land grants and concessions. Now, homeowners were federally subsidized, and they had a voice in where the towns grew. This new West, with its irrigated homes and federal agents anxious to do the bidding of their owners, blew away Cody’s dreams like smoke from the embers of a prairie fire.
WITHOUT A MANAGING PARTNER after Bailey’s death in 1906, Cody was exhausted by the organizational work of his show. At the end of the 1908 season, Bailey’s heirs sold a one-third interest in the show to Gordon “Pawnee Bill” Lillie. Gordon William Lillie was born in 1860, in Illinois, the son of a flour mill owner. When the family moved to Wellington, Kansas, in 1876, the sixteen-year-old boy spent a year as a trapper, then a brief season on a cattle ranch before moving to the Pawnee Agency in Oklahoma, where he became secretary and schoolteacher, and eventually a translator. He was a head shorter than Cody and his own frontier imposture drew heavily on Buffalo Bill’s example. A onetime employee of Cody’s (he had been a translator for the Pawnees in the Wild West show’s debut season of 1883), he created his own Wild West show in 1888, becoming a somewhat uneven competitor for Buffalo Bill’s entertainment. This longtime show rival would now take up the reins as Cody’s managing partner.27
Despite the competition, Lillie idolized Cody. He eagerly bought up Bailey’s interest apparently out of desire to work with Buffalo Bill, and to attach himself to the most famous Wild West show of all.
He found Cody anxious and distracted by his financial troubles. “In his business dealings, he was like a child,” recalled Lillie. “He apparently cared nothing for money, except when he wanted or needed to spend it. Then, if he did not have it, or could not borrow it, it made him sick—actually sick, so that he would have to go to bed.”28 The Bailey heirs were still demanding payment of Cody’s outstanding $12,000 loan. Lillie negotiated a deal, buying out the Bailey heirs and paying off Cody’s debt. He then allowed Cody to buy back enough of the show from that year’s profits to make him half owner. The move was generous, but also fair. Cody’s Wild West comprised most of their joint show and his presence was the main attraction. 29
The two impresarios then combined their companies to create “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West combined with Pawnee Bill’s Great Far East.” Fans called it the “Two Bills’ Show.” Virtually every segment of the show was one of Buffalo Bill’s standard features, the exception being one segment called “A Dream of the East,” in which elephants, camels, belly dancers, and Arab warriors made a circuit of the arena. The array of exotic Oriental wonders dissipated the coherence of the frontier narrative, but it also provided the Wild West show more of a sensual edge, for “oriental” motifs had long been associated with the relaxation of Puritan constraints. The show had some huge successes. In 1908, a two-week stand at Madison Square Garden sold out, and the partners grossed $60,000 in Philadelphia.30
In 1910, John Burke proposed advertising Cody’s imminent retirement as an inducement to audiences. The partners agreed on a three-year tour that would present Cody one more time to the public, appearing in no place more than once, allowing him to claim each appearance to be “positively” his “last performance” at that location. Kicking off the 1910 season, Cody gave his first of many farewell speeches to a hushed crowd. “Out in the West I have my horses, my buffalo, my staunch old Indian friends, my home, my green fields—but I never see them green… . My message to you is one of farewell … and I take this opportunity to emphatically state that this will be my last and only professional appearance in the cities selected, as no return dates will be given.”31 “Buffalo Bill Bids You Good Bye,” said one program cover. Another leaflet of 1912 announced his retirement with the announcement, “Buffalo Bill, Back to the New West. The Old West I Leave With You.” Inside was a list of his many business concerns, especially in the town of Cody.
By no means was the show unprofitable. The 1910 season saw the two owners split a $400,000 profit, and even in 1912, a comparatively weak year, it reportedly made them $125,000.32
On these proceeds, perhaps Cody could have retired. Lillie spent $100,000 on a mansion for himself and his wife in Oklahoma, and stashed a like sum into his bank account.33
Cody threw his money down a hole. In 1902, Colonel D. B. Dyer, a member of New York’s Union League Club, introduced Cody to a prospective gold mine in Arizona, at the Campo Bonito mine works, some forty-three miles from Tucson.34 Cody began investing. The following year, after seven months of tunneling, his managers reported a gold strike. Cody (who was beginning to realize his Big Horn Basin effort would not pay off) thought his retirement was now secure. “It seemed like a great load had suddenly been taken off me.”35
Gold continued to appear in smaller quantities, just enough to keep Cody hopeful. But profits from the mine proved as elusive as the proceeds of his towns. The showman emptied something like $200,000 into his Arizona mines.36 He sought investors and wrote almost as many letters about the shafts as he had about ditches in the Big Horn Basin. Like his other investments, he complained bitterly about managers who failed to keep him informed, and he pretended to supervise the mine as much as he did his show arena.37
There was a degree of showmanship in soliciting investors that appealed to him. He led trips to Campo Bonito to convince the parties he brought along to invest their money. The guide and showman understood the value of providing these clients an authentic experience of the mining West. He fixed up his own cabin with western relics, including Yellow Hair’s scalp. 38 Letters to his managers instructed them to prepare suitable camping amenities for the travelers, as if Campo Bonito was a new arena for his ongoing show. “Will you have the Mrs. Thomas House sealed with light colored burlap, as it’s a rather dark room—two beds like I had in my teepee—nice blankets, pillows &c. A curtain to hide the beds … Wash stand—fix it up something like my teepee … writing desk &c… . Hope you sowed some barley so it will look green like last winter… . I wish you would have the Mrs. Thomas house white washed, also the store. It would help the looks greatly… . You should get the soft burlap, 56 inches wide, and tack it on the walls—hard burlap goes on with paste.” 39
Cody never deceived investors about his profits. Despite his attention to the entertainment of his guests, he did not hide the fact that the mine consistently failed to tu
rn a profit. There were numerous obstructions to mining and milling, and the promised ore failed to materialize.40 The show he ran at Campo Bonito was honest, and very unprofitable.
But he was so busy running that show—or maybe he was just credulous— that he failed to realize another show was operating at his mine. Lewis Getchell was the Arizona partner who had lured Cody and Dyer into the operation. Getchell was notorious for promoting worthless commercial properties, and he found an easy mark in Cody, whose faith in the mine sprang from the fraudulent report of a crooked mining engineer (whom Getchell had commissioned, of course). Getchell lived high on Cody’s money, sending the showman fake receipts for his expenses and pocketing the money the showman sent. At the same time, he employed forty-five people to scrabble in the tunnels, making the mine look potentially profitable.41
Other observers were not fooled. One engineer on a neighboring claim judged the mine “a tremendous swindle and I am very much afraid that Cody is innocent and Getchell is playing him for a sucker.”42
In a sense, Cody was defrauded by Getchell’s show and then constrained by his own public image. In 1912, perplexed by the financial failure of the mine, Cody’s partner, D. B. Dyer, requested an evaluation by a qualified mining engineer. The engineer, E. J. Ewing, caught a worker seeding the mill with refined minerals to make the ore look richer than it was, and he uncovered the kickbacks Getchell had engineered. Beyond losing his job, Getchell paid no penalty. Fear of adverse publicity kept Cody from filing charges. After he was taken in by Getchell’s staging of a “working” mine, his need to protect his own show reputation as a clear-sighted westerner kept him from seeking legal recourse.43
By this time, Cody had spent his great profits from the 1910 season, and even though the mines began making a small profit (mostly from tungsten, used in new electric lightbulbs), it would take many years for them to return the money Cody had spent. Dyer died soon after the fraud was uncovered. Cody, unable to finance more operations, leased the mines to Ewing. For the rest of his life, he searched in vain for buyers.44