Louis S. Warren

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

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Richard J. Walsh and Milton S. Salsbury, The Making of Bu falo Bill: A Study in Heroics (1928; rprt. Kissimmee, FL: International Cody Family Association, 1978), 352.

  2. E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1904–1962, ed. George J. Firmage (New York: Liveright, 1991), 90.

  3. Don Russell, The Lives and Legends of Bu falo Bill (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960). The primary debunkers were Richard J. Walsh and Milton S. Salsbury, The Making of Bu falo Bill; and Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), 103–11.

  4. Other biographies, or biographical treatments: Rupert Croft-Cooke and W. S. Meadmore, Bu falo Bill: The Legend, the Man of Action, the Showman (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1952); Henry Blackman Sell and Victor Weybright, Bu falo Bill and the Wild West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955); Nellie Snyder Yost, Bu falo Bill: His Family, Fame, Fortunes, Failures, and Friends (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1979); Joseph G. Rosa and Robin May, Bu falo Bill and His Wild West: A Pictorial Biography (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989), while not comprehensive, offer some useful correctives.

  5. Correcting the excesses and dishonesties of myth is a major project of the New Western History, but of earlier scholars, too. Any list of the most helpful recent works would include: William Cronon, Jay Gitlin, George Miles, eds., Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (New York: Norton, 1992); Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1985); Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner, and Charles E. Rankin, eds., Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991); Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1991); Don Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford, 1982). Predecessors who blazed this trail are also numerous, but include among the most prominent Howard Roberts Lamar, Dakota Territory, 1861–1889: A Study of Frontier Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), and Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West in Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950).

  6. Among the most prominent: Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 52–108; Peter H. Hassrick, Richard Slotkin, Vine Deloria, Jr., Howard R. Lamar, William Judson, and Leslie A. Fiedler, Bu falo Bill and the Wild West (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 1984); Joy S. Kasson, Bu falo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000); Paul Reddin, Wild West Shows (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Richard Slotkin, GunfighterNation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 63–87; Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Richard White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,” in The Frontier in American Culture, ed. James Grossman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 7–65.

  7. For example, see William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78 (March 1992): 1347–79; Alan S. Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995); David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Ann Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-CenturyAmerica (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

  8. The “progress of civilization” was a common refrain after the Civil War, evoking the triumph of modern, white America—with all its agrarianism, industrialism, literacy, law, Christianity, democracy, capitalism, and the family home—over the dark forces of barbarism and savagery. See Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 23–44; Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 57–60; Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The American Spirit: A Study of the Idea of Civilization in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1942), 62–97.

  9. L. G. Moses, Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 1883–1933 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996).

  10. See, for example, John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone (New York: Henry Holt, 1994); Taylor, William Cooper’s Town; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990).

  CHAPTER ONE : PONY EXPRESS

  1. BBWW 1893 Program (Chicago: Blakely Printing, 1893), 2.

  2. The Free Press [Ontario, CA], Sept. 2, 1885, in Nate Salsbury Scrapbook (hereafter NSS), vol. 1, 1885–86, W. F. Cody Collection, WH 72, Western History Collection, DPL.

  3. BBWW 1893 Program, 7.

  4. William F. Cody, The Life of the Hon. William F. Cody Known as Bu falo Bill the Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide (1879; rprt. New York: Indian Head Books, 1991), 57–124. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 91.

  5. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 91–92.

  6. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 93–102.

  7. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 104.

  8. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 108.

  9. “Buffalo Bill,” New York Herald, July 21, 1879, 2.

  10. The best discussion of the Pony Express in history and legend is Christopher Corbett, Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express (New York: Broadway Books, 2003). Other literature on the subject is vast, but much of it is antiquarian. The first history of the Pony Express was Frank A. Root and William Elsey Connelley, The Overland Stage to California (1901; rprt. Columbus, OH: Long’s College Book Co., 1950); followed soon after by William Lightfoot Visscher, A Thrilling and Truthful History of the Pony Express, or Blazing the Westward Way (1908; rprt. Chicago: Charles T. Powner, 1946), and Glenn D. Bradley, The Story of the Pony Express (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1913), reprinted in The Story of the Pony Express, ed. Waddell F. Smith, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Hesperia House, 1960), 27–146. See also Le Roy R. Hafen, The Overland Mail, 1849–1869: Promoter of Settlement, Precursor of Railroads (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1926); Arthur Chapman, The Pony Express: The Record of a Romantic Adventure in Business (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1932); J. V. Frederick, Ben Holladay: The Stagecoach King (1940; rprt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989); Roy S. Bloss, Pony Express—The Great Gamble (Berkeley, CA: Howell-North, 1959); Robert West Howard, Roy E. Coy, Frank C. Robertson, and Agnes Wright Spring, Hoofbeats of Destiny: The Story of the Pony Express (New York: Signet Books, 1960); Raymond W. Settle and Mary Lund Settle, Saddles and Spurs: The Pony Express Saga (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1955); M. C. Nathan and W. S. Boggs, The Pony Express (New York: The Collector’s Club, 1962); Fred Reinfeld, Pony Express (1966; rprt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973); W. Turrentine Jackson, “A New Look at Wells Fargo, Stagecoaches, and the Pony Express,” California Historical Society Quarterly (Dec. 1966): 291–324; Carl H. Scheele, A Short History of the Mail Service (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1970), esp. 83–86.

  11. Visscher, Thrilling and Truthful History; Corbett, Orphans Preferred, 173–99. For an example of the passage of Cody’s pony tales from show to history, see Bradley, Story of the Pony Express, 127. Bradley lifted his discussion of Cody’s exploits almost verbatim from Root and Connelley, Overland Stage to California, 129–30. Root and Connelley, in turn, lifted their account almost entirely from Cody himself. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 97, 103–7.

  12. The closest, most critical analysis is John S. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction in the Kansas Boyhood of Buffalo Bill,” Kansas History 8 (Spring 1985): 2–20, esp. 17–19. For contemporary critics, see Luther North, Man of the Plains: Recollections of Luther North, 1856–1882, ed. Donald F. Danker (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 23; Herbert Cody Blake, Blake’s Western Stories: History and Busted Romances
of the Old Frontier(Brooklyn, NY: Herbert Cody Blake, 1929).

  13. Russell, Lives and Legends, 44–54; Sandra K. Sagala, Bu falo Bill, Actor: A Chronicle of Cody’s Theatrical Career (Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 2002), 19–21, 110.

  14. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill; Don Russell, ed., “Julia Cody Goodman’s Memoirs of Buffalo Bill,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 28, no. 4 (Winter 1962) (hereafter JCGM): 442–96.

  15. Russell, Lives and Legends, 272–73. Don Russell and Albert Johannsen make a compelling case that Cody authored several dime novels. See Russell, Lives and Legends, 265–73; Albert Johannsen, The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels: The Story of a Vanished Literature, 3 vols. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), 2:59–61. I am not persuaded by the evidence for Cody’s authorship of dime novels. Unlike the 1879 autobiography, the Buffalo Bill dime novels I have been able to examine are characterized by flowery, ornate prose nothing like Cody’s letters. Johannsen reproduces a Cody letter in which the showman mentions having contributed to the dime novels of a prominent publisher. I suspect Cody was either joking, or referring to the fact that his persona helped boost sales, or both.

  16. JCGM, 448; Russell, Lives and Legends, 4–10.

  17. Russell, Lives and Legends, 7.

  18. JCGM, 453; Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 21.

  19. JCGM, 457, 461; A. T. Andreas and W. G. Cutler, History of the State of Kansas (1883; rprt. Atchison, KS: Atchison Historical Society, 1976), 505, 508.

  20. Settlement figures are from Stephen A. Flanders, Atlas of American Migration (New York: Facts on File, 1998), 94.

  21. D. Jerome Tweton, “Claim Association,” in New Encyclopedia of the American West, ed. Howard R. Lamar (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 219; Everett Dick, The Sod-House Frontier, 1854–1890 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1937), 21–29; Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own,” 141; Allan G. Bogue, “The Iowa Claim Clubs: Symbol and Substance,” in The Public Lands: Studies in the History of the Public Domain, ed. Vernon Carstensen (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963), 47–69.

  22. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 4; Louise Barry, The Beginning of the West: Annals of the Kansas Gateway to the American West, 1540–1854 (Topeka: Kansas State Historical Society, 1972), 1266.

  23. JCGM, 458; Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 38; the Fourth of July meeting was announced as a territorial convention. See Martha B. Caldwell, ed., “Records of the Squatter Association of Whitehead District, Doniphan County,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 13 (Feb. 1944): 23, n. 33.

  24. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 4–5. For Indians in the Civil War, Jay Monaghan, Civil War on the Western Border, 1854–1865 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1955), 209–27; also Ari Kelman, “Deadly Currents: John Ross’s Decision of 1861 Sheds Light on Race and Sovereignty in the Cherokee Nation,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 62 (Spring 1995): 80–103.

  25. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 5; JCGM, 459; Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 42.

  26. The Democratic Platform [Liberty, Missouri], Sept. 28, 1854, quoted in Russell, Lives and Legends, 14.

  27. JCGM, 459–60; Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 41–42.

  28. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 43.

  29. JCGM, 460; Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 42.

  30. Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004); Thomas Goodrich, War to the Knife: Bleeding Kansas, 1854–1861 (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1998).

  31. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 43.

  32. JCGM, 460.

  33. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 48.

  34. JCGM, 471.

  35. Thomas Goodrich, Black Flag: Guerrilla Warfare on the Western Border, 1861–65 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 1–5; Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas, 109–112.

  36. JCGM, 443; for Topeka legislature, and Grasshopper Falls, see Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas, 50–88, 150.

  37. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 47.

  38. JCGM, 465–66.

  39. JCGM, 465.

  40. JCGM, 471.

  41. JCGM, 471.

  42. JCGM, 475.

  43. JCGM, 475.

  44. The estimate is from Home E. Socolofsky, “Kansas,” in The New Encyclopedia of the AmericanWest, ed. Howard R. Lamar (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 585. Charles Dunn led an attack on free state voters at Leavenworth in 1855. The Kickapoo Rangers attacked Grasshopper Falls in 1856. Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas, 75, 134.

  45. JCGM, 475.

  46. Daniel C. Fitzgerald, Faded Dreams: More Ghost Towns of Kansas (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), xi.

  47. Maria E. Montoya, “Santa Fe and Chihuahua Trail,” in Lamar, Encyclopedia of the AmericanWest, 1021–22; Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 8.

  48. Merrill J. Mattes, The Great Platte River Road (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969), 23.

  49. Mattes, Great Platte River Road, 23.

  50. JCGM, 455.

  51. West, Contested Plains, 145.

  52. West, Contested Plains, 216.

  53. West, Contested Plains, 211–12.

  54. West, Contested Plains, 211–12. The use of this new route did not last long, as the partners acquired a mail contract which required them to deliver along the older government route to the north, along the Platte River, connecting to Denver with a cutoff along the South Platte River.

  55. Horace Greeley, An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859, quoted in Corbett, Orphans Preferred, 16–17.

  56. Mary Cody sued William Russell and several associates in 1860, claiming that after Isaac died they had taken property which belonged to him. See Rosa and May, Bu falo Bill and His Wild West, 10.

  57. West, Contested Plains, 215–25.

  58. JCGM, 476.

  59. John Willis to WFC, Oct. 4, 1897, in Stella Foote, Letters from “Bu falo Bill,” (Billings, MT: Foote Publishing Co., 1954), 46; Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 12.

  60. Elliott West, Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 87–91.

  61. Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict, 1850–1859 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960), 109–10.

  62. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 13; Otis G. Hammond, ed., The Utah Expedition, 1857–58: Letters of Capt. Jesse A. Gove, 10th Inf., U.S.A., of Concord, N.H., to Mrs Gove, and Special Correspondence of the New York Herald (Concord: New Hampshire Historical Society, 1928), 12:28, 70. Leroy and Ann Hafen, eds., “Diary of Captain John W. Phelps,” in The Utah Expedition: A Documentary Account (Arthur H. Clark, 1958), 8:90–102, 149, esp. 102; “Morehead’s Narrative” (with details about the Indian raid) is in William Elsey Connelley, War with Mexico: Doniphan’s Expedition and the Conquest of New Mexico and California (Topeka, KS: By the author, 1907), 604–5.

  63. WFC to Julia Cody Goodman, June 9, 1911, in Stella A. Foote, Letters from Bu falo Bill, 72.

  64. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 15–17. Crossing the South Platte in Aug. 1857, Captain Jesse Gove remarked, “The water was not over three feet deep in the current.” Hammond, Utah Expedition, 42.

  65. Cody recalls being hired by George Chrisman, who was merely a station tender and had no authority to hire anybody. He later says he rode on “Bill Trotter’s division” of the line. But Trotter became division agent for the firm later on. In 1859, he was actually bound for Denver as a teamster. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 104; Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 17; “William Trotter,” Progressive Men of Montana (Chicago: A. W. Bowen and Co., 1901), 933.

  66. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 19; Joseph G. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill: The Life and Adventures of James Butler Hickok, 2nd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974), 43.

  67. JCGM, 488.

  68. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 19.

  69.
Mark Pinney, “Charles Becker: Pony Express Rider and Oregon Pioneer,” Oregon HistoricalQuarterly 67, no. 3 (Sept. 1966): 213–56, esp. 228.

  70. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 17–19; Alexander Majors, Seventy Years on the Frontier (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1893), 243, also 182–93; Russell, Lives and Legends of Bu falo Bill, 47–48; Corbett, Orphans Preferred, 154–55.

  71. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 16; Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 89; Valentine Devinny, The Story of a Pioneer (Denver: Reed Publishing Co., 1904), 11–12, 44–46. For a description of Pony Express riding, see Corbett, Orphans Preferred, 82.

  72. Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 55–83; Will Bagley, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 307–22; see also Sally Denton, American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003); and Juanita Brooks, The Mountain Meadows Massacre, 3rd ed. (1950; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970).

  73. Russell, Lives and Legends, 35–36.

  74. James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 224; Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 141–48.

  75. “Camp Sketches—No. IX—John Nelson,” The Topical Times, Aug. 27, 1887, in Julia Cody Goodman Scrapbook, MS 58, NSHS; Dan L. Thrapp, Encyclopedia of Frontier Biography,3 vols. (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1988), 2:1048–49.

  76. John Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776– 1900 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1976), 53–136.

  77. Quoted in Corbett, Orphans Preferred, 121.

  78. Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 32.

  79. W. Turrentine Jackson, Wagon Roads West: A Study of Federal Road Surveys and Constructionin the Trans-Mississippi West, 1846–1869 (1952; rprt. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), 161–62, 164.