46. Dippie, Nomad, 55–57.
47. Barnum quoted in Millbrook, “Big Game Hunting,” 447–48.
48. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 145.
49. The literature on Custer is enormous but a good place to start is Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin,1–27. See also Jay Monaghan, Custer: The Life of General George Armstrong Custer (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1959), 237–38.
50. Utley, Life in Custer’s Cavalry, 98; Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 52–53. For dogs, see Custer, My Life on the Plains, 98.
51. Utley, Life in Custer’s Cavalry, 128–29.
52. See Elizabeth Custer to Mrs. Sabin, n.d., in Merington, Custer Story, 284; also, Robert Winston Mardock, The Reformers and the American Indian (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971), 41–42.
53. Utley and Washburn, Indian Wars, 256; Russell, Lives and Legends, 109–10; Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 67–68, 95–100; Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 75–78.
54. Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 106–7; Wert, Custer, 26; Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 200–2; Smith, View from Officers’ Row, 83; Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 389, n. 45.
55. Guardhouse in Hays is in Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 120–21.
56. Albert Barnitz to Jennie Barnitz, May 15, 1867, in Utley, Life in Custer’s Cavalry, 50.
57. King, War Eagle, 214.
58. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 42. Emphasis added.
59. George Custer to Elizabeth Custer, Sept. 11, 1873, in Merington, Custer Story, 264: “When the theatrical ventures of Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack were discussed Tom said it might be a good speculation to back our own ‘Antelope Jim’—on which Mr C rushed out indignantly from the tent.”
60. Davis, “Buffalo Range.”
61. Joseph G. Rosa, Wild Bill Hickok: The Man and His Myth (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990), 95–96; John S. Gray, “New Light on Will Comstock, Kansas Scout,” in Custer and His Times, ed. Paul Hutton (El Paso: Little Big Horn Associates, 1981), 183–207.
62. Custer, My Life on the Plains, 144–45.
63. Custer, My Life on the Plains, 44.
64. North, Man of the Plains, 146–50.
65. Louis A. Holmes, Fort McPherson, Nebraska, Fort Cottonwood, N.T.: Guardian of the Tracks and Trails (Lincoln, NE:, Johnsen Publishing Co., 1963), 47.
66. Quoted in Millbrook, “Big Game Hunting,” 447.
67. Paul Andrew Hutton, “Introduction,” in Davies, Ten Days on the Plains, 16–19.
68. Earl of Dunraven [Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin], Past Times and Pastimes, 2 vols. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1922), 2: 78.
69. North, Man of the Plains, 150.
70. North, Man of the Plains, 108.
71. Millbrook, “Big Game Hunting,” 451; Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 153.
72. For significance of Indians, see Deloria, Playing Indian, esp. 63–5; for Pawnee scouts in 100th Meridian Expedition, see David Haward Bain, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (New York: Viking, 1999), 292–93; Silas S. Seymour, Incidents of a Trip Through the Great Platte Valley to the Rocky Mountains and Laramie Plains in the Fall of 1866 (New York: Van Nostrand, 1867).
73. The first Wild West show program included an account of the Hundredth Meridian Expedition. Buffalo Bill and Doc Carver Wild West, Rocky Mountain, and Prairie Exhibition 1883 program (Hartford, CT: Calhoun Printing, 1883), n.p.
74. Donald Danker, in North, Man of the Plains, 125; original source is Bruce, Fighting Norths and Pawnee Scouts, 19.
75. Webb, Buffalo Land, 212.
76. “The Imperial Buffalo Hunter,” New York Herald, Jan. 16, 1872, p. 7.
77. My interpretation of Cody’s tales relies on Carolyn S. Brown, who writes that, generally speaking, tellers of tall tales invent themselves as characters in a performance, a fool or a hero who triumphs over nature, danger, fear, and outsiders through wit and skill. The storyteller holds an audience spellbound in proportion to his ability to fudge the line between truth and fiction, to dance across it and back again, never quite giving away which side is which, suspending the audience over it and allowing them to believe what they will. Brown, Tall Tale, 28.
78. My interpretation of guides, dudes, and practical jokes borrows from Tina Loo, “Of Moose and Men: Hunting and Masculinities in British Columbia, 1880–1939,” Western Historical Quarterly 32, no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 296–319.
79. Webb, Buffalo Land, 195.
80. Henry E. Davies, Ten Days on the Plains, ed. Paul Andrew Hutton (1872; rprt. Dallas, TX: DeGolyer Library, 1985), 122–23: “A story was told the next day, that, while our camp was buried in repose that night, a small party of Indians roamed among the sleepers, and the appearance of an undersized and ill-favored little squaw, dressed in a complete suit of red flannel, who accompanied the chief in command of the party, was minutely described by those who pretended to have observed these unexpected and unwelcome visitors.”
81. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 290–91; Millbrook, “Big Game Hunting,” 451–53.
82. See Paul A. Hutton’s notes in Davies, Ten Days on the Plains, 135–49.
83. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 282.
84. Davies, Ten Days on the Plains, 83.
85. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 282–83.
86. Davies, Ten Days on the Plains, 113, 123.
87. Davies, Ten Days on the Plains, 122.
88. Davies, Ten Days on the Plains, 107.
89. William Tucker, The Grand Duke Alexis in the United States of America (1872; rprt. New York: Interland Publishing, 1972), 155.
90. Tucker, Grand Duke Alexis, 156, 158.
91. Tucker, Grand Duke Alexis, 160–62.
92. Tucker, Grand Duke Alexis, 163.
93. Tucker, Grand Duke Alexis, 164, 167–68.
94. Ambrose, Crazy Horse and Custer, 344. Tucker, Grand Duke Alexis, 175, 178.
95. Tucker, Grand Duke Alexis, 185–89.
96. Joy S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 47; at least one of Cody’s contemporaries pointed out the fakery. Herbert Cody Blake to Judge Paine, June 6, 1934, Folder 2, WFC Collection, MS 58, NSHS.
97. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 305–6.
CHAPTER SEVEN: THEATER STAR
1. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 311. The New York Herald suggests a different scenario. “When the real Buffalo Bill was recognized on his entrance the audience rose en masse and greeted him with an ovation such as actors at the more aristocratic theatres never received.” “Amusements,” New York Herald, Feb. 21, 1872, p. 5.
2. Paul Hutton, “Introduction,” xvii–xviii, in David Crockett, A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett by Himself (1834; rprt., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987); Carolyn S. Brown, The Tall Tale in American Folklore and Literature, 56, 71–72; also, Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1931), 70–71; James Kirk Paulding, The Lion of the West, ed. James N. Tidwell (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1954).
3. Roger A. Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 1870–1906 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 28.
4. Russell, Lives and Legends, 183.
5. Cody recalled bowing from the box, but the New York Herald says only that “strange to say, the hero of the play was present in a box, in company with the writer of the story [Ned Buntline], and the dramatizer, Mr. Fred G. Maeder.” “Amusements,” New York Herald, Feb. 21, 1872, p. 5.
6. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 276–78; Russell, Lives and Legends, 191.
7. For claims of election to the Nebraska legislature, see Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 319; BBWW 1895 program, 10; for comparisons to Washington, Jackson, and Lincoln, see BBWW 1909, both in WFC Collection, WH 72, Box 3, DPL-WHR.
8. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 311.
9. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 324.
10. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 324–25.
11. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 44�
��46.
12. Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 22–48.
13. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 327.
14. Chicago Times, Dec. 18, 1872, quoted in Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 46.
15. For stage profits, see Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 209.
16. Kit Carson Cody was born on Nov. 26, 1870; Orra Maude on Aug. 15, 1872. See Yost, Buffalo Bill, 43.
17. WFC testimony, p. 29.
18. Cody recalls they moved to Rochester in 1873, but he missed the date by a year. According to the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, March 11, 1874, the Cody family moved to Rochester that month. WFC testimony, Folder 2, p. 29; Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 103.
19. “Sharp Pursuit of Indian Thieves,” New York Times, June 9, 1870; “Sheridan’s Buffalo Hunt,” New York Times, Oct. 7, 1871, p. 11.
20. Webb, Buffalo Land, 149.
21. Oliver Knight, Following the Indian Wars: The Story of the Newspaper Correspondents Among the Indian Campaigners (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960), 321; Beau Riffenburgh, The Myth of the Explorer: The Press, Sensationalism, and Geographic Discovery (New York: Belhaven, 1993), 58; Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 53; David Rains Wallace, The Bonehunter’s Revenge: Dinosaurs, Greed, and the Greatest Scientific Feud of the Gilded Age (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 4–10.
22. “The Grand Duke’s Hunt—General Sheridan and ‘Buffalo Bill’ Lead the Way—At Grand Battue on the Plains,” New York Herald, Jan. 14, 1872, p. 7. See also “The Grand Duke’s Buffalo Hunt,” New York Herald, Jan. 15, 1872, p. 7; “The Imperial Buffalo Hunter,” New York Herald, Jan. 16, 1872, p. 7; “Alexis’ Grand Hunt,” New York Herald, Jan. 17, 1872; “Bos Americanus!,” New York Herald, Jan. 18, 1872, p. 3; “Nimrod Alexis,” New York Herald, Jan. 22, 1872, p. 7.
23. “The Grand Duke,” New York Herald, Feb. 13, 1872, p. 3; “Amusements,” New York Herald, Feb. 13, 1872, p. 4.
24. “Buffalo Bill’s Best Shot,” New York Times, March 9, 1872, p. 5; also “Buffalo Bill’s Best Shot,” March 10, 1872, p. 5, and “Buffalo Bill’s Best Shot,” March 11, 1872, p. 5.
25. “An Immense Cattle Drive,” New York Times, July 21, 1880, p. 1; “Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack,” New York Times, Oct. 24, 1880, p. 3.
26. Quote from Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 947; Mary C. Henderson, The City and the Theater: New York Playhouses from Bowling Green to Times Square (Clifton, N.J.: James T. White and Company, 1973), 135.
27. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 320.
28. Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 2; Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 46–51.
29. David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture, 1800–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 85–86; Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 51.
30. Hattie C. Fuller to Nate Salsbury, May 7, 1868, Box 1, Folder 2, Papers, in NSP. In the cousin’s hometown, in Iowa, “The People generally—with the exception of the lower classes” were “very bitter against it.” Hattie C. Fuller to Nate Salsbury, Jan. 8, 1870, Box 1, Folder 3, NSP.
31. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 162–69. For an account of capturing buffalo for Barnett’s show, see Ena Raymonde Ballantine Journal, entry of June 15, 1872.
32. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 320.
33. Frank North, “The Journal of an Indian Fighter: The 1869 Diary of Frank J. North,” ed. Donald F. Danker, Nebraska History 39, no. 2 (June 1958): 87–178.
34. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 21.
35. Melvin Schoberlin, From Candles to Footlights: A Biography of the Pike’s Peak Theatre, 1859–1876 (Denver: Old West Publishing Co., 1941), 50; also Rourke, American Humor, 108–15.
36. Schoberlin, From Candles to Footlights, 53.
37. Goodrich, Black Flag, 114.
38. In Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill, 86, Don Russell speculates that Cody saw the play in St. Louis. The play’s staging in Denver is in Schoberlin, From Candles to Footlights, 47.
39. C. Robert Haywood, Victorian West: Class and Culture in Kansas Cattle Towns (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), 174–78.
40. Holmes, Fort McPherson, 73.
41. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 327.
42. “The Imperial Buffalo Hunter,” New York Herald, Jan. 16, 1872, p. 7; also Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 64; Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 58–60.
43. Undated clipping, “May Cody,” Notices of Buffalo Bill Season of 1879–80, BBHC.
44. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 70–71; also Peter H. Hassrick, Richard Slotkin, Vine Deloria, Jr., Howard R. Lamar, William Judson, and Leslie Fiedler, Buffalo Bill and the Wild West (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 1981).
45. “Scouts of the Prairie” n.d., New Haven, CT, clipping in WFC Scrapbooks, Stage Play Notices and Reviews, 1875–80, BBHC.
46. Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 61.
47. Schwartz, Culture of the Copy, 212. My discussion of authenticity borrows from Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian, 101–5; T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 57; Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), xv–xix; Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 91–107.
48. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 9:168, 218, 225–26.
49. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 329; Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 9:278, 290, 349.
50. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 9:276.
51. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 330; Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 9:328.
52. Orvell, Real Thing, 50.
53. Orvell, Real Thing, 55–56; also Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (1955; New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217–52; see Jennifer Price, Flight Maps, for thoughtful essays on this kind of imitation in the late Victorian age and our own.
54. Orvell, Real Thing, 57.
55. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 10:217, 328.
56. Roger Hall maintains that the authentic Cody displaced the faux Cody, and that professional actors ceased to play “Buffalo Bill” by the summer of 1873. Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 67. Nevertheless, the play was reprised in New York by Studley and Dowd in 1876 and ’77, and presumably elsewhere by others. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 226, 344.
57. In June 1885, A. H. Sheldon and Co., a vaudeville troupe, performed Buffalo Bill’s Last Shot at Henry Miner’s Theatre in the Bowery (Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 12: 531). From September 7 through 12, 1891, Buffalo Bill Abroad and at Home was playing at Bennett’s Casino, in Brooklyn, a variety house which featured in subsequent weeks a leg-less dancer, a male impersonator, and Irish dialect comedians. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 15:252–53.
58. J. M. Burke to Jack Crawford, March 5, 1877, M Crawford Box 1, DPL-WHR.
59. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 9:560.
60. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 9:570.
61. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 9:560.
62. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 335.
63. Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled, 195.
64. John Burke to “Captain Jack” Crawford, March 25, 1877, M Crawford L, DPL-WHR.
65. Role book, “Buffalo Bill in Life on the Border,” MS 126, WFC Collection, Box 1, Folder 4, Colorado State Historical Society, Denver, CO.
66. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 131–33.
67. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 117, 129.
68. Kit Carson, Jr.’s prospects were not helped
by his arrest for striking his wife with intent to kill in 1879. W. F. Cody to Sam Hall, July 5, 1879, Box 1/6, WFC Collection, MS 6 Series I:B, BBHC.
69. The Buffalo Bill Combination took home profits of $13,000 in 1877, and over $50,000 in 1880. Russell, Lives and Legends, 257; Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 209.
70. Robert Jenkinson Hicks to A. E. Sheldon, June 21, 1936, MS 58 WFC Collection, NSHS.
71. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 11–16, 74–81.
72. “The Indian War,” New York Herald, July 23, 1876, p. 7; Don Russell, Lives and Legends, 224, n. 11.
73. J. M. Burke to Jack Crawford, March 5, 1877, M Crawford Box 1, DPL-WHR.
74. Darlis A. Miller, Captain Jack Crawford: Buckskin Poet, Scout, and Showman (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 25.
75. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 143; White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,” 35.
76. See R. B. Davenport to Jack Crawford, March 7, 1877, M Crawford Box 1, DPL-WHR; S. R. Shankland to Jack Crawford, Nov. 5, 1877, M Crawford Box 1, DPL-WHR. Darlis Miller says that Crawford’s regrets prevented him from capitalizing on the scalp. Miller, Captain Jack Crawford, 60–61.
77. WFC to J. Crawford, Aug. 7, 1877, Box 1/3, WFC Collection, WH 72, M Cody L Box 1/3, Western History Collection, DPL-WHR.
78. Jack Crawford to Mrs. Nate Salsbury, March 16, 1907, in NSP.
79. “The Drama of the Future,” New York Times, April 6, 1873, p. 4.
80. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 163.
81. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 73–77.
82. Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled, 172, 227–28.
83. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 362–63; WFC to “Captain Jack” Crawford, April 22, 1879, M Cody L, Box 1, DPL-WHR. Miller, Captain Jack Crawford, 210; Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 288–89.
84. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 306.
85. Jay Monaghan, The Great Rascal: The Life and Adventures of Ned Buntline (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951), 147–49.
86. “Prairie Scouts,” n.d., n.p., WFC Scrapbooks, Stage Play Notices and Reviews, 1875–80, BBHC.
87. Quoted in Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 235.
88. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 180–81, 197.
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