CHAPTER TWO

The Attack on the Settler’s Cabin

THE SETTLER RETURNED from his hunt. His wife stepped out the door to greet him. A shout in the near distance. Turning, the settler confronted an Indian racing toward the house, dazzling and fierce in his feathers and war paint. Raising his rifle, the hunter fired and saw the man topple into the dust. An outburst of cries and screams erupted from nearby, and suddenly, the lonesome cabin became the center of a swirling mass of mounted Indian warriors, guns blazing. The settler and his wife retreated through the door, their children helping to load and fire guns through the windows. But the Indians were too many. They came ever closer to the cabin. The war cries were terrifying, the roar of guns and smoke filled the air. They were even closer now. The destruction of the tiny frontier home was only a moment away.

But suddenly—another yell, and the Indians now turned to face the massed guns of a long-haired Buffalo Bill Cody and an entourage of whooping, shooting cowboys! A fierce fight ensued. Indians and cowboys dropped from saddles, their bodies thudding into the dust. But finally, the last of the Indians rode out of sight. As the settler family emerged from the cabin to thank the scout and his cowboy militia, another sound rolled over the home, a roar, as the audience applauded, stamped their feet, and stood.

FOR MOST OF the Wild West show’s long life, the climactic finale of the drama was the “Attack on the Settler’s Cabin.” Figuratively, that lightning-quick courier of the Pony Express and all the other horsemen who charged around the arena, from the drivers of the Deadwood Stage to the families on the wagon train, were bound for the cabin that appeared in the show’s final act. They fought Indians and yelled and raced in circles, on their way to this mock family home.

The image of home salvation reinforced the most persistent claim of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show: that Buffalo Bill Cody was the savior of the settler family. The cabin rescue finale was not the only family scene in the show. White families also rode in the wagon train which trundled into the arena, and which was then attacked by Indians, who were, of course, driven off by Buffalo Bill. There was the oddly humorous and elegant scene in which Buffalo Bill, the cowboys, and the show’s cowgirls performed a Virginia reel on horseback, a tableau which suggested that settler men and women could join for courting and marriage even on the rough-and-tumble frontier. The family theme ran through acts from which Cody was absent, too. Annie Oakley spent sixteen years with the show, performing as its star shooter, and everybody knew that she was married to Frank Butler, the man who held her targets. They were a handsome, wholesome couple. The fact that she fired a gun at targets in his hands, over and over, without ever so much as grazing him, made them seem somehow weird proof of the marital covenant’s protection. Much of the time, the settler’s cabin stood in the arena from the show’s beginning, positioned slightly toward one end, so that all of the other show acts swirled around it. The audience could tell that the home was where the action would culminate.¹

Cody cultivated the connection between Buffalo Bill and home defense for his entire public career. It was a major component of his theatrical performances, which began in 1872, and as we have seen, it was a consistent thread in the autobiography of 1879. In one of the book’s yarns about the Civil War, the spy William Cody protects the home of a Missouri secessionist from being plundered by Union soldiers, an action which left him “happy in the thought that I had done a good deed, and with no regrets that I had saved from pillage and destruction the home and property of a confederate and his family.”² The story was undoubtedly fictional (as we shall see), but it suggests that for Cody, family defense even trumped wartime enmity. Such a code of honor no doubt appealed to northern and southern readers alike, longing as they were for national reunion.

Cody did not invent family defense as an entertainment attraction—he merely perfected it. The “Settler’s Cabin” finale of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show seems to have been implemented by Nate Salsbury after he became the show’s managing partner in 1884. Even then, it was hardly new. White family defense was a consistent motif in popular literature, art, and entertainment throughout the life of the republic. Myriad writers, dramatists, and artists portrayed Indian war as the necessary precursor to family salvation. In inscribing a frontier line between domestic order and savagery, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West made Cody himself into a chief bulwark of the American family. In a sense, the arc of Buffalo Bill’s life touched earth at one end with the speeding pony, at the other with the family home.

Despite the fact that he never actually drove an Indian war party away from anybody’s home, Cody assumed the role of the white family’s defender with the natural grace that comes from experience and conviction. If he was not the first to portray frontier warfare as the fight for domestic bliss, his commitment to it reflected some belief in the essential reality of the scene. Indeed, home salvation was much on his mind as a boy.

But the frontiersmen of myth are not domesticated. They straddle the line between civilization and savagery. In his actual life, if Cody was defender of the home, he could also be its assailant. As a teenager, he found that staving off family destruction meant earning money, a challenge which required him to leave his own home repeatedly and for extended periods. In the early 1860s, he was inspired by fellow Kansans who combined the hunt for money with the quest for revenge.

THROUGHOUT the late 1850s, many Free Kansans longed for vengeance against their tormentors in Missouri. When the Civil War erupted on April 12, 1861, they got their chance. In the absence of a strong occupation by either army, the border of Kansas and Missouri exploded in a vast paramilitary conflagration, as competing bands of Union jayhawkers and secessionist bushwhackers embarked on wars of pillage, rapine, and murder. Jayhawker and bushwhacker alike rousted their enemies from their cabins at night and dispensed beatings, mutilations, hangings, and shootings. They stole, savaged, and ruined.³

And they burned homes. George Caleb Bingham, a Unionist, described the devastating progress of a leading anti-slavery regiment, the Seventh Kansas Volunteer Cavalry, better known as Jennison’s Jayhawkers, on their raid from Kansas to Missouri in 1861. Their “entire route from Independence to Westpoint may be traced by the ruins of the dwellings of our citizens, which were first pillaged and then burned without discrimination or mercy. As they were generally constructed of wood, they are now but heaps of ashes, above which the tall chimneys remain in their solitude.” In 1862, Jennison’s regiment fell on the town of Dayton, Missouri, and burned forty-six of forty-seven homes. When they reached the partially burned town of Morristown, they burned the rest. One eyewitness, awed by the horror they inflicted near Kingsville, remembered: “I counted one evening, while standing on Brushy Knob, one hundred and sixty houses on fire.”⁴

The Bleeding Kansas years had seen house burnings, too, but the increasing frequency and scale of home destruction makes it hard to overstate the impact of the Civil War on settlers along the Kansas-Missouri line. Throughout the United States, and more so on the western border, the premier social institution was the family, and the premier economic, educational, and social welfare establishment was the family home. In a society where federal, state, and local governments were weak, where educational institutions were rudimentary, where a multiplicity of churches competed for the attention of minority churchgoers, the family home was the chief organizing unit. The home was where children were conceived and delivered, where much of their education took place, where they and their parents produced most of the family’s wealth, and where they relaxed and enjoyed their lives and one another. As they grew, children would move into homes of their own, and in those homes they would care for aged parents as well as their own progeny. The home thus enfolded the present and future of the family that created it.⁵

All wars destroy families and homes. In the American South, the Civil War would turn on the destruction of cities and the ravaging of rural plantations, and in the process many thousands of homes were damaged or ruined. But the absence of other institutions across much of Kansas made the destruction of homes, and the families they contained, even more poignant and devastating.

One of the ironies of the guerrilla war in Kansas and Missouri was that in firing the homes of their enemies, and in the most extreme cases killing or driving away their families altogether, partisans removed the one institution which constrained boys and men from extended guerrilla forays. With no families to protect, and no family farms to tend, young men were free— or driven—to pursue revenge. Fierce raids by one band of partisans thus gave rise to more partisans in opposition. “Now,” one guerrilla concluded, “when you find a dozen, twenty-five, fifty, or one hundred men whose lives have come together in this way, you can understand how they come to be terrors.”⁶

Will Cody was fifteen years old in 1861. As far as he and his family were concerned, pro-slavery partisans had murdered Isaac. For years, they had threatened his mother, his sisters, and his little brother, Charlie. And as Kansas jayhawkers took the war to Missouri on their own terms, he rode with them.

By his own account, in 1861, he took up with a gang of horse thieves bent on avenging the losses of Free Kansas settlers by stealing from their pro-slavery neighbors. He left this crowd after his mother objected. ⁷

But then, in 1862, he “became one of the red legged scouts,” a paramilitary unit dedicated, at least by their own reckoning, to the defense of Kansas, and whose name was derived from the red leather garters they wore to distinguish themselves. The Red Legs did not keep lists of members, or any other records. Boys and men joined and departed as they wished. Cody says he remained with the Red Legs until the spring of 1863. As he recounted, “our field of operations was confined mostly to the Arkansas country and southwestern Missouri. We had many a lively skirmish with the bushwhackers and Younger brothers, and when we were not hunting them, we were generally employed in carrying dispatches between Forts Dodge, Gibson, Leavenworth, and other posts.”⁸

Given the fictional nature of his western tales, we must be careful in accepting his claims about the border war. But several clues suggest there is some truth to this account. First, he barely mentions this period at all, choosing not to mythologize it beyond “many a lively skirmish” with the likes of the Younger brothers. He takes little opportunity to embellish what could have been a highly colored narrative.

Second, his sister Julia’s memoir confirms his extensive forays with the Red Legs. Unlike the Pony Express stories, which she summarizes in two sentences with no new detail, and in contrast to other adventures where she simply quotes him at length, she offers far more detail on his Red Leg days than he does. Thus, she writes that he was out with “the Red Legged Scouts” throughout much of late 1861, and that, as their mother fell ill again, “he stayed home that winter and went to school most of the time,” occasionally leaving “for several days” when “the Scouts sent for him to go out on a Scouting Tour.” The association between William Cody and the Red Legs rings of something other than pure fiction.⁹

Biographers typically dismiss these experiences as incidental. But Cody’s affiliation with a band guilty of some of the region’s most brutal persecutions suggests a dark counterweight to his gleaming boyhood tales of Pony Express heroism. Elvira Scott, of Miami, Missouri, might have seen the sixteen-year-old Will Cody. If so, she was not favorably impressed. The Red Legs “were about the lowest, most desperate looking specimens of humanity it has ever been my lot to witness.” Another Missourian described the settler exodus for St. Louis as the Red Legs raided into the countryside. “The roads are lined with movers driven away from thare homes by Red Legs. . . . The Red Legs are desolating the country, they have no respect for any person’s political opinions.”¹⁰ Red Leg depredations grew so extreme, their exactions of property and lives from innocent civilians so consistent and terrifying, that the provisional governor of Missouri begged President Lincoln to restrain them.¹¹

There are some intriguing hints that Cody was with the Red Legs on some of their forays. Some of the most wrenching testimony about Red Leg savagery comes from the region of Lexington, Missouri, where carriage maker Willard Mendenhall wrote that in the spring of 1862, the Red Legs were so uncontrolled, “they appear to be a band of murderers and robers,” burning homes and pillaging Unionist and secessionist alike.¹² Was Cody with them? Throughout his adult life, he stood out. Tall, handsome, and with a pronounced sense of style and timing, he was recognizable from an early age, and it may be that Lexington residents noticed him that spring. After the war, in 1866, while traveling aboard a Missouri River steamboat out of St. Louis, Cody recalled, “There happened to be on board the boat an excursion party from Lexington, Missouri, and those comprising it seemed to shun me, for some reason which I could not account for.” When another passenger advised, “They say that you are one of the Kansas jay-hawkers, and one of Jennison’s house-burners”—victims of pro-Union guerrillas often lumped their persecutors together as “Jennison’s” soldiers—Cody confirmed that he “was in Kansas during the border ruffian war.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he mused, “Perhaps these people know who I am....”¹³

The Red Legs were unsalaried guerrillas. They supported themselves through the theft and sale of their victims’ belongings. Indeed, Red Legs often chose targets for their property, not their politics. Pro-Union settlers frequently complained that jayhawkers, and the Red Legs in particular, stole their property as if they were secessionists. But there was little to be done. No lawmen dared stop them. During the Civil War, the towns of Leavenworth and Lawrence served as Red Leg entrepôts, where they auctioned stolen goods with impunity, in the open street.¹⁴

Looting and sale of goods reflected the hunger for cash not just of the Red Legs, but of Kansans generally. Modern nostalgia for subsistence farmers has created a powerful mythology of settler independence, but in reality, by 1850 almost all westerners were entangled in market relations to some degree. Isaac Cody’s stints as stagecoach owner, salaried farm manager, mill owner, land speculator, and hay contractor for the army suggest a dedication less to raising crops than to raising cash. His farm was just one of many businesses he ran. The farm equipment stolen from his home by bushwhackers included modern technological implements, such as the plow, mow, and hay rake, all of which were bought with specie. Like other rural families, the Codys produced some food for the family table, but increasingly they required cash to buy new farm technology which allowed them to cultivate larger parcels, grow more surplus crops, and buy more consumer goods. Kansas during the Civil War was home to a people always in need of money, and the Cody family, which had been comparatively well off, perhaps needed it more than most.¹⁵

Indeed, the moneymaking ethic so prevalent on the Kansas frontier seems to have been especially strong among the Cody children, particularly Julia and Will. As Julia put it, “I don’t think there ever was 2 children that had more Responsibility than we did.”¹⁶ The absence of Isaac Cody’s income left them with a large and ever present need for money to provide for their young siblings, and the insistence on making money above other needs could extend to the most intimate family relations. In 1862, Julia Cody decided to marry. In her conversations with husband-to-be Al Goodman, she said, “I would tell him to let’s Talk Business, not love for my marrying was a Business Proposition....”¹⁷

The allure of the Red Legs for a boy in need of money was considerable. The shreds of evidence for the teenage William Cody’s activities in this period suggest that he, like the Red Legs, “confiscated” property for commercial gain. He “took it for granted that as Missouri was a slave state the inhabitants must all be secessionists, and therefore our enemies.” Since he had “a longing and revengeful desire to retaliate upon the Missourians for the brutal manner in which they had treated and robbed my family,” stealing Missouri horses was a way of “getting back our own, or the equivalent, from the Missourians.”¹⁸

Cody mingled his stolen Missouri horses with others closer to home. In May of 1862—during the very period in which William Cody says he was with the Red Legs—Mary Cody returned at least two horses to the Union army’s Third Wisconsin Cavalry, near Leavenworth. According to her sworn affidavit, the horses were found to have strayed from the post, and they were brought to her by son William Cody. Military authorities demanded to know where he was. “Absent,” she told them. Mary Cody visited the fort twice for this purpose, and for her trouble was paid a $2 bounty on each horse.¹⁹ Was William Cody merely returning loose horses he rounded up? Did he confiscate them from a secessionist who had stolen them in the first place? Or was he, like so many Red Legs, stealing horses from Unionist and secessionist alike, and making a little money by returning them for the bounty? Did he hand them over to his mother so she could protect him from suspicion? Was his mother, who disapproved of his jay-hawking, returning stolen horses he had left in her care? If he was not stealing horses, why did Mary Cody refuse to reveal her son’s whereabouts? Eventually, Union army patrols pursued jayhawkers and Red Legs because their thieving lowered regional support for the anti-slavery cause. Cody recalled that his first forays into horse theft ended when “government officials” finally “put detectives upon our track, and several of the party were arrested.” Were those officials pursuing the band because they stole government horses? ²⁰

Whoever the victims of his thievery were, Cody was now fatherless and adrift in a world where targeted violence—anti-slavery or pro-slavery— easily spread into general violence against anybody who had property or was in the way. Among the partisans along the Kansas-Missouri border were any number of criminals who worked both sides of the conflict, robbing and killing secessionist and Unionist alike. Whether he served as partisan or mostly as an observer, Cody rode through the same social chaos that spawned the James, Dalton, and Younger brothers of future outlaw infamy, not to mention bloody Confederate murderers like William Quantrill, William “Bloody Bill” Anderson, and, on the other side, the insatiably murderous Union partisan, Charles “Doc” Jennison.²¹

The temptation to borrow a few Union horses and return them for the money must have been considerable. We cannot know if Cody burned houses, as some Missourians alleged, but he rode with men who did. And however he did it, he made money. As his sister Julia recalled of his time with the Red Legs, “the money that Willie Brought Home and gave to Mother was a big help.”²²

Mimicking the pattern set by Isaac Cody, and in keeping with practices of many men of fighting age during the war, young Will Cody was frequently abroad for prolonged periods. The long period of violence imposed such severe strain on the civil order that child rearing and family bonds generally were difficult to achieve or sustain. The gangs of armed men who roamed the countryside were renowned for drunkenness and debauchery in Kansas towns. White and black refugees from Missouri, and anti-slavery Indians routed out of Indian territory to the south, poured into the towns of Leavenworth, Lawrence, and Atchison, contributing to a profound sense of social disorder and anomie. The refugees included or attracted large numbers of prostitutes, vagrants, pickpockets, and thieves. Soldiers and settlers walked the streets among teamsters, steamboat sailors, Mexican traders, Indians, fugitive slaves, and any number of outlaws and killers who styled themselves Free State militiamen, many of whom packed the towns’ numerous saloons, bordellos, and gambling halls.²³ The relentless violence of this society shocked even enthusiastic brawlers like James Butler Hickok, later known as Wild Bill, who wrote to his sister from Kansas in 1858, “You dont [k]no[w] what a Country this is for drinking and fighting . . . this is no place for women and children....” ²⁴

In Leavenworth and elsewhere, bands of men wearing red leather garters were a frequent, intimidating sight on the streets. Cody’s prosaic, brief descriptions of town visits during his Red Leg days have an undercurrent of menace. “Whenever we were in Leavenworth we had a festive time. We usually attended all the balls in full force, and ‘ran things’ to suit ourselves.”²⁵ Whether he was actually a Red Leg or not, he knew Leavenworth and its wartime dissipation intimately.

In November 1863, William Cody returned home to tend his ailing mother, but soon thereafter Mary Cody died. William Cody was bereft. In his autobiography, he recalled taking himself back to Leavenworth for two months, during which time he became “a very ‘hard case,’ ” drinking himself to the point of “dissipation” in the town’s unsavory wartime society. The loss of his mother, “whom I had so tenderly loved,” meant another severing of family bonds. The alienation was complete when he awoke one morning, “after having been under the influence of bad whisky,” and found himself a soldier in the Seventh Kansas Volunteer Cavalry, the regiment better known as Jennison’s Jayhawkers. ²⁶

Cody’s career with the Seventh Kansas was remarkable for its lack of distinction. The regiment fought mostly in the Old Southwest, helping to crush Nathan Bedford Forrest in Mississippi and General Sterling Price in Missouri. His service record reveals almost nothing of his duties during this time, although the Seventh Kansas Volunteers saw fierce combat at Tupelo, and Cody must have been there. He later claimed he was a scout and a spy, and that he renewed his acquaintance with Wild Bill Hickok while both were spying. We should remain doubtful of these tales. For one thing, they are mere copies of stories that were widely circulated about Hickok at the time. For another, spying and scouting seem unlikely postings for Cody, a soldier who—according to official records—was ordered to serve as a hospital orderly in January 1865, and who four weeks later took up a cushy post as messenger for an office of the Freedmen’s Bureau in St. Louis.²⁷

The heroism of protecting family must have seemed all the more important to him by war’s end, when he journeyed back to his own family in Kansas. His little brother, Charlie, was sick, and the boy died in October 1865. The family’s sadness only accented the sorrow visited on the region by the recent conflict. The fearsome war on the home which had absorbed Cody’s energies had also engulfed the countryside. There were so few people across the once thickly populated farmlands of Missouri that much of the state was silent. One traveler recorded a journey from one town to another in which he “did not pass one house,” and in truth, “there was neither town nor village” to be found in the entire county. The population of another county had sunk to six families.²⁸ In western Missouri, one returning exile recounted that “for miles and miles, we saw nothing but lone chimneys to mark the spots where happy homes stood. It seemed like a vast cemetery— not a living thing to break the silence.”²⁹ On the Kansas side of the line, the scene was much the same. When they remembered the war, the people of Kansas and Missouri would be horrified not just by the violence, the vengefulness of the partisans, or the destruction of property. As one journalist reflected, this “most alarming picture of war that can be painted” was the consequence of “the frightful spirit of hate and revenge” with which partisans continually hunted one another, “resulting in the most fearful loss and breaking up of family ties.”³⁰

The war on the family home was the definitive experience of William Cody’s young life. In it, he was, like so many others, both victim and perpetrator. The man who experienced real war on a home front as casualty and victor would spend most of his adult life trying to become a builder of family and community, and representing himself as the savior of the white family home. The Wild West show cut a swath through American entertainments for three decades beginning in the 1880s, and most of its audience were northerners and urbanites who did not live in Kansas or the South. They did not lose homes in the Civil War. Their sense of vulnerability about home and family had many other sources, from exploding slums in America’s cities to labor unrest that came close to insurrection. William Cody understood those anxieties intuitively, and he knew that his simulated attack on a settler’s cabin gave them a sense of participation in the show’s drama.

Buffalo Bill Cody himself never drove Indians away from a cabin. But he had certainly defended a home from savage attack, and longed to wage war on the homes of his enemies from his earliest days.