CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Showdown in Cheyenne

HAD CODY’Sdivorce petition succeeded, it would have marked his second dissolution of a long-term partnership in recent years. When Nate Salsbury died after a prolonged illness late in 1903, William Cody found himself unhindered by the man’s professional demands for the first time in eighteen years.

Cody still had a managing partner in James A. Bailey, of Barnum & Bailey, who arranged the show’s travel schedule and transportation. Salsbury himself had brokered the agreement with Bailey in 1894, when he realized that failing health would keep him from traveling extensively. But Bailey was a behind-the-scenes operator, with no desire for the limelight. His extensive inventory of railroad cars made him a worthwhile partner. He managed the transportation for the show, and he was essentially the local manager in every town where the show appeared.¹

But Bailey was never a friend. He did not link his name to the show, was less invested in it, and had no personal influence over the star. In this sense, Salsbury’s absence left Cody shorthanded, and it may have been responsible for some of his poor decisions. The relationship between Cody and Salsbury was often strained. Their partnership in this respect was akin to that of Rodgers and Hart or Lennon and McCartney, that is, famously creative and notoriously difficult. As co-owners of the show, Salsbury and Cody made decisions about it together. The managing partner was sometimes more careful than Cody in watching the show’s bottom line. But even if the Big Horn Basin was a bad investment, Salsbury had not only joined the Shoshone Irrigation Company but encouraged Cody to find other investors, too. Salsbury himself made some disastrous choices for the show, dreaming up the money-losing Ambrose Park appearance of 1894. The next year he created Black America, which proved an expensive failure. Both of these drove Cody to invest even more time and effort in the Big Horn Basin in hope of making up show losses.

Tensions between the partners grew. Salsbury knew he was dying. His illness made him less temperate. Perhaps Cody showed signs of impatience. The managing partner anticipated a split with Cody, or a posthumous legal assault on the Salsbury heirs. Sometime after 1901, Salsbury sat down at his home in Long Branch, New Jersey, to dictate (or possibly type himself) a scathing history of his career with William Cody and the Wild West show. 2

What he wrote was not for publication, he said, but if it were, he would call it “Sixteen Years in Hell with Buffalo Bill.” His grievances were many, starting with Cody’s hedonism. “Cody makes a virtue of keeping sober most of the time during the Summer Season, and when he does so for the entire season, he looks on himself as a paragon of virtue and self-abnegation.” But when he drank, “he forgets honor, reputation, friend, and obligation, in his mad eagerness to fill his hide with rot gut of any kind.” As a rule, said Salsbury, “he would keep at it until he fell so sick that he could not move, or as he used to put it, ‘His liver flopped,’ and then would co[m]e the strain of getting his head reduced.”

Cody’s indulgence was nowhere near as irritating as his permanent sense of entitlement. “When he sobers up a little, he is so conceited as to imagine he has had a perfect right to get drunk, no matter at what cost to his associates in business, and takes it for granted that he is so great a man that all the world excuses him because he is a hero and an ‘Old Timer’ who saved America from going back to the wilderness [as] Columbus found it.”

Combined with his womanizing, these habits endangered the reputation of everybody in his orbit. In Rome, Cody visited the homes of dignitaries when he was so drunk “that he could hardly get into his carriage,” and, worse, with a woman in tow. Ushered into the drawing room of the British minister, “he remarked to his concubine that ‘We can beat this in Nebrasky at a fifty-cent admission shakedown.”

Salsbury grimaces through his typescript memoir with his head in his hands. “And this is the gentleman that ladies and gentlemen have delighted to honor. Bah.”³

This “Tin Jesus on horseback” demanded continual attention and adulation. He had “abused every man in our employ who ever showed that he did not regard the Hero as the head and front of the Showman’s Universe.” ⁴ Salsbury remarked on the new biography of Cody written by his sister, Helen Cody Wetmore. She called it Last of the Great Scouts, “and if she will only insure the verity of her title page,” wrote Salsbury, “she will be doing humanity a service. A man may be a ‘Great Scout’ and a d——d rascal at the same time.” Salsbury had had a bellyful of Cody’s frontier heroics. After all, “as a private soldier during the Civil War, I smelled more powder in one afternoon at Chickamauga, than all the ‘Great Scouts’ that America has ever produced ever did in a lifetime.”⁵

Cody’s misbehavior and ungratefulness were all the more insulting, in Salsbury’s eyes, because Buffalo Bill was his creation, “a commercial proposition that I discovered when I invented the Wild West, and picked him out for the Figure Head.” He boldly (and incorrectly) proclaimed, “I invented every feature of the Wild West Show that has had any drawing power.” To hear the managing partner tell it, he could have been just as successful with any number of other men as his star. “There were others, and there will be others,” he wrote, pointing to Cody’s many imitators. If any of them “had had the good fortune to be good looking, tall, dashing, and the subject of romantic tale telling for a decade, there would have been some other commercial propositions that could have been developed.”⁶ More than anything else, Nate Salsbury wanted the world to know that he, the manager, was the reason for Buffalo Bill’s worldwide fame. In 1885, on the train from Montreal to Toronto, Salsbury promised Cody “that I would land him at ‘the foot of the throne of England.’ ” Two years later, Cody performed before Queen Victoria. As we have seen, Cody had that ambition in mind before he ever met Nate Salsbury. But the managing partner recalled the idea as his alone. “Of course, he forgot the promise and took the kudos.”⁷

Salsbury’s rant, though wounded and defensive, still contains some suggestions about the sources of Cody’s enduring appeal and creativity, particularly his childlike enthusiasms which sometimes veered into childish impulsiveness. “It would not be so bad,” wrote the partner in one of his more reflective moments, “if he had the common intelligence of a child, or if he could remember from one day to another the experience he has already passed through.” At least then the show’s star would not need to spend large amounts of time “apologising for his BLUNT WESTERN WAYS. . . . I have heard so much of the manly behavior of the WESTERN man since I have been mixed up with him, that I might believe in it, if I did not have Cody for a partner.”⁸

The managing partner’s account is so wry and vivid that Cody biographers may be forgiven for finding it irresistible. Watching the downward trajectory of the Wild West show after 1900, it is easy to believe much of what rolled off that typewriter in Long Branch. In one of his last acts on this earth, the old comic Salsbury entered the debate that swirled around Cody—Is he a hero, or is he a charlatan?—and came down firmly on the side of the latter.

But for today’s readers, perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Salsbury’s story is how familiar it is. The drama of the sensible, businesslike manager struggling to contain the unappreciative star is a central narrative of modern culture. In the century since Salsbury’s death, his bitter memoir has been echoed by the laments of managers for movie icons, athletes, and rock stars, including Fatty Arbuckle, Babe Ruth, and the Beatles. These stories resonate for audiences in part because of their grand psychological drama, in which the manager plays superego, the containing force, to the id of the star, thereby playing out internal tensions of the consumer era as effectively as a Greek tragedy.

More directly, the recurrent complaint of the manager about the star reflects tensions within modern entertainment itself, whose stars must appeal to mass audiences, a task which requires them to be in part products of professional booking, travel, and publicity staffs, and partly the projection of less quantifiable forces such as charisma and talent.

The tensions between manager and star that pervade Salsbury’s account emerged in the era’s popular literature at the very moment that Buffalo Bill reached his apogee. They were reflected in George Du Maurier’s 1890 novel Trilby, which was the source of the Svengali legend. As we have seen, they were also at the heart of Bram Stoker’s relationship with Henry Irving, and were central to the novel Dracula, which appeared only a few years before Salsbury wrote his account. Salsbury probably never read Stoker’s novel. But by the end of his life, he likely would have sympathized with Stoker’s fear that the man whose career he managed had drained him of all vitality.

Indeed, the comparison of Salsbury and Stoker suggests the sense of awe and wonder, fear and admiration, that Cody’s celebrity inspired in his closest partners. Even dripped in Salsbury’s vitriol, we see Cody’s irrepressible charisma. He is innocent, needy, and playful. His energy and his appetites are both boundless. Most of all, he exerts a curious power over his audience, which Salsbury exploits but which he only half understands. Recalling the meeting with Pope Leo XIII in Rome, Salsbury wrote that the Sistine Chapel was packed with worshippers that day. The pope, however, was drawn to Buffalo Bill. “As he passed the spot where Cody and myself were standing he looked intently at Cody,” recalled the manager, “who looked a picture in his dress coat and long hair.” The costume would have been ridiculous on anybody else. Cody was “the only man that I have ever known that could wear it without exciting laughter.” Cody bowed his head as the pope passed. “His Holiness spread his hands in token of his blessing, and the good Catholics around us looked with envy at Cody during the balance of the ceremonies.”

But in contrast to this sense of wonder, what haunts every word of Salsbury’s memoir, are his half-articulated fears. He was terrified of a Cody legal assault, which might deprive him and his family of their share of the Wild West show, which he had worked so hard to sustain. “I have always realized the slender hold I have had on a man that would not scruple to throw me out at a moment’s notice if he dared.”⁹

For all Salsbury’s complaints, he remained with Cody to the end of his life. Despite his intimate knowledge of Cody’s many foibles, he too found the star irresistible. This fact seems to have puzzled Salsbury. His hastily composed memoir offers plenty of ammunition for any future showdown with Cody in court. But it also hints at Salsbury’s unease with his own vulnerability to Cody’s spell. The manager’s vehemence could not disguise his own uncertainty. He wanted to believe he created Cody. But in the end, he feared he merely orbited him like all those ignorant fans, suffering the star to abuse him like some lackey. In Salsbury’s hands, Cody emerges as beautiful and horrifying, magnificent and monstrous. In Salsbury’s deathbed gaze, Buffalo Bill flickers between real and fake, hero and showman, demigod and demon.

SALSBURY’S MEMOIR remained private until years after Cody died. But in a curious way, many of his complaints about the man were echoed in public soon after, when Louisa Cody refused to grant her husband of almost four decades a divorce, and went to court to contest his petition. The trial that followed became a press scandal and the greatest public relations disaster of Buffalo Bill’s long career. When William and Louisa Cody faced off in a courtroom, with their lawyers and witnesses, they scripted their marriage into dueling narratives, each battling for the sympathy of the judge. This was a contest in which the old storyteller and showman should have been an easy victor. But as the trial rapidly became a scandal in the mass press, it became a show of its own. Louisa Cody retreated to the settler’s cabin, announced her loving devotion to a befuddled old husband, and pleaded with the court to make him desist from his scabrous attacks on her dignity, and especially on her marriage. Meanwhile, William Cody found himself cast as the circling antagonist, the savage bent on destruction of his own home. He was not to have the ending he wanted.

To understand why his suit for divorce went so wrong, we have to understand how central his image as a family man had remained to the Wild West show. To complete the narrative of frontier settlement, show programs emphasized not just his abilities as Indian fighter and hunter, but his accomplishments as a progressive pioneer, who not only conquered the West but domesticated it. His earliest show programs had featured pictures of his comfortable home in North Platte, where he had settled “to enjoy its fruits and minister to the wants and advancements of the domestic circle with which he is blessed.” ¹⁰ Cody expanded on this image in the 1893 program, by compressing a pair of images on one page, with a poem sandwiched between them. At the top of the page was an image of a savage frontier, a pen-and-ink sketch of Buffalo Bill “Lassoing Wild Horses on the Platte in the Old Days.” Below was a photograph of cattle grazing peacefully in front of the Victorian home and a barn clearly labeled “Scout’s Rest Ranch,” with the caption “ ‘Buffalo Bill’s’ Home and Horse Ranch on the Old Fighting Ground of the Pawnee and Sioux.”

The narrative sequence was clear, from top to bottom: the progress from frontier to pastoral countryside, from war to peace, and even from open space to domestic space, had been made possible by Buffalo Bill.

The march of civilization is made all the more apparent in the movement from pen-and-ink illustration at the top to photograph at the bottom, and in the transformed nature in the two scenes. The animals in the bottom image do not need lassoing: they graze peacefully, and they even face the same direction, right, like words on the page. Perhaps the most salient component of the bottom image is Buffalo Bill’s house, slightly to the left. It is a remarkable Gilded Age middle-class home, planted in the Nebraska prairie in front of a row of trees. Audiences would not need any prompting to associate this elegant home with a wife. The message was clear: by subduing the frontier, Buffalo Bill made homes possible. And he made it possible to keep women—or better, wives—inside them.

Midpage, between the two images, is a telling poem, “Lines Inspired on Witnessing the Prairie Chief Caressing His Baby Daughter, Little Irma Cody”:

Only a baby’s fingers patting a brawny cheek,
Only a laughing dimple in the chin so soft and sleek,
Only a cooing babble, only a frightened tear,
But it makes a man both brave and kind
To have them ever near.
The hand that seemed so harsh and cruel,
Nerved by a righteous hate
As it cleft the heart of Yellow Hand,
In revenge of Custer’s fate,
Has the tender touch of a woman,
As rifle and knife laid by,
He coos and tosses the baby,
Darling “apple of his eye.”

Thus the prairie centaur featured in the top illustration, the vengeful slayer of “Yellow Hand,” has been domesticated by the daughter—and the wife who provided her—in the bottom image. In a limited way, the frontier hero has become a paragon of the new, suburban “masculine domesticity,” which situated men in closer proximity to family and home than in previous generations.¹¹

So audiences were astonished to read in major newspapers, in the early months of 1904, that after thirty-eight years of marriage, Buffalo Bill Cody was suing his wife for divorce. The family, however, was not surprised. The 1890s had been no kinder to the Cody marriage than any of the previous decades. In 1893, while he was showing in Chicago, Louisa made a surprise visit to the house where she had heard that he was living with Katherine Clemmons. She did not find Clemmons. Louisa tore the place to pieces. Upon her return to North Platte, she told her staff, “I cleaned out the house.”¹²

Cody’s image hinged on his being a domesticator of the frontier (top) through the establishment of the family home (bottom), particularly at the Scout’s Rest Ranch—where Louisa refused to live. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West 1893 Program, author’s collection.

In 1898, she went to New York and took a room at the Astoria. She called her husband at the Hoffman House, where the phone was answered by a press agent named Bess Isbell. This time, she upended her own room, and William Cody paid the bill.¹³

Mistresses aside, their most constant bone of contention was his Scout’s Rest Ranch, over which she struggled to gain control, although she refused to live in it. Under pressure from Louisa, William Cody’s sister Julia and her husband, Al Goodman, had vacated the premises in 1891, so that Arta and her husband, Horton Boal, could manage the property. Although Goodman returned to manage it again in 1894, he left for good in 1899.¹⁴ Goodman and the other managers and foremen of the ranch took their orders from William Cody, but all of them complained of interference, even hostility, from his wife, who constantly countermanded Cody’s orders and imposed demands of her own. As time passed, there may have been confusion about who was in charge. William Cody corresponded with ranch managers and continued to give them advice about how to handle the ranch. “I sent out . . . one of my old dining room tents,” he wrote one of them, “to cover the [hay]stacks with . . . to keep the exposed stack from getting wet.” ¹⁵ He advised them on confrontations with Louisa right up to the time he filed the divorce petition. But in 1900, soon after Al Goodman left, he handed the ranch over to Louisa with a one-line, unpunctuated message: “The ranch is yours take it run it to suit yourself.”¹⁶ He returned home to North Platte for a brief Christmas break in 1901. After that, he ceased his visits to the town or to Louisa.¹⁷

William Cody’s petition for divorce rested on two complaints. First, he made the stunning accusation that Louisa had many times threatened to poison him. Second, and more banal, was the charge that she had driven him “from his former home in North Platte, Nebraska, and has at divers times refused” to let him “bring his friends and guests” to that home. At times when he did, Louisa “would make it so unpleasant for him and his guests they were forced to leave.” His married life was “unbearable and intolerable” in these conditions.¹⁸

The nation’s newspapers quickly cast the drama as a tongue-in-cheek Wild West show. “Intrenched in a legal fastness and surrounded by a band of brave attorneys, who know every byepath [ sic] of the Wyoming divorce laws, the hero of the thrillers of two generations started today to fight his way to marital freedom,” wrote one reporter. On the other side, “Mrs. Cody, surrounded by another brave band of attorneys, is determined to fight to the last ditch, for she asserts the colonel wants the divorce only in order to marry another woman.” ¹⁹

The newspaper narrative turned the celebrity divorce trial into entertainment. But understanding how William Cody understood his marriage and his life, and why he lost this case, requires examining a very different story. The divorce trial was in a sense a battle of narratives, and William Cody’s charges told a familiar and popular tale. For all the tensions over money and property that checkered their marriage, the heart of his case was the sensational allegation of the poison threat. Wild West show programs had long scripted Buffalo Bill’s home, especially Scout’s Rest Ranch, as the domesticated triumph of the frontiersman. The poison charge emplotted both Codys into a quite different drama, one in which an evil woman lured her husband to provide home and wealth, and then poisoned him to gain control of the property.

This was, indeed, the plot of Lucretia Borgia, a popular melodrama in the nineteenth century, and one which so appealed to William Cody that by the late 1860s he had named his favorite buffalo rifle after the treacherous title character. Whether or not he was aware of the similarities between his accusations and the play, the old showman’s complaint resonated with the dark side of the domestic dream, the nightmare of the deceiving woman who strikes out from the heart of the home where the man believes he is safest. As various scholars have observed, this narrative is a mythic trope as old as the home itself, and a powerful undercurrent running against the popular enthusiasm for home and domesticity in the late nineteenth century. ²⁰

William Cody’s first attempt at divorce, more than twenty years before, had halted when little Orra Cody suddenly died. Nothing would stop this one from proceeding, but the couple’s bitterness was compounded by another tragedy. Weeks after William Cody filed the petition, daughter Arta suddenly died of “organic trouble.” Her life had become a tragedy in itself. Her first husband, Horton Boal, committed suicide in 1902, leaving her with two infant children. She remarried in January 1904, at a small Denver wedding which her father attended. Her new husband, Dr. Charles Thorp, worked as a surgeon for the Northern Pacific railroad. But within a month, she was dead.²¹

With the heartbroken parents locked in a court battle, the funeral was a disaster. Upon hearing of Arta’s sudden death, William Cody sent a telegram to Louisa, asking to put “personal differences” aside while they buried their daughter.²² Louisa herself may have been attempting a reconciliation at the time Arta died. Arta’s two children had been visiting Louisa when Arta sent word that she was very ill and was about to have surgery, from which she did not expect to recover. Louisa and the children immediately began journeying to Arta’s home in Spokane. She had resented the Cody sisters for many years, but in Denver she asked her husband’s youngest sister, May Cody Bradford, to come along and help her, and she may have intended the invitation as a gesture to her husband.

But now, at the Bradford house in Denver, devastated by the telegram announcing Arta’s death, Louisa was further hurt and infuriated by her husband’s message. She refused to reconcile merely for the duration of the funeral. According to May Cody Bradford, she wanted to send a telegram accusing William Cody of murdering their daughter by breaking her heart with the divorce petition. Relatives persuaded her to soften her language.²³ William Cody, on his way to meet the family funeral procession in Omaha, received a message telling him his wife believed he “broke Arta’s heart. Suit entered under false accusation.” Louisa would accept no temporary reconciliation. “Never for only a while, forever or not at all.”²⁴

The couple met in Omaha and did not speak, as they made their way with Arta’s body to Chicago and on to its last resting place in Rochester, New York. The procession was tearful and tense. They rode in separate rooms of the sleeper car. As it became clear he would not attempt a reconciliation with her, Louisa threatened to “denounce him as Arta’s murderer from the grave of his dead child.”²⁵

But she was silent as she put her first daughter in the ground, beside the graves of Kit and Orra Cody. At the conclusion of the funeral, William Cody left for New York City. As he left, he turned to his old friend Frank Powell and asked him to see if Louisa was open to a reconciliation. According to Powell, a man for whom Louisa had only contempt, she refused. She made her way back to Nebraska, still accompanied by her sister-in-law. Stopping over in Chicago, she raged at William Cody, shook her fist at his sister, and swore, “I will bring you Codys down so low the dogs won’t bark at you.”²⁶

The divorce trial did not begin until almost a year after Arta’s death, by which time William Cody had added two more complaints to his petition. The first was that Louisa refused to sign mortgages, which made it impossible for him to carry on his business. The final charge was that she had subjected him to “extreme cruelty” in charging him with Arta Cody’s murder. ²⁷ Testimony was made in depositions, many of them in open court in Cheyenne, before an audience of some three hundred “women, cowboys, and officers from Fort Russell,” according to the press.²⁸ At the close of proceedings, the judge would render his decision.

The opening testimony by William Cody was actually made in a deposition the year before, in which he told the court of his long, unhappy marriage to Louisa—of his fights with her from their earliest days, his venture to “the end of the line” to escape his unhappy home, her discontent with his buffalo hunting and her disappointment in him upon the failure of his town of Rome. She disliked his life in the theater, was jealous of friendly actresses, and was always critical of him. “My home was made disagreeable to such an extent that I am ashamed to say . . . that I chose the saloons and the wine cup at times in preference.”²⁹ In recent years, matters had become worse. “Well, kiss it goodbye, that’s gone,” she taunted him every time she signed a mortgage to provide cash for the Wild West show. Finally, she “refused to sign her name to any piece of paper at all for me.” He had outstanding mortgages he could not pay, and other properties he needed to sell. But “as she will not sign any papers, I find myself unable to conduct my affairs in a businesslike manner.” ³⁰

The allegations of poisoning began to seem almost credible as his witnesses painted a picture of Louisa’s generally toxic personality. One seamstress who had worked for Louisa Cody related that she openly disdained her husband. ³¹ Another, Florence Parker, the daughter of a ranch manager who had departed because of Louisa’s constant interference, said that Louise had bragged of beating Irma Cody with a buggy whip and burning her with a match, that she consulted fortune-tellers about her husband “to get power over him so she could get possession of his wealth,” that she drank frequently, that “very vulgar” speech was “the most prominent part of her conversation,” that she often said she hated her husband, and that she killed his prize greyhound dogs with poison-laced crackers. ³²

Mrs. John Boyer, the wife of another ranch foreman and manager, who lived at Scout’s Rest for nine years, said that on her first meeting with Louisa Cody, the wife of America’s most famous showman complained that her husband “had ladies traveling with him, or women rather, that made him unloyal to her,” and that he was “immoral with any woman that he met.” Over subsequent years, “she told me all.” ³³ Mrs. Boyer said the woman used “such bad language” in her own home “that ladies could not stay there.” She drank heavily—“toddies,” wine, and “beer by the case.” In years past, “she used to take a drink the first thing in the morning,” and when she drank, “you could smell it on her.” She refused to entertain his guests, ladies and gentlemen alike, and she accused her husband’s friends of stealing household trinkets. The Boyers hired a housemaid, a young woman who had a baby out of wedlock, to work in their quarters at Scout’s Rest. Louisa Cody showed up to demand they fire the maid. Mrs. Boyer refused. Louisa “spit in the baby’s face,” and accused Mrs. Boyer “of keeping that girl in the house for my husband’s use.” Mrs. Boyer seized Mrs. Cody by the throat and pushed her bodily out the front door. ³⁴

Mrs. Boyer’s testimony was the heart of the poisoning evidence. She recounted how Louisa had bought a concoction called “Dragon’s Blood” from a gypsy camp near North Platte and put it in his coffee. Concerned that it would do him harm, “I switched the cups,” Mrs. Boyer recalled, “and it made her sick.”³⁵

One day when William Cody was intoxicated in their home, Louisa Cody told Mrs. Boyer, “I will rule Cody or ruin him.” She called him to the top of the stairs and handed him a cup of tea, saying, “Willie, drink this it will do you good.” He drank it, then lurched toward the bathroom door and collapsed, vomiting as he fell. “You are a drunken brute,” Louisa told him. Some of the hired men put him to bed and called the doctor. “The girl that was working there, Katie Burke, said ‘She will surely kill him this time for she has worked on this tea all day.’ ” Mrs. Boyer claimed that she had confronted Louisa Cody, and been told that nobody would believe her if she said anything. On other occasions Louisa told her that the potion would make him “so weak that she could get him to sign papers” and “she wanted him to make his ranch over to her.”³⁶

Mrs. Boyer saw Louisa slip more of the potion into a bottle of whiskey on the buffet in their home, just before a banquet honoring her husband. Then she set about “nagging and jawing first about one thing and then another and he said ‘Oh Mamma, hush,’ and he went over and grabbed the bottle and took a drink and said ‘The only way a man can stand you is to drink.’ ” By the time he rose to speak at the banquet, he was practically incoherent. Moments later, he collapsed at the table, whereupon he was bodily carried from the room.³⁷

Cody’s banquet speech, or rather his failure to give a coherent speech, became a central moment in the trial narrative. Other witnesses, including his sister May, said that he had complained his legs were numb, and that he felt worse than he ever had in his life, moments before he fainted. ³⁸ Outside, with his stomach in agony, he walked to Guy Laing’s saloon, where he climbed onto a billiard table and lay facedown, gripping the railings on both side “in a way as to relieve the agony in my stomach.” Half an hour later, he stood up, went to his carriage, and went home. ³⁹

As riveting as the story of Louisa the Poisoner was for the public, Cody had not reckoned with the powerful countermythology of the home and the domestic order which his show had been entwined with, and in many ways reinforced, for a generation. Very quickly, his wife’s attorneys cast William Cody as an aggressor against his own home. Throughout the trial, Louisa Cody exploited the public’s fascination with homemaking as salve to the deleterious influence of nomadism. She played the role of a loyal wife aggrieved by a befuddled, peripatetic husband, whose drinking, infidelities, and unsteady business hand became primary exhibits in the case against him.

The strategy of Louisa’s lawyers was to depict the Cody household as loving, warm, and generally happy. In this story of the Cody marriage, William Cody appeared as an affectionate and kind man, but with an unfortunate thirst for alcohol and unrestrained lusts for women. Only through his marriage to Louisa Cody could his anarchic energies and unsavory appetites be contained.

Her attorneys built this case from the most respectable materials. Her witnesses were largely North Platte’s middle-class professionals, including bankers, doctors, and lawyers. “She always conducted herself as a loving wife,” testified local attorney Beach “Judge” Hinman. “I have never known there to be the least friction between the two.” ⁴⁰ Edith Colvin, who stayed at the Cody household for five weeks in the fall and winter of 1901, described how Louisa headed up a crowd of people who welcomed her husband at the train station when he returned for Christmas, bearing gifts—steel purses and a cut-glass serving set—for his wife and daughters. Their home was decorated with his image in paintings and busts and photographs. She called him “Willie.” He called her “Mamma.” During Christmas dinner, he treated her “very nicely, indeed.” ⁴¹

Others noted that Cody had seemed perfectly happy in 1901, the last time he had been in North Platte. He had discussed plans to build a Masonic temple for the town. He never made any suggestion that he was planning to leave. He ceased to return after that year. Many wondered why.⁴²

Still others described Louisa Cody’s behavior toward guests as “uniformly courteous,” and her conduct toward her husband as “never anything but proper.” She was an excellent hostess. “She was always very fully occupied in entertaining his guests. I never heard her say an unkind word to him, or manifest any ill-feeling of any description at any time.” Her reputation as wife and mother was “beyond reproach.” Another “never saw anything” to indicate trouble and bad feeling. Friends of three decades, including the Grand Master of Nebraska Masons, Frank Bullard, described her as a teetotaler, and the contention that she used “vulgar, obscene, and profane language” was “ridiculous. I never heard of such a thing. . . . I never heard her use a word that even approached that.” ⁴³

Dr. E. B. Warner, fourth-term mayor of North Platte and delegate to the 1892 National Republican Convention, had known the Codys for twentyfive years. He told the court that Louisa Cody was “perfectly ladylike; an ideal hostess,” and a loving wife and mother.⁴⁴ Said Mrs. W. H. Turpie, a friend of Irma’s who was a neighbor of the Codys for several years, “It always seemed to me that she simply idolized him; as much as she could any person. She was very much wrapped up in him, and doing everything for his pleasure, as far as I could see. . . .”⁴⁵ Another neighbor who visited often with Louisa testified that Louisa once showed her a newspaper report of her husband’s infidelities, but even then, she never said a word against him.⁴⁶

In the strategy of Louisa’s attorneys, the public face of the marriage was what mattered. If marriage was by definition a public institution, the foundation of home and civil society, then the judge would have to accept its public face as evidence of how well it ordered the chaotic life of the showman. If a marriage looked happy, it must be happy.

Louisa’s attorneys also illuminated the challenges facing the wife and domesticator, by painting William Cody as dissolute and unable to function on his own. Most of the witnesses on this point were longtime friends of both Codys. They proved to be not only enthusiastic in defense of his wife, but so eager to fulminate against Buffalo Bill that one detects a sense of aggrievedness on their part, as if the disgrace of the scandal was only the latest of the old showman’s many offenses. Their bewilderment over his abandonment of their town for Cody, Wyoming, apparently added to a popular resentment at being dragged into his marital troubles. To judge by their testimony, they felt their affection for Buffalo Bill was poorly repaid with this self-serving trial. They hit back hard, and their harshest attack was their testimony about Cody’s drinking.

Alcohol and its control were major social and political issues in the nineteenth century. To temperance advocates, alcohol was the despoiler of the home, an evil force that corrupted men, broke their marriages, ruined their talents, and left their children destitute. Drink was savagery in a bottle.

Indeed, temperance advocates deployed the symbol of the home and womanly domesticity in much the same way as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West did. As we have seen, Cody himself touted his show camp as a temperance community (although even heavy drinking was not unusual when the cast was out on the town) in order to appeal to the respectable middle class. In the minds of many, the home needed to be protected from alcohol, but a faithful wife and a warm domicile were also the best defense against a man’s alcohol abuse. Women dominated temperance campaigns, and they depicted the fight to control alcohol as an expression of women’s domesticating influence over the public spaces which men traditionally controlled, especially saloons. They were particularly powerful in the West. Carry Nation began chopping her way to glory in 1900 by attacking Kansas saloons with her hatchet. Less spectacularly, campaigns to ban alcohol were often led by, and corresponded with the rising power of, middle-class women. Thus the nation banned alcoholic beverages with the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, and empowered women with the right to vote in the Nineteenth Amendment of 1921.⁴⁷

The control of alcohol and its influence thus spoke to the containment of savagery and to anxieties about the home which were central to Cody’s show and his myth. Charges of habitual drunkenness struck at the heart of his public persona, and he defended himself vigorously. He testified that drinking never interfered with his business, and moreover that he had quit drinking in 1901. He may have. “Oh but I am enjoying this trip—More than I ever did any before,” he wrote a friend that year, “because I am not drinking. Everything looks bright and prosperous.” Two months later he was still abstaining. In New York, pulling together his show for another season, he was “feeling like new money. [H]ead clear all the time. . . . My prospects never looked brighter.”⁴⁸ Charles Wayland Towne, a journalist who went hunting with Cody and several of the showman’s old drinking partners in 1903, reported that Cody had become a teetotaler on orders from his doctor.⁴⁹

Whether or not Cody had been on the wagon since 1901, residents of North Platte had not seen him since that year, and they had many stories to tell about Cody’s drinking from earlier days. “I have seen him frequently when I thought he was very much under the influence of liquor,” both “in h[i]s own home and on the streets,” said Frank Bullard.⁵⁰ William Cody’s attorney told Bullard that Cody did not drink during his show season. Bullard shrugged. “He generally waited until he got here to get drunk.” ⁵¹ A. F. Streitz, the town druggist, concluded that Cody “has been a hard drinker during his stay in North Platte during these years.” Streitz had seen Cody intoxicated “many times,” and in fact “the first time I met him in North Platte he was intoxicated.”⁵² C. M. Newton, a merchant who had known the Codys for fifteen years, said he had seen Cody drunk in public many times. William Cody’s attorneys suggested that their client was polite and kind even when drunk:

Q: He always conducted himself gentlemanly, did he not, during the times he was drunk, on the streets?

A: I think at some times he did not act like a gentleman.

Q: What caused you to think so?

A: I think he was too much intoxicated.⁵³

Louisa Cody’s lawyers proved adept at dredging up old acquaintances to testify about his prior habits. Such people were legion in the Platte country. One recalled events two decades before, when William Cody would make his “headquarters” in Dave Perry’s bar, a known resort of prostitutes. When William Cody’s lawyers attempted to mitigate the remark by asking if all saloons did not have prostitutes at the time, the witness, Patrick McEvoy, disagreed. Perry’s saloon, he pointed out, “was the only saloon in North Platte that allowed women to go into them.” The witness was careful to point out that he had never seen Cody with any of these shady women—but he stayed there most days and much of the night, too. “He would be unable to walk, and the boys would have to haul him in a carry-all, or hack, to take him home.”⁵⁴ One local cowboy turned up to recall Cody bringing wagons of liquor to the Dismal River roundup when he was part owner of the Cody-North Ranch in the Sand Hills.⁵⁵ Still another claimed, “I saw him lying drunk myself right at the store building of Mr. Burke’s,” near Fort McPherson. Even while he had a wife and baby at the fort, he frequented a bordello near Cottonwood Canyon which “stood on a high knoll, and you could not help seeing him.”⁵⁶

In this telling, the story of William Cody was of a man who may or may not have been drinking during his show season, but was unable to stop when he was at home. Ira Bare, editor of a North Platte newspaper, who had known the Codys for more than twenty-three years, concluded “as a rule, when the Colonel drank, he kept on drinking . . . during his presence here, he was more or less under the influence of liquor. . . . I do remember instances when he did not drink, but not often.”⁵⁷

How much of these stories was true and how much produced by the alchemy of resentment and memory is impossible to say. The self-deprecating humor of his autobiography, in which he often recalled having too much “tanglefoot,” buying drink for his detachment and forgetting to buy food, and scouting hostile territory with brandy-filled canteens, suggest either heavy drinking, or playful derision of the era’s potent temperance movement, or both.

But however true or false the testimony about Cody’s drunkenness was, the stories reflected the barely concealed antitheatricalism of North Platte, a middle-class Nebraska town which had always been uneasy with William Cody’s brand of show business patricianism. Charles Iddings, a prominent mill owner and businessman in North Platte, said that whatever shortcomings of temperament or manners Louisa might have, she was simply more honorable, and credible, than her husband, because she was not in show business. While her husband traveled the world in pampered comfort, she stayed home:

She has not had the extensive travel, she has not mingled with the best people perhaps in the east and the old country. She has not had a press agent to dress up her little stories or to correct her little imperfections of speech. She simply stayed at home. She has not had a ladies maid to mix her drinks for her or fix her attire to best advantage. She has simply been a plain body, stayed at home and taken good care of the children and such property as she had there. . . . She has been at home most of the time during 23 years.⁵⁸

The description of Louisa Cody as a “plain body” suggested she possessed democratic values of sincerity, modesty, and honesty, which William Cody—ornamented, showy, and extravagant—could not have. She was, said Beach Hinman, “a very industrious woman, and I do not know as I have noticed any extravagance in her living or dress.” She had a “certain amount of charge at all times over her ranch and farms. She went out and conducted the business of the farm, which was very extensive in later years.” Her habits were “exemplary beyond reproach.” Hinman had “never heard a mere hint of any source against her reputation or conduct.”⁵⁹

In contrast, her husband’s style of living was not moral. When William Cody’s attorneys tried to put Hinman on the defensive by pointing out that the showman had taken his daughters with him when he traveled, Hinman demurred. “I guess Arta Cody was with him some of the time, but I don’t think the truck he had around with him did his daughters any good.”⁶⁰ At one time, in Hinman’s presence, William Cody “got to ridiculing our Lord and Master, and I took exceptions to it....”⁶¹ In these accounts, Cody’s debauchery could be attributed equally to an absence of moral regulation along the frontier—which had long since passed into history but which yet coursed through his person—and to the urban theatrical corruptions in which he immersed himself. In fact, the two forces combined in his person, to create a figure who had lost his balance and fallen into the drunkenness and moral lassitude of the savage.

This drunkard, philanderer, and blasphemer was Louisa Cody’s husband, and she begged the court to allow her to remain his wife. “He always was kind to me when in North Platte,” said Louisa. “He drank a great deal, but he always was pleasant when he came home.” Testifying on her own behalf, between sobs, she denied every charge in the divorce petition. She recalled his last visit home, in 1901, when she arranged the Christmas welcome party for him. He seemed delighted. “He embraced me and kissed me,” she said. He left on Christmas night. He held her in his arms until the train was about to leave, then kissed her goodbye. That was the last time he had come home. She knew nothing of poisonings, of dragon’s blood, of having treated guests badly. Arta had been devastated by the divorce petition. Louisa’s attorneys submitted in evidence the last letter she received from her eldest daughter: “About Papa, oh why did he do it? My heart is just broken over it. I cannot find words to express how dreadfully I feel about it.”⁶²

Louisa said she had been careful with mortgages only to protect him from their many creditors. She had certainly objected to some guests, but never to their faces. She wanted a reconciliation—if only he would retract the allegations of poisoning.⁶³

William Cody’s case was not helped by the letters he wrote to her, which her attorneys submitted as evidence of his continuing affection. Reading the first of these letters into the record, her attorney stumbled over his crabbed handwriting. “Better let me read it,” interrupted William Cody. “That may be one I wrote on horseback.”

He read them all, as if he was playing in a drama. “The venerable showman carried off the role with easy grace and due regard to dramatic values,” reported the Chicago Tribune.⁶⁴

The letters were indeed affectionate, but they also made a powerful case for Louisa’s virtues as a wife. The ideal wife of the Gilded Age stayed at home but was capable of assisting her husband in business. One of her witnesses testified that she was “a good business woman, better than the average,” and her husband’s correspondence substantiated this. ⁶⁵ One of his letters reminded her of his $50,000 loss with his Canadian tour of 1885, the financial debacle of Ambrose Park in 1894, and the $10,000 lost in Black America in 1895, all as a prelude to explaining to her that his “share of the losses” for the 1900 season amounted to another $10,000. “I had a terrible blow this morning. I got all my printing bills in. Our printing was supposed to cost $60,000 a season, but this year it’s $80,000 so I have to pay. . . . This makes an unexpected loss to me of $20,000.” The show season a bust, he still had to pay half the expenses of sending the cast home and wintering the livestock. For this year, the expense of running Scout’s Rest Ranch would have to be paid with hay and grain sales. “Don’t you think it can be made to do it?” he asked her. Signing off as “Papa,” he scribbled a PS: “Wish you would read this letter and say nothing to any one.”⁶⁶

As the ranch prospered, his reliance on her business abilities grew, and his letters expressed his gratitude.

Say you are getting right down to business—why I am delighted—I never believed you could run that big ranch. . . . But you seem to over come business troubles as well as a man who had been used to it—I am really proud of you as a business manager—Wish I had let you have the ranch years ago. May and June will be two busy months for you, then come on and make me a long visit.

With love
Papa⁶⁷

Although he was loath to lose John Boyer as ranch manager, he supported Louisa when she demanded that Mrs. Boyer leave the ranch after the choking incident in the Boyer house.⁶⁸ “I have turned the ranch over to Mrs. Cody and she is boss. You look to her for orders,” he told Boyer.⁶⁹

By the end of the summer of 1901, the old showman could not have been more pleased with Louisa’s success at a job that had for years exhausted the men he hired. “Say you are relieving me of lots of worry and work, by running the ranch and you are making no fuss about it, as though it was nothing to do.” His letters were full of his hopes for Cody town and the Irma Hotel and a military college he hoped to found in the town. ⁷⁰ He complimented her on her liberal food policy for hired men. He confided personal matters to her. “What makes me so poorly outside of the piles is, I have to[o] much on my mind, so many different interests to look after.” Thankfully, he had Louisa. “You have relieved me from the ranch worry—and that don’t give me a thought any more for you know more about it than I ever did.”⁷¹

Other witnesses substantiated that she had indeed mortgaged her own North Platte properties, which included three houses and four lots, to help him finance his show and other ventures. Moreover, she paid the mortgages from rents on properties she owned.⁷²

The final blow to William Cody’s case, however, came in the testimony about his infidelities, which her attorneys skillfully dropped on the packed courtroom three days into the trial. Although the name of Katherine Clemmons had floated through press coverage, she split with William Cody in 1894, when the plays he financed for her reportedly lost $35,000. Soon after, Cody and a prominent “sport” named Fred May were in a fistfight in a Washington, D.C., restaurant over insults exchanged concerning the affair. Subsequently, Clemmons married Howard Gould, son of the notorious robber baron Jay Gould. The same year he filed for divorce, Buffalo Bill Cody filed a $10,000 claim against Clemmons for money lost in supporting her show. ⁷³

But now, the attention of the court, and the public, turned to William Cody’s newest lover, twenty-eight-year-old Bess Isbell, reportedly a press agent first hired by the Wild West show in 1899.⁷⁴ Isbell seems to have been the woman who was the center of a Buffalo Bill faux pas during the 1903 show season in London. King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra knew Cody well, having ridden in the Deadwood stage during his debut season in London in 1887. They arrived in the show camp again near the end of its 1903 season, and all went well until the end of their visit. Another press agent, Dexter Fellows, recalled: “Just when we in the press department were congratulating ourselves upon the smoothness with which we had entertained our eminent guests, Bill committed a breach of etiquette which just about made us sick.” The royal party were leaving the camp when a young woman holding a large bundle of orchids stepped forward. Cody, “with all the nonchalance he could command, said: ‘Oh, Your Majesties, permit me to introduce Miss—— ——, my ward.’ ”

Because nobody is presented to kings and queens except by royal request, the queen turned away, refusing the orchids. Fellows was mortified. “Happily the newsmen present agreed to forget the incident.”⁷⁵

But other witnesses to Cody’s affection for Isbell trundled forward, telling tales. John Clair, a former valet for the showman, told the court a sensational story of the affair that Buffalo Bill had carried on since Isbell joined the show. The showman and the lady took adjoining rooms on the road. In Sherman, Texas, Cody asked Clair to give him a rubdown in Isbell’s room, while Isbell watched, dressed only in “a sort of a kimona ladies generally wear I understand in their private boudoir.” They kissed often, but there were troubles between them. She asked to ride in the parade with Cody one day. He refused. She “sat down on the bed which [was] in Col. Cody’s tent and began to sob very bitterly.” In 1901, while Arta and Irma visited their father in Buffalo, New York, Clair said, Isbell went out to Cody, Wyoming, from where she sent frequent telegrams.⁷⁶

Key facts of Clair’s testimony were supported by Ed Clark, a ranch manager who testified that he had built another bedroom onto Cody’s small TE ranch home for Isbell’s use. The woman stayed there for several weeks in 1901, and William Cody eventually joined her there that year. They rode together frequently. He deeded her forty acres of his spread at the head of Rock Creek, and handed over some of his calves, ordering Clark and several other hands to mark them with her brand, the or “bar BQ.” ⁷⁷

Cody denounced Clair as a liar who was out for revenge after having been fired from the Wild West show for theft, and dismissed Ed Clark as a temporary ranch hand who was only briefly at the TE.⁷⁸ He denied that he and Isbell were romantically involved. He did not take a room in Sherman, Texas, in the year in question, he said, because the show was only there for one day (which was true). In any case, on the road, even his private rooms functioned as semipublic business space, where he was surrounded by “from 1 to 10 people” until he went to bed.⁷⁹ There had been no kisses between them that he recalled, although his staff was generally an affectionate crowd. As he explained it, Isbell was merely a hardworking, talented press agent. She secured positive reviews for the show in ladies’ magazines, a market that the Wild West show’s male press agents “did not or could not succeed in reaching.”⁸⁰ Such coverage, with its appeal to middle-class women, helped maintain the show’s appeal as a family attraction. In this regard, Isbell was indispensable.

Unfortunately, the press agent had fallen ill with tuberculosis. “I have sent quite a number of people out to Cody, Wyoming, who were suffering with tuberculosis.” The dry climate aided their recovery. He gave her letters of introduction to many people, including the town’s finest young women, who accompanied her to his ranch. He did not give her any property. She paid $200 for her forty-acre ranch, and $15 a head for the cattle. When she was at the TE, she stayed in the guest room, like everyone else who visited him.⁸¹

Whatever the nature of Cody’s relationship with Isbell, the scandal of the lady press agent highlighted the contradiction between the domestic imagery of the show and the professionalism and independence of the women performers and publicists, from Annie Oakley to Bess Isbell, who were central to that image. Cody endorsed woman suffrage as early as 1894, and reiterated that support in later years. But for middle-class consumers the presence of unescorted, single women on the stage and in show life generally was one of the most questionable aspects of the theatrical world. William Cody testified that some of the most bitter disputes with Louisa followed farewell kisses bestowed upon him by young actresses at an end-of-the-season party in the mid-1870s. He felt the kisses were as innocent as hand-shakes. She felt otherwise. Thirty years later, the same issue reared up to separate Cody from his public, as the proximity of an unmarried lady press agent to his bed—whether in his hotel room or in his semipublic tent— became a titillating detail that undermined his assertions of manly self-restraint.

None of his denials could overcome the allure of stories about the love triangle involving the “siren” press agent.⁸² In the context of all the other testimony about his drinking and his dalliances with prostitutes, there was enough to persuade the public, and the judge, that Buffalo Bill Cody was in love with a younger woman.

Of all the accusations, Cody fought this one the hardest. “No, no more marriage for me,” he told a journalist. “If I get a divorce I’m going to live on the Cody ranch. I’m going to be buried there and have a red granite buffalo, heroic size, put over my grave on the mesa.” ⁸³ He wished only for solitude and respite from the domestic war of his marriage, in the peaceful wilderness of the Big Horn Basin. As he explained in his testimony, he went to Wyoming because “I had never had any peace up to this time during my married life, and I wanted to seek a place where I could have peace in my old age; and I went off up into that new wild country to be away from trouble— domestic trouble.”⁸⁴

In the narrative combat of the trial, William Cody and his attorneys cast Louisa Cody as Lucretia Borgia and produced a story about a grasping, treacherous wife who attempted to poison her husband and deny him his rightful wealth.

Louisa Cody and her attorneys cast her in a kind of inverted Wild West show, where she retreated to the settler’s cabin only to find her pioneer husband had been corrupted by the temptations of the frontier and now attacked her as enthusiastically as any savage. Buffalo Bill had become a renegade.

It was up to the judge to decide which story was true. Then he could choose its ending. If he chose “Lucretia Borgia,” he had no choice but to grant William Cody a divorce. But if he chose the inverted Wild West, he could put a stop to the worst excesses of the prairie turncoat and tell him he was still bound to the settler’s cabin.

That he chose the latter was, in a sense, not surprising. “Under the laws of this state incompatibility is not a ground for divorce,” wrote Judge Scott in his decision. Extreme cruelty and other indignities were cause for ending a marriage, but where William Cody alleged he had been poisoned, the judge averred that Louisa had only administered “some household remedy” to help him sober up before a banquet. In every way, William Cody was the one guilty of inflicting indignities. Louisa and her attorneys had made some charges about Cody’s infidelity which remained unproved. But when they withdrew those accusations, the judge found for Louisa. The Codys were still married.

Louisa’s victory was the consequence of her story, which was more convincing than her husband’s. In this sense, his defeat reflected his failure to extend certain principles of show business into the trial. He had struggled for years to become a middle-class attraction. But in his divorce case, he presented a melodrama cast with a working-class crowd of seamstresses, ranch foremen, and housemaids. His case hinged on sensational tales told by the hired help. The limits of their credibility became apparent when one witness, the wife of ranch manager Henry Parker, testified that Louisa believed her husband had been the lover of Queen Victoria and later Queen Alexandra. The judge, horrified, ruled the testimony “so manifestly unjust, preposterous, false, and brutal” that he expunged it from the record.⁸⁵

Where there was evidence of her inhospitable behavior toward his guests, the court—and the public—sympathized with Louisa. His guests were theater people and besides, with one exception, they did not appear in court. The only testimony against her on this point came from Robert “Pony Bob” Haslam, a former Pony Express rider and booking agent for the show. He related that during a stay at the Cody house in North Platte, he was awoken by William Cody, who told him “things were not very pleasant” in the house, then took him to another of the Cody homes to sleep. The evidence, decided the judge, did not support the charge of mistreatment.⁸⁶

Louisa’s case, in contrast, was built on the testimony of North Platte’s “better class”: bankers, merchants, newspaper editors, and businessmen. There were some lowbrow moments, as when Henry Blake, a bitter retired soldier, related that the scout had a “bevy” of “dusky maidens” in his bed during the Indian wars. ⁸⁷ But these were the exceptions, and even then the stories were consistent with tales told by North Platte’s most esteemed citizens. In the end, Louisa Cody appeared in a middle-class drama as the defender of her own home against the frontier hero gone bad.

This story was nothing if not entertaining, and the press seized upon it even before the trial began. A reporter from the Chicago Inter-Ocean interviewed Louisa in North Platte right after her husband filed his petition for divorce. “Less than a week ago a prairie fire raged west of this place, and among the property threatened was the Cody ranch,” began the reporter. “North Platte people to the number of nearly 400 went out” to save the ranch Louisa Cody managed, and “for hours fought to save the buildings from the flames.”⁸⁸ The article went on to warn that North Platte residents would sally to Louisa’s defense in her latest trouble, too.

The prairie fire was an old symbol of savage frontier nature, one which Buffalo Bill had reenacted in The Drama of Civilization, in fact. Now he had become the prairie fire.

In his decision the judge admonished William Cody and sent a message to Cody himself, advising him to contemplate the reasons for his own unhappiness. During the trial, Louisa’s witnesses hinted that Cody’s sisters often tried to intervene in the couple’s disputes, on their brother’s behalf. The judge urged the showman to weigh his own behavior over the years, counseling “that you and Mrs. Cody had been kept apart, not through the workings of your own brain and heart, but through the influence of your relatives.” ⁸⁹

Inwardly, back in Paris with the show, Cody raged. Judge Scott “has not had to live with her,” he fumed to an old friend. “Nor has he any idea of what a man suffers in his mind when he lives with a woman as cold blooded as a frog and who never sees anything good in any one. . . . He has never had to live with a woman like the one he has tied me to. . . . I would far rather die than to live with her. . . . If there is no way to divide the property then it will have to go. But no court can make me live with her.”⁹⁰

How much of each story was true? On some issues, the couple’s conflicts are easily understood. Their struggle over property had been going on for many years, and had been at the heart of the original petition for divorce in 1883. His income ebbed and flowed like an ocean tide. At high water, Louisa invested in real estate, which left him hurting during low times. In no small measure, the couple’s enduring wealth came from her investments.

Disparate accounts of her language and temper are also easily explained. The consistent testimony by ranch hands and hired help regarding Louisa Cody’s bad manners suggests she could be coarse and abusive in private with employees. In public, and among people of her own class, she retained a more decorous persona. She resented the presence of “dirty show people,” as she called them, and preferred not to play hostess to them.⁹¹ The court found no reason to censure her for reflecting the general view of the middle class.

The most bizarre charge might also be the most revealing. William Cody’s testimony about the banquet of 1893 suggests he was ill from something. Perhaps he was especially drunk. Perhaps he had food poisoning. But there is another possibility. Her attorneys suggested the so-called “Dragon’s Blood” was “love powders.” Louisa consulted astrologers, said one witness, and Mrs. John Boyer said she bought the potion from a gypsy camp.⁹² Weird as it sounds, the charge was not outside the realm of possibility: many of North Platte’s middle class flocked to a gypsy camp near the town at one point in the early 1890s.

Louisa’s prejudices stand out in the trial. But if it was “love powders,” and if, as her lawyer implied, she gave her husband a magic potion to make him love her more, this is only another clue to her bitter loneliness. She was married to a profoundly absent man, by whom she had had four children, three of whom were now gone. Much of the divorce testimony concerned the raising of their youngest and sole surviving daughter, Irma. The young woman was now married and living in the Philippines with her army officer husband. But the testimony kept harking back to her treatment as a child, as if by reprising it, something now departed could be restored. William Cody complained that when she was a girl, he placed her in fine boarding schools, from which Louisa promptly removed her. This was the story with Arta, as well. “I furnished the means to send my children to the best schools in the country and paid for their tuitions at these different schools,” and with rare exceptions, “the children were never allowed to remain their full term at school.”⁹³ He thought it obstinate and quarrelsome.

But Louisa was lonely. According to one witness, “Mrs. Cody said that Cody could run around the country as he wanted to, but she wasn’t going to leave her baby in school, she was all she had and she was going to bring her home.”⁹⁴

During William Cody’s deposition in 1904, he faced many questions about marriage and children. “Was it while you were living in Rochester that you lost one or more of the children?” asked an attorney.

“Yes, we lost our little son in Rochester,” he replied.

“Do you remember his age at the time of his death?”

William Cody seldom spoke of death, or of people who had died. In all his correspondence, there is barely a mention of any deceased friends or acquaintances. He wrote no poignant words about Wild Bill Hickok, Sitting Bull, or Nate Salsbury. No matter how tragic their deaths, he seldom spoke of the loss.

But the death of his son, Kit Carson Cody, was different. The night Kit died, in 1876, William Cody wrote a letter to his sister, Julia. It was 3:00 a.m. “Julia, God has taken from us our only little boy,” he began. “Lulu is worn out and sick. . . . I was hundreds of miles away when Lulu telegraphed me and I only got home a few hours before Kitty died. He could not speak, but he put his little arms around my neck as much as to say, Papa has come.”⁹⁵

Years later, William Cody faced the question of Kit’s age at the time of his death. “He was five years and six months old when he died,” he answered. Then, almost pensively, he added, “He was five years, six months, and twenty-two days, if I remember rightly.”⁹⁶

The little boy was three decades gone, and if Cody’s memory reckoned his age wrong by about two months, the error only cast into sharper relief the sense of loss that sent the father backward through the years, trying to number all the child’s days. No doubt his mother did the same, for each of their children. There are a few pictures of Louisa and William Cody together, including family portraits with children. But to contemplate them as mother and father, producers of a family, is to weigh the empty spaces between them. Many families lost children in the nineteenth century. But each death eroded the bond between them, and to have lost so many left the Codys precious little to bridge their many differences.

In another sense, William Cody’s show business strengths were his marital undoing. His mastery of ambivalence made him a fine icon for a mass audience. His spectacle invited fantasy. His show programs included excerpts from books in which authors made him a veteran of battles he did not fight. Why correct them? Why not reprint them, and let people believe if they wanted? As we have seen over and over again, spectators could project their fantasies upon him in part because he had been in some genuine Plains conflicts, in part because he looked like a frontier hero was supposed to look, and in part because he did so little to dissuade those who credited him with more greatness than he deserved. He lived extravagantly, and hid the costs and losses. He was a shimmering mirage of frontier success.

He brought the same strategy to his marriage, where it proved much less successful. He wrote affectionate letters to Louisa, and simultaneously carried on his affair with Bess Isbell, allowing both women to see him in their future. He avoided open political battle and partisan strife. In private life, he abhorred confrontation too much to inform Louisa, or even to leave her. “I defy any man or woman to swear that they ever heard me speak an unkind word to her,” he told the court. “I do not believe in quarreling with either man or woman.”⁹⁷

His happy mask was a central issue in the trial. Her lawyers’ strategy hinged on a simple rhetorical question: How could a man who was mistreated at home seem so happy in the eyes of his friends and neighbors? Louisa and other North Platte residents puzzled over Buffalo Bill’s sudden abandonment of their town in 1901. He had seemed so affable and happy at the Christmas dinner that year. Then he boarded the train and never returned.

In fact, in 1901 he had turned the ranch over to Louisa. That Christmas, he was again in need of cash. He returned home to ask Louisa for a mortgage or for a signature so he could sell some of their land in Wisconsin. She refused. He left angry.

“When you left the home at North Platte the last time did you not leave on friendly and agreeable relations with Mrs. Cody and her friends?” asked Louisa’s attorney.

“No,” he said, “she knew that I was displeased at being turned down at the ranch.” But he would not allow himself to show it: “I used the same tactics as I always have done through life to try and conceal any words or troubles by putting on a smiling face outwardly while my heart might be aching inside. This I have to do in my business as a showman. No matter how bad the business is, we have learned that our capital and stock is a smiling countenance and a buoyant spirit.”⁹⁸

Now, his case lost, he headed back to Paris to catch up with the Wild West show. The public backlash against his divorce petition was harsh. The Masonic lodge in North Platte threatened to have a trial to expel him. Cody, a thirty-third-degree Mason who had been a member since 1869, was mortified. Fortunately, the lodge elected not to hold the trial. But Cody did not return to North Platte for years.⁹⁹

The press lampooned him, and criticism was widespread. In North Platte, the Reverend John Gray hailed the judge’s decision from the pulpit of the Episcopal church, where the Cody family had long ago donated two stained-glass windows in honor of their deceased children Kit and Orra:

The careless, licentious and sensual attitude of too many persons in many of our communities has been held up to execration and shame. The pulpit sends back a resounding “Amen” to the judgment of the “righteous judge.” It pledges itself anew to teach the rising generation on these boundless plains cleanness of heart and hand the sanctity of the irrevocable holy and indissoluble relation of the marital covenant.¹⁰⁰

At least one eastern pastor wrote a note of thanks to Judge Scott. “If there were more men of your stamp to preside at divorce suits there would be less scandalous decisions.”¹⁰¹

The hero of the “Settler’s Cabin” was an outcast.