NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS
AHC American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming
BBDC Buffalo Bill and Dr. Carver Wild West, Rocky Mountain, and Prairie Exhibition Program 1883 (Hartford, Connecticut: Calhoun Printing)
BBHC McCracken Library, Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming
BBM Buffalo Bill Museum, Golden, Colorado
BBWW Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
CC Cody v. Cody, Civil Case 970, Sheridan County District Court, Wyoming State Archives, Cheyenne, Wyoming
CHS Colorado Historical Society
DPL Denver Public Library, Denver, Colorado
DPL-WHR Denver Public Library, Western History Room, Denver, Colorado
GAPR General Administrative Project of the Bureau of Reclamation, NARA-RMR, Denver, Colorado
JCG Julia Cody Goodman
JCGM Julia Cody Goodman memoirs
KSHS Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka, Kansas
NARA National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.
NARA-CPR National Archives and Records Administration, Central Plains Region, Kansas City, Missouri
NARA-RMR National Archives and Records Administration, Rocky Mountain Region, Denver, Colorado
NSHS Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln, Nebraska
NSP Nate Salsbury Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature (YCAL), Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
NSS Nate Salsbury Scrapbooks, W. F. Cody Collection, Western History Collection, Denver Public Library, Denver, Colorado
WFC William F. Cody
WFC testimony William F. Cody’s testimony in Cody v. Cody, Civil Case File 970, Folder 2, Wyoming State Archives, Cheyenne, Wyoming
WSA Wyoming State Archives, Cheyenne, Wyoming
YCAL Yale Collection of American Literature, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
INTRODUCTION
1. Richard J. Walsh and Milton S. Salsbury, The Making of Bu falo Bill: A Study in Heroics (1928; rprt. Kissimmee, FL: International Cody Family Association, 1978), 352.
2. E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1904–1962, ed. George J. Firmage (New York: Liveright, 1991), 90.
3. Don Russell, The Lives and Legends of Bu falo Bill (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960). The primary debunkers were Richard J. Walsh and Milton S. Salsbury, The Making of Bu falo Bill; and Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), 103–11.
4. Other biographies, or biographical treatments: Rupert Croft-Cooke and W. S. Meadmore, Bu falo Bill: The Legend, the Man of Action, the Showman (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1952); Henry Blackman Sell and Victor Weybright, Bu falo Bill and the Wild West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955); Nellie Snyder Yost, Bu falo Bill: His Family, Fame, Fortunes, Failures, and Friends (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1979); Joseph G. Rosa and Robin May, Bu falo Bill and His Wild West: A Pictorial Biography (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989), while not comprehensive, offer some useful correctives.
5. Correcting the excesses and dishonesties of myth is a major project of the New Western History, but of earlier scholars, too. Any list of the most helpful recent works would include: William Cronon, Jay Gitlin, George Miles, eds., Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (New York: Norton, 1992); Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1985); Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner, and Charles E. Rankin, eds., Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991); Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1991); Don Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford, 1982). Predecessors who blazed this trail are also numerous, but include among the most prominent Howard Roberts Lamar, Dakota Territory, 1861–1889: A Study of Frontier Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), and Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West in Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950).
6. Among the most prominent: Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 52–108; Peter H. Hassrick, Richard Slotkin, Vine Deloria, Jr., Howard R. Lamar, William Judson, and Leslie A. Fiedler, Bu falo Bill and the Wild West (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 1984); Joy S. Kasson, Bu falo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000); Paul Reddin, Wild West Shows (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Richard Slotkin, GunfighterNation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 63–87; Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Richard White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,” in The Frontier in American Culture, ed. James Grossman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 7–65.
7. For example, see William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78 (March 1992): 1347–79; Alan S. Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995); David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Ann Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-CenturyAmerica (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
8. The “progress of civilization” was a common refrain after the Civil War, evoking the triumph of modern, white America—with all its agrarianism, industrialism, literacy, law, Christianity, democracy, capitalism, and the family home—over the dark forces of barbarism and savagery. See Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 23–44; Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 57–60; Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The American Spirit: A Study of the Idea of Civilization in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1942), 62–97.
9. L. G. Moses, Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 1883–1933 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996).
10. See, for example, John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone (New York: Henry Holt, 1994); Taylor, William Cooper’s Town; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990).
CHAPTER ONE : PONY EXPRESS
1. BBWW 1893 Program (Chicago: Blakely Printing, 1893), 2.
2. The Free Press [Ontario, CA], Sept. 2, 1885, in Nate Salsbury Scrapbook (hereafter NSS), vol. 1, 1885–86, W. F. Cody Collection, WH 72, Western History Collection, DPL.
3. BBWW 1893 Program, 7.
4. William F. Cody, The Life of the Hon. William F. Cody Known as Bu falo Bill the Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide (1879; rprt. New York: Indian Head Books, 1991), 57–124. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 91.
5. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 91–92.
6. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 93–102.
7. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 104.
8. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 108.
9. “Buffalo Bill,” New York Herald, July 21, 1879, 2.
10. The best discussion of the Pony Express in history and legend is Christopher Corbett, Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express (New York: Broadway Books, 2003). Other literature on the subject is vast, but much of it is antiquarian. The first history of the Pony Express was Frank A. Root and William Elsey Connelley, The Overland Stage to California (1901; rprt. Columbus, OH: Long’s College Book Co., 1950); followed soon after by William Lightfoot Visscher, A Thrilling and Truthful History of the Pony Express, or Blazing the Westward Way (1908; rprt. Chicago: Charles T. Powner, 1946), and Glenn D. Bradley, The Story of the Pony Express (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1913), reprinted in The Story of the Pony Express, ed. Waddell F. Smith, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Hesperia House, 1960), 27–146. See also Le Roy R. Hafen, The Overland Mail, 1849–1869: Promoter of Settlement, Precursor of Railroads (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1926); Arthur Chapman, The Pony Express: The Record of a Romantic Adventure in Business (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1932); J. V. Frederick, Ben Holladay: The Stagecoach King (1940; rprt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989); Roy S. Bloss, Pony Express—The Great Gamble (Berkeley, CA: Howell-North, 1959); Robert West Howard, Roy E. Coy, Frank C. Robertson, and Agnes Wright Spring, Hoofbeats of Destiny: The Story of the Pony Express (New York: Signet Books, 1960); Raymond W. Settle and Mary Lund Settle, Saddles and Spurs: The Pony Express Saga (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1955); M. C. Nathan and W. S. Boggs, The Pony Express (New York: The Collector’s Club, 1962); Fred Reinfeld, Pony Express (1966; rprt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973); W. Turrentine Jackson, “A New Look at Wells Fargo, Stagecoaches, and the Pony Express,” California Historical Society Quarterly (Dec. 1966): 291–324; Carl H. Scheele, A Short History of the Mail Service (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1970), esp. 83–86.
11. Visscher, Thrilling and Truthful History; Corbett, Orphans Preferred, 173–99. For an example of the passage of Cody’s pony tales from show to history, see Bradley, Story of the Pony Express, 127. Bradley lifted his discussion of Cody’s exploits almost verbatim from Root and Connelley, Overland Stage to California, 129–30. Root and Connelley, in turn, lifted their account almost entirely from Cody himself. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 97, 103–7.
12. The closest, most critical analysis is John S. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction in the Kansas Boyhood of Buffalo Bill,” Kansas History 8 (Spring 1985): 2–20, esp. 17–19. For contemporary critics, see Luther North, Man of the Plains: Recollections of Luther North, 1856–1882, ed. Donald F. Danker (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 23; Herbert Cody Blake, Blake’s Western Stories: History and Busted Romances of the Old Frontier(Brooklyn, NY: Herbert Cody Blake, 1929).
13. Russell, Lives and Legends, 44–54; Sandra K. Sagala, Bu falo Bill, Actor: A Chronicle of Cody’s Theatrical Career (Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 2002), 19–21, 110.
14. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill; Don Russell, ed., “Julia Cody Goodman’s Memoirs of Buffalo Bill,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 28, no. 4 (Winter 1962) (hereafter JCGM): 442–96.
15. Russell, Lives and Legends, 272–73. Don Russell and Albert Johannsen make a compelling case that Cody authored several dime novels. See Russell, Lives and Legends, 265–73; Albert Johannsen, The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels: The Story of a Vanished Literature, 3 vols. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), 2:59–61. I am not persuaded by the evidence for Cody’s authorship of dime novels. Unlike the 1879 autobiography, the Buffalo Bill dime novels I have been able to examine are characterized by flowery, ornate prose nothing like Cody’s letters. Johannsen reproduces a Cody letter in which the showman mentions having contributed to the dime novels of a prominent publisher. I suspect Cody was either joking, or referring to the fact that his persona helped boost sales, or both.
16. JCGM, 448; Russell, Lives and Legends, 4–10.
17. Russell, Lives and Legends, 7.
18. JCGM, 453; Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 21.
19. JCGM, 457, 461; A. T. Andreas and W. G. Cutler, History of the State of Kansas (1883; rprt. Atchison, KS: Atchison Historical Society, 1976), 505, 508.
20. Settlement figures are from Stephen A. Flanders, Atlas of American Migration (New York: Facts on File, 1998), 94.
21. D. Jerome Tweton, “Claim Association,” in New Encyclopedia of the American West, ed. Howard R. Lamar (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 219; Everett Dick, The Sod-House Frontier, 1854–1890 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1937), 21–29; Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own,” 141; Allan G. Bogue, “The Iowa Claim Clubs: Symbol and Substance,” in The Public Lands: Studies in the History of the Public Domain, ed. Vernon Carstensen (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963), 47–69.
22. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 4; Louise Barry, The Beginning of the West: Annals of the Kansas Gateway to the American West, 1540–1854 (Topeka: Kansas State Historical Society, 1972), 1266.
23. JCGM, 458; Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 38; the Fourth of July meeting was announced as a territorial convention. See Martha B. Caldwell, ed., “Records of the Squatter Association of Whitehead District, Doniphan County,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 13 (Feb. 1944): 23, n. 33.
24. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 4–5. For Indians in the Civil War, Jay Monaghan, Civil War on the Western Border, 1854–1865 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1955), 209–27; also Ari Kelman, “Deadly Currents: John Ross’s Decision of 1861 Sheds Light on Race and Sovereignty in the Cherokee Nation,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 62 (Spring 1995): 80–103.
25. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 5; JCGM, 459; Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 42.
26. The Democratic Platform [Liberty, Missouri], Sept. 28, 1854, quoted in Russell, Lives and Legends, 14.
27. JCGM, 459–60; Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 41–42.
28. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 43.
29. JCGM, 460; Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 42.
30. Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004); Thomas Goodrich, War to the Knife: Bleeding Kansas, 1854–1861 (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1998).
31. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 43.
32. JCGM, 460.
33. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 48.
34. JCGM, 471.
35. Thomas Goodrich, Black Flag: Guerrilla Warfare on the Western Border, 1861–65 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 1–5; Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas, 109–112.
36. JCGM, 443; for Topeka legislature, and Grasshopper Falls, see Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas, 50–88, 150.
37. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 47.
38. JCGM, 465–66.
39. JCGM, 465.
40. JCGM, 471.
41. JCGM, 471.
42. JCGM, 475.
43. JCGM, 475.
44. The estimate is from Home E. Socolofsky, “Kansas,” in The New Encyclopedia of the AmericanWest, ed. Howard R. Lamar (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 585. Charles Dunn led an attack on free state voters at Leavenworth in 1855. The Kickapoo Rangers attacked Grasshopper Falls in 1856. Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas, 75, 134.
45. JCGM, 475.
46. Daniel C. Fitzgerald, Faded Dreams: More Ghost Towns of Kansas (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), xi.
47. Maria E. Montoya, “Santa Fe and Chihuahua Trail,” in Lamar, Encyclopedia of the AmericanWest, 1021–22; Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 8.
48. Merrill J. Mattes, The Great Platte River Road (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969), 23.
49. Mattes, Great Platte River Road, 23.
50. JCGM, 455.
51. West, Contested Plains, 145.
52. West, Contested Plains, 216.
53. West, Contested Plains, 211–12.
54. West, Contested Plains, 211–12. The use of this new route did not last long, as the partners acquired a mail contract which required them to deliver along the older government route to the north, along the Platte River, connecting to Denver with a cutoff along the South Platte River.
55. Horace Greeley, An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859, quoted in Corbett, Orphans Preferred, 16–17.
56. Mary Cody sued William Russell and several associates in 1860, claiming that after Isaac died they had taken property which belonged to him. See Rosa and May, Bu falo Bill and His Wild West, 10.
57. West, Contested Plains, 215–25.
58. JCGM, 476.
59. John Willis to WFC, Oct. 4, 1897, in Stella Foote, Letters from “Bu falo Bill,” (Billings, MT: Foote Publishing Co., 1954), 46; Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 12.
60. Elliott West, Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 87–91.
61. Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict, 1850–1859 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960), 109–10.
62. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 13; Otis G. Hammond, ed., The Utah Expedition, 1857–58: Letters of Capt. Jesse A. Gove, 10th Inf., U.S.A., of Concord, N.H., to Mrs Gove, and Special Correspondence of the New York Herald (Concord: New Hampshire Historical Society, 1928), 12:28, 70. Leroy and Ann Hafen, eds., “Diary of Captain John W. Phelps,” in The Utah Expedition: A Documentary Account (Arthur H. Clark, 1958), 8:90–102, 149, esp. 102; “Morehead’s Narrative” (with details about the Indian raid) is in William Elsey Connelley, War with Mexico: Doniphan’s Expedition and the Conquest of New Mexico and California (Topeka, KS: By the author, 1907), 604–5.
63. WFC to Julia Cody Goodman, June 9, 1911, in Stella A. Foote, Letters from Bu falo Bill, 72.
64. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 15–17. Crossing the South Platte in Aug. 1857, Captain Jesse Gove remarked, “The water was not over three feet deep in the current.” Hammond, Utah Expedition, 42.
65. Cody recalls being hired by George Chrisman, who was merely a station tender and had no authority to hire anybody. He later says he rode on “Bill Trotter’s division” of the line. But Trotter became division agent for the firm later on. In 1859, he was actually bound for Denver as a teamster. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 104; Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 17; “William Trotter,” Progressive Men of Montana (Chicago: A. W. Bowen and Co., 1901), 933.
66. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 19; Joseph G. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill: The Life and Adventures of James Butler Hickok, 2nd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974), 43.
67. JCGM, 488.
68. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 19.
69. Mark Pinney, “Charles Becker: Pony Express Rider and Oregon Pioneer,” Oregon HistoricalQuarterly 67, no. 3 (Sept. 1966): 213–56, esp. 228.
70. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 17–19; Alexander Majors, Seventy Years on the Frontier (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1893), 243, also 182–93; Russell, Lives and Legends of Bu falo Bill, 47–48; Corbett, Orphans Preferred, 154–55.
71. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 16; Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 89; Valentine Devinny, The Story of a Pioneer (Denver: Reed Publishing Co., 1904), 11–12, 44–46. For a description of Pony Express riding, see Corbett, Orphans Preferred, 82.
72. Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 55–83; Will Bagley, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 307–22; see also Sally Denton, American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003); and Juanita Brooks, The Mountain Meadows Massacre, 3rd ed. (1950; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970).
73. Russell, Lives and Legends, 35–36.
74. James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 224; Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 141–48.
75. “Camp Sketches—No. IX—John Nelson,” The Topical Times, Aug. 27, 1887, in Julia Cody Goodman Scrapbook, MS 58, NSHS; Dan L. Thrapp, Encyclopedia of Frontier Biography,3 vols. (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1988), 2:1048–49.
76. John Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776– 1900 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1976), 53–136.
77. Quoted in Corbett, Orphans Preferred, 121.
78. Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 32.
79. W. Turrentine Jackson, Wagon Roads West: A Study of Federal Road Surveys and Constructionin the Trans-Mississippi West, 1846–1869 (1952; rprt. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), 161–62, 164.
80. Donald C. Biggs, The Pony Express: Creation of the Legend (San Francisco: privately printed, 1956), 16–17, quote from 17.
81. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 30.
82. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 30.
83. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 30–37.
84. For the circus in California and the Pacific, see John Culhane, The American Circus: An Illustrated History (New York: Henry Holt, 1990), 80–81. For horses: Hubert Howe Bancroft, California Pastoral (San Francisco: The History Company, 1888), 336; Dan Flores, Horizontal Yellow: Nature and History in the Near Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 81–124.
85. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 33.
86. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 37.
87. William Webb, Bu falo Land (Cincinnati and Chicago: E. Hannaford and Co., 1873), 149.
88. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 135.
89. Ned Buntline [E. Z. C. Judson], Bu falo Bill: The King of Border Men (1869; rprt. William Roba, Davenport, IA: Service Press, 1987).
90. Sagala, Bu falo Bill, Actor, 110.
91. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 46.
CHAPTER TWO : THE ATTACK ON THE SETTLER’S CABIN
1. See chapter 9.
2. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 139.
3. Thomas Goodrich, Black Flag: Guerrilla Warfare on the Western Border, 1861–65 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 6–7.
4. Goodrich, Black Flag, 16, 24.
5. John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 86; David P. Handlin, The American Home: Architecture and Society, 1815–1915 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1979), 4; David B. Danbom, The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900–1930 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1979), 9: “Economic exigencies and the American practice of individual land settlement conspired to make the family the preeminent social, economic, and educational institution of rural society.”
6. Goodrich, Black Flag, frontispiece.
7. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 126, 135.
8. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 135.
9. JCGM, 488–89.
10. Quoted in Thomas Goodrich, Black Flag, 67–70. Mendenhall was recording events from May 1861. In his autobiography, Cody claimed to have joined them in the winter of 1862, but since most of the Red Leg forays occurred in the summer of 1862, he likely has confused dates and seasons, as he frequently did in his autobiography. Julia Cody recalls that her brother “stayed out all summer” with the Red Legs. JCGM, 488–89.
11. Goodrich, Black Flag, 69.
12. Goodrich, Black Flag, 69.
13. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 144–45.
14. Thomas Ewing, commander of the Eleventh Kansas Volunteers, singled out the Red Legs as especially virulent examples of certain Kansans who were “stealing themselves rich in the name of liberty,” and “giving respectability to robbery when committed on any whom they declare disloyal.” Ewing threatened to meet them “with a rough hand.” General James Blunt, the Union officer in charge of Kansas in 1863, ordered the Ninth Kansas Volunteers into western Missouri, with the stated purpose of fighting the Red Legs as well as the bushwhackers. (Captain Tough, whom Cody claimed as his commander, had close ties to Blunt.) Albert Castel, A Frontier State at War: Kansas, 1861–1865 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958), 111–13, 137, 214–15.
15. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 19–21; Faragher, Sugar Creek, 96–99, 199–204, argues that the market penetration of western farming prior to 1850 was slow and uneven.
16. JCGM, 479.
17. JCGM, 490.
18. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 125–27.
19. The affidavits are in Box 1, Folder 18, William F. Cody Collection, MS 6 Series I:A., BBHC.
20. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 127.
21. Goodrich, Black Flag and War to the Knife: Bleeding Kansas, 1854–1861 (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1998); Stephen Z. Starr, Jennison’s Jayhawkers: A Civil War Cavalry Regiment and Its Commander (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 96–118; T. J. Stiles, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).
22. JCGM, 489.
23. Goodrich, Black Flag, 114.
24. Quoted in Joseph G. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill: The Life and Adventures of James Butler Hickok, 2nd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974), 26.
25. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 135.
26. Ibid.
27. See the copies of muster rolls in Box 1/17, William Cody Collection, MS 6, Series I:A, BBHC; also Starr, Jennison’s Jayhawkers, 356.
28. Charlie Cody’s death in JCGM, 491; quote from Goodrich, Black Flag, 160.
29. George Miller, quoted in Goodrich, Black Flag, 160.
30. Samuel McKee, quoted in Goodrich, Black Flag, 162.
CHAPTER THREE : THE VILLAGE... THE CYCLONE
1. Scene announcement is in BBWW 1886 programs, M Cody Programs, Folder 2, DPL; quote from “Buffalo Bill in Drama,” New York Times, Nov. 25, 1886, p. 5.
2. Quote from BBWW 1893 program, p. 4.
3. Lew Parker, Odd People I Have Met, (n.p., n.d.), 37–39.
4. Percy MacKaye, Epoch: The Life of Steele Mackaye, 2 vols. (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927), 2:78–79.
5. Parker, Odd People I Have Met, 39; BBWW 1887 program, M Cody Programs, Folder 2, DPL.
6. BBWW 1907 Program (Buffalo, NY: Courier, 1907).
7. “Prosperous Kansas,” New York Times, Nov. 13, 1869, p. 4.
8. John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 120–23, 241–45; William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1996); Gunther Barth, Instant Cities: Urbanization and the Rise of San Francisco and Denver (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). For Iowa towns see John W. Reps, Cities of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century Images of Urban Development (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994), 238–53.
9. Albert D. Richardson, Beyond the Mississippi (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Co., 1867), 57–60.
10. JCGM, 461.
11. John Hoyt Williams, A Great and Shining Road: The Epic Story of the Transcontinental Railroad(New York: Times Books, 1988), 69–70.
12. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 141–42.
13. Louisa Frederici Cody and Courtney Riley Cooper, Memories of Bu falo Bill, by His Wife (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1919), 1–28; William Cody’s memory of his mother-in-law is in his divorce testimony, WFC testimony, March 23, 1904, 2, Folder 2, Cody v. Cody, Civil Case 970, Sheridan County District Court, Wyoming State Archives, Cheyenne, WY; hereafter WFC testimony.
14. See WFC testimony; also, Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 144.
15. I infer her desire for a husband in business from the implications of Cody’s divorce testimony, and from Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 144: “Having promised my wife that I would abandon the plains, I rented a hotel in the Salt Creek Valley. . . .”
16. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 145; WFC testimony, 2.
17. Russell, Lives and Legends, 78; Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 145.
18. WFC testimony, 4.
19. Russell, Lives and Legends, 77–78, 84; Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 145.
20. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 127.
21. “Prosperous Kansas,” New York Times, Nov. 13, 1869, p. 4.
22. John H. Putnam, “A Trip to the End of the Union Pacific in 1868,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 13, no. 3 (Aug. 1944): 196–203, at 198.
23. WFC testimony, 3.
24. Hauling goods and dugout is in Russell, Lives and Legends, 78; liquor is in Joseph G. Rosa and Robin May, Bu falo Bill and His Wild West: A Pictorial Biography (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989), 16.
25. Rosa and May, Bu falo Bill and His Wild West, 17–18.
26. The English traveler likely met Buffalo Bill Cramer, a local settler. Russell, Lives and Legends,90–91.
27. Rosa and May, Bu falo Bill and His Wild West, 12; Russell, Lives and Legends, 84–85; Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 149–50.
28. For Cody choosing name, see WFC testimony.
29. Samuel Bowles, Our New West (Hartford, CT: Hartford Publishing Co., 1869), 50.
30. “In the East, the railroads are built for the towns; on the border they build the towns.” Richardson, Beyond the Mississippi, 571.
31. Quiett, They Built the West, 85.
32. William A. Bell, New Tracks in North America (New York: Scribner, Welford & Co., 1870), 18.
33. Quiett, They Built the West, 82–91.
34. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 150, says two hundred homes, but his divorce testimony of many years later gives the more credible figure of thirty houses. WFC testimony, 4.
35. WFC testimony, 5.
36. WFC testimony, 5. See also the quote from the Hays City Sentinel, Jan. 16, 1877, which states that Cody was a local buffalo hunter throughout 1867–68, in Rosa and May, Bu falo Bill and His Wild West, 17–18. Cody’s biographers have followed Don Russell’s lead in making Cody a hunter for the Kansas Pacific only after the failure of his town-building scheme. Russell argued that Cody said eighteen months when he meant eight. He and others have been loath to accept Cody’s claims to have been employed as a market hunter in 1867, since the need to deliver twelve buffalo a day would pretty much eliminate any chance that Cody could have been a scout and guide for the army that year. Russell, Lives and Legends, 88–89; Rosa and May, Bu falo Bill and His Wild West, 17–18. But there can be no doubt Cody hunted buffalo for Goddard Brothers while he promoted the town of Rome. Cody himself recalled that town building and buffalo hunting were contemporaneous, both in his divorce testimony of 1904 and in his autobiography, where he lets slip that he hunted for Goddard Brothers for eighteen months before the railroad ceased construction in May 1868. Cody repeated the eighteen months figure to journalists, too. See Edward Aveling, An American Journey (New York: John W. Lovell, 1887), 152. This would mean that he had to be working for Goddard Brothers for all of 1867. How could he have scouted for the army in the same year? The solution to the puzzle is simple: he didn’t. The dubious claims of his autobiography aside, there is no evidence that he worked for the military in Kansas until late in 1868.
37. All Cody quotes that follow regarding the town of Rome are in WFC testimony, 4–6.
38. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 152; WFC testimony.
39. Daniel C. Fitzgerald, Faded Dreams: More Ghost Towns of Kansas (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), 49–51. Fitzgerald also mentions Arvonia (p. 69) and Kickapoo City (pp. 7–8).
40. BBWW 1886 program.
41. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Frontier in American History (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1920); see also Ann Fabian, “History for the Masses: Commercializing the Western Past,” in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, ed. William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin (New York: Norton, 1992), 223; White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill.”
42. MacKaye, Epoch, 2:74, 77.
43. Daniel Justin Herman, Hunting and the American Imagination (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 41–43; Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Je fersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 19–20.
44. Quoted in Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 219.
45. For a sample of settler enthusiasm for wildlife shooting, see Rolf Johnson, Happy as a Big Sunflower: Adventures in the West, 1876–1880, ed. Richard E. Jensen (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).
46. Alan Taylor, “ ‘Wasty Ways’: Stories of American Settlement,” Environmental History 3, no. 3 (1998): 291–310.
47. William Webb, Bu falo Land, (Cincinnati and Chicago: E. Hannaford and Co., 1873), 194; see also Theodore R. Davis, “The Buffalo Range,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 38, no. 224 (Jan. 1869): 147–63.
48. Rosa and May, Bu falo Bill and His Wild West, 17–18.
49. Russell, Lives and Legends, 89.
50. David A. Dary, The Bu falo Book (1974; rprt. New York: Avon, 1975), 74, 77; Dan Flores, The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), 50–69.
51. Dary, Bu falo Book, 74.
52. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 161.
53. Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 133. For sitting down, see Stanley Vestal, Queen of Cowtowns: Dodge City (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1952), 41.
54. See, for example, Johnson, Happy as a Big Sunflower, 52–74.
55. Vestal, Queen of Cowtowns, 41–44.
56. Webb, Bu falo Land, 457–58; Dary, Bu falo Book, 99.
57. Cody, Life of Bu falo Bill, 162; Vestal, Queen of Cowtowns, 43–44. The three Clarkson brothers of Hays City killed 22,000 buffalo in brief hunting careers beginning in 1868. “The Matthew Clarkson Manuscripts,” ed. Rodney Staab, Kansas History 5, no. 4 (1982): 256–87.
58. Elliott West, “Bison R Us: Images of Bison in American Culture,” MS in author’s possession.
59. Vestal, Queen of Cowtowns; West, “Bison R Us.”
60. WFC testimony.
61. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782; rprt. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957), 42, 47.
62. Carl Ludvig Hendricks, “Recollections of a Swedish Buffalo Hunter, 1871–1873,” Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly 32, no. 3 (1981): 190–204.
63. Joseph W. Snell, ed., “Diary of a Dodge City Buffalo Hunter, 1872–1873,” Kansas HistoricalQuarterly 31, no. 4 (1965): 345–95.
64. Gary L. Roberts, “William Matthew Tilghman, Jr.” and “Earp Brothers,” both in New Encyclopedia of the American West, ed. Howard R. Lamar (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 327–29, 1114; Glenn Shirley, Guardian of the Law: The Life and Times of William Matthew Tilghman (Austin, TX: Eakin Press, 1988); Casey Tefertiller, Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend (New York: John Wiley, 1997).
65. In the 1870s, William Cody knew John Y. Nelson, Hank and Monte Clifford, Arthur Ruff, and Dick Seymour, all of whom lived with their Sioux wives in western Nebraska, where they hunted buffalo for the market. See Paul A. Hutton, “Introduction,” in Henry E. Davies, Ten Days on the Plains, ed. Paul A. Hutton (1872; Dallas, TX: DeGolyer Library, 1985), 166, n. 30.
66. See Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670–1870 (Winnipeg: Watson and Dwyer, 1981); William R. Swagerty, “Marriage and Settlement Patterns of Rocky Mountain Trappers and Traders,” Western Historical Quarterly11 (April 1980): 159–80; John Mack Faragher, “The Custom of the Country: Cross-Cultural Marriage in the Far Western Fur Trade,” in Western Women: Their Land, Their Lives, ed. Lillian Schlissel, Vicki L. Ruiz, and Janice Monk (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 199–215.
67. Dary, Bu falo Book, 88–92.
68. Washington Irving, Astoria, quoted in Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land, 177.
69. WFC testimony, 7.
70. William A. Dobak, Fort Riley and Its Neighbors: Military Money and Economic Growth, 1853–1895 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). Among Cody’s associates at Fort McPherson were Charles McDonald and Isaac S. Boyer, both of whom profited from military contracts as post traders, and both of whom would parlay these contracts into life-long careers as merchants and local politicians. McDonald would eventually become a prominent banker, on whom Cody relied for many of his Nebraska business dealings. On McDonald as banker, see Mrs. Charles Hendy, Sr., Folder 8, Civil Case 970, Cody v. Cody (hereafter CC), pp. 92–96; Yost, Bu falo Bill, 171. For Isaac Boyer, see Yost, Bu falo Bill, 6, 9, 23.
71. Rosa and May, Bu falo Bill and His Wild West, 18; J. G. Rosa, “J. B. Hickok, Deputy U.S. Marshal,” Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 2, no. 4 (Winter 1979): 239–40.
CHAPTER FOUR: WITH THE PRINCE OF PISTOLEERS
1. Ned Buntline (the pseudonym of E. Z. C. Judson), “Buffalo Bill: The King of Border Men,” appeared originally as a serial in the story paper The New York Weekly from Dec. 23, 1869, to March 3, 1870. It is reprinted as Ned Buntline, Buffalo Bill: The King of Border Men, ed. William Roba (Davenport, IA: Service Press, 1987).
2. Dexter W. Fellows and Andrew A. Freeman, This Way to the Big Show: The Life of Dexter Fellows (New York: Viking Press, 1936), 33–34.
3. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 70.
4. The story of Hickok’s escape first appeared in George Ward Nichols, “Wild Bill,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 34, no. 201 (Feb. 1867): 273–85; Cody places himself at the scene in Life of Buffalo Bill, 139–40.
5. BBWW 1895 program, p. 16, in Cody Collection, WH 72, Box 2, Folder 27, DPL-WHR.
6. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 17, 34–52.
7. JCGM, 484.
8. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 34–52, 90–93, 103–206, 351–52.
9. Nichols, “Wild Bill,” 274.
10. Nichols, “Wild Bill,” 279, 285.
11. Nichols, “Wild Bill.” The story was published in its entirety in Joseph G. Rosa, Wild Bill Hickok: The Man and His Myth (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), 215–40.
12. Joseph G. Rosa, The West of Wild Bill Hickok (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982), 87–89.
13. See Ena Raymonde Ballantine Journal, entry for March 6, 1873, MS 1730, Nebraska State Historical Society (hereafter NSHS), Lincoln, Nebraska.
14. John H. Putnam, “A Trip to the End of the Union Pacific in 1868,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 13, no. 3 (Aug. 1944): 196–203, at 199.
15. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 82–83, 106.
16. Quoted in Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 83.
17. Nichols, “Wild Bill,” 285.
18. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 205.
19. Rosa, West of Wild Bill Hickok, 77; also Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 107. Stanley’s 1867 account is reproduced in Henry M. Stanley, My Early Travels and Adventures in America and Asia (1895; rprt. London: Duckworth, 2001), 29–32, 118.
20. William Elsey Connelley, Wild Bill and His Era: The Life and Adventures of James Butler Hickok (New York: Press of the Pioneers, 1933), 18.
21. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 84.
22. Joseph G. McCoy, Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest (1874; rprt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 203–4.
23. I follow the lead of Hillel Schwartz, who distinguishes “between imposture, the compulsive assumption of invented lives, and impersonation, the concerted assumption of another’s public identity.” Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 72.
24. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 120, also 224–25.
25. James F. Meline, Two Thousand Miles on Horseback. Santa Fe and Back (1867; rprt. Albuquerque, NM: Horn and Wallace, 1966), 17; also Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 92.
26. Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1972), 77–89; Andie Tucher, Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 57; James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 73–81.
27. Cook, Arts of Deception, 30–72, 163–255.
28. Cook, Arts of Deception, 73–118; Harris, Humbug, 213.
29. Tucher, Froth and Scum, 57.
30. Harris, Humbug, 21–25, 62–67, 77, 167.
31. See Henry Morton Stanley, My Early Travels and Adventures in America and Asia (1895; rprt. London: Duckworth, 2001), 114, 183–86; Robert Dykstra, The Cattle Towns (New York: Atheneum, 1976), 112–15.
32. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); West, Contested Plains.
33. Tall tales were a kind of game for the entertainment of an audience as Carolyn S. Brown explains them. As fictions narrated in the first person, they pretend to be true. At first, the audience believes the ruse, or pretends to, and the narrator designs and manipulates the story’s elements to heighten this perception, often by mingling realistic detail and experience with the story’s deceptions. Audience members who perceive the fictions— and this might be everyone in the room—often play along, acting as if they believe the narrator is truthful. As the story continues, it begins to challenge the listener with “comic outlandishness,” until the punch line or resolution, in which the storyteller makes his deception more or less obvious, undermining his own credibility and allowing the audience to laugh. Carolyn S. Brown, The Tall Tale in American Folklore and Literature (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), 58–59.
34. See James H. Wilkins, ed., The Great Diamond Hoax and Other Stirring Incidents in the Life of Asbury Harpending (1915; rprt. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958).
35. In southern Illinois during the era of Hickok’s boyhood, the legendary tall-tale narrator Abe Smith attracted hundreds of local people to his town on a given weekend, just waiting to hear his stories. Brown, Tall Tale, 37.
36. Brown, Tall Tale, 10–11, 32.
37. Brown, Tall Tale, 10.
38. Stanley Vestal [Thomas Campbell], Joe Meek: The Merry Mountain Man (1952; rprt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), 292–93.
39. John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 16.
40. The term is ubiquitous in gold rush accounts, but see William H. Goetzmann and William N. Goetzmann, The West of the Imagination (New York: Norton, 1986), 131.
41. “Donner Party,” in The New Encyclopedia of the American West, ed. Howard R. Lamar (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 316–17; also C. F. McGlashan, History of the Donner Party: A Tragedy of the Sierra, 2nd ed. (1880; rprt. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1947).
42. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 18.
43. The census of 1880 enumerates 996,096 Kansas settlers. James R. Shortridge, Peopling the Plains: Who Settled Where in Frontier Kansas (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 15, 72.
44. Fred A. Shannon, The Farmer’s Last Frontier: Agriculture, 1860–1897 (1945; rprt. New York:, 1966), 74–75; David Emmons, The Garden in the Grassland: Boomer Literature of the Central Great Plains (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), 25–46, 99–127; Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, The American West: A New Interpretive History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 335–36; White, “ It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own,” 43–45.
45. My use of Artifice vs. Nature and their relation to authenticity is inspired by Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 114–24. For further discussion of authenticity, see chapter 6.
46. “Every single one of Barnum’s living curiosities was a liminal figure of some sort, a caricatured disruption of the normative boundaries between black and white (albino Negroes), male and female (bearded ladies), young and old (General Tom Thumb), man and animal (dog-faced boys), one self or two (Siamese twins).” Cook, Arts of Deception, 121.
47. In London, in 1846, Barnum presented the “Wild Man of the Prairies,” an exhibit in which Hervey Leech, a black man from New Jersey, dressed up in a hairy costume, with Barnum claiming that he had been discovered living among Indians in “the wilds of California.” Cook, Arts of Deception, 133. The showman partnered with the West’s own menagerie man, Grizzly Adams, in 1860, as if to reprise some of the themes of his wild man exhibit. Playing on the West as a space for sexual revolution, he invited Brigham Young to become an exhibit in his museum in 1868. Harris, Humbug, 195.
48. Indeed, perhaps no Hickok attribute was so pronounced, or so practiced, as his marksmanship. Guns had become such a vital symbol of the frontier that mastery of them was central to any white man’s frontier imposture. Guns were mass-produced technological wonders. Central features of the age of mechanical revolution, firearms went from cumbersome, hand-crafted, single-shot instruments to lightweight, mass-produced repeaters during Hickok’s lifetime. Their hammers, triggers, chambers, pins, cogs, wheels, and other increasingly standardized parts were emblematic of the “American system” of manufactures, of which they were at the same time products, being made from machined parts, and cogent symbols, “producing” lead slugs—and death—through machinery of their own. The nineteenth century was an age of complex machines, marvels of engineering like the locomotive, the electrical generator, the sewing machine, and an astonishing array of mechanical reapers. Modern guns were at least as intricate as many other machines, but they were more portable, and they were affordable, too. The industrial and technological wizardry which both explained and rationalized the triumph of Anglo-Saxon America could be held in one hand. The frontiersman’s mastery of the gun not only empowered him to battle evil. It made him the bearer of civilization, the harbinger of progress. A natural man with a modern weapon, he symbolized America itself.
49. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 339–40. Most of these tales were probably apocryphal, but Hickok and other railside showmen practiced shooting obsessively in the late 1860s and ’70s, to provide a vital element of machine authenticity to their frontier pose. As the railroads extended west, they enhanced the value of marksmanship and frontier imposture as a commodity in more remote locations. By the early 1870s, settlers in North Platte, Nebraska, could witness dozens of shooting competitions every week. See the Ena Raymonde Ballantine Journal, MS 1730, NSHS, especially entries for June 7 and July 26. My thanks to Elliott West for calling the Ballantine papers to my attention.
50. According to Luther North, Frank North and Hickok “used to meet about twice a week and shoot at targets at John Talbot’s roadhouse between Cheyenne and Fort Russell and Talbot would shoot with them.” North claims that his brother Frank would usually come in first, Talbot second, and Hickok third. Luther North, Man of the Plains: Recollections of Luther North, 1856–1882, ed. Donald F. Danker (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 150–51.
51. In 1863, P. T. Barnum’s American Museum—which included a lecture hall and performance space—featured a woman spy, identified only as Miss Cushman, a “prettily dressed” speaker who lectured briefly on her duties and then performed a series of quick changes “to show the power of military disguise.” Quote from Harris, Humbug, 168. Original source is George D. C. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 14 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927–1945), 7:57. Cushman was probably Pauline Cushman, who claimed to have been a spy. See Reneé M. Sentilles, Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity (New York: Cambridge, 2003), 169, n. 12.
52. E. C. Downs, Four Years a Scout and Spy (Zanesville, OH: Hugh Dunne, 1866), 12, emphasis in original. For other examples of scouts in disguise, see Edward W. Eckert and J. Amato Nicholas, “ ‘A Long and Perilous Ride’: The Memoirs of William W. Averell,” part 1, Civil War Times Illustrated 16, no. 6 (1977): 22–30. For disguise in the border wars, see Nicholas P. Hardeman, “The Bloody Battle That Almost Happened: William Clarke Quantrill and Peter Hardeman on the Western Border,” Civil War History 23, no. 3: (1977): 251–58.
53. See Milo Milton Quaife, ed., Kit Carson’s Autobiography (1926: rprt., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 152.
54. Quaife, Kit Carson’s Autobiography, 135.
55. DeBenneville Randolph Keim, Sheridan’s Troopers on the Borders: A Winter Campaign on the Plains (1870; rprt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 38.
56. Also see chapter 7.
57. Dan L. Thrapp, Encyclopedia of Frontier Biography, 3 vols. (Glendale: Arthur H. Clark, 1988), I: 281, 297, 385, 403; II: 880; III: 1105; Nat Love, The Life and Adventures of Nat Love: Better Known in the Cattle Country as Deadwood Dick (Los Angeles: A. P., 1907). By this time western imposture had become a semilegitimate art form. Cody, Hickok, and others had performed it on eastern stages. In the Black Hills, audiences bought tickets to see it performed in local theaters. In 1879, one traveler recorded meeting “a typical western boy” of “about 16” who looked the quintessential westerner in his “broad brimmed hat and blue woolen shirt.” His demeanor was authentic, too, since he “chewed tobacco, smoked, drank, and swore like a bullwhacker.” The boy claimed to have spent two years in the Black Hills, where he had been “a miner, muleskinner, bullwhacker, [and] cowboy song and dance boy in the theaters.” Like the men and women he was imitating, he had found a way to profit from this alleged life story, in part because its dubious claims were so entertaining. “He is sharp as a steel trap, and had not been with me more than two hours till he had told me over a hundred lies and borrowed half a dollar of me.” Johnson, Happy as a Big Sunflower, 168–69.
58. Mark Twain, Roughing It (1872; rprt. New York: New American Library, 1962); Brown, Tall Tale, 89–107.
59. William Webb, Buffalo Land (Cincinnati and Chicago: E. Hannaford and Co., 1873), 149.
60. See Webb, Buffalo Land, 147.
61. Hickok taunted his opponents, especially southerners, in letters to the press, and he killed several men in Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska. See Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 73–74, 147, 157, 248.
62. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 243–44.
63. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 245. “Wild Bill accuses Buffalo Bill of having given Ned Buntline incidents of his (Wild Bill’s) life, and claiming them as his (Buffalo Bill’s) own adventures.” Jefferson City (Missouri) People’s Tribune, Aug. 23, 1876.
64. John Burke to Jack Crawford, March 5, 1877 [1878?], M Crawford, Box 1, DPL-WHR.
65. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 156–57, 249.
66. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 107.
67. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 90–91; Cody made up the expedition in W. F. Cody, An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1920), 81–90; Robert Athearn writes of Sherman’s time in the West, and at Fort Riley, in William Tecumseh Sherman and the Settlement of the West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956), 46–47.
CHAPTER FIVE: GUIDE AND SCOUT
1. Major Armes of the Tenth Cavalry, Ups and Downs of an Army Officer (Washington, DC: By the author, 1900), 272. There is no official record of Cody scouting for the army until Sept.
2. Elbert Huber to Don Russell, Aug. 7, 1953, W. F. Cody 201 File, RG 407, NARA.
3. Russell, Lives and Legends, 104.
4. “Scout,” The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 2677.
5. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 188, 234–35, 289–91; D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923; rprt., New York: Penguin, 1977), 68–69; Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), 59–80. For a full discussion of the cultural and political implications of white Indianness in its manifold variations, see Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), esp. 11–12, 41–42.
6. Smith, Virgin Land, 81–89.
7. Slotkin, Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization (1985; rprt. New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 198–99.
8. Russell, Lives and Legends, 480.
9. Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and Clark (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 267–312; Frank R. Secoy, Changing Military Patterns on the Great Plains (Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin, 1953); Richard White, “The Winning of the West: The Expansion of the Western Sioux in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of American History 65, no. 2 (Sept. 1978): 319–43.
10. Richard N. Ellis, “Introduction,” xiv–xv, in Cheyenne Dog Soldiers: A Ledgerbook History of Coups and Combat, ed. Jean Afton, David Fridtjof Halaas, Andrew E. Masich, and Richard N. Ellis (Niwot CO: Colorado Historical Society and University Press of Colorado, 1997).
11. Eugene F. Ware, The Indian War of 1864 (1911; rprt. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1960), 114; Louis A. Holmes, Fort McPherson, Nebraska, Cottonwood, N.T.: Guardian of the Tracks and Trails (Lincoln, NE: Johnsen Publishing Co., 1963), 6.
12. Figures from Joanna L. Stratton, Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 121.
13. Secoy, Changing Military Patterns; Richard White, “Winning of the West,” 319–43; Preston Holder, The Hoe and the Horse on the Plains: A Study of Cultural Development Among North American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970); Andrew Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 31–122; Joseph Jablow, The Cheyenne in Plains Indian Trade Relations,1795–1840 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1950); West, Contested Plains.
14. Keim, Sheridan’s Troopers on the Borders, 134.
15. Custer, “On the Plains,” Turf, Field, and Farm, Jan. 4, 1868, in Nomad: George A. Custer in Turf, Field and Farm, ed. Brian W. Dippie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), 36–37.
16. BBWW program 1887 (London: Allen, Scott, and Co., 1887), 29.
17. Buffalo Bill and Doc Carver Wild West, Rocky Mountain, and Prairie Exhibition 1883 (Hartford, CT: Calhoun Printing Co., 1883), n.p.; BBWW 1893 program (Chicago: Blakely Printing Co., 1893), 6, 17.
18. After his discharge from the Union army in September 1865, he was never a soldier again. Russell, Lives and Legends, 61; see also Cody’s military records file, MS 6 W. F. Cody, Series I:A, Box 1/17, BBHC.
19. BBWW 1887 program (London: Allen, Scott & Co., 1887), 28. Russell, Lives and Legends, 326; for reprinting of the letter and the change of dates, see BBWW 1893 program, 16.
20. Russell, Lives and Legends, 160.
21. For a full discussion of Cody’s loss of the medal and its restoration in 1989, see Oliver Kennedy, Memo of Jan. 12, 1989, Old Military and Civil Records, Case File of William F. Cody, Restoration of the Congressional Medal of Honor (NWTCB-94-Casefiles-AC88[10374]), NARA, Washington, D.C. The subject of Cody’s military record and the Medal of Honor has been exhaustively discussed and documented in 201 File for William Cody, RG 407, Box 219, 370/84/27/03, NARA, Washington, DC (see esp. Lutz Wahl to Richard J. Walsh, Feb. 6, 1928).
22. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 271; WFC to “My Dear Friends in Rochester,” Aug. 9, 1872 [1874] MS 6, I:B, BBHC. The letter is dated 1872, but since Cody reports his assignment to the Big Horn Expedition of 1874, I have corrected the error in my citation. As chief of scouts for the Fifth Cavalry, a post he ascended to in 1868, Cody would have been entitled to a share of the horses and other property captured from enemy Sioux and Cheyenne. WFC testimony, March 23, 1904, p. 9.
23. Russell, Lives and Legends, 103.
24. Philip H. Sheridan, Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Webster & Company, 1888), 2:300–1.
25. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 188–97.
26. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 197; for mules in the army, see Robert Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1868–1891 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1973), 48; also Emmett M. Essin, Shave Tails and Bell Sharps: The History of the U.S. Army Mule (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1997).
27. Sheridan, Personal Memoirs, 2:301.
28. George E. Hyde, The Life of George Bent, Written from His Letters, ed. Savoie Lottinville (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 335–39; E. Adamson Hoebel, The Cheyennes: Indians of the Great Plains (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 72–73; West, Contested Plains, 198.
29. George F. Price, Across the Continent with the Fifth Cavalry (1883; rprt. New York: Antiquarian Press, 1959), 131–33.
30. Russell, Lives and Legends, 111.
31. Webb, Buffalo Land, 194.
32. George A. Custer, My Life on the Plains, or Personal Experiences with Indians (1874; rprt. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 279.
33. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 1–32.
34. Stanley, My Early Travels and Adventures, 114, 183–86.
35. Eugene A. Carr, “Memoirs of Brvt. Major General E. A. Carr,” typescript, n.d., p. 195, microfilm MS 2688, Reel 1, NSHS.
36. Utley, Frontier Regulars, 65–67.
37. Utley, Frontier Regulars, 11–14; also Robert Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin: George Armstrong Custer and the Western Military Frontier (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 103; soldiers usually had only partial uniforms—or none at all. See Utley, Frontier Regulars,77; also John F. Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac: The Big-Horn and Yellowstone Expedition(1890; rprt. Chicago: R. R. Donnelly & Sons, 1955), 249: “[A]nd as for the uniform the absence thereof is a leading characteristic of the service.”
38. Sherry Smith, The View from Officers’ Row: Army Perceptions of Western Indians (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990), 2.
39. Smith, View from Officers’ Row, 7–10; Knight, Life and Manners in the Frontier Army, 220–26; Utley, Frontier Regulars, 59–68. This alienation was traditional. Edward M. Coffman writes that up to 1860, all soldiers shared “the experience of being military men in a country which did not like soldiers and at a time when many also deplored the concept of professionalism in any field.” Edward M. Coffman, The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime, 1784–1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 103.
40. Knight, Life and Manners in the Frontier Army, 76.
41. Knight, Life and Manners in the Frontier Army, 80.
42. Smith, View from Officer’s Row, 141. The army reinstituted brevet promotions in 1890.
43. Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 103; Russell, Lives and Legends, 119–20; for jealousy, see Armes, Ups and Downs of an Army Officer, 333.
44. For cold, see Armes, Ups and Downs of an Army Officer, 208.
45. Custer, My Life on the Plains, 49.
46. Among the sternest critics of the Indian wars army were Civil War veterans, who looked down on the struggling Plains campaigns as a series of ill-fought minor skirmishes. Nate Salsbury, Cody’s managing partner for many years in the Wild West show and a Union combat veteran, reflected his comrades’ consensus when he bitterly remarked that “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.” Nate Salsbury Papers (henceforth cited as NSP), “Long Hair and a Plug Hat,” MS 17, Box 2/63, YCAL, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
47. Utley, Frontier Regulars, 114–21; and Cavalier in Buckskin, 47–49.
48. Utley, Frontier Regulars, 23. Custer’s regiment was plagued by desertion and low morale. Of the 963 enlisted men assigned to the Seventh Cavalry at Fort Riley, Kansas, in 1866, 80—nearly 10 percent—deserted in the next six months. Jeffrey D. Wert, Custer: The Controversial Life of George Armstrong Custer (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 233–36, 246–64; Evan S. Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 150–51.
49. Coffman, Old Army, 339–48. Soldiers voted with their feet. Where fewer than one soldier in ten deserted in 1871, nearly one in three deserted the following year. For six months without pay, see Robert Utley, ed., Life in Custer’s Cavalry: Diaries and Letters of Albert and Jennie Barnitz, 1867–1868 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 128.
50. Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 34–36, 62–97; Slotkin, Fatal Environment, 230–31; Smith, Virgin Land, 37–38. For contemporary references to Anglo-Saxonism see “The Loss of the Tasmanians,” New York Times, Jun. 12, 1869, p. 4; “What Anglo-Saxonism Is,” New York Times, Feb. 8, 1880, p. 7; Walt Whitman meditates on Aryan millennialism and westward expansion in his 1860 poem, “Facing West from California Shores,” in Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose, ed. John Kouwenhoven (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 92. See also Stuart Anderson, Race and Rapprochement: Anglo-Saxonism and Anglo-American Relations, 1895–1904 (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981), 1–70, esp. 39–45, 57–61. General Sherman referred to the Indian wars as “the Battle of Civilization.” G. W. Baird, A Report to the Citizens Concerning Certain Late Disturbances on the Western Frontier Involving Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Chief Joseph, and Geronimo (1891; rprt. Ashland, OR: Lewis Osborne, 1972), 21. In 1868, General Sherman could claim that his soldiers were fighting “enemies of our race and our civilization.” William T. Sherman to Philip Sheridan, Oct. 9, 1868, quoted in Utley, Frontier Regulars, 145.
51. These were the Thirty-eighth, Thirty-ninth, Fortieth, and Forty-first infantries. Utley, Frontier Regulars, 25–26; Coffman, Old Army, 331; see also William H. Leckie and Shirley A. Leckie, The Buffalo Soldiers: A Narrative of the Black Cavalry in the West, rev. ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003); Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990 (New York: Norton, 1998), 164–91, esp. 165.
52. Oliver Knight, Following the Indian Wars: The Story of the Newspaper Correspondents Among the Indian Campaigners (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960), 23.
53. Custer, in Dippie, Nomad, 34; see also Coffman, Old Army, 330, 334. For the Irish in Custer’s Seventh in 1876, see Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 168.
54. I am indebted to recent scholarship on whiteness and race for these insights and much of the discussion that follows. See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (New York: Verso, 1994); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Verso, 1990).
55. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 53–55. Germans’ ethnic political organization also was a factor in leading some anxious Americans to denounce them for taking opportunities from “white” men. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 47.
56. Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 86.
57. Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 34–61.
58. Arthur Comte de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races (1855), quoted in Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 44.
59. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White; and Roediger, Wages of Whiteness.
60. Coffman, Old Army, 332; quote from Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 120.
61. Armes, Ups and Downs of an Army Officer, 288.
62. Armes, Ups and Downs of an Army Officer, 247.
63. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 158–60, 209.
64. WFC testimony, March 23, 1904, p. 2.
65. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Di ferent Color, 47.
66. Knight, Life and Manners in the Frontier Army, 223–30. Frontier communities were almost as racially complex as the army. In 1865, more than 14,000 German, Irish, French, and English settlers lived in Kansas. Leavenworth was almost one-third German and Irish, and emigrants from both countries settled in considerable numbers along railroad routes. Over the next decade, they were joined by Russian, Austrian, German, Swedish, and Hungarian emigrants, so that between 15 and 20 percent of the frontier population was so ethnically distinctive as to appear “foreign” to native-born observers. Shortridge, Peopling the Plains, 30–33, 92–94.
67. Colin G. Calloway, “Army Allies or Tribal Survival?,” in Legacy: New Perspectives on the Battle of Little Big Horn, ed. Charles E. Rankin (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1996), 63–81. Fairfax Downey and Jacques Noel Jacobsen Jr., The Red/Bluecoats (Fort Collins, CO: Old Army Press, 1973), 193–94; Thomas W. Dunlay, Wolves for the Blue Soldiers: Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army, 1860–1890 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982).
68. “The Indians—Col. Wyncoop’s Letter Resigning His Agency,” New York Times, Dec. 19, 1868, p. 3.
69. For frontier race degeneracy, see Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country, 250; Stephen P. Knadler, “Francis Parkman’s Ethnography of the Brahmin Caste and the History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac,” American Literature 65, no. 2 (June 1993): 215–38, esp. 225. Even Francis Parkman’s mixed-blood trapper and guide, Henri Chatillon, was without “the restless energy of the Anglo-American.” Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail (1847; rprt. New York: Doubleday & Co., 1946), 11. Seminole men, of black, Indian, and white ancestry, frequently scouted for the all-black Ninth and Tenth cavalries (whom Cody also guided). Downey and Jacobsen, Red/Bluecoats, 193–94.
70. “Mulatto,” Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary 1:1872.
71. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race, 18.
72. Richard Burton, The City of the Saints and Across the Rocky Mountains to California (1861; rprt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 89–90. Francis Parkman referred to mixed-bloods as “a mongrel race,” in a few of whom “might be seen the black snaky eye of the Indian half-breed.” Parkman, Oregon Trail, 61.
73. Anxieties about frontier race mixing were prevalent long before Cody was born, but the abolition of slavery heightened them to a fever pitch after the Civil War. Warnings that the end of slavery would begin a slide into interracial sex and the birth of a mixed-race America gave rise to the term “miscegenation,” which was coined only in 1864, replacing the older term “amalgamation,” and reflecting the increasing emphasis on race mixing as the “miscasting” or “misbegetting” of people. The word derived from the Latin for “mixed race” but had deep resonances with “miscast,” or “misbegotten.” “Miscegenation,” Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, 1809. See also Gary B. Nash, “The Hidden History of Mestizo America,” Journal of American History 82, no. 3 (Dec. 1995): 943.
74. Smith, Virgin Land, 177.
75. Rosa, West of Wild Bill Hickok, 101.
76. “Unfit amalgamation” is from Joseph G. McCoy, Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest (1874; rprt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 80. Others who used Mexicans as warnings about frontier race decay include Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast (1841; rprt. New York: Airmont Publishing Co., 1965), 136–37; Bancroft, California Pastoral, 263–65, 284.
77. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 347, quoted in Joe DeBarthe, The Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard (1894; rprt. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958), 88.
78. West, Contested Plains, 330; David Fritjof Halaas and Andrew E. Masich, Halfbreed: The Remarkable True Story of George Bent (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2004), 246–47; Stanley, My Early Travels and Adventures, 180.
79. Halaas and Masich, Halfbreed, 221–22.
80. Randolph B. Marcy, The Prairie Traveler (1859; rprt. Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, n.d.), 173. Custer believed that Indians were superior to even the best white frontiersman when it came to trailing, which was “peculiarly and undeniably an Indian accomplishment.” George A. Custer, “On the Plains,” Nov. 11, 1867, in Turf, Farm and Field, Nov. 23, 1867, in Dippie, Nomad, 28, 31.
81. Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, 289, also 95–98, 114–16; Colin G. Calloway, “Neither White nor Red: White Renegades on the American Indian Frontier,” Western Historical Quarterly 17, no. 1 (Jan. 1986): 43–66; for an example of how the Boone/Girty, white Indian/renegade confrontation shaped American literature, see Robert Montgomery Bird, Nick of the Woods, or the Jibbenainosay (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and Blanchard, 1837). From the days of the Puritans, whites abducted by Indians showed a disturbing enthusiasm for Indian life, many of them refusing to return to white society even after they were free to do so. Indian captivity “cannot be, therefore, so bad as we generally conceive it to be,” wrote Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in 1782. “There must be in their social bond something singularly captivating, and far superior to anything boasted of among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians.” J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782; rprt. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957), 209. Literature on Indian captivity is gigantic. See Roy Harvey Pearce, “The Significance of the Captivity Narrative,” American Literature 19 (March 1947): 1–20; James Axtell, “The White Indians of Colonial America,” William and Mary Quarterly 32 (Jan. 1975): 55–88; Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, esp. 116–45; James Axtell, The InvasionWithin: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); June Namias, White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on American Frontiers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).
82. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale (1851; rprt. New York: Penguin, 1992), 295.
83. When Cheyenne warriors shouted insults “in plain English” in 1867, they raised suspicions among the Tenth Cavalry’s commanders that “many of our own race were with the enemy,” whose successes on the battlefield could be attributed to their being led by “the basest of white men, well drilled in war.” Armes, Ups and Downs of an Army Offices, 249, 252. See also Theodore R. Davis, “A Summer on the Plains,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 36 (Feb. 1868): 305–6; Stanley, My Early Travels and Adventures, 161.
84. For Carr’s views on Hickok, see Rosa, The West of Wild Bill Hickok, 101. There is no biography of Frank North, but see George Bird Grinnell, Two Great Scouts and Their Pawnee Battalion (1928; rprt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973); Robert Bruce, The Fighting Norths and Pawnee Scouts (Lincoln, NE: n.p., 1932); Luther North, Man of the Plains: Recollections of Luther North, 1856–1882, ed. Donald F. Danker (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961); Frank North, “The Journal of an Indian Fighter: The 1869 Diary of Frank J. North,” ed. Donald F. Danker, Nebraska History 39, no. 2 (June 1958): 87–178.
85. The story is almost certainly apocryphal, coming as it does from Nate Salsbury, in a particularly bitter memoir written around 1902. See “The Origin of the Wild West Show,” NSP, YCAL MSS 17, Box 1/63, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT; Walsh and Salsbury, Making of Buffalo Bill, 155–56.
86. James T. King, War Eagle: A Life of General Eugene A. Carr (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), 276, n. 40; E. A. Carr, “The Combat on Beaver Creek,” Pearson’s Magazine (Aug. 1904): 188.
87. Davis, “Summer on the Plains,” 303.
88. DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 88, n. 4; Smith, View from Officers’ Row, 40, 83. Also Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 36.
89. Richard I. Dodge, Plains of the Great West (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1877), 429.
90. North, Man of the Plains, 121.
91. Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac, 247. Cody, of course, implied that he figured this out on his own, after riding “ahead of the command about ten miles,” where he saw a “body of men” marching toward him, “that I at first believed to be the Indians of whom we were in pursuit.” Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 350.
92. Carr, “Memoirs,” 30–31; George F. Price, Across the Continent with the Fifth Cavalry (1883; rprt. New York: Antiquarian Press, 1959), 133; Russell, Lives and Legends, 110.
93. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 227.
94. “Mongrels” is in Rosa, West of Wild Bill Hickok, 101.
95. Russell, Lives and Legends, 114; Luke Cahill, “An Indian Campaign and Buffalo Hunting with ‘Buffalo Bill,’ ” Colorado Magazine, 4, no. 4 (Aug. 1927): 125–35.
96. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 226–37; Rosa and May, Buffalo Bill and His Wild West, 28.
97. WFC testimony, March 23, 1904.
98. H. C. Bonnycastle to Chief, Personnel Division, OQMC, March 20, 1924, in William F. Cody, 201 File, RG 407, NARA, Washington, DC; Russell, Lives and Legends, 115.
99. Keim, Sheridan’s Troopers on the Border, 150.
100. Utley and Washburn, Indian Wars, 258; Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 110.
101. Bvt. Maj. Gen. E. A. Carr to Bvt. Brig. Gen. Geo. D. Ruggles, May 22, 1869, and Adj. Gen. E. D. Townsend to Bvt. Maj. Gen. C. C. Augur, June 11, 1869, both in RG 533, U.S. Army Continental Command, Dept. of the Platte, Letters Recd. 1867–69, Microfilm Reel 7, NSHS; Russell, Lives and Legends, 122–24; King, War Eagle, 99; Rosa and May, Buffalo Bill and His Wild West, 29–30.
102. The events leading up to the campaign may be found in James T. King, “The Republican River Expedition, June–July 1869,” pt. I, “On the March,” Nebraska History 41, no. 3 (Sept. 1960): 165–200, esp. 165–70; pt. II, “The Battle of Summit Springs,” Nebraska History 41, no. 4 (Dec. 1960): 281–99.
103. King, “Republican River Expedition,” 170–75.
104. Cody’s grocery wagon has been a bone of contention for biographers. Don Russell, believing crass mercantilism below the dignity of a hero-scout, argued that Cody never had such a wagon, and that it was the product of the jealousy of Luther North, whose resentment of Cody’s fame had grown to “a positive hatred” by the 1920s. Russell, Lives and Legends, 132, 151. But Luther North mentioned the wagon only once, in an account generally complimentary to Cody, though it was incorrect about Cody’s role in the battle of Summit Springs. North, Man of the Plains, 103. The vital evidence for Cody’s grocery wagon comes from his divorce trial, a quarter century before North wrote his memoirs. Eric Ericson explained the wagon and its business origins, in Eric Ericson testimony, Feb. 9, 1905, Folder 8, 21–30; May Cody, who lived with William and Louisa Cody in 1871, says that her brother had the title of “Field Settler Station” (possibly “field sutler”), as which “he furnished goods to the [a]rmy when they were out in the field. . . .” May Cody Bradford Testimony, Feb. 16–20, 1905, File 7–1, 117; William Cody himself claimed, “I had the concession from the commanding officer as a settler [sutler]” for troops in the field, “and I was at the time making a good deal of money out of my sutler store.” WFC testimony, March 5, 1905, Folder 13, 14–15, all in CC.
105. North, Man of the Plains, 102–3, 126.
106. King, “Republican River Expedition,” 174–75; North, Man of the Plains, 103–4.
107. “Journal of the March of the Republican River Expedition,” entry for June 15, Ra 533 Reel 7, NSHS; King, “Republican River Expedition,” 179; Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 251–53; North, Man of the Plains, 107–8. For the Fetterman fight, see Utley, Frontier Regulars, 93–110.
108. Cody later claimed to have killed thirty-six buffalo during a hunt at this point in the expedition. No other source confirms that number. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 253. Frank North records a hunt in “Journal of an Indian Fighter,” 133.
109. King, “Republican River Expedition,” 198–99; “Journal of the March,” entry for July 10.
110. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 255; “Journal of the March,” entry for July 11; Bvt. Maj. Gen. E. A. Carr to Bvt. Brig. Gen. Geo. D. Ruggles, July 20, 1869, RG 533, U.S. Army Continental Command, Dept. of the Platte, Letters Recd. 1867–69, Microfilm Reel 6, NSHS; Price, Across the Continent with the Fifth Cavalry, 137–41. Also see North, Man of the Plains, 113–14; Grinnell, Two Great Scouts, 194–95.
111. King, “Republican River Expedition, June–July 1869: pt. II, The Battle of Summit Springs,” 289.
112. Pen-and-ink drawing in BBWW 1884 program (Hartford, CT: n.p., 1884); cover illustration on BBWW 1888 program (Hartford, CT: Calhoun, 1888), BBHC.
113. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 260–61.
114. Carr to Ruggles, July 20, 1869; North, Man of the Plains, 117; Grinnell, Two Great Scouts, 198–99; Joyce Szabo, Howling Wolf and the History of Ledger Art (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), 154; Hyde, Life of George Bent, 334; also West, Contested Plains, 314–15, 378, n. 88, and King, War Eagle, 115. The regimental journal recorded Tall Bull “was killed after a desperate personal defence.” “Journal of the March,” entry for July 11.
115. Price, Across the Continent with the Fifth Cavalry, 138.
116. Bvt. Brig. Gen. Thomas Duncan to Lt. Wm. G. Forbush, Dist. of the Republican, Oct. 7, 1869, RG 533, Reel 7, NSHS.
117. Buffalo Bill: The King of Border Men originally appeared in serial form between Dec. 23, 1869, and March 3, 1870. See William J. Roba, ed., Buffalo Bill: The King of Border Men (Davenport, IA: Service Press, 1987). For Cody’s meeting with Buntline, see Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 263.
118. Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1998), 10–16.
119. “Memorandum,” March 20, 1924, in W. F. Cody 201 File, RG 407, NARA.
120. WFC testimony, March 23, 1904, pp. 9, 27.
121. King, “Republican River Expedition”; North, Man of the Plains, 115.
122. Knight, Life and Manners in the Frontier Army, 39–70; for an eyewitness account of how much officers’ wives shaped fort culture, see Duane Merritt Greene, Ladies and Officers of the United States Army; or, American Aristocracy (Chicago: Central Publishing Co., 1880).
123. See the photograph in Rosa and May, Buffalo Bill and His Wild West, 41; for carpet, see May Cody Bradford testimony, Folder, 7–1, in CC pp. 106–7.
124. Louisa Burke testimony, Feb. 19, 1905, Civil Case 970, Folder 8, p. 111; Eric Ericson testimony, p. 24; Mrs. Charles Hendy, Sr., testimony, Folder 8, p. 95; all in CC; Kit Carson Cody birthdate in Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 275; Russell, Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill, 160; quote from Ena Raymonde, entry for July 10, 1872, see also entry for Oct. 11, 1872, Ena Raymonde Ballantine Journal, MS 1730, NSHS.
125. Capt. Charles J. Meinhold, 3rd Cavalry, to Lt. J. B. Johnson, Post Adjutant, April 27, 1872, and attached copies of expedition reports, recommendations, and approvals, in Case File for Correction of Military Record: William Cody, Stack 8W3, 4/8/2, Box 10, RG 94, NARA, Washington, DC; also Adjutant General’s Office, document file 377, 592 (William Cody), Stack 8W3, 12/1/D, Box 2609, NARA, Washington, DC.
126. “Sharp Pursuit of Indian Thieves,” New York Times, June 9, 1870.
127. “Sheridan’s Buffalo Hunt,” New York Times, Oct. 7, 1871, p. 11.
128. “The Grand Duke’s Hunt—General Sheridan and ‘Buffalo Bill’ Lead the Way—At Grand Battue on the Plains,” New York Herald, Jan. 14, 1872, p. 7.
129. Capt. Charles J. Meinhold, 3rd Cavalry, to Lt. J. B. Johnson, Post Adjutant, April 27, 1872, and attached copies of expedition reports, recommendations, and approvals, in Case File for Correction of Military Record: William Cody, Stack 8W3, 4/8/2, Box 10, RG 94, NARA, Washington, DC; also Adjutant General’s Office, document file 377, 592 (William Cody), Stack 8W3, 12/1/D, Box 2609, NARA, Washington, DC. Note that Meinhold’s report spells the name “Volks,” but official records list the man as “Vokes.”
130. The Congressional Medal of Honor: The Names, the Deeds (Forest Ranch, CA: Sharp & Dunnigan, 1984), 1, 4–5. It was perfectly in keeping with the low status of the award that, even with so colorful a recipient as Buffalo Bill, the press seems not to have noticed. Despite press coverage of various Buffalo Bill hunts and skirmishes, I have yet to find a newspaper report of the commendation.
131. Quote from Cody to Friends in Rochester, Aug. 9, 1872 [1874], MS 6 I:B, BBHC; Anson Mills, My Story, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Byron S. Adams, 1921), 151; Anson Mills, “Big Horn Expedition, Aug. 15 to Sept. 30, 1874, commanded by Capt. Anson Mills,” pamphlet (n.p., n.d.).
132. Quoted in King, War Eagle, 154. For departure from stage, see Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 136–37.
133. “The Indian Campaign,” New York Times, Aug. 17, 1876, p. 5.
134. Description of Cody’s costume from Charles King, Campaigning with Crook (Milwaukee: The Sentinel Co., 1880), 38; “most reliable account” from Chris Madsen, who gave it to Don Russell, “Buffalo Bill’s Fight,” MSS in MS 62 Don Russell Collection, Series 1:R, Military, Box 7/4, BBHC. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 343–44; see also “Diary of James Frew,” MS 58, Box 1, Misc. p. 1, NSHS.
135. Many accounts of the battle incorrectly refer to southern Cheyennes. Yellow Hair was from the northern Cheyenne band of Little Wolf, who were then living near Red Cloud Agency, on the Sioux Reserve. Beaver Heart added “Furthermore, Yellow Hair was not killed by any one man as far as I could see, as the whole two troops of soldiers were firing at him. If Buffalo Bill was with those soldiers he stayed with them until Yellow Hair was killed, and he did not come out and engage Yellow Hair single-handed.” From E. A. Brininstool, “Who Killed Yellow Hand?,” Outdoor Life—Outdoor Recreation, Feb. 1930, typescript in MS 62 Don Russell Collection, Series 1:R, Military, Box 7/8, BBHC. See also “Statement of Josie Tangleyellowhair Regarding Killing of Yellow Hair (Yellow Hand) on War Bonnet Creek,” May 27, 1929, MS 58, Box 1, Folder 1, NSHS.
136. For army partisans, see Don Russell, Lives and Legends, 236; for Cheyenne numbers and Merritt’s report, see Paul Hedren, First Scalp for Custer: The Skirmish at War Bonnet Creek, Nebraska, July 17, 1876, 58–59, 78; for quote, see Carr, “Memoirs,” 127, and King, War Eagle, 162.
137. WFC to Louisa Cody, July 18, 1876, on display in the Buffalo Bill Museum, BBHC. The text is reprinted in “Buffalo Bill Yarn Is Verified Here,” Baltimore Sun, Morning Edition, Dec. 21, 1936, clipping in MS 62 Don Russell Collection, Series 1:R, Military, Box 7/9, BBHC; see also Russell, Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill, 230. The controversy over whether or not Cody killed Yellow Hair has consumed forests. See Don Russell, “Captain Charles King,” The Westerners New York Posse Brand Book 4, no. 2 (1957): 39; also MS 62 Don Russell Collection, Series 1:R, Box 7, Folders 1–12, BBHC. There is also a file with hundreds of letters on this question in the Cody materials at the NSHS.
138. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 355.
139. DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, xvii; Edgar I. Stewart, “Frank Grouard,” in The Reader’s Encyclopedia of the American West, ed. Howard R. Lamar (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1977), 172; Evan S. Connell evaluates the Grouard controversy in Son of the Morning Star, 327–28. See also John S. Gray, “Frank Grouard: Kanaka Scout or Mulatto Renegade,” Chicago Westerner’s Brand Book 16, no. 8 (1959); Russell, Lives and Legends, 239–40.
140. Field diary of Gen. A. H. Terry, entry for Aug. 10, 1876, in The Field Diary of General Alfred H. Terry—The Yellowstone Expedition, 1876, ed. Michael J. Koury (Bellevue, NE: Old Army Press, 1970), 31.
141. Burt’s authorship is discussed in Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 162; his participation in the 1876 campaign is in Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac, 112, 117, 164.
142. King, Campaigning with Crook, 32.
143. King, Campaigning with Crook, 34. For New York Herald, see “The Indian War,” New York Herald, July 23, 1876, p. 7, col. 3; King’s authorship is discussed in Charles King to W. J. Ghent, March 18, 1929, in MS 62 Don Russell Collection, Series 1:R, Military, Box 7/7, BBHC. For King and Cody as drinking partners, see CSS of Don Russell and Paul Hedren in MS 62 Don Russell Collection, Series 1:R Military, Box 7, BBHC.
144. The Buffalo Bill Combination performed May Cody and other plays in Milwaukee, Jan. 1–3, 1878. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 318, 337.
145. King, Campaigning with Crook, 36. Merritt’s report at the battle says an Indian was killed. See Hedren, First Scalp for Custer, 78. King’s account was so colorful, and fanciful, that Chris Madsen, a Fifth Cavalry veteran who was at Warbonnet Creek, once wrote, “I can not understand why King would write such stuff about a fight where there was plenty to tell without going Munchauson [sic] one better.” Chris Madsen to Fred P. Todd, April 8, 1938, MS 62 Don Russell Collection, Series 1:R Military, Box 7/4, BBHC.
146. Emphasis added. The letter is reproduced in Life of Buffalo Bill, iv.
147. Carr to Ruggles, July 20, 1869; Carr in Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, vii. For Cody’s request for endorsement, Carr’s warning against “embroidery,” and his attendance at the show, see Carr, “Memoirs,” 36–38, also 218; for Carr’s career, see King, War Eagle; also Russell, Lives and Legends, 139–48; for testimonial, see BBWW 1907 program (Buffalo, NY: Courier, 1907), n.p.
148. Charles King (as told to Don Russell), “My Friend, Buffalo Bill,” The Cavalry Journal 41, no. 173 (Sept.–Oct. 1932): 19. Russell provides an account of his meeting with King, and his research for the article, in Don Russell, “A Very Personal Introduction,” in Paul Hedren, First Scalp for Custer, 15–21.
149. May Cody Bradford, Folder 7-1, 119, CC.
150. WFC testimony, March 23, 1904, p. 10.
CHAPTER SIX: BUFFALO HUNT
1. From BBWW 1894 program.
2. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 253.
3. Buffalo Bill and Dr. Carver Wild West, Rocky Mountain, and Prairie Exhibition 1883 Program (Hartford, CT: Calhoun Printing, 1883), n.p.; also, BBWW 1893 program, 13.
4. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 174; William Cody, with John Burke, Story of the Wild West and Camp-Fire Chats (Chicago: Historical Publishing, 1888), 511.
5. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 156–57.
6. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 172.
7. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 171–75.
8. Buffalo Bill and Dr. Carver Wild West program, n.p.; BBWW 1893 program, 12–13; also Cody, Story of the Wild West, 507–11; 536–37.
9. “Buffalo Bill,” n.p., n.d., clipping in WFC Scrapbooks, Stage Play Notices and Reviews, 1875–80, BBHC. See also “That Buffalo Hunt,” n.d., n.p., WFC Scrapbooks.
10. “Both the grown buffalo and the calves, are very frequently driven in this manner to the encampment, where they are readily slaughtered.” Lansford W. Hastings, The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California (1845; rprt. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1932), 9; also Elizabeth B. Custer, Following the Guidon (1890; rprt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 119.
11. The only verification of the Comstock hunt comes from Louisa Frederici Cody’s memoirs, which are based entirely on her husband’s autobiography and appear even more fictionalized than his. See Cody and Cooper, Memories of Buffalo Bill, by His Wife, 122–36; Rosa and May, Buffalo Bill and His Wild West, 39–40.
12. Rosa and May, Buffalo Bill and His Wild West, 40.
13. William Comstock was killed in a fight with Cheyenne Indians in 1868. See Rosa and May, Buffalo Bill and His Wild West, 40; Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 36–38.
14. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 32–62.
15. Earl of Dunraven [Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin], The Great Divide: Travels in the Upper Yellowstone in the Summer of 1874 (1876; rprt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), xiii.
16. See Jonathan Culler, “The Semiotics of Tourism,” in Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 153–67.
17. Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 108–16.
18. “Home Incidents,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Nov. 28, 1868, pp. 173–74; see also Theodore R. Davis, “The Buffalo Range,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 38, no. 224 (Jan. 1869): 147–63, at 149.
19. Dippie, Nomad, 48; E. B. Custer, Following the Guidon, 204.
20. Keim, Sheridan’s Troopers on the Borders, 76.
21. Kansas State Record (Topeka), Oct. 20, 1869, quoted in Minnie Dubbs Millbrook, “Big Game Hunting with the Custers, 1869–70,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 41, no. 4 (Winter 1975): 429–53, at 433.
22. Putnam, “A Trip to the End of the Union Pacific,” 197, n. 2.
23. Daniel Justin Herman, Hunting and the American Imagination (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 2001), 1–8; Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Settlers, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 58; Louis S. Warren, The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-CenturyAmerica (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).
24. I am borrowing the notion of invented traditions from Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1–14.
25. Elliott West, “Bison R Us: Images of Bison in American History,” MS in author’s possession.
26. John C. Ewers, “Fact and Fiction in the Documentary Art of the American West,” The Frontier Re-examined, ed. John Francis McDermott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 79–95, at 84–85.
27. William E. Deahl, Jr., “Nebraska’s Unique Contribution to the World of Entertainment,” Nebraska History 49 (1968): 283–98.
28. Washington Irving, A Tour on the Prairies (London: John Murray, 1835), 263–78; William H. Goetzmann, David C. Hunt, Marsha V. Gallagher, and William J. Orr, Karl Bodmer’s America (Lincoln: Joslyn Art Museum and University of Nebraska Press, 1984); Brian W. Dippie, “The Visual West,” 675–705, esp. 682–85, in The Oxford History of the American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner, Carol A. O’Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Wayne Gard, The Great Buffalo Hunt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), 59–74; Ann Hyde, “Tourist Travel,” and David C. Hunt, “Alfred Jacob Miller,” in The New Encyclopedia of the American West, 699–700, 1117–19; for emigrant bison hunting, Herman, Hunting and the American Imagination, 200–3, and Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail, 84–85, 99–103.
29. St. Louis Democrat, Feb. 17, 1868, quoted in Richard J. Walsh and Milton S. Salisbury, The Making of Buffalo Bill: A Study in Heroics (rprt. 1978; New York, Bobbs-Merrill, 1928), 113.
30. Warren, Hunter’s Game, 13–15; Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature, 58–62; Herman, Hunting and the American Imagination, 122–58. Also, see John Reiger, American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation, 3rd ed. (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1999), 5–104.
31. Webb, Buffalo Land, 149, 453, 458.
32. Davis, “Buffalo Range,” 154, 157.
33. Davis, “Buffalo Range,” 157.
34. Webb, Buffalo Land, 255–56.
35. Davis, “Buffalo Range,” 155.
36. Armes, Ups and Downs of an Army Officer, 179.
37. Custer, My Life on the Plains, 51; Davis, “Buffalo Range,” 155–57; Dippie, Nomad, 50.
38. David D. Smits, “The Frontier Army and the Destruction of the Buffalo: 1865–1883,” Western Historical Quarterly 23, no. 3 (Autumn 1994): 313–38; “At that time the War Department encouraged hunting in the army, not only for the game that would help out the company messes, but because the men hunting would learn more about takeng [sic] care of themselves and their horses, and how creeks and roads were located in the vicinity of the posts, so that when a call would come in from some ranch that hostile Indians were in the vicinity, some one was able to go direct to the place.” Chris Madsen to Don Russell, May 16, 1938, MS 62 Don Russell Collection, Series 1:R Military, Box 7/4, BBHC.
39. Davis, “Buffalo Range,” 154. Their wives and daughters occasionally joined these hunts. Patricia Y. Stallard, Glittering Misery: Dependents of the Indian Fighting Army (Fort Collins, CO: Old Army Press, 1978), 47.
40. Elizabeth Bacon Custer, Following the Guidon, 213–25, and Tenting on the Plains or, GeneralCuster in Kansas and Texas (1895; abridged ed., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 342–43.
41. Dippie, Nomad.
42. Custer, in Dippie, Nomad, 48.
43. George A. Custer, “On the Plains,” Oct. 12, 1867, in Dippie, Nomad, 13.
44. G. Custer to E. Custer, May 2, 1867, from Ft. Hays, Kansas, in The Custer Story: The Life and Intimate Letters of General George A. Custer and His Wife Elizabeth, ed. Marguerite Merington (New York: Devin-Adair Co., 1950), 200.
45. Custer, in Dippie, Nomad, 46–47; in Millbrook, “Big Game Hunting,” 436–37; Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 106.
46. Dippie, Nomad, 55–57.
47. Barnum quoted in Millbrook, “Big Game Hunting,” 447–48.
48. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 145.
49. The literature on Custer is enormous but a good place to start is Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin,1–27. See also Jay Monaghan, Custer: The Life of General George Armstrong Custer (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1959), 237–38.
50. Utley, Life in Custer’s Cavalry, 98; Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 52–53. For dogs, see Custer, My Life on the Plains, 98.
51. Utley, Life in Custer’s Cavalry, 128–29.
52. See Elizabeth Custer to Mrs. Sabin, n.d., in Merington, Custer Story, 284; also, Robert Winston Mardock, The Reformers and the American Indian (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971), 41–42.
53. Utley and Washburn, Indian Wars, 256; Russell, Lives and Legends, 109–10; Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 67–68, 95–100; Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 75–78.
54. Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 106–7; Wert, Custer, 26; Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 200–2; Smith, View from Officers’ Row, 83; Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 389, n. 45.
55. Guardhouse in Hays is in Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 120–21.
56. Albert Barnitz to Jennie Barnitz, May 15, 1867, in Utley, Life in Custer’s Cavalry, 50.
57. King, War Eagle, 214.
58. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 42. Emphasis added.
59. George Custer to Elizabeth Custer, Sept. 11, 1873, in Merington, Custer Story, 264: “When the theatrical ventures of Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack were discussed Tom said it might be a good speculation to back our own ‘Antelope Jim’—on which Mr C rushed out indignantly from the tent.”
60. Davis, “Buffalo Range.”
61. Joseph G. Rosa, Wild Bill Hickok: The Man and His Myth (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990), 95–96; John S. Gray, “New Light on Will Comstock, Kansas Scout,” in Custer and His Times, ed. Paul Hutton (El Paso: Little Big Horn Associates, 1981), 183–207.
62. Custer, My Life on the Plains, 144–45.
63. Custer, My Life on the Plains, 44.
64. North, Man of the Plains, 146–50.
65. Louis A. Holmes, Fort McPherson, Nebraska, Fort Cottonwood, N.T.: Guardian of the Tracks and Trails (Lincoln, NE:, Johnsen Publishing Co., 1963), 47.
66. Quoted in Millbrook, “Big Game Hunting,” 447.
67. Paul Andrew Hutton, “Introduction,” in Davies, Ten Days on the Plains, 16–19.
68. Earl of Dunraven [Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin], Past Times and Pastimes, 2 vols. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1922), 2: 78.
69. North, Man of the Plains, 150.
70. North, Man of the Plains, 108.
71. Millbrook, “Big Game Hunting,” 451; Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 153.
72. For significance of Indians, see Deloria, Playing Indian, esp. 63–5; for Pawnee scouts in 100th Meridian Expedition, see David Haward Bain, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (New York: Viking, 1999), 292–93; Silas S. Seymour, Incidents of a Trip Through the Great Platte Valley to the Rocky Mountains and Laramie Plains in the Fall of 1866 (New York: Van Nostrand, 1867).
73. The first Wild West show program included an account of the Hundredth Meridian Expedition. Buffalo Bill and Doc Carver Wild West, Rocky Mountain, and Prairie Exhibition 1883 program (Hartford, CT: Calhoun Printing, 1883), n.p.
74. Donald Danker, in North, Man of the Plains, 125; original source is Bruce, Fighting Norths and Pawnee Scouts, 19.
75. Webb, Buffalo Land, 212.
76. “The Imperial Buffalo Hunter,” New York Herald, Jan. 16, 1872, p. 7.
77. My interpretation of Cody’s tales relies on Carolyn S. Brown, who writes that, generally speaking, tellers of tall tales invent themselves as characters in a performance, a fool or a hero who triumphs over nature, danger, fear, and outsiders through wit and skill. The storyteller holds an audience spellbound in proportion to his ability to fudge the line between truth and fiction, to dance across it and back again, never quite giving away which side is which, suspending the audience over it and allowing them to believe what they will. Brown, Tall Tale, 28.
78. My interpretation of guides, dudes, and practical jokes borrows from Tina Loo, “Of Moose and Men: Hunting and Masculinities in British Columbia, 1880–1939,” Western Historical Quarterly 32, no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 296–319.
79. Webb, Buffalo Land, 195.
80. Henry E. Davies, Ten Days on the Plains, ed. Paul Andrew Hutton (1872; rprt. Dallas, TX: DeGolyer Library, 1985), 122–23: “A story was told the next day, that, while our camp was buried in repose that night, a small party of Indians roamed among the sleepers, and the appearance of an undersized and ill-favored little squaw, dressed in a complete suit of red flannel, who accompanied the chief in command of the party, was minutely described by those who pretended to have observed these unexpected and unwelcome visitors.”
81. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 290–91; Millbrook, “Big Game Hunting,” 451–53.
82. See Paul A. Hutton’s notes in Davies, Ten Days on the Plains, 135–49.
83. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 282.
84. Davies, Ten Days on the Plains, 83.
85. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 282–83.
86. Davies, Ten Days on the Plains, 113, 123.
87. Davies, Ten Days on the Plains, 122.
88. Davies, Ten Days on the Plains, 107.
89. William Tucker, The Grand Duke Alexis in the United States of America (1872; rprt. New York: Interland Publishing, 1972), 155.
90. Tucker, Grand Duke Alexis, 156, 158.
91. Tucker, Grand Duke Alexis, 160–62.
92. Tucker, Grand Duke Alexis, 163.
93. Tucker, Grand Duke Alexis, 164, 167–68.
94. Ambrose, Crazy Horse and Custer, 344. Tucker, Grand Duke Alexis, 175, 178.
95. Tucker, Grand Duke Alexis, 185–89.
96. Joy S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 47; at least one of Cody’s contemporaries pointed out the fakery. Herbert Cody Blake to Judge Paine, June 6, 1934, Folder 2, WFC Collection, MS 58, NSHS.
97. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 305–6.
CHAPTER SEVEN: THEATER STAR
1. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 311. The New York Herald suggests a different scenario. “When the real Buffalo Bill was recognized on his entrance the audience rose en masse and greeted him with an ovation such as actors at the more aristocratic theatres never received.” “Amusements,” New York Herald, Feb. 21, 1872, p. 5.
2. Paul Hutton, “Introduction,” xvii–xviii, in David Crockett, A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett by Himself (1834; rprt., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987); Carolyn S. Brown, The Tall Tale in American Folklore and Literature, 56, 71–72; also, Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1931), 70–71; James Kirk Paulding, The Lion of the West, ed. James N. Tidwell (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1954).
3. Roger A. Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 1870–1906 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 28.
4. Russell, Lives and Legends, 183.
5. Cody recalled bowing from the box, but the New York Herald says only that “strange to say, the hero of the play was present in a box, in company with the writer of the story [Ned Buntline], and the dramatizer, Mr. Fred G. Maeder.” “Amusements,” New York Herald, Feb. 21, 1872, p. 5.
6. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 276–78; Russell, Lives and Legends, 191.
7. For claims of election to the Nebraska legislature, see Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 319; BBWW 1895 program, 10; for comparisons to Washington, Jackson, and Lincoln, see BBWW 1909, both in WFC Collection, WH 72, Box 3, DPL-WHR.
8. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 311.
9. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 324.
10. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 324–25.
11. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 44–46.
12. Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 22–48.
13. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 327.
14. Chicago Times, Dec. 18, 1872, quoted in Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 46.
15. For stage profits, see Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 209.
16. Kit Carson Cody was born on Nov. 26, 1870; Orra Maude on Aug. 15, 1872. See Yost, Buffalo Bill, 43.
17. WFC testimony, p. 29.
18. Cody recalls they moved to Rochester in 1873, but he missed the date by a year. According to the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, March 11, 1874, the Cody family moved to Rochester that month. WFC testimony, Folder 2, p. 29; Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 103.
19. “Sharp Pursuit of Indian Thieves,” New York Times, June 9, 1870; “Sheridan’s Buffalo Hunt,” New York Times, Oct. 7, 1871, p. 11.
20. Webb, Buffalo Land, 149.
21. Oliver Knight, Following the Indian Wars: The Story of the Newspaper Correspondents Among the Indian Campaigners (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960), 321; Beau Riffenburgh, The Myth of the Explorer: The Press, Sensationalism, and Geographic Discovery (New York: Belhaven, 1993), 58; Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 53; David Rains Wallace, The Bonehunter’s Revenge: Dinosaurs, Greed, and the Greatest Scientific Feud of the Gilded Age (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 4–10.
22. “The Grand Duke’s Hunt—General Sheridan and ‘Buffalo Bill’ Lead the Way—At Grand Battue on the Plains,” New York Herald, Jan. 14, 1872, p. 7. See also “The Grand Duke’s Buffalo Hunt,” New York Herald, Jan. 15, 1872, p. 7; “The Imperial Buffalo Hunter,” New York Herald, Jan. 16, 1872, p. 7; “Alexis’ Grand Hunt,” New York Herald, Jan. 17, 1872; “Bos Americanus!,” New York Herald, Jan. 18, 1872, p. 3; “Nimrod Alexis,” New York Herald, Jan. 22, 1872, p. 7.
23. “The Grand Duke,” New York Herald, Feb. 13, 1872, p. 3; “Amusements,” New York Herald, Feb. 13, 1872, p. 4.
24. “Buffalo Bill’s Best Shot,” New York Times, March 9, 1872, p. 5; also “Buffalo Bill’s Best Shot,” March 10, 1872, p. 5, and “Buffalo Bill’s Best Shot,” March 11, 1872, p. 5.
25. “An Immense Cattle Drive,” New York Times, July 21, 1880, p. 1; “Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack,” New York Times, Oct. 24, 1880, p. 3.
26. Quote from Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 947; Mary C. Henderson, The City and the Theater: New York Playhouses from Bowling Green to Times Square (Clifton, N.J.: James T. White and Company, 1973), 135.
27. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 320.
28. Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 2; Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 46–51.
29. David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture, 1800–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 85–86; Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 51.
30. Hattie C. Fuller to Nate Salsbury, May 7, 1868, Box 1, Folder 2, Papers, in NSP. In the cousin’s hometown, in Iowa, “The People generally—with the exception of the lower classes” were “very bitter against it.” Hattie C. Fuller to Nate Salsbury, Jan. 8, 1870, Box 1, Folder 3, NSP.
31. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 162–69. For an account of capturing buffalo for Barnett’s show, see Ena Raymonde Ballantine Journal, entry of June 15, 1872.
32. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 320.
33. Frank North, “The Journal of an Indian Fighter: The 1869 Diary of Frank J. North,” ed. Donald F. Danker, Nebraska History 39, no. 2 (June 1958): 87–178.
34. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 21.
35. Melvin Schoberlin, From Candles to Footlights: A Biography of the Pike’s Peak Theatre, 1859–1876 (Denver: Old West Publishing Co., 1941), 50; also Rourke, American Humor, 108–15.
36. Schoberlin, From Candles to Footlights, 53.
37. Goodrich, Black Flag, 114.
38. In Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill, 86, Don Russell speculates that Cody saw the play in St. Louis. The play’s staging in Denver is in Schoberlin, From Candles to Footlights, 47.
39. C. Robert Haywood, Victorian West: Class and Culture in Kansas Cattle Towns (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), 174–78.
40. Holmes, Fort McPherson, 73.
41. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 327.
42. “The Imperial Buffalo Hunter,” New York Herald, Jan. 16, 1872, p. 7; also Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 64; Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 58–60.
43. Undated clipping, “May Cody,” Notices of Buffalo Bill Season of 1879–80, BBHC.
44. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 70–71; also Peter H. Hassrick, Richard Slotkin, Vine Deloria, Jr., Howard R. Lamar, William Judson, and Leslie Fiedler, Buffalo Bill and the Wild West (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 1981).
45. “Scouts of the Prairie” n.d., New Haven, CT, clipping in WFC Scrapbooks, Stage Play Notices and Reviews, 1875–80, BBHC.
46. Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 61.
47. Schwartz, Culture of the Copy, 212. My discussion of authenticity borrows from Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian, 101–5; T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 57; Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), xv–xix; Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 91–107.
48. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 9:168, 218, 225–26.
49. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 329; Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 9:278, 290, 349.
50. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 9:276.
51. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 330; Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 9:328.
52. Orvell, Real Thing, 50.
53. Orvell, Real Thing, 55–56; also Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (1955; New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217–52; see Jennifer Price, Flight Maps, for thoughtful essays on this kind of imitation in the late Victorian age and our own.
54. Orvell, Real Thing, 57.
55. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 10:217, 328.
56. Roger Hall maintains that the authentic Cody displaced the faux Cody, and that professional actors ceased to play “Buffalo Bill” by the summer of 1873. Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 67. Nevertheless, the play was reprised in New York by Studley and Dowd in 1876 and ’77, and presumably elsewhere by others. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 226, 344.
57. In June 1885, A. H. Sheldon and Co., a vaudeville troupe, performed Buffalo Bill’s Last Shot at Henry Miner’s Theatre in the Bowery (Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 12: 531). From September 7 through 12, 1891, Buffalo Bill Abroad and at Home was playing at Bennett’s Casino, in Brooklyn, a variety house which featured in subsequent weeks a leg-less dancer, a male impersonator, and Irish dialect comedians. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 15:252–53.
58. J. M. Burke to Jack Crawford, March 5, 1877, M Crawford Box 1, DPL-WHR.
59. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 9:560.
60. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 9:570.
61. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 9:560.
62. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 335.
63. Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled, 195.
64. John Burke to “Captain Jack” Crawford, March 25, 1877, M Crawford L, DPL-WHR.
65. Role book, “Buffalo Bill in Life on the Border,” MS 126, WFC Collection, Box 1, Folder 4, Colorado State Historical Society, Denver, CO.
66. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 131–33.
67. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 117, 129.
68. Kit Carson, Jr.’s prospects were not helped by his arrest for striking his wife with intent to kill in 1879. W. F. Cody to Sam Hall, July 5, 1879, Box 1/6, WFC Collection, MS 6 Series I:B, BBHC.
69. The Buffalo Bill Combination took home profits of $13,000 in 1877, and over $50,000 in 1880. Russell, Lives and Legends, 257; Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 209.
70. Robert Jenkinson Hicks to A. E. Sheldon, June 21, 1936, MS 58 WFC Collection, NSHS.
71. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 11–16, 74–81.
72. “The Indian War,” New York Herald, July 23, 1876, p. 7; Don Russell, Lives and Legends, 224, n. 11.
73. J. M. Burke to Jack Crawford, March 5, 1877, M Crawford Box 1, DPL-WHR.
74. Darlis A. Miller, Captain Jack Crawford: Buckskin Poet, Scout, and Showman (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 25.
75. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 143; White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,” 35.
76. See R. B. Davenport to Jack Crawford, March 7, 1877, M Crawford Box 1, DPL-WHR; S. R. Shankland to Jack Crawford, Nov. 5, 1877, M Crawford Box 1, DPL-WHR. Darlis Miller says that Crawford’s regrets prevented him from capitalizing on the scalp. Miller, Captain Jack Crawford, 60–61.
77. WFC to J. Crawford, Aug. 7, 1877, Box 1/3, WFC Collection, WH 72, M Cody L Box 1/3, Western History Collection, DPL-WHR.
78. Jack Crawford to Mrs. Nate Salsbury, March 16, 1907, in NSP.
79. “The Drama of the Future,” New York Times, April 6, 1873, p. 4.
80. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 163.
81. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 73–77.
82. Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled, 172, 227–28.
83. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 362–63; WFC to “Captain Jack” Crawford, April 22, 1879, M Cody L, Box 1, DPL-WHR. Miller, Captain Jack Crawford, 210; Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 288–89.
84. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 306.
85. Jay Monaghan, The Great Rascal: The Life and Adventures of Ned Buntline (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951), 147–49.
86. “Prairie Scouts,” n.d., n.p., WFC Scrapbooks, Stage Play Notices and Reviews, 1875–80, BBHC.
87. Quoted in Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 235.
88. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 180–81, 197.
89. Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 188.
90. Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 185–88.
91. Jay Monaghan, Custer: The Life of General George Armstrong Custer (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1959), 358.
92. Ena Raymonde Ballantine Journal, Dec. 30, 1872, MS 1730, NSHS.
93. Ena Raymonde Ballantine Journal, Oct. 4, 1872, MS 1730, NSHS.
94. Everett Dick, Sod House Frontier, 367.
95. The quote is Halttunen, summarizing Goffman, in Confidence Men and Painted Women, 186.
96. David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 13.
97. Nasaw, Going Out, 14.
98. Nasaw, Going Out, 18.
99. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 59–60, 132.
100. Untitled clipping, n.d., n.p., WFC Scrapbook, Stage Plays and Theater Reviews, 1875–80, BBHC; for complaints of critics see no title, n.d., n.p., WFC Scrapbook, Stage Play Notices and Reviews, 1875–80, BBHC.
101. “The Scouts at Niblo’s,” n.d., n.p., WFC Scrapbook, Stage Play Notices and Reviews, 1875–80, BBHC.
102. “Niblo’s Garden,” n.p., n.d., clipping in WFC Scrapbook, Stage Play Notices and Reviews, 1875–80, BBHC.
103. Denning, Mechanic Accents, 47–61; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 88–97.
104. “Big Indians,” n.d., n.p., clipping in WFC Scrapbook, Stage Play Notices and Reviews, 1875–80, BBHC.
105. “The Opera House,” n.d., n.p., WFC Scrapbook, Stage Play Notices and Reviews, 1875–80, BBHC.
106. Richard Moody, The Astor Place Riot (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958), 12.
107. The significance of Astor Place Riot is in Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled, 67–75; Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 63–69; Buntline’s sentence is in Moody, Astor Place Riot, 236. Quote from “The Great Scalpers on the Warpath—What a Gory Ink-Slinger Considers a ‘Gentlemany Intimation’—SCALPS BY THE BALE,” St. Louis Post Dispatch, n.d., WFC Scrapbooks, BBHC.
108. Entry for March 7, 1874, James Johnson Collection, MSS 1175, Colorado State Historical Society, Denver, CO; WFC testimony, March 23, 1904.
109. “Amphitheatre Play Bill,” n.d., n.p., in WFC Scrapbook, Stage Play Notices and Reviews, 1875–80.
110. Rosa, West of Wild Bill Hickok, 61.
111. Quoted in Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 130. In important ways, Hickok was heir to an earlier form of violence than Cody. Backcountry brawlers and “rasslers” had long been lower-class heroes, and their better-armed successors in Kansas and Nebraska, Hickok among them, appealed to the same hardscrabble lot. In this sense, he was less suited to be the hero of the predominantly northern and midwestern audience of the mass-market press. Middle-class readers of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine enjoyed lurid characters and episodes, but their tastes ran to more reluctant heroes, in part because of gathering anxieties about working-class violence in the exploding cities. Elliot Gorn, “Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry,” American Historical Review 90, no. 1 (Feb. 1985): 18–43. For examples of backcountry wrestling and fighting in Kansas, see Nyle H. Miller and Joseph W. Snelly, Why the West Was Wild (Topeka: Kansas State Historical Society, 1963); in Nebraska, see Johnson, Happy as a Big Sunflower, 102, 107.
112. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 333; see also Louisa Frederici Cody and Courtney Riley Cooper, Memories of Buffalo Bill (D. Appleton and Co., 1919), 255–56; WFC testimony, March 23, 1904.
113. For Hickok’s departure, see entry for March 11, 1874, in James Johnson Collection, MSS 1175, CHS. Cody notes that Hickok left at Rochester in Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 332–33. For Cody’s family moving to Rochester, see Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 102–3. Cody testified in 1904 that Louisa moved to Rochester when the combination played there in 1874, which makes the date of her move March 10–11. See WFC testimony and Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 331.
114. “A Disgrace to Our Civilization,” New York Herald, Aug. 11, 1876, p. 4.
115. Controversy in King, Campaigning with Crook, 39: Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 73; and Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 142. Madsen’s conversation is related in Homer Croy, Trigger Marshall: The Story of Chris Madsen (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1958), 12; also Homer Croy, “How Buffalo Bill Killed Chief Yellow Hand,” The American Weekly, June 8, 1958, pp. 11–13, clipping in MS 62 Don Russell Collection, Series 1:R, Military, Box 7/3, BBHC.
116. “Buffalo Bill,” n.d., n.p., Notices of Buffalo Bill, 1879–80, BBHC.
117. “The Knight of the Plains,” n.d., n.p., Notices of Buffalo Bill, 1879–80, BBHC.
118. “Buffalo Bill,” Notices of Buffalo Bill, 1879–80, p. 25, BBHC.
119. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 238; John Culhane, The American Circus: An Illustrated History (New York: Henry Holt, 1990), 92; Miller, Captain Jack Crawford, 87–111.
120. Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled; Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow; for prices and affordability (or lack thereof) in the theater, see Nasaw, Going Out, 13–24.
121. “Another Anti-Rent League,” New York Times, Aug. 1, 1878, p. 8.
122. “A Notorious Locality,” New York Times, Sept. 1881, p. 2. Another Buffalo Bill, a man named Horton, ran a boardinghouse and stabbed a man named Grau in a fight over an alleged insult Grau had made to Horton’s wife. “A Serious Stabbing Affray,” New York Times, Sept. 23, 1875, p. 2.
123. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 97.
124. “Cincinnati,” n.d., n.p., “Pike’s Opera-House,” n.d., n.p., WFC Scrapbook, BBHC.
125. Keim, Sheridan’s Troopers on the Borders, 3.
126. “Indianapolis,” Acadamy [sic] of Music, n.p., n.d., WFC Scrapbook, Stage Play Notices and Reviews, 1875–80, BBHC.
127. Reviews of Cody’s autobiography are in “Notices of Buffalo Bill Season of 1879–80,” BBHC, 60, 61, 64. Typical is the reviewer who writes that Cody tells his experiences “in a plain straight-forward manner and with no effort at braggadacio [sic].” Trip to Europe is in Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 365; and WFC to Robert Haslam, June 20, 1883, Robert Haslam Scrapbook, CHS.
CHAPTER EIGHT: INDIANS, HORSES
1. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 297. It is also likely that Cody’s friend John Y. Nelson, who was married to a Lakota woman and spoke fluent Lakota, may have played a role. Nelson’s home was at the winter village of Whistler’s band, not far from the fort; local settlers sometimes called the tipi encampment “Sioux City.” Ena Ballantine Papers. Whistler was a leading chief of Spotted Tail’s Brulés. George Hyde, Red Cloud’s Folk: A History of the Oglala Sioux Indians (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1937) , 85.
2. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 57–58; Reddin, Wild West Shows, 1–52.
3. Cesare Marino, The Remarkable Carlo Gentile: Pioneer Italian Photographer of the American Frontier (Nevada City, CA: Carl Mautz Publishing, 1998), 45.
4. Peter Iverson, Carlos Montezuma and the Changing World of American Indians (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982).
5. Marino, Remarkable Carlo Gentile, 45.
6. Keim, Sheridan’s Troopers on the Borders, 123–24; Stanley, My Early Travels and Adventures, 279; Roger T. Grange, “Fort Robinson, Outpost on the Plains,” Nebraska History 39, no. 3 (Sept. 1958): 217–18; James T. King, “The Republican River Expedition, June–July 1869,” Nebraska History 41, no. 3 (Sept. 1960): 173.
7. James R. Walker, Lakota Society, ed. Raymond J. DeMallie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 65–66; West, Contested Plains, 325; Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 134.
8. “An Indian Skirmish,” New York Times, Dec. 11, 1881, p. 13.
9. WFC to Sam Hall, July 5, 1879, MS 6 Series I:B Css, Box 1/6, BBHC: “I did say that I would never again have another Scout or a western man with me that is one [illeg.] I would work up. for just as soon as they see their names in print a few times they git the big head and want to start a company of their own. I will name a few. Wild Bill. Texas Jack. John Nelson. Oregon Bill. Kit Carson. Capt. Jack. etc. all busted flat before they were out a month and wanted to come back because I would not take them then they talked about me.”
10. Russell, Lives and Legends, 258.
11. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 163.
12. Spotted Tail’s moderate stance toward the United States eventually contributed to his murder at the hands of another Lakota. For Spotted Tail and Sword, see Carl Waldman, Biographical Dictionary of American Indian History, rev. ed. (New York: Facts on File, 2001), 369–71; Hyde, Red Cloud’s Folk, 174, 223, 226. Also for Sword, see Harvey Markowitz, “George Sword,” in Encyclopedia of North American Indians, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), <http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/naind/html/na037900_swordgeorge.htm> online citation, March 7, 2005. Two Bears was a Hunkpapa who had made a name for himself as a Lakota dissident through his support for U.S. Army officers and the Peace Policy, as well as the missionary Father DeSmet. He would also become a go-between for agent McLaughlin and the Hunkpapa at Standing Rock Reservation in the early 1880s. Robert Utley, The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), 67, 79, 252.
13. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 364; Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 320–28.
14. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 11: 365.
15. Utley, Lance and the Shield, 263.
16. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 163.
17. Moses, Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians.
18. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 164.
19. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 223.
20. Robert Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: Images of an Idea from Columbus to the Present (New York: Afred A. Knopf, 1978).
21. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 139; Sell and Weybright, Buffalo Bill and the Wild West, 147.
22. “Buffalo Bill,” unattributed clipping, n.d., WFC Scrapbook 1879, BBHC.
23. “Buffalo Bill,” unattributed clipping, n.d., WFC Scrapbook, 1879, BBHC.
24. Quoted in Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 185.
25. Joe Starita, The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge: A Lakota Odyssey (1995; rprt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 150–51, 173.
26. Vine Deloria, Jr., “The Indians,” in Hassrick et al., Buffalo Bill and the Wild West, 49–50.
27. Untitled clipping, n.d., n.p., in WFC Scrapbook, Stage Play Notices and Reviews, 1875–80, BBHC.
28. Daryl Jones, The Dime Novel Western (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1978), 28–34.
29. Jones, Dime Novel Western, 28–34.
30. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Clyde Griffen, “Reconstructing Masculinity from the Evangelical Revival to the Waning of Progressivism: A Speculative Synthesis,” in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 183–204; Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: Norton, 2000), 151–52.
31. Stanley, My Early Travels and Adventures, 154.
32. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 140.
33. Agnes Wright Spring, Cheyenne and Black Hills Stage and Express Routes (Glendale, CA: Caxton Press, 1948), 62. Cody met with Sioux diplomats who traveled to Washington about the matter, and likely tried to convince them to sign away the land (p. 64).
34. “An Interview with the Hon. W. F. Cody,” Montreal Herald and Daily Commercial Gazette, Aug. 17, 1885, clipping in Series VI:G, Box 1, Folder 15, BBHC.
35. See the article on David L. Payne in BBWW 1884 program (Hartford, CT: Calhoun Printing, 1884), n.p.
36. Russell, Lives and Legends, 305; Arrell Morgan Gibson, Oklahoma: A History of Five Centuries,2nd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1981), 173–78; Carl Coke Rister, Land Hunger: David L. Payne and the Boomers (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1942).
37. Smith, View from Officers’ Row, 92–93.
38. Smith, View from Officers’ Row, 92–93; Utley, Frontier Regulars, 188–92.
39. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 82.
40. For quote, see Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 185.
41. Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 180.
42. Quoted in Utley, Frontier Regulars, 111.
43. Quotes from Crook, Howard, and Miles from Smith, View from Officers’ Row, 118–21, 125; Sheridan from Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 182–83.
44. Smith, View from Officers’ Row, 114.
45. Smith, View from Officers’ Row, 113–38.
46. Life on the Border role book, MS 126, WFC Collection, Box 1, Folder 4, CHS.
47. All quotes from Smith, View from Officers’ Row, 118–21.
48. Smith, View from Officers’ Row, 125.
49. Smith, View from Officers’ Row, 134–35.
50. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 280. For Henry A. Ward, see Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 308. For Sioux hostility to Marsh, see Spring, Cheyenne and Black Hills Stage and Express Routes, 45–46.
51. Utley, Life in Custer’s Cavalry, 72.
52. Richard Irving Dodge, Our Wild Indians: Thirty-Three Years’ Personal Experience of the Red Men of the Great West (1882; rprt. New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 337.
53. Davis, “Summer on the Plains,” 303.
54. Armes, Ups and Downs of an Army Officer, 193.
55. Armes, Ups and Downs of an Army Officer, 194.
56. Dodge, Our Wild Indians, 582.
57. Janet M. Davis, The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 16.
58. Davis, Circus Age, 17.
59. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 211.
60. Quotes from BBWW 1901 program (Buffalo, NY: Courier, 1901), 3.
61. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 172; for buffalo horses, see John Ewers, The Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1955).
62. Dodge, Our Wild Indians, 341–42.
63. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 269.
64. Davis, Circus Age, 20.
65. Davis, Circus Age, 15–36, 39–46.
66. Davis, Circus Age, 93–94.
67. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 106–7, 113–14.
68. Davis, Circus Age, 31–32.
69. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 179–80.
70. Davis, Circus Age, 7, 21, 39–41, 45.
71. Davis, Circus Age, 32.
72. Dan Castello was also part of this partnership, but he soon departed. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 169–70.
73. “Barnum’s Roman Hippodrome,” New York Times, April 25, 1874, p. 7.
74. Davis, Circus Age, 40.
75. Elbert R. Bowen, “The Circus in Early Rural Missouri,” Missouri Historical Review 47, no. 10 (1952): 1–17; Deahl, “Nebraska’s Unique Contribution,” 283–98.
76. Nellie Snyder Yost, Buffalo Bill, 30–33, 41; also the same author’s The Call of the Range: The Story of the Nebraska Stock Growers Association (Denver, CO: Sage Books, 1966).
77. James C. Olson and Ronald C. Naugle, History of Nebraska, 3rd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 190–93.
78. Olson and Naugle, History of Nebraska, 191–92; John Bratt, Trails of Yesterday (Chicago: The University Publishing Co., 1921), 278; lost money is in WFC to Sam Hall, May 9, 1879, MS 6 Series I:B Css Box 1/6, BBHC.
79. Bratt, Trails of Yesterday, 279.
80. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 363.
81. Bratt, Trails of Yesterday, 279.
82. Bratt, Trails of Yesterday, 279.
83. Richard W. Slatta, Cowboys of the Americas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 141–42.
84. An 1844 pickup contest between Texas Rangers, Indians, and Hispanics in San Antonio was echoed in a similar contest at the Texas State Fair in 1852. Slatta, Cowboys of the Americas, 139.
85. In the first few years of the Wild West show, one act featured a cowboy called Mustang Jack, who leapt over a tall horse from a standing start. Such feats were a range standard, too. Cowboy competition extended to physical feats not necessarily associated with cowboy skills. The Dismal River roundup included swimming races. Throughout Mexico and South America, cowboys eschewed walking or running on foot, but in the United States, cowboys not only ran footraces, but challenged one another to jumping contests, including the high jump, the broad jump, and the triple jump (or “hop, step, and jump” as it was known at the time). Slatta, Cowboys of the Americas, 140–41.
86. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 362.
87. Yost, Buffalo Bill, 118–22.
88. Nate Salsbury, “Cody’s Personal Representatives,” typescript, YCAL MSS 17, NSP; also Nate Salsbury, “The Origin of the Wild West Show,” Colorado Magazine 32, no. 3 (July 1955): 205–8, original in YCAL MSS 17, NSP.
CHAPTER NINE: DOMESTICATING THE WILD WEST
1. Yost, Buffalo Bill, 132–33.
2. For concerns about unsuitable entertainment, see Allen, Horrible Prettiness; John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 6–7. “Better class of people” in WFC to W. F. Carver, Feb. 11, 1883, WA MSS S-1621, Beinecke Library, New Haven, CT.
3. For middle-class women in audiences, see Nasaw, Going Out, 18, 26. For the appeal of the Wild West show to families, see “The Wild West,” Montreal Herald and Commercial Gazette, Aug. 17, 1885, n.p., clipping in Series VI:G Box 1, folder 15, BBHC.
4. The phrase “Westward the Course of Empire,” from an eighteenth-century poem by Bishop Berkeley, was widely used in American painting, and it appeared in Wild West show posters, too. See Jack Rennert, 100 Posters of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (New York: Darien House, 1976), foldout A. Anxieties about national decay also inspired art. Between 1835 and 1839, Thomas Cole, America’s most famous landscape painter, produced a four-part series of paintings which he titled The Course of Empire. The paintings illustrated a people’s progress from wilderness savagery, through pastoral and commercial stages to imperial grandeur, before falling into decadence and fiery collapse. Based on the experience of Rome, the paintings suggested America’s own passage from wilderness beginnings to nascent imperial grandeur. The Course of Empire both celebrated progress and questioned its outcome. All eyes turned westward in the nineteenth century, and most remained optimistic. But Cole’s Course of Empire might just as well have been titled “Downward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.” See Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 10, 19–20, 110.
5. Quoted in Lears, No Place of Grace, 50.
6. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 84–88; also Lears, No Place of Grace, 49–51.
7. Bernard Bailyn, Robert Dallek, David Brion Davis, David Herbert Donald, John L. Thomas, and Gordon S. Wood, The Great Republic: A History of the American People, 2 vols. 4th ed. (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1992), 2:228–29; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encountered Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 6: “Between 1870 and 1920, some twenty-six million immigrants entered the United States.”
8. See David M. Wrobel, The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993); G. Edward White, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989).
9. Robert A. Woods, ed., The City Wilderness: A Settlement Study by Residents and Associates of the South End House (1898; rprt. New York: Garrett Press, 1970); Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 1174–75; Robert W. Cherny, American Politics in the Gilded Age, 1868–1900 (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson Press, 1997), 136; Eric Rauchway, Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 133–35. Also see Katherine Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830–1902 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Victoria Brown, The Education of Jane Addams (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Rosalind Rosenberg, Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 25–35.
10. Peggy Samuels and Harold Samuels, Frederic Remington (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 33; Remington quoted in G. Edward White, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 109.
11. Remington’s painting of Buffalo Bill in 1899 was reproduced in Helen Cody Wetmore’s biography of her brother, Last of the Great Scouts (1899; rprt. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1918), and on the covers of show programs for 1901, with Remington’s permission. See BBWW 1901 program (Buffalo, NY: Courier, 1901).
12. Dr. N. Allen, “Changes in Population,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 38, no. 225 (Feb. 1869): 386.
13. Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, 6 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1889–96); Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 170–215.
14. “Actresses See Cowboys,” New York Advertiser, July 31, 1894, in NSS, 1894, WH72, Series 7, Box 4, DPL.
15. Brick Pomeroy, quoted in BBWW 1899 program, p. 11. For G. Stanley Hall and educational theory, see Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 88–101.
16. “Women’s Kingdom,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 20, 1883, p. 12; “Female Suffrage and Woman’s Advancement,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 21, 1883, p. 4.
17. Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 23–45; Lears, No Place of Grace, 103–7; also Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 56–59.
18. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 63–87, esp. 77.
19. Orvell, Real Thing, 77, 101.
20. Bachmann, quoted in Rennert, 100 Posters of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 4.
21. WFC to Carver, Feb. 11, 1883, WA MSS S-1621, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
22. Buffalo Bill and Dr. Carver Wild West, Rocky Mountain, and Prairie Exhibition Program 1883 (Hartford, CT: Calhoun Printing), n.p., [hereafter BBDC]; BBWW 1885 program, n.p., Cody Collection, WH 72, Box 2/19, DPL-WHR.
23. Quotes from Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 95, 146; for Matthewson, see “Real Buffalo Bill,” Chicago Post, July 14, 1894, and “He Met Buffalo Bill,” New York Press, Sept. 3, 1894, both clippings in NSS, vol. 4; George E. Hyde, Life of George Bent: Written from His Letters, ed. Savoie Lottinville (Norman: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), 268; Yost, Buffalo Bill, 374–75.
24. See “New Jersey’s Farm Work,” New York Times, Sept. 16, 1884, p. 8.
25. For a survey of competing Wild West shows, see Don Russell, The Wild West: A History of the Wild West Shows (Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum, 1970); Paul Reddin, Wild West Shows (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999). For Samuel Franklin Cody, see Garry Jenkins, “Colonel” Cody and the Flying Cathedral: The Adventures of the Cowboy Who Conquered Britain’s Skies (London: Simon and Schuster, 1999), esp. 8–12.
26. WFC to William Carver, Feb. 11, 1883, WA MSS S-1621, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
27. Moses, Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 23.
28. Carver’s fraudulent biography is in BBDC 1883 program (Hartford, CT: Calhoun, 1883), n.p. Carver paid $200 for 160 acres of North Platte property in 1874. See WA MSS S-1621, Beinecke Library; see also Yost, Call of the Range, 106; and Yost, Buffalo Bill, 126–27. For a full-length biography of Carver which accepts all of his fabrications uncritically, see Raymond W. Thorp, Spirit Gun of the West (Glendale, CA: A. H. Clark, 1957).
29. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 337.
30. Salsbury, “The Origins of the Wild West Show,” in YCAL MSS 17, NSP, 207. The reference to a piano stool came from Carver’s unsuccessful attempt to import a piano to his mother’s house near North Platte. See Yost, Call of the Range, 106.
31. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 66.
32. “Carver’s Big Rifle Feat,” New York Times, July 14, 1878, p. 12; also, “The Great Rifle Shot,” New York Times, July 5, 1878, p. 8.
33. James B. Trefethen, “They Were All Sure Shots,” American Heritage (April 1962): 26–32.
34. WFC to W. F. Carver, Feb. 11, 1883, WA MSS S-1621, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
35. WFC to Carver, n.d.; Cody to Carver, Feb. 11, 1883; WFC to Carver, Feb. 28, 1883, in WA MSS S-1621, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
36. George Ward Nichols, “Wild Bill,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (Feb. 1867): 274; also Webb, Buffalo Land, 145.
37. “The Grand Duke’s Hunt—General Sheridan and ‘Buffalo Bill’ Lead the Way—At Grand Battue on the Plains,” New York Herald, Jan. 14, 1872, p. 7.
38. “Buffalo Bill,” undated clipping, BB Scrapbook, 1879, BBHC.
39. Yost, Buffalo Bill, 127; Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 265.
40. Yost, Buffalo Bill, 128.
41. Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953), 49.
42. The ethnological congress was pioneered by a German circus owner, Carl Hagenbeck, in 1874. Davis, Circus Age, 118.
43. BBDC 1883, n.p.
44. BBDC 1883, n.p.
45. This synopsis and quote are from Yost, Buffalo Bill, 134–36.
46. BBDC 1883, n.p.
47. Russell, Lives and Legends, 295.
48. Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, “The Centrality of the Horse in the Nineteenth-Century American City,” in The Making of Urban America, ed. Raymond Mohl, 2nd ed., (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1997), 109.
49. “Pictures of the Plains,” The World (New York), July 16, 1886, p. 3. Within months, the tribute was reprinted in the London dramatic publication The Era (“The ‘Wild West’ Show,” The Era, Sept. 18, 1886, p. 10). Less than two years later, John Burke, Cody’s ghostwriter, repeated it for an American readership in Story of the Wild West and Camp-FireChats (1888; rprt. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 714–15. The description was imitated and plagiarized thereafter, as when Percy MacKaye described Cody as “veritably a Centaur,” in 1927, and when Stella Foote recalled him as “the complete restoration of the Centaur,” in 1954. MacKaye, Epoch, 2:91; Foote, Letters from “Buffalo Bill,” 15.
50. “Transatlantic Centaurs,” see The Era, April 23, 1887, clipping in Johnny Baker Scrapbook, DPL-WHR. For “coming centaur,” see Cody, Story of the Wild West, 721.
51. Firmage, E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1904–1962, 90.
52. J. Michael Padgett, quoted in “Human Fate: Part Beast, Part Angel,” New York Times, Oct. 31, 2003, p. B42.
53. Page DuBois, Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1982), 25–42.
54. See Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 16; Deloria, Playing Indian, 107–9; Herman, Hunting and the American Imagination, 237–69. Remington himself played football at Yale in 1880. See Samuels and Samuels, Frederic Remington, 26–27.
55. Yost, Buffalo Bill, 135.
56. Handcrafted, individually numbered and named (“The Deadwood,” “The Wyoming”), ornamented with hand-painted scrollwork and original landscape paintings on their doors, these coaches were frontier “originals” in two ways: each was unique, and no other company could afford to mimic their master craftsmanship (which was so painstaking that only three thousand of them were ever manufactured). Spring, Cheyenne and Black Hills Stage Routes, 88–89, 334; also “Stagecoach,” in New Encyclopedia of the American West, 1074–75.
57. “Staging in the Far West,” Harper’s Weekly, July 4, 1874, p. 556.
58. In 1884, the owners of the Cheyenne and Black Hills Stage Line sold out when the railroad extended from Cheyenne to the Black Hills. In 1887, the new owner of the line, Russell Thorp, “staged” a final journey of the Deadwood stage for paying customers in Cheyenne, with passengers, driver, and vehicle posing for a famous photograph of “the last coach out” just before they departed. “Days of ’49” was a popular miners’ song in the Black Hills. See Rodman W. Paul, Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 1848–1800 (1973; rprt. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1974), 178–79; for “last coach out,” see Spring, Cheyenne and Black Hills Stage Routes, 334–35. For trolleys, see Wild West Diary of 1896, M. B. Bailey, reprinted in Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 352.
59. BBDC 1883 program, n.p.
60. “The Wild West Show,” clipping attached to sketch of Deadwood stage pursuit, in WFC Scrapbook, 1887, Buffalo Bill Museum, Lookout Mountain, CO.
61. Russell, Lives and Legends, 295; Spring, Cheyenne and Black Hills Stage and Express Routes, 359.
62. Cody himself described his route out of the Plains in Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 359; he recounted it again in WFC testimony, March 6, 1905, Folder 13, 18–19, in CC.
63. In other ways, too, its real history diverged considerably from show accounts. If this coach was named “The Deadwood,” it was only one of several dozen to ply the route between Deadwood and Cheyenne. The Cheyenne and Black Hills Stage Line, the original proprietor of this coach, owned thirty Abbot and Downing Concords. When he established the line at the beginning of the Black Hills gold rush in 1874, Luke Voorhees ordered new coaches (not veterans dating from 1863). Later, he outfitted two so-called “treasure coaches,” Concord coaches with steel plates bolted to the inside of their compartments, and small portholes for windows—through which guards fired their weapons. During the Cold Spring holdup, a steel-plated coach named “The Monitor” was attacked by a gang of bandits who killed one guard and wounded others before finally seizing the coach. The famed “Deadwood” of Buffalo Bill’s arena had no steel plates, no portholes—and no connection to the Cold Spring holdup. Spring, Cheyenne and Black Hills Stage and Express Routes, 248–49, 265–75.
64. Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower, Old Diaries, 1881–1901 (London: John Murray, 1902), 107–8.
65. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 180.
66. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 180.
67. Although he toyed with the idea of commissioning gamblers to play the crowd, he turned away from it. In future years, whenever small-money shell games and faro dealers became too numerous on the fringes, Cody would send out show cowboys to break their equipment—and their noses, too. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 117–18.
68. “Over the arena proper where the exhibition is given there is nothing but the blue vault of the sky,” claimed Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World 1898 Show Courier (New York: J. A. Rudolph, 1898), 32.
69. Lears, No Place of Grace, 23.
70. Nate Salsbury, “A Card from Nate Salsbury,” The Frontier Express—Buffalo Bill Wild West Courier 12, no. 95 (1895), BBHC.
71. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, “in no wise partaking of the nature of a ‘circus,’ will be at once new, startling, and instructive,” claimed Wild West show programs, and publicists never tired of contrasting the Wild West with the “old played out circus-menagerie combination.” John Burke, “Salutatory” in BBWW 1885 program (Hartford, CT: Calhoun Printing, 1885), n.p.; “played out circus-menagerie” in “The Wild West,” Montreal Herald,Aug. 12, 1885, in NSS, vol. 1, 1885–86, DPL.
72. Rennert, 100 Posters of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 5.
73. Steele Mackaye, quoted in Walter Havighurst, Annie Oakley of the Wild West (1954, rprt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 86.
74. “The Wild West,” Free Press and Times, Aug. 6, 1885; in NSS, vol. 1, 1885–86, DPL.
75. Route from Russell, Lives and Legends, 295–99; quote from WFC to Julia Cody Goodman, Aug. 16, 1883, in Foote, Letters from “Buffalo Bill,” 20.
76. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 68–69;
77. Russell, Lives and Legends, 297.
78. Courtney Riley Cooper, quoted in Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 69.
79. Cody to Sam Hall, Sept. 2, 1879, MS 6 Series I:B Css Box 1/6, BBHC.
80. “Finding a Fortune,” transcript of article from Denver Tribune, March 28, 1882, in MSS 126, Box 1, CHS; also WFC to Al Goodman, Feb. 12, 1882, MS 6 Series I:B Css Box 1/7, BBHC. The pattern of legal fights with extended relatives was something of a family tradition. After Isaac Cody died, his brothers, Joseph and Elijah, battled each other in a suit over unpaid debts, tying up Isaac Cody’s estate in probate court. See Leavenworth County Probate Court, Case File: Joseph Cody v. Elijah Cody, June 8, 1857, KSHS, Topeka, KS.
81. WFC testimony, Denver, March 23, 1904, p. 11; CC Folder 13; also Russell, Lives and Legends, 257–58.
82. WFC testimony, March 23, 1904, Folder 2, p. 13.
83. Yost, Buffalo Bill, 154–55; Foote, Letters from “Buffalo Bill,” 22.
84. WFC to Julia Cody Goodman, Sept. 24, 1883, in Foote, Letters from “Buffalo Bill,” 21. For birth of Irma, see Yost, Buffalo Bill, 126.
85. Yost, Buffalo Bill, 142.
86. McCoy, Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade, 202, 204; Terry Jordan, North American Cattle Ranching Frontiers: Origins, Diffusion, Differentiation (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1997), 210–11, 232–34.
87. Robert Zeigler, “The Cowboy Strike of 1883: Its Causes and Meaning,” West Texas HistoricalAssociation Year Book 47 (1971): 33; Don D. Walker, Clio’s Cowboys: Studies in the Historiography of the Cattle Trade (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 141; Hine and Faragher, American West, 322.
88. BBWW 1885 program, n.p.; 1893 program, 25–26. Omohundro’s article originally appeared as “The Cow-Boy,” Spirit of the Times, March 24, 1877. See Herschel C. Logan, Buckskin and Satin (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Co., 1954), 26–30.
89. Robert Utley, Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989); Casey Tefertiller, Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend (New York: John Wiley, 1997).
90. WFC to “Dear Sister and Brother,” Sept. 24, 1883, in Foote, Letters from “Buffalo Bill,” 21.
91. “The Wild West,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 18, 1883, p. 3. On dime novels and crime, see “Sunday Tribune,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 20, 1883, p. 4. “The life of ‘Red Bill,’ alias ‘Razor Joe,’ a thief who has just died in a Philadelphia prison, is printed in another column. It is recommended to the young as less likely to inspire a criminal inclination than the current histories of Jesse James and ‘Cowboy Charley.’ ” See also Denning, Mechanic Accents.
92. “The Wild West,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 18, 1883, p. 3.
93. “The Dime Novel,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 18, 1883, p. 8.
94. Salsbury, “The Origin of the Wild West Show,” in YCAL MSS 17, NSP Box 2/63.
95. Cecil Smith, “The Road to Musical Comedy,” Theatre Arts, Nov. 1947, pp. 57–58.
96. “Salsbury’s Troubadors at the Grand Opera House,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 16, 1883, p. 5.
97. BBDC 1883 program, M Cody Box 6, DPL.
98. Nate Salsbury, “Long Hair and a Plug Hat,” typescript in YCAL MSS 17, NSP.
99. See, for example, Cody’s own celebration of the fact that his show cast was “everywhere acclaimed gentlemen,” and “free of impure associations,” in “The Wild West,” Montreal Herald and Commercial Gazette, Aug. 17, 1885, n.p., clipping in Series VI:G, Box 1, Folder 15, BBHC.
100. WFC to Nate Salsbury, n.d., YCAL MSS 17, NSP, Box 1, Folder 4.
101. Sarah J. Blackstone, Buckskin, Bullets, and Business: A History of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 54.
102. For descriptions of the scene, see “Royalty at the ‘Wild West,’ ” The Era, May 7, 1887, p. 15; “Buffalo Bill,” The Globe (Toronto), Aug. 19, 1885, clipping in Series VI:G, Box 1, Folder 15, BBHC. In those few cases when it was not the show finale, it was almost always included earlier in the program. Alternative finales included a cyclone during parts of the 1886 and 1887 seasons, the battle of Tsien-Tsin in 1901, and an avalanche in 1907. BBWW 1886 (Madison Square Garden Program), Inaugural Invitation Exhibition of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” (Manchester, UK: Guardian Printing Works, 1887), n.p., M Cody Box 6, DPL-WHR; BBWW 1907, various programs, MS 6:VIA, BBHC.
103. Richard White has noted that by the 1890s the log cabin served as an icon of progressive history, the humble origins of a great nation. White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,” 19–26.
104. David Nasaw, Going Out, 15: “The home—not the club, the saloon, the firehouse, or the theater—was the heart and soul of middle-class existence.” Mary Ryan, Cradle of the MiddleClass, 155–85; Richard Sennett, Families Against the City: Middle-Class Homes of IndustrialChicago, 1872–1890 (New York, 1974), 52–53, 224.
105. Nate Salsbury, “A Dilemma,” typescript, n.d., YCAL MSS 17, NSP, Box 2163; Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 70–71.
106. WFC to N. Salsbury, Feb. 14, 1885, YCAL MSS 17, NSP, Box 1/4.
107. WFC to N. Salsbury, March 9, 1885, YCAL MSS 17, NSP, Box 1/4.
108. Russell, Lives and Legends, 311–13.
109. Discussion of the merits of shooting skill, as opposed to stage tricks, was widespread. See “The Referee,” n.d., n.p., clipping in Annie Oakley Scrapbook, 1887, BBHC.
110. Russell, Lives and Legends, 315.
111. Allen, Horrible Prettiness.
112. Nasaw, Going Out, 26.
113. Glenda Riley, The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 22–26.
114. See the advertisement for the Wild West show in the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, Oct. 19, 1884, p. 12.
115. Russell, Lives and Legends, 314.
116. The theory of “male essence” was articulated by George H. Naphey, The Transmission of Life: Counsels on the Nature and Hygiene of the Masculine Function, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: H. C. Watts, 1878). For further discussion, see Bram Dijkstra, Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 48–49, 80–90; see also Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1978); Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 112–16.
117. Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 15–18.
118. Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 22; Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 33–35.
119. “Marksmanship of the Militia,” New York Times, Sept. 12, 1877, p. 4.
120. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 202; Utley, Frontier Regulars, 147–48.
121. Warren, Hunter’s Game, 45, 71–105.
122. BBWW 1884 program (Hartford, CT: Calhoun Printers, 1884), n.p.; James W. Wojtowicz, The W. F. Cody Buffalo Bill Collector’s Guide with Values (Paducah, KY: Collector Books, 1998), 13.
123. Mexican displays of skill were restricted to rope tricks. Indians were marvelous riders, and seem to have carried guns some of the time, but had no room to display marksmanship in the show. In the buffalo hunt they carried lances. For buffalo hunt and Custer’s Last Stand photos, see Isabelle S. Sayers, Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (New York: Dover Publications, 1981), 65–66.
124. BBWW 1884 program; Wojtowicz, Buffalo Bill Collector’s Guide, 13.
125. See the ad in Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, Oct. 19, 1884, p. 12.
126. Walter Havighurst, Annie Oakley of the Wild West, 9; Annie Fern Swartout, Missie: An HistoricalBiography of Annie Oakley (Blanchester, OH: Brown Publishing Co, 1947), 3–34; see also Riley, Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley; Sayers, Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. For much of the discussion that follows, I am indebted to Christine Bold, “Introduction,” in Walter Havighurst, Annie Oakley of the Wild West, ix–xvii.
127. “Camp Sketches No. IV: Annie Oakley,” The Topical Times (UK), June 23, 1887, clipping in Julia Cody Goodman Scrapbook, MS 58 Box 1, NSHS.
128. Even Oakley’s niece, Annie Fern Swartout, in a loving biography, refers to Oakley’s fixation with the name as “an obsession,” and concludes “my dear aunt was utterly in the wrong” to expunge it from family records. Swartout, Missie, 41–42. Also Russell, Lives and Legends, 312.
129. Not even family members could explain why Oakley chose this name. Swartout, Missie, 68.
130. Indeed, her extended family reviled her for becoming an entertainer. Swartout, Missie, 68.
131. Russell, Lives and Legends, 315.
132. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 73.
133. Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 181. For wives and the restraint of male sexuality, see John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 179.
134. “Women and the home represented stability in a rapidly changing society, and women were forced into a more circumscribed position to facilitate the transition to an industrial society.” Joyce Warren, quoted in Tracy Davis, “Annie Oakley and Her Ideal Husband of No Importance,” p. 302, in Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 229–312.
135. Other scholars have argued that Annie Oakley’s act was in fact a conservative spectacle for being a complete inversion of domestic norms, therein heightening awareness and sensitivity to the “normal” domestic order. See Tracy C. Davis, “Shotgun Wedlock: Annie Oakley’s Power Politics in the Wild West,” p. 153, in Gender in Performance: The Presentation of Difference in the Performing Arts, ed. Laurence Senelick (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992), 140–53.
136. The Courier of London, n.d., Annie Oakley Scrapbook, 1887, BBHC.
137. Unattributed clipping, n.d., MS 126 WFC Collection, Box 2, Folder 19, CHS. For a sample of how reformers saw the bicycle, see Frances E. Willard’s 1895 memoir of bicycle riding and social advocacy. Originally published under the title A Wheel Within a Wheel, it is available in revised form as How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, ed. Carol O’Hare (Sunnyvale, CA: Fair Oaks Publishing, 1991).
138. Bold, “Introduction,” xii.
139. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 72–73.
140. C. L. Daily to “Dear Folks,” n.d., Neuilly, France, 22nd (no month), 1889, copy in BBHC; there is a photo of Princess Winona in William Cody Bradford Scrapbook, P. 6.612.20A, BBHC.
141. For Smith’s years with the show, see BBWW, 1886–89, BBHC; Wojtowicz, Buffalo Bill’s Collector’s Guide, 14–17. Georgia Duffy was with the show as early as 1886. She was married to Tom Duffy, one of the show’s cowboys. See “Pictures of the Plains,” The World (NY), July 16, 1886, p. 3; and berth assignments for the 1887 trip to London in “W. F. Cody Scrapbook, 1883–1886–1888,” BBHC.
142. For family, see Swartout, Missie, 79–80; for resentments, see Bold, “Introduction,” xv: “She seems to have regarded the other white female performers in the Wild West . . . as rivals to be vanquished, not sisters to be embraced.”
143. Cody, Story of the Wild West, 737.
144. Havighurst, Annie Oakley of the Wild West, 207–8.
145. Rennert, 100 Posters of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 8, 46.
146. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 1072.
147. “The Wild West,” (illegible attribution) clipping in WFC Scrapbook, 1887, Buffalo Bill Museum, Lookout Mountain, CO.
148. See the show programs, 1886–1916, in BBHC and DPL, or see the show program summaries in Wojtowicz, Buffalo Bill Collector’s Guide, 14–47. The frequency of the Virginia reel or quadrille on horseback scene is difficult to judge, given that it was often incorporated into the “Attack on the Emigrant Train” scene and not mentioned separately. For connection of the dance and emigrant train scenes, see BBWW programs for 1886, 1888, 1898, 1902, 1903, 1910. Wojtowicz, Buffalo Bill Collector’s Guide, 15–16.
149. See for example “Programme, Subject to Changes and Additions,” in the opening pages of BBWW 1885 program (Hartford, CT: Calhoun Printers), n.p.; also Rocky Bear, quoted in Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 212.
150. For Ma Whittaker in the Wild West show, see “The Wild West’s ‘Mamma,’ ” Brooklyn Citizen, Sept. 15, 1894; “City Camp Life,” Brooklyn Citizen, May 20, 1894; “With ‘Marm’ Whittaker,” New York Commercial Advertiser, June 16, 1894; all in NSS, vol. 4, CC, Series 7, Box 4.
151. Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-VictorianLondon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
152. In this sense the scene harkened to traditions of American melodrama. See Grimstead, Melodrama Unveiled; also Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 81–87. Thanks to Karen Halttunen for the insight.
153. In the words of one study, “Population movement was ubiquitous” in the nineteenth century. Michael Katz, Michael J. Doucet, and Mark J. Stern, The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), 113, 119.
154. The fact that the settler’s cabin itself occupied a prominent place in the arena throughout the show, so that all other acts swirled around it, suggested too that the home anchored the drama, and that all of the movement and energy on display in the arena would in fact end up there. See the arena photos, Series XI:J, Box 2, BBHC.
155. Rauchway, Murdering McKinley, 133–35.
156. Margaret Marsh, Suburban Lives (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 67–74; also Margaret Marsh, “Suburban Men and Masculine Domesticity, 1870–1915,” in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 111–28.
157. Marsh, Suburban Lives, 79.
158. In other ways, the show was at pains to remind people that the white people were only temporary nomads. Thus, in the 1887 season, the wagons were loaded with white families, as well as furniture and household effects, the very stuff of domesticity. For families, see “The Wild West Show,” The Era, May 14, 1887, Annie Oakley Scrapbook, 1887, BBHC. For furniture, see “Royal Visit to the Wild West,” The Sporting Life, May 12, 1887, Annie Oakley Scrapbook, BBHC.
159. For Cody’s correspondence requesting Sitting Bull for his show, see WFC to J. O. Lamar, April 29, 1885, Letters Received, 1881–1907, Box 239, no. 9492, RG 75, NARA; WFC to Secretary Lamar, May 2, 1885, Letters Received, 1881–1907, no. 10488, Box 241, RG 75, NARA. Sherman’s endorsement—“Sitting Bull is a humbug but has a popular fame on which he has a natural right to ‘bank’ ”—is in Utley, Lance and the Shield, 264.
160. Swartout, Missie, 91–92; “Camp Sketches—No. VII,” Topical Times (London), Aug. 13, 1887, in Annie Oakley Scrapbook, 1887, BBHC.
161. “Greek Meets Greek,” Buffalo Courier, n.d., reprinted in BBWW 1885 program, n.p. For sitting Bull’s adoption of Salsbury, “The Wild West,” Boston Daily Advertiser, July 28, 1885, NSS, vol. 1, 1885–86.
162. The Daily Witness, Aug. 12, 1885, clipping in NSS, vol. 1, 1885–86, DPL; the cabinet photograph is in BBHC, p. 69. 1844.
163. Utley, Lance and the Shield, 266.
164. Untitled clipping, New York Herald, July 12, 1886; “Happy Wild West Redmen,” The Sun, July 11, 1886; “The Sioux Dog Feast,” The Mail and Express, July 7, 1886; “Sioux Hymn Singers,” The Morning Journal, July 5, 1886; “A Fire on the Plains,” Telegram, June 28, 1886; all NSS, vol. 1, 1885–86, Microfilm 18, Reel 1, in WFC Collection, Western History Collection, DPL.
165. Havighurst, Annie Oakley of the Wild West, 85.