THERE PARD WAS LAYING, eyes closed and snoot flat in the dust. He had been hit in the head, which was one big smear of blood. I gathered him up in my arms, where as a limp weight he was quite a burden to carry the couple blocks home. I hadn’t ever lifted him before. At least he hadn’t turned cold yet. I thought about how he had traveled so far to find me after I left him behind at Cheyenne. I never had no human friend would of done that, and I didn’t blame humanity: I might be just the kind of person whose best friend naturally was an animal, on account of my shiftless ways, but the fact was I did have a dog who had been a fine pal, and now he was dead.
To relieve my sadness I developed quite a hatred for the Earps, the cowboys, the gambling, drinking, robbery, and killing that Tombstone consisted of for me, not remarkably different from Dodge in that respect, and now this goddam foolish fight, which was more like a slaughter, in which three young men had been gunned down mainly because Ike Clanton had shot his mouth off and couldn’t back it up.
I was even resentful of Bat Masterson for having led me to this town and then soon left himself. Why didn’t I go with him? Because anyplace was much the same as all, insofar as my life went. To be fair to Dodge and Tombstone and wherever else I had wandered, including even Deadwood after a while, I’ll bet, they all had or was developing a respectable element with decent ladies, children, schools, churches, and business activity in something other than whiskey, faro, and sporting women. In Tombstone right at the same time as all the mayhem I been telling you about, there was Sunday school picnics, ice-cream socials, private musicales, a wedding dance at the Cosmopolitan Hotel with a quadrille band (of which occasion the Epitaph waxed poetic: “Love looked love to eyes that spoke again, and all went merry as a wedding bell”), and even an organization called the Tombstone Literary and Debating Club. But why didn’t I participate in any of that uplifting activity? Because I was coarse and ignorant and half illiterate, as I have said many times before, and would of been ashamed to show up. Then why didn’t I try to improve myself? I tell you, I didn’t know how. You seen how I tried to do so, in my own way, in the case of Amanda Teasdale, and that was quite pathetic when you looked at it. I was sure it would take a woman to make me better than what I was and would likely stay if I associated with men only, and not just a female but a lady, and what specimen of the last-named would put up with me except to carry her luggage?
Well, I finally got Pard back to the shack that had been home to me and him, and put his body down and begun to dig a grave in the rear of the lot, or tried to in the material that passed for earth in that part of the world, but not having no pickaxe I had to use a broken-handled shovel I found someplace and managed to make only a fairly shallow hole in the ground which was sunbaked hard again despite the recent rains, and wrapped old Pard in my best shirt of blue-and-white check, and laid him to rest. Now I have always considered myself a religious person at the core, despite my lifelong avoidance of church (except when forced to go as a kid, and when besotted with Miss Hand), and I said a word or two commending my faithful friend to the Everywhere Spirit who made him and me, and then I apologized to Pard for not being able to bury him in his home ground of the Black Hills, after which I covered him with the dry dust I had scratched up.
But this arrangement didn’t look too secure against such living dogs, rodents, et cetera, as might catch the scent of his remains and make a meal of them, animals having no sentimentality whatever towards the dead, so I went looking for a boulder, hunk of iron, or other weight to batten down that grave, for I didn’t have anything of the sort at hand.
In my search I had gotten as far as Virgil Earp’s house without finding what I needed when who do I encounter but Allie just coming out the door.
“Virge will live,” says she though I hadn’t asked. “The bullet just went through the calf of his leg and didn’t hit no bone.”
“Glad to hear it,” I says. “Say, Allie, you wouldn’t know where I could find some big rocks without going out to the desert?”
“I expect you’re heading the wrong way,” says she. “You ain’t likely to find any from here on. They would of cleared them away when puttin’ up the buildin’s.”
“Yeah. I should of thought of that.”
“Say Jack,” she asked, “what’s wrong with your eyes? Get a faceful of dust? They’re right watery.”
“My dog got killed, Allie,” I says. “He was an awful good fellow.”
She wasn’t wearing her sunbonnet now, though the sun was as bright as ever: I figured being taken for Virgil’s mother was to blame. So when she squinted, I thought it was due to the glare, but in fact it was not. She was staring past me.
“Jack,” she says, “this ain’t the day for jokes.”
I hadn’t no idea of what she meant, and considering the situation I might of made an equally testy reply had I not heard at that moment a familiar whine and spun around in disbelief and saw Pard, his bloody head now caked with dust, trotting along lively as ever and producing that sound which in his case was one of triumph and not complaint.
Well sir, you can imagine what a joyful occasion it was, probably more for me than for Pard, who took everything in his stride including death when it come, but it hadn’t yet, and he seemed to consider being buried, coming to, and digging himself out as an entertaining puzzle I had arranged for him, and he was proud of having solved it.
I explained to Allie what happened, so she wouldn’t think I was trying to make a fool of her, and she says, “Well, I’m glad for you, Jack, for I know what a nice dog can mean to a person, but I still say you ought to get yourself a good woman too. Now I’m going down and fetch some soup meat from Bauer’s to put some strength back in Virge. I’ll save the bones for your pooch.”
I squatted down and examined Pard’s wound. His skull had been creased, and he had been coldcocked by the impact, but the bullet just tore across the skin of his crown without penetrating the solid bone underneath. “You was saved by your thick head.” I told him, and he twisted his face around and licked the hand I was examining him with and then runs off a little and back, like a puppy at play. Being near-killed seemed to of made him younger!
The events of that day hadn’t done so for me. I felt a deal better than when I buried him, but Pard’s coming back from the dead hadn’t changed my feeling about my way of and place in life, and from that minute on I was studying what I could do to improve it. I didn’t take long to come to the conclusion that to get a clean start I needed to get out of Tombstone, but not just to go to another town of the same sort. And so I probably hung around too long, which is what Allie said about her and Virgil too, and in their case it was worse than mine, as I will relate directly after I quick run through the other notable events of the fall of ’81.
After the big fight the town was more divided than ever between the two factions, that which supported the Earps, and them what favored the cowboys or anyway thought they got a raw deal, and there seemed to be more of the latter than before.
Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers had the biggest funeral Tombstone ever seen. They was laid out in dress suits, in coffins trimmed with silver and fronted with glass, and was so displayed in the window of Ritter’s undertaking establishment. The Tombstone Brass Band led the two hearses along Allen Street to the cemetery while watched by an audience of just about everybody in town.
But a coroner’s inquest failed to find the Earps to blame for the battle, and when Ike Clanton nevertheless brought murder charges against them and Doc Holliday, a justice of the peace named Spicer, a friend of the Earps (as was the mayor, the publisher of the Epitaph, and the postmaster, all of which was the same man, John Clum), found them justified in what they did, Virgil being chief of police, and they never went on trial except for these two hearings, in which each side produced eyewitnesses at variance with one another. Probably because I hadn’t been noticed back of that wagon, nobody from either faction called me to testify, and I sure didn’t volunteer. I never cared a whole lot for either side, but if I had told the unvarnished truth like I done here it would of served mostly the cowboys’ argument, so I would be helping thieves who was friends of holdup men and murderers and also offending Allie and Bat Masterson when he heard about it and maybe getting myself gunned down by Doc.
Not everything went the Earps’ way, though. The town council suspended Virgil as chief marshal, and believing their enemies might be plotting to kill them, the brothers and their families moved out of the Fremont Street houses and into the Cosmopolitan Hotel. Virge and Morgan was still recovering from their wounds. I rarely run into Allie after that move.
Speaking of wounds, Pard’s healed up before a week was out, but a new scar was added to his collection, this one like a part in the hair on the head of a person. His ways however had gotten tamer, and he hung around the shack more than before and wanted to be petted by me. Unfortunately that brand-new check shirt I had used as his burial shroud was a dead loss.
One brighter happening during this time in Tombstone was the opening of the Bird Cage Variety Theater, on Allen near Sixth, where only a year before Curly Bill Brocius, himself now not long for the world, killed the then marshal Fred White. Given my earlier ambitions to own a place like this, I would of been right envious, for it was real nice, with a saloon on one side and a theater on the other, the latter lined on both walls with hanging private boxes, to which bar girls delivered drinks, singing while they did so, but the main entertainment was on the stage, with all manner of performers, including in the future even the great Eddie Foy, who like so many of us come there from Dodge City, but I was gone by time he arrived, another violent event having hastened my overdue departure.
One night just after Christmas, Virgil Earp, leg healed now, was crossing Fifth Street right outside the Oriental, when several shotguns was fired at him from out of a building under construction across at the diagonal on Allen Street, the buckshot slugs shattering his elbow, and them that missed went into the walls and windows of the Crystal Palace saloon and some up through the ceiling into Doc Goodfellow’s office above.
Virge wasn’t killed, but his left arm had been made permanently unusable, and he was laid up worse than when he had the leg wound.
Three men, not identified, was seen fleeing the unfinished building on Allen, but had long disappeared by time pursuit was mounted. Wyatt might of been right to blame it on the cowboy element out for revenge, led by Ike Clanton.
I myself saw the incident as a strong suggestion that from now on this sort of thing would be a regular occurrence, with resultant sprays of lead throughout the neighborhoods where I lived and worked. Damn if I wanted to be maimed or killed in somebody else’s quarrel.
So I decided to leave soon as I could, and in a while I’ll tell you where I was heading, but first I’ll wind up my story of Tombstone.
I didn’t have no more possessions than I had brought with me a year earlier, but I had accumulated another nest egg of several hundred dollars, most of which I sewed into the tails of the new coat I bought me at the Summerfield Bros. Dry Goods rather than stuff it in my boots like some did, only to have to take them off and shake them upside down for a holdup man who stopped the stage, and I considered getting some armament for the journey, particularly for getting out of Arizona Territory, which had gotten so wild as to even upset President Chester Arthur, who wanted to police it with the Army, but hadn’t fired a gun for so long now I doubted my proficiency up against practiced outlaws, and the Apaches had quieted down, so maybe if held up I would pretend to be a preacher.
I went to the Cosmopolitan to say goodbye to Allie, who was looking after her husband in their room there. Virgil was sleeping at the time, so she stepped out in the hall for our conversation. He was going to recover, she thought, but had lost a lot of blood and would not ever again be able to do much with his left arm.
She then looks up and down the hallway, for the other brothers had rooms there too, and she lowers her voice and says, “This is the second time Virge got hurt lately. He got shot in the War too. But ain’t it funny Wyatt allus goes untouched?”
“I sure hope the marshal gets well soon,” I says. “I come to say that and also to tell you so long and thanks for being my friend while I been in Tombstone.”
“Well, Jack,” says she, “I don’t know what I done for you, but I’m proud you’re happy about it. And I’ll say this, I just wish Virge was strong enough so we could leave too. We should of got out when the gettin’ was good. Now I don’t know if we’ll ever get away.”
She looked more worried than I ever seen her, so I says, “Oh, sure you will.”
“I just have this feelin’ it’s going to get worse.”
“You’re a superstitious Irishman,” I says to cheer her up.
“God bless you, Jack,” says she with a grin, “and don’t forget what ole Allie told you: git yourself a good woman. Then if you are ever shot, you’ll have yourself a nurse.” Her grin was fading into a weepy look, so wishing her and hers all the best, I left.
Now before dropping the subject of Tombstone, to which I won’t be returning, let me tie up the loose ends, though everything from here on is hearsay.
Allie was right in her foreboding, though nothing further happened to Virgil in the way of physical damage. In March of that year, Morgan Earp was playing pool at Hatch’s billiard parlor when two shots come through the glass-paned door behind him, the first cutting through his spine and killing him, the second hitting near, but naturally just missing, his brother Wyatt.
Wyatt subsequently collected a gang including of course Doc Holliday and still another brother, Warren, and in the ensuing months pursued and shot down, sometimes in cold blood, a number of men he rightly or wrongly believed responsible for the back-shootings of his brothers, and Sheriff Behan again tried to arrest him for murder but as usual got nowhere, for now the Earp gang left the Territory. Meanwhile Allie and Virgil moved to California, where I believe Virge despite his impairment once more become a town marshal someplace.
A few years later Doc Holliday coughed himself to death from consumption up in Colorado. As to Kate Elder, I had the good fortune never to encounter her again, and I never heard what become of her except for a somewhat indecent account of her death which I never believed and won’t repeat, for you know my principles regarding the fair sex, except to say she was supposed to of been shot to death by a chance bullet that left no unnatural opening on her body.
Now given my occupation in both towns, I haven’t talked no more about silver mining at Tombstone than I did about longhorn cattle at Dodge, though these was respectively the main reasons them places existed, but I’m ashamed to say I never knowed much about such professions and won’t pretend I did, just so long as you don’t forget that my account of shooting and drinking, poker, faro, and calico queens doesn’t represent the whole of or even most of life in the Old West: it’s just the part that people seem to enjoy hearing about. In fact, before long it become all that Tombstone was remembered for by the rest of the world, for a few years after my time there, water, scarce on the surface of the earth in that region, got so abundant underground that them silver mines flooded and the veins of ore could no longer be reached, and pumping the water out cost more than the mined metal would fetch, silver being so expensive to extract and prepare. So the mines and assorted operations closed down, and the town was about to make the familiar change from boom to ghost when somebody come up with the bright idea to market what Tombstone had in abundance, and could never be taken away, namely, the history of a lot of bloodshed, and I hear still today the tourists come to watch regular reenactments of the killings around the corner and down the street from the O.K. Corral.
Now before I forget let me say while I was at Tombstone I had sent back by mail that money Klaus Kappelhaus loaned me on my hasty departure from the Indian school, and I did the same in the case of Longhorn Lulu of the Lone Star in Dodge, along with one of them postcards she loved to get, in this case showing a picture of Schieffelin Hall, which I called my house: she’d get a laugh out of that when it was read to her.
I didn’t send any money to Mrs. Agnes Hickok, to replace that of Wild Bill’s I had lost, on account of I never had an address for her.
So where did me and Pard head on leaving Tombstone? Well, you might recall when me and Bat was up in Nebraska rescuing no-good Billy Thompson, helped by Buffalo Bill Cody, the latter had spoke about a traveling show he was going to put together and had invited both me and Bat to join him—he really wanted Bat and probably included me just to be polite, but I thought of that now and figured though I didn’t have any special talents at riding, shooting, and the like, I could make myself useful and was willing to work as a flunky if I could get some association with entertainment, which the more of it I seen as a spectator, the more alluring it was to me. I don’t mind admitting I could put myself in the place of that fellow in the story who give enemas to circus elephants and got beshat a lot but stayed at the job because he couldn’t give up show business. That halfway offer of Cody’s seemed the best chance I’d ever have.
So I’ll skip the details of our trip up to Nebraska now and go direct to North Platte, where I figured right in looking in on Dave Perry’s saloon first before going out to the Welcome Wigwam, though it was only midmorning, for there was Buffalo Bill, belly up to the bar, and as usual in the midst of a number of fellows listening to what he was saying. His subject at the moment was patriotism, George Washington and the cherry tree, Ben Franklin’s kite, Paul Revere’s ride, and the like, and lifting his glass, he says, “Let’s drink to Tom Jefferson, who was known for taking a beaker of good cheer on occasion.”
Then he spots me, who he hadn’t seen in a couple of years and besides had paid most of the attention to Bat at that time, and what I had been worried about was that given all the people he had dealt with since, traveling around the country performing in plays, not to mention his heavy drinking, he wouldn’t believe my reminiscence of the last time I was in his town. But Cody was a remarkable individual, as I hope I will be able to convey.
“Good to see you again, Captain!” he says heartily, and to the crowd around him, “Step aside, boys, and let Captain Jack wet his whistle.” And he gives me one of his big handshakes that made anybody else’s seem weak. “And how is my friend Colonel Masterson?” He was wearing one of his buckskin jackets, even fancier than the ones I had seen before, with fringes on top of fringes, beadwork on beadwork, and embroidery likewise, and an enormous white sombrero which must of been part of his stage costume, for it was certainly impractical garb elsewhere, though Cody probably could of wore it untarnished through a mud storm.
After a decent interval I brought up the reason I was there. “You might not recall it, but the time me and Bat was over here you mentioned a show you might be—”
“Let me head you off at the pass, Captain,” he says, motioning the others to close in again now I had been given entrance, for Cody loved to be crowded especially when drinking. “Not only do I renew my personal invitation to you to join me in that endeavor, but the first phase of it is already at hand. You could not have arrived at a more opportune moment, sir. Let’s drink to that!” After several big swallows, he elucidates. “To my unpleasant surprise, nothing by way of local observance had been planned for our nation’s birthday, which will arrive before you know it. No redblooded lover of the country could stand by while the Glorious Fourth was treated as inconsequential. I couldn’t look my wife and family in the face again, let alone the multitude of fellow Americans who expect better. I have therefore been drawing up some preliminary ideas. Given that the season will be summer and the fact that while we here in North Platte have no indoor stage large enough for what I envision, which would include a simulated buffalo hunt, riding, roping, shooting competitions, and the like, there is a fenced racetrack at the edge of town which should be ideal. I am about to persuade a number of our generous businessmen”—he tipped the brim of the big white hat at Dave Perry, back of the bar, who thereupon refilled every extended glass—“to invest in some prizes.”
I took note that he put everything in a positive way, which no doubt had something to do with his popularity, for it tended to make people feel good. Take that “invest in” instead of just saying they was donating sums of money like it was charity. He made it sound like a profitable business opportunity, as in fact it turned out to be.
Now the interesting thing about Cody’s optimism is that it generally started out sounding like exaggeration, but when it was applied to entertainment it usually proved to be on the modest side. He thought his blowout for the Fourth of July would attract maybe a hundred contestants. Instead, more than a thousand showed up when the time come, and most everybody else living at the time in western Nebraska, northeastern Colorado, and upper Kansas showed up as audience, so in fact the local merchants did turn out to have invested in a successful venture, with what the visitors ate and drank and bought in North Platte.
And I had a part in this, as well as a place for me and Pard to stay in one of the outbuildings at the Welcome Wigwam. Now though adequate enough at both, I never claimed to be a dead shot nor a champion rider, and all my life I been sufficiently clever not to pretend to be something I ain’t if there is a great likelihood I will be put to the test. So at this point what could I do that Cody would find worthwhile? For though he had that lavish manner he was no fool when it came to getting the best from the people he associated with, and soon enough he established which of my capabilities was most useful to him at this moment. You might snort when you hear what it was. He figured I could serve him best as his personal, well I guess the right term would be bartender, though he give me the respectable title of quartermaster.
You might wonder why Cody needed someone to provide a supply of drink when he spent so much time in saloons, but when planning outdoor shows he had to spend time outdoors. You got to know this about Buffalo Bill, his entertainments would never of been so successful as they was did he not apply himself to them in the ideas and the applications. I never knowed anybody worked harder than Bill Cody, and he seemed to take energy from a quantity of drink that would of paralyzed the average man.
But he couldn’t be seen with a bottle, for kids had already begun to look up to him, and besides he didn’t want anybody to think of him as a drunk—which you might laugh when I say he wasn’t, but I never saw him worse than what could be called feeling real good, certainly never the real low-down and dirty drunkenness which was common enough in them days by many whose intake was less than his.
What he done was get me a cart that could be pulled by one horse, and it had a canvas cover on it like a miniature covered wagon. The inside was fitted with a little desk and some boxes full of papers, ledgers, and the like, so he could call it his “field headquarters,” for Cody always had to give a special name to everything associated with him. It was big enough to climb on board and sit down at the desk as though he was going to work on the business records, but underneath the papers was bottles of different kinds of spirits and wines, each type in a box of its own with the outside labeled according to a code known only to me and him, like “Accounts Payable” might signify gin and “New Expenditures,” brandy, and so on.
I would park this vehicle near that racetrack where the Blowout was being readied, and then during the events themselves, and Bill would visit the interior from time to time for reinforcement for his energies. He was so pleased by how I handled the job that he offered me regular employment on a similar basis with the traveling show he begun to prepare now on the basis of that commemoration of the Glorious Fourth.
Now I was pleased to have found a new direction for myself, but not thrilled to be doing essentially the same kind of work I wanted to get away from, though truly it wasn’t no longer in a smoky room full of gamblers ready to go outside at some point and shoot one another down. Cody’s shows was real wholesome from the first, decent entertainment for families, and you never heard no filthy language from the performers even amongst themselves, nor unruly behavior, and that was just the kind of association I wanted at this time of my life. What I had to do was come up with an idea that would appeal to Cody beyond this wagon full of wet goods, but I was unequipped for fancy horsemanship or spectacular shooting, and I tell you, seeing the performances in the various events at the Blowout, and by amateurs, I realized no mere practice would elevate me from mediocrity. There was ordinary cowboys who could make their horses dance on hind feet, and ranch hands who ordinarily pitched hay and shoveled manure but with a pistol could hit a silver dollar thrown in the air.
So I had to employ my brain, which had gone unused too long else I would of left Tombstone earlier. What I come up with now was such a good idea that Cody had already gotten it himself and in fact had already arranged to carry it out by means of a well-known man of that day, Major Frank North, who back in the ’60s had organized the Pawnee Scouts what become part of the U.S. Army and back when the railroad was being built across the plains, when I hired out as a wagon driver, I met North, who didn’t think much of me, and at least one of his sharp-eyed Pawnee recognized me from being on the other side in a previous fight they had had with their traditional enemies the Cheyenne, and I felt real uncomfortable until everybody’s attention was claimed by a battle.
Yessir, the idea I had for Cody’s show was to include Indians in it, and by Indians I of course meant them who I knowed best, the Cheyenne, who was wonderful riders, though they never did a trick on a horse unless it had practical value, like hanging on the far side of a galloping pony’s neck if being fired at, and was also remarkable shots with a bow and arrow while riding, which called for controlling the animal with the legs alone. I figured there was white audiences, especially in the cities where Cody was planning to take his troupe, that would find such a demonstration real entertaining without no danger to the audience, while on the Indian side it would be a way to get paid for showing prowess at activities they was discouraged or even prohibited from doing on the reservations.
Well, it was such a good idea that as I say Cody had it himself, and as always with that pertaining to public performance, he took it much further than my limited concept.
Seated at that little desk in the wagon, he says, “Madeira wine, Captain, if you please.” He pounded himself in the area of his stomach. “I’m off my feed today.” I found the bottle under some ledgers in the box marked “Matters Pending” and poured him a tin cup full. After a big swig he says, “As for your suggestion, I welcome it.” He smiles broadly and raises his cup in a toast. “Major Frank North will join us with a band of his Pawnees.”
“Pawnees!” I said with an instinctive disgust which might of been noticed and inquired about by another person, but Cody disregarded anything of a negative nature.
“Fine fellows,” he says. “We go back a long way.” He referred to the battle of Summit Springs against Tall Bull’s band of Cheyenne, and so far as North himself went, him and Cody was also partners in a ranch up on the Dismal River, so I wouldn’t be able to talk him out of this arrangement, and if the Pawnee was there, I sure wasn’t going to want to invite some Cheyenne, in view of the old enmity between them two tribes.
Frank North was not just going to bring Pawnee warriors but also women and children and set up a village at the show grounds, wherever they happened to be at the moment, so white folks could see at close hand how redskins cooked and ate their food and how they spent the night, and in the show itself the Indians would not just ride their horses like my idea but would attack a stagecoach, shooting blanks of course, and be driven off by Buffalo Bill and his white scouts and cowboys, and later have a big scalp dance, and then in a grand finale would surround the cabin of a helpless settler and his family and be about to burn it down when Buffalo Bill and his bunch show up once again in the nick of time. It was real ironic that the Pawnee would be acting these parts, for in real life they was the white man’s ally. What they’d be doing in the show, you might say, was playing Cheyenne.
The first season opened up the following spring, and I won’t go into it day by day but just touch the highlights, many of which was unfavorable, beginning with the rehearsal of the Indian attack on the Deadwood stagecoach, conducted by Major North and them Pawnee, with the mayor of Colville, Nebraska, and several town councilors as passengers. Now the Indian charge, with screaming war cries and much firing of blanks, spooked the mules and they stampeded, which excited the Indians even more, and it was quite a while before anyone but the driver and them inside the coach knowed anything had gone wrong. When the vehicle was finally brung to a stop, the mayor jumped out and, though on wobbly legs, wanted to whip Cody’s arse for what he believed a practical joke.
Then in Omaha in late May of ’83, Doc Carver was suffering from a hangover and missed a lot of the glass balls thrown into the air as targets for the shooting exhibition and was booed by the crowd, who called for Buffalo Bill to take over, which embittered Doc, but I forgot to explain who he was in the first place. W. F. Carver was a fellow Cody had met in New York while performing in a stage play, Carver himself being a champion shot who traveled as far as Europe with his marksmanship shows and could put up enough money for Buffalo Bill to take him on as a full partner in what was now called Cody and Carver’s Rocky Mountain and Prairie Exhibition.
Carver also claimed to of had extensive Indian-fighting experience, a close friendship with Wild Bill Hickok, and other distinctions, all of which was lies as anyone who could of made genuine claim to them things but did not (guess who?) could tell right away. Cody privately told me once that Doc “went West on a piano stool.” And guess why he was called Doc? He was another damn dentist! On top of all this, though he wore decorated buckskins and sported long hair like his partner, he couldn’t hold his liquor like the latter, and every time I seen him he was notably under the weather. Yet when he broke with Cody at the end of the first season, he says it was on account of Buffalo Bill was drunk throughout.
More reliable marksmen, and easier to get along with, was a man name of Captain Bogardus and his four sons, and Cody himself was a fine shot from horseback, which even if you never been mounted you can imagine as an achievement, hitting 75 out of 100 glass balls at twenty yards while at the gallop. There have been some who discounted this, as well as the other feats of exhibition shooting in them shows, for loose shot and not solid bullets was used even in the rifle and pistols. Well, they started with lead slugs, until they busted windows half a mile away and nearly plugged a few citizens, so from then on used a half load of powder and a quarter ounce of Number 71/2 shot, in case you want to try it, but my advice is don’t do it at home, not even with a BB gun, for you’re likely to put an eye out with it sooner or later.
Then Cody had some bad personal fortune. We was at Indianapolis at the time. In the buffalo herd, which at every show was chased around a fenced enclosure, individual animals getting roped and not killed, was one big bull who nobody even tried to put a lariat on, him being so strong and mean to begin with and getting meaner, having at every performance to get run around like that. But never letting anything go untried, Cody asks the leading rider, Buck Taylor, billed as “King of the Cowboys” and an enormous fellow six foot five or six, to not only rope and throw this big devil but climb on and ride him!
“Hell, with that,” Buck said, meaning the riding, but him and Jim Lawson got ropes on the bull, who was called Monarch, and managed to throw it.
Now I could repeat for almost every episode that Buffalo Bill produced more hot air than anyone I knowed, but he also really done a lot of things that took more nerve than was common or even sensible.
He now comes over to where Monarch is down but struggling so hard to get free that it was all Buck and Jim could do to hold onto the ropes. As a joke Cody once again asked Taylor to climb on, for he liked to kid him, but then he admitted that not even Jim Bullock, the lead steer-rider with the show, would come near old Monarch.
“So,” says Buffalo Bill, “I guess that leaves only me.” And don’t you know, he got on the back of that enraged animal, which when allowed up, the ropes still trailing from it, took maybe three steps, then bucked with all the force of its massive, hairy body, big brute head lowered to the ground, snorting through wide-open nostrils and beady eyed, and Cody flew high into the air and come down so hard he didn’t breathe for a spell nor could talk at all.
The audience give him a mighty cheer, believing this a part of the spectacle, and the other performers, including the Indians, had been prepared by Bill himself to go on with the show no matter what happened, so while he was being taken to the hospital the redskin attack on the settler’s cabin proceeded, the only difference from the usual being that Cody didn’t lead the rescuers, for he had no stand-in. How could there be a substitute for Buffalo Bill?
He stayed in the hospital a couple of weeks and joined us in Chicago, fully recovered from the stunt, but then something a lot worse occurred. He had to hurry back to the Nebraska home where he spent so little time, on account of the sickness of one of his children he saw so seldom, namely little Orra, only eleven. Now while living winters at the ranch I had hardly seen his missus or the little daughters, so far did his wife Louisa, called by him Lulu, keep aloof from anybody or -thing associated with Bill’s career, believing it beneath her, and she might of been right about that, but it did not bring them closer. And now little Orra died, though at least he was there for that sad event and not too late as with the little son who had passed away previously.
Cody’s absence from the show meant I never had anything to do, for I had still been providing his drinks, either in his tent or his private railroad car. By the way, Pard was still with me, and we traveled, him and me, in a little section I walled off at the end of one of the cars that carried the livestock, in this case horses, which stank less and wasn’t so noisy as the steers and buffalo. I stayed apart because I didn’t want them white performers to complain about him, and I didn’t want to go near the Indians on account of my fear they might eat him.
Speaking of the Indians with what since Carver’s departure had been called Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, I have so far mentioned only the Pawnee of Major Frank North’s bunch, who I avoided for reasons stated, but in fact Cody had managed to get ahold of a small contingent of Sioux as well, and like the Cheyenne they was historically hostile to the Pawnee and had always fought against that tribe. Yet with the Wild West the two groups camped peaceably side by side at each of our stops. This encampment was considered part of the show, and the public came and watched them, the Indians actually living in those tepees, cooking their meals on outside fires, and once in a while babies would be born in the traditional redskin fashion and not in a hospital and carried on their mothers’ backs while being called “papooses” by white visitors.
I got to know a young fellow name of Gordon Lillie, then an interpreter for the Wild West, as he had worked at the Pawnee reservation in Indian Territory, and he told me the two tribal groups while feeling a natural rivalry in this situation, like baseball teams, tolerated each other and never come close to quarreling in his observation. Which caused me to reflect that even I tended sometimes to underrate the red man. He was getting plenty of grub here, a decent wage for the time, and admiration from the white public merely by pretending to be who he once had been, in the fake attacks on stagecoaches and settlers, and after the performance, being who he really was, a person with a wife and family and a portable home—two more things than me. He didn’t have no more territory to contest over, and no horses to steal or be stolen, so there wasn’t no reason for fighting.
Lillie by the way later on took the name of Pawnee Bill and for a while had a traveling show of his own.
When the Wild West closed its tour at Omaha that fall, I told Cody of my old connection with the Cheyenne and proposed to go up to their reservation and hire a bunch for the season to open next spring, and he says sure, the more the merrier, which reaction was typical of the man. We was back at the ranch in North Platte, along with a big bunch of others from the show, even an Indian or two, and Cody, full of drink and wearing a battered plug hat he had borrowed from somebody, was telling the stories for which he was noted but which, oddly enough, in various examples wasn’t as remarkable as some of his true adventures, as I learned only in later years when many of the Army officers who he had scouted for wrote or spoke of exploits of his he rarely or never mentioned and in fact called him modest. My own opinions changed as I knowed him better, and at any given point here I am trying to tell you how I felt at the time.
In my earliest impressions, based on hearsay, I believed him just a blowhard. I had been wrong. If he were not the inventor of a new style, then he perfected it, and of course by now it is a pretty standard mix in which the true and the false are so intimately intertwined as probably never to be told apart, and anybody tries to figure them out will get thrown so off balance as to fear for his reason. I expected it’s only owing to this state of affairs that anybody ever gets elected to public office in this country.