The Honorable Cody Read online

  General Miles sent us some kind words too, and General Scott. Will was an outstanding scout for the army during the Indian wars and won a Medal of Honor for his bravery, which was since rescinded. I always wondered how they could do that but they did. For the army, at least, Will did something valuable and worthy of commendation. Not like the years in show business when he was kissing actresses. So any condolence wired to me by a general or colonel is welcome, unlike the ones that come from show people, and I have shown these to the newspaper reporters who hang around here wanting a sensation.

  I am sure we will receive many condolences and I will let his sisters May and Julia record them, or maybe our daughter Irma, but I won’t. I refuse to read them. After all, why should I read praise of a man who twice tried to divorce me and accused me of poisoning him with Dragon’s Blood? They can all sit around May’s ugly parlor and read them and feel proud, but I won’t participate. I know Will better than to make a plaster saint of him. He sired my dead son and our daughters but left the raising of them to me because he was never home. He neglected me so I will neglect him. Of course I am staying in a Denver hotel; I refuse to be dependent on Will’s sisters.

  Oh, I don’t mean to sound so bitter. I’m not. He may have brought his friends to Scout’s Rest and banished me to the kitchen, but I am not bitter. I ended up owning most of our property in Nebraska so it doesn’t matter whether I was treated as a chamber maid and serving girl.

  No sooner was Will settled in his ebony and nickel casket than we had another family feud. His sisters wanted to bury him in Cody, Wyoming, the town he and some friends of his founded, and Irma did too. They argued that he wanted to be buried there, overlooking the town. I was against it. I would not let them kidnap his remains and bury them up there. He was going to be buried right here in Denver where I can keep an eye on him. I’m the widow and I prevailed. Besides, the Post had started a big campaign to bury him in Colorado and was inviting school children to send in their pennies. I approved. I was not going to let Will’s family shut me out. Besides, my Nebraska property is not far from Denver and I intend to keep him close at hand.

  So it was settled. I made sure that Will was sent back to a crypt in the mortuary, and work has begun on a permanent grave up on Lookout Mountain, hewn out of granite so his family cannot ever kidnap him and take him to Cody. When the grave is done we will have a burial, but before we drive up that mountain I intend to open the casket and make sure his sisters have not kidnapped him and replaced him with a joker.

  I haven’t decided yet whether I will join him up there. I don’t want to lie beside a man who accused me in a divorce trial of trying to poison him. It was I who should have gotten the divorce, but decency and religion prevent it, no matter that he took to his bosom so many women that he would put a sultan to shame.

  Irma is not happy with me. Will named his hotel in Cody after her and all she thinks of is Cody this, Cody that. But who cares? I paid for the funeral and whoever pays the piper calls the tune.

  And yet, in the middle of these nights, I awake and listen to my bruised heart.

  “Oh, Will,” I say, over and over. “Why did you do these things?”

  He was like a wild thing, a creature who could not be domesticated, and who fluttered his wings and beat his limbs against any cage, including the cage of love called marriage. He could not stand fences and that was the hardest lesson for me to learn in our long and miserable marriage.

  He was unhappier than I, called our marriage a lie and a sham, and tried to flee it but I would not let him. I contested both divorces and won.

  And now, in the deeps of the night, I remember Will, and know that he loved me, and I loved him, and still do, and that is what is so sweet and terrible now.

  (From the memoir of Colonel William F. Cody)

  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

  This material is to remain sealed until my death. I have undertaken to rectify errors that have crept into works about me over the years. I have penned a series of notes about notorious events in my life, and mean for these notes to replace the nonsense that overzealous editors and publicists have penned. To the best of my knowledge every-thing written here is true, carefully considered, and drawn from personal memory.

  I dedicate this last, true, and faithful account of my life to my beloved wife Louisa Frederici Cody, my bosom companion, dear friend, tender mate, and mother of my children for close to half a century. It is my profound hope that some day she will rest in peace beside me at the place I have prepared for us, in Cody, Wyoming, together for all eternity.

  –William F. Cody

  It is not known for certain whether I am descended from Irish Kings as my sister claims, but when I compare the planes of my face to those of the kings of that race, as observed in lithographs, I think there may be a distinct possibility. But modesty prevents me from making the claim. McCody, Legody, Mocody, names employed by my forebears, sound royal to the educated ear. What is better known is that we are from the Islands of Guernsey and Jersey, which may be why I am naturally capable in the care of livestock and have a fondness for milk, and also why I like children. My mother, Mary, was descended from the Buntings, fine British stock who settled in Pennsylvania and befriended William Penn.

  My father, Isaac Cody, was a westering man who settled in the Territory of Iowa. It was there, in Scott County, that my older brother Samuel was born in 1841, and my oldest sister, Julia Malvina, was born in 1843, and I was born in 1846. Make no mistake about my birth date. Some accounts claim I was born in 1845, in order to make my employment with the Pony Express at a tender age more credible to readers. But in fact I am an Iowan, born in 1846, as verified by the family bible, and I am proud to say I served the Pony Express at an age when most boys were first fitted with long trousers.

  I never went to school in my life though my father and others employed Miss Helen Goodrige to instruct several neighbor children and myself for a while, though I was but two years old on that occasion. I am a self-educated man, and proud that I mastered my letters and numbers all by myself. In 1853 a rearing mare fell on my brother Samuel and crushed him to death, and that soured us on Iowa. We headed for Kansas, which is where I grew up and where we found ourselves in the fierce struggle between free-staters like ourselves, and slave-staters like so many of our neighbors. That struggle affected me all the rest of my life, and made me what I am, a man of the borders.

  Chapter 3

  Major John M. Burke

  I knew it was coming. I had the operators ring up the Cody family every day through December and January for a report on the colonel. For a while I thought he would pull through. But oh, it was a blow.

  “Major,” May Decker said, “he left us just past noon.”

  “Oh, May. I thought he would live forever.”

  “He will, thanks to you,” she replied.

  I reckoned that was the sweetest thing ever to come out of an earpiece.

  I hung up after talking to her and stared numbly out the window, knowing the world had changed and the past century had finally slipped into oblivion. When Bill Cody died so did the Old West and so did youth. The nation turned old overnight. Maybe he wasn’t a politician or a statesman or an artist or a genius, but he was all of those in his own way and the most important man alive, and his passage changes the very texture of the new century.

  It is a terrible thing to say but when Bill died my work ended. When Bill died so did I. There is nothing left for me except to wait for the sands in the hourglass to run out. I’m fragile now, spending my days in an easy chair, afflicted with gout and ticker trouble, my breath labored. I don’t even like a rye whiskey any more. My doctor shakes his head. It is only a matter of time. But these are things I keep to myself.

  I’ve tried to conjure up memories ever since I spotted the story on the front page, but my mind runs blank. I do not even know what to wire the family by way of condolences. Or who to send the wire to. Of his children only Irma lives. I would say one thing to Louis
a and another to his sisters. To his sisters I would say that the greatest man in all of show business has left us. To Louisa I would say a great scout has crossed the divide. I suppose I will say something else: one of this young nation’s great oaks was felled. The historians might not see it that way, wrapped up in dry policies and politics the way they are, but I have lived in the real world, not a bookish one, and I know who was great.

  I wish his wandering spirit might perch here for a time before traveling onward into the other frontier. I would like to bid him farewell and let him know that soon I will be crossing over there myself. I would like to tell him that from the moment we met, he transformed my life and gave it purpose. I’d like to ask him if he was satisfied with all he received from my efforts. It was my business to make him famous and rich, and I did it. I enjoy reminiscing about him as I am now, enjoying my private recollections.

  The memories of Buffalo Bill Cody did come to me after a while, but in a fevered jumble, not in any order at all, crowding upon my mind this way and that until I am distracted with images. The voice, mild and strong and cheerful. I will conjure up that voice for the rest of my life. In later years his border twang vanished and he spoke as a man of the world. He could talk with velvety affection among friends but out in the arena he could hurl his words to the farthest bleachers and electrify twenty thousand people. I wonder if the Edison people ever recorded it. He’s on film, at least, and those motion pictures he produced and starred in just a few months ago should give future generations an inkling of that amazing man. But they’ll see him as a creaking old fellow and not the vibrant young scout who first came to my attention.

  I spent a lifetime making him known. I can proudly say I made Buffalo Bill what he became and I am not shy about taking credit for it. He was an international celebrity and I had no small role in all of that. I was the world's first publicist, before the word, or the profession, was known the way it is now, when every corporate mogul has his smooth publicity man. I was called an advance man before anyone thought to call me a publicity man.

  I developed publicity for Cody and the Wild West in ways never before known, and he was the perfect student, clay in my hands, willing to be sculpted into what he became. Yes, the fame, the legend of Buffalo Bill Cody, scout, frontiersman, pony express rider, and showman, is the handiwork of Major John Burke, and I will carry that accomplishment to my grave. Now he is gone, all that I built over a long and loyal life lies cold in a coffin.

  How often I studied the man, seeing what might be done to bring customers to our doors.

  He came out of the West on the counsel of that genius and scoundrel and dime novelist, Ned Buntline, who whipped out stories and plays and married various willing women, sometimes all at once. Buntline put Cody in a play called “The Scouts of the Prairie,” along with another rough frontiersman and Army scout, Texas Jack Omohundro. I had a modest hand in managing and publicizing this and other early productions, and that is how I got to know Bill Cody. He didn’t know a thing about acting and didn’t need to know, but over a lifetime he got smart at it.

  He was an authentic Indian fighter, fresh off the plains, and we wanted the audience to know it in a glance. We got him up in bright buckskins and when he walked out in front of the hot footlights, he was the cynosure of all eyes. There he was, in his mid-twenties, lean, straight, almost six feet, with brown hair that hung down in ringlets after the manner of the western scouts, scaring women half to death, and that was all it took. He couldn’t remember lines but didn’t need to. Actors fed him lines by asking the right questions. He sprang catlike around the boards, his sixguns dispatching Indians, rescuing maidens in distress, driving away bandits, and the show did just fine. Some reviewers didn’t much like the play, but they all liked Cody.

  Louisa didn’t think much of show business and thought it was the skunk in her woodpile. So she headed east to St. Louis one December to see her wayward husband perform. Bill was an absentee spouse except between seasons when he stopped at their cottage at Fort McPherson, which usually increased the family. But one time, driven by curiosity, she was indeed in the audience, and Bill could hardly stand it.

  He paused, headed for the hissing gas footlights, found her in the third row, and leaned over them.

  “Oh, mamma, I’m a bad actor,” he said.

  The audience chuckled.

  “Honest, mamma, does this look as awful out there as it feels up here?” he continued.

  That got some cheerful hooting.

  Well, there was no help for it but for Louisa to come up and take a bow, which she did, pale and alarmed and itching to escape to obscurity once again.

  I met her after the show. She sat rigidly at an eatery, her lips compressed, dabbling with dumplings, oozing respectability, while Bill caroused with the rest of us. I think perhaps she thought show people were loose and not quite proper, and here was her very own Bill cavorting with the worst of us. I knew there was trouble brewing in that household and that proved to be correct. In fact, it was when Cody’s show closed a few years later that his marriage blew apart. Marriage to an actor was more than she had ever bargained for.

  She had her one taste of theater and scarcely ever returned to watch her husband. But the show went on without her, touring through the falls and winters, shutting down in the springs. He went for whole seasons without so much as seeing her and I don’t think he penned a letter a month. She stayed at Fort McPherson, or Rochester, or North Platte, and raised the babies while he trod the boards. I think that he liked it that way.

  He did that for a while, you know. He scouted for the army during the summer seasons and hit the boards in the winter when the Indians were holed up in their lodges. Texas Jack and his bride, the beauteous Italian dancer Mlle. Morlacchi, employed me to promote them, and for a while Buffalo Bill was lost to sight. But not for long. The summertime soldier, if I might call him that even though he worked for the army as a civilian, soon abandoned Buntline, or maybe Buntline abandoned him, and set up his own show, “The Scouts of the Plains.” Cody added Texas Jack and his sultry madame, hired a seasoned manager, namely myself, and a seasoned playwright named Meader to make a melodrama of it, featuring himself of course, and there he was, in business with the Buffalo Bill Combination.

  But we added one more player, another long-haired trigger-happy frontiersman called Wild Bill Hickok, a vain fop whose theatrical career might be called noisy. There was a lot of black powder expended during that show, and it blued the air, choked the players, deafened everyone until our ears rang, and afflicted the audiences, whose eyes smarted, but it was a grand success. I managed the production and saw the potential of these gunpowder gallants. The country wanted to sample all the frontier life people had been reading about.

  Hickok was a mean devil and began shooting his blanks at the legs of our New Jersey redskins, just for the amusement in it, often burning them. They writhed so much they couldn’t go about their business of dying. So Wild Bill was excommunicated after one season and went west toward his rendezvous with Jack McCall in Deadwood. I was glad to get that deadly dandy out of there. He dressed like Oscar Wilde sober, and never looked enough like a border man to suit me though he certainly was handy with one of Sam Colt’s six-guns. I always feared he would double the powder in his blank cartridges and bloody up some of our East Coast Indians as a joke.

  As for me, I kept the shows profitable, cut expenses, hired and fired supers, printed up handbills, took out ads in the papers, never failing to pump up the name of Buffalo Bill Cody, which had a nice ring to it. People could enjoy a show featuring someone with a moniker like that, and they gladly paid their thirty cents at the ticket window. I saw the truth of it and pretty soon my handbills and posters were touting the great scout Buffalo Bill, as well as Texas Jack. But it was Cody’s name that caught the eye and I made what I could of it.

  It became my habit to step into the editorial sanctums of the local papers soon after we had booked a playhouse in that town. I would t
ake this ink-stained fellow wearing wire-rimmed spectacles, this Ned or Joe or Ernie, out to lunch, or buy a few pilsners, or whatever it took, and slide in a few remarks about Buffalo Bill, our leading man, and what a story there was in an actor who summered out on the plains, fighting real redskins for the real army. It got results. Cody got more ink than any actor in history. And he made a pretty good interview too, modest and offhand, even when describing hair-raising escapes from Cheyenne war parties. He was a real scout and that fascinated those newsmen. I got to know nearly every editor in the United States on a first-name basis, and that made my career even as it made Buffalo Bill’s career.

  The Buffalo Bill Combination made money, sometimes a lot of it, and that attracted some attention in the theater world. Pretty soon there were other western melodramas floating about, populated with names like Arizona Joe, Dead-Eye Dick, or the Buffalo Kid. They may not have appealed to Harvard professors but the public couldn’t get enough of the excitement and it didn’t take much intelligence to figure out the secret: get ’em into trouble and then worse trouble, shoot everyone in sight, and add some humor.

  Now I think upon the old days, and Bill Cody lying in his grave, and how the world changed in a few decades. If he had died a little sooner he wouldn’t have had to endure all these new things. But we two, we’re a pair of nineteenth century boys who just happened to live too long, and now I am lost.

  Chapter 4

  Lieutenant General Nelson Appleton Miles

  The press had been full of Colonel Cody’s imminent death so it was no surprise to me to read about it in the Washington papers. Of course I dispatched my condolences at once, calling him an outstanding man and all that.