Custer was dead. The news spread quickly through Colonel Wesley Merritt’s 5th U.S. Cavalry camp at Sage Creek, Wyoming Territory, on July 7, 1876. It had taken a full 12 days for the dispatch to reach this column so perilously close to the scene of the disaster. Chief of Scouts William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody had escorted the Fort Laramie courier to the colonel’s tent at midmorning. Everyone was stunned. It was the sort of news that takes time to process—Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and every man of five companies of the 7th Cavalry dead on the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory. It seemed impossible. But it was true.
“Lieutenant Charles King, acting adjutant of the 5th, never forgot that morning: “A party of junior officers were returning from a refreshing bath in a deep pool in the stream, when Buffalo Bill came hurriedly towards them from the general’s tent. His handsome face wore a look of deep trouble, and he brought us to a halt in stunned, awe-stricken silence with the announcement, ‘Custer and five companies of the Seventh wiped out of existence. It’s no rumor—General Merritt’s got the official dispatch.’” King sensed that Cody had taken the news hard. “Perhaps no man felt it more than Cody, who had ridden with Custer on many a run for buffalo,” he recalled.
Cody had only recently departed his theatrical troupe to rejoin the 5th Cavalry on the northern Plains. Reunited with his old friends on June 10, 1876, he was immediately reappointed chief of scouts by Lt. Col. Eugene A. Carr. Enlisted men and officers alike were delighted to have their old scout back; when Cody galloped into camp, the men cried out, “Here’s Buffalo Bill!” followed by three rousing cheers.
“There is very little change in his appearance since I saw him last in ’69,” noted one enlisted man in a newspaper interview, “except that he looks a little worn, probably caused by his vocation in the East not agreeing with him. All the old boys in the regiment, upon seeing General Carr and Cody together, exchanged confidences and expressed themselves to the effect that with such a leader and scout they could get away with all the Sitting Bulls and Crazy Horses in the Sioux tribe.”
As Cody greeted old friends, all present must have felt a strange mixture of déjà vu and nostalgia. Bill Cody, known so well by so many men of the 5th, had become Buffalo Bill, hero of dime novels and stage shows. Since departing the 5th in 1872, he had become one of the most celebrated actors in America—though of course he only portrayed a single character: himself. Now he had returned to the past life of adventure he had so cleverly exaggerated before Eastern footlights. Within a few days both lives and both Buffalo Bills—daring scout and celebrated actor—would give their greatest performance on a ghastly frontier stage in which Western myth and Western reality would seamlessly morph.
Cody was a true child of the frontier. Born in Scott County, Iowa, on February 26, 1846, William Frederick was the third child of Isaac and Mary Cody. Isaac moved his family to newly organized Kansas Territory in 1854, settling near Fort Leavenworth, where he became a prominent advocate of the Free Soil cause. On September 18, 1854, as Isaac spoke against the extension of slavery into Kansas, proslavery men pulled him from his platform and stabbed him. Although he recovered well enough to win election to the Free Soil Topeka legislature in 1856, the wound continually plagued him until his death on March 10, 1857. To young Bill, his father was a martyr, having “shed the first blood in the cause of the freedom of Kansas.”
With the family in financial straits after his father’s death, Cody went to work for Alexander Majors and William Hepburn Russell, whose freighting company had contracted with the government to haul supplies for Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston’s army during the 1857–58 Mormon War. On the trail Cody struck up a friendship with fellow scout James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok. When Russell, Majors and Waddell initiated the short-lived Pony Express in 1860, Cody served briefly as a rider.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, Cody quit the Pony Express and joined a band of Kansas Jayhawkers preying upon neighboring Missourians. Eager to avenge his father’s murder and the depredations of the Missouri Border Ruffians, he felt no pangs of conscience about these horse-stealing forays.
Cody later admitted these were not his best days. “I entered upon a dissolute and reckless life—to my shame, be it said—and associated with gamblers, drunkards and bad characters generally.” After one particularly rowdy night in February 1864, Cody enlisted as a private in the 7th Kansas Volunteer Cavalry. He claimed to have passed out under “the influence of bad whiskey” and then awoke to find himself a soldier. Private Cody served in the regiment until war’s end, participating in several battles as well as acting as scout and dispatch rider.
After the war, Cody took a bride, Louisa Frederici of St. Louis, and tried to settle down to the life of a hotelkeeper at his Salt Creek Valley home. It was not to be, for Bill was devoid of business skills, and within a year he headed west to seek employment with the Army. Hickok was a scout at Fort Ellsworth, Kan., at the time and got his friend Cody a job as guide at the post. There, Cody met 7th Cavalry Lt. Col. George Custer, then beginning his frontier career.
Custer asked Cody to scout for the 7th in a proposed summer campaign against the Cheyennes, but an offer to hunt buffalo for the Union Pacific Eastern Division proved more attractive. The firm of Goddard Brothers had the contract to feed the railway workers, and they employed Cody at the princely sum of $500 a month for this dangerous work.
Between October 1867 and May 1868, Cody killed 4,280 buffalo for the Union Pacific. Mounted on his fleet horse Brigham (named after the Mormon patriarch) and armed with a breechloading .50-70 Springfield trapdoor rifle dubbed “Lucretia Borgia,” Cody became a familiar and welcome sight in the tough, end-of-track railway camps. Workers conferred on him the sobriquet Buffalo Bill, and it stuck. Construction gangs even composed a ditty in his honor: Buffalo Bill, Buffalo Bill/Never missed and never will; /Always aims and shoots to kill/And the company pays his buffalo bill.
A combination of bad weather and hostile Indians temporarily halted construction of the Union Pacific when end-of-track reached Sheridan, Kan. Cody’s contract ended, but he was not unemployed for long. A new war was brewing with the Cheyennes and their allies, and the Army promptly hired him as a scout. He reported to Fort Larned under Colonel William Babcock Hazen, the Indian superintendent for the southern Plains, whose job it was to protect friendly Indians and identify potential hostiles.
Cody soon drew the attention of Phil Sheridan. In September 1868, the young scout was sent from Fort Larned to Fort Hays, a distance of 65 miles, to report to the general that Kiowas and Comanches had joined the warring bands. This disturbing news forced Sheridan to change his troop dispositions, and it was vital he get orders through to Fort Dodge. “This too being a particularly dangerous route— several couriers having been killed on it—it was impossible to get one of the various ‘Petes,’ ‘Jacks’ or ‘Jims’ hanging around Hays City to take my communication,” Sheridan later recalled. “Cody, learning of the strait I was in, manfully came to the rescue and proposed to make the trip to Dodge, though he had just finished his long and perilous ride from Larned.”
Sheridan, profoundly impressed by Cody’s “exhibition of endurance and courage,” appointed him chief of scouts for the 5th Cavalry. Although scouts were generally hired only for individual expeditions, Cody continuously served as chief of scouts for the 5th from September 1868 until November 1872. He soon became the Army’s most famous scout.
On April 26, 1872, near the south fork of Nebraska’s Loup River, Cody led a squad of soldiers in a running battle with Indian raiders, earning him the Medal of Honor on May 22. Captain Charles Meinhold, in the letter of commendation describing the engagement, wrote, “Mr. William Cody’s reputation for bravery and skill as a guide is so well established that I need not say anything else but that he acted in his usual manner.” Meinhold’s words were typical of the high regard with which frontier soldiers held Cody. Phil Sheridan, William Emory, Eugene Carr, Wesley Merritt, Charles King, Anson Mills and other Army officers lavishly praised Cody both before and after he became nationally famous. Cody’s exploits, though later exaggerated by press agents and show business hype, were authentic. Later writers who downplayed his scouting activities or treated him as one among many comparable Army guides either ignored the evidence or were ignorant of the facts.
Cody ranks with Ben Clark, Frank Grouard, Al Sieber, Luther “Yellowstone” Kelly and Frank North as one of the few truly outstanding scouts during the Indian wars. In one 12-month period (October 1868 to October 1869), for example, Cody, as chief of scouts for the 5th Cavalry, participated in seven expeditions against the Indians, engaging in nine fights. Few soldiers experienced that much action in a decade of service. All of Cody’s frontier exploits, including 16 Indian battles, occurred before his 31st birthday, for after 1876 he devoted his time exclusively to show business.
The grand maestro of Cody’s rise to international fame and show business glory was Ned Buntline, an obscure writer of limited talent but unflagging imagination. Buntline’s real name was Edward Zane Carroll Judson. Born in Stamford, N.Y., in 1823, this plump little man was a master of the dime novel, claiming to have written half a dozen of them in one week. Writing and women were Ned’s great passions, and he pursued both with a vengeance. He went through several fortunes and six wives, some of whom he was married to simultaneously.
July 24, 1869, found Buntline at Fort McPherson, Neb., to deliver, of all things, a temperance lecture. Buntline, ever in search of a good story, learned that Major William Brown was leading a detachment of troops in pursuit of an Indian raiding party and volunteered to go along. Brown introduced the celebrated writer to the 5th Cavalry’s chief of scouts, and while the detachment found no Indians along the North Platte, Buntline made a singular discovery in Buffalo Bill. When the troops reached Fort Sedgwick, Buntline promptly headed back East, promising to keep in touch.
On December 23, 1869, Street and Smith’s New York Weekly carried the first installment of Buntline’s “Buffalo Bill, the King of Border Men.” The story was a fictional reworking of the already well-circulated Civil War exploits of Cody’s friend Wild Bill Hickok. Regardless, Buntline’s story gave rise to the legend of Buffalo Bill. Back at Fort McPherson, the real Buffalo Bill was flattered by the tale, even if none of it was true. At the birth of his son on November 26, 1870, Cody proposed to name him after Buntline. Cooler heads prevailed, and the lad was instead named Kit Carson Cody.
Buntline was not a man to allow opportunity to slip away. He commenced scribbling a new dime novel, Buffalo Bill’s Best Shot; or, the Heart of Spotted Tail, which began its serial run in the New York Weekly on March 25, 1872, followed in July by Buffalo Bill’s Last Victory; or, Dove Eye, the Lodge Queen. Buntline also barraged Cody with letters, promising fame and fortune if he would travel east and portray himself onstage.
Cody finally relented and recruited a fellow Fort McPherson scout, John “Texas Jack” Omohundro, to accompany him to Chicago on this novel enterprise. Buntline met the scouts-turned-actors in Chicago on December 12. To their amazement, Cody and Omohundro found that Buntline had no script, even though the play was to open at Nixon’s Amphitheatre on December 18. Retreating to his hotel room, Buntline penned Scouts of the Prairie in four hours. An unimpressed Chicago Tribune theater critic later questioned why it had taken Ned so long.
Buntline hired 10 aspiring thespians off the Chicago streets to portray Indians in his little drama and acquired the services of a lovely Italian actress, Giuseppina Morlacchi, to play the Indian heroine. Unlike the other members of the cast, Morlacchi actually had stage experience; she was well known for introducing the can-can to the United States in 1867.
A crowd estimated at 2,500 thronged Nixon’s Amphitheatre on opening night. The play had no discernible plot, which was fine, as Cody forgot all his lines anyway. It didn’t really matter, for the scouts were handsome, Morlacchi fetching as an Italian-accented Indian maiden and the action nonstop.
Scouts of the Prairie was a grand success. Even theater critics had to admit that while it might not be art, it was certainly entertainment of a unique sort. “On the whole it is not probable that Chicago will ever look upon the like again,” declared the Chicago Tribune. “Such a combination of incongruous drama, execrable acting, renowned performers, mixed audience, intolerable stench, scalping, blood and thunder is not likely to be vouchsafed to a city a second time—even Chicago.”
The Western had been born, with Ned Buntline and Buffalo Bill serving as able midwives, and popular, mass-market entertainment was never to be the same. The play toured Eastern cities, greeted by enthusiastic audiences, stunned theater critics and overflowing box office tills. By the time the tour ended in June 1873, Cody was fully committed to a stage career. He no longer had need of Buntline, and they parted company for keeps that month.
For the 1873–74 theatrical season, Cody enlisted playwright Fred G. Maeder to create a new drama for the Buffalo Bill Combination, as his gypsy troupe was now called. Scouts of the Plains opened at Williamsport, Pa., on September 8. Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack played themselves, of course, with Morlacchi portraying another Indian maiden. Co-starring was another authentic Western hero, Cody’s old friend Wild Bill Hickok. By this time Wild Bill had added to his laurels as scout and Indian fighter by serving as marshal in Hays City and Abilene. But the life of a thespian did not suit Hickok. All of Cody’s efforts to imbue his friend with a proper respect for show business failed, and after one particularly heated exchange, Hickok departed in a huff. They met again only once, in Wyoming in July 1876 when Cody was scouting for the 5th Cavalry and Hickok was heading for the Black Hills boomtown of Deadwood.
For more than a decade—from 1873 until 1885—Cody toured in various frontier dramas. In every play he starred as Buffalo Bill, with each drama supposedly based on authentic adventures from his own past. It was this connection between history and drama that gave unique electricity to Buffalo Bill Cody’s stage presence and made his blood-and-thunder plays popular with the public.
Cody’s 1876 tour was a huge success, but was interrupted in April in Springfield, Mass., by a telegram reporting that 5-year-old Kit was desperately ill with scarlet fever. Returning home to Rochester, N.Y., Cody was able to hold his son one last time: “I found my little boy unable to speak, but he seemed to recognize me, and putting his little arms around my neck, he tried to kiss me.” Kit died in his father’s arms.
Shattered by his loss, Cody was determined to answer the call of Phil Sheridan, Eugene Carr and other Army officers to return to the West for what all assumed would be the last great Indian war. After a final show in Wilmington, Del., on June 3, Cody and Texas Jack split up the troupe, and Buffalo Bill headed west to join Colonel Merritt’s 5th Cavalry in Wyoming Territory.
The regiment, transferred from action against the Arizona Apaches, was serving under Brig. Gen. George Crook, whose column was moving north from Fort Laramie against the Sioux. Bands led by Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Gall and others had defied the government’s order to report to a reservation. The Grant administration, determined to force the reluctant Sioux to sell the gold-laden Black Hills, blamed Sitting Bull for the failure to strike a deal.
Sheridan, ordered to drive in the Sioux, had dispatched three columns to envelop them. From the west came Colonel John Gibbon’s command out of Fort Ellis, and from the east Brig. Gen. Alfred Terry marched from Fort Abraham Lincoln with Custer’s 7th Cavalry as his strike force. Crook headed north with 15 companies of cavalry and five of infantry. Sheridan assigned the eight available companies of the 5th Cavalry to scout between Crook and Terry’s columns and block any Sioux reinforcements and supplies from the Nebraska agencies. It was assumed the field troops might confront, at most, 500 warriors. That estimate proved wildly wrong, for Bureau of Indian Affairs agents had lied about census numbers.
Crazy Horse checked Crook on the Rosebud on June 17, 1876. Crook claimed victory, holding the field, but then fell back to Goose Creek to tend his wounded, reorganize and await reinforcements. He was still hunkered down, licking his wounds, on June 25 when Custer’s 7th, ignorant of Crook’s setback, met the same Sioux but a few miles north on the Little Bighorn. Sheridan’s plan to envelop the Indians had spectacularly failed.
Crook’s run-in on the Rosebud had unnerved the usually levelheaded general. At a standstill on Goose Creek, along the eastern edge of Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains, Crook now demanded Merritt’s 5th Cavalry before he dared advance north against the Sioux. Merritt, however, had received intelligence that hundreds of Cheyennes had left the Nebraska agencies to join Sitting Bull in Montana. Disregarding his orders to reinforce Crook, he instead moved north to block the Powder River Trail. The troops marched a punishing 85 miles in 31 hours to reach Warbonnet Creek (also called Hat Creek) in northwestern Nebraska, on the great Indian trail from the agencies to Powder River country. Buffalo Bill Cody, astride a strawberry roan some 16 hands high, was ever in the lead. The exhausted command bedded down late on July 16. There, among the 5th Cavalry troopers, Buffalo Bill was truly in his element. Little did he realize how the next morning’s events would forever mark his life.
Before dawn on July 17, 1876, Merritt ordered Cody out to scout Little Wolf’s advancing Cheyennes. Oddly, Cody dressed that morning in one of the stage costumes he had brought with him from the East—a Mexican vaquero outfit of black velvet pants, trimmed in scarlet and flared at the ankles, and a red silk shirt, topped with a broad-brimmed beaver sombrero. Buffalo Bill had certainly dressed for his role that day. Quickly locating the Cheyenne village, he returned to find the camp on full alert, as sentries had spotted Cheyenne scouts nearby. Cody reported to Merritt atop a slight conical hill overlooking Warbonnet Creek.
Directly across the valley in the distance, a party of Cheyenne scouts formed opposite the 5th Cavalry. Merritt ordered Carr to saddle up the regiment. Cody then noticed that the Indians were actually watching a distant supply train en route to Merritt’s command. Two dispatch riders from the wagon train were galloping toward camp and had caught the attention of the Cheyennes. A party of warriors rushed forth to intercept them.
Cody asked Merritt for permission to engage the hostiles with his scouts, and the colonel gave the go-ahead. Lieutenant King was to watch from the hill and send in the scouts just before the Cheyennes could intercept the messengers.
“Now, lads, in with you!” cried King in the nick of time. Cody’s men charged the surprised warriors, turning the tables and scattering them with a rifle volley. As Cody’s horse splashed across Warbonnet Creek, a Cheyenne warrior turned to meet him. His name was Yellow Hair (though often incorrectly referred to as Yellow Hand), and like Cody he had dressed splendidly for combat. He wore a feathered bonnet, a special charm, tin bracelets and a beautifully beaded belt, from which hung the blond scalp that inspired his name. His unique breechcloth had been fashioned from a cotton American flag. As his handful of companions fled, Yellow Hair boldly stood his ground and fired at the longhaired scout.
Yellow Hair’s shot missed, but Cody placed a round through the Cheyenne warrior’s leg, dropping his calico pony. At the same moment, Cody’s horse stumbled, sending him tumbling onto the ground. Clear of their horses, Cody and the wounded Yellow Hair fired simultaneously. The Cheyenne missed, Buffalo Bill did not, and the former fell. Cody rushed forward to scalp the fallen warrior. Raising the topknot and war bonnet aloft, he cried out, “The first scalp for Custer!”
Merritt ordered the regiment forward, and the cavalrymen cheered as they galloped past Cody in pursuit of the retreating warriors. The 5th Cavalry pursued the Cheyennes some 30 miles back to the Red Cloud Agency, where they quickly blended back into the general population.
King recalled that the Indians were as impressed as the whites with Cody: “One and all, they wanted to see Buffalo Bill, and whenever he moved, they followed him with awe-filled eyes. He wore the same dress in which he had burst upon them in yesterday’s fight, a Mexican costume of black velvet, slashed with scarlet and trimmed with silver buttons and lace— one of his theatrical garbs, in which he had done much execution before the footlights in the States, and which now became of intensified value.”
An exhausted Cody took a moment that evening to write his wife: “We have had a fight. I killed Yellow Hand [sic] a Cheyenne Chief in a single-handed fight. You will no doubt hear of it through the papers. I am going as soon as I reach Fort Laramie the place we are heading for now [to] send the war bonnet, shield, bridal, whip, arms and his scalp to Kerngood [a friend in Rochester] to put up in his window. I will write Kerngood to bring it up to the house so you can show it to the neighbors.” When Kerngood showed the scalp to Louisa Cody, she fainted.
The 5th Cavalry next moved north to reinforce Crook’s column and pursue Sitting Bull’s band. Crook’s huge command, the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition, had more than 2,000 men. Buffalo Bill was appointed chief of scouts, with some 20 men working under him. But the triumphant Indians scattered, and the lumbering Army columns had no chance of catching them. On August 22, Cody asked for his discharge.
Cody soon put a new theatrical combination together, featuring the poet-scout Captain Jack Crawford, a companion from the Great Sioux War. The new play was The Red Right Hand; or Buffalo Bill’s First Scalp for Custer, a five-act monstrosity that was, according to Cody, “without head or tail, and it made no difference at which act we commenced the performance.” It was his most successful play. Not the least of the show’s attractions were Yellow Hair’s scalp and feathered war bonnet. The Northeastern press and clergy quickly sent up a howl of protest over this barbaric display, so Cody withdrew his trophies from theater windows and confined himself to brandishing them onstage. This only increased box office receipts, as folks hurried to see the controversial scalp.
Was The Red Right Hand a case of art imitating life? Or, rather, had the slaying of the unfortunate Yellow Hair been a case of life imitating art? Cody, in fact, had dressed for the stage on the morning of July 17, 1876, and, thus attired, had gone forth and killed an Indian in a dramatic, grisly ritual that reaffirmed his status as a true frontiersman. He then hurried eastward, scalp in hand, to exploit the deed. It was as if the frontier West had become Cody’s vast living stage, upon which he performed ritualistic acts of heroism for the entertainment of the industrial East. After his premier performance on Warbonnet Creek, Buffalo Bill simply took the show on the road. The Red Right Hand was a rerun, and the residuals were quite profitable.
In 1883, inspired by the success of a July Fourth rodeo he staged at his North Platte, Neb., ranch, Cody initiated his famous Wild West. This outdoor spectacle combined such rodeo standbys as bucking broncos, wild steers, roping and riding with historical motifs from his stage plays, including the Deadwood stage, the Pony Express and Custer’s Last Stand. Various animals from the Western wilds were on display, as were such famous frontier celebrities as Pawnee Bill, Frank North, Sitting Bull and, of course, Buffalo Bill himself. The cowboy, once a pejorative name, now became an American hero in the form of William Levi “Buck” Taylor, the King of the Cowboys, and Johnny Baker, the Cowboy Kid. Displays of marksmanship were provided by Cody, Baker and, most notably, Annie Oakley, Little Sure Shot.
As the years passed, Cody updated the historical pageants in the Wild West (he never used the word “show”) to include the Spanish-American War, the Boxer Rebellion and the Philippine Insurrection. But such signature events as an Indian attack on the Deadwood stage and the first scalp for Custer remained standard fare throughout the show’s long run.
Cody took his Wild West to London in 1887 for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, where it became an international sensation. Buffalo Bill gave the Europeans, just as he had his own countrymen, a taste of the vanishing frontier. He exploited the romantic possibilities of the American West, making them intelligible to millions who had no other knowledge of the frontier than what he presented. He became a buckskin-clad goodwill ambassador, winning the hearts of the world as had no American since Benjamin Franklin.
After a three-decade run, in which time Cody made and lost several fortunes, the Wild West extravaganza finally failed in 1913. He toured for two more seasons with the Sells-Floto Circus and made his final appearance with the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Wild West in 1916.
Cody died in Denver on January 10, 1917. It was as if the last link between the modern America of automobiles, airplanes and world wars and the old frontier America of the Pony Express, the stagecoach and Indian wars had been severed. The city fathers, not about to lose a potential tourist attraction, buried him atop Lookout Mountain— in a concrete-lined steel vault. They had feared that citizens of Cody, Wyo., the town Buffalo Bill had promoted and made his home after 1902, might attempt to steal the body. Buffalo Bill was a valuable commodity, dead or alive. No doubt Cody would have understood. It was, after all, show business.
William F. Cody both created and physically embodied the essential American myth of Westward expansion. At Warbonnet Creek, for a single moment, myth and reality melded into one.
Author Paul Andrew Hutton teaches history at the University of New Mexico and is executive director of Western Writers of America. See Buffalo Bill’s America, by Louis S. Warren, and Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill, by Don Russell.
Originally published in the February 2009 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.
