Louis S. Warren (5 page)

What truth is there to Cody's teenage odyssey? As far as we can tell, he was indeed a boyhood teamster, who at the age of fourteen drove a wagon to Denver. In the summer of 1860, his uncle Elijah, a prominent merchant, moved there from Missouri. Nephew Will went along to drive a wagon of goods. We know this because Arthur “Pat” Patterson, a fifteen-year-old neighbor and friend of young Will Cody, went to Colorado on this very journey as a teamster, and both he and Cody would later recall having made that journey together. The boys waited out the winter in Denver. Will Cody needed money, and it seems likely he tried his hand at prospecting and possibly trapping, two common ways of making extra cash. Somehow, he broke his leg during the trip. He returned home with his friend Pat Patterson, in the summer or fall of 1860, not on a raft but by hiring himself out as a teamster again.
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Cody's Utah war and Rain-in-the-Face stories were fictions. So, too, were his Pony Express adventures. Cody claimed to have ridden for the Pony Express for two separate periods, the first in late 1859, out of Julesberg, Colorado. But none of the stations he lists as his stops correspond to stations on that section of the trail. The men he says hired him actually did work for the Pony Express, but they could not have hired him, because they either ranked too low on the corporate hierarchy or were not on that section of the Pony Express line during this time. More to the point, the Pony Express functioned for only eighteen months, beginning in April 1860. Nobody was a Pony Express rider in 1859.
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His second stretch as a pony rider, from summer 1860 until spring 1861, was allegedly along the Sweetwater Division, where Indian attacks forced a temporary closure of the line, and Cody says he went with Wild Bill Hickok's raiding party to reclaim horses from the Sioux on Powder River. Some of the events Cody describes actually happened—but not to him. A station keeper along the transport line, at Gilbert's Station, was killed, just as Cody recounts, but the killing happened in 1859, before the Pony Express began. There was an Indian attack on a stagecoach which did close down the line for six weeks, and the names of passenger casualties even correspond to the names in Cody's account. But it did not happen until April 1862, long after the Pony Express was discontinued. Cody claimed that he joined Wild Bill Hickok's retaliatory raid in 1861. But that year, Hickok was a stock tender at a station in faraway Rock Creek, eastern Nebraska, where he was recovering from an injury which prevented him from doing much of anything.
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Cody's pony tale begins to look ragged under investigation, and other eyewitnesses fail to curry it. Julia Cody wrote her memoirs in the early 1900s, when her brother's Pony Express adventures were renowned around the world. She dismisses them with this summary: “he hired to go out and Ride the Pony Express, and he made the longest Ride of any of the others. They sayed he was the youngest one and the Lightest and swiftest rider, and seemed to understand the Country, and the Rouffians and how to handle them.”
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That is all. No details to suggest he really rode for the Pony Express, not even a repetition of one of his stories.

There are three alleged eyewitnesses who claimed to have met Cody on his Pony Express route. One, Edward Ayer, a prominent collector of western Americana, told a story in the 1920s, about getting to know the boy rider during a month's travel along the Platte River in 1860, as Ayer's wagon train journeyed to California. But there are some problems in this story. The wagon route was on the north bank of the Platte; the Pony Express route on the south bank. Riders had deadlines and did not stop to chat. Not even the slowest oxen could keep a wagon train in one rider's assigned section of the trail for a month.
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Another eyewitness, Charlie Becker, was a Pony Express rider who recalled meeting Cody both at Fort Bridger and then afterward as a Pony Express rider. But Becker, whose account was not recorded until sometime after 1900, recalls he and Cody became good friends and comrades, serving next to each other on the route for the entire year and a half the pony line was in existence. Even Cody himself wrote that he served in two different sections, and neither for very long. Like Ayer, Becker seems to have embroidered himself into Cody's mythology, decades after the showman wrote his autobiography and long after he had become the embodiment of America's frontier myth.
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The third eyewitness is perhaps most revealing. In 1893, Cody paid Alexander Majors, the sole survivor of the Russell, Majors, and Waddell partnership, to write his autobiography. Cody's press agent wrote a preface for it, and his ghostwriter took a hand in the work, too. The book,
Seventy
Years on the Frontier,
went on sale at Buffalo Bill's Wild West show that summer, appearing alongside Cody's own autobiography at the bookstall on the showgrounds in Chicago. Royalties went to Majors.

Cody sponsored the book out of kindness. Majors had been a friend of Isaac Cody's. Not long after Isaac died, Mary Cody took her son Will to Majors's office in Leavenworth, and asked a favor. Could he employ the boy? Majors looked at twelve-year-old Will Cody, and he asked no questions—just gave him a job carrying dispatches along the three miles of road between the telegraph station and company offices in Leavenworth.

Now, in 1893, the old man was broke and alone. Cody offered him help. One might expect Majors would oblige Cody's generosity by conjuring up some fabulous adventures for the young Buffalo Bill. But despite the fact that Cody hired Prentiss Ingraham, a voluble dime novelist, to ghostwrite for Majors, and even though Cody paid for the book's publication, Majors was unable to recall any specific feats of Cody's supposed Pony Express riding other than the ones that appear in Cody's own 1879 autobiography.
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What was Cody doing if he was not riding the Pony Express in 1860 and 1861? Three other, independent accounts, one by his sister, one by a former teacher, and one actually by himself, all agree: he was in school. Julia wrote, and William Cody confirmed, that he was taught by Valentine Devinny, a teacher who later recalled Cody being a particularly determined ballplayer. Devinny moved to Leavenworth only in the fall of 1860, and left for Colorado sometime in 1862.

The first year Devinny taught at Leavenworth, the Pony Express had begun. The route started in Saint Joseph, Missouri, and passed through northeastern Kansas, to the north of Leavenworth. At the moment Mr. Devinny took up the chalk before a roomful of expectant pupils, young men were stationed at points across the Plains, waiting to carry the mail over trail sections that were seventy-five to a hundred miles long. Their rides were so punishing that they often arrived with blood flowing from noses and gums. Couriers slept on their horses; snow buried the trails. The few authentic accounts that survive describe the agony of forty-below winter blasts and horses (not to mention riders) on the verge of death. Pony Express riders did not take days off for school. William Cody could not have been in Devinny's classroom and riding for the Pony Express at the same time.
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If young Will wasn't on the Pony Express, why did no contemporaries debunk his fabulous story? What of his partner in the trapping expedition to Colorado, Dave Harrington? The feared John Slade? Wild Bill Hickok? Together they illustrate William Cody's remarkable talent for choosing witnesses. For if they might once have deflated some of the celebrity's more extravagant lies, by 1879, when the book appeared, it was impossible. They were all dead.

Cody's childhood Mormon-and-Indian-fighting, prospecting, Pony Express–riding, Hickok-knowing, bullwhacking saga was the foundation of his mythic western persona. These glittering ornaments of western youth tied William Cody firmly to the expanding West of the pre–Civil War period, making him an “old-timer” rather than a greenhorn interloper, authenticating his stage performance as “Buffalo Bill” in 1879 and ever after.

But if we know he packed his childhood story with untruths, what do those fabrications tell us about him? About why he told the tales he did? About his rationale for making himself part of the largely forgotten Utah Expedition, and the failed business enterprise of the Pony Express?

Americans of Cody's day were generally concerned about the survival of families in their rapidly changing country. As a performer in theatrical melodrama—a genre that fixated on threats to the family—Cody was profoundly aware that heroism in family defense had popular appeal. Given the constant ordeal of defending Isaac from his many enemies, it was even fitting that so many of Cody's autobiographical fictions, from his Mormon War adventures to the Pony Express saga, reflect an ardent defense of family. From the 1840s until 1900, many Americans perceived polygamous Mormons as a threat to monogamous marriage. Novels and “historical” accounts portrayed them as liars, murderers, and, especially, as kidnappers of virgins to serve as concubines for lecherous church patriarchs. Prior to the Civil War, northern reformers labeled polygamy and slavery as “the twin relics of barbarism” which it was the duty of civilization to banish. In 1857, Mormon militiamen massacred a wagon train of emigrants at Mountain Meadows, in southern Utah. The event was shrouded in secrecy. The U.S. government did not achieve a conviction in the case until 1877, when they tried—and shot—the Mormon elder John D. Lee for masterminding the crime.
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Lee's sensational trial renewed America's long-standing anti-Mormonism, and in 1877, Buffalo Bill took advantage of the furor by commissioning a new play,
May Cody, or Lost and Won.
In the drama, his sister May Cody was abducted by Mormons and rescued by Buffalo Bill. Two years later, as Cody wrote his life story for publication, he inscribed himself back into the 1857 Mormon War as a way of claiming the play as an authentic reflection of his real life, with the boy Will Cody facing off against the notoriously antimonogamy religious sect. The story in his autobiography was packed full of authentic details, and placed Indian attacks, cattle herds, and wagon trains in places that correspond with the historical record, so that biographers and historians have long concluded that Cody must have been on the Utah Expedition as a child.
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But if his story was so credible, it was because it illustrates William Cody's remarkable talent for grafting details of other people's tales onto his own. Cody was a gifted storyteller, and as such he knew that one of the most effective ways of making a fiction credible is to slather it in seemingly nonessential, truthful details. Repeated genuine details in a story pile up in the reader's—or the listener's—imagination, collectively whispering, “We are the real.” The technique is so widely used that the scholar Roland Barthes has given it a name: the “reality effect.”
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Cody learned the reality effect from other storytellers, and we shall see more in the chapters ahead about how he learned to construct his elaborate fictions. But for now, we may observe that as a messenger boy and drover for the West's biggest transport firm and as a teenage teamster himself, fireside retellings of adventure on the western trails were a regular feature of his upbringing. His account of the Mormon War and the winter at Fort Bridger is remarkably similar to the one recounted by John Y. Nelson, an old trail guide, buffalo hunter, and teamster who also claimed to have been on the Utah Expedition and to have spent the same winter at Fort Bridger that Cody did. Nelson befriended Cody in the 1860s and toured with his dramatic troupe as translator for the two Sioux Indians who joined the theatrical show on its tours of the East and Midwest, beginning in 1877—the same year that Buffalo Bill's anti-Mormon drama,
May Cody, or Lost and Won,
debuted.
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If the Mormon drama of Cody's autobiography reflected popular anxieties about the sanctity of marriage, the Pony Express was an even more useful symbol. In American popular reckoning, the Pony Express assumed heroic stature for various reasons. The replacement of people by machines had been a familiar characteristic of American progress at least since the industrial looms of Lowell, Massachusetts, began to replace the weaver by the hearth in the 1810s, and it became increasingly evident throughout rural America as McCormick's reapers began replacing family labor in the 1840s.
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Mechanization was both celebrated and condemned, but whatever one's feelings on the advent of technology, it was increasingly inevitable as the nineteenth century wore on, even in frontier mail delivery. When the Pony Express began in 1860, westbound mail traveled by train to Saint Joseph, Missouri, where the tracks ended. There the letters passed to a waiting rider.

But at a rate of $5 per half-ounce, only the most urgent messages went by Pony Express. Regular correspondence went by ship or by creaking coach and wagon on a longer, more southerly route. Faster, more economical delivery would come with the transcontinental railroad, a development long anticipated, and long delayed by congressional fighting over proposed northern and southern routes.

With the departure of the South from Congress, workers would soon begin laying track west again. But long before they completed that job, another machine emerged to carry the most important correspondence between California and the eastern states: the telegraph. A line of poles connected by wire sprouted westward from Saint Joseph beginning the summer of 1861. The riders of the Pony Express were in a sense advance couriers for the train, but even more for the telegraph, the technology that replaced them with the completion of the transcontinental telegraph line in 1861, an achievement that finally destroyed whatever segment of the market remained for the messengers of Russell, Majors, and Waddell. Pony Express riders symbolized not only rugged strength and courage, but the anachronism of organic workers—animals and people—and their heroic endurance as they prepared the ground for the machine. The
Sacramento Bee
eulogized the pony soon after the last rider dismounted. “Thou wert the pioneer of a continent in the rapid transmission of intelligence between its peoples, and have dragged in your train the lightning itself, which, in good time, will be followed by steam communication by rail.”
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As the nineteenth century rolled on, ever more laborers were replaced by an ever wider array of machines, and the horseman as harbinger of technological revolution became ever more apt a symbol for Americans, especially in cities where the Wild West show played to packed stands.