Read Online Louis S. Warren by Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody, the Wild West Show - Free Book Online

Express was to heal the nation’s troublesome rift, to bring desolate and broken families together through the fragile connection of correspondence. Cody never rode for the Pony Express, but it made sense that he wished he had. If the adventures he recounted were ones he had heard or read elsewhere, he claimed them as his own in part because he was still seeking to be the bearer of news that could save the family—just as he had sought to be when he climbed out of a sickbed to straddle a pony and ride to the rescue of his father.
    The stature of the Pony Express increased through its association with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, where the union of man and horse headed west with the mail came to symbolize not only the last redoubt of organic labor before ascendant technology and the reunited family and nation, but also the grafting of the Far West onto America. The unruly, racially distinctive Indians, the mixed-blood Mexicans and perfidious Mormons, the savage, weird nature of the mysterious frontier with its vast herds of buffalo and rumored hot springs, deserts, unending prairie and endless sky—all of these were now joined to the republic. In no small way, the Pony Express rider embodied this hybrid conjunction of wilderness and civilization. The young white man barely in control of the beast beneath him represented America joined to the West’s untamed promise and peril. Thus, contemporaries hailed the Pony Express not only as a fast mail service, not just as a man on a horse, but as a horse-man, and sometimes a hippogriff, a mythical beast with the body of a horse, the head of a lion, and the wings of an eagle. Most of all, though, as Donald C. Biggs has noted, descriptions of the Pony Express often fuse the rider and the horse, sometimes explicitly, sometimes by failing to mention the existence of a rider at all. “The image becomes more animal and rather less than human; what truly emerges is the centaur.” 80
    Buffalo Bill Cody could not have explained all this. At least, he never did. But intuitively, he understood from a young age that the story of the Pony Express was about much more than delivering mail. Growing up beside the trail to California, he saw the nation moving west, and in his own front yard heard the lamentations of families sundered by emigration to Colorado and exotic, alluring, and faraway California.
    One last, seldom-noticed story in his autobiography suggests his connection of the West and the longing for family reunion. Shortly before he staked his claim in Kansas, Isaac Cody took his son Will on a trip to trade with Kickapoo Indians, just inside Kansas Territory. For the eight-year-old boy, the trip not only provided a first glimpse of Indians, but also a chance meeting with a long-lost relative who proved to be the boy’s first showman mentor. While camped near the Indian agency (the headquarters of the government’s representative to the Kickapoos), father and son saw a herd of horses “approaching from the West, over the California trail,” driven by “seven or eight mounted men, wearing sombreros, and dressed in buckskin, with their lariats dangling from their saddles.” 81 When one of the horse drovers ventured over to meet Mr. Cody, “my father called to me to come and see a genuine Western man; he was about six feet two inches tall, was well built, and had a light, springy and wiry step. He wore a broad-brimmed California hat, and was dressed in a complete suit of buckskin, beautifully trimmed and beaded.” After a cheerful reunion, the westerner assisted young Will in the breaking of the two ponies which Isaac had just bought from the Kickapoos. Then he demonstrated riding tricks which he claimed to have learned as a circus rider in Hawaii, and in California, where he had also been a “bocarro,” or vaquero, a Mexican cowboy. 82
    It sounds too good to be true, and perhaps it is, but both Julia and William Cody