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

recalled that the stranger proved to be Horace Billings, a long-lost nephew of Isaac’s. Over the summer Billings took the boy with him on short trips out on the Plains to catch wild horses, which they sold for cash at the nearby military post. Billings departed for the Far West that fall. 83
    There is, in fact, nothing intrinsically incredible about William Cody’s colorful version of the story. In the early nineteenth century, young men did run away to sea. Hawaii was a major port of call. Many of the first immigrants to gold rush California came from the Hawaiian Islands. There were circuses that toured the goldfields and the Pacific in the 1840s and ’50s, and even if Billings had not been in a circus, many people in the West imitated circus riding tricks for amusement. Wild horses were endemic to California and the Southwest. Americans—and Mexicans, and Indians—did venture out to the Plains for horse-capturing, or “mustanging,” expeditions, either to capture and break horses, or to trade for Indian horses, which they then drove to the exploding markets of the midwestern frontier. The Santa Fe Trail, the most popular route for this trade, connected the Far Southwest to Saint Joseph, Missouri, and ran near the Kickapoo Indian agency. 84
    But whether or not Billings was a real figure, Cody’s story about him suggests how he thought about the West as a place from which fatherly heroes emerged. The man’s mastery of horses reassured the young boy, whose older brother had died beneath a volatile mare the year before. When Little Gray, a troublesome horse, began to sprint for home, “Billings stood straight up on his back, and thus rode him into camp. As he passed us he jumped to the ground, allowed the horse to run to the full length of the lariat, when he threw him a complete somersault.” 85
    Cody’s memory of Billings was of a consummate horseman, a buckskin-clad showman, mentor, and father figure. “Everything that he did, I wanted to do,” recalled the theatrical star. “He was a sort of hero in my eyes, and I wished to follow in his footsteps.” 86 Those footsteps led both westward and into show business.
    The expedition to the Kickapoo Indian agency showed young Will Cody his first Indians, and also a white man who came out of the West over the California trail, having mastered Mexican horsecraft and wild horses, too. The most striking thing about Billings is how much he resembles the future Buffalo Bill Cody himself, a horseman from the West in finely beaded buckskin and a broad-brimmed hat, “six feet two inches tall,” and “well built” with a “light, springy and wiry step.”
    THE FUTURE LAY WEST. And for the young man who turned his eyes that way after the Civil War was over, the memory of Horace Billings, the glorious man who rode out of the West, made it seem a wonderful place indeed. In William Cody’s memory, some harbinger of his own future self rode to him across the Plains from California that summer. Isaac Cody would never come home again. But in William Cody’s mind, the western trails brought absent father figures back to the family.
    When Cody recounted his life story in future years, he told himself into those trails. In 1867, he had the first of several encounters with writer and railroad agent William Webb. In 1873, Webb published a description of Cody as a man who crossed the Plains “twice as a teamster, while a mere boy, and has spent the greater part of his life on it since.” 87 The story was true. Cody traveled from Leavenworth to Denver when he was fourteen. He made another trip to Denver in 1863, and raced back to be with his dying mother. 88 He told Webb nothing about the Pony Express.
    Two years after Webb’s first meeting with Cody, the dime novelist Ned Buntline toured the West and met William Cody, then an army scout. The two men plied each other with drink and western yarns.