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

Buntline soon published the first version of Cody’s life story. It was highly fictionalized, but had many real elements of Cody’s life, including fights with Charles Dunn and other bushwhackers, and a friendship with Wild Bill Hickok. But it contained nary a mention of the Pony Express. 89
    Cody’s fame as a hunting guide and dramatic actor made him the subject of many newspaper interviews in the early 1870s. But he never said anything about being in the Pony Express until 1874. He had been a stage star for a year and a half when he suddenly blurted out to a newspaperman that he “rode the pony express route from St. Jo to San Francisco” in 1860. By the end of the month, he was announcing himself as the “
first
rider who started on
the route.” 90
    William Cody created the persona of Buffalo Bill not as a western man alone, but as a man who grew up connecting East and West, the Far West and the States, frontier and home. It was California and the Far West that harbored the youthful manliness and wild horse spirit that so entranced the young boy, and journeying out of that West came familial reunion and adulation. In his mind, the trail to the Far West was the path to manhood, and lost family, too. In his memory of his youth, the trails betokened his own ideal future. In his memory, the Wild West show in some sense came to him from over that far horizon.
    William Cody’s 1879 autobiography did not recount his childhood so much as reinvent it. Much more than a memoir of real events, the book mixed truth and fiction, to cast the child Will Cody as the protagonist of an American myth. The boy came up through hard times by dint of his own energy, hard work, and good luck and great connections. He grew up holding together the nation with the Pony Express, fighting for its families by battling the Mormons. If these were lies, they were skillfully told ones, and there was a method to them. They appealed to his audience, but, just as important, they retained and embellished a genuine aspect of his childhood struggle to defend his family. At eleven years old, he was the eldest surviving male in a family blasted by the border wars, lurching toward poverty, afflicted with the violence of their enemies.
    The desperate effort to protect the Cody family from the maelstrom which engulfed them was a burden that passed from Isaac and Mary, neither of whom lived to see its conclusion, to their eldest children, Julia—who was twenty and married when her mother died—and William, who was a mere seventeen.
    In recalling the weight of that load, the grown-up William Cody never dwelt on its darkness. He was innately optimistic, a characteristic which served him well in show business. But to understand him, his biography, and the many lies he told about both, we need only recall the boy who rose from a sickbed, leapt to the back of his pony, and outran border ruffians to meet his father at Grasshopper Falls. One of the reasons we may believe this story is because of details Cody left out, which emerged long after, from other sources. When Buffalo Bill told the story in
The Life of Buffalo Bill
in 1879, he said he got away from his pursuers and found his father, having “arrived in ample time to inform him of the approach of his old enemies.” 91 He left out details his sister provided: his stop at the neighbor’s, the horse covered with vomit, being put to bed by his concerned friend, and the fact that his father turned out not to be in danger. William Cody left out the panic, the illness, his own weakness. He left out the terror.
    The Kansas border wars brought terror for many families, and we can only wonder how many boys and girls rode fast horses to warn parents of impending doom. What were they thinking, during these races to save family from destruction? They likely feared falling from the back of the galloping horse at every bump in the road or hidden hole in the fields across which they