Buffalo Bill on Stage

5: First Scalp for Custer

• 77 • • C h a p t e r f i v e • FirstScalpforCuster •••• It didn’t make much difference how many shots were fired; the number of Indians that toppled over was always more than the number of bullets, which chased them to their death. —Louisa Frederici Cody and Courtney Ryley Cooper, Memories of Buffalo Bill Texas Jack Omohundro and his wife Giuseppina Morlacchi rejoined Cody at the end of summer 1875 when Kit Carson Jr. left to form his own combination. The newly organized troupe opened in Albany, New York, on September 2 and toured around New York State. At the end of the month in Rochester, they once again were performing in combination the two plays of the previous seasons with which Jack was familiar—Scouts of the Plains and Life on the Border. When the combination appeared at Easton, Pennsylvania’s opera house, they had the best house of the season. Receipts compared favorably to the $800 profit in Scranton and the $900 taken in Wilkes-Barre. Easton’s Free Press reported that one day when Cody was talking with friends at West Chester’s Green Tree Hotel, a young lawyer “chipped in, anxious to have Bill talk about his exploits, something he never does except on Sundays chapter five 78 • after church.” The barrister asked if he ever shot anyone “under necessity, of course.” Cody frowned “as black as a whole troop of corkologians” and “thundered: ‘No! what do you ask me such a thing for?’” The lawyer, under the mistaken impression that Cody enjoyed a reputation as a gunman, assumed he believed in “that kind of thing a little.” Cody growled, “No, sir, emphatically I don’t. But see here, my friend, I’ll tell you something. If you ever find some thunderin’ fool mixing into your business and trying to insult you, and you feel that that man’s brain is suffering for want of ventilation, always shoot quick.” At that, he suddenly grabbed at his hip pocket, “but before he could get his paper of ‘Solace’ out the young lawyer was on the other side of a two-inch door.”1 For all his claims of reenacting actual events, Cody may not have realized that his act onstage translated into a perception of himself as violent in the public mind. Early in his career, he boasted he and Jack would clean out the Modocs. Months later, he had been goaded into a “revelation” that he had killed dozens of men. Now he was being taken more seriously as an actor, and the idea of appearing as a bloodthirsty gunfighter did not sit well. Despite the legend, a gunfighter was not the “heroic lone crusader who fights evil in order that good may prevail.” Instead, according to Joseph G. Rosa, “the gunfighter invokes a sinister image” of a man who “arouses controversy and stirs emotions.”2 But even though Cody’s stage persona embodied the frontier spirit where skill with firearms was a necessity for both hunting and self-defense, he vigorously protested being regarded as a brawler or gunman. Some years before, he responded to a story in the New York Herald about another “Buffalo Bill” in Pensacola, Florida, who had stolen the sheriff’s horse and then been shot by the lawman. Cody clarified, though the name was the same, it was not he. “When I die it will be maintaining honor—that which constitutes the safeguard of society, whether it apply to man or to woman.”3 In previous seasons, the troupe had confined its travels to eastern states, but in November 1875, Cody headed for the Deep South, to Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, even as far west as Texas. Unlike the North where the Civil War brought expansion and redistribution of wealth, the first years of the war closed a number of southern theatres, and only some reopened.4 Frontier stories of triumph over savagery did not appeal only to eastern audiences. The southern man was not that different from his northern counterpart . Both expected to expand their province for agriculture and speculation by claiming Indian lands. When Cody came south, the Civil War had First Scalp for Custer • 79 been over for over ten years. His service as a Union soldier did not detract from southerners’ acceptance of him, if indeed it was common knowledge. One journalist admitted, “[W]e know nothing of the company other than that...