Buffalo Bill on Stage

2: Treading the Boards

• 17 • • C h a p t e r t w o • TreadingtheBoards •••• Everything was so wonderfully bad that it was almost good. —New York Herald, April 1, 1873 During the time Cody scouted for the Fifth Cavalry, Cheyenne chief Tall Bull and his mixed band of incensed Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapaho terrorized emigrants along the route from Leavenworth to Denver. Graves of those the Indians had murdered mottled the trail. One outrage occurred in summer 1869 when Tall Bull abducted two women from Solomon, Kansas. Lieutenant General Philip H. Sheridan called on the Fifth Cavalry to stop him. Cody guided troops to Summit Springs, Colorado, where Major Eugene A. Carr attacked the camp, killing some fifty Cheyenne. One of the hostages was wounded; the other woman was killed, as was the Indian chief. Controversy has continued ever since over who actually killed Tall Bull, Cody or Frank North, but Cody was generally credited with the killing and never denied it. In his version, he said he noticed the Indian close by a ravine. “When he was not more than thirty yards distant I fired, and the next moment he tumbled from his saddle.”1 Contradicting her husband’s account, Louisa wrote in her memoirs , “Many times afterward he laughed at the historical account of the chapter two 18 • killing—one out of the many heroic things with which he is credited that he did not accomplish.”2 Shortly after the Summit Springs battle, Ned Buntline arrived at Fort McPherson, the home of the Fifth, from a temperance tour in California. Buntline was the pen name of Edward Zane Carroll Judson, an overweight, baggy-eyed New Yorker who wrote for eastern publications. Besides advocating various causes, he made his living giving temperance lectures (some while drunk), all the while on the lookout for new dime-novel material. A prolific author, Buntline churned out a number of books, some with social reform themes, a topic that kept him hopping, so he said, from the villains he exposed.3 There are a number of conflicting accounts about the first meeting between Cody and Buntline. Some suggest he came looking for Wild Bill Hickok whose adventures in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine highlighted his recent fracas at Rock Creek station. Others claim Buntline hoped to make a fictional hero out of Frank North, the rumored champion of Summit Springs. North refused to have anything to do with such romance and instead pointed out Cody as a likely hero.4 Cody’s charisma captivated Buntline and, a few months after he went back to New York, his story Buffalo Bill, King of the Border Men appeared in print. Serialized in the New York Weekly, it reinforced Cody’s name in the nation’s attention. The eastern sportsmen whom Cody had impressed as a hunting guide invited him to visit New York City, where they showed him off as being what a real scout and Indian fighter looked like. The New York Herald believed he came “from the land of the buffalo and red men to see for himself the difference between an Indian powwow and a genuine masquerade.”5 At the time, February 1872, actor and playwright Frederick G. Maeder had just dramatized the King of the Border Men story. Buntline thought it a fine idea for Cody to attend the play. Forty years previously, The Lion of the West, James Kirke Spaulding’s comedy about a rough, ill-mannered frontiersman named Nimrod Wildfire, had played in Washington. Spaulding modeled Wildfire after Tennessee congressman Davy Crockett. At one performance, when buckskinned actor James Hackett realized Crockett himself was in the audience, he bowed to him in acknowledgement. Crockett rose and bowed back. Perhaps Buntline fancied the scenario enough to harbor hopes of a repeat. Cody, oblivious to Buntline’s ruse, admitted to being “curious to see how I would look when represented by someone else.”6 For the play—actually a Treading the Boards • 19 reworking of Hickok’s Civil War adventures—Buntline had supplied a good description of Cody, so actor J. B. Studley made himself up to resemble him. We don’t know what Cody thought of this fiction, but the audience discovered his presence and insisted he step onstage. Years later in his autobiography , he confessed that, “I felt very much embarrassed—never more so in my life—and I knew not what to say. I made a desperate effort...