American Experience (1988) s20e09 Episode Script
Buffalo Bill
1
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NARRATOR: For many of the women,
the sight was overwhelming:
U.S. cavalry appearing
over the horizon,
closing in on their encampment
near Wounded Knee.
Some of them began to cry.
The men tried to comfort them.
The soldiers marched
steadily forward.
The high wailing
of the women blended
with the tinkling bells
of a merry-go-round,
with the sounds of the cars
that were still arriving,
and of the spectators
who had come in
from all over Nebraska
and South Dakota.
At the center of it all
was one of the most
famous people in the world:
William Cody,
better known as “Buffalo Bill.“
The 67-year-old Cody
was directing his first movie--
a reenactment
of the Wounded Knee massacre--
and doing
what he had always done--
blurring the line
between truth and entertainment,
history and myth.
Buffalo Bill Cody had lived
both sides of that line.
He had grown up
in the real West,
knew the sorrow and cruelty
and courage that had created it.
But he understood that
the West was something more,
even for those
who would never see it,
and that he could be the hero
in the story
they wanted to live.
MAN:
That myth of the west,
all of those things
that we tend to think of
as the western adventure--
somehow it was all wrapped up
in the person
of Buffalo Bill.
He connects us to a story
that is at the heart
of the American experience.
And he made the American West
into the American story.
NARRATOR: In 1866, the 20-year-old
William Cody was adrift
in the wake of the Civil War.
His boyhood home was gone,
most of his family dead.
He left behind the remains
of his past
and joined the flood
of young men heading west.
“I sighed for the freedom
of the plains,“
he later recalled.
“I started out alone
for Salina, Kansas,
which was then the end
of the track.“
(crowd chatter,
cattle lowing)
PAUL FEES: Kansas must have been
an enormously exciting place--
lots of soldiers suddenly
out on their own,
the railroads building,
the army moving out
on the plains
to resume their war
on the Plains Indians.
A very interesting place
for people on the make.
And Cody certainly was
on the make.
NARRATOR: He was at home
with the tracklayers,
bullwhackers, speculators
and cowboys
who congregated in the towns
that were springing up
as the rails pushed west.
Life was exciting
and could be treacherous,
but he'd spent most
of the Civil War
riding with Union irregulars--
rough customers.
He could handle himself.
Cody-- he was well
over six feet tall,
very attractive.
And this is a time
when the average height was,
like, you know,
five and a half feet.
So he really
he stood out in a crowd.
NARRATOR:
He had the brash confidence
that sometimes comes
of hardship and loss.
He could drink with the best
of them, and often did.
But Cody was a bit of a loner.
He kept his many companions
at arm's length.
In fact, it might have come
as a surprise
to his drinking buddies
that Bill Cody
had left a wife behind.
He'd met Louisa Frederici
in St. Louis
at the end of the war.
They weren't a perfect match.
You've got Cody, who's a kid
that's grown up
in eastern Kansas,
has been out west
and lived a pretty rugged life.
And she grows up in the French
quarter of St. Louis,
goes to Catholic convent school.
FEES: Golly, she's
In her pictures, she's
almost sultry looking.
And she must have seemed
terribly exotic to him.
And his was a life then
of trying to make
make a home for her.
But he wasn't good at that part.
NARRATOR:
Louisa had warned Cody
that she didn't want
any roving plainsman
for a husband.
But he just couldn't
settle down.
It was only six months
after their wedding
that he'd headed off
to west Kansas,
leaving her
at his sister's home,
alone and pregnant.
But he didn't forget about her.
He sent home
whatever money he could
and lived a hard life to do so.
Cody finally got a bit
of a break
in the spring of 1868
when U.S. Army officers
at Fort Hays hired him to help
track down some deserters.
For Cody, the best part
of the job
was the company he got to keep--
the deputy marshal
from nearby Junction City.
James Butler Hickok
was already well known
as “Wild Bill.“
LOUIS WARREN: Wild Bill
is a scout for the army.
He occasionally acts
as U.S. detective,
which means he's in charge
of tracking down deserters.
And then,
in 1867, Wild Bill Hickok
became the subject
of a magazine article
in Harpers New Monthly Magazine.
FEES: It made Hickok into
what, for Easterners,
seemed the very embodiment
of kind of a flamboyant western,
dangerous hero
or anti-hero even.
So Hickok became famous
largely through
his own flamboyance,
but also through publicity.
(railroad bells clanging)
NARRATOR: Hickok made a habit
of waiting on railway platforms
for Eastern tourists.
He knew what they wanted to see,
and he dressed the part,
wearing clothes that would have
suited Daniel Boone's Kentucky
better than post-Civil War
Kansas.
WARREN: Cody looks on Wild
Bill and sees Hickok running
what is kind of a one-man show,
and the show is the life
of Wild Bill Hickok.
And he starts to think,
“Maybe I could do that.“
Cody begins
to wear his hair long.
He begins to put on buckskin.
He begins to tell
some of the same stories
that Hickok has told,
only he features himself
at the center of those stories
instead of Hickok.
NARRATOR: Easterners
pictured frontier life
as a heroic struggle
to bring civilization
to the West
and subdue Indian savagery.
In fact, a demoralized army
was stuck in an ugly war,
fighting an elusive enemy
in unfamiliar terrain.
Scouts were crucial,
and Cody was good.
As the war
with the Plains Indians
heated up in the late 1860s,
Cody would fight in more battles
than most full-time soldiers.
He liked scouting.
It was adventuresome,
and it paid well.
What's more,
it was stable enough
that Louisa brought
their daughter
and rejoined him
at Fort McPherson.
The next year,
the couple had a second child,
a boy they named after
the famous scout Kit Carson.
But Cody always had his eye
on the horizon,
looking for the next chance.
In the summer of 1869,
that chance turned up
in the person
of a New York writer who went
by the name of Ned Buntline.
Buntline had plenty of reasons
for using an alias.
On more than one occasion,
he'd neglected
to get rid of one wife
before marrying another,
and despite his surplus
of wives,
had found the energy
to kill a man
in a duel
over yet another woman.
But he was also one of the most
successful writers of the day.
Buntline is looking for somebody
to write a book about,
and it was going to be
Wild Bill Hickok
by most accounts.
Hickok either wasn't available
or refused to talk to him
or what have you,
and he decides to write a book
about Cody,
which is called Buffalo Bill:
King of the Border Men.
The book finally gets serialized
in one of
the New York publications.
And at that point, Cody suddenly
becomes a real celebrity.
NARRATOR: Buffalo Bill joined a
growing band of frontier heroes,
idols of a public
fascinated by the West.
For most Americans, that West
existed only in dime novels
and story papers.
But the wealthy
and well-connected
could live out
their Western fantasies.
Soon, Eastern sports were
saddling up to hunt buffalo,
led by famous scouts
like Buffalo Bill.
WARREN: But very few of these men
knew how hard this actually was.
The most common mishap
was for a hunter to shoot
his own horse through the head.
One guide said the safest place
to be with a party of dudes
is nearest the buffalo.
And Cody was hunting with
these men, and they adored him.
Because not only did he look
the part of a Western hero,
but he cultivated his skills
as a horseback hunter
in ways
that few other people had.
One of his biggest critics
actually said,
“I saw him shoot 16 buffalo
from the back of a horse
that was frightened of buffalo,
using 16 shots.“
It was the most spectacular
exhibition
of buffalo hunting
he'd ever seen.
That's what these dudes
are paying for, in part,
is to be in the company
of somebody who's like that.
NARRATOR:
Cody was brushing elbows
with men from the most rarefied
circles of society.
Their adulation was new to him;
he was becoming aware
of his own charisma
and of how far
that might take him.
Just three years after Louisa
had moved to Fort McPherson,
Cody left the family behind
again.
He took Ned Buntline up
on an offer to come to Chicago.
Instead of telling his stories
to well-heeled tourists,
Buffalo Bill would bring
the West to audiences
who could only dream
of the frontier.
FEES:
Cody agreed to appear in a play
that Buntline supposedly
had written for him.
Now, Buffalo Bill himself was
probably inclined to do this,
but he had a pal,
Texas Jack Omohundro,
who was almost clamoring
to become part of this.
BOBBY BRIDGER:
When they got to Chicago,
they found that Buntline
hadn't written the play yet.
When the word got out that
the play had not been written,
the man
who owned the theater
backed out of the production.
And so Buntline
had to borrow the money
from Texas Jack and Buffalo Bill
to rent the theater.
And I think that says a lot
about Ned Buntline.
Buntline says, “Don't worry
about it, don't worry about it.“
Takes him to a hotel,
gets him into a hotel room
and says he'll be back
in a little bit with the play.
And four hours later, he leapt
up from his desk, allegedly,
and shouted “Hurrah, hurrah,
for Scouts of the Plains.
That's the title of the play.
It's finished."
BRIDGER: These two men that
Buntline brought to the theater
were totally inexperienced.
They had a terrible time
remembering their lines.
And when they got out on stage,
they just went absolutely
stone-cold petrified.
Buntline started coaching them
on stage
and trying to throw lines
to them
that they froze
and wouldn't respond to.
So finally, in desperation,
he asked Cody,
“What have you been doing?“
Cody saw a friend of his
out in the audience
and said, “I've been on a hunt
with Mulligan up there.“
WARREN: And then he proceeds to
tell stories about the hunt,
and the crowd just loved it.
They just roared.
And in fact, Cody would recount
that he did not utter one word
of his lines that whole night,
that he just made up stories.
BRIDGER: At that moment,
Buffalo Bill realized
that people would come
to see the star
more than they would the show.
And from that point forward,
he was the star.
NARRATOR:
“Such incongruous drama,
“execrable acting,
intolerable stench,
blood and thunder,“
one critic wrote,
“is not likely to be vouchsafed
to a city a second time,
even Chicago.“
incongruous, execrable and
intolerable it might have been,
but the company played
to packed houses
for the rest of the season.
WARREN: But there are plenty
of signs along the way
that this was a partnership
that wouldn't work out for Cody.
Buntline had a long history
as not only a novelist
and playwright
but as a rabble-rouser.
He was a founding member
of the Know Nothing Party,
which was really
a party of nativists,
that is, they're strongly
anti-immigrant.
NARRATOR: Back in the 1850s,
Buntline had been arrested
for inciting anti-German
violence in St. Louis.
He'd skipped bail and left town,
but he hadn't been forgotten.
When Scouts of the Plains
traveled to St. Louis,
all three men were arrested.
Cody and Omohundro
were quickly released,
and Buntline managed
to skip bail yet again.
It was becoming apparent to Cody
that Buntline
had a lot of baggage
and that maybe Buntline's plans
for the Buffalo Bill character
or figure
weren't in Cody's plans.
Buntline appears to have hoped
that Cody would become
a kind of anti-immigrant figure,
a kind of nativist hero.
And Cody.
For reasons of his own,
didn't want to go there.
NARRATOR: Cody had grown up in
Kansas before the Civil War,
when it was the most dangerous
place in America.
Pro-slavery neighbors
and militias
had terrorized the family.
When Cody's father
spoke out against slavery
at a town meeting,
he was stabbed by a neighbor
as the eight-year-old boy
looked on.
Cody would become the family's
main breadwinner
three years later,
when his father finally died
of his wounds.
One loss followed another:
a brother, his father,
his mother,
a sister, a second brother.
The specter of death
followed him always.
In the spring of 1876,
it suddenly caught up with him.
He was on the road
with his theater combination
when he received an urgent
telegram from Louisa.
Their son, Kit,
had contracted scarlet fever.
Cody rushed home,
but the boy died in his arms
a few hours later.
“Louisa is worn out and sick,“
he wrote to his sister.
“We all clung to him
“and prayed God not to take
from us our little boy.
But there was no hope
from the start.“
FEES: His grief was
intense, and it was real.
But at the same time, uh,
he wasn't able to help his wife
through that, um,
that terrible grief.
And and instead,
he did what he did so often
in their marriage-- he fled.
WARREN: Cody veers away
from the darkness,
almost always.
He doesn't like to focus
on sad stories.
He doesn't like to talk
about pain.
He likes to focus on triumph
and victory.
And this would serve him very,
very well in show business.
In his personal life, it
probably served him less well.
Cody got a summons that must
have seemed providential
to come West and rejoin
General Carr in the 5th Cavalry.
So he went.
WARREN: Cody's company
is with the 5th Cavalry
and they get word that Custer
and most of his command
have died on the banks
of the Little Big Horn River.
And they're shocked.
NARRATOR: By 1876,
Americans had been assured
that the Indian wars
were all but over.
Out of the blue,
a host of warriors
had annihilated
an army detachment
led by one of
its most famous generals.
All eyes were on the West
where Cody and the 5th Cavalry
were searching
for hundreds of Cheyenne.
The high command was panicked.
The public wanted revenge.
Cody saw his chance
to write Buffalo Bill
into Custer's high drama.
WARREN: Cody hits on this idea
that he can live his life,
live this story.
For the entertainment
of his audience.
What's really bizarre
about this whole thing,
I mean, it really is bizarre,
Cody gets dressed up, literally,
in his stage costume.
Black pants
with piping down the front,
silver buttons down the side,
a red silk shirt
and his big hat.
And he's going to go out
and kill an Indian.
NARRATOR: The climactic
battle never happened.
The only action
that the 5th Cavalry saw
was a skirmish with a half dozen
luckless Cheyenne, in which Cody
shot and killed
a warrior named Yellow Hair.
He had killed
other Indians before,
but now, for the first
and only time in his life,
he walked over to the body,
crouched down,
and cut off its scalp.
The incident barely rated
a mention in the Army report,
but within a few months,
Cody was reenacting it
for audiences
from New York to St. Louis
in a play called
The Red Right Hand,
or Buffalo Bill's First Scalp
for Custer.
He sported the same velvet
costume he had worn that day,
used the same knife
and hoisted the real scalp at
the climax of the performance.
He had crossed a threshold.
William Cody
had become Buffalo Bill.
By 1883, Cody had become a star
of frontier melodramas:
lowbrow spectacles featuring
the rescue of a white woman
from the clutches of Indians,
Confederate sympathizers,
Mormons, or the like.
He was a hero to the workingmen
who crowded the theaters,
but he wanted a bigger,
more respectable audience.
He teamed up with a sharpshooter
named Doc Carver
to put on a new kind of show.
“Our entertainment don't
want a smack of a circus,“
he wrote Carver.
“Must be on a high-toned basis.“
They called it “Buffalo Bill
and Doc Carver's Wild West,
Rocky Mountain
and Prairie Exhibition.“
Everybody else just called it
“The Wild West.“
SCOGGIN: They got some wild
steers that they can ride.
They got bucking horses.
They've got buffalo.
And the other thing they got
a lot of is evidently alcohol.
And there are legendary stories.
Supposedly they had
a car full of alcohol.
Whatever it was,
both Carver and Cody
would really go on some pretty,
pretty good drunks.
I think Cody definitely had
a problem with binge drinking,
there's no question about it.
So they travel around
the country with this show,
sometimes not making the
performances because they're,
you know, dead drunk, literally.
Carver's got a terrible temper.
I mean, at one point,
he's the trick shot in the show
and he puts on a lousy
performance.
And he's so frustrated
that he breaks his rifle
over the head of his horse
and beats up his assistant who's
throwing the ball in the air.
I mean, it's that sort of thing.
NARRATOR: The Wild West staggered
through to the end of the season,
and then Cody went off
to meet Nate Salsbury,
a successful, experienced
and sober manager.
WARREN:
Cody had had enough.
He said, “You come on board,
“and help me out with this
or I'm going to quit.
“I wouldn't go through
another summer like this
for a hundred thousand dollars.“
NARRATOR:
Over the next three years,
Cody and Salsbury
overhauled the Wild West,
adding acts and giving it
a story line.
Every year the crowds
grew bigger.
Every year the two owners
reinvested their profits.
In 1885 alone, they cleared
over a hundred thousand dollars.
When he was a young man,
Cody had sighed
for the freedom of the plains.
Now he realized that millions
of people shared his longing.
PATRICIA NELSON LIMERICK: As the majority
of Americans are moving into cities,
working in offices,
working in factories,
they're yearning.
Their imaginations are pent up
and are wanting some place
to run free.
And so, setting
our minds west
that turns out to be
the thing to do.
It's just a wonderful thing
to think,
“There's a different
way of living,
and I can at least spend
my leisure time imagining that."
NARRATOR:
In 1886, the Wild West played
to over a million people
in New York.
Mark Twain and P.T. Barnum
both showed up
and gave Cody the same advice.
As Barnum put it, if they
“take this show to Europe,
they will astonish
the Old World.“
The following spring, Cody,
Salsbury and the Wild West
left New York Harbor
for England.
The Wild West had become
one of the most elaborate shows
on earth.
In a stadium near London,
workers used 17,000 carloads
of rock and earth
to build the mountains
in a sweeping Western landscape.
200 cast members: cowboys,
Native Americans, vaqueros.
Stars like Annie Oakley
and Buffalo Bill himself,
along with hundreds
of horses, buffalo,
mules, elk, steers,
donkeys and deer
all moved into an encampment
on the grounds.
SCOGGIN: Essentially, everybody
had a backstage pass.
You could wander around and see
the performers and such
and see what's going on.
One of the things that might be
most impressive as you
first walk in is what it
must have smelled like.
And of course the noise.
In the background,
the Cowboy Band is playing
and you're getting ready
to see this show.
WINCHESTER: You had people
to sell tickets, there were
people to count the tickets,
people to count the money,
and there was plenty of that.
WARREN: There were butchers
who traveled with the show.
There were bakers.
There were pastry chefs.
There was a whole
kitchen full of cooks.
There are blacksmiths.
There are wheelwrights.
GEORGE MOSES: Spectators were invited
to go into the Indian villages
to see how the people
themselves lived,
and also to see
how they shared that life
with the other members
of the show.
FEES: The Wild West was
an experience for people,
not just a show.
When the show began,
it began with a bang.
WINCHESTER:
And then this man comes out.
And your dad's giving you
the elbow and saying,
“Look at that man.
Remember you've seen
Buffalo Bill Cody.“
FEES: Annie Oakley was
a natural shooter.
She never seemed to aim.
She simply pointed
toward the target
and blew it away.
WINCHESTER: Well, she could take
a mirror and shoot an apple
off the head
of her faithful dog.
She could split a playing card.
If you held a playing card,
she could split it.
Cody took a lot
of responsibility
about making sure
that everything ran
according to plan,
and that people were
at their best
when they performed.
There are photographs of him
peeking through a hole
in the tent, watching the show
and making sure that everybody
was cued correctly.
MOSES:
There would be Indians
leaving their horses
and sneaking up
upon the settlers.
Coming to the rescue was
Buffalo Bill and the cowboys,
and the Indians would race off.
And Cody and his cowboys
would have made the frontier,
once again, safe for settlers.
SCOGGIN: Cody had the reenactment
of the Battle of Little Bighorn.
They reenact the whole thing.
Custer and his command
are all dead.
But Cody rides into the scene
and it's flashed
on the curtain of the stage,
“Too Late.“
As if Cody could have
saved Custer.
FEES:
So it would have been
just an assault on the senses
to the time two and a half hours
after the show began
that people began to go home.
NARRATOR:
Buffalo Bill was a sensation.
One distinguished fan
wrote in her diary
with the excitement
of a schoolgirl,
"An attack on a coach
“and on a ranch,
with an immense deal of firing,
“was most exciting.
“So was the buffalo hunt
and the bucking ponies
that were impossible to sit.“
Queen Victoria's
enthusiasm was contagious.
On the eve of the great ceremony
marking her Golden Jubilee,
the royalty
of 13 countries
followed her example
and went to see Buffalo Bill.
Four years
after treating audiences
to the spectacle of Doc Carver
coming unhinged,
Cody was charming his way
through the salons of London
and needed a secretary to manage
his social engagements.
WINCHESTER:
He had a natural charisma.
You know,
when they describe him,
he stands straight as an arrow.
He has a mild voice, a soft eye.
“Nature's nobleman,“
as they liked to say.
So he could be an asset
to your party to have
this colorful man, you know,
rubbing elbows with your guests.
NARRATOR: His personal
life was another matter.
Louisa stayed in Nebraska,
and the two rarely communicated.
It was easy
to ignore distant problems
with the world at his feet.
He would spend most of the next
five years in Europe.
Three full trains
carried the show
to Paris, Rome,
Barcelona and Berlin.
Buffalo Bill had become
America's first cultural export.
Europeans do not know what
to make of the United States.
It's a it's a problem.
It has the poor taste to revolt
and become
an independent nation
and then become quite
a swaggering, confident nation.
To have something
that causes Europeans
to say, “Wow, we love that.“
That's, in some ways, the end
of the American Revolution.
NARRATOR:
Cody wrote home to friends
trying to explain
what had happened in Europe.
“There was never anything
like it ever known,
and never will be again."
He was right about one thing:
there had never been anything
like Buffalo Bill.
SCOGGIN: He invented the
genre of celebrity.
One reason he was able to do it
is there was now
an infrastructure
that you could have
international celebrities.
NARRATOR:
The telegraph, the railroad,
cheap printing, and a public
hungry for entertainment--
Cody and his managers
put the pieces together.
They were discovering
that you could be famous
for being famous.
FEES:
Buffalo Bill had
a brilliant publicist,
Arizona John Burke,
who managed
to get Cody into print
probably more than any
other man of his time.
And eventually Cody's face,
his image, became so well known
that a poster
just bearing his image--
on a buffalo, of course--
could be labeled “I Am Coming,“
with no mention of Buffalo Bill
or Buffalo Bill's Wild West.
NARRATOR: Buffalo Bill would
never have been famous,
would never have had
a story to tell,
without Native Americans.
He had built the Wild West
around the Sioux
he had been fighting
only a few years before.
In 1885, only nine years
after Custer's Last Stand,
he convinced the most famous
Native American of all,
Sitting Bull,
to join the Wild West.
WINCHESTER:
Well, Sitting Bull was
kind of the focus figure
for the public's horror
and anger over Little Bighorn
and here it is, not very many
years after all of this.
I think the public
had this combination
of fascination and horror.
They're going to go
and look at the man
who wreaked such havoc
on American dreams,
almost like this morbid
fascination they had.
NARRATOR:
It was a publicist's dream:
foes in '76,
friends in '85.
Sitting Bull did get on famously
with Cody,
but he lasted only one season.
He hated the noise and the
squalor of the Eastern cities.
“The white man knows
how to make everything,“
he told a reporter,
“but he does not know
how to distribute it.“
Sitting Bull had had enough,
but hundreds of his fellow Sioux
would follow him
to the Wild West.
Some were overwhelmed,
but many more took
to their new lives.
When they got to Europe,
they were treated
as minor celebrities,
their every move reported
in the papers.
But for Native Americans
back home on the Plains,
it was another story.
In December of 1890,
four centuries of Indian wars
finally ended
in the massacre at Wounded Knee.
GUY DULL KNIFE: My grandfather
at the time was pretty young.
They lived not too far
from Wounded Knee.
And I guess they could hear
those guns going off over there.
And my grandfather said
they went over there after.
And the bodies were still
all laying out there
when my grandfather
went out there.
NARRATOR: George Dull
Knife had been an infant
at the time
of the Little Bighorn.
He had somehow survived
the bullets,
cold and hunger
of the following years,
as the United States
relentlessly
avenged Custer's defeat.
But the years
after Wounded Knee were worse.
On the reservations
there was no hope,
no way out.
GUY DULL KNIFE: I guess there's a
rumor going around the reservation
that, you know, there's a show,
a Wild West show
that was, you know,
they're recruiting.
And, uh, his relatives told him,
you know, you better not go,
you know,
because you don't know
what's out there.
But it was
really hard times then,
you know, people were starving,
and so him and his friend,
they went to Gordon to sign up.
And they don't know
when they're going to come back.
And they don't really know
where they're going either.
The worst thing he said,
when they go overseas,
is that boat.
See, we're not, uh,
we're Plains Indians.
We don't know nothing
about the ocean.
So (chuckles)
I can just imagine riding a boat
for almost two weeks, you know.
But Buffalo Bill,
I guess, he makes his rounds,
talks to people, you know,
and encourages them.
NARRATOR: The Wild West show was
based on a familiar narrative:
the triumph
of white civilization
over wilderness and savagery.
The show Indians attacked
an emigrant train,
a stagecoach,
and a settler's cabin,
only to be foiled every time
by Buffalo Bill.
To Cody and his audiences,
the superiority of white
civilization was a given,
and its victory inevitable.
But there was more to the show.
Other scenes,
and the encampment itself,
offered white audiences a rare
and sympathetic glimpse
of Native American life.
Cody no longer billed himself
as “The Terror of the Red Men,“
and he had stopped boasting
about the first scalp
for Custer.
When he needed a break
from the chaos and the crowds,
he slept in a tepee
in the Indian village.
GUY DULL KNIFE:
My grandfather at the time,
he didn't speak no English.
He kind of had a rough time,
and Buffalo Bill noticed that.
So he started teaching him.
All the guys, you know,
whenever they get a chance,
he'll sit down with them
and teach them.
So that's how my grandfather
learned how to read and write.
In return, they teach him
how to speak Lakota.
So, I guess, over the years,
it got to the point
where he understands
Indian pretty good.
He said they get to travel
all over, like, you know,
they're not doing nothing,
Buffalo Bill takes them around.
They even He even took them
to see the Pope.
That's where, uh, my grandfather
became a nonbeliever
in Christianity.
In the opening of the Wild West
Show, Buffalo Bill came in,
followed by the Indians
on horseback.
And what film there is, uh,
is remarkable
when you look at the faces
of the Indians on horseback.
That they're obviously
having a good time
and many of them are smiling
and laughing;
and they're just having a heck
of a time.
Um, that, that is something
that you cannot fake.
All the Indians
that like my grandfather,
they all liked him.
Whenever they come back
to Gordon from a show,
I guess they usually roll out
a barrel of cognac
or something they bring back
from overseas.
And they have a big party
and then, you know,
he goes his way.
But my grandpa said looks like,
a lot of times,
he doesn't want to, you know.
He's, you know, he likes
likes what he does,
you know.
And likes his company,
Indians and all these cowboys.
I guess he really hates
to leave them.
WARREN:
The pressures of the life
that Cody was living
were enormous.
SCOGGIN: He's feeling all this
responsibility for people.
He's got all these ventures
he's trying to make successful.
He's got all these people
counting on him.
And he becomes a pretty
melancholy fellow.
But he's not William F. Cody.
He's Buffalo Bill.
And he's got
to play that role 24/7.
The image of Buffalo Bill
as bon vivant
was crucial to him
and crucial to his success.
But it was a very sort
of public life,
which left him without much time
for real friendships
or for any kind
of intimate relationships.
In reality,
he spent most of his nights
in his railroad car alone.
NARRATOR:
In 1893,
Buffalo Bill brought
the Wild West home from Europe
for the first time
in five years,
to the Columbian Exposition
in Chicago.
He hadn't been forgotten.
Americans had been reading
about his travels,
the royal accolades,
about the shows in Paris,
Rome and Berlin.
None of that mattered
to the exposition's
high-minded managers.
The show was deemed too crass
and was excluded
from the grounds.
The exposition was
a grandiose celebration
of white civilization
in America.
Its centerpiece, the White City,
perfectly captured the spirit
of the fair.
It might have been
another planet
to the people who lived
and worked
in Chicago's dark
and crowded streets.
Cody's version of the American
story spoke to them.
He ignored the exposition's
managers
and set up shop
across the street.
Three million people saw
the Wild West that summer,
and Cody walked away with
over half a million dollars.
He still had that innate feel
for his audience,
especially the immigrants,
who were transforming
the country.
BRIDGER:
On the street,
you had newsboys
barking dime novels:
“Buffalo Bill, Buffalo Bill.“
And then you had people
pouring into America
by the droves at that point
with no idea what it meant
to be an American.
And so on the street
you had these little newsboys.
“Here's what an American is,“
you see.
"This is an American.“
WARREN:
Americans, up to the 1890s,
it's really the Puritans
that they looked to
as the founders of this thing
that becomes the United States
of America.
Cody takes American history,
situates it somewhere
in this frontier West, and says,
“This is your story.“
In searching to broaden
his story for that public
so he can draw them in
and make money,
he actually changes the telling
of American history.
It's that search
for bigger audiences
as much as anything else
that has driven the
the changes in how we tell
American history.
NARRATOR: On a hot and
sunny July afternoon,
a group of historians
took a break from a conference
they were attending
at the exposition
and headed across the street
to the Wild West.
One of their colleagues,
a young historian named
Frederick Jackson Turner,
stayed behind to work
on a presentation
for the evening session.
When the historians returned
from Cody's celebration
of the frontier,
they heard Turner announce
its passing.
“Four centuries
from the discovery of America,
the frontier has gone,“ he said,
“and with its going has closed
the first period
of American history.“
The West of Cody's youth
had slipped out of reach.
Where his earliest shows
had been
like newsreels
from the frontier,
now he was commemorating scenes
from a receding past.
LIMERICK: So it's a mournful
occasion in many ways.
But it somehow or other
manages to stay cheerful,
even though this exciting era
that made us a distinctive
people has just ended.
Somehow that works--
elegy and celebration
in the same package.
NARRATOR: Shortly after the
glittering season in Chicago,
Nate Salsbury contracted
a disease
that slowly paralyzed him.
He gave up the management
of the show
and drifted away from Cody.
His steadying hand
would be missed.
His death in 1902
marked a turning point
in Cody's fortunes.
A few months
after Salsbury's death,
Cody wrote to his sister,
“Divorces are not looked down
upon now as they used to be.
“People are getting
more enlightened.
“I will give her every bit
of the North Platte property
“and an annual income
if she will give me
a quiet legal separation.“
Louisa wasn't going anywhere
quietly.
After Cody filed for divorce,
she threatened
to bring him down "so low
the dogs won't bark at you.“
Cody was sure that the public's
adulation would insulate him.
For once,
he misjudged his audience.
SCOGGIN: There's a prolonged
trial, lots of depositions.
Things come out
about Cody's behavior
that aren't all that flattering.
His relationship
with other women is exposed,
one of which is Bessie Isbelle,
who was his publicity agent.
In the course of the trial,
Cody admitted
that he had bought a ranch
and conveyed title to Isbelle
for one dollar
and other considerations.
And when asked what
the other considerations were,
Cody said, “I don't remember.“
NARRATOR: The press had
helped create Buffalo Bill.
Now it fed on him.
He was a drunkard,
a philanderer, a blasphemer.
At the end of the ordeal,
the judge rejected Cody's suit.
He was bound to Louisa.
Cody fled again.
This time to rejoin
the Wild West in Paris.
His fame had turned on him.
“I do not want
to die a showman,“ he wrote.
“I grow very tired of this sort
of sham hero-worship sometimes.“
He dreamed
of a peaceful retirement,
but he had a habit
of spending more than he earned.
In 1910 alone, he made $200,000
and could have retired
then and there.
Instead, he squandered it
on a gold mine swindle
in Arizona.
Cody couldn't seem
to pass up a bad idea.
SCOGGIN: He's investing
in printing companies,
gold milling companies.
A company that's making
a coffee substitute
for the Mormons
livery stables,
a car service
into Yellowstone,
a military boys' school
in Wyoming,
the Cody oil fields.
And he just got taken
to the cleaners.
NARRATOR: After 40 years
of show business,
the 65-year-old Cody was looking
for a way out--
out of debt,
out of the endless grind
of travel and performances.
SCOGGIN (reading):
“St. Louis, October 5, 1911.
“Dear Pard,
your telegram just came.
"It found me sick
and working in rain and mud.
“The doctors tell me
I'm running a fearful risk,
“and I know it.
“But although
we are doing no business,
“I should miss a performance,
“the newspapers
would take it up,
“and no one would come.
“Heaven knows
we are losing enough as it is.
I have never been
so discouraged.“
NARRATOR:
It was only getting harder.
More and more of his audience
was going to the movies,
including the dozens
of Westerns on offer.
Cody decided to bet everything
on a plan
to produce a movie himself--
a film about the Indian Wars.
He borrowed heavily,
called on his old
army connections
to supply the troops.
And got one last performance
out of his old Sioux friends
at Wounded Knee.
But for all that,
Cody just didn't know
how to make a film.
It looked like a Wild West show,
seen from a distance.
WARREN:
Directors and producers
hit on this idea.
“We can focus on individuals.
“We can make their faces
look so large on the screen
that you can see
their emotions.“
And it becomes
a very different kind of story
from the Wild West spectacular.
WINCHESTER: When the show
went bankrupt in 1913,
that was the beginning
of the end.
One of the people that was
involved in the bankruptcy
was Henry Tammen,
who was the owner
of The Denver Post.
And Tammen also owned
the Sells-Floto circus,
and as partial payment
for this debt,
he put Cody in the circus
and exhibited him
as Buffalo Bill
and traveled with him
around the country--
a grueling, grueling schedule.
NARRATOR:
Cody never did find a way out.
He was a showman to the end.
But in his last years,
he did find some
of the tranquility
that had eluded him ever since
his childhood in Kansas.
Six years
after the divorce trial,
45 years
after they were married,
the Codys' only
surviving daughter contrived
to leave the couple alone
in a room together.
By the time they emerged,
Louisa Cody
and her roving plainsman
had finally made peace.
WINCHESTER:
I don't think
Louisa ever stopped
loving Will Cody.
And she traveled with him
during these really
difficult years.
And one
of the interesting things is,
if you look at old photographs,
in the early days,
he's always wearing
a large gold,
horseshoe-shaped watch fob.
It's one of the few things
you always see on him.
After their reconciliation,
she's wearing it as a necklace.
Louisa has it as a necklace.
And after his death,
she's still wearing it.
It's one of those talismans
of their relationship
that they never
that she never let go of it.
NARRATOR: Cody's life was
hard, but he had Louisa,
he was sober,
and he had found a quiet faith
in the same place
he had found everything else.
“I believe that a man
gets closer to God out there
in the big, free West,“
he wrote.
“You are filled
with a true religion
and a bigger realization
of life.“
Cody's nephew remembered
his last hours.
“He would imagine
“that he was on the road
with his show
“and ask me where we were
and what time it was
"and when we got in.
“In fact,
he lived his life over again.
“He done just as he did
when he was on the road
with the show.“
William Cody died quietly
at his sister's home in Denver
on January 10, 1917.
25,000 people lined up
to pay their respects.
Tributes flooded in
from the King of England,
President Wilson,
generals, old colleagues
and ordinary people
who had seen him
in the Wild West decades before.
Among the messages
was a note to his family
from Pine Ridge, South Dakota.
“The Oglala Sioux Indians
of Pine Ridge, South Dakota,
“resolve that deepest sympathy
be extended to the wife,
“relatives and friends
of the late William F. Cody
“for the loss
they have suffered.
“These people
who have endured may know
"that the Oglalas found
in Buffalo Bill
a warm and lasting friend.“
NARRATOR: The frontier had
vanished, the buffalo were gone,
the Indian Wars had ended.
America had been transformed
by industry
and waves of immigration.
The civilization
Cody had championed was dying
in the carnage
of the Western Front.
But the myth of the American
frontier remained,
and William Cody--
Buffalo Bill--
would forever be part
of that story.
WARREN: Even the people
who didn't see him
heard so much about him.
His story was so alluring.
This wide-open frontier
that he came from
where there were no elites
to tax you,
where there was nobody
to make you work for them.
The story is
such a great story,
and they could attach it to him.
And I think we still
We're still in love
with that story,
and we still need it.
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NARRATOR: For many of the women,
the sight was overwhelming:
U.S. cavalry appearing
over the horizon,
closing in on their encampment
near Wounded Knee.
Some of them began to cry.
The men tried to comfort them.
The soldiers marched
steadily forward.
The high wailing
of the women blended
with the tinkling bells
of a merry-go-round,
with the sounds of the cars
that were still arriving,
and of the spectators
who had come in
from all over Nebraska
and South Dakota.
At the center of it all
was one of the most
famous people in the world:
William Cody,
better known as “Buffalo Bill.“
The 67-year-old Cody
was directing his first movie--
a reenactment
of the Wounded Knee massacre--
and doing
what he had always done--
blurring the line
between truth and entertainment,
history and myth.
Buffalo Bill Cody had lived
both sides of that line.
He had grown up
in the real West,
knew the sorrow and cruelty
and courage that had created it.
But he understood that
the West was something more,
even for those
who would never see it,
and that he could be the hero
in the story
they wanted to live.
MAN:
That myth of the west,
all of those things
that we tend to think of
as the western adventure--
somehow it was all wrapped up
in the person
of Buffalo Bill.
He connects us to a story
that is at the heart
of the American experience.
And he made the American West
into the American story.
NARRATOR: In 1866, the 20-year-old
William Cody was adrift
in the wake of the Civil War.
His boyhood home was gone,
most of his family dead.
He left behind the remains
of his past
and joined the flood
of young men heading west.
“I sighed for the freedom
of the plains,“
he later recalled.
“I started out alone
for Salina, Kansas,
which was then the end
of the track.“
(crowd chatter,
cattle lowing)
PAUL FEES: Kansas must have been
an enormously exciting place--
lots of soldiers suddenly
out on their own,
the railroads building,
the army moving out
on the plains
to resume their war
on the Plains Indians.
A very interesting place
for people on the make.
And Cody certainly was
on the make.
NARRATOR: He was at home
with the tracklayers,
bullwhackers, speculators
and cowboys
who congregated in the towns
that were springing up
as the rails pushed west.
Life was exciting
and could be treacherous,
but he'd spent most
of the Civil War
riding with Union irregulars--
rough customers.
He could handle himself.
Cody-- he was well
over six feet tall,
very attractive.
And this is a time
when the average height was,
like, you know,
five and a half feet.
So he really
he stood out in a crowd.
NARRATOR:
He had the brash confidence
that sometimes comes
of hardship and loss.
He could drink with the best
of them, and often did.
But Cody was a bit of a loner.
He kept his many companions
at arm's length.
In fact, it might have come
as a surprise
to his drinking buddies
that Bill Cody
had left a wife behind.
He'd met Louisa Frederici
in St. Louis
at the end of the war.
They weren't a perfect match.
You've got Cody, who's a kid
that's grown up
in eastern Kansas,
has been out west
and lived a pretty rugged life.
And she grows up in the French
quarter of St. Louis,
goes to Catholic convent school.
FEES: Golly, she's
In her pictures, she's
almost sultry looking.
And she must have seemed
terribly exotic to him.
And his was a life then
of trying to make
make a home for her.
But he wasn't good at that part.
NARRATOR:
Louisa had warned Cody
that she didn't want
any roving plainsman
for a husband.
But he just couldn't
settle down.
It was only six months
after their wedding
that he'd headed off
to west Kansas,
leaving her
at his sister's home,
alone and pregnant.
But he didn't forget about her.
He sent home
whatever money he could
and lived a hard life to do so.
Cody finally got a bit
of a break
in the spring of 1868
when U.S. Army officers
at Fort Hays hired him to help
track down some deserters.
For Cody, the best part
of the job
was the company he got to keep--
the deputy marshal
from nearby Junction City.
James Butler Hickok
was already well known
as “Wild Bill.“
LOUIS WARREN: Wild Bill
is a scout for the army.
He occasionally acts
as U.S. detective,
which means he's in charge
of tracking down deserters.
And then,
in 1867, Wild Bill Hickok
became the subject
of a magazine article
in Harpers New Monthly Magazine.
FEES: It made Hickok into
what, for Easterners,
seemed the very embodiment
of kind of a flamboyant western,
dangerous hero
or anti-hero even.
So Hickok became famous
largely through
his own flamboyance,
but also through publicity.
(railroad bells clanging)
NARRATOR: Hickok made a habit
of waiting on railway platforms
for Eastern tourists.
He knew what they wanted to see,
and he dressed the part,
wearing clothes that would have
suited Daniel Boone's Kentucky
better than post-Civil War
Kansas.
WARREN: Cody looks on Wild
Bill and sees Hickok running
what is kind of a one-man show,
and the show is the life
of Wild Bill Hickok.
And he starts to think,
“Maybe I could do that.“
Cody begins
to wear his hair long.
He begins to put on buckskin.
He begins to tell
some of the same stories
that Hickok has told,
only he features himself
at the center of those stories
instead of Hickok.
NARRATOR: Easterners
pictured frontier life
as a heroic struggle
to bring civilization
to the West
and subdue Indian savagery.
In fact, a demoralized army
was stuck in an ugly war,
fighting an elusive enemy
in unfamiliar terrain.
Scouts were crucial,
and Cody was good.
As the war
with the Plains Indians
heated up in the late 1860s,
Cody would fight in more battles
than most full-time soldiers.
He liked scouting.
It was adventuresome,
and it paid well.
What's more,
it was stable enough
that Louisa brought
their daughter
and rejoined him
at Fort McPherson.
The next year,
the couple had a second child,
a boy they named after
the famous scout Kit Carson.
But Cody always had his eye
on the horizon,
looking for the next chance.
In the summer of 1869,
that chance turned up
in the person
of a New York writer who went
by the name of Ned Buntline.
Buntline had plenty of reasons
for using an alias.
On more than one occasion,
he'd neglected
to get rid of one wife
before marrying another,
and despite his surplus
of wives,
had found the energy
to kill a man
in a duel
over yet another woman.
But he was also one of the most
successful writers of the day.
Buntline is looking for somebody
to write a book about,
and it was going to be
Wild Bill Hickok
by most accounts.
Hickok either wasn't available
or refused to talk to him
or what have you,
and he decides to write a book
about Cody,
which is called Buffalo Bill:
King of the Border Men.
The book finally gets serialized
in one of
the New York publications.
And at that point, Cody suddenly
becomes a real celebrity.
NARRATOR: Buffalo Bill joined a
growing band of frontier heroes,
idols of a public
fascinated by the West.
For most Americans, that West
existed only in dime novels
and story papers.
But the wealthy
and well-connected
could live out
their Western fantasies.
Soon, Eastern sports were
saddling up to hunt buffalo,
led by famous scouts
like Buffalo Bill.
WARREN: But very few of these men
knew how hard this actually was.
The most common mishap
was for a hunter to shoot
his own horse through the head.
One guide said the safest place
to be with a party of dudes
is nearest the buffalo.
And Cody was hunting with
these men, and they adored him.
Because not only did he look
the part of a Western hero,
but he cultivated his skills
as a horseback hunter
in ways
that few other people had.
One of his biggest critics
actually said,
“I saw him shoot 16 buffalo
from the back of a horse
that was frightened of buffalo,
using 16 shots.“
It was the most spectacular
exhibition
of buffalo hunting
he'd ever seen.
That's what these dudes
are paying for, in part,
is to be in the company
of somebody who's like that.
NARRATOR:
Cody was brushing elbows
with men from the most rarefied
circles of society.
Their adulation was new to him;
he was becoming aware
of his own charisma
and of how far
that might take him.
Just three years after Louisa
had moved to Fort McPherson,
Cody left the family behind
again.
He took Ned Buntline up
on an offer to come to Chicago.
Instead of telling his stories
to well-heeled tourists,
Buffalo Bill would bring
the West to audiences
who could only dream
of the frontier.
FEES:
Cody agreed to appear in a play
that Buntline supposedly
had written for him.
Now, Buffalo Bill himself was
probably inclined to do this,
but he had a pal,
Texas Jack Omohundro,
who was almost clamoring
to become part of this.
BOBBY BRIDGER:
When they got to Chicago,
they found that Buntline
hadn't written the play yet.
When the word got out that
the play had not been written,
the man
who owned the theater
backed out of the production.
And so Buntline
had to borrow the money
from Texas Jack and Buffalo Bill
to rent the theater.
And I think that says a lot
about Ned Buntline.
Buntline says, “Don't worry
about it, don't worry about it.“
Takes him to a hotel,
gets him into a hotel room
and says he'll be back
in a little bit with the play.
And four hours later, he leapt
up from his desk, allegedly,
and shouted “Hurrah, hurrah,
for Scouts of the Plains.
That's the title of the play.
It's finished."
BRIDGER: These two men that
Buntline brought to the theater
were totally inexperienced.
They had a terrible time
remembering their lines.
And when they got out on stage,
they just went absolutely
stone-cold petrified.
Buntline started coaching them
on stage
and trying to throw lines
to them
that they froze
and wouldn't respond to.
So finally, in desperation,
he asked Cody,
“What have you been doing?“
Cody saw a friend of his
out in the audience
and said, “I've been on a hunt
with Mulligan up there.“
WARREN: And then he proceeds to
tell stories about the hunt,
and the crowd just loved it.
They just roared.
And in fact, Cody would recount
that he did not utter one word
of his lines that whole night,
that he just made up stories.
BRIDGER: At that moment,
Buffalo Bill realized
that people would come
to see the star
more than they would the show.
And from that point forward,
he was the star.
NARRATOR:
“Such incongruous drama,
“execrable acting,
intolerable stench,
blood and thunder,“
one critic wrote,
“is not likely to be vouchsafed
to a city a second time,
even Chicago.“
incongruous, execrable and
intolerable it might have been,
but the company played
to packed houses
for the rest of the season.
WARREN: But there are plenty
of signs along the way
that this was a partnership
that wouldn't work out for Cody.
Buntline had a long history
as not only a novelist
and playwright
but as a rabble-rouser.
He was a founding member
of the Know Nothing Party,
which was really
a party of nativists,
that is, they're strongly
anti-immigrant.
NARRATOR: Back in the 1850s,
Buntline had been arrested
for inciting anti-German
violence in St. Louis.
He'd skipped bail and left town,
but he hadn't been forgotten.
When Scouts of the Plains
traveled to St. Louis,
all three men were arrested.
Cody and Omohundro
were quickly released,
and Buntline managed
to skip bail yet again.
It was becoming apparent to Cody
that Buntline
had a lot of baggage
and that maybe Buntline's plans
for the Buffalo Bill character
or figure
weren't in Cody's plans.
Buntline appears to have hoped
that Cody would become
a kind of anti-immigrant figure,
a kind of nativist hero.
And Cody.
For reasons of his own,
didn't want to go there.
NARRATOR: Cody had grown up in
Kansas before the Civil War,
when it was the most dangerous
place in America.
Pro-slavery neighbors
and militias
had terrorized the family.
When Cody's father
spoke out against slavery
at a town meeting,
he was stabbed by a neighbor
as the eight-year-old boy
looked on.
Cody would become the family's
main breadwinner
three years later,
when his father finally died
of his wounds.
One loss followed another:
a brother, his father,
his mother,
a sister, a second brother.
The specter of death
followed him always.
In the spring of 1876,
it suddenly caught up with him.
He was on the road
with his theater combination
when he received an urgent
telegram from Louisa.
Their son, Kit,
had contracted scarlet fever.
Cody rushed home,
but the boy died in his arms
a few hours later.
“Louisa is worn out and sick,“
he wrote to his sister.
“We all clung to him
“and prayed God not to take
from us our little boy.
But there was no hope
from the start.“
FEES: His grief was
intense, and it was real.
But at the same time, uh,
he wasn't able to help his wife
through that, um,
that terrible grief.
And and instead,
he did what he did so often
in their marriage-- he fled.
WARREN: Cody veers away
from the darkness,
almost always.
He doesn't like to focus
on sad stories.
He doesn't like to talk
about pain.
He likes to focus on triumph
and victory.
And this would serve him very,
very well in show business.
In his personal life, it
probably served him less well.
Cody got a summons that must
have seemed providential
to come West and rejoin
General Carr in the 5th Cavalry.
So he went.
WARREN: Cody's company
is with the 5th Cavalry
and they get word that Custer
and most of his command
have died on the banks
of the Little Big Horn River.
And they're shocked.
NARRATOR: By 1876,
Americans had been assured
that the Indian wars
were all but over.
Out of the blue,
a host of warriors
had annihilated
an army detachment
led by one of
its most famous generals.
All eyes were on the West
where Cody and the 5th Cavalry
were searching
for hundreds of Cheyenne.
The high command was panicked.
The public wanted revenge.
Cody saw his chance
to write Buffalo Bill
into Custer's high drama.
WARREN: Cody hits on this idea
that he can live his life,
live this story.
For the entertainment
of his audience.
What's really bizarre
about this whole thing,
I mean, it really is bizarre,
Cody gets dressed up, literally,
in his stage costume.
Black pants
with piping down the front,
silver buttons down the side,
a red silk shirt
and his big hat.
And he's going to go out
and kill an Indian.
NARRATOR: The climactic
battle never happened.
The only action
that the 5th Cavalry saw
was a skirmish with a half dozen
luckless Cheyenne, in which Cody
shot and killed
a warrior named Yellow Hair.
He had killed
other Indians before,
but now, for the first
and only time in his life,
he walked over to the body,
crouched down,
and cut off its scalp.
The incident barely rated
a mention in the Army report,
but within a few months,
Cody was reenacting it
for audiences
from New York to St. Louis
in a play called
The Red Right Hand,
or Buffalo Bill's First Scalp
for Custer.
He sported the same velvet
costume he had worn that day,
used the same knife
and hoisted the real scalp at
the climax of the performance.
He had crossed a threshold.
William Cody
had become Buffalo Bill.
By 1883, Cody had become a star
of frontier melodramas:
lowbrow spectacles featuring
the rescue of a white woman
from the clutches of Indians,
Confederate sympathizers,
Mormons, or the like.
He was a hero to the workingmen
who crowded the theaters,
but he wanted a bigger,
more respectable audience.
He teamed up with a sharpshooter
named Doc Carver
to put on a new kind of show.
“Our entertainment don't
want a smack of a circus,“
he wrote Carver.
“Must be on a high-toned basis.“
They called it “Buffalo Bill
and Doc Carver's Wild West,
Rocky Mountain
and Prairie Exhibition.“
Everybody else just called it
“The Wild West.“
SCOGGIN: They got some wild
steers that they can ride.
They got bucking horses.
They've got buffalo.
And the other thing they got
a lot of is evidently alcohol.
And there are legendary stories.
Supposedly they had
a car full of alcohol.
Whatever it was,
both Carver and Cody
would really go on some pretty,
pretty good drunks.
I think Cody definitely had
a problem with binge drinking,
there's no question about it.
So they travel around
the country with this show,
sometimes not making the
performances because they're,
you know, dead drunk, literally.
Carver's got a terrible temper.
I mean, at one point,
he's the trick shot in the show
and he puts on a lousy
performance.
And he's so frustrated
that he breaks his rifle
over the head of his horse
and beats up his assistant who's
throwing the ball in the air.
I mean, it's that sort of thing.
NARRATOR: The Wild West staggered
through to the end of the season,
and then Cody went off
to meet Nate Salsbury,
a successful, experienced
and sober manager.
WARREN:
Cody had had enough.
He said, “You come on board,
“and help me out with this
or I'm going to quit.
“I wouldn't go through
another summer like this
for a hundred thousand dollars.“
NARRATOR:
Over the next three years,
Cody and Salsbury
overhauled the Wild West,
adding acts and giving it
a story line.
Every year the crowds
grew bigger.
Every year the two owners
reinvested their profits.
In 1885 alone, they cleared
over a hundred thousand dollars.
When he was a young man,
Cody had sighed
for the freedom of the plains.
Now he realized that millions
of people shared his longing.
PATRICIA NELSON LIMERICK: As the majority
of Americans are moving into cities,
working in offices,
working in factories,
they're yearning.
Their imaginations are pent up
and are wanting some place
to run free.
And so, setting
our minds west
that turns out to be
the thing to do.
It's just a wonderful thing
to think,
“There's a different
way of living,
and I can at least spend
my leisure time imagining that."
NARRATOR:
In 1886, the Wild West played
to over a million people
in New York.
Mark Twain and P.T. Barnum
both showed up
and gave Cody the same advice.
As Barnum put it, if they
“take this show to Europe,
they will astonish
the Old World.“
The following spring, Cody,
Salsbury and the Wild West
left New York Harbor
for England.
The Wild West had become
one of the most elaborate shows
on earth.
In a stadium near London,
workers used 17,000 carloads
of rock and earth
to build the mountains
in a sweeping Western landscape.
200 cast members: cowboys,
Native Americans, vaqueros.
Stars like Annie Oakley
and Buffalo Bill himself,
along with hundreds
of horses, buffalo,
mules, elk, steers,
donkeys and deer
all moved into an encampment
on the grounds.
SCOGGIN: Essentially, everybody
had a backstage pass.
You could wander around and see
the performers and such
and see what's going on.
One of the things that might be
most impressive as you
first walk in is what it
must have smelled like.
And of course the noise.
In the background,
the Cowboy Band is playing
and you're getting ready
to see this show.
WINCHESTER: You had people
to sell tickets, there were
people to count the tickets,
people to count the money,
and there was plenty of that.
WARREN: There were butchers
who traveled with the show.
There were bakers.
There were pastry chefs.
There was a whole
kitchen full of cooks.
There are blacksmiths.
There are wheelwrights.
GEORGE MOSES: Spectators were invited
to go into the Indian villages
to see how the people
themselves lived,
and also to see
how they shared that life
with the other members
of the show.
FEES: The Wild West was
an experience for people,
not just a show.
When the show began,
it began with a bang.
WINCHESTER:
And then this man comes out.
And your dad's giving you
the elbow and saying,
“Look at that man.
Remember you've seen
Buffalo Bill Cody.“
FEES: Annie Oakley was
a natural shooter.
She never seemed to aim.
She simply pointed
toward the target
and blew it away.
WINCHESTER: Well, she could take
a mirror and shoot an apple
off the head
of her faithful dog.
She could split a playing card.
If you held a playing card,
she could split it.
Cody took a lot
of responsibility
about making sure
that everything ran
according to plan,
and that people were
at their best
when they performed.
There are photographs of him
peeking through a hole
in the tent, watching the show
and making sure that everybody
was cued correctly.
MOSES:
There would be Indians
leaving their horses
and sneaking up
upon the settlers.
Coming to the rescue was
Buffalo Bill and the cowboys,
and the Indians would race off.
And Cody and his cowboys
would have made the frontier,
once again, safe for settlers.
SCOGGIN: Cody had the reenactment
of the Battle of Little Bighorn.
They reenact the whole thing.
Custer and his command
are all dead.
But Cody rides into the scene
and it's flashed
on the curtain of the stage,
“Too Late.“
As if Cody could have
saved Custer.
FEES:
So it would have been
just an assault on the senses
to the time two and a half hours
after the show began
that people began to go home.
NARRATOR:
Buffalo Bill was a sensation.
One distinguished fan
wrote in her diary
with the excitement
of a schoolgirl,
"An attack on a coach
“and on a ranch,
with an immense deal of firing,
“was most exciting.
“So was the buffalo hunt
and the bucking ponies
that were impossible to sit.“
Queen Victoria's
enthusiasm was contagious.
On the eve of the great ceremony
marking her Golden Jubilee,
the royalty
of 13 countries
followed her example
and went to see Buffalo Bill.
Four years
after treating audiences
to the spectacle of Doc Carver
coming unhinged,
Cody was charming his way
through the salons of London
and needed a secretary to manage
his social engagements.
WINCHESTER:
He had a natural charisma.
You know,
when they describe him,
he stands straight as an arrow.
He has a mild voice, a soft eye.
“Nature's nobleman,“
as they liked to say.
So he could be an asset
to your party to have
this colorful man, you know,
rubbing elbows with your guests.
NARRATOR: His personal
life was another matter.
Louisa stayed in Nebraska,
and the two rarely communicated.
It was easy
to ignore distant problems
with the world at his feet.
He would spend most of the next
five years in Europe.
Three full trains
carried the show
to Paris, Rome,
Barcelona and Berlin.
Buffalo Bill had become
America's first cultural export.
Europeans do not know what
to make of the United States.
It's a it's a problem.
It has the poor taste to revolt
and become
an independent nation
and then become quite
a swaggering, confident nation.
To have something
that causes Europeans
to say, “Wow, we love that.“
That's, in some ways, the end
of the American Revolution.
NARRATOR:
Cody wrote home to friends
trying to explain
what had happened in Europe.
“There was never anything
like it ever known,
and never will be again."
He was right about one thing:
there had never been anything
like Buffalo Bill.
SCOGGIN: He invented the
genre of celebrity.
One reason he was able to do it
is there was now
an infrastructure
that you could have
international celebrities.
NARRATOR:
The telegraph, the railroad,
cheap printing, and a public
hungry for entertainment--
Cody and his managers
put the pieces together.
They were discovering
that you could be famous
for being famous.
FEES:
Buffalo Bill had
a brilliant publicist,
Arizona John Burke,
who managed
to get Cody into print
probably more than any
other man of his time.
And eventually Cody's face,
his image, became so well known
that a poster
just bearing his image--
on a buffalo, of course--
could be labeled “I Am Coming,“
with no mention of Buffalo Bill
or Buffalo Bill's Wild West.
NARRATOR: Buffalo Bill would
never have been famous,
would never have had
a story to tell,
without Native Americans.
He had built the Wild West
around the Sioux
he had been fighting
only a few years before.
In 1885, only nine years
after Custer's Last Stand,
he convinced the most famous
Native American of all,
Sitting Bull,
to join the Wild West.
WINCHESTER:
Well, Sitting Bull was
kind of the focus figure
for the public's horror
and anger over Little Bighorn
and here it is, not very many
years after all of this.
I think the public
had this combination
of fascination and horror.
They're going to go
and look at the man
who wreaked such havoc
on American dreams,
almost like this morbid
fascination they had.
NARRATOR:
It was a publicist's dream:
foes in '76,
friends in '85.
Sitting Bull did get on famously
with Cody,
but he lasted only one season.
He hated the noise and the
squalor of the Eastern cities.
“The white man knows
how to make everything,“
he told a reporter,
“but he does not know
how to distribute it.“
Sitting Bull had had enough,
but hundreds of his fellow Sioux
would follow him
to the Wild West.
Some were overwhelmed,
but many more took
to their new lives.
When they got to Europe,
they were treated
as minor celebrities,
their every move reported
in the papers.
But for Native Americans
back home on the Plains,
it was another story.
In December of 1890,
four centuries of Indian wars
finally ended
in the massacre at Wounded Knee.
GUY DULL KNIFE: My grandfather
at the time was pretty young.
They lived not too far
from Wounded Knee.
And I guess they could hear
those guns going off over there.
And my grandfather said
they went over there after.
And the bodies were still
all laying out there
when my grandfather
went out there.
NARRATOR: George Dull
Knife had been an infant
at the time
of the Little Bighorn.
He had somehow survived
the bullets,
cold and hunger
of the following years,
as the United States
relentlessly
avenged Custer's defeat.
But the years
after Wounded Knee were worse.
On the reservations
there was no hope,
no way out.
GUY DULL KNIFE: I guess there's a
rumor going around the reservation
that, you know, there's a show,
a Wild West show
that was, you know,
they're recruiting.
And, uh, his relatives told him,
you know, you better not go,
you know,
because you don't know
what's out there.
But it was
really hard times then,
you know, people were starving,
and so him and his friend,
they went to Gordon to sign up.
And they don't know
when they're going to come back.
And they don't really know
where they're going either.
The worst thing he said,
when they go overseas,
is that boat.
See, we're not, uh,
we're Plains Indians.
We don't know nothing
about the ocean.
So (chuckles)
I can just imagine riding a boat
for almost two weeks, you know.
But Buffalo Bill,
I guess, he makes his rounds,
talks to people, you know,
and encourages them.
NARRATOR: The Wild West show was
based on a familiar narrative:
the triumph
of white civilization
over wilderness and savagery.
The show Indians attacked
an emigrant train,
a stagecoach,
and a settler's cabin,
only to be foiled every time
by Buffalo Bill.
To Cody and his audiences,
the superiority of white
civilization was a given,
and its victory inevitable.
But there was more to the show.
Other scenes,
and the encampment itself,
offered white audiences a rare
and sympathetic glimpse
of Native American life.
Cody no longer billed himself
as “The Terror of the Red Men,“
and he had stopped boasting
about the first scalp
for Custer.
When he needed a break
from the chaos and the crowds,
he slept in a tepee
in the Indian village.
GUY DULL KNIFE:
My grandfather at the time,
he didn't speak no English.
He kind of had a rough time,
and Buffalo Bill noticed that.
So he started teaching him.
All the guys, you know,
whenever they get a chance,
he'll sit down with them
and teach them.
So that's how my grandfather
learned how to read and write.
In return, they teach him
how to speak Lakota.
So, I guess, over the years,
it got to the point
where he understands
Indian pretty good.
He said they get to travel
all over, like, you know,
they're not doing nothing,
Buffalo Bill takes them around.
They even He even took them
to see the Pope.
That's where, uh, my grandfather
became a nonbeliever
in Christianity.
In the opening of the Wild West
Show, Buffalo Bill came in,
followed by the Indians
on horseback.
And what film there is, uh,
is remarkable
when you look at the faces
of the Indians on horseback.
That they're obviously
having a good time
and many of them are smiling
and laughing;
and they're just having a heck
of a time.
Um, that, that is something
that you cannot fake.
All the Indians
that like my grandfather,
they all liked him.
Whenever they come back
to Gordon from a show,
I guess they usually roll out
a barrel of cognac
or something they bring back
from overseas.
And they have a big party
and then, you know,
he goes his way.
But my grandpa said looks like,
a lot of times,
he doesn't want to, you know.
He's, you know, he likes
likes what he does,
you know.
And likes his company,
Indians and all these cowboys.
I guess he really hates
to leave them.
WARREN:
The pressures of the life
that Cody was living
were enormous.
SCOGGIN: He's feeling all this
responsibility for people.
He's got all these ventures
he's trying to make successful.
He's got all these people
counting on him.
And he becomes a pretty
melancholy fellow.
But he's not William F. Cody.
He's Buffalo Bill.
And he's got
to play that role 24/7.
The image of Buffalo Bill
as bon vivant
was crucial to him
and crucial to his success.
But it was a very sort
of public life,
which left him without much time
for real friendships
or for any kind
of intimate relationships.
In reality,
he spent most of his nights
in his railroad car alone.
NARRATOR:
In 1893,
Buffalo Bill brought
the Wild West home from Europe
for the first time
in five years,
to the Columbian Exposition
in Chicago.
He hadn't been forgotten.
Americans had been reading
about his travels,
the royal accolades,
about the shows in Paris,
Rome and Berlin.
None of that mattered
to the exposition's
high-minded managers.
The show was deemed too crass
and was excluded
from the grounds.
The exposition was
a grandiose celebration
of white civilization
in America.
Its centerpiece, the White City,
perfectly captured the spirit
of the fair.
It might have been
another planet
to the people who lived
and worked
in Chicago's dark
and crowded streets.
Cody's version of the American
story spoke to them.
He ignored the exposition's
managers
and set up shop
across the street.
Three million people saw
the Wild West that summer,
and Cody walked away with
over half a million dollars.
He still had that innate feel
for his audience,
especially the immigrants,
who were transforming
the country.
BRIDGER:
On the street,
you had newsboys
barking dime novels:
“Buffalo Bill, Buffalo Bill.“
And then you had people
pouring into America
by the droves at that point
with no idea what it meant
to be an American.
And so on the street
you had these little newsboys.
“Here's what an American is,“
you see.
"This is an American.“
WARREN:
Americans, up to the 1890s,
it's really the Puritans
that they looked to
as the founders of this thing
that becomes the United States
of America.
Cody takes American history,
situates it somewhere
in this frontier West, and says,
“This is your story.“
In searching to broaden
his story for that public
so he can draw them in
and make money,
he actually changes the telling
of American history.
It's that search
for bigger audiences
as much as anything else
that has driven the
the changes in how we tell
American history.
NARRATOR: On a hot and
sunny July afternoon,
a group of historians
took a break from a conference
they were attending
at the exposition
and headed across the street
to the Wild West.
One of their colleagues,
a young historian named
Frederick Jackson Turner,
stayed behind to work
on a presentation
for the evening session.
When the historians returned
from Cody's celebration
of the frontier,
they heard Turner announce
its passing.
“Four centuries
from the discovery of America,
the frontier has gone,“ he said,
“and with its going has closed
the first period
of American history.“
The West of Cody's youth
had slipped out of reach.
Where his earliest shows
had been
like newsreels
from the frontier,
now he was commemorating scenes
from a receding past.
LIMERICK: So it's a mournful
occasion in many ways.
But it somehow or other
manages to stay cheerful,
even though this exciting era
that made us a distinctive
people has just ended.
Somehow that works--
elegy and celebration
in the same package.
NARRATOR: Shortly after the
glittering season in Chicago,
Nate Salsbury contracted
a disease
that slowly paralyzed him.
He gave up the management
of the show
and drifted away from Cody.
His steadying hand
would be missed.
His death in 1902
marked a turning point
in Cody's fortunes.
A few months
after Salsbury's death,
Cody wrote to his sister,
“Divorces are not looked down
upon now as they used to be.
“People are getting
more enlightened.
“I will give her every bit
of the North Platte property
“and an annual income
if she will give me
a quiet legal separation.“
Louisa wasn't going anywhere
quietly.
After Cody filed for divorce,
she threatened
to bring him down "so low
the dogs won't bark at you.“
Cody was sure that the public's
adulation would insulate him.
For once,
he misjudged his audience.
SCOGGIN: There's a prolonged
trial, lots of depositions.
Things come out
about Cody's behavior
that aren't all that flattering.
His relationship
with other women is exposed,
one of which is Bessie Isbelle,
who was his publicity agent.
In the course of the trial,
Cody admitted
that he had bought a ranch
and conveyed title to Isbelle
for one dollar
and other considerations.
And when asked what
the other considerations were,
Cody said, “I don't remember.“
NARRATOR: The press had
helped create Buffalo Bill.
Now it fed on him.
He was a drunkard,
a philanderer, a blasphemer.
At the end of the ordeal,
the judge rejected Cody's suit.
He was bound to Louisa.
Cody fled again.
This time to rejoin
the Wild West in Paris.
His fame had turned on him.
“I do not want
to die a showman,“ he wrote.
“I grow very tired of this sort
of sham hero-worship sometimes.“
He dreamed
of a peaceful retirement,
but he had a habit
of spending more than he earned.
In 1910 alone, he made $200,000
and could have retired
then and there.
Instead, he squandered it
on a gold mine swindle
in Arizona.
Cody couldn't seem
to pass up a bad idea.
SCOGGIN: He's investing
in printing companies,
gold milling companies.
A company that's making
a coffee substitute
for the Mormons
livery stables,
a car service
into Yellowstone,
a military boys' school
in Wyoming,
the Cody oil fields.
And he just got taken
to the cleaners.
NARRATOR: After 40 years
of show business,
the 65-year-old Cody was looking
for a way out--
out of debt,
out of the endless grind
of travel and performances.
SCOGGIN (reading):
“St. Louis, October 5, 1911.
“Dear Pard,
your telegram just came.
"It found me sick
and working in rain and mud.
“The doctors tell me
I'm running a fearful risk,
“and I know it.
“But although
we are doing no business,
“I should miss a performance,
“the newspapers
would take it up,
“and no one would come.
“Heaven knows
we are losing enough as it is.
I have never been
so discouraged.“
NARRATOR:
It was only getting harder.
More and more of his audience
was going to the movies,
including the dozens
of Westerns on offer.
Cody decided to bet everything
on a plan
to produce a movie himself--
a film about the Indian Wars.
He borrowed heavily,
called on his old
army connections
to supply the troops.
And got one last performance
out of his old Sioux friends
at Wounded Knee.
But for all that,
Cody just didn't know
how to make a film.
It looked like a Wild West show,
seen from a distance.
WARREN:
Directors and producers
hit on this idea.
“We can focus on individuals.
“We can make their faces
look so large on the screen
that you can see
their emotions.“
And it becomes
a very different kind of story
from the Wild West spectacular.
WINCHESTER: When the show
went bankrupt in 1913,
that was the beginning
of the end.
One of the people that was
involved in the bankruptcy
was Henry Tammen,
who was the owner
of The Denver Post.
And Tammen also owned
the Sells-Floto circus,
and as partial payment
for this debt,
he put Cody in the circus
and exhibited him
as Buffalo Bill
and traveled with him
around the country--
a grueling, grueling schedule.
NARRATOR:
Cody never did find a way out.
He was a showman to the end.
But in his last years,
he did find some
of the tranquility
that had eluded him ever since
his childhood in Kansas.
Six years
after the divorce trial,
45 years
after they were married,
the Codys' only
surviving daughter contrived
to leave the couple alone
in a room together.
By the time they emerged,
Louisa Cody
and her roving plainsman
had finally made peace.
WINCHESTER:
I don't think
Louisa ever stopped
loving Will Cody.
And she traveled with him
during these really
difficult years.
And one
of the interesting things is,
if you look at old photographs,
in the early days,
he's always wearing
a large gold,
horseshoe-shaped watch fob.
It's one of the few things
you always see on him.
After their reconciliation,
she's wearing it as a necklace.
Louisa has it as a necklace.
And after his death,
she's still wearing it.
It's one of those talismans
of their relationship
that they never
that she never let go of it.
NARRATOR: Cody's life was
hard, but he had Louisa,
he was sober,
and he had found a quiet faith
in the same place
he had found everything else.
“I believe that a man
gets closer to God out there
in the big, free West,“
he wrote.
“You are filled
with a true religion
and a bigger realization
of life.“
Cody's nephew remembered
his last hours.
“He would imagine
“that he was on the road
with his show
“and ask me where we were
and what time it was
"and when we got in.
“In fact,
he lived his life over again.
“He done just as he did
when he was on the road
with the show.“
William Cody died quietly
at his sister's home in Denver
on January 10, 1917.
25,000 people lined up
to pay their respects.
Tributes flooded in
from the King of England,
President Wilson,
generals, old colleagues
and ordinary people
who had seen him
in the Wild West decades before.
Among the messages
was a note to his family
from Pine Ridge, South Dakota.
“The Oglala Sioux Indians
of Pine Ridge, South Dakota,
“resolve that deepest sympathy
be extended to the wife,
“relatives and friends
of the late William F. Cody
“for the loss
they have suffered.
“These people
who have endured may know
"that the Oglalas found
in Buffalo Bill
a warm and lasting friend.“
NARRATOR: The frontier had
vanished, the buffalo were gone,
the Indian Wars had ended.
America had been transformed
by industry
and waves of immigration.
The civilization
Cody had championed was dying
in the carnage
of the Western Front.
But the myth of the American
frontier remained,
and William Cody--
Buffalo Bill--
would forever be part
of that story.
WARREN: Even the people
who didn't see him
heard so much about him.
His story was so alluring.
This wide-open frontier
that he came from
where there were no elites
to tax you,
where there was nobody
to make you work for them.
The story is
such a great story,
and they could attach it to him.
And I think we still
We're still in love
with that story,
and we still need it.
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