November 20, 2007
Who Was the Real Buffalo Bill Cody? An Interview with Robert E. Bonner (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 11:55 AM EST The trail blazed by William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody has been traveled by so many biographers, historians, and debunkers that there wouldn’t seem to be anything new signposts on it. Robert E. Bonner’s William F. Cody’s Wyoming Empire: The Buffalo Bill Nobody Knows (University of Oklahoma Press, 318 pages, $32.95) examines an important part of the Buffalo Bill story that has been virtually forgotten, Cody’s attempt at becoming a Western land developer and town promoter in Wyoming. Bonner, a professor of history emeritus at Carleton College, answered these questions for us from his home in Northfield, Minnesota. The interview is appearing in two parts It would be hard to find a figure of the frontier west more mythologized than William F. Cody. There have been several books on him this decade alone, including Joy S. Casson’s Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Larry McMurtry’s The Colonel and Little Missie. What’s the essential difference between William F. Cody’s Wyoming Empire and those books? The first and most fundamental difference is that both Kasson and McMurtry look at Buffalo Bill through the lens of the Wild West show. Both of them are concerned with his self-creation through that medium and—Kasson to a greater extent than McMurtry—the effect his celebrity had on ideas of the West and American history in general. I have tried, insofar as it is possible, to keep the Wild West out of my account. Obviously the show was the source of most of the money that went into Cody’s Wyoming ventures, and his need to appear every summer in arenas away from Wyoming affected the way he did or did not attend to business there, but I am not concerned with what he did in the Wild West, and they are. The fact that he was a great celebrity I take as given, and I attempt to understand how that celebrity played out in his enterprises in Wyoming. McMurtry appears not to be interested at all in what Bill Cody did when he was not the star of the Wild West. He mentions some of the things Cody did in Wyoming more or less in passing, but it is the show and the relationship with Annie Oakley that occupy most of his time. He locates Buffalo Bill’s Wyoming life entirely in Sheridan, where he spent one or two off seasons before the Cody venture got going, and more or less ignores his work around the town of Cody. Kasson is not especially interested in his work in Wyoming either. Both of them have interesting things to say about Cody as a celebrity guide and hunter, but mostly as a young man prior to the Wild West. I have chosen to concentrate on his work in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin, because it is there that we can see the man off his horse and on the ground, working (or not working) with other men to build something more substantial than an entertainment. How did Cody use his fame from the Wild West shows to promote his business interests? Was he shy about his own celebrity? In the first instance, he used his celebrity to horn in on the big irrigation project that George Beck and Horace Alger, two Sheridan businessmen, were planning. As Beck said later, Cody came to them and asked to join in, and, as they knew he was the “best advertised man in the world,” they not only let him in, they made him president of the company. Celebrity was perhaps more to the fore in his dealings with officials of the government of the state of Wyoming. He presented to them the prospect of having their state advertised across the nation by the most popular man in America, and they went out of their way to accommodate him. Cody patronized Elwood Mead, the state engineer, to smooth the way not only for the Cody Canal but for several other projects he conceived. Mead was not quite an errand boy for Buffalo Bill, but he took care of just about anything Cody wanted, and he ultimately certified the Cody Canal as completed when it would not reliably hold water, because he had hitched his wagon to Cody’s star. Cody employed his small army of press agents to fill newspapers in Wyoming with glowing descriptions of his plans for the Big Horn Basin. He dropped the names of Theodore Roosevelt and General Nelson Miles whenever he had a chance, to remind governors and others just who they were dealing with. He was never shy about reminding people in Wyoming how well-connected he was in the East. He was so full of himself that he identified the state’s interests with his own, and important state officers came to accept this identification. You write that “William Cody, addicted to the spotlight, seemed to choose undertakings with at least one eye on reputation. He also attempted to use the weight of the reputation he had earned in the Wild West arena to swing money and authority his way in economic transactions in Wyoming. He had convinced himself of the truth of his ‘frontier imposture’ and built fame and fortune on it.” Did Cody really see himself as on a par with the great capitalist businessmen and political leaders of his era, or was he simply a confidence artist on a colossal scale? I don’t believe he thought for a minute he was in the same league with Rockefeller, Carnegie, Frick, or those guys. He did rub shoulders with wealthy capitalists of somewhat lesser rank in clubs in New York like the Rocky Mountain Club, and he cultivated relationships with people like George Perkins of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad. He made personal calls on Presidents Cleveland and Roosevelt, and hosted Generals Nelson Miles and Leonard Wood in Wyoming. I think he thought he belonged in the company of wealthy men and political leaders on terms other than those of a visiting showman, and he expected his undertakings in Wyoming to gain him that status. Unfortunately, the tools he found at hand for this job were the tools of show business, and as a result he became vulnerable to the charge that he was only a large-scale con artist. I developed the term “capitalist imposture” as a more polite way of pointing to that. The entire story of his second land development in the Big Horn Basin, the Cody-Salsbury project, reveals this most painfully, but the cold-eyed observations of the Burlington’s men in the field regarding the conduct and prospects of the Shoshone Irrigation Company on the Cody Canal show how real businessmen regarded him. This interview concludes here.
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