November 20, 2007
Who Was the Real Buffalo Bill Cody? An Interview with Robert E. Bonner (Part 2) Posted by Allen Barra at 01:30 PM EST This is the conclusion of the interview that begins here. How did Buffalo Bill get along in his declining years? And why has the memory of his colossal business failures been erased from our national memory? Assuming his declining years would be his sixties (he died just before his seventy-first birthday), we are talking about 1906 to 1917. In Wyoming those were not especially hard years. He did suffer the final loss of all his development prospects and had to endure the ignominy of being sued by everyone who farmed under the Cody Canal, but he probably did not lose any more money. His show continued to bring in reasonably good money until 1912, but he got involved in a gold mine in Arizona where an unscrupulous partner bilked him of just about every dollar he earned. In 1913 he fell prey to Henry Tammen, publisher of the Denver Post, who broke up his show and took Cody into a kind of debt peonage that had him riding into arenas every summer for the rest of his life, no matter how sick or exhausted he became. He came back to Cody every winter and enjoyed his time in town and at the ranch. The town would hold big parties for him whenever he returned, but he had very little to do with its growing or running. Sometime after 1910 his wife, Louisa, returned to him and lived with him when he was in Cody. She also, as I pointed out in the book, became the owner of his ranch and the Irma Hotel, to protect them from being seized for debt. There were occasional bursts of the old energy, and he was never living in actual poverty, but he was obviously fading out. As for the second question, I am not sure the national consciousness ever grasped how seriously he had failed as an entrepreneur. He continued to advertise the town of Cody in the Wild West and promote Yellowstone tourism. He kept his face before the public, and by that time he had built such a triumphal myth around himself that there was probably little room for people in general to attach any idea of these failures to his familiar form on horseback. He had made a place for himself in a comfortable version of American history. Nobody wanted to have their visions of him complicated by facts that might have pointed elsewhere. Our modern-day experience of Ronald Reagan might be somewhat similar. In your conclusion you write that Cody was “a complex and conflicted man, one who failed to realize his imperial ambitions in Wyoming but who nevertheless left an enduring mark on the country. His legacy is as complex as his personality.” Who, then, would you say is the real William Cody—the performer and Wild West impresario or the ambitious but failed businessman? If you don’t mind, I will expand the choices a bit, because in my mind he is not finally either of these. Louis Warren (author of Buffalo Bill’s America) thought that the real Buffalo Bill was the performer, and given the point and scope of his book, that makes sense. He was also, on the strength of my own research, an ambitious but failed capitalist. I came to think in the course of my work, however, that he was most himself when he was out hunting, or taking other people out hunting, in the mountains above his ranch or along the eastern border of Yellowstone Park. The life of the performer, while he wore it well as a young man, came increasingly to drag him down. His venture into the world of business and development seemed to have chastened him. His hunting trips were refuges from those things, where he could turn his mind back to his youth and happier times. They also showed him (and others) that there was money to be made in tourism, particularly tourism based on hunting and the outdoor life of those up-country ranches. I think tourism as Cody saw it was continuous with his Wild West shows, in that it was presenting to people from the East a packaged vision of life in the West. The venue had shifted from Eastern arenas to Western ranches, but the goal was the same. I think I would say that the real Bill Cody was the genial host who presided over the meeting of East and West.
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