Louis S. Warren (6 page)

But there was another, surprising reason behind the pony's popularity, one which drew on Cody's experience of boyhood even more directly: the Pony Express represented national unity, in profoundly familial terms. Many were the scribes who evoked the glories of western annexation prior to the war with Mexico, with John O'Sullivan's call to “manifest destiny” being only the most famous. But in reality, the acquisition of the Far West blew the nation apart. The U.S.-Mexican War began the year William Cody was born and ended when he was two. Its most immediate result was the annexation of California and the Far West, but following fast on the heels of that event was the gathering storm over slavery in the new western territories, the fight which took Isaac Cody's life and finally ended only at Appomattox in 1865.

As eastern states grappled over slavery in the West, the West itself became a site of profound familial loss. The gold rush began in 1848, and California's stunning growth made it a state in 1850. But if statehood signified a legal and republican unity, California was very much a place apart, separated from the rest of the nation by 1,500 miles of plain and desert. Suddenly, east-west crossing of the nation required the ordeal of foreign travel. Whether one chose the sea route around the Cape of Good Hope, or a sea-and-land route through Mexico or Panama, or the Overland Trail through Indian country and the Mormon territories, alienation was unavoidable. Getting from one end of the United States to the other now meant sojourning among Mexicans, Catholics, polygamous Mormons, and half-naked or all-naked Indians, amid parching deserts, towering mountains, awesome storms, and wild, desolate country.

The journey was all the more fearful because, in most cases, the routes to California pulled families apart.
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Men went ahead intending to send for families or merely to return rich. Husbands and wives took their kids, pulled up stakes, and left their beloved extended kin behind. Letters took at least three weeks to travel the long stagecoach routes between California and eastern states. If they went by sea, they could go unread for six months.

By the mid-1850s, the growing threat of a southern secession made the chasm between California and her sister states seem all the more dangerous. Californians numbered half a million by that time, and they were most conscious of the urgent need for closer bonds with nation and family. In 1856, they presented the largest petition in the history of the United States Senate, 75,000 signatures on a memorial complaining, “We are now, as it were, a distant colony.” They requested a federally supported wagon road with army protection from the Mississippi Valley to their new home, so that distant families could join the multitudes of young men toiling in the mines and domesticate this distant, wild frontier.
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Thus, when they remembered the Pony Express, Americans—especially Californians—recalled it as a reassuring sign amid rumblings of civil war, as the entity that sealed the bond of union between West and East. To ride the Pony Express was to heal the nation's troublesome rift, to bring desolate and broken families together through the fragile connection of correspondence. Cody never rode for the Pony Express, but it made sense that he wished he had. If the adventures he recounted were ones he had heard or read elsewhere, he claimed them as his own in part because he was still seeking to be the bearer of news that could save the family—just as he had sought to be when he climbed out of a sickbed to straddle a pony and ride to the rescue of his father.

The stature of the Pony Express increased through its association with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, where the union of man and horse headed west with the mail came to symbolize not only the last redoubt of organic labor before ascendant technology and the reunited family and nation, but also the grafting of the Far West onto America. The unruly, racially distinctive Indians, the mixed-blood Mexicans and perfidious Mormons, the savage, weird nature of the mysterious frontier with its vast herds of buffalo and rumored hot springs, deserts, unending prairie and endless sky—all of these were now joined to the republic. In no small way, the Pony Express rider embodied this hybrid conjunction of wilderness and civilization. The young white man barely in control of the beast beneath him represented America joined to the West's untamed promise and peril. Thus, contemporaries hailed the Pony Express not only as a fast mail service, not just as a man on a horse, but as a horse-man, and sometimes a hippogriff, a mythical beast with the body of a horse, the head of a lion, and the wings of an eagle. Most of all, though, as Donald C. Biggs has noted, descriptions of the Pony Express often fuse the rider and the horse, sometimes explicitly, sometimes by failing to mention the existence of a rider at all. “The image becomes more animal and rather less than human; what truly emerges is the centaur.”
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Buffalo Bill Cody could not have explained all this. At least, he never did. But intuitively, he understood from a young age that the story of the Pony Express was about much more than delivering mail. Growing up beside the trail to California, he saw the nation moving west, and in his own front yard heard the lamentations of families sundered by emigration to Colorado and exotic, alluring, and faraway California.

One last, seldom-noticed story in his autobiography suggests his connection of the West and the longing for family reunion. Shortly before he staked his claim in Kansas, Isaac Cody took his son Will on a trip to trade with Kickapoo Indians, just inside Kansas Territory. For the eight-year-old boy, the trip not only provided a first glimpse of Indians, but also a chance meeting with a long-lost relative who proved to be the boy's first showman mentor. While camped near the Indian agency (the headquarters of the government's representative to the Kickapoos), father and son saw a herd of horses “approaching from the West, over the California trail,” driven by “seven or eight mounted men, wearing sombreros, and dressed in buckskin, with their lariats dangling from their saddles.”
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When one of the horse drovers ventured over to meet Mr. Cody, “my father called to me to come and see a genuine Western man; he was about six feet two inches tall, was well built, and had a light, springy and wiry step. He wore a broad-brimmed California hat, and was dressed in a complete suit of buckskin, beautifully trimmed and beaded.” After a cheerful reunion, the westerner assisted young Will in the breaking of the two ponies which Isaac had just bought from the Kickapoos. Then he demonstrated riding tricks which he claimed to have learned as a circus rider in Hawaii, and in California, where he had also been a “bocarro,” or vaquero, a Mexican cowboy.
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It sounds too good to be true, and perhaps it is, but both Julia and William Cody recalled that the stranger proved to be Horace Billings, a long-lost nephew of Isaac's. Over the summer Billings took the boy with him on short trips out on the Plains to catch wild horses, which they sold for cash at the nearby military post. Billings departed for the Far West that fall.
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There is, in fact, nothing intrinsically incredible about William Cody's colorful version of the story. In the early nineteenth century, young men did run away to sea. Hawaii was a major port of call. Many of the first immigrants to gold rush California came from the Hawaiian Islands. There were circuses that toured the goldfields and the Pacific in the 1840s and '50s, and even if Billings had not been in a circus, many people in the West imitated circus riding tricks for amusement. Wild horses were endemic to California and the Southwest. Americans—and Mexicans, and Indians—did venture out to the Plains for horse-capturing, or “mustanging,” expeditions, either to capture and break horses, or to trade for Indian horses, which they then drove to the exploding markets of the midwestern frontier. The Santa Fe Trail, the most popular route for this trade, connected the Far Southwest to Saint Joseph, Missouri, and ran near the Kickapoo Indian agency.
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But whether or not Billings was a real figure, Cody's story about him suggests how he thought about the West as a place from which fatherly heroes emerged. The man's mastery of horses reassured the young boy, whose older brother had died beneath a volatile mare the year before. When Little Gray, a troublesome horse, began to sprint for home, “Billings stood straight up on his back, and thus rode him into camp. As he passed us he jumped to the ground, allowed the horse to run to the full length of the lariat, when he threw him a complete somersault.”
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Cody's memory of Billings was of a consummate horseman, a buckskin-clad showman, mentor, and father figure. “Everything that he did, I wanted to do,” recalled the theatrical star. “He was a sort of hero in my eyes, and I wished to follow in his footsteps.”
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Those footsteps led both westward and into show business.

The expedition to the Kickapoo Indian agency showed young Will Cody his first Indians, and also a white man who came out of the West over the California trail, having mastered Mexican horsecraft and wild horses, too. The most striking thing about Billings is how much he resembles the future Buffalo Bill Cody himself, a horseman from the West in finely beaded buckskin and a broad-brimmed hat, “six feet two inches tall,” and “well built” with a “light, springy and wiry step.”

THE FUTURE LAY WEST. And for the young man who turned his eyes that way after the Civil War was over, the memory of Horace Billings, the glorious man who rode out of the West, made it seem a wonderful place indeed. In William Cody's memory, some harbinger of his own future self rode to him across the Plains from California that summer. Isaac Cody would never come home again. But in William Cody's mind, the western trails brought absent father figures back to the family.

When Cody recounted his life story in future years, he told himself into those trails. In 1867, he had the first of several encounters with writer and railroad agent William Webb. In 1873, Webb published a description of Cody as a man who crossed the Plains “twice as a teamster, while a mere boy, and has spent the greater part of his life on it since.”
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The story was true. Cody traveled from Leavenworth to Denver when he was fourteen. He made another trip to Denver in 1863, and raced back to be with his dying mother.
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He told Webb nothing about the Pony Express.

Two years after Webb's first meeting with Cody, the dime novelist Ned Buntline toured the West and met William Cody, then an army scout. The two men plied each other with drink and western yarns. Buntline soon published the first version of Cody's life story. It was highly fictionalized, but had many real elements of Cody's life, including fights with Charles Dunn and other bushwhackers, and a friendship with Wild Bill Hickok. But it contained nary a mention of the Pony Express.
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Cody's fame as a hunting guide and dramatic actor made him the subject of many newspaper interviews in the early 1870s. But he never said anything about being in the Pony Express until 1874. He had been a stage star for a year and a half when he suddenly blurted out to a newspaperman that he “rode the pony express route from St. Jo to San Francisco” in 1860. By the end of the month, he was announcing himself as the “
first
rider who started on
the route.”
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William Cody created the persona of Buffalo Bill not as a western man alone, but as a man who grew up connecting East and West, the Far West and the States, frontier and home. It was California and the Far West that harbored the youthful manliness and wild horse spirit that so entranced the young boy, and journeying out of that West came familial reunion and adulation. In his mind, the trail to the Far West was the path to manhood, and lost family, too. In his memory of his youth, the trails betokened his own ideal future. In his memory, the Wild West show in some sense came to him from over that far horizon.

William Cody's 1879 autobiography did not recount his childhood so much as reinvent it. Much more than a memoir of real events, the book mixed truth and fiction, to cast the child Will Cody as the protagonist of an American myth. The boy came up through hard times by dint of his own energy, hard work, and good luck and great connections. He grew up holding together the nation with the Pony Express, fighting for its families by battling the Mormons. If these were lies, they were skillfully told ones, and there was a method to them. They appealed to his audience, but, just as important, they retained and embellished a genuine aspect of his childhood struggle to defend his family. At eleven years old, he was the eldest surviving male in a family blasted by the border wars, lurching toward poverty, afflicted with the violence of their enemies.

The desperate effort to protect the Cody family from the maelstrom which engulfed them was a burden that passed from Isaac and Mary, neither of whom lived to see its conclusion, to their eldest children, Julia—who was twenty and married when her mother died—and William, who was a mere seventeen.

In recalling the weight of that load, the grown-up William Cody never dwelt on its darkness. He was innately optimistic, a characteristic which served him well in show business. But to understand him, his biography, and the many lies he told about both, we need only recall the boy who rose from a sickbed, leapt to the back of his pony, and outran border ruffians to meet his father at Grasshopper Falls. One of the reasons we may believe this story is because of details Cody left out, which emerged long after, from other sources. When Buffalo Bill told the story in
The Life of Buffalo Bill
in 1879, he said he got away from his pursuers and found his father, having “arrived in ample time to inform him of the approach of his old enemies.”
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He left out details his sister provided: his stop at the neighbor's, the horse covered with vomit, being put to bed by his concerned friend, and the fact that his father turned out not to be in danger. William Cody left out the panic, the illness, his own weakness. He left out the terror.