Louis S. Warren (13 page)

Hoaxes and frauds were often elaborate variations on the tall tale, a form of artful deception which was the most popular and enduring means of representing the West. Although not unique to the United States, the American tall tale achieved an attraction and a currency unmatched elsewhere, and by the 1830s—the same decade that Barnum began to stage his hoaxes almost as tall tales made real—Americans could claim it as a national art form.
³⁵
Tall tales were not unique to the frontier. But because they played on the ignorance of their audience, and because they frequently exploited unfamiliar natural settings and animals, they tended to feature frontier and backcountry locales. Thus, the southwestern frontier of Arkansas, Tennessee, and Louisiana spawned many early tall tales of Davy Crockett, Mike Fink, and others.
³⁶

In the course of the nineteenth century, the locus of the tall tale moved west, across the Mississippi, with the expanding fur trade and the frontier of settlement. Mountain men provided fonts of entertaining tales for eastern audiences beginning in the 1830s. The West was ideal for this form of entertainment, in part because its distinctive and remote geography often meant that seemingly outrageous elements of stories could prove true. When Jim Bridger described the remote northern Rockies as a place of steaming geysers and boiling pools, the editor of the
Kansas City Journal
refused to publish the story for fear it would reveal him as a dupe of the notorious tale spinner. Years later, he apologized to Bridger when it became apparent that at least that feature of his Yellowstone accounts was true.
³⁷
So there was similar willingness to countenance if not quite believe mountain men's colorful accounts of petrified forests, prairie fires that could outrun a horse, and buffalo herds stretching from one horizon to the other. Audiences enjoyed these tales as a kind of performance: fur trapper Joe Meek once paid passage on a steamboat by charging passengers to hear his entertaining stories of the Oregon country.
³⁸

The frontier Hickok and Cody grew up hearing about, and which tourists went to Kansas looking for, was not just a region, or a place, but a subject in which fact and fiction had been so thoroughly mixed that the very idea of the Far West suggested deception, some of it entertaining. Both Hickok and Cody had roots in the Old Northwest (today's northern Midwest), the region that provided most of the emigrants who made their way along the Overland Trail to California and Oregon in the 1840s and 1850s.
³⁹
The gold rush generated a torrent of fantastic, but sometimes half-true, tales of fist-sized gold nuggets, a climate so mild it was impossible to die in, and a stupendously fertile land where it never snowed. But already the Far West was a region that had to be seen to be understood, a locus of the fabulous and the monstrous. When Hickok and Cody were boys, legends of the circus permeated every rural hamlet, and none were so entrancing as the stories of gigantic beasts with noses that could lift a man's hat from his head or spray a crowd with water. Rural folk were so intrigued that many abandoned work whenever the big top came to town, paying hard-earned money to examine the legendary animals for themselves. By 1849, stories of the gold rush sounded so much like circus legends that journeying west came to be known as “seeing the elephant.”
⁴⁰

Consequently, that migration west generated a library of trail narratives, in which people who otherwise never kept journals or wrote letters archived their adventures for posterity. By the end of the 1850s, these made up a new genre of American literature, emigrants' own true tales of discovering the “real” West and its many correspondences with or differences from popular images in emigrant guidebooks (many of which were highly dubious), dime novels, newspaper accounts, and rumor. Through these narratives, and throughout the popular understanding of the West itself, coursed a powerful theme of democratic exploration, less of the trail itself—which was well marked even before the gold rush—than of the spaces between western reality and eastern fantasy.

Of course, in the West as in the East, there were real risks which made the discernment of fantasy and reality more than a game. To many emigrants, the trails west led through cholera, Indian attacks, and financial collapse, not to mention loneliness. When the promoter Lansford Hastings assumed the guise of a trail guide, the Donner Party swallowed his bait, and took his “shortcut” across the desert south of the Great Salt Lake. Those who survived endured a cannibal winter in the Sierra Nevada before they ever made it to Sacramento.
⁴¹

According to William Cody, his own father weighed the stories of California riches and decided they came up short. Discussions about what to believe and what to dismiss in the many California accounts swirled through young Will's trailside upbringing.
⁴²
But if the Donner horror and other, less spectacular failures underscored the importance of discerning fakery from authenticity in the West, it also made the line between them even more a subject for legitimate entertainment. By the time Cody was a child and Hickok was a teenager, the region was understood to have a genuine, spectacular nature, looming beneath layers of cultural fraud and hype, like an elephant beneath a giant canvas tent.

After the Civil War, Kansas and the West developed in ways that further heightened public sensitivity to its many deceptions. Despite the Bleeding Kansas violence, between 1854 and 1865, 142,000 settlers arrived in Kansas. In the next fifteen years, they were joined by 850,000 more.
⁴³
These massive displacements and their concomitant revolutionary changes were announced by a deluge of paper, as presses churned out notices of western opportunities real and fraudulent. Hyperbolic land speculation generated an ocean of advertising: real estate posters; multicolored land titles; maps accurate, fantastic, and many shades between; bird's-eye views of western towns, many of which would never approach their depicted size and many others which never existed at all. Railroad companies and their agents distributed pamphlets in most languages across every state and most European countries. They promised fertile soil with plentiful water, but dumped gullible emigrants on vast and arid grassland, many miles from markets or towns. Dishonest brokers sold claims they did not own, described one parcel to buyers and sold them another, or sold the same parcel to numerous customers before skipping town. Deceptions about land made up only one layer of endemic fraud on the frontier, where any number of “honest men” could sell an aspiring immigrant a lucrative mining claim, a paying saloon, even a bridge. Settlers had their own share of tricks. After 1862, the federal government deeded 285 million acres to homesteaders. Half their claims were fraudulent, backed by false identities, fake improvements, or worse.
⁴⁴

By the time William Cody was watching Hickok's imposture in Hays, the West not only possessed a heightened anxiety about fakery and a white-hot market for artful deceptions. In the popular mind the West
was
an artful deception, a place to be explored with the same methods, and often the same level of enjoyment, as any humbug. In ways long underappreciated by historians, frontier ideology reinforced popular eagerness to play this game. After all, the border between settlement and wilderness was not only the meeting point of civilization and savagery. It was also where the West— whatever that was—met the printing press, the artist's canvas, and the lithograph machine. The frontier was the junction of American craft and manufacturing (Artifice) and frontier material (Nature). In detecting for themselves the truth about Hickok, and later Cody, tourists sought to trace a frontier line that ran, shifting and inscrutable, between the Fake and the Real.
⁴⁵

Barnum himself recognized the inherent value of the frontier line in this regard. Like the FeeJee Mermaid's conjunction of fish and primate, the best hoaxes befuddled normative boundaries, and the mythic line between civilization and savagery expressed almost every kind of normative boundary there was.
⁴⁶
The entertainer staged several western attractions, including a buffalo hunt in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1843, but none of them approached the popularity of Joice Heth or the FeeJee Mermaid, perhaps because Barnum was too much the sharp Yankee to be credible as a presenter of frontier wonders.
⁴⁷

Hickok, on the other hand, was an authentic frontiersman, who could track and shoot like few others. Informed by dime novel fictions into which his own life was inscribed, he appropriated popular symbols (those guns, that long hair, and the buckskin and moccasins). All of these had been symbolic of “frontierness” in popular imagination at least since James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking sagas, which in turn were inspired by biographies of Daniel Boone and mountain man lore. Long hair and deerskin garments implied connections to untamed nature, wild animals, and Indians, and the getup was so outdated in post–Civil War Kansas that he stood out. Hickok alternated his leather outfit with fashionable dress shirts and pointed boots, as if the ability to exchange buckskin for fine clothing symbolized the frontiersman's essential civility (while simultaneously it naturalized urban menswear, thereby legitimating many urban readers and tourists as potential frontiersmen). Facility with firearms represented the mastery of technology, particularly the machinery of violence through which an enervated white race could be regenerated.
⁴⁸

Hickok sharpened his attraction with genuine feats of pistolcraft like those in the Nichols article. Tourist witnesses recounted Hickok's cool skill: hitting a dime edge-on, driving a cork through the neck of a bottle with a bullet, shooting through a chicken's throat without breaking a bone.
⁴⁹
To the delight of many observers, Wild Bill practiced pistol shooting frequently on the outskirts of whichever town he happened to be in.
⁵⁰
However good a shot he actually was—and his willingness to shoot for an audience suggests he must have been at least fairly good—posing as a marksman allowed Hickok to assume the mythical hero's clarity of vision and apply the most modern technology to raw frontier nature. It allowed him to be avatar of the encounter between wilderness and civilization, assert his authority as a lawman, and advertise his services as hunting guide and scout, all at the same time.

Working from his bedrock authenticity as a guide, marksman, and lawman, Hickok's style of tourist entertainment included careful crafting of the tall tale. References to these stories are ubiquitous, and although none of the tales themselves survive, reportedly his personal adventures could entrance a circle of visitors for an hour or more. If we assume that he drew from the well of western standards, we can picture him as he spins out his story for a rapt audience (with Cody among them more than once) before ceasing his narration abruptly, leaving himself surrounded, disarmed, and facing imminent death.

After a breathless pause, some greenhorn would feed him the inevitable question: “How did you escape?”

Taking a breath, Hickok would drawl, “I didn't.” Another pause. “I was killed.”

This kind of leg pulling (a classic mountain man joke) served as fair warning that he was not strictly honest. His biography reinforced that message, especially in his consistent public claims of having been a spy. Spies were of necessity liars, and their ability to change appearance and identity fascinated Americans during and after the Civil War.
⁵¹
As one Union spy explained in his 1866 autobiography, espionage “requires an
accomplished
liar.
” That is, not a “
habitual
liar,
” but one who “can
successfully practice decep
tion.”
⁵²
For audiences, the allure of the spy figure was partly in the challenge he posed to their faculties of discernment. In no small measure, the claim to have been a spy called into question the veracity of the storyteller, for if he was indeed “an accomplished liar,” how could the audience know if he was telling the truth or not?

In important ways, scouting underscored similar messages. Although scouts today are recalled as authentic wilderness figures, through the Civil War they bore a close relationship to spies. Indian scouts were often called spies, because they not only tracked enemy warriors but could creep close enough to listen in on their conversations.
⁵³
Scouts for Union and Confederate forces also were spies, donning enemy uniform or civilian garb to reconnoiter the territory or plant misinformation. Both Hickok and Cody fought along the bloody Kansas-Missouri line. There, the Red Legs and their bushwhacker opponents often took on the guises of one another. Scouting, deception, imposture: these dubious pursuits went hand in hand. Thus, the occupations converged in Hickok's life. Thus, William Cody, seeking to memorialize himself as the West's greatest scout in 1879, fictionalized assignments as a Civil War spy (and Hickok associate) for his artfully deceptive autobiography.

The scout figure had other sources of popular resonance, which we shall explore in the next chapter. But for now we may observe that scouts were not only repositories of knowledge about the wilderness and the enemy, but also spies who were masters of deception and intrigue. Dime novels were jammed with scouts in part because they were marginal, rural people who dominated the story's action, constantly masquerading and changing identities. In this sense, they were both nostalgic icons of a vanishing frontier America and profoundly modern figures whose talents at imposture empowered them to dominate the city, something they frequently did in the dime novels which proliferated toward century's end.

These literary and cultural trends coalesced around Hickok and many others. To be sure, not every scout who found himself represented in the popular press enjoyed the experience. In 1858, Kit Carson guided an army detachment to the camp of a Jicarilla Apache raiding party in hopes of rescuing a captive emigrant, one Mrs. White. The Apaches escaped, and Mrs. White was found dead soon after. But Carson was most troubled by something that turned up in her belongings: “We found a book in the camp, the first of the kind I had ever seen, in which I was represented as a great hero, slaying Indians by the hundred.” Carson could only ponder the tragic elements of this misrepresentation: “I have often thought that Mrs. White must have read it, and knowing that I lived near-by, must have prayed for my appearance in order that she might be saved.”
⁵⁴