Trumpet on the Land (6 page)

So Bill prayed, not at all embarrassed that he asked the Almighty to leave some of the hostiles for the Fifth Cavalry to fight.

After all, Bill figured—the Fifth Cavalry always had been an Injun-fighting outfit. And no matter where life might lead William F. Cody, no man—nor woman—would ever be able to take the magic of these plains from him.

He had been twenty-three years old that fall of eighteen and sixty-nine, following the summer he led the Fifth down on Tall Bull's village of Cheyenne Dog Soldiers at Summit Springs. That first year of scouting for the army was crammed chock-full of adventure and even some downright belly-busting fun—like that time he had talked Wild Bill and that gray-eyed Irishman into stealing a shipment of Mexican beer bound for another regiment wandering the Staked Plain of the Texas Panhandle in search of Cheyenne and Comanche. After hijacking the load of foamy brew, the trio of scouts instead took their contraband back to their own camp and immediately set up shop for the boys of Carr's Fifth Cavalry.

But now … well, now he couldn't dare get away with such a stunt. Now that Buffalo Bill was the darling of the boards and theater lights back east. But Wild Bill? Well, Cody had heard Hickok had become quite the army scout before he turned lawman down in Abilene, Kansas, then finally had retired to become a knight of the green felt: ofttimes making his day's wages over a single turn of the cards. And Donegan? Damn—Bill didn't know what had ever become of the Irishman after that evening he plucked Donegan's hash from the fire back behind the sutler's bar at Fort McPherson in November sixty-nine.

For some reason it seemed most reasonable to think Seamus Donegan could not possibly still be alive, not the way that man lived. But in the next moment Bill decided that it was every bit as reasonable to believe that the Irish
man would still be very much alive. A man who pushed out at the edges of his Ufe with as much vitality and zest as did that Irishman—why, you didn't easily kill off that sort of man.

Not the sort of man as was William F. Cody.

Likely, it was Edward Zane Carroll Judson who got the whole damn thing started what had pulled Cody off the plains to begin with. The stocky little prairie cock called himself Ned Buntline. Whatever name he wanted to use, in whatever company, it had been that fall of sixty-nine Cody first ran onto the dime novelist who was out to write the glories of the opening of the West. Bill instantly took a liking to that Buntline fella who had been hanged of a time, but the rope broke; some said the rope was cut by an accomplice. Still, it took some stewing, Buntline's ideas did, before Bill seriously considered leaving these plains. But that chance meeting with Buntline that fall of sixty-nine was to come back to haunt Cody more than once. The first time was that very Christmas when an officer at Fort McPherson ran over to show him a copy of Buntline's latest dime novel just arrived with a shipment of tinware at the sutler's:
Buffalo Bill the King of the Border Men.

Cody promptly bought up what all copies the sutler had and gave them away over whiskey and cigars for a chuckle or two, along with the feeling it gave him to see his very own name in print. To think of it! Buffalo Bill in print back east—even though Buntline's story was nothing short of pure horse pucky—to think that his name in that tale was being read by thousands of eyes. Thousands upon thousands!

The Fifth Cavalry had only one Indian fight in all of 1870—things quieting down after the drubbing they had given the warrior bands, so it seemed. So it was that following winter of seventy, seventy-one that an eager Bill Cody jumped at the request made of him to guide for the British sportsman, the Earl of Dunraven. There followed hunting expeditions for the Grand Duke Alexis in seventy-two—the hunt when Bill got to meet George Armstrong Custer, the
Seventh Cavalry's hero of the Washita—as well as later expeditions guiding ornithologists and all manner of scientists out beneath this great open sky, into the midst of hundreds upon hundreds of intoxicating miles of absolutely nothing.

Again the following campaign season of seventy-one the Fifth had but one Indian skirmish. Nonetheless, he was developing a personal style mixed with a generous mix of charisma and electrifying dash that would make him truly memorable when he finally took that first step behind the smoky footlights of an eastern theater. Then in November of seventy-one, with little happening on the Central Plains, the Fifth was reassigned to the Apache war in Arizona. They were leaving Bill Cody behind at McPherson, bound for Fort McDowell.

No less than Phil Sheridan himself had instructed the regiment's commanding officer to leave Bill at McPherson because he knew nothing of the Apache, and perhaps even less of the new terrain. The Fifth was ordered “not to take Cody.”

The Third Cavalry would be coming to take the place of the Fifth. Sheridan informed Cody he would never have a better chance to accept those numerous invitations to visit New York City. Bill went east. And his life was never to be the same again.

Dividing his time between newspaper publisher james Gordon Bennett and Ned Buntline, Bill got a real taste of the high life that only New York could offer. And he got to see himself played by an actor on opening night at the Bowery Theater for Fred Maeder's production of Buntline's story,
Buffalo Bill: The King of Border Men.
At intermission the theater manager learned that no less than the real William F. Cody was in the audience, so after he made the announcement to the audience, the crowd prevailed upon the scout to make his way reluctantly to the stage, where he said little if anything—frightened to death, and frozen speechless.

Staring at a half-dozen painted, screaming warriors,
each waving a rifle or war club as they charged down on him … why, that was one thing. But staring out at hundreds of theatergoers, all expecting him to entertain them merely by opening his mouth and saying something worthwhile? Now, that was a polecat of a whole different color!

Buffalo Bill made the one and only retreat in his life that night as he ducked through the side curtains—but was immediately cornered backstage by the theater manager, who offered him five hundred dollars a week to play the part of Buffalo Bill himself.

Five hundred dollars a week!

At the time Cody believed the man had to be mad, or merely addlebrained. No one could make that sort of money playacting, pretending, simply having fun. So Bill begged off, wanting nothing more than to escape the place as fast as he could get out of there.

“I never was one to talk to a crowd of people like that,” he told the group that had him cornered backstage. “Even if it was to save my neck. You might as well try to make an actor out of a government mule.”

And with that Bill ducked out a back door into the dark of a New York alley where he made good his hairbreadth escape, back none too soon on his beloved plains, assigned to Colonel John J. Reynolds's Third Cavalry.

The next month, April of seventy-two, Cody guided Captain Charles Meinhold's B Company on the trail of a war party that had killed three soldiers and run off some cavalry mounts a mere half-dozen miles from Fort McPherson itself. Two days later on the evening of the twenty-sixth as the entire company went into camp, Cody led Sergeant Foley and six men out to reconnoiter the immediate area before settling in for the night. No more than a mile from their bivouac Bill discovered a small Indian camp and a nearby pony herd, which included some of those stolen army horses. Cody and Foley decided to attack—killing three of the horse thieves. In the brief fight Bill found himself alone among the warriors, facing some daunting odds—yet stayed cool long enough to shoot his way out of the
fix while the remaining horse thieves made good their escape before the rest of the company came up on the run.

For that bravery shown along the South Fork of the Loup River in Nebraska, Bill was awarded the Medal of Honor. And he thought on that now, touching his gloved fingers to his breast for a moment here in the warm morning sun—remembering how damned proud Louisa had been to slip that ribbon over his neck, remembering how the medal felt against the hammer of his heart. Recalling how he so enjoyed the long, joyous rolls of deafening applause from those in attendance as they clambered to their feet, their approbation ringing from those walls and rolling over and over him.

That same spring some of his McPherson friends secured Bill's nomination by the Democratic party to represent the twenty-sixth district in the Nebraska legislature. He won by the slim margin of forty-four votes. When Bill had pressing matters with the army and did not show up at Lincoln on the specified date to be sworn in and to claim his seat, a suit was filed on behalf of his opponent, stating that some votes had been improperly returned.

Despite a questionable recount, Bill accepted the new figures, which gave D. P. Ashburn the election. Cody went on with his life.

Following his return to McPherson from the skirmish on the Loup River, Bill received the first of what would be many letters sent him by Buntline, every one of them urging, cajoling, begging Bill to go on stage to play himself.

“I still remember that dreadful night at the Bowery Theater,” he wrote Buntline.

“You'll get over it,” the novelist wrote back. “Any man as brave as you can learn to overcome an enemy so weak as shyness.”

But Colonel Reynolds distrusted the self-promoter Buntline. “I advise against you going, Cody,” he told Bill. “You have a good job with us. A good future. Think of your family. Three children now?”

Yes. Two daughters and his beloved Kit Carson Cody.
He had wavered, gazing again across the plains that surrounded McPherson. Who was he fooling, anyway? To think about becoming a showman, a traveling actor? He was a frontiersman. A scout. He didn't have what it took to make a go of that theater stuff.

Then Buntline's bluntest letter arrived late that November. Ned cut right to Cody's quick. “There's money in it. Big money.”

Cody remembered the money. Most of all, the money. Five hundred dollars a week, by damned. What that kind of money could do for his family! For Lulu and the three babies.

By that time Louisa was anxious to visit her family in St. Louis, so they started Bill's trip east right there. A journey that would last more than three and a half years before he got back here to the plains. Fact was, he hadn't been off the army's payroll since he made that first ride for General Sheridan back to September of sixty-eight … right on through to that December of seventy-two when he resigned, went east with the family, and began a whole new life.

Again now Bill's eyes all but closed as he drank deep of the air, feeling the stiff breeze against his face. He turned in the saddle to find Sheridan's escort column far behind him, inching along like a dark serpent wending its way through the broken country. Far out on either side rode a few flankers. But he was out front. Alone. The way he so enjoyed. Just him and the horse. Him and the horse, and by God these plains he had forsaken for theater lights.

On the eighteenth of December, 1872, he made his first appearance in Ned's production of
Buffalo Bill
at Nixon's Amphitheater in Chicago, starring in a play Buntline called
The Real Buffalo Bill!
By the time the curtain dropped that night, Cody was able to savor his first success on the boards.

“There's no backing out now,” he told Buntline later that night at a bar as they celebrated their take from the door.

Ned promptly set about writing a whole new play he would coproduce with Bill,
The Scouts of the Prairie.
Wherever they opened to packed houses, reviewers praised the show: “The Indian mode of warfare, their hideous dances, the method they adopt to ‘raise the hair' of their antagonists, following the trail, etc., or in the way their enemies deal with them, manner of throwing the lasso, &c, are forcibly exhibited, and this portion of the entertainment alone is worth the price of admission.”

Another waxed, “Those who delight in sensations of the most exciting order will not fail to see the distinguished visitors from the western plains before they leave.”

And the Boston
Journal
even told its readers, “The play itself is an extraordinary production with more wild Indians, scalping knives, and gunpowder to the square inch than any drama ever before heard of.”

Soon even the New York
Times's
theater critic declared, “It is only just to say that the representation was attended by torrents of what seemed thoroughly spontaneous applause; and that whatever faults close criticism may detect, there is a certain flavor of realism and of nationality about the play well calculated to gratify a general audience.”

From Chicago to Cincinnati, on to Boston, New York, Rochester, and Buffalo, he and Buntline moved the production company, consistently grossing more than sixteen thousand dollars a week!

“I promised you there'd be money in this!” Buntline reminded him one evening after the performance as they were taking their leisure over a brandy and a good cigar.

“You've kept your word to me, Ned. And I'm thankful to have you to trust.”

For the moment there was no turning back.

From the first hint of autumn to the last vestige of spring each year, Bill toured the eastern theaters with his troupe of actors, moving through the steps of a newly inspired Buntline melodrama every season. Why, in the fall of seventy-three Cody even invited his old friend Wild Bill
to come take a stab at the easy money of playacting. But Hickok didn't take to it the way Bill had, and he muffed his lines and missed his cues—making for a rub between the two old friends from army days. It didn't take long for the savvy Hickok to realize he was out of his element. Wild Bill quit to go back out west. Cody got Hickok paid off proper, with a thousand-dollar bonus to boot, and they shook— promising to meet again one day, out here on the prairie.

It was a promise Bill prayed they both would keep.