American Experience

Narrator: He had the brash confidence that sometimes comes of hardship and loss. He could drink with the best of them, and often did. But Cody was a bit of a loner; he kept his many companions at arm’s length. In fact, it might have come as a surprise to his drinking buddies that Bill Cody had left a wife behind.

He’d met Louisa Frederici in St. Louis at the end of the war. They weren’t a perfect match.

Charles Scoggin, Writer: You’ve got Cody who’s a kid that’s grown up in eastern Kansas, has been out West and lived a pretty rugged life. And she grows up in the French quarter of St. Louis. Goes to Catholic convent school.

Paul Fees, Historian: Golly, she’s, in her pictures she’s, she’s almost sultry looking. And she must have seemed terribly exotic to him. And his was a life then of trying to make a home for her. But he wasn’t good at that part.

Narrator: Louisa had warned Cody that she didn’t want any roving plainsman for a husband. But he just couldn’t settle down: it was only six months after their wedding that he’d headed off to west Kansas, leaving her at his sister’s home, alone and pregnant. But he didn’t forget about her. He sent home whatever money he could, and lived a hard life to do so.

Cody finally got a bit of a break in the spring of 1868 when U.S. Army officers at Fort Hays hired him to help track down some deserters. For Cody the best part of the job was the company he got to keep: the deputy marshal from nearby Junction City.

James Butler Hickok was already well known as Wild Bill.

Louis Warren, Biographer: Wild Bill is a scout for the army. He occasionally acts as US detective, which means he’s in charge of tracking down deserters. And then in 1867 Wild Bill Hickok became the subject of a magazine article in Harpers New Monthly Magazine.

Paul Fees, Historian: It made Hickok into what, for Easterners, seemed the very embodiment of kind of a flamboyant Western, dangerous hero or anti-hero even. So Hickok became famous largely through his own flamboyance but also through publicity.

Narrator: Hickok made a habit of waiting on railway platforms for Eastern tourists. He knew what they wanted to see and he dressed the part, wearing clothes that would have suited Daniel Boone’s Kentucky better than post-Civil War Kansas.

Louis Warren, Biographer: Cody looks at Wild Bill and sees Hickok running what is kind of a one-man show and the show is the life of Wild Bill Hickok. And he starts to think maybe I could do that.

Cody begins to wear his hair long. He begins to put on buckskin. He begins to tell some of the same stories that Hickok has told only he features himself at the center of those stories instead of Hickok.