American Experience

Narrator: Back in the 1850s Buntline had been arrested for inciting anti-German violence in St. Louis. He’d skipped bail and left town, but he hadn’t been forgotten. When Scouts of the Plains traveled to St. Louis, all three men were arrested. Cody and Omohundro were quickly released, and Buntline managed to skip bail yet again.

Louis Warren, Biographer: It was becoming apparent to Cody that Buntline had a lot of baggage and that maybe Buntline’s plans for the Buffalo Bill character or figure weren’t in Cody’s plans. Buntline appears to have hoped that Cody would become a kind of anti-immigrant figure, a kind of, of Nativist hero. And Cody, for reasons of his own, didn’t want to go there.

Narrator: Cody had grown up in Kansas before the Civil War, when it was the most dangerous place in America. Pro-slavery neighbors and militias had terrorized the family. When Cody’s father spoke out against slavery at a town meeting, he was stabbed by a neighbor as the eight-year old boy looked on Cody would become the family’s main breadwinner three years later, when his father finally died of his wounds. One loss followed another: a brother, his father, his mother, a sister, a second brother.

The specter of death followed him always. In the spring of 1876 it suddenly caught up with him. He was on the road with his theater combination when he received an urgent telegram from Louisa. Their son Kit had contracted scarlet fever. Cody rushed home, but the boy died in his arms a few hours later. “Louisa is worn out and sick,” he wrote to his sister. “We all clung to him and prayed God not to take from us our little boy. But there was no hope from the start.”

Paul Fees, Historian: His grief was intense. It was real. But at the same time he wasn’t able to help his wife through that, that terrible grief. And, and instead he did what he did so often in their marriage, he fled.

Louis Warren, Biographer: Cody veers away from the darkness almost always. He doesn’t like to focus on sad stories. He doesn’t like to talk about pain. He likes to focus on triumph and victory. And this would serve him very, very well in show business. In his personal life it probably served him less well.

Paul Fees, Historian: Cody got a summons that must have seemed providential to come West and rejoin General Carr in the 5th Cavalry. So he went.

Louis Warren, Biographer: Cody’s company’s with the 5th Cavalry and they get word that Custer and most of his command have died on the banks of the Little Big Horn River. And they’re shocked.

Narrator: By 1876 Americans had been assured that the Indian Wars were all but over. Out of the blue, a host of warriors had annihilated an army detachment led by one of its most famous generals. All eyes were on the West, where Cody and the Fifth Cavalry were searching for hundreds of Cheyenne. The high command was panicked, the public wanted revenge. Cody saw his chance to write Buffalo Bill into Custer’s high drama.