American Experience

Louis Warren, Biographer: Cody hits on this idea that he can live his life, live this story, for the entertainment of his audience.

Charles Scoggin, Writer: What’s really bizarre about this whole thing. It really is bizarre. Cody gets dressed up literally in his stage costume. Black pants with piping down the front, silver buttons down the side, a red silk shirt, and his big hat. And he’s going to go out and kill an Indian.

Narrator: The climactic battle never happened. The only action that the Fifth Cavalry saw was a skirmish with a half dozen luckless Cheyenne, in which Cody shot and killed a warrior named Yellow Hair. He had killed other Indians before, but now, for the first and only time in his life, he walked over to the body, crouched down, and cut off its scalp.

The incident barely rated a mention in the Army report, but within a few months Cody was reenacting it for audiences from New York to St. Louis in a play called “The Red Right Hand, or Buffalo Bill’s First Scalp for Custer.” He sported the same velvet costume he had worn that day, used the same knife, and hoisted the real scalp at the climax of the performance. He had crossed a threshold. William Cody had become Buffalo Bill.

By 1883 Cody had become a star of frontier melodramas: lowbrow spectacles featuring the rescue of a white woman from the clutches of Indians, Confederate sympathizers, Mormons, or the like. He was a hero to the workingmen who crowded the theaters, but he wanted a bigger, more respectable audience. He teamed up with a sharpshooter named Doc Carver to put on a new kind of show. “Our entertainment don’t want to smack of a circus,” he wrote Carver, “must be on a high toned basis.” They called it “Buffalo Bill and Doc Carver’s Wild West, Rocky Mountain and Prairie Exhibition.” Everybody else just called it “The Wild West.”

Charles Scoggin, Writer: They got some wild steers that they can ride. They got bucking horses. They’ve got buffalo. And the other thing they got a lot of is evidently alcohol. And there are legendary stories; supposedly they had a car full of alcohol. Whatever it was, both Carver and Cody would really go on some pretty, pretty good drunks. I think Cody definitely had a problem with binge drinking, there’s no question about it. So they travel around the country with this show sometimes not making the performances because they’re you know dead drunk literally. Carver’s got a terrible temper. I mean at one point he’s the trick shot in the show and he puts on a lousy performance and he’s so frustrated that he breaks his rifle over the head of his horse and beats up his assistant who’s throwing the ball in the air. I mean it’s that sort of thing.

Narrator: The Wild West staggered through to the end of the season, and then Cody went off to meet Nate Salsbury, a successful, experienced, and sober, manager.

Louis Warren, Biographer: Cody had had enough. He said, you come on board, and help me out with this or I’m going to quit. I wouldn’t go through another summer like this for a hundred thousand dollars.