Trumpet on the Land: The Aftermath of Custer's Massacre, 1876

Chapter 2

Late June 1876

God! But the air out here smelled better than it did in those closed-in places back east.

William F. Cody drank deep of it this summer morning, chest swelling as he drew it into his lungs as one would drink a life-giving elixir. With that prairie air seeping through his body, Bill remembered his youth as teamster, those months as mail rider for the pony express, and finally his years as army scout. All of that adventure and fun, all that unfettered life crammed into his youth before he had gone and followed the siren song of fame and fortune, pursuing a career on the stage.

Now, as he led General Philip Sheridan and his headquarters staff toward Camp Robinson near the Sioux’s Red Cloud Agency in the heart of these Central Plains, his keen eyes squinting into the distance from beneath the expanse of his broad-brimmed sombrero, searching the horizon for smoke, or dust, or the dippling of human forms atop fleet ponies breaking the skyline at the crest of some hilltop, Bill Cody couldn’t for the life of him remember what had been so damned seductive about that career on the boards before the footlights that it had lured him away from the West Away from these wide and open places.

Lord, but he loved this life! A good horse beneath him, his favorite rifle—the one he had long ago affectionately named Lucretia Borgia—stuffed securely in the saddle pocket across the pommel, and the sweet smell of the tall grass trammeled beneath his buckskin’s hooves. This had to be the essence of living! Something few men would ever experience, or so Bill had long ago determined.

Leaving behind Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Carr’s Fifth Cavalry at Fort Laramie for a few days before the regiment would once again begin searching these hills and swales like an inland sea of grass, looking for any Indians trying to make it north to join the roaming hostiles, Cody itched to be shed of Phil Sheridan. He wanted to be back with the Fifth as they scoured this land for warriors fleeing the reservations. But not just any warriors. This summer they were hunting the young fighting men who were jumping the reservations to the south: the hotbloods who were stirring things up as they fled the agencies and rode out for the northern camps of those winter roamers, to join Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull.

Maybe Custer would get his chance, Bill thought. Maybe ol’ Yellow Hair will finish off those Sioux hostiles in one fell swoop like everyone back east thought only Custer would. Damn, but Bill wanted Carr’s Fifth to be the outfit that would have a crack at the action before this Indian war was nothing more than a few footnotes in dusty history books schoolboys would be reading in the decades to come.

God, how he hoped Custer and the rest of them up north left some of the fighting for the Fifth Cavalry.

He looked at the sky, wondering about God. If He really did listen to man. To a lone individual, anyway. Bill thought he’d pray, just in case God was listening right then and wasn’t too busy with other matters of more pressing concern. Out here, Cody had found, it was about as easy to pray as breathing. Out here it was damn sure as easy as breathing to know down in his marrow that there was for certain-sure a God. Just to look around him in all directions, why—a man had to realize some great hand had been at work here.

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.

Since that winter when Wild Bill left for the frontier, hints and rumors floated back east. Cody learned that his friend finally ended up in Cheyenne, where he gambled his nights away through the intervening years, at least until he met the widow Mrs. Agnes Thatcher Lake, a circus performer Hickok had met years before while serving as city marshal in Abilene. Then this past March, Bill telegraphed Hickok his heartiest congratulations the moment he read of Wild Bill’s marriage to Mrs. Lake in the eastern papers. He figured Hickok would be following the circus in its travels from now on—sawdust show business! To think of Wild Bill Hickok giving up the saloons and keno tables, forsaking the lamplit fan-spread of cards laid out before each player as the last card is dealt in a high-stakes game of stud!

Surely something would eventually lure Wild Bill away from his intoxicating widow and that traveling circus. Something seductive, something far west of the hundredth meridian.

The following spring Cody was asked to act as guide for a group of rich Englishmen headed west for a Nebraska hunting expedition. Late summer found him guiding Captain Anson Mills, who led five companies of the Third Cavalry and two of infantry on a fruitless search for warrior bands making for trouble in the hill country surrounding Rawlins Station in Wyoming Territory. Besides packers and teamsters, also along were four Pawnee scouts who remembered Cody from the summer campaign of sixty-nine, and a young scout named Charlie White.

An excellent horseman who had served with General J. E. B. Stuart’s Confederate cavalry during the war, White had come in to McPherson to have a leg wound treated by army surgeons that fall. When the physicians refused to treat the civilian because he had no money and no visible means of support, Cody intervened, saying he would pay White’s bill. Some twenty-four or twenty-five years old, the pockmarked Confederate veteran promptly latched on to the famous Cody, eager to prove himself an excellent marksman. In fact, that very fall White began to grow his hair into long curls in fond imitation of Buffalo Bill’s flowing brown mane, as well as coming to dress, walk, and talk in the manner of the great frontier scout.

The gentle, soft-spoken White was proud in every way to be compared to the famous Buffalo Bill and soon earned his very own, if unflattering, nickname: “Buffalo Chips.”

For the next year and a half Bill stayed back east, reorganizing his troupe of players and relaxing at his new home in Rochester. Then come this past spring, just a month after Hickok’s wedding, on a terrible, rainy April night, a telegram caught up to him in Springfield, Massachusetts, where Scouts was playing.

Kit Carson Cody seriously ill. Stop.

Please come home at once. Stop. Your

son needs you. Stop. I need you

desperately. Stop. Please, Bill.

Louisa

Cody choked down the sour taste that remembrance brought him and stared into the bright summer sunlight reflected off the endless brilliance of these grassy plains, blinking away the sting of tears the loss welled up within him. Kitty, his only son, so ill with scarlet fever the night Bill made it home to Rochester, flung open that front door and left it hanging in the wind as he leaped up those stairs two and three at a time to reach the boy’s room. He had held young Kit Carson tightly, so tightly, against his breast as his son took his last breath.

Perhaps it was that, he thought now as he turned around once again and peered back at the short, snaking serpent of a column far behind him among the verdant hills, the grass bending and rising in undulating swells beneath the omnipresent breeze. Perhaps it was his dear Kitty’s death as much as the barrage of letters he received all last spring from Colonel Anson Mills, urging Cody to return to the frontier, to return to service for the army— saying this was surely to be the last great fight every frontiersman knew would one day come to these plains.

It took him six long weeks after they had laid the cold sod over his beloved five-year-old son for Bill finally to wrestle a decision out of himself. On the night of June 3, while playing Wilmington, Delaware, he told his audience that he was through with playacting and off to the Indian wars.

Making his way west that Centennial summer at the same time the entire nation’s eyes were beginning to turn east, focusing on the grand Exposition in Philadelphia, Cody stopped at Sheridan’s Division Headquarters in Chicago, where the lieutenant general inquired as to the scout’s plan as he shuffled through a stack of correspondence that day in early June.

“I’m headed to Cheyenne, from there to make my way on to join Colonel Anson Mill’s Third Cavalry.”

“He’s with Crook’s column, just marched away from Fort Fetterman—bound for the villages of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, I’d daresay. Yes, I daresay Crook will strike the hostiles very, very soon.”

“Damn, I was hoping—”

“Don’t get yourself disappointed just yet, Bill.”

Cody had been, couldn’t help it. “I was wanting to attach myself to Colonel Mills and the Third.”

“Ah, yes—here it is,” Sheridan exclaimed as he yanked out a telegraph flimsy. “General Carr has asked for you: ‘Your old position open to you. Join us here.’”

“The Fifth?”

“Yes.”

“I thought they were in Arizona.”

“Lord, no!” Sheridan said, beaming. “Carr’s got them marching off to fight the Sioux as we speak.”

“C-carr wants me to guide for the Fifth?” Cody’s voice rose.

“Your old outfit, Bill. Since the regiment’s been reassigned to the plains, Carr’s written here twice, inquiring as to your whereabouts.”

“He wants me?”

“Bloody right he does,” Sheridan replied. “I’ll see you have orders written before you leave this office. You can meet your old regiment by taking that same train to Cheyenne City.”

Four days later, Bill had stepped off the Union Pacific onto the platform at Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory, to shake hands with Lieutenant Charles King of the Fifth Cavalry … whereupon Bill had promptly smelled the air.

Knowing in his heart, in every fiber of his being, that he had returned home.