THE FLAMBOYANT MR. CODY IN ARIZONA

Buffalo THE ARIZONA LIFE AND TIMES Bill Cody

Born on an Iowa farm in 1846, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody became an American giant. He began his career at age 11 as a cattle herder for a wagon train, and he went on to become a Pony Express rider, buffalo hunter, and in 1872, he was awarded the Medal of Honor for his service as a scout in the Indian wars. His Wild West Show traveled the world.

Some contend his reputation sprang from sensation-seeking dime novelists, and the flamboyant Cody gave the writers plenty of material.

One celebrated incident occurred July 17, 1876, weeks after Custer's Little Big Horn debacle. As a scout for the 5th Cavalry, Cody came face to face with the Cheyenne warrior Yellow Hair on Hat Creek in northwestern Nebraska. The two rode toward each other firing until both horses went down. Cody then shot his opponent from about 20 feet, and with other Cheyenne and soldiers looking on, he took Yellow Hair's scalp, raised the grisly trophy above his head, and shouted, “The first scalp for Custer!” Few realize, however, that the man whose fame was made on the Plains spent his final winters in Arizona. By 1909 Cody's Wild West Show had been touring the world for more than 25 years, playing before kings, potentates, and an estimated 5 million people. The great showman had tired of the strain, and friends convinced him he could turn a fortune mining gold in the Catalina Mountains near Oracle, 35 miles north of Tucson.

The venture, known as Campo Bonito, failed, costing Cody close to half a million dollars and destroying his dream of a comfortable retirement. “He trusted that the mines would provide an easy life for him at the end,” says Paul Fees, seniorcurator at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming. “But all they gave him was more debt, and he had plenty of that already. The Oracle mines were an albatross in his final years.” But Cody's time in the desert did produce a fascinating footnote to history: The old scout, if he desired, could well have become Arizona's first United States senator.

In the spring of 1911, Arizona's last year as a Territory, newspapers bannered Cody's name for senator after statehood in 1912. “With a Senator on the floor able to snuff out a candle at forty paces,” intoned the Washington Post in March of 1911, “decorum could be preserved . . . without the services of a presiding officer.” Cody didn't particularly want the job, but he reveled in the attention. He announced to the New York Journal that he absolutely favored women's suffrage: “I'd like to know of any boy t'other side of an idiot who didn't go to his mother with all his troubles and who didn't take her way as settling the matter.” On another occasion, he declared, “Arizona doesn't care how I stand on public questions as long as I am able to shoot straight.” On the subject of conservation, Cody cracked, “Here, just a second, I'll show you.” He produced a whiskey bottle. “Here's something I've been conserving for years. What'll you have?” With his good nature and extraordinary name recognition, few doubt Cody could've won the legislative election, but money trouble, much of it caused by Campo Bonito, forced him to drop the idea. Cody's experiences in Arizona began in November of 1892, when he led a group of Englishmen on a hunting expedition

OF A DARNED GOOD SHOWMAN

to the Kaibab Plateau. He came at the request of promoter John Young, son of Mormon leader Brigham Young, who was trying to turn the Kaibab into a hunter's playground for rich Europeans. The two met in 1889 at London's Windsor Castle, where Cody was giving a show for Queen Victoria.

A reporter for the Coconino Sun met the hunting party at the Flagstaff depot and wrote that Cody was "a little more aged, and perhaps a trifle more gray" than the Buffalo Bill of yore. But he "retains that striking individuality and air of distingue that make him a man among men."

Young escorted the hunters by wagon to the Kaibab and the Grand Canyon's North Rim. John Burke, Cody's good friend and one of the party, sent a telegram to the Omaha Bee-News about the awesome sight: "I promised to send you a description. Impossible! The most versatile romantic cannot exaggerate its surprising character. It is the coming mecca to those interested in nature's works. Our party is in ecstasies. The Kaibab proved too remote for Young's purposes, but Cody couldn't exit Arizona without engaging in a bit of drama. The incident took place as the old scout and several of his party rode through Navajo country on the way to southern Utah. At the San Francisco Peaks north of Flagstaff, a horse ridden by Maj. St. John Milmey, a member of Britain's Grenadier Guards, slipped on some ice and began sliding toward the edge of a high cliff.

Cody, still retaining his legendary skills, threw his lasso and roped the horse just in time, probably saving Milmey's life. His quick action astonished onlookers.

Buffalo Bill's show toured Arizona for the first time in October, 1908, playing Phoenix, Tucson, Bisbee, and Douglas over four days. When his massive troupe, consisting of 48 railroad cars and 600 people, pulled into the Tucson depot, they were met by swarms of citizens hoping to get a look at the famous scout.

In its review of the show, The Arizona Daily Star noted that parts of Bill's program proved uninteresting to Arizonans already intimate with the ways of the frontier. But the sight of cowboys and Indians, in full garb, playing football on horseback caught the crowd's fancy, as did Cody himself.

"Buffalo Bill, mounted on his snow-white charger, demonstrated the manner in which he was wont to slay the redman in the pioneer days of the great West," the paper reported. "[He] trotted seven buffaloes into the ring and killed them, imaginatively, as he had done in the times of war."

Cody's show in Yuma two years later was a huge hit. The October 23, 1910, performance drew, according to newspapers, "the largest crowd ever gathered" in that dustblown town. Mexicans trekked up from below the border, Indians came from neighboring reservations, and miners walked or rode burros down from the mountains. The show was billed as Cody's farewell salute.

"His retirement from the show arena is not dictated by impaired powers," reported Yuma's Arizona Sentinel. "His poise in the saddle is as firm and lithe as ever, his eye as keen and his aim with a rifle as unerring." When his work was done, Cody was guest of honor at a sumptuous dinner featuring barbecued bull heads.

But accounts of Cody's physical prowess were, by then, part of the hype he was expert at generating. He was 64 when he came to Yuma, and not the man of vigor he'd been on the Plains. Yet illusion and spectacle had become a way of life.

The fanfare accompanying his 1909 arrival in southern Arizona was typical. The Tucson Citizen later described him striding "optimistically and jovially" through the streets of Tucson before being driven to Oracle in a Packard touring car. When he stepped from the car at the Mountain View Hotel, owned by his old scout William "Curly" Neal, Cody called out," Hello there, Curly, how are you?" He then proceeded to inspect Neal's scalp, which still bore a crease from an Indian's bullet.

But some accounts from Cody's Oracle days aren't so dashing. George Stone Wilson, a pioneer who befriended him, watched in amazement one day as the famous horseman fell off his pony. "I saw his horse go on one side of a bush and Buffalo Bill on the other," Wilson wrote in Arizona Cattlelog magazine in 1964. "It was a clean spill. I went over to him and asked if he was hurt. He said not a bit, but if you ever tell anyone about this, I will scalp you."

Buffalo Bill Cody

Another Oracle pioneer, Elizabeth Lambert Wood, revealed to The Arizona Republic on April 8, 1956, that Cody's flowing white hair, the essence of his romantic appearance, was in fact a wig.

Cody spent much of his time in Oracle holding court on the porch of the Mountain View, with his wife, Louise, knitting nearby. She was his polar opposite, quiet, unassuming, and utterly unimpressed with Arizona, or her husband's dreams of gold, which she thought foolhardy.

Sometimes, when the porch talk dulled, Cody would toss a wood block into the air and blast it to pieces with a shot from his pistol, or pitch $10 gold pieces with his show cronies, many of whom came to Arizona to winter with him. At Christmas he played Santa Claus for the children of his workers and others.

"He was darned good at it, too," said Wood. "Christmas was a great feast those three years at Campo Bonito. There were presents for everyone on the payroll and for youngsters from miles around. The Colonel, attired in the bright red suit, surely was a dramatic sight. His long white beard was as white as his wig."

Generosity was a Cody trademark. He doled out silver dollars to acquaintances in need and even sent $5,000 to victims of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. But he disdained possessions. Wood wrote that Cody owned an exquisite silver ornamented saddle, given to him by Queen Victoria, but he left it on the dirt floor of an open shed at his Oracle camp.

"When you die, people will say, 'There goes a man who made a million dollars and kept it," Cody said. "When I go, people can say, 'There goes a man who made a million dollars and spread it among his friends.'"

Carelessness with money, and Cody's naivete, led to disaster at Campo Bonito. By 1912 he was desperately, and unsuccessfully, trying to sell his mines, and on top of that, his Wild West Show went bankrupt in 1913. Cody was forced back on the road the following year with a circus that showed movies of Indian battles. But that failed, too.

In late 1916, Cody departed Oracle for Denver, where he died of kidney failure on January 10, 1917. Even then, his popularity was so great that some feared his body would be snatched. Boy Scout troops spent three days guarding the corpse as it lay in state at the capitol building. His state funeral may still be the largest in Colorado history. Located on the summit of Lookout Mountain, near Golden, Colorado, Cody's grave looks out across the mountains and plains he loved so much.

Henry Lewis "Johnny" Baker, Cody's foster son, and others completed construction of a ranch at the Campo Bonito site in 1927. The High Jinks, as it was called, housed many artifacts from Cody's life, including his Medal of Honor, until 1945, when the last of the mementos were removed to a gravesite museum in Colorado. The beautifully restored ranch house and still-thriving High Jinks cattle spread were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1996. "I feel a real sense of history living at this place," says writer E. Dean Prichard, the current owner of High Jinks. "Buffalo Bill's presence here is part of Arizona's her-itage, so when I bought the ranch 22 years ago, I felt it was important to restore it to its original splendor.

"After I die, I'd like the public to enjoy it, too, maybe as a Buffalo Bill retreat or a museum."

The old showman would like that.