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William F. Cody's Wyoming Empire
The Buffalo Bill Nobody Knows
By Robert E. Bonner UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 University of Oklahoma Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-5477-0
CHAPTER 1
Coming into the Basin
The Big Horn Basin is one of the dominant land forms in the northwest quadrant of Wyoming. Seen from above, it is a vast trough, roughly a hundred miles north to south and seventy east to west, lying between the Absaroka and Owl Creek mountain ranges on the west and the Big Horn Mountains on the east. The Big Horn Mountains are the easternmost rampart of the Rocky Mountains; Yellowstone Park and Jackson Hole border the Basin on the west. The Basin derives its name from the Big Horn River running northward along its eastern edge, carrying all the water of the Basin off to join the Yellowstone River in southern Montana. The Big Horn actually begins as the Wind River, high up in the mountains of the same name, west and south of the Basin. It has cut two spectacular canyons, the Wind River Canyon at the southern end of the Basin (where the Wind loses that name and takes on the other) and the Big Horn Canyon on the north. People entering the Basin, however, rarely came through the canyons, following instead established trails over one or another of the mountain ranges or through the wide, easy pass at the north end. Two mountain rivers, the Shoshone (once the Stinking Water, so named for the sulphur hot springs near its own canyon on the western edge of the Basin) and the Greybull, drain west to east into the Big Horn, falling from above 5,000 feet altitude to below 4,000 in the fifty miles. The Basin is semiarid, with annual precipitation ranging from twelve or fourteen inches on the western slopes to six inches on the floor. Aboriginal human populations were never high in this environment, although the first white explorers reported reasonably good populations of game along the rivers and up the valleys on the sides of the Basin. Crow hunters would come down from the Yellowstone valley to hunt occasionally, and Shoshone and Bannock hunters would come east from their mountain homes to pursue the small buffalo herd, but none lived there routinely.
When and under what circumstances did Buffalo Bill first enter into the Big Horn Basin of Wyoming? It seems such a simple question, but in pursuit of an answer the historian must work through a bewildering variety of statements masquerading as answers. As a scout with the army in the decade after the Civil War, Cody no doubt learned the oral histories of the traders and trappers who had first described the interior West. John Colter, one of the first generation of mountain men, had been the first white American to enter the Basin, and he left a lot of stories behind. Although Cody conducted his scouting mostly on the plains of Kansas and Nebraska until the Big Horn Expedition of 1874, he would have heard of the mountain trails; he probably knew, for instance, of the road Jim Bridger had marked into and through the Basin during the Red Cloud wars, as a safer route to the Montana gold fields than the Bozeman Trail had become. Cody claimed in a newspaper interview in 1910 to have guided Yale paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh into the Basin in 1870, and consequently to have learned of its great agricultural potential. The fact is, however, that he was taken off that assignment just as it began and spent only one day with Marsh. He appears to have learned something about the geology of Wyoming around Marsh's campfire, but it was unlikely to have been specific to the Big Horn Basin, as Marsh probably never set foot in the Basin. They did form a friendship that endured at least a few years and probably included informal geological tutorials, including the idea that Wyoming's wide basins had once been the floor of an inland sea, a foundation idea of Cody's vision of agricultural development. The trail Cody claimed to remember taking into the Basin was Bridger's, which might mean he had planned to travel that way forty years earlier. It seems clear that he knew something and learned some more about the Basin in the early 1870s, but almost certainly he did not enter it at that time.
Helen Cody Wetmore's adoring 1899 biography contains a pair of fables touching upon the question. The first is an account of how Bill heard of the Big Horn Basin, with its perfect weather, its healing waters, its abundance of game and grass, and all other creaturely comforts, from an Arapaho warrior in 1875. The Arapaho called the Basin "Eithity Tugala," the place on earth closest to heaven. She goes on to describe an 1882 trip Cody supposedly took over the Big Horns with an "exploring party." His eyes were inflamed and bandaged, so he rode with them while relying on another guide. At a point where they could see the Basin, Bill took off the bandages and drank in the unmatchable beauty of the place, with its distinctive landmarks, carpets of wildflowers, silver streams, and myriad of animals and birds.
This account is problematic from start to finish. Cody could have learned something from an Arapaho whom he met, although it does not seem likely. The Arapahos ranged generally south of the North Platte River, hundreds of miles to the south, and the Big Horn Basin was traditionally Crow hunting ground. A more telling objection is that the conversation, as related by sister Helen, reads more like a press agent's creation than a historical document, at once superlative in its adjectives and devoid of supportable facts. Her account of Cody's first vision of the Basin is even less believable. In the first place, the aspect of the Big Horn Basin most evident to a traveler on the crest of the Big Horns is its vastness and its aridity. Moreover, by 1882 his exploring days, such as they might have been, were far behind him. When we remember that this book, titled Last of the Great Scouts, was written for sale at Wild West performances, and that in 1899 Bill was actively promoting settlement in the Basin through his Wild West press agency, no reason remains to believe any particular thing in the book. It is part of that great cloud of make-believe that attended Buffalo Bill wherever he went in those days, until he himself was clearly confused about what he had done and where he had been.
How much he might have seen of the Basin in 1874 we cannot say, but it is clear from the record of the Big Horn Expedition led by Captain Anson Mills in the autumn of that year that he crossed enough of the Big Horn Mountains to find the headwaters of the Nowood River, which joins the Big Horn River from the east in the central part of the Basin. Cody was scouting out a route by which the detachment hoped to surprise a group of Indians they were pursuing, but found that this stream was going to take them too far west, so they doubled back and found another way along the top of the mountains. This expedition crossed — and knew they crossed — Bridger's wagon road to Montana, so there can be little doubt that Cody had the Big Horn Basin on his mental map in 1874.
Elwood Mead, Wyoming's first state engineer, who went on to serve as the first commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, appears to have been responsible for another bit of confusion on Cody's entry into the Basin. In their obituary published at Mead's death in 1936, two of his Reclamation associates credited him with intimate knowledge of the Wyoming backcountry, gained in part from a trip through the mountains with Buffalo Bill in 1888. In fact, Cody spent half of 1888 in Europe and did not even return as far west as Nebraska until mid-November. He did not see Wyoming at all that year. Careful collation of Mead's and Cody's known activities in those years leads to the conclusion that the commissioner's recollection in old age, expressed perhaps in conversation with his staff on one trip or another, must have been off by a few years. They were almost certainly not together in the Wyoming mountains until 1895.
Buffalo Bill's life as a frontiersman came to an end after the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition of 1876, in which he stayed well to the east and north of the Big Horn Basin itself. For the next fifteen years he pursued his show business interests in the East and in Europe and his ranching interests in Nebraska. Home life with his wife, Louisa, seems to have deteriorated steadily during that time, and he began to think of alternative arrangements. It was probably inevitable that his eyes should have turned west. As the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad pushed its rails west and north from Nebraska, Cody's attention was pulled that way. His son-in-law, Horton Boal, having failed as the manager of Bill's North Platte ranch, took Cody's daughter, Arta, on the new train to Sheridan, Wyoming, in 1893. Tired of North Platte and always on the lookout for investment opportunities, Bill himself had already looked into Sheridan. Soon after the Burlington arrived there, in 1892, he had formed the W. F. Cody Hotel Co. His company furnished the new hotel the Burlington had constructed near its depot in Sheridan, and hired one of Cody's cronies from Omaha, George Canfield, to manage it. Cody also opened up a transportation company to take advantage of the railroad's presence.
Sheridan in 1893 was a rough frontier town. Legend has it that Cody would sit on the porch of the Sheridan Inn and audition ropers and riders for the upcoming season of the Wild West. But Sheridan had also attracted a group of men who were interested in building up the country and making some money. Prominent among this group was the young son of a U.S. senator from Kentucky, George Washington Thornton Beck. Beck had come west initially in search of gold, but gave it up in deference to his father's wishes. Still determined to live in the West, he eventually made his way to the Big Horn Mountains, where a family friend, Colonel Nelson A. Miles, had suggested he might make a good living as a rancher. That was in 1879, when he was twenty-three years old. He set up with a friend as a sheep rancher, and soon ran the largest flocks in northern Wyoming. After ten years, he sold out in 1889 at a good profit. He had manipulated the public land laws to great profit, taking up as many homestead, timber culture, and desert land claims as he could manage in his own name and those of family and friends. He became a successful farmer as well as a sheep rancher, and even set up northern Wyoming's first flour mill at a town called Beckton. When he gave up ranching he began to invest in towns, first Buffalo and then Sheridan. His family's political tradition was deep and strong — in addition to his father the senator, he counted George Washington himself as a great-grand uncle. He was a member of Wyoming's last territorial legislature in 1889, where he was elected president of the Council. He was an unsuccessful candidate for Congress, running as a Democrat in Republican Wyoming, the first year of statehood. In 1902 he would be the Democratic candidate for governor; although he lost again, friends and associates commonly referred to him as "Governor" for the rest of his days. Beck was, then, a man of substance and wide experience, though only thirty-six years old, when he first made the acquaintance of William F. Cody.
One of the interests that Beck turned to was mining. During the fateful year of 1893 he was looking into setting up a gold mine on Bald Mountain, atop the Big Horns, when he was approached by an old man who had walked up the mountain from the Basin side. This man, Labin Hillsberry, was himself a prospector, but in this case he was looking for financing for a water development. He described the Stinking Water country to Beck and sketched out the possibilities for irrigation from the South Fork of that river above Cedar Mountain, which was clearly visible from Bald Mountain on the Big Horns, although sixty miles away. Beck sent a friend, Jerry Ryan, with a wagon to take Hillsberry back and look at the country for him. When Ryan reported that autumn that it looked good to him, Beck began to prepare for a serious reconnaissance.
Beck and Cody surely met in Sheridan, perhaps even at the Sheridan Inn, as early as 1893. There are stories of Cody taking hunting parties into the Big Horn Mountains and stopping at Beck's ranch on the way back to Sheridan to drink mint juleps made in water buckets. One of Cody's biographers hints at an earlier acquaintance, noting the presence of "the wife of George T. Beck of Wyoming" at Cody's North Platte ranch in the summer of 1888, when Arta was living there. If Beck was married that early, no record of it shows up in Johnson or Sheridan counties; I have seen no evidence of his being married before 1896. There may, however, have been some prior connection between the Cody and Beck families, for the newly arrived Horton Boal was one of the party that Beck took into the Big Horn Basin in the summer of 1894 to look into irrigation development possibilities along the Stinking Water River. Beck's partner, Sheridan banker Horace Alger, had already agreed to pay Hillsberry $2,000 for the water right he had secured in 1893. The entire party consisted of eighteen men, including state engineer Elwood Mead and his assistant. They crossed the Big Horn Mountains south of Buffalo, crossed the Big Horn River and proceeded up the Stinking Water to Sage Creek, near the eventual site of the town of Cody. They spent the summer running survey lines over a territory roughly fifty miles long and twenty-five miles wide, extending from the mountains on the western side of the Basin all the way to the Big Horn River. Beck invested $2,700 in the trip, a considerable sum for a land speculation of this sort. Beck and Alger were obviously thinking big.
When Buffalo Bill returned to Sheridan after his 1894 Wild West season, he learned from his son-in-law of the Big Horn Basin venture. Although 1894 had not been a good year for the show, he was nevertheless looking for investment opportunities. He was at the height of his powers as a man: not yet fifty years old, known from coast to coast, this very successful showman yearned to become a great capitalist as well, to convert the liquid capital of the Wild West show into a solid monument that would carry his name across time. Cody approached Beck and Alger and proposed to join their partnership. As Beck recalled, "Horace was quick to agree that by taking Cody in we would acquire probably the best advertised name in the world. That alone, we reasoned, would be advantageous and we thereupon made Cody president of the company we organized." Cody had shown interest in irrigation as a way to build up the country around North Platte, and he had frequently expressed his hope to bring people to live in the great West he loved. The Big Horn Basin proposition, then, brought his interests and aspirations together at what seemed a very propitious time.
Looking back, it was a fateful moment when Beck and Alger took Cody into their prospective plans for development. Their resources were limited compared to Cody's, and on their own they would surely have been forced to proceed cautiously. Bringing in Cody's name and wealth could have made it more possible for them to accomplish a modest irrigation project, if it had not come packaged with Buffalo Bill's grand conceit of himself and his unthinking, unmanageable drive to turn anything he did into a press agent's dream. Beck, in particular, can have had no idea what a life-changing step he was taking to enter into this relationship. He must have thought that, as the man who would be in charge on the ground, he would be able to maintain some kind of control. He was, after all, the scion of an important political family, with his own set of important friends and a habit of authority born of family privilege. Although in the long run it all worked out for him, in the next decade Beck often must have felt as if he had lassoed a whirlwind.
No doubt Beck and Alger showed Cody the extensive report Elwood Mead had prepared for them upon their return from the Basin. Mead eventually became one of the giant figures of western American history through his management of the Bureau of Reclamation in the 1920s and '30s. His first important professional position was that of territorial engineer for Wyoming, and he remained in that job for the first decade of Wyoming's statehood. Perhaps his most enduring claim to fame is the Wyoming water law, which became the model for many other western states as they faced the development pressures of the early twentieth century. Mead was a visionary thinker, a capable administrator, and a born promoter. On the evidence of the "Report on the South Side Canal" he prepared for Beck and Alger, however, it appears to be a good thing he did not have to make his reputation as a civil engineer.
Mead's report referred to the "South Side" of the Stinking Water River. The north side of the river was already in the development process. Frank Mondell, a hard-charging young man from Newcastle, Wyoming, who would go on to a thirty-year career as Wyoming's congressman, had taken out a water right from the Stinking Water to develop 155,000 acres that lay north of the river. Mondell had close ties with the Burlington Railroad, and was surely aware that they planned to run a line through the Big Horn Basin. His activity added to the sense of urgency with which the Sheridan group pursued their development. It must have looked to them as if the ground floor was about to be occupied if they did not move quickly.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from William F. Cody's Wyoming Empire by Robert E. Bonner. Copyright © 2016 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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