Free Louis S. Warren by Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody, the Wild West Show

made their dark and dangerous journeys. Did they fear that they would die? Perhaps they did not want to remember. Perhaps, like William Cody, they wanted to forget the terror, and to remember something else. When he thought of himself on a horse, he wanted to be like his cousin: a genuine western man who mastered this most powerful beast with the natural skill that came from being a westerner. The loss of fathers wreaked havoc on family after family in eastern Kansas in the 1850s, despite the best efforts of their loved ones to protect them. Thus the Wild West show, for all its colorful posters and glamorous Pony Express mythology, has in its origin this genuine scene of heroism: a darkling Kansas meadow and a winding road, the hoofbeats of a galloping horse, a child clinging to its back with a sob of fear in his throat, and terrible loss on his horizon.
    CAREFUL READERS will notice something else about Cody’s very tall boyhood tales. His autobiography is remarkably truthful until the death of his father, whereupon he launches into his Mormon War adventure. In rapid succession come all the tales of prospecting, Indian fighting, and the Pony Express. After the death of his father, Cody turns our eyes west, distracting us from the dark, briefer tale of another journey he soon took, to the east and the south. By the late 1870s, when Cody sat down to write his autobiography, slavery had been consigned to history. It was no longer a national issue, the way the future of Indians and the West still was. Cody was a preternaturally talented reader of cultural longings, and so he downplayed his participation in the Civil War and its bloody Kansas prelude as southern, part of the past, in favor of advancing himself as a product of the West, the region of the nation’s future. If his imaginary boyhood West was so golden, it was in part because it hid from public view, and perhaps from his own mind, the sense of desperation, loss, and the longing for revenge which consumed him upon the death of his father.

CHAPTER TWO
    The Attack on the Settler’s Cabin
    THE SETTLER RETURNED from his hunt. His wife stepped out the door to greet him. A shout in the near distance. Turning, the settler confronted an Indian racing toward the house, dazzling and fierce in his feathers and war paint. Raising his rifle, the hunter fired and saw the man topple into the dust. An outburst of cries and screams erupted from nearby, and suddenly, the lonesome cabin became the center of a swirling mass of mounted Indian warriors, guns blazing. The settler and his wife retreated through the door, their children helping to load and fire guns through the windows. But the Indians were too many. They came ever closer to the cabin. The war cries were terrifying, the roar of guns and smoke filled the air. They were even closer now. The destruction of the tiny frontier home was only a moment away.
    But suddenly—another yell, and the Indians now turned to face the massed guns of a long-haired Buffalo Bill Cody and an entourage of whooping, shooting cowboys! A fierce fight ensued. Indians and cowboys dropped from saddles, their bodies thudding into the dust. But finally, the last of the Indians rode out of sight. As the settler family emerged from the cabin to thank the scout and his cowboy militia, another sound rolled over the home, a roar, as the audience applauded, stamped their feet, and stood.
    FOR MOST OF the Wild West show’s long life, the climactic finale of the drama was the “Attack on the Settler’s Cabin.” Figuratively, that lightning-quick courier of the Pony Express and all the other horsemen who charged around the arena, from the drivers of the Deadwood Stage to the families on the wagon train, were bound for the cabin that appeared in the show’s final act. They fought Indians and yelled and raced in circles, on their way to this mock family home.
    The image of home salvation reinforced the most persistent claim of Buffalo