Louis S. Warren Read Free Page B

late in life.
    Cody persuaded many that his entertainment was genuine in part by refusing to call it a show at all. Its official name was “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” as if it were a real place. This was a ruse to draw reluctant spectators, of course. But the semblance of reality owed much to the apparent bond between his arena full of charging horses and his real life, which began— he said—in a fast-paced drama of Pony Express adventure. We begin our story, then, with the child Will Cody and his legendary connection to the pony line.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE
    Pony Express
    The Former Pony Post rider will show how the Letters and Telegrams of
the Republic were distributed across the immense Continent previous to the
railways and the telegraph. 1
    LIKE EVERY OTHER frontier reenactment in the Wild West show, the Pony Express was a chapter in the life of its hero and his country. Before audiences of thousands, the horseman—not Cody himself, but another “Former Pony Post” rider—raced “down to the grand stand at a gallop,” wrote one ecstatic viewer, “checked his pony within a length, and almost before it was at standstill the rider was on the ground, the bag on another pony, and the man galloping off at full speed, in less time than it would take an ordinary man to dismount.” 2 It was a showstopper.
    Of course Buffalo Bill rode the Pony Express. Everyone who perused the sixty or so printed pages of Wild West show programs could read it for themselves. “William F. Cody was born in Scott County, Iowa. He removed at an early age to Kansas, and was employed as a herder, wagonmaster, and pony express rider.” 3
    The more curious might buy a copy of Buffalo Bill’s autobiography, also for sale at the Wild West show. There they could read the story in detail. Left fatherless at an early age, the young Kansas boy ventured out to make money for his bereaved mother, five sisters, and infant brother. Between his eleventh birthday, in 1857, and his fifteenth, in 1861, he freighted wagons over the plains with rough teamsters, befriended Wild Bill Hickok, was captured by enemy Mormons in the government’s abortive war against polygamy, survived a starvation winter at Fort Bridger, skirmished with some Indians and befriended others, prospected for gold in Colorado, and trapped beaver on the Plains. 4
    But of all the boyhood adventures William Cody claimed, those on the Pony Express were the most astonishing, and the most famous. On his way back to Kansas after failing to find gold at Pikes Peak, the thirteen-year-old boy ambled into the Pony Express station at Julesberg, Colorado, where he talked his way into his first Pony Express job. His mother feared it would kill him. “She was right about this, as fifteen miles an hour on horseback would, in a short time, shake any man ‘all to pieces’; and there were but very few, if any, riders who could stand it for a great length of time.” But young Will Cody took up his forty-five-mile route, and “stuck to it for two months,” before he returned to Kansas to be with his mother, who had fallen ill. 5
    After she recovered, the boy and a friend tried their hand at trapping beaver up the remote reaches of the Republican River, in western Kansas. They lost an ox, and so were unable to move their wagon when Cody slipped on the ice and broke his leg. Left behind while his friend went for a replacement ox team, the young boy spent a month alone, and avoided being killed by a Sioux war party only because its leader, Chief Rain-in-the-Face, remembered meeting the young Will Cody at Fort Laramie the previous year. 6
    The following summer, in 1860, when he was fourteen, Cody returned to Pony Express riding again, and his adventures made his previous escapades seem pale in comparison. Warned that “it will soon shake the life out of you,” he took up the most dangerous length of the Pony Express route,