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
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.
Chapter 3
Late June 1876
