BUFFALO BILL CODY,
MARYLAND, AND THE GERMANS
illiam F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody
(1846-1917) is in all likelihood
the best-known American hero to
emerge in the latter third of the nineteenth
century. His legend dominated the Ame-
rican consciousness during the period of
Reconstruction directly following the
American Civil War. For many he typified
the pioneer of the American West at the
time. Yet in what would become a typical
modus operandi, Cody himself went to
great lengths to augment and develop his
reputation as the greatest frontiersman of
the West without actually misrepresenting
the facts. In 1869, he talked extensively to
Ned Buntline, the most prolific and success-
ful writer of dime novels of the time. Cody
then worked with Buntline to create
"Buffalo Bill, The King of the Border Men,"
which appeared serially in hundreds of
newspapers in the country the same year. At
about the same time, New York journalists
began to publicize in extensive newspaper
articles the buffalo hunts organized by
Cody. Two years later, in 1871, a military
publicist wrote a privately-printed and influ-
ential book about this Great Plains frontier
of Kansas and Nebraska. He described
Cody as "a mild, agreeable, well-mannered
man, quiet and retiring in disposition,
though well informed. ...Tall and somewhat
slight in figure, though possessed of great
strength and iron endurance; straight and
erect as an arrow, and with strikingly hand-
some features, ...."¹ Cody projected his
own life as symbolic of the settlement pat-
tern of the Trans-Mississippi valley, using
the ele-ments of his own experiences from
1861 to 1879 as a model. Thus he referred to
the American West as one inhabited by
Plains Indians, such as the Sioux, living in
their teepees, hunting buffalo, and resisting
the domesticating values of Middle Western
and European families who settled the
region.
In creating his own legend, Cody drew
heavily on his own life experience. He had
served the U. S. Army as a scout in the
plains area of Kansas and Nebraska in the
1870s. He was viewed as a natural gentle-
men, always proper with the ladies and act-
ing as their protector. Superficially this had
the appearance of truth. In the early years of
the twentieth century, he had been married
for over thirty years, had several children,
and a beloved homestead, "Scouts Rest,"
near North Platte, Nebraska. In his business
dealings, he relied upon a handshake more
than a written contract, but he was certainly
as ethical as his competitors.
However, Cody did develop one per-
sonal problem which influenced his every-
day life if not his career. He always started
the day with a good shot of rye whisky,
called "tanglefoot" colloquially. As a result
there were many tensions behind the scenes
over the years. A string of "girl friends,"
drunken behavior, and other, similar pecca-
dilloes led finally to a very public divorce in
1905. The trial which ended thirty-eight
years of marriage was held in Wyoming and
thoroughly covered by the newspapers. The
reports there painted a very different picture
of Cody's life and character from the one he
had so carefully crafted for public consump-
tion. Family members were angry at Cody
not only for his mistreatment of his wife, but
also for his public defense of the boorish
behavior. His nephew, Herbert Cody, pre-
W
BUFFALO BILL CODY____________
sented the view of many family members by
stating "were all of us to contribute a chap-
ter each—Cody wouldn't look so big—a
man who would come out of a
saloon—drunk and knock his wife down in
the street—which Cody did—is no angel."²
Although he reconciled with his wife in
1910, the damage to his reputation was
done. By May 1910, Cody gave the first of
the farewell speeches which signaled the
final year of his national tour, starting with
the show in Madison Square Garden which
as usual was the first stop on the American
tour.
At the beginning of his career forty
years earlier, however, Cody's reputation
was intact, and he was able to reinforce the
legend he and Buntline had built for him
during national and international tours with
his own troupe. As an entertainer, Cody
used fairly traditional methods for travelling
companies at the time. He reconstituted his
group annually by organizing a new "com-
bination" of partners, players, and staff.
Cody and his cowboy colleagues presented
their tales of the "Old West" to a truly
national audience extending as far south as
Alabama, Arkansas, and Georgia.³ For thir-
teen years between 1873 and 1886, Cody
toured nationally, acting in western plays in
rented theaters. On six of those tours, Cody
brought his melodramatic productions to
Baltimore, where he starred in plays such as
"Scouts of the Prairie" in front of large and
enthusiastic audiences. In reviewing one of
Cody's shows in a local newspaper, one
commentator wrote that those who did not
attend had "missed one of the most striking
and stirring dramas of the age, performed by
men who have gone through in stern reality
what they stimulate on the stage."
4
Amidst
stilted language, with lots of guns blazing
on the proscenium, these cowboy melodra-
mas played successfully not only in the in-
dustrial regions of the Northeast, but also in
Alabama, Arkansas, North Carolina, South
Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia, six states
which had a generation earlier been part of
the Confederate States of America.
The popularity of Cody's troupe in
both the North and the South is somewhat
surprising given his strong and well-known
sympathy for the Union cause. Cody had
joined the irregular militia in southeastern
Kansas, acting in concert with other
"Jayhawkers" during the first few years of
the Civil War. In 1864 he joined the Seventh
Kansas Volunteer Cavalry. In post-war years
he continued as a civilian scout for the U. S.
Army of the West, maintaining his Union
connections throughout his career. Cody's
contemporaries would have well understood
that it was no oversight that he and his
troupe were ignored by Henry M. Stanley,
top correspondent for Gordon Bennett's
New York Tribune, who was actually in
Nebraska in July, 1869. Stanley had been a
ardent sympathizer for the Southern cause,
and Cody would have nothing to do with
him. Stanley was simply giving as good as
he got. Nonetheless, the early performances
by Cody and his company gained him na-
tional acceptance as an authentic hero of the
Western region which he defined, the fron-
tier scout who "realized to perfection the
bold hunter and gallant sportsman of the
plains."
6
He and his network of Union vet-
erans and cowboy friends created his first
successful entertainment experience. A few
years later, Cody and friends returned to the
Eastern Shore of Maryland with a new cow-
boy play called "May Cody; or Lost and
Won." Supposedly focused on the exploits
of Cody's sister, the play was written by
Major Andrew Burt, who had served in the
Sixth Ohio Voluntary Infantry during the
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Civil War and had subsequently befriended
Cody, Unfortunately, the opening of this
new play was marred by the use of firearms.
In the last act, there was a lot of firing from
guns using blank charges, which was typical
for these quasi-dramatic presentations, "In
one of the exciting scenes near the close of
the drama, Buffalo Bill, while riding on a
pony up a mimic mountain, fired several
shots at supposed Indian pursuers, and by
some grave mischance one barrel was
loaded with ball, and a boy..., Michael Gard-
ner, occupying a front seat in the gallery,
received a bullet in the left shoulder."
5
Luckily the boy survived and later traveled
to Cody's home in North Platte, Nebraska.
True to the conventions of the time, Cody
spared no expense in providing medical
services to the accident victim, who became
a friend of the family.
Cody's career and his reputation ex-
panded as his troupe embellished its basic
presentation. He developed a more interac-
tive performance to be held in the open
spaces of an emerging urban America. Cody
capitalized on his earlier experiences to
develop a new version of his show. The
result was ultimately the world-famous
"Wild West Show," which made "Buffalo
Bill" a household name from 1880 until
1910.
One less well-known aspect of the in-
credible success of the show which became
known as "Wild West" was Cody's keen
understanding of the importance of
German-Americans as part of his audience.
6
While he was a boy in eastern Iowa, his
father managed a farm with upwards of
twenty laborers, all of them German-speak-
ing workers. His older sister in all likeli-
hood learned to speak German. Cody later
married Louisa Frederici, whose father,
John Frederici (1817-1905), had migrated
to St. Louis in 1830 from the Duchy of
Alsace. After his retirement from the St.
Louis Police Department in 1878, John
Frederici lived with his daughter and son-
in-law for the next twenty-seven years. Thus
it is quite probable that Cody learned con-
versational German—not the educated ver-
sion of the university, but the language of
the people, Plattduutsch, or Low German,
which was the terminology usually used to
designate the dialects of much of North
Germany. In America it remained an oral
language, and for Cody, who always strug-
gled with sentence structure and grammar
even in English, spoken German proved
helpful in formulating a new international
standard of entertainment.
Cody's association with the German
language reveals itself in his hiring of two
performers in particular. In 1887-1888
Cody toured the British Isles and created for
himself an international reputation. One of
the "combination" members on that tour
was Emma Lake, a famous horse woman
who rode side-saddle. Recent research has
unearthed the fact that she sometimes billed
herself as Emma Lake Hickok. Her mother
was Agnes Lake, a circus owner who had
been married briefly to Cody's old friend
"Wild Bill" Hickock before his death in
Deadwood, South Dakota. More to the
point, Agnes was born in 1826 in Olden-
burg, Germany, with the family name
Pohlschneider.
7
The last name underwent
several changes but sixty-one-year-old
Agnes spoke Plattduutsche and her Ger-
man-American daughter was hired with that
firm ethnic underpinning.
A second German connection appeared
in 1889, when Cody and his troupe were
playing to large and appreciative crowds in
Paris. He discovered that the famous Sioux
hunter, Black Elk, and five other tribal
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BUFFALO BILL CODY
_____________
members had been employed in an inferior
western show called "Mexican Joe's." They
had missed the steamship in 1887, and
ended up in northern Germany and France!
8
The twenty-six-year old Oglala Sioux was
linguistically gifted and had no trouble in
touring the northern German provinces, as
he had learned spoken German from the
Jesuit priests on the Rosebud Indian Reser-
vation! Since the 1870s, the tribe had
requested Catholic priests for their mission,
and Black Elk was proficient enough to tour
by himself for a year before being discov-
ered by Cody and company.
9
Cody had gained a lot of experience
from years of presenting his plays in a tradi-
tional theater. That experience became fun-
damental to his plans for developing an
entirely new show, this time in an outdoor
venue. In the early 1880s, there were more
than fifty circuses touring the country. This,
of course, was the time when the Wiscon-
sin-born Ringling Brothers started their cir-
cus. The competition for shows like the one
Cody produced was fierce. To be successful,
an entrepreneur had to keep costs down yet
develop a program which was different
enough and entertaining enough to attract an
audience. Cody liked the idea of presenting
his shows in inexpensive outdoor venues,
but it would be difficult to modify the fanci-
ful plays of the prior decade to accommo-
date an all-natural setting. The solution was
an outdoor show which presented a series of
frontier episodes with real cowboys and
scenes showing the increasing degree of
civilization in the American West. The out-
doors was an appropriate backdrop for a
show about the American West, and the
adventurous aspects of pioneer life proved a
suitable substitute for the romantic tales
which had been the staple of the indoor
shows. One recurring scene was that of the
Virginia Reel danced on horseback. Another
perennial set performance was an action
tableau of the type presented in the "Attack
on the Burning Cabin," which became al-
most a signature scene. The classic show of
the 1890s used recurring images which
fixed Cody in the collective imagination of
Europe, and particularly Germany, as the
greatest frontiersman of the age. Cody was
able to transcend his ordinary roots and to
exploit the romantic possibilities of a fast-
vanishing western region while making the
story of America's expansion westward ac-
cessible to a world audience. One can imag-
ine the impact which the show had on
German-speaking audiences in Europe by
recalling four scenes from the production
which came to be known as the "Wild West"
show. Together they summarize the key ele-
ments of Cody's myth of the American West
as envisioned by German artists: ,,Der
Oberst der Kundschafter Buffalo Bill" (The
Scout Buffalo Bill); ,,Buffalo Bill im Galopp
Schiessend" (Buffalo Bill Shooting while
Riding); ,,Angriff von Sioux Indianer auf die
Dead-wood-Post-Kutsche" (Attack on the
Old Deadwood Coach by Indians); and
,,Portraitblatt" (Gen. W. F. Cody/Annie
Oakley).
10
Cody and local investors invested in a
new type of entertainment on 4 July 1882 in
North Platte, Nebraska. It was called "Old
Glory Blowout," and from the numerous
newspaper advertisements and first-hand
impressions, one can deduce that it was
basically a rodeo-type version of cowboy
skills and excitement. Although sharp-
shooting and Indian fights remained a cen-
tral part of the show, they were transformed
into a scenic portrayal of how a "Prairie
Aristocracy" was responsible for the civiliz-
ing of the American frontier.
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For the second season of its existence,
Cody renamed his newly recast show the
"Wild West" and brought together an all-
star cast of authentic western celebrities
who had never appeared publicly before.
11
When he brought his show to the outskirts
of Baltimore for a six-day "stand" (his own
nomenclature for a performance venue), the
large and enthusiastic audiences enjoyed
cowboys, Indians, Mexican vaqueros, buf-
falo, elk, mountain sheep, bucking horses
and the one prop to be used continuously for
the next three decades, the Old Deadwood
Stagecoach. Performances by Cody's troupe
were meant to be both entertaining and edu-
cational To underscore the authenticity of
the scenes, the show featured five authentic
Western heroes: Major Frank North, "Pilot
of the Prairie;" Captain Daniel L.
"Oklahoma" Payne; Con Groner, "Cowboy
Sheriff of the Platte River;" Groner's good
friend, thirty-seven-year-old Dr. Frank Po-
well from Lacrosse, Wisconsin (his Sioux
nickname was "White Beaver," but he had
Seneca tribal ancestry!), who put on sensa-
tional shooting exhibits. Perhaps the great-
est star was William Levi "Buck" Taylor,
the first and original "King of the Cowboys"
(1857-1929). Taylor was tall, 6'5", and it
was said that he could "throw a steer by the
horns or tail and tie him singlehanded, pick
up a hankerchief from the ground while rid-
ing a horse at full speed, and master the
worst of bucking broncos."
12
Thus the
Maryland audiences were treated to a cow-
boy spectacular which remained a principal
part of the show.
In June 1885, Cody returned to the
Eastern Shore with fewer rodeo stars than
he had had previously. Of the original five,
only Buck Taylor and Con Groner
remained, but Cody had persuaded Johnny
Baker, "The Cowboy Kid," to appear along
with two genuine standouts, Sitting Bull and
Annie Oakley. Sitting Bull (1831-1890),
whom Cody insisted on paying at the same
wages as white cowboys in the show, was a
chief and medicine man of the Hunkpapa
Sioux. Annie Oakley (1860-1926), who was
known as "Little Sure Shot," was a skilled
performer. At only five feet tall, she was
able to use either a rifle or a six-shooter for
exhibition purposes.
In 1888, Cody spent most of the sum-
mer at Erastiana, a major summer resort on
Staten Island across from New York and
Brooklyn. After this successful run, Cody
moved south, reaching Baltimore in
September and eventually closing at the
Virginia Agricultural, Mechanical and
Tobacco Exposition in Richmond. As
opposed to the popularity of the earlier
indoor shows in the South, the new outdoor
show was never particularly well received
outside of the Northeast region. The far-
thest south Cody ever ventured with the
"Wild West" was Virginia. The dangers of
going too far afield from the industrialized
cities of the north were made painfully
apparent that year to Pawnee Bill, one of
Cody's competitors. Pawnee Bill was
underfinanced and overly confident when
he merged his western show with Buckskin
Joe and hired Annie Oakley after Cody's
show ended. "The combined shows drew
big crowds at Gloucester Beach, New
Jersey. In the fall they started south, playing
fairs, but unfavorable contracts and bad
weather melted away profits. Buckskin Joe
withdrew, and the show was attached by the
sheriff at Easton, Maryland. Pawnee Bill
could not pay his hotel bill, and his trucks
were seized."
13
The content of the "Wild
West" show never succeeded in any of the
former Confederate states. Cody learned
this and managed to remain profitable.
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BUFFALO BILL CODY
_____________
For half a decade, Cody's "Mid West"
was at its finest, with huge crowds and prof-
its. Cody enjoyed tremendous popularity in
England with the help of Queen Victoria,
her family, and other aristocrats. He gained
the support of German aristocrats and the
personal imprimatur of Kaiser Wilhelm II,
and he was successful at home as well. After
returning to the states, he added a subtitle,
"Congress of Rough Riders," which Teddy
Roosevelt appropriated and used in naming
his own personal regiment during the Spa-
nish-American War of 1898. The phrase
Rough Rider was apparently cowboy talk,
for the bronco buster given the wildest hors-
es was said to be "riding the rough stray."
Moreover, Cody began to apply the Kaiser's
techniques of public pageantry to his pre-
show parade in town, and many of the new
flourishes appeared in the Baltimore "stand"
of 30 September 1895. The huge audiences
thrilled to the revised program of the run-
ning of the Deadwood coach, the Pony
Express chase, and the spectacle of a buffa-
lo hunt. The program also featured a mili-
tary parade of international cavalry units.
After the "6th Cavalry of the United States
Army [came a] company of 1st Guard Uhlan
Regiment of his Majesty, King William II,
German Emperor, popularly known as the
'Potsdammer Reds,' a company of French
Chasseurs; and a Company of 12th Lancers
of British Army"
14
One very interesting German-Ameri-
can development was Cody's shift towards
more spectacular set-pieces in his "Wild
West" show, following the public pageantry
of Wilhelmine Germany, influential in
Berlin and other German cities in the early
twentieth century. Baltimoreans watched
the last performance of the expensively
staged scene called "Custer's Last Fight" on
11-12 May 1898. The scene was, in fact, so
extravagant that it actually appeared only
five times during the run of the show. The
next year Cody returned to the Eastern
Shore with sixteen of Roosevelt's "Rough
Riders" participating in a mock Battle of
San Juan Hill. Two years later San Juan Hill
had become the "Capture of Pekin." From
1907 to 1909 the show reappeared in late
May with spectacles already pretested at
Madison Square Garden. These consisted of
The "Battle of Summit Springs," the "Great
Union Pacific Hold-Up," and "Football on
Horseback."
15
The move towards more elaborate and
spectacle-laden performances actually par-
alleled developments in vaudeville. During
this time, famous performers such as
Blackstone and Houdini invested heavily in
stage illusions: unique acts such as the dis-
appearance of an elephant before 16,000
people in the old Madison Square Garden or
soldiers marching right through a brick wall
mimicked the extravagances of British stage
productions of the time.
16
During this same period of time, Cody
experimented with major logistical im-
provements in moving his show by train. In
1895 he had 131 performances in 190 days;
fifty-two railway cars traveled over 9,000
miles of track.
17
In 1898 he employed 467
people in the show for its wide-spread per-
formances. He improvised and experiment-
ed between 1903 and 1906 when the "Wild
West" toured England, Scotland, France,
Italy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the
German Empire. In Europe he used "50
cars, each 54' long and 8' wide, moved in
three sections. There were 22 flats, 18
orange stock cars, 9 red sleepers, including
one box sleeper, and an advance car."
18
It
was during this time that members of the
show observed special representatives of the
Kaiser watching the logistics; long after-
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wards this was adduced as the source for the
Imperial High Command's ability to use the
railways for their initial successes in the
First World War.
By 1910 there were major changes in
audience appeal, and an erosion of support
for the "Wild West." Cody gave his first of
many farewell speeches at the end of his
Madison Square "stand" in May 1910. It
became a basic appeal to increase ticket
sales during the remaining six years of his
career, with appearances in 1911, 1913 and
1916. In that last year on the road, the show
was billed as the "Pageant of Preparedness,"
as Cody had obviously become a tired, old
trouper of seventy years.
Certain observations follow from this
analysis of Cody's appeal to Marylanders,
German-Americans, and Germans. First, the
interdisciplinary techniques of German-
American Studies imply interaction be-
tween Germans and Americans. In Cody's
case the influence flowed both ways. If
Cody learned from the pageantry of the
Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany, it seems proba-
ble that the Imperial bureaucracy learned
from the logistics of Cody's Wild West.
Second, several generations of cultural his-
torians have missed the structural basis of
Cody's phenomenal success. It was not a
national cultural pattern of showmanship,
but rather one which shrewdly recognized
the importance of the industrial cities of the
Middle West and the East Coast, and the key
ingredient for large and enthusiastic audi-
ences: the German-American population of
these cities, whether Chicago or Baltimore.
— William Roba
Scott Community College
1
Henry Davies, Ten Days on the Plains (New
York: Crocker & Co., 1872), 79.
2
Cody used the reference to whisky in a letter to
Buckskin Sam Hall, 2 September 1879. The
Business of Being Buffalo Bill; Selected Letters
of William F. Cody, 1879-1917, Sarah J.
Blackstone, ed. (New York: Praeger, 1988).
The notes and marginalia by Herbert Cody
Blake appear in a copy of Helen Cody
Wetmore's Last of the Great Scouts; Life Story
of Col. W. F. Cody (Duluth, IA: Privately pub-
lished, 1899) which is owned by an anony-
mous book collector. The trial is recapitulated
by Arthur Sears Henning, "Buffalo Bill's Suit
for Divorce Recalled by Henning," Chicago
Tribune (8 January 1854).
3
Sandra K. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor: A
Chronicle of Cody's Theatrical Career.
(Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 2002).
4
Davies, 83.
5
Baltimore American (10 September 1878).
6
William Roba, German-Iowan Studies:
Selected Essays (New York: Lang, 2004),
Chapter 3 [forthcoming].
7
Linda Fisher, "Immigration in Disguise: Agnes
Mersman Lake," paper presented at the 28th
annual symposium of the Society for German-
American Studies, New Ulm, MN, 23 April
2004.
8
Black Elk Speaks; Being, the Life Story of a
Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux as told to
Johnnes Gneisenau Neihardt. (New York:
Morrow, 1932), 225-228.
9
Anthony Richter, "Father Eugene Buechel and
the Lakota Sioux," paper presented at the 28th
annual Society for German-American Studies
symposium, New Ulm, MN, 23 April 2004.
Notes
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BUFFALO BILL CODY
, NOTES________
10
Carl Henckel, Buffalo Bill und sein wilder
Westen. Zeichnungen nach dem Leben (Mün-
chen: A. Twietmeyer, 1891. This portfolio of
fifteen plates, which also appeared in French,
is located in the Rare Books Room — Research
Libraries of the New York Public Library.
11
Russell, Don., The Lives and Legends of Buf-
falo Bill (Oklahoma: U. of Oklahoma Press,
1960), 305.
12
Russell, 305.
13
Russell, 349.
14
Russell, 76-377. The Uhlan Cavalry Regiment
had been an elite unit during me Franco-
Prussian War, and it was rejuvenated by Kaiser
Wilhelm II; Marlene Dietrich's father was a
major in the unit.
15
See Kevin Starr, Embattled Dreams;
California in War and Peace, 1940-1950
(New York: Oxford UP, 2002), 179.
16
See Kenneth Silverman, Houdini!!! The
Career of Ehrich Weiss (Harper-Collins, New
York, 1996) and J. B. Priestly, Lost Empires
(Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1965).
17
Russell, 379.
18
Russell, 444.
William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody (1846-1917)
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