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

proposition, and his domestic life was not helped by the sudden collapse of his village. In a strange foreshadowing of the staged destruction of the Wild West show, the failure of his town looked like a natural disaster. But it was industrial might, not hostile nature, that destroyed it.
    Twenty years later, the Wild West show functioned as a kind of traveling community, and its success was a product of the many railroads which allowed its props, its dozens of animals, and its hundreds of people to move from town to town. Just as railroads brought Cody’s show to city lots, they carried audiences from the surrounding countryside, usually at special rates negotiated by Cody and his agents. Later, just before the twentieth century began, Cody would turn again to the creation of a more conventional town, this time in arid Wyoming. There, one of the first steps he took was to secure railroad support for his settlement. William Cody learned the need for alliances with railroads, and he did it during the late 1860s, as a consequence of his first attempt to create a frontier community. Here, the entrepreneurial William Cody learned a hard lesson in the power of corporations and the new railroads. It stayed with him all his life.
    ANY ASPIRATIONS to becoming a mythic hero were not in evidence upon Cody’s return from the Civil War. Back in Leavenworth, he returned to his series of odd jobs and ephemeral business ventures. For a few months he drove a stage for a transport company in western Nebraska, between Kearney and Plum Creek. It was “a cold, dreary road,” and in February 1866, bouncing over its muddy ruts in the frigid air, he decided to “abandon staging forever, and marry and settle down.” He returned to St. Louis, where he and Louisa Frederici were married on March 6, 1866. Immediately after the wedding at her parents’ home, they took the steamboat north and returned to Leavenworth. 12
    Louisa Maude Frederici grew up in the French-speaking quarter of St. Louis. Her father was an Austro-Italian, French-speaking immigrant from Alsace. Her mother may have been an American woman. Louisa Cody claimed she was, and that her maiden name was Smith. But William Cody described her as a German who spoke the language fluently. We know little about Louisa’s early association with William Cody, except that they met during the Civil War, and that they had a jocular courtship. Superficially, they seemed well suited to one another. To Cody, she was a dazzling, beautiful woman at home in the largest city he had ever seen. We can only guess at his attractions for her. He was very handsome. He exaggerated his prospects throughout his life, and there is no reason to believe he did otherwise then. 13

    William Cody at eighteen. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical
Center.

    Louisa Frederici Cody, at about the time of her
marriage to William Cody. Courtesy Buffalo Bill
Historical Center.
    In any case, Louisa was the child of merchants, and she expected a middle-class life when she married William Cody. Almost immediately, she began to have doubts about her choice of a husband and his financial capabilities, both of which would trouble her for the rest of her life, even after he began to make large profits in show business. 14 Moving back to Leavenworth, Cody took along with him a desire to make a new family around him, and to restore to them the life of relative wealth the Codys had lost since the death of Isaac. In this, Louisa was supportive, but she demanded certain guarantees. She wanted no roving plainsman for a husband. He must settle into a paying business. 15
    Hoping to profit from the widening flow of migrants through the region, William Cody rented his mother’s old house from its new owners and opened it as a hotel called the Golden Rule House. Four miles west of Leavenworth and near several arteries of western emigration, it was an ideal location for a business that provided emigrant services. 16 Like