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

most of Cody’s ventures, this one was a failure, owing in part to his tendency to spend money faster than he made it, a characteristic which was better suited to the nomadic, raiding economy of the jayhawker than to the fixed business he was trying to run. 17
    The strains of the new business pervaded a house already filled with tension between his wife and his sisters. Initially, he and Louisa stayed with his sister Eliza, who was now married to George Myers. When they moved out of the Myerses’ house, little sister Helen Cody moved in with them. Although Helen and Louisa got along at first, they eventually quarreled, and the relationship was never close thereafter.
    â€œShe was always wanting a home of her own,” recalled William Cody of his wife, many years later, “and of course I was young . . . and I didn’t know anything about business and I couldn’t get a home in a minute.” 18 Money problems aggravated their personal differences, especially as Louisa was soon expecting a child. In September, William Cody gave up his lease and abandoned the Golden Rule House. Leaving his pregnant wife in a rented house with his sister Helen, he “started alone for Saline, Kansas, which was then at the end of the track of the Kansas Pacific railway.” 19 He was breaking his promise to settle down, and their parting words must have been acrimonious. He would not return to Louisa for the better part of a year. Their first child, a daughter, Arta, was born in December, while he was away. 20
    Thus began the self-exile from his own hearth that characterized most of Cody’s adult life. What began right after the Civil War as a marital estrangement became standard when he was touring with his theater company and, after that, the Wild West show. Ironically, the man who became a hero for saving the frontier family home did so primarily by seeking to escape his own troubled house. For Cody, roving as plainsman or showman was usually preferable to the stationary combat of his fireside.
    OUT IN WEST KANSAS, at “the end of the tracks,” he scrabbled for a livelihood among mostly low-class frontiersmen: down-and-out prospectors, cowhands, buffalo hunters, and teamsters who moved from job to job, with no fixed address. The cash economy of Kansas had been expanding for most of William Cody’s life. After the Civil War, a wave of new Kansas emigrants, combined with a dramatic increase in railroad and other investment, fueled spectacular economic growth. The railroad, especially, brought about a tectonic shift in the prairie’s social, economic, and natural relations. Nowhere was that fact more apparent than where the rails extended farthest into the frontier. At track’s end, thousands of Irish tracklayers, or “gandy dancers,” pounded spikes into ties and did the other work of building the railway toward the western horizon. From the other direction came hundreds of bullwhackers from Mexico, the United States, and points unknown, whips cracking beside prairie schooners creaking with tons of Colorado and New Mexico cattle hide, sheep’s wool, buffalo robes, and mineral ore, all to be sold at the railroad’s western terminus. At the same time, the east-west migration of goods and people swelled with a northerly flow of mostly poor and young cowboys—white, black, Mexican, and mixed-blood Texans—driving huge herds of cattle to these newly minted “cow towns,” from which 50,000 animals were shipped east in 1868 alone. 21 On top of all this, black, white, and immigrant soldiers, merchants, laborers, speculators, entertainers, and tourists, the wealthy and those of middling means, came west on the railroad. Settlers followed not long after.
    The rivers of mostly male workers—flowing ahead of the train, alongside the prairie schooners, and behind the cattle—converged in one vast lake of loneliness and thirst in the arid plain. Entrepreneurs took