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

advantage. To the north, in Nebraska, the Union Pacific Railroad created a genuine moving town, famously called “Hell on Wheels,” where drink, food, and sex could be had for cash, and where card games, shell games, real estate swindles, and a hundred other ways to cheat men of their money proliferated. End-of-the-line social relations were similar even in more permanent towns on the UPED, where boomers waxed rhapsodic about civilization, but other observers were more critical. “The houses” in Ellsworth, remarked one traveler, “are alternately Beer Houses, Whiskey Shops, Gambling houses, Dance houses and Restaurants,” wherein patrons consumed large quantities of beer, whiskey, and “tarantula juice.” 22
    As Cody later recalled it, when he was testifying in his own divorce trial, the first year away from Louisa he was “railroading and trading and hunting; I went out to make money and I was just looking around for anything that would come along.” 23 He spent the winter like many other single men on the Plains: in a “dugout,” a hole in an embankment with a crude roof over the top, sharing the dark, dingy space with a man named Alfred Northrup. Early in 1867, he helped a former neighbor from Leavenworth haul goods to open a new store. He mixed his odd jobs with stuttering efforts at founding a business. That summer, a series of drunken, bloody melees between soldiers and railroad workers compelled army officers at Fort Hays to seize the supplies of unlicensed booze merchants. In their dragnet, they confiscated the stores of William Cody, which included, among other things, four gallons of whiskey and three gallons of bitters. 24 The well-known mule-whacker and aspiring saloonkeeper was also a peddler of buffalo meat on the streets of Hays; locals soon took to calling him Buffalo Bill. 25
    The name itself long preceded him. On the Plains, when any number of men were named Bill, appending “Buffalo” as an epithet was a way of distinguishing among them. In the 1860s and ’70s there were Buffalo Bills in Texas, Kansas, and Dakota Territory. As early as 1862, an English traveler in Montana would record his meeting with “Buffalo Bill, a personage whom I have hitherto regarded as a myth.” 26 The name may have been applied to Cody in derision, as a taunt. But however he earned the moniker, in the long run it was a boon to his notoriety. The name was so endemic to the frontier that upon being introduced to
the
Buffalo Bill, many believed they were meeting a man of wide reputation, even if the Buffalo Bills they had heard about were different men.
    In his long absences from home in the 1860s, this Buffalo Bill’s career resembled a low-rent version of his father’s. Before Isaac Cody’s troubles with pro-slavery settlers began, he had been kept away from his family by the demands of his own stage line, and by the burdens of managing large farms for absentee investors and of founding successful towns. William Cody’s stints as teamster, whiskey seller, and market hunter were of a lower-class variety.
    So, too, was his next venture, when he joined a man named William Rose in a contract to grade track for the UPED. 27 It was hard, dusty work, driving teams of horses behind the scraper blades which pulled up the prairie sod and churned grit into the air. Although he continued to send Louisa money, there was no way she would join him in this peripatetic life, with no fixed home and surrounded by men of low standing and hard disposition.
    Then he made an audacious move. In the summer of 1867, he joined with Rose in founding a town along the course of the railroad near Fort Hays. The young men’s faith in the advancement of civilization and their own interests, their conviction of the town’s permanence and eventual greatness, was expressed in the name Cody chose for it: Rome. 28
    Cody and Rose would soon learn that, where the game of