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

Leavenworth only in the fall of 1860, and left for Colorado sometime in 1862.
    The first year Devinny taught at Leavenworth, the Pony Express had begun. The route started in Saint Joseph, Missouri, and passed through northeastern Kansas, to the north of Leavenworth. At the moment Mr. Devinny took up the chalk before a roomful of expectant pupils, young men were stationed at points across the Plains, waiting to carry the mail over trail sections that were seventy-five to a hundred miles long. Their rides were so punishing that they often arrived with blood flowing from noses and gums. Couriers slept on their horses; snow buried the trails. The few authentic accounts that survive describe the agony of forty-below winter blasts and horses (not to mention riders) on the verge of death. Pony Express riders did not take days off for school. William Cody could not have been in Devinny’s classroom and riding for the Pony Express at the same time. 71
    If young Will wasn’t on the Pony Express, why did no contemporaries debunk his fabulous story? What of his partner in the trapping expedition to Colorado, Dave Harrington? The feared John Slade? Wild Bill Hickok? Together they illustrate William Cody’s remarkable talent for choosing witnesses. For if they might once have deflated some of the celebrity’s more extravagant lies, by 1879, when the book appeared, it was impossible. They were all dead.
    Cody’s childhood Mormon-and-Indian-fighting, prospecting, Pony Express–riding, Hickok-knowing, bullwhacking saga was the foundation of his mythic western persona. These glittering ornaments of western youth tied William Cody firmly to the expanding West of the pre–Civil War period, making him an “old-timer” rather than a greenhorn interloper, authenticating his stage performance as “Buffalo Bill” in 1879 and ever after.
    But if we know he packed his childhood story with untruths, what do those fabrications tell us about him? About why he told the tales he did? About his rationale for making himself part of the largely forgotten Utah Expedition, and the failed business enterprise of the Pony Express?
    Americans of Cody’s day were generally concerned about the survival of families in their rapidly changing country. As a performer in theatrical melodrama—a genre that fixated on threats to the family—Cody was profoundly aware that heroism in family defense had popular appeal. Given the constant ordeal of defending Isaac from his many enemies, it was even fitting that so many of Cody’s autobiographical fictions, from his Mormon War adventures to the Pony Express saga, reflect an ardent defense of family. From the 1840s until 1900, many Americans perceived polygamous Mormons as a threat to monogamous marriage. Novels and “historical” accounts portrayed them as liars, murderers, and, especially, as kidnappers of virgins to serve as concubines for lecherous church patriarchs. Prior to the Civil War, northern reformers labeled polygamy and slavery as “the twin relics of barbarism” which it was the duty of civilization to banish. In 1857, Mormon militiamen massacred a wagon train of emigrants at Mountain Meadows, in southern Utah. The event was shrouded in secrecy. The U.S. government did not achieve a conviction in the case until 1877, when they tried—and shot—the Mormon elder John D. Lee for masterminding the crime. 72
    Lee’s sensational trial renewed America’s long-standing anti-Mormonism, and in 1877, Buffalo Bill took advantage of the furor by commissioning a new play,
May Cody, or Lost and Won.
In the drama, his sister May Cody was abducted by Mormons and rescued by Buffalo Bill. Two years later, as Cody wrote his life story for publication, he inscribed himself back into the 1857 Mormon War as a way of claiming the play as an authentic reflection of his real life, with the boy Will Cody facing off against the notoriously antimonogamy