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

religious sect. The story in his autobiography was packed full of authentic details, and placed Indian attacks, cattle herds, and wagon trains in places that correspond with the historical record, so that biographers and historians have long concluded that Cody must have been on the Utah Expedition as a child. 73
    But if his story was so credible, it was because it illustrates William Cody’s remarkable talent for grafting details of other people’s tales onto his own. Cody was a gifted storyteller, and as such he knew that one of the most effective ways of making a fiction credible is to slather it in seemingly nonessential, truthful details. Repeated genuine details in a story pile up in the reader’s—or the listener’s—imagination, collectively whispering, “We are the real.” The technique is so widely used that the scholar Roland Barthes has given it a name: the “reality effect.” 74
    Cody learned the reality effect from other storytellers, and we shall see more in the chapters ahead about how he learned to construct his elaborate fictions. But for now, we may observe that as a messenger boy and drover for the West’s biggest transport firm and as a teenage teamster himself, fireside retellings of adventure on the western trails were a regular feature of his upbringing. His account of the Mormon War and the winter at Fort Bridger is remarkably similar to the one recounted by John Y. Nelson, an old trail guide, buffalo hunter, and teamster who also claimed to have been on the Utah Expedition and to have spent the same winter at Fort Bridger that Cody did. Nelson befriended Cody in the 1860s and toured with his dramatic troupe as translator for the two Sioux Indians who joined the theatrical show on its tours of the East and Midwest, beginning in 1877—the same year that Buffalo Bill’s anti-Mormon drama,
May Cody, or Lost and Won,
debuted. 75
    If the Mormon drama of Cody’s autobiography reflected popular anxieties about the sanctity of marriage, the Pony Express was an even more useful symbol. In American popular reckoning, the Pony Express assumed heroic stature for various reasons. The replacement of people by machines had been a familiar characteristic of American progress at least since the industrial looms of Lowell, Massachusetts, began to replace the weaver by the hearth in the 1810s, and it became increasingly evident throughout rural America as McCormick’s reapers began replacing family labor in the 1840s. 76
    Mechanization was both celebrated and condemned, but whatever one’s feelings on the advent of technology, it was increasingly inevitable as the nineteenth century wore on, even in frontier mail delivery. When the Pony Express began in 1860, westbound mail traveled by train to Saint Joseph, Missouri, where the tracks ended. There the letters passed to a waiting rider.
    But at a rate of $5 per half-ounce, only the most urgent messages went by Pony Express. Regular correspondence went by ship or by creaking coach and wagon on a longer, more southerly route. Faster, more economical delivery would come with the transcontinental railroad, a development long anticipated, and long delayed by congressional fighting over proposed northern and southern routes.
    With the departure of the South from Congress, workers would soon begin laying track west again. But long before they completed that job, another machine emerged to carry the most important correspondence between California and the eastern states: the telegraph. A line of poles connected by wire sprouted westward from Saint Joseph beginning the summer of 1861. The riders of the Pony Express were in a sense advance couriers for the train, but even more for the telegraph, the technology that replaced them with the completion of the transcontinental telegraph line in 1861, an achievement that finally destroyed whatever segment of the market remained for the messengers of Russell, Majors, and