Johnny D. Boggs, East of the Border

Imagine the Three Stooges on tour in a play about themselves, and you’ll get a hint of this antic novel about Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, and Texas Jack Omohundro. It’s the 1873-74 theatrical season, and while the country’s economy dissolves into another panic, Cody’s troupe of actors turn away eager crowds everywhere east of the Mississippi.

They present two plays, Scouts of the Plains and Buffalo Bill! King of the Border Men. Best described as lunatic melodramas, they feature the killing of large numbers of Indians and dances performed by the Italian entertainer, Guiseppina Morlacchi.

Buffalo Bill Cody

Plot. Boggs’ novel follows Cody’s acting company as their tour has been documented in memoirs and newspapers of the time. Where there is a thread of plot, it concerns Buffalo Bill’s mostly unsuccessful attempts to manage the behavioral excesses of Wild Bill, who lives up to his name. Each undyingly loyal to the other as lifetime “pards,” they are rarely an easy match of temperaments.

Cody is the enterprising showman, missing the freedom of his youth as a scout, but married with kids. Hickok, the older of the two men, is sliding into an alcoholic haze, darkly given to brawling, whores, and other forms of mischief. Cody keeps him in the show long after everyone else has begged him to fire the man.

Meanwhile, Hickok would welcome release from the promise he’s made to stick with the tour for a year. The clownish fakery of the playacting gets riotous applause but galls the man who survived the perils of life on the border. The displays of Indian killing are cheap farce and demeaning. Making this point during a backstage dispute, he pulls off his costume to show the scars of a gash from an actual Indian’s lance.

Wild Bill Hickok, c1874

A subplot concerns the ongoing marital discord between Cody and his wife Louisa. He is true to her as the mother of his children—in his way. She distrusts him, often on the verge of volcanic fury, showing up during the tour to accuse him of consorting with one of his actresses. Hickok, playing a joke on his old friend, has tipped her off.

Cody is already overtaxed by the constant demands of managing his fractious company while busy meeting and greeting the public. Keeping Louisa happy nearly undoes him. In a desperate move, he gets her to come onstage during a performance. Instead of being pleased by the warm reception of the audience, she is deeply embarrassed and determines to go back to Nebraska, taking the kids.

But this crisis, too, passes. While real-life Cody and his wife seem never to have been reconciled, Boggs gives their part of the story a happy ending that is surely a stretch of his own imagination.

Loren D. Estleman, This Old Bill (1984)

ebook edition

Estleman is a wonder. This novel based on the life of Buffalo Bill Cody, is an entertaining portrayal of a larger-than-life man who didn’t know the meaning of excess. Not a biography, the book is a series of scenes, often no more than snapshots. They start in 1854 with his boyhood, when Cody witnessed the murder of his abolitionist father in Kansas, and ends with his own death in Denver in 1917.

The novel teems with figures from frontier history: Wild Bill Hickok, Sitting Bull, George Armstrong Custer, Gen. Nelson Miles, and Texas Jack Omohundro. Queen Victoria, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Grand Duke Alexis of Russia make appearances. We also get to know the man’s long-suffering wife Louisa and their children, as well as his several business partners, who both used and abused his trust.

Estleman notes in an afterword that accuracy in a book about Cody is no easy task. With the help of Ned Buntline, the press, and Cody’s own fevered imagination, any record of his life was sure to be highly colored—when not wildly exaggerated. Print the legend was the general rule.

William "Buffalo Bill" Cody

While Estleman claims to have hewed more or less closely to known facts, he admits to taking a few modest liberties of his own. One of them is to strike a consistently comic point of view. Always wry, droll, and ironic, this is a story as Mark Twain would have told it.

Narrative style. Portraying the frontier West as a world that scorned temperance and moderation, Estleman marshals language to achieve a similar effect. His sentences are crowded with sharply precise verbs and adjectives. Words almost tumble over each other.

Big Isaac Cody, whiskered like a border raider, with the build of a canal-boat puller and the eyes of a boy on his first visit to a Leavenworth whorehouse, rested a horned hand on his eight-year-old son’s shoulder and watched Kansas bleed.

That’s the first sentence of chapter one, and its careening storytelling style, overflowing with metaphor, sets the tone for the whole novel.

Abrupt scene-to-scene shifts catapult the reader forward in skips and jumps. Often a scene is well underway as it begins. We don’t know where we are or what’s going on until paragraphs later, and then only by paying attention to the dialogue.

And the dialogue itself is typically facetious and understated. Leading a rescue party to find lost cavalry troops in the dead of winter, Cody comes upon a starving and near-frozen Hickok trying to warm his hands at a buffalo chip fire. There follows this exchange:

“What you doing, Wild Bill?”

“Well,” drawled the other,  “when they got hot enough I was fixing to eat my fingers. But yours are fatter.” 

In the rough and tumble narrative flow, extraneous details compete with description of the central action of a scene—as when a cavalry officer orders his troops to attack an Indian camp and the bugler “disremembers” how to sound the charge.

Historical characters make entrances under their birth names, and their identity isn’t discovered until pages later. A man named Jim turns out to be Hickok, and a sharpshooter, Mrs. Phoebe Butler, is eventually revealed as Annie Oakley.