Editors’ Note: This article was written by James Holloway, Special to The Post. Holloway is a writer in the process of moving to Vicksburg, where at least five of his ancestors served in the city’s defense under General Pemberton.

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, a three-hour extravaganza of Sioux warriors, cowboy sheriffs, desperate raids, heroic rescues and herds of buffalo came to Vicksburg for the first time in 1884. With the legendary buckskin-clad frontiersman serving as main attraction and master of ceremonies, audiences were thrilled by back-to-back performances on the first Friday and Saturday. Those were the last performances of a grueling eight-month tour that began on the Mississippi River and crossed the Midwest, New England and the Mid-Atlantic before turning south.

Cody, then 38, may well have been satisfied. Wild West played to record audiences and rave reviews – including one from none other than Mark Twain, the first great chronicler of Life on the Mississippi. Twain, after witnessing a July performance in Connecticut, wrote a letter to Cody that appeared in newspapers across the nation. The show, Twain enthused, “brought vividly back the breezy, wild life of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, and stirred me like a war-song.” The famed satirist praised the show’s realism “down to the smallest details. .  . cowboys, vaqueros, Indians, stagecoach, costumes and all; it is totally free from sham and insincerity.”

It was, on the surface, the best of times for William Frederick Cody. Born in Iowa, he grew up amid the violence of “Bleeding Kansas,” rode for the Pony Express at the age of 15 and served the Union Army as a scout during the Civil War. He signed on as a scout again, this time as a civilian, during the U.S. wars against the Plains Indians. He is said to have carried news of General George A. Custer’s July 1875 Little Bighorn disaster to Generals Crook and Sheridan. Stories of his skills as a scout, guide and warrior grew into legends. Cody guided Russia’s Grand Duke Alexei on a bison hunt in 1872; wealthy Northeastern bankers also sought him out for such services.

The frontiersman’s path to the stage came by way of Ned Buntline, pen-name for author and publisher Edward Jordan. Buntline, booted from the Union Army for drunkenness and a lifelong dipsomaniac, nevertheless toured the country speaking for the temperance movement. He crossed paths with Cody on one such tour and wrote a novel titled Buffalo Bill, King of the Bordermen. It was adapted into a play in 1872. Buntline wrote another play, this one called Scouts of the Prairie, and convinced Cody to take a starring role. It turned into a smash hit. Cody founded his own company, the Buffalo Bill Combination, in 1874. It toured for some ten years. Wild Bill Hickok was a cast member briefly but suffered from severe stage fright; he hid behind scenery and once shot at a spotlight that shone on him. The show’s highlight was Buffalo Bill re-enacting his scalping of Yellow Knife, a Cheyenne warrior, in 1876. He claimed it, historian Evan Connell notes, the “first scalp for Custer.”

Cody founded Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in 1883 in partnership partnered with Nate Salsbury, his theatrical manager, and Evelyn Booth, a wealthy big-game hunger. Outdoor entertainments were a rage in the 1880s. Some fifty circuses were on the road in the U.S. by the middle of the decade, including P.T. Barnum and Ringling Brothers. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West promised something far, far different from clowns, elephants and trapeze artists: the story of the American conquest of the Plains, the New Nation attaining its destiny from sea to shining sea. Buffalo Bill designed gripping vignettes: an Indian raid on a stagecoach, passengers saved by doughty cowboys. Legendary marksmen like Texas Jack Omunhandro and Captain Bogardus shot holes through silver dollars. There was a Pony Express vignette; a buffalo chase; cowboys riding wild steers in a precursor to the rodeo. The grand finale was described as an  “Attack on Settler’s Cabin by Indians and Rescue by Buffalo Bill with his Scouts, Cowboys and Mexicans.” The cast comprised two hundred “Scouts, Cowboys, Indians [and] Mexicans and Buffalo, Elks, Steers and 100 Ponies.

The inaugural show was April 27 in St. Louis. In May, some 41,000 gathered in Chicago’s Driving Park. In June, the show reached New York City, where it played for a week. Audiences and critics were united in their praise. All agreed that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was a rare opportunity to experience the Great Plains that even then was vanishing beneath railroads, telegraphs and Conestoga wagons.

But the show was hemoragghing money. Yost cites the expense of transporting an army of performers, props and herds of wild and domestic beasts from city to city. Don Russell, another Cody biographer, said the one-show-a-day model wasn’t bringing in the money fast enough to cover these expenses. Buffalo Bill and partners came up with a new plan. The World’s Industrial and Cotton Exposition was scheduled to open in New Orleans in late December. The Wild West would play iver towns down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and reach New Orleans in time for the opening of the Exposition. The first show was scheduled for December 23.

Buffalo Bill tasked Bob Haslam, a friend from Pony Express days, with the logistics. Haslam hired a steamer called the M.P. Thompson to carry the show down the river. Biographer Yost does not endorse Haslam’s choice, calling the vessel a “decrepit tug.”

On November 2, the Wild West ended a string of dates in Cincinnati and steered west down the Ohio. It played Lawrenceburg on the Ohio side, then Louisville, Owensboro, Uniontown and Paducah on the Kentucky shore. Cairo, Illinois on the Mississippi River on November 21-23. After a break for Thanksgiving, the show played Helena, Arkansas on December 1 and 2 and continued down the Father of Waters.

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West played its first ever dates in Mississippi on December 3-4 in Greenville. The Greenville Times-Democrat praised the shooting skills of Buffalo Bill as “well worth the price of admission.” The attacks on the settlers’ cabin and stagecoach were “quite exciting.” Indeed, “every feature of the show as full of interest.” Advertisements were placed in Vicksburg newspapers. They featured, oddly enough, an endorsement from General William T. Sherman, who praised the show as follows: “it is gradually realistic and historically reminiscent.”

The Thompson docked at the Vicksburg wharfs on Friday, December 5, with the first show was scheduled for 2pm in Parisot Field, where a grandstand with capacity for 2,000 was erected. Tickets were fifty cents for adults, half of that for children. The entertainment would begin with a “Grand Street Parade” – performers, their mounts and the bison through the streets of Vicksburg. Doors would open at 2pm and the show would go on, rain or shine. Governor Robert Lowry planned to attend the December 5 show and stand in the presence of the “sphinx of the prairie,” “the most celebrated of all Scouts and Indian fighters known in American history”: Buffalo Bill Cody.

The company performed again on Saturday, December 6. Some 2500-3000 attended ea h performance.  The Vicksburg Herald, in a review published Sunday, praised the “unsurpassed skill in marksmanship and equestrianship” demonstrated by the Wild West marksman. Buffalo Bill’s shooting skills were particularly impressive. He “rode his horse full speed past an Indian who threw up two glass balls” and shattered each with a single shot from a Winchester rifle before they hit the ground. A correspondent for a paper in Lincoln, Nebraska reported that the show featured “something unusual in any time or clime: a brace of bucking cows that could cut more antics and jump bench legged harder and faster than any broncho (sic) that ever pranced over prairie or flung a cowboy.”  The correspondent found the horsemanship “marvelous” overall, but considered the Indians  “unimpressive.”

The Wild West loaded back into the Thompson on Sunday, December 7. Buffalo Bill was already on his way to New Orleans to scout the site Haslam chose near the Cotton Exhibition. The Vicksburg Post reported clear weather and weather and declining water levels in the Mississippi. But that evening, disaster struck.

Initial reports were misleading. “The first report, which come by passengers on the Valley road from the south, was that the barge E.C. Carroll had sunk,” the Vicksburg Herald reported on December 10. However, the paper said, that was incorrect: the Thompson sank, not a barge. The Natchez Daily Democrat offered a more detailed account the following day. The Thompson collided with the Capt. Miller, a passenger steamboat,

at about 9pm in the evening of December 7, some 1.5 miles above Rodney Landing.

Captain Randell, at the wheel of the Miller, said his boat was underway near a sandbar on the Louisiana side when the Thompson appeared. The two vessels traded horn-blasts, but the Thompson did not adjust course. The Miller hugged the bank, but to no avail.

The vessels collided. The Miller was struck forward of amidships, but the Thompson had the worst of it. Water gushed through a gaping hole in the bow. It sank on the sandbar.

Captain Randell offered to take the passengers from the Thompson, but its captain declined. The correspondent lauded the crew of the Miller, singling out Mrs Snow, the wife of the ship’s clerk, for her “cool, deliberate courage” which put to shame “many of the sterner sex.” “The praises bestowed upon Mrs Snow will be appreciated by the many friends of the brave little lady in this city,” the paper said. Similarly heroic: Frank Snow the barman, who with “cool energy” extinguished a fire, and Jas. Haley the engineer. He showed “the greatest presence of mind, and did his duty in the most faithful manner.” Captain Randall himself was the very model of a steamship captain.

The collision cost the Miller two steampipes. Captain Randell proceeded to Natchez for repairs, the cost of which he estimated at $2000 (TK). As for the Thompson? “We have not heard from anyone on the W.P. Thompson, as that boat had not been able to proceed on her trip down the river,” the Natchez paper said. It had not been able to proceed because it had sank.

“We lost all our personal effects,” Buffalo Bill later recounted in his autobiography. “Including wagons, camp equipage, arms, ammunition, donkeys, buffaloes and one elk.” The company managed to save its horses and various props – including the stagecoach used in that vignette. Total losses were about $20,000, or TK in current dollars.

Buffalo Bill had headaches of his own in New Orleans, which was itself enduring a a wet and sloppy December. He visited the grounds of the Exposition to be greeted by the sight of a man padding across it in a rowboat. He managed to secure a racetrack which though muddy was not underwater.  Then came word of the Rodney disaster.

And, as a reminder: Wild West was scheduled to open in New Orleans on December 23.

Buffalo Bill fired off the following telegram to his partner Salsbury:

“Outfit at bottom of the river, what do you advise?”

Salsbury’s reply: “Go to New Orleans, reorganize and open on your date.”

And Buffalo Bill did just that. Within eight days he had managed to round up sufficient bison, elk and equipment. Wild West opened in New Orleans as scheduled.

Buffalo Bill still had an ocean of worry. The rain continued in New Orleans for forty-four days. The muddy racetrack became a sea of mud. But Wild West never missed a show. A ticket seller noted that only nine tickets had been sold for one show. He recommended cancellation. Buffalo Bill wouldn’t have it: “If nine people come out here and see us in all this rain, we’ll show.”

Buffalo Bill ended the tour some $60,000 in debt (TK in current). But 1885 looked promising. Two new stars were slated to join: Sitting Bull, the nemesis of George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry, and a young lady who called herself Annie Oakley, said to be handy with a rifle.

And Buffalo Bill – arguably the greatest showman in American history – brought his vision of the Old West to audiences in the U.S. and Europe well into the 20th century. He returned to Vicksburg in 1900 and 1908. Audiences were still captivated by his vision of the Plains, and he never lost another boat.

Read more from James Holloway here.