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Chapter One

THE GREAT

IMITATORS

THE PROGRESS OF CIVILIZATION

THRILLING INCIDENTS IN ACTUAL BORDER LIFE

IN THE WILD WEST

THE GREAT DRAMA ENACTED BY FRONTIER HEROES

* * *

In the summer of 1888, Adam D Forepaugh's `original and world famed Wild West show' lived up to the grandiose promise of its posters.

For a fifty-cent admission fee, audiences were treated to the spectacle of the legendary `Doc' Carver, `world's champion marksman', shattering a never-ending stream of flying glass balls with his Colt .45 revolvers, Forepaugh's son, Adam Jr, riding and driving a herd of thirty-one horses simultaneously, Round Up Bob, `champion trick rider and roper of Texas', picking dimes off the floor in his teeth while remaining in the saddle of a galloping mustang, and -- last but not least -- a troupe of two dozen Sioux warriors re-enacting the blood-curdling events at the Battle of the Little Big Horn a dozen years earlier.

As a depiction of `actual border life', of course, it was about as genuine as the pig's blood that oozed from Lieutenant Colonel Custer's corpse at the climax of his fateful Last Stand. Quite what it had to do with `the progress of civilization' was anyone's guess. If that mattered little to the hordes of eastern townspeople who packed Forepaugh's 10,000-seater arena twice daily that season, it was of even less consequence to the impresario then vying with Phineas T Barnum for the right to call himself the greatest showman in America, if not on earth.

Forepaugh's rise from small-time Philadelphia butcher to big-top impresario owed nothing to artistic veracity and everything to vaudevillian chutzpah. Four years earlier, for instance, on hearing Barnum's claim to have the world's only `sacred white elephant' in his travelling show, Forepaugh had ordered one of his grey circus elephants scraped clean, whitewashed and rechristened Light of Asia. New York's yellow press had had a field day with the White Elephant War that ensued.

The stars of his travelling show were strangers to the truth too. While a New York variety artist called Louise Montague had reinvented herself as a dusky Indian Princess called Lalla Rookh, Doc Carver had obscured his true origins as a far-from-successful frontier dentist with a weave of stories so complex he often mixed them up himself. In a biographical sketch printed in the Forepaugh programme that season, for instance, Carver claimed to have played a crucial role in the bloody war fought against the Sioux and their chief Little Crow in Minnesota back in 1862.

`The defeat, capture and subsequent hanging of "Little Crow" was due largely to his courage, strategy and sleepless zeal,' Carver's publicist claimed with typical modesty in the notes. In the diaries that later formed his autobiography, however, Carver let slip that he had been hundreds of miles away at the time of Little Crow's demise and only heard of the uprising in a city newspaper.

Their brand of brazen sensationalism was far from unique, of course. By 1888, with the prairies and cattle trails enmeshed in barbed wire and the golden age of the cowboy all but over, the last great frontier now lived mostly in the imagination of travelling burlesque players and dime novel writers. Most of them had been no farther West than Chicago. From their rumbustious, romantic and frequently preposterous version of the cowboy era, the most enduring and inaccurate of all American legends would take shape.

Yet as the Forepaugh circus worked its way along the railway routes of the 98th Meridian, at least one of its troupers seemed fit to be called a bona fide `frontier hero'. Samuel Cody Jr had joined the show earlier that year. A former horsewrangler, mustang hunter and cattle-trail boss, he had launched a new career as a `sharpshooter, cowboy and pistol shot'.

The apprentice showman had clearly learned much from watching and listening to the boastful and bellicose Doc Carver. Already a master of Carver's trick of firing at a hail of white, glass balls, fired from a clay-pigeon trap, Cody was applying his inventive, young mind to newer, more spectacular pieces of gunplay. Soon, for instance, Cody would perfect a heart-stopping stunt in which he could shoot an apple off a man's head while blindfolded. In his appearance and attitude, however, he had chosen to fashion himself after a frontiersman more famous than even Carver.

It had been with the dead-eyed dentist as his partner that WF `Buffalo Bill' Cody had first whetted the American population's appetite for horse-thief lynchings and stagecoach attacks five years earlier. The `Wild West, Rocky Mountain and Prairie Exhibition' they staged at a fairground in Omaha, Nebraska, had laid a trail which Forepaugh and a fistful of other, lesser entertainers were now extending to the eastern states and beyond. The partnership had degenerated into a series of court cases and public slanging matches in which both claimed to have sole use of the term Wild West. Carver's bitterness only deepened as the man he called `The Great Imitator' acquired the rights to the title, then blossomed into the most famous Wild West cowboy in the world. In May of the previous year, 1887, Bill had even placed a thin smile on the face of Queen Victoria. His show at Earl's Court in London had drawn the mournful monarch into a public arena for the first time in the twenty-five years since her husband Prince Albert's death and made him a worldwide, living legend.

If Cody Jr's choice of role model was astute, it was also largely unavoidable. He was, even to those who had seen and known Bill, a doppelgänger for the older man. To accentuate this he had let his sun-bleached hair grow foppishly on to his shoulders, wore a thick, drooping walrus moustache and decked himself out in frazzled Codyesque buckskin from top to toe.

In the hotel bars and gambling halls of the east, the young sharpshooter did little to disillusion his public as to a genuine family connection. Anyone who asked was informed he was indeed `a relative' of the great scout. Anyone who had the inclination could listen on as the garrulous young gun unfurled stories that proved he was also the tale-spinning equal of his `Uncle Bill'.

The talkative Cody would spin the stories time and again in the years that followed, embroidering each episode, lending new and suitably dramatic denouements according to his audiences as he did so. Whether the tale was being told in Wilmington, North Carolina, or Wolverhampton, Warwickshire, however, the essential elements generally remained the same.

Cody Jr had spent his childhood in the small town of Birdville, near Fort Worth, Texas. He had been born there in March 1861 to Samuel Franklin Cody Sr and Phoebe Cody, descendants of settler families from County Antrim and Holland respectively.

`Birdville, I might tell you, was then a small village of seven or eight wooden houses, a small church, a prison built of rough-hewn logs, the boarders of the latter-mentioned establishment being few and far between on account of Judge Lynch,' he explained a few years later, unable as ever to resist adding a little colourful detail. (Judge Lynch, in fact, did not exist. The term had become a shorthand for instant justice since the activities of Colonel Charles Lynch, who punished those he considered criminals -- or, worse, Tories -- with hanging in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, during the time of the American Revolution in 1780.)

In the heyday of the 1850s, the Cody cotton plantation and vineyards had provided a lifestyle befitting the grandest antebellum aristocrat. A small army of slaves picked, ginned and baled the cotton for the mills at Dallas two dozen miles to the east. The grapes were collected and dried in the arid heat ready to be sold in Fort Worth, nine miles to the west. The onset, shortly after Cody Jr's birth, of what was then called the War of Secession brought the idyll to an undignified end.

According to his son, Samuel Cody Sr was something of a local hero. `He had distinguished himself in the Texan and Mexican war,' he explained proudly. `His fellow citizens always accepted him as a leader and councillor when at war with the Redskins.' He had, naturally, taken on an officer's role in the Confederate Army. Like a million other men of the South, however, Cody Sr had returned from the humiliation of the Civil War with his pride battered and his health impaired. `He was the worst for wear,' his son once said.

To make matters worse, the soldier had arrived home to discover his land overgrown with weeds and his emancipated slaves now demanding wages he could not afford to meet. As the carpetbaggers of the North overran Texas, he and his family left the ranch to be reclaimed by the prairie.

The Codys accepted the lifeline offered to the north of Fort Worth in Wise County where, by now, the untended longhorn cattle that had drifted free from the ranches to roam the prairies during the War had multiplied into immense, half-wild herds. As the golden age of the West began, the grape growers became cowboys, and successful ones at that.

By the time he quit school at ten or so he was working as a nighthawk, tending to the herds after dark on ranches in Wise and Denton Counties. It had been on his return from his duties at a ranch one day in 1873 or so, that he witnessed the event that had shaped his young life.

Cody arrived back to discover the ranch besieged by a Sioux raiding party. The `Redskins' had spent a day and night attacking the two log cabins in which his family and their ranch-hands lived. His account of the atrocity varied considerably over the years. In most Cody was saved by a gunshot wound to his thigh that had left him lying in a ditch on the edge of the ranch. He had managed to crawl his way to a safe spot, from where he had watched the war party raze the farm to the ground. In most accounts, the fateful moments of the raid happened at night.

`Whilst daylight lasted the cowboys were able to keep their foes at a distance, but when it became dark the Indians charged in a body, climbed over the palisade, and made the besieged beat a retreat into the log-house' he recalled in one version. `Here, finding it impossible to force their way, the Redskins got on the log house, stopped up the chimney, piled up large quantities of wood on all four sides of the building and set fire to them.'

In some versions his family all perished. According to others, he later discovered that his parents and beloved sister Mandy had survived. In one or two accounts his family were spared any involvement in the attack whatsoever. Each telling of the story concluded the same way, however: with the wounded Cody dragging himself the nine miles to Fort Worth, being patched up in the town's army hospital and then striking out on his own for a life roaming the ranges and cattle trails of the Western frontiers. His adventures had taken him from the plains of Texas to the mountains of Montana and encompassed spells as a mustang and buffalo hunter, trail-boss cowboy and Klondyke gold prospector. It had been at the end of the legendary Chisholm Trail in San Antonio that his days in the saddle had been brought to an end, he explained. A scout from Forepaugh's show had heard talk of his exploits and offered him a job in the Wild West show. `The rest is history,' he probably added.

The stories were as plausible as they were entertaining, especially given the impeccable cowboy credentials Cody displayed daily under Forepaugh's Big Top. In reality, they were laced with more than a few great imitations of his own ...

Cody's version of his life story remained unchallenged and intact throughout his life. There were, naturally, those who suspected his tales were as inventive as his aeroplanes, pieces of crowd-pleasing playfulness provided to add lustre to his reputation and steer the curious clear of a truth that was probably more mundane. `His early life consists of a prolific mythology,' wrote one sceptic. `I never knew whether Birdville was a joke', puzzled another. In a gentler journalistic age, neither put much effort into adding substance to their suspicions, even though both would have been wise to follow their instincts. The story was fake -- a mixture of myth and reality, hokum and half-truth.

Samuel Cody had in fact been born seven hundred miles or so to the north of the parched flatlands of Texas, amid the verdant landscape of the Great Plains and the city of Davenport, Iowa. His real name was not Samuel Franklin Cody, but Franklin Samuel Cowdery.

He had been born there on 6 March 1867, the fourth of five children born to Samuel Franklin Cowdery Sr and his wife Phoebe.

Many would have been happy to have claimed the heritage he had rejected. His American bloodline extended back eight generations and 250 years to the Pilgrim Fathers themselves.

The founder of the line, William Cowdrey, had completed the journey from Weymouth in the West of England to the windswept outpost of Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1630, the same year the first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, led his four ships and 500 Puritans out of an intolerant England in search of `a city of God'.

As well as a new spelling for the family name, the industrious Cowdery quickly established what would prove a lasting tradition for piety and public service. With his first wife, Joanna, he was instrumental in forming the settlement of Reading around 1640. He was, it seems, `a most influential and useful citizen' serving at various times as a Deacon, Clerk of the Writs, Town Clerk, Selectman and Representative to the General Assembly of the Colonies. `They found this spot a wilderness, they left it a fruitful field,' the grateful citizens of Reading wrote of the Cowdery family a generation later.

William Cowdery's heirs had continued to serve their country with humility and honour -- and occasional heroism -- throughout the century and a half that followed. In particular, the young Franklin Cowdery would almost certainly have heard of the exploits of his great-grandfather, Jonathan Cowdery, a sailor and surgeon in the embryonic US Navy at the turn of the nineteenth century. Aboard the frigate Philadelphia , Cowdery saw action against the French in the West Indies and the Barbary forces of North Africa in the Mediterranean. In Tripoli in 1803 he was captured and imprisoned for eighteen months by the Turks. Cowdery's memoirs of his time in a jail were serialised in an American newspaper and formed the basis for a sensational adventure book. Such was his resilience, he went on to become the oldest surgeon and indeed the oldest officer in the US Navy.

Jonathan Cowdery's eldest son Benjamin had refused to follow his father into medicine or the military, and had instead found prominence as a printer, publisher and editor. He set up his first newspaper in Angelica, New York, in 1819. Four years later he launched the first in Cattarangus County and later founded the Ontario Chronicle . He seems to have inherited a blend of his ancestor William's religiousness and his father's staying power. He was a leading figure in the revival that swept Rochester, New York, in the 1840s and, with his wife Amanda, campaigned tirelessly for the antislavery and temperance causes. He was, according to family lore, at least, the oldest printer in the United States at the time of his death, aged seventy-seven, two months after his grandson Franklin was born, in 1867.

Benjamin Franklin Cowdery died believing the greatest gift he had bestowed on his heirs was their good name, `which though not highly valued by money changers is yet rather to be chosen than great riches'.

It would not be a view shared by young Franklin, however. The bleak, inglorious chapter his father added to the Cowdery family history may have been responsible for that.

Franklin Cowdery's father Samuel was the fourth of five children born to Benjamin and his wife Amanda Cowdery. He had been born in November 1831 in Rochester, New York. The turning point in his young life came with his mother's early death, at their then home in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1842. Afterwards Benjamin had been unable or unwilling to look after all his children and placed his youngest son, Jabez Franklin, then aged just seven, in an orphan asylum in the city. The loss of his only brother seems to have hit Samuel Cowdery hard. When Jabez later disappeared, presumed dead, after being `bound' to a Shaker family in the city, his heartbroken older brother adopted the name Franklin on his behalf.

In fact Jabez had embarked on an adventure-filled life to rival that of any of his ancestors. He had run away from the Shaker homestead one morning, hopped aboard a canal barge bound for New York and begun a life as a `buccaneer', first transporting molasses aboard the schooner Mary Perkins of Cape Cod , then on the Carrington . Jabez's adventures took him to the West Indies and Panama, Java and Shanghai. Back in San Francisco he spent time on the stage with the Bingham Theatrical Combination. From there he headed to Nevada and a spell as a gold prospector in the booming mining town of Downieville. By 1859, however, Jabez was practising law in the District Court. By 1861 he was elected District Attorney of the County of Sierra. By the time the Civil War broke out in 1861, the youngest of the Cowderys was ready to accept a post as the United States Internal Revenue Collector. It would be the beginning of a highly successful political career.

While his brother was travelling the world, Samuel had gravitated to the Great Plains and the burgeoning community of Davenport, Iowa, at the mouth of the Rock River in the Upper Mississippi Valley. Two decades after the first settlers had arrived there, Davenport and its neighbours across the Mississippi in Illinois, Moline and Rock Island, formed an important commercial crossroads in a rapidly changing landscape. While the Mississippi connected Davenport to Minneapolis to the north and St Louis to the south, the new railroads linked it with Chicago to the east. To the west lay the Great Plains, an untamed expanse consisting, as one of Cowdery's contemporaries recalled, `of grass as far as the eye could see'.

In May 1857, Samuel married Phoebe Jane Van Horn, a twenty-four-year-old from Ohio. In February 1859 they welcomed their first child, Amanda, into the world. A second daughter, Martha, arrived in September of the following year. His expanding family apart, however, Samuel's life was singularly uneventful. While Jabez blazed a trail in California, and his sisters Martha and Sarah devoted themselves to the church -- both were married to prominent Presbyterians -- their elder brother seems to have drifted from job to job. Unusually, family histories make no mention of how he spent his early working life. In the Davenport city census of 1860 he left the column marked `profession' blank. If he had been searching for a sense of purpose in his life, the outbreak of the War of Secession provided it.

As every American fifth-grade student knows, the darkest period in the history of the United States began at around 4.30 a.m. on 12 April 1861 as Confederate troops under the splendidly named Brigadier General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard opened fire on the Union-controlled Fort Sumter, in the secessionist Southern state of North Carolina.

In the wake of the attack President Abraham Lincoln called on an extra 100,000 men to join the Union army. Samuel Cowdery had been among the very first to respond to the recruitment posters and their call to `vindicate the honor of that Flag so ruthlessly torn by traitor hands from the walls of Sumter'. He had signed up as a private in the 2nd Iowa Volunteer Infantry on 24 May at Davenport.

Samuel's joining up seems to have provided his family with the opportunity and the funds to buy their home, a weather-boarded house, built in the popular, Midwestern style, with a small parcel of land attached, at mo Gaines Street. Phoebe paid the area's main landowners, the Forrest and Dillon families, $200 for the property that August.

If Samuel Cowdery had entertained romantic notions of emulating his grandfather's glories, the squalid realities of the conflict he had entered soon put an end to them. From camp at Davenport, he set off on a riverboat to Benton Barracks four days down the Mississippi at St Louis. Over the following twelve months, Benton would grow into a camp capable of housing 30,000 troops. It would be much later in the war that its health and sanitary standards would catch up, however.

The Barracks quickly became a breeding ground for disease. One Iowan volunteer described how the situation was worsened by the swarms of `bare-legged, dirty-faced boys and girls' selling `baskets filled with what they called "Pi-zan-cakes" `, a confection which `produced diseases as fatal as did the swamps and bayous of the Mississippi'. `It has been said that these little urchins have slain more Iowa soldiers than were killed in all the battles with rebel armies in Missouri,' the soldier added.

Samuel Cowdery was assigned to C company, where he was given the role of wagoner or teamster. The only record of his activities in the first year of the war was of an expedition in which he led a wagon train from Bird Point in October. Instead his campaign was concentrated on Benton, where his prolonged stay produced predictable results.

According to his army records, Cowdery's medical problems began in late November when he began making a series of visits eventually put down to what doctors then called `dysenteria'. Two weeks later he was admitted again, this time with bronchitis.

As a slow, shapeless war entered its second year, the 2nd Iowa Volunteers found themselves dispatched to the western front and the fight for control of the strategic lifeline that was the Mississippi. By now General Grant had begun planning what would be one of the key conflicts of the entire war, his assault on Vicksburg. Stung by the failure of a waterborne attack in June 1862, the Union leader spent six months trying to find a new route through the swamps and bayous into the Confederate stronghold.

Cowdery and the 2nd Iowa Infantry, by now based at Camp Montgomery, were among the pathfinders. In the first week of October, Samuel Cowdery set off at the head of his wagon on what his war record described as a `foraging expedition'. Almost immediately, on 5 October, he and his company were overrun and, as his war record put it, `taken prisoner by a guerrilla band'. He was chained and led into the garrison at Vicksburg.

Contemporary historians have compared conditions in the prison camps of the South to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Prisoners had to cope with overcrowding, polluted water, disease-riddled food, lack of medicine, and rats, not to mention the vicious habits of the guards and their bloodhounds. If tuberculosis, dysentery, scurvy, gangrene or yellow fever did not account for them, injury by beating, shooting, stabbing or hanging generally did.

It was Samuel Cowdery's good fortune that, under the Dix Hill agreement of July that year, both sides had begun operating a system of paroling and exchange. On this occasion Cowdery's time in prison in Vicksburg was short. He was back at Benton by the end of October, where he remained as an `exchanged' soldier until February 1863.

That summer, with the war grown more ferocious and frenzied, he was soon back in action. Once more he was captured, however, near Corinth, Mississippi, on 7 July 1863. This time his luck failed him.

With the exchange agreement by now broken, he was taken to Richmond and the notorious Belle Island, where he arrived two weeks later on 18 July.

Belle Island, an oblong, mile-long tract on a desolate spit of land in the James River between Richmond and Manchester, was among the worst of the Southern prisons. Among Cowdery's fellow inmates there that autumn was GE Sabre, a lieutenant in the Rhode Island Cavalry. `My first visit though the camp was a theme of the greatest horror' he wrote in a diary. `round me were seven thousand men, human beings, massed, literally massed, within a space that was not sufficiently large to accommodate one half that number'

Sabre's diary recorded how prisoners were forced to live off a daffy diet of half-baked corn bread, an ounce or two of meat, and a pint of bean soup made up of `a few wormy, hog beans, the more worms the better, a superabundance of James River water, and occasionally an imperceptible quantity of salt or saltpetre'. So appalling were the rations that prisoners had been known to skin rats and eat them raw. `Cases have been known of Belle Isle prisoners vomiting up their breakfast and this afterward was eaten by others,' wrote another inmate, Frederick Bartleson.

Anyone straying into the `dead line' ditch surrounding the camp was shot instantly. For the bulk of the inmates, sickness denied them even the strength to take this way out. Burial parties would scour the camp each day at noon asking any motionless men, `Are you dead yet?' `Anybody who did not answer went into a pine box for carting to the graveyard,' wrote Sabre. He regularly saw bodies twitching hopelessly as the lids were fitted to their coffins.

In this appalling place, Samuel Cowdery's sickness inevitably returned and worsened. For a while, at least, it seems safe to guess he would have been among the ranks of men to feel the butt of the jailers' rifles at noon each day. Somehow, however, he contrived an escape.

It is unclear quite how Cowdery managed to win himself a place at the Belle Island Hospital. He may well have resorted to bribery. According to Sabre, who himself paid $25 for a two-month spell `invalided', `greenback' was the only means by which the jailers could be induced into letting inmates into the relative safety of the medical block. Whatever the means, he not only talked his way into the sick ward but, by late September, on to the list of prisoners eligible for parole once more. At the end of the month he was taken to City Point, Virginia, at the conflux of the James and Appomattox Rivers, the main point of exchange for prisoners captured by the Confederacy. From there he was taken to hospital at Annapolis, Maryland. He remained there, `debilitated', until 2 December.

His flight from Belle Isle was the most remarkable and heroic action of Samuel Cowdery's war. It was also the last. By the time he returned on parole to Benton Barracks he was, according to one family member, `completely shattered' and `so broken down in health from his terrible prison experiences that he was unfit for further duty'. He served six months more there. He was honourably discharged at Davenport on 13 June 1864.

Back at 1110 Gaines Street, civilian life proved hard. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Samuel and Phoebe produced three more children. In between his first son Charles, born in September 1865, and Lillie Elizabeth, born in 1869, Franklin Samuel was born on 6 March 1867. Yet the father the young Franklin grew to know in the following years was clearly, as he later put it, `the worst for wear'. Like many of his wartime colleagues, Samuel returned to a North overrun with cheap labour, drawn predominantly from the new wave of European immigrant labour then arriving in the cities of the Midwest. He struggled to find odd jobs, mainly, it seems, as a carpenter and general labourer in the town. His humiliation was made complete by the demeaning nature of his illness.

`I have suffered from constipation and indigestion ever since I was a prisoner of war, he said in a declaration for an increase in soldier's pension years later in 1902. `As I grow older these complaints seems to grow worse. I have had to take medicine ever since the war to keep my bowels in order.'

The blend of resilience, resourcefulness and raw courage that had carried Samuel Cowdery out of Belle Island would manifest itself in his youngest son. In the broken figure of Samuel, however, the young Franklin was unable to see much of which to be proud. He would not, of course, be the first to reinvent his father's achievements, to mould them into something grander and more glorious than the truth. The temptation to paint over the past was, perhaps, all the more understandable, given the turn of events around his twelfth year.

Samuel and Phoebe Cowdery were divorced in 1879. Within the more pious sections of the Cowdery clan, the separation was never even acknowledged. (All mention of it was certainly excluded from the family history.) By 1880, Samuel had left Iowa and headed for California, where he was finally reunited with his long-lost brother Jabez, then on his way to winning the post of City and County Attorney of San Francisco. Jabez seems to have taken pity on his poor older brother. His weighty influence eventually secured Samuel a place in the Army Veterans' Home at Yountville in the nearby Napa Valley. He would remain there until he returned to Davenport, just a few months before his death.

(When Samuel died on 27 September 1902, his newspaper obituarist found little to say beyond the fact he had served in the Iowa Infantry and that `all old soldiers are invited to attend' his funeral. His gravestone in Davenport's Oakdale Memorial Gardens made no mention of his children or his wife, even though, by then, she already lay in a brick mausoleum seven plots of land away. His headstone was marked simply, SF Cowdery, `Co C, 2 Ia Inf'.)

Samuel Sr's departure left the family to fend for itself. Charles had already left home and had been working on a nearby farm since the age of fourteen, but the sisters rallied around their mother. Martha, married to a local carpenter, Frederick Meckel, in 1882, and Amanda, a nurse, stayed close to Gaines Street. It seems to have fallen to the youngest child, Lillie Elizabeth, to remain at home to provide her mother's main support.

The family's troubles seem to have had the most profound effect on the young Franklin, however. By his early teens the rootless, restless spirit that would characterise his life was already apparent. No record remains of his schooldays in the city. (Later in life there would be a debate over whether he had learned to even read or write.) Like his brothers and sisters, he seems to have struck out into the working world at an early age. Unlike his siblings, however, he did so far from Davenport and its unhappiness. Instead, by the early 1880s, he had embraced the Cowderys' adventurer tradition, hundreds of miles to the west.

Only the final listing for him in the city register offered a due to the life that had begun in the untamed territories of Montana. The entry did scant justice to the eventful existence he was already leading. It simply read, `Cowdery, Franklin, horsetrainer'.

(Continues...)

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Colonel Cody and the Flying Cathedral : The Adventures of the Cowboy Who Conquered Britain's Skies

0312241801

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