On the whole,” wrote the drama critic of the Chicago Times of the show that opened on December 16, 1872, “it is not probable that Chicago will ever look upon the like again. Such a combination of incongruous drama, execrable acting, renowned performers, mixed audience, intolerable stench, scalping, blood and thunder, is not likely to be vouchsafed to a city for a second time,—even Chicago.” The play, The Scouts of the Plains , had as its principals “Buffalo Bill” Cody and “Texas Jack” Omohundro (a former scout with Jeb Stuart’s cavalry), both playing themselves; Mile. Morlacchi, acting the part of Dove Eye (she was described by the Tribune ’s, critic as “a beautiful Indian maiden with an Italian accent and a weakness for scouts”); numerous supers as Indian warriors; and the man known as Ned Buntline, in whose wildly fertile imagination the spectacle had originated, playing the hero, Cale Durg. (He is posing, opposite, in costume for that role.) In city after city in which the troupe performed, critics carped. The New York Herald said that Buntline played the part of Cale Durg “as badly as is possible for any human being to represent it,” and took particular exception to the scene in which Durg, momentarily subdued by redskins, was tied to a tree with a torture fire ignited at his feet, from which position he delivered a long temperance lecture. But with the public, Ned Buntline had scored again.

Born in 1823 as Edward Zane Carroll Judson (on a night, he later wrote, “when thunder loudly booming/Shook the roof above my head—/When red lightning lit the glooming—/Which o’er land and sea was spread”), he ran away to sea when he was eleven, embarking upon a career in which fact and fiction became so thoroughly entangled as to defy separation. By the time he was twenty he had fought in the Seminole War, taken his first wife, and published his first story—under the pseudonym Ned Buntline (a buntline being a rope at the bottom of a square sail). Before long he had, by his own account, travelled to the Far West and killed buffaloes and grizzlies; started a periodical called Ned Buntline’s Own ; and been lynched in Nashville, Tennessee. There, shortly after his wife died, Ned had made no secret of his admiration for young Mrs. Robert Porterfield, and one day her husband came looking for him. Porterfield fired at Buntline, who took aim and shot his pursuer through the head. Ned was in court pleading selfdefense when Porterfield’s brother and some friends poured in and started shooting. After a wild chase, during which Ned was hit in the chest by one bullet, he fell forty-seven feet from a window (the injury left him with a limp for life) and was captured by the sheriff’s men. That night a mob stormed the jail, dragged him from his cell, and strung