The Yipee-ki-yay Adventures of the Ten Cent Millionaire

Ned Buntline

There are few myths in American history as enduring as the saga of the Wild West. The cowboy-and-Indian skirmishes and high-noon dramas of characters like Wild Bill, Calamity Jane, and Jesse James have flowed from books, movies and television to penetrate our imaginations. One of the key creators of this phantasmagoria was Ned Buntline.

Buntline — his real name was Edward Zane Carroll Judson — was not from the West. He was born in 1821 in upstate New York near the Catskill town of Stamford. He ran off to sea at the age of thirteen. Having saved some drowning victims, he won a commission as a U.S. Navy midshipman.

During his spare time on ship, Judson wrote and sold his first adventure story. He used the pen name Buntline — the word referred to a rope for hoisting a sail. After eight years, he resigned from the Navy and edited a magazine in Kentucky. In 1845 he captured two murderers there and picked up a $600 reward.

A year later, although married to a Cuban woman, he developed an interest in the teenage wife of Nashville resident Robert Porterfield. Rumors of the dalliance enraged Porterfield, who fire a pistol at his rival and missed. Ned shot back and hit Porterfield in the forehead, killing him.

Buntline was pursued by an angry mob that included his victim’s brother. They shot at him twenty-three times, nicked him with three bullets, and chased him into a hotel. He leaped from a third-floor porch and fell to the pavement – “not a bone cracked!” The crowd got hold of him and hung him by the neck from an awning post. The rope broke. The sheriff hauled him to jail where, newspapers reported, he died of his injuries.

No, wait. He actually revived, escaped, and went to New York. He got involved in the nativist political movement that became the Know Nothing party. Suspecting a Catholic plot, these nervous xenophobes railed against immigrants and had a particular dislike of the British.

All this time, Ned was churning out stories and novels in a literary style that one critic called a “compendium of clichés.” He scored a big hit with Mysteries and Miseries of New York, an 1848 novel that depicted the worst bordellos and lowlife joints of the big city. It sold a hundred thousand copies and made him famous. A year later he helped foment the Astor Place riot in that city to protest the appearance of a British actor. Twenty-one people, mostly bystanders, were killed. (Read my account of the event HERE).

Buntline was fined $250 and spent a year in jail for that debacle. When he was released, his fans treated him to a torchlight parade while blaring “Hail to the Chief.”

In 1862, at the age of forty-one, he enlisted in the New York State militia. He saw little action during the Civil War and was discharged as a private two years later. He gave himself a promotion to colonel and wrote accounts of his lurid and adventure-filled fights with the Confederates.

He toured the West after the war delivering temperance lectures. They flopped, in part because he couldn’t leave the booze alone. In 1869, he met the twenty-three-year-old William Cody, a soldier, Army scout and buffalo hunter. Buntline, who had already written more than a hundred novels, turned some of Cody’s stories into Buffalo Bill, the King of Border Men. It was the seed of one of the great American legends.

Ned Buntline, Buffalo Bill Cody, Giuseppina Morlaccchi, and “Texas Jack” Omohundro

Three years later, Cody and his pal “Texas Jack” Omohundro joined Buntline in Chicago, where he cast them in his play Scouts of the Prairie. Always prolific, Ned wrote the drama in four hours. He hired unemployed actors and the Italian dancer Giuseppina Morlaccchi to depict Indians and acted in a role himself.

Like his novels, the play was short on literary merit. “A horrible mass of rubbish,” was the verdict of The New York Times. A Chicago paper said the drama was about “everything in general and nothing in particular.” Patrons were surprised when Buntline broke into a temperance diatribe in the middle of the action.

But audiences loved it, and it took New York by storm. Ned wrote a couple more Buffalo Bill novels, but Cody himself soon went out on his own. His Wild West Show — half circus, half pageant — made him world famous during the 1870s. Other dime novelists took up the story — one wrote 165 Buffalo Bill novels. Cody became one of the nation’s earliest show-business celebrities.

Ned Buntline just kept on writing. He claimed to have completed more than four hundred novels in his life. “I once wrote a book of 610 pages in 62 hours,” he boasted. In 1847, he had published seven seafaring novellas in two weeks, including The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main, an iconic pirate adventure. Mark Twain, twelve years old at the time, later depicted Tom Sawyer playing the role of the Black Avenger.

During his crowded life, Buntline married six times — or maybe it was seven, he remarried his third wife while still hitched to his fifth. He probably made more money than any other nineteenth-century American author — at one point he was netting $20,000 a year (half a million in today’s currency).

Although he moved restlessly all his life, Buntline eventually settled down near where he was born in Stamford. Because of his achievements writing dime novels, he was called the “Ten Cent Millionaire.” Every Fourth of July, he sponsored a colossal fireworks display for his neighbors.

Ned suffered considerably from the various incidents of mayhem he had endured. When in the mood, he would bare his chest to show off his scars. He would relate how he had gotten them while dueling pirates or chalking up wartime heroics.

In 1886, newspapers reported that noted author Ned Buntline had died. This time, it was true.

Ned Buntline

Please comment and share. Thanks to the always imaginative Grace Gunning for suggesting this topic.