Buffalo Bill's Mentor

THE GREAT RASCAL (353 pp.) --Jay Monaghan--Little, Brown ($4.50).

Chief Tall Bull crashed to the ground, shot dead as a doornail by Major Frank North of the Pawnee scouts. Little did the poor Indian know that in biting the. dust he was launching a literary fad, and that it would change the lives of half the boys in the civilized world. For hot on the heels of North's bullet rode Ned Buntline, the famed dime novelist, all agog to plump Tall Bull's slayer into one of his thrillers. North, a simple soldier, refused to be blown up into a "paperback hero." "If you want a man to fill that bill," he told Buntline, "he's over there." He meant the "young giant with sleepy eyes and straw in his hair" who was soon to set the nation ablaze as "Buffalo Bill" Cody.

Shortly starred in Ned Buntline's Wild West show, Bill Cody became a promoter's dream. Unlike his roughhewn pal, "Wild Bill" Hickock, Cody never "spat the liquid on the stage" in whisky-drinking acts, never barked, "Any damn fool would know that was cold tea." He usually muffed, but never scorned such lines as: "Fear not, fair maid; by heavens, you are safe at last with Buffalo Bill, who is ever ready to risk, life and die if need be in the defense of weak and helpless womanhood." Then he stood blushing on the stage, "handsome as Apollo," while hundreds of fascinated men and boys rocked the house with wild applause.

Today, thousands of admirers still pay homage at the tomb of Buffalo Bill on Lookout Mountain near Denver. But not one man in a hundred thousand knows the name of the remarkable, gnomelike promoter without whom Buffalo Bill would never have existed. The Great Rascal is Ned Buntline's first full-dress biography, and the galloping glitter of his career more than makes up for the limping prose in which Author Monaghan describes it.

Rapid Writer. Ned Buntline wrote hundreds of western and adventure tales. He could turn out a 610-page thriller in 62 hours--complete with such immortal lines as: "[Isabella] arose from the couch whereon she had been carelessly thrown . . ." He could ride and shoot like a Cody or a Hickock. When he was not dead drunk, he could spout a temperance speech that would awaken the remorse of the most sodden toper. When he was not in jail for fraud, slander, bigamy, libel or inciting to riot, he wrung women's hearts with his impassioned campaigns for purity. This was a sore point among his mistresses and his wives; he married at least six, in various cities, and sometimes had as many as three wives at once.

His real name was Edward Zane Carroll Judson. His father, Levi Judson, fifth generation of an old Connecticut family, wrote solemn essays on the nature of man, and tried his best to ground his son in the elements of decent behavior. Ned was about twelve years old when he ran away to sea; at 15 he was a midshipman in the Navy. At 21, he was dashing off sea stories and editing Ned Buntline's Magazine (a "buntline" is the rope at the bottom of a square sail). Two years later, a recent widower, he was caught in a Nashville cemetery with the wife of a local auctioneer. When the husband opened fire, Buntline shot him through the head. An angry mob attacked Ned at the court hearing, but he escaped to the top floor of a nearby hotel. Clawing for the roof, he plummeted "forty-seven feet three inches (measured)," to the ground. Though the scars and broken bones that resulted crippled him for life, they also became a good investment. Some of his "wounds," he later told Bill Cody, had been suffered when he swam the Blackwater River under fire in the Civil War, others dated from his storming of the Halls of Montezuma and from the Seminole War.

Hasty Heart. For years Buntline was a bigamist, kept one wife in New York City, the other in Westchester, N.Y. What with dashing from one wife to the other, delivering lectures and churning out dime novels, he had little time for his favorite refuge--an Indian tent on the outskirts of Stamford, N.Y., where he wrote a tract titled "Woman as Angel and Fiend." He was also, he claimed, founder of the Order of the Sons of Temperance, vice president of the Patriotic and Benevolent Order of the Sons of America, and a pillar of the Order of Good Templars. When he relaxed his temperance so far as to be unable to churn out the next installment of a popular serial, "ghosts" carried on until his head was clear again. On one such occasion, he awoke to find that a ghost had maliciously killed off his hero in the middle of the serial. Buntline blandly carried on--using the dead hero in spirit form.

Dime novels eventually brought Buntline an income of $20.000 a year, but much of it was squandered on sprees or paid out as hush money to one of his earlier wives. By 1880, he had settled down (with wife No. 6) on his Stamford estate, where he was known as Colonel E.Z.C. Judson, former "Chief of Scouts in the Rebellion of 1861-5," and a respectable literary gentleman. "I might have paved for myself a far different career in letters," the colonel liked to say, 'but my early lot was cast among rough men on the border . . ." He died in 1886, and Stamford gave him one of the finest funerals in local history.

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