The Legend Maker: Ned Buntline, 140 Years Gone
- Matthew Kerns
- 20 hours ago
- 15 min read
Edward Zane Carroll Judson died of heart failure at 4:20 in the afternoon on July 16, 1886 — one hundred and forty years ago today — at Eagle's Nest, his twenty-room mansion in the Catskills above Stamford, New York. The funeral two days later was the largest the village had ever seen. The New York Times counted more than eight hundred mourners. Special trains ran on the Ulster and Delaware to bring them in. Nearly two hundred Grand Army of the Republic men marched in the procession, and behind the casket walked one of Judson's Hambletonian horses, saddle empty, boots reversed in the stirrups. The man in the coffin was better known to the mourners, and to a few million American readers, as Ned Buntline.
The eulogies were barely finished before the letters started arriving at the Delaware County Surrogate's Court. The first came the day after he died, from a Westchester attorney representing a Mrs. Kate Judson, who claimed to be his widow and the mother of four of his children. Another followed on behalf of a woman he'd married in 1847. Within two weeks a third claimant arrived in Stamford in person, by borrowed carriage, to press her case against the widow actually living at Eagle's Nest. The Times put it on the front page: "Ned Buntline's Estate: Two Widows in the Field for the Property." The paper undercounted. Buntline had married at least nine women, and had not always troubled himself to unmarry one before wedding the next.
We'll come back to the widows. First I want to go back thirteen and a half years, to a hotel room in Chicago, because the thing Ned Buntline is remembered for, to the extent he's remembered at all, happened there in the span of about four hours.
Four Hours in Chicago
In December of 1872, Buntline convinced two working plainsmen to meet him in Chicago and become actors. William F. Cody was a twenty-six-year-old Army scout Buntline had met at Fort McPherson in the summer of 1869 and had been writing into serialized heroics ever since, starting with Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men. John B. Omohundro, "Texas Jack," was Cody's friend and fellow scout at McPherson, a Virginia cavalryman turned Texas cowboy turned government scout. Neither man had ever stood on a stage.
Buntline had promised Chicago theater manager Jim Nixon a spectacle: real scouts, real Indians, a real border drama. Cody and Omohundro arrived without the Indians Buntline might not have ever even suggested they bring, and when Nixon asked to see the script, Buntline admitted there wasn't one. It was Thursday. The opening was scheduled for Monday. Buntline hired local actors to paint up as the missing warriors, found a famous Italian prima ballerina willing to lower herself to perform with non-actors, herded his scouts to a hotel, called for pen and paper, and wrote The Scouts of the Prairie in, by his own boast, four hours. They rehearsed it twice.
Cody left us an account of the study session that followed, the two most famous frontiersmen in America hunched over their parts like schoolboys. "How long will it take to commit your part to memory, Bill?" Jack asked. "About six months, as near as I can calculate," Cody answered. "How long will it take you?" Jack replied, "It will take me about that length of time to learn the first line." When Buntline coached them to stop at the cue, Cody protested that he'd never seen a cue outside a billiard room.
None of that mattered.
On December 16, 1872, at Nixon's Amphitheater, the curtain rose on a full house, Cody went blank with stage fright, Buntline, wearing a wig and playing a temperance-sermonizing mountain-man trapper named Cale Durg, fed him prompts disguised as dialogue, Buffalo Bill told them about a hunt he and Jack had done earlier that summer instead, Texas Jack yelled out that they were under attack by Indians an act or two too early, and the audience roared anyway.
The Chicago Times pronounced the evening a combination of "incongruous drama, execrable acting, renowned performers, mixed audience, intolerable stench, scalping, blood and thunder" the likes of which the city would never see again, and the paper was wrong within the week, because Nixon added performances and sold out every one. The critics savaged the play in every city it touched — a New York reviewer doubted any other man alive could write such execrable stuff — and every city it touched filled the house. The public had not come for a play. They had come to see two authentic heroes of the plains standing in the gaslight, and no review could touch that.
The show made Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack immediate national sensations, and it is not too much to say that a cornerstone of American entertainment — the Western, on stage and everything it would eventually become — starts that night.
The Most-Read Man You've Never Read
Step back from the footlights and the critically panned blockbuster of a play consider for a moment the man who had written it. By 1872 Ned Buntline had been one of the most widely read authors in America for a quarter century. His story papers and dime novels, from sea yarns, city "mysteries and miseries," to border thrillers sold in numbers that rivaled or beat the literary lions of the age in raw contemporary readership. He was, by most scholarly reckonings, among the three or four most popular American fiction writers of his era. When Mark Twain wanted to show us what boys' imaginations were made of, he had Tom Sawyer play pirate as "the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main," the title role of a Ned Buntline blood-and-thunder from 1847. Twain didn't need to explain the reference. Every boy in America reading Tom Sawyer already knew it by heart. From Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain:
About midnight Tom arrived with a boiled ham and a few trifles, and stopped in a dense undergrowth on a small bluff overlooking the meeting-place. It was starlight, and very still. The mighty river lay like an ocean at rest. Tom listened a moment, but no sound disturbed the quiet. Then he gave a low, distinct whistle. It was answered from under the bluff. Tom whistled twice more; these signals were answered in the same way. Then a guarded voice said: "Who goes there?” “Tom Sawyer, the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main. Name your names.” “Huck Finn the Red-Handed, and Joe Harper the Terror of the Seas.” Tom had furnished these titles, from his favorite literature.
Buntline himself was clear-eyed about what he made. He had started out with literary ambitions, he admitted late in life, and discovered that to make a living he must write "trash for the masses" — the writer who serves only the critical few, he said, will go hungry. He wrote his trash at industrial speed, sold it outright to his publishers, and never looked back at a page of it.
But the writing is only half the man, and even with stories of swashbuckling pirates and tales of the wild west, honestly the writing in this case may be the calmer half.
A Pattern of Departures
Trace Buntline's itinerary through the 1840s and 1850s and a pattern emerges: he arrives in a city, he rises fast, and he leaves under circumstances that make return inadvisable.
Nashville, 1845–46. Buntline, newly widowed and freshly failed as a magazine publisher, took up with Mary Porterfield, the nineteen-year-old wife of Robert Porterfield. When the rumors could no longer be ignored, Porterfield confronted him with a pistol on March 14, 1846, at Sulphur Spring, and fired three times. He missed. Buntline fired once and didn't. At the courthouse examination that night, Robert's brother John burst through the crowd firing a revolver; Buntline fled, took a bullet-graze across the scalp, ran to the third floor of the City Hotel, tried to shinny down a balcony post, slipped, and fell to the street, breaking a leg. Days later a mob broke into the jail, dragged him to the public square, put a noose around his neck, and threw the rope over an awning. The rope broke (cut, by some accounts, by a sympathizer) and the mob's appetite broke with it. No prosecutor ever appeared to try him for Porterfield's death. Buntline slipped out of Nashville by steamboat.
New York, 1849. Now editing Ned Buntline's Own and commanding one of the largest weekly circulations in the city, Buntline had refashioned himself as the loudest voice of the nativist movement, a political ideology that favored native-born Americans first, and damnation to foreign influence in politics, in the church, and, as it happened, on the stage. When the feud between the American actor Edwin Forrest and the English tragedian William Macready came to a head at the Astor Place Opera House on May 10, 1849, Buntline appointed himself field general. Witnesses put him at the center of the mob, calling out "Are there any Americans here?", proposing a fire be set at the rear of the theater, announcing himself by name as the nucleus the crowd was waiting for. The militia fired into that crowd. At least twenty-two people died, some accounts say more than thirty, with at least a few of the dead bystanders blocks away. Buntline was arrested raising a paving stone over his head, convicted of inciting the riot, and served a year on Blackwell's Island. When his sentence expired, his nativist brethren chartered a steamboat to fetch him, met him with a coach-and-four and a marching band, and paraded him through the streets. "It is supposed," one paper observed, "that after his decease he will be canonized."
He converted the celebrity directly into a lecture tour, charging twenty-five cents a head to hear Ned Buntline rail against Catholics and immigrants, delivered in a coat hung with medals of dubious merit, with a brass band behind playing him. The tour took him west, preaching the American Party gospel down the Mississippi Valley, and in April 1852 it delivered him to St. Louis on election day, where he led a nativist mob through the German wards in an attempt to suppress non-American born voters. A saloon was burned with the keeper's wife and newborn carried out on a mattress; a young fireman named Joseph Stephens was shot dead; and a telegram went out over the national wires reporting that Ned Buntline had a horse killed under him and "acted like a man," which as a dispatch reads suspiciously as if its hero composed it himself.
Indicted for instigating the riot, Buntline made his bail, married a Mormon farmer's daughter across the river in Illinois while the court dates were postponed, and in January 1853, when the case was finally called, simply failed to appear. His friends forfeited their bonds and Ned Buntline once again moved on.
A nativist demagogue with a genius for self-promotion; a man who discovered that outrage and celebrity are the same currency, and spent freely in both; a hypocrite who preached morality; a leader of riots who blamed everyone but himself; a man whose supporters greeted his release from prison with a parade. I describe the 1850s. Any instances of history repeating itself is purely coincidental.
The Bill Comes Due at the Box Office
Here's the thing about jumping bail: the paperwork keeps. Twenty years after that St. Louis no-show, The Scouts of the Prairie rolled into St. Louis on its first triumphant tour, and on Christmas Eve 1872 a deputy marshal walked into the company's hotel and arrested the playwright. Cody and Omohundro found the whole thing more comic than alarming. "If we were out on the plains, we might have something to say," Texas Jack observed, "but here in the city it is no use. We must take what comes." A banker friend posted Buntline's bond in time for him to limp into the first act that same night at the St. Louis Opera House.
The tour rolled on, to Cincinnati and Cleveland and Pittsburgh and on east through the great houses of the seaboard, Niblo's Garden in New York packed past its thirty-five-hundred capacity — and it made everyone money, though as with everything in Buntline's orbit, exactly how much and exactly where it went are questions the principals answered differently ever after.
And then, having built the most successful theatrical novelty in America, Buntline lost it in a single summer.
One Season
The Buntline edition of the Scouts lasted exactly one dramatic season: December 16, 1872, in Chicago, Illinois, to June 28, 1873 in Port Jervis, New York. And it's clear Buntline expected a second. As late as the end of June and into July, he was running notices in the New York dramatic papers addressed "TO MANAGERS," announcing that his "immensely successful play, THE PRAIRIE SCOUTS," together with a new drama of border life titled TEXAS JACK, "will be produced with the real heroes and a fresh corps of Indian braves, fresh from the Plains, during the fall and winter season in the United States, prior to an extended European tour." Buffalo Bill, Texas Jack, Ned Buntline, and "a corps of the first actors and actresses in America" would fill the roles. Managers were to send dates and offers at once to Col. E. Z. C. Judson, Box 4,896, New York City.
It seems the real heroes had other plans. Back in Nebraska for the summer, Cody and Omohundro told the Omaha Evening Bee (in an article that ran July 28, 1873, while Buntline's notices were still soliciting bookings) that the scouts had "dissolved partnership with Ned Buntline, and will now go it alone. The boys think they have made enough money for other people, and now propose to paddle their own canoe. They have learned the eastern country and the ways of the world sufficiently to hereafter be their own guides." The item added that on the contemplated European trip the scouts would be accompanied by James B. Hickok, "the original 'Wild Bill'," and while Europe never happened, Hickok did indeed join his old friends on the boards that fall, in the scouts' own production, under the scouts' own management.
There's a poetry in the Bee's phrasing that no one seems to have planned. Two scouts, men whose profession was guiding others through country they didn't know, had just spent a season being guided through the theatrical East, and now judged themselves competent enough to serve as their own guides. They were right. The combination Cody and Omohundro ran without Buntline toured successfully for years, split amicably into two stars' separate companies, and led, after Texas Jack's death in Leadville in 1880, to the outdoor spectacle Cody launched in 1883 as the Wild West. Buntline, for his part, cobbled together a rival troupe with hired actors and Barnum's Indians and worked the smaller towns his former stars skipped. It lost money. The audiences knew what the critics never grasped: the words were replaceable. The men saying them were not.
No Hard Feelings
What Buntline apparently never did was turn on them. Five years after the split, in the October 31, 1878, issue of Forest and Stream, the old showman weighed in on a sporting debate — whether long-range target shooting at the fashionable ranges actually unfitted a rifleman for quick, open work on game — and reached for his old costar to settle it. He never knew a first-class target shot worth a blessing after deer, elk, or antelope, he wrote, and offered a wager: "I'll put 'Texas Jack' against Mr. Hyde or Mr. Partello on the plains, and he will kill two to their one all the time, or more game on the same ground than both of them put together." He signed it E. Z. C. J.
Consider what that is. Charles E. Hyde and Dwight W. Partello were two of the most celebrated marksmen in the world, the Creedmoor medal-winners of the sporting press. And here is Ned Buntline, the man Texas Jack had walked away from, the man whose second season died in the dramatic columns, telling a national sporting audience that his old scout would outshoot both of them on the same ground. Whatever Buntline was, and he was a great many things, he was not small about the men he had put on stage.
The Russell Problem
The standard scholarly corrective on Buntline comes from Don Russell, whose landmark Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill set out to deflate the notion that Buntline invented Buffalo Bill. Russell's facts are sound: Buntline's total output of Buffalo Bill dime novels was four; he didn't coin the nickname; Cody had a genuine and distinguished record as a scout that owed nothing to any writer; the discovery at Fort McPherson was, as Russell has it, quite coincidental. Cody himself, late in life, told an interviewer that Buntline had done him harm as much as good, painting him as a wholesale killer of Indians and cheapening him "in the estimation of people worth knowing."
All of that is true, and all of it is beside the point. Yes, others wrote far more Buffalo Bill than Buntline ever did. Prentiss Ingraham alone may have contributed more to the printed legend than any man living. But inasmuch as "Buffalo Bill" the character and William F. Cody the man can be separated, "Buffalo Bill" is a Ned Buntline story. Saying otherwise is like saying Arthur Conan Doyle didn't contribute much to the film and television legacy of Sherlock Holmes. Sure. But it misses the point. If William F. Cody and John B. Omohundro hadn't existed, Buntline couldn't have made "Buffalo Bill" and "Texas Jack" sensations. But if Buntline hadn't written them into his stories and then taken them onto the stage, they'd number among the countless other possibly extraordinary, but ultimately unremembered, men and women who lived and died in the West.
Cody, whatever he told interviewers, seems to have understood the ledger. Asked about Buntline after the old man's death, he defended him: "He was extremely patriotic, and had great love of his country — and from what I know of him I would say that he deserved well of our nation as much so as any who took up arms in its defense."
The Estate of a Legend
Which brings us back to Stamford, and the widows.
The mourners who trudged up to Eagle's Nest after the burial had every reason to assume the man they mourned had amassed a sizable fortune. Buntline had earned, by the common estimate, an average of twenty thousand dollars a year for decades. Just for some context, $20,000 in 1886, the year Buntline died, is around $715,000 in 2026. In 1847, the year his Black Avenger was published, it's closer to $820,000. But the estate the widows fought over barely existed. Anna, the wife at his deathbed, testified there was no personal property to speak of; she had to borrow from friends just to pay for the funeral. The life insurance policy listed in his will turned out to be imaginary. The pension application he'd finally signed a week before his death, after years of loudly refusing to become "a government pauper," was denied, and the hundreds of pages of the pension file thereafter record the government's decade-long attempt to sort out which of the marriages counted. None of the wives or children ever collected a cent.
And here's the detail that closes the circle: his family couldn't profit from his writing either, because there was nothing to inherit. Buntline had sold every story outright to his publishers, wholesale, rights and all. The houses could reprint his work forever, retitle it, even reissue it under other men's names, and owed the Judson estate nothing. The man received no royalties on any character he ever created — not the Black Avenger, not Buffalo Bill, not Texas Jack.
Sit with that a moment. Ned Buntline wrote several hundred, perhaps more than a thousand, novels and owned none of them. He created the two founding celebrities of the Western entertainment tradition and held no rights to either. Every property he ever generated slipped through his hands — sold cheap, signed away, or forfeited like a St. Louis bail bond. The one thing he made that could not be sold, reprinted under a house title, or contested by widows was the one thing that outlived everything else: that one December night in Chicago when he put two real plainsmen in front of the footlights and let America look at them.
The play was written in four hours and forgotten in a season. What walked out on that stage is still with us. When Buffalo Bill's Wild West filled its grandstands, when the cowboy rode into the nickelodeon and then the movie palace and then the living room, all of it descended from the sensation Ned Buntline manufactured out of Cody and Omohundro in December 1872, and by June 1873 it was a sensation that no longer needed him. He learned the same lesson every showman since has had to learn about authenticity: you can write it a script, you can market the hell out of it, you can make a fortune on its merits, but you can't keep it under contract.
He died one hundred and forty years ago today, and eight hundred people came to watch him buried behind a horse with empty boots turned backward in the stirrups. It was a fine piece of staging. Easy to think it would have made Ned Buntline proud.
Today, Ned Buntline is remembered, when he's remembered at all, as the man who discovered Buffalo Bill. That's completely accurate, and it is accurate beyond any argument. What he should be remembered for is the thing he created and then couldn't hold on to. Because, yes, Ned Buntline wrote Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men. Yes, he wrote Texas Jack, the White King of the Pawnees. And yes, he wrote The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main; or, The Fiend of Blood. But what he created — the gumbo he stirred up when he combined elements from his dime novel stories, his temperance lectures, an Italian ballerina dressed as a Native American princess, a scout named Buffalo Bill, and a cowboy named Texas Jack — was the western.
Full stop.
For the fullest modern accounting of Buntline's life — the nine marriages, the pension file, the riots, and the strange machinery of his celebrity — I recommend my friend Julia Bricklin's wonderful biography, The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline: A Tale of Murder, Betrayal, and the Creation of Buffalo Bill, on which portions of this essay heavily rely.
