Son of William and Sarah [Watson] Trego.
Charles Trego and Buffalo Bill.
Charlie Trego was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, in 1856, and he is still a monumental presence in the Philadelphia area. The heroic statue "The Cowboy" in Fairmount Park may be the most dynamic piece of public art in Philadelphia -- it is alive with tension and arrested motion. It has additional stature as the only full-size sculpture ever completed by Frederic Remington. And the cowboy is Charlie Trego. In preparing his model, Remington had Trego pose horseback on the very spot selected for placement of the statue. It was installed and dedicated in 1908. The artist died barely a year later. It is usually suggested that Remington met Trego on one of his western sojourns in Montana, but the facts are even better. They met in the town founded by Buffalo Bill himself, Cody, Wyoming. Remington traveled to Cody during the summer of 1899 to be the guest of Buffalo Bill's daughter, Irma Cody Garlow, on one of the family's ranches (her father was touring with his show) and to go hunting and sketching with the town's co-founder, George Beck. At the time, Charlie Trego was managing some of Buffalo Bill's business interests in Cody, including a rough hotel in which the artist probably stayed one or two nights, and served as one of Remington's hosts on his rides into the mountains. Charles Trego was by this time one of Buffalo Bill Cody's best and most trusted friends. Their business relationship dated from the early 1880s when Trego first went to work on Cody's Scout's Rest Ranch in North Platte, Nebraska. But their friendship may have dated from as early as 1872 when Buffalo Bill first visited the east as a guest of General Philip Sheridan and New York newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett. Before returning to Nebraska he visited the Guss family at West Chester, Pennsylvania, his mother's family whom he had never met. The Trego farm was nearby, and it is not hard to imagine that Charlie as a youngster met and perhaps idolized Cody, already becoming noted as a western hero. Two years later, as Buffalo Bill pursued his stage career, the Cody family lived for several months near West Chester before moving on temporarily to Rochester, New York. Almost certainly it was at Cody's invitation that the 23- or 24-year-old Trego found his way to North Platte. There he befriended such other future stars of Buffalo Bill's Wild West as Buck Taylor who gained fame with the show as the first "King of the Cowboys." (Taylor later moved to Downington, Pennsylvania, where he and the Tregos resumed their friendship.) Though Charlie traveled as a cowboy with the Wild West show for a few years, Cody found the young man's organizational and management skills too valuable to allow him to stay on the road. He made Trego foreman of Scout's Rest Ranch forcing Charlie to miss, to his regret, the Wild West's triumphal visit to England in 1887. Through the mid-1890s Cody's son-in-law Horton Boal was nominal manager of Scout's Rest, but it was Charlie Trego whom he trusted to make the place run. After Boal's death in 1902, another Cody son-in-law, Fred Garlow, took over management, and Charlie gradually bowed out, returning by 1907 to run the family farm in Pennsylvania. For Buffalo Bill and Charles Trego, 1894 was a pivotal year in their developing relationship. First, Cody's profits from the spectacular success of his show during Chicago's World Fair the year before were burning holes in his pockets, and he began investing in Wyoming. Second, his partner, Nate Salsbury, fell seriously ill and had to give up an active role in management. With the burden of putting the show in winter quarters falling entirely on his shoulders at the end of the 1894 season, he looked to Trego for help. Cody needed a place not far from New York with sufficient forage for all the livestock, including draft horses and buffalo, ample room to store the wagons and coaches, and convenient access to a railhead. The solution? The Trego farm met all the requirements, and for almost two decades Chester County, Pennsylvania, was home to a bit of the Wild Wild West. Charlie himself handled much of the logistics of moving and accommodating the show properties and animals those first years. Buffalo Bill and some of his cowboys became frequent visitors to the Trego home. A photograph that accompanies this lot shows Cody and a few of his personnel (including chief cowboy Si Compton) with Charlie and Carrie, Charlie's folks, and a group of their friends and neighbors. Meanwhile, Buffalo Bill was pouring money into the development of the town of Cody. He acquired several
ranches, including his sanctuary thirty miles southwest of Cody, the TE. He built a livery stable and barn, a newspaper, a simple frame hotel (the Irma came along only in 1902), and a fire hall. The most expensive project was a canal -- "the ditch" mentioned in so many of Cody's letters to Trego -- to carry water from the Absaroka Mountains to the potential farm lands south and northeast of town. George Beck supervised the canal construction, but the other interests were run by old cronies of Buffalo Bill such as the former Indian Wars scout Frank Grouard. In late 1895 or early 1896, Cody sent Trego to take charge. Since there was not even a post office yet in Cody, Charlie had to fetch his mail at Corbett, nothing more than a ford across the Stinking Water River (whose name was changed in 1899, for obvious reasons, to the Shoshone River) with a general store and rowdy house known locally as Corbett's Shebang. Trego put down deep enough roots to build a house west of town at the confluence of the North and South Forks of the Stinking Water, in an area called Marquette. A photograph (included here) shows a group of Trego friends gathered on the porch of the newly completed house. The picture looks north toward Rattlesnake and Logan Mountains. Marquette had to be abandoned after 1905 when the Shoshone Dam (in 1946 renamed Buffalo Bill Dam) was built downstream. Back in 1894, Charlie had made a life-changing decision of his own. From Philadelphia he brought his beloved, Carrie Ash, out to Nebraska where in November they were wed (their marriage certificate is part of this lot). Cody couldn't be there, but he was well-represented. The witnesses to the wedding were his wife, Louisa, and his best friend in North Platte, John Boyer. The newlyweds made their home at Buffalo Bill's Scout's Rest Ranch. How close were the Tregos and the Codys? The letters included in this lot span two decades beginning in 1896. In 1913 Buffalo Bill's Wild West went bankrupt in Denver, and the old scout returned to his namesake town, seeing it during the summer for the first time. Among the other irons he inevitably had in the fire was a movie-making venture with Chicago's Essanay Films. They were to shoot a feature-length (five-reel) saga in the Black Hills on the Indian Wars. The Wild West's failure enabled them to get an early start, and the Essanay crew met Buffalo Bill in Cody in August. Since they were ahead of schedule, they shot a couple of one-reel shoot-em-ups on the dirt streets of the town. The films do not survive, but fortunately a photographer made some stills. They show a couple of abandoned shacks at the east end of Main Street decorated with crudely lettered signs, "old West" style. One of the signs is deliberately misspelled "Salune." The other? It is a humorous reference to one of Charlie's jobs during the town's earlier pioneer days: "Hotel de Trego." Cody's genuine affection for Charlie and Carrie, and his comfort with their friendship is revealed on one of the envelopes in the grouping contained within this lot. In a playful flourish that may be unique in all of Cody's vast correspondence, he drew a rebus on the line above their route number -- a tree, the word "go," and a tepee -- "Trego home." One of Cody's letters to "Dear Charlie & Carrie" written in 1910 closes with "You know I love you both." That it was not simply a commonplace is demonstrated by the extraordinary letter Cody wrote to them on June 5, 1914, while appearing with the Sell-Floto Circus, his unhappiest season in show business. He may also have been feeling his mortality in a way that he hadn't before. Even the salutation is effusive: "My Dear Friends Charlie & Carrie." "...I have a lot of friends and will say sincere ones. But they don't seem to touch the my the [sic] heart like the Tregos. Nothing has ever come into our friendship to give it the least bit of a jar. And I hope it will continue on that beautiful shore beyond the divide..." Cody wrote his last letter to the Tregos on November 3, 1916. Ever the optimist, he told them, "As I've got my health back I am going to try and make some old time money next season." Two months later, on January 10, 1917, he died at his sister's home in Denver. Charlie died at home in Pennsylvania in 1925. He was 66.
Contributor: Jim (48904267) • [email protected]
Charles Trego and Buffalo Bill.
Charlie Trego was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, in 1856, and he is still a monumental presence in the Philadelphia area. The heroic statue "The Cowboy" in Fairmount Park may be the most dynamic piece of public art in Philadelphia -- it is alive with tension and arrested motion. It has additional stature as the only full-size sculpture ever completed by Frederic Remington. And the cowboy is Charlie Trego. In preparing his model, Remington had Trego pose horseback on the very spot selected for placement of the statue. It was installed and dedicated in 1908. The artist died barely a year later. It is usually suggested that Remington met Trego on one of his western sojourns in Montana, but the facts are even better. They met in the town founded by Buffalo Bill himself, Cody, Wyoming. Remington traveled to Cody during the summer of 1899 to be the guest of Buffalo Bill's daughter, Irma Cody Garlow, on one of the family's ranches (her father was touring with his show) and to go hunting and sketching with the town's co-founder, George Beck. At the time, Charlie Trego was managing some of Buffalo Bill's business interests in Cody, including a rough hotel in which the artist probably stayed one or two nights, and served as one of Remington's hosts on his rides into the mountains. Charles Trego was by this time one of Buffalo Bill Cody's best and most trusted friends. Their business relationship dated from the early 1880s when Trego first went to work on Cody's Scout's Rest Ranch in North Platte, Nebraska. But their friendship may have dated from as early as 1872 when Buffalo Bill first visited the east as a guest of General Philip Sheridan and New York newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett. Before returning to Nebraska he visited the Guss family at West Chester, Pennsylvania, his mother's family whom he had never met. The Trego farm was nearby, and it is not hard to imagine that Charlie as a youngster met and perhaps idolized Cody, already becoming noted as a western hero. Two years later, as Buffalo Bill pursued his stage career, the Cody family lived for several months near West Chester before moving on temporarily to Rochester, New York. Almost certainly it was at Cody's invitation that the 23- or 24-year-old Trego found his way to North Platte. There he befriended such other future stars of Buffalo Bill's Wild West as Buck Taylor who gained fame with the show as the first "King of the Cowboys." (Taylor later moved to Downington, Pennsylvania, where he and the Tregos resumed their friendship.) Though Charlie traveled as a cowboy with the Wild West show for a few years, Cody found the young man's organizational and management skills too valuable to allow him to stay on the road. He made Trego foreman of Scout's Rest Ranch forcing Charlie to miss, to his regret, the Wild West's triumphal visit to England in 1887. Through the mid-1890s Cody's son-in-law Horton Boal was nominal manager of Scout's Rest, but it was Charlie Trego whom he trusted to make the place run. After Boal's death in 1902, another Cody son-in-law, Fred Garlow, took over management, and Charlie gradually bowed out, returning by 1907 to run the family farm in Pennsylvania. For Buffalo Bill and Charles Trego, 1894 was a pivotal year in their developing relationship. First, Cody's profits from the spectacular success of his show during Chicago's World Fair the year before were burning holes in his pockets, and he began investing in Wyoming. Second, his partner, Nate Salsbury, fell seriously ill and had to give up an active role in management. With the burden of putting the show in winter quarters falling entirely on his shoulders at the end of the 1894 season, he looked to Trego for help. Cody needed a place not far from New York with sufficient forage for all the livestock, including draft horses and buffalo, ample room to store the wagons and coaches, and convenient access to a railhead. The solution? The Trego farm met all the requirements, and for almost two decades Chester County, Pennsylvania, was home to a bit of the Wild Wild West. Charlie himself handled much of the logistics of moving and accommodating the show properties and animals those first years. Buffalo Bill and some of his cowboys became frequent visitors to the Trego home. A photograph that accompanies this lot shows Cody and a few of his personnel (including chief cowboy Si Compton) with Charlie and Carrie, Charlie's folks, and a group of their friends and neighbors. Meanwhile, Buffalo Bill was pouring money into the development of the town of Cody. He acquired several
ranches, including his sanctuary thirty miles southwest of Cody, the TE. He built a livery stable and barn, a newspaper, a simple frame hotel (the Irma came along only in 1902), and a fire hall. The most expensive project was a canal -- "the ditch" mentioned in so many of Cody's letters to Trego -- to carry water from the Absaroka Mountains to the potential farm lands south and northeast of town. George Beck supervised the canal construction, but the other interests were run by old cronies of Buffalo Bill such as the former Indian Wars scout Frank Grouard. In late 1895 or early 1896, Cody sent Trego to take charge. Since there was not even a post office yet in Cody, Charlie had to fetch his mail at Corbett, nothing more than a ford across the Stinking Water River (whose name was changed in 1899, for obvious reasons, to the Shoshone River) with a general store and rowdy house known locally as Corbett's Shebang. Trego put down deep enough roots to build a house west of town at the confluence of the North and South Forks of the Stinking Water, in an area called Marquette. A photograph (included here) shows a group of Trego friends gathered on the porch of the newly completed house. The picture looks north toward Rattlesnake and Logan Mountains. Marquette had to be abandoned after 1905 when the Shoshone Dam (in 1946 renamed Buffalo Bill Dam) was built downstream. Back in 1894, Charlie had made a life-changing decision of his own. From Philadelphia he brought his beloved, Carrie Ash, out to Nebraska where in November they were wed (their marriage certificate is part of this lot). Cody couldn't be there, but he was well-represented. The witnesses to the wedding were his wife, Louisa, and his best friend in North Platte, John Boyer. The newlyweds made their home at Buffalo Bill's Scout's Rest Ranch. How close were the Tregos and the Codys? The letters included in this lot span two decades beginning in 1896. In 1913 Buffalo Bill's Wild West went bankrupt in Denver, and the old scout returned to his namesake town, seeing it during the summer for the first time. Among the other irons he inevitably had in the fire was a movie-making venture with Chicago's Essanay Films. They were to shoot a feature-length (five-reel) saga in the Black Hills on the Indian Wars. The Wild West's failure enabled them to get an early start, and the Essanay crew met Buffalo Bill in Cody in August. Since they were ahead of schedule, they shot a couple of one-reel shoot-em-ups on the dirt streets of the town. The films do not survive, but fortunately a photographer made some stills. They show a couple of abandoned shacks at the east end of Main Street decorated with crudely lettered signs, "old West" style. One of the signs is deliberately misspelled "Salune." The other? It is a humorous reference to one of Charlie's jobs during the town's earlier pioneer days: "Hotel de Trego." Cody's genuine affection for Charlie and Carrie, and his comfort with their friendship is revealed on one of the envelopes in the grouping contained within this lot. In a playful flourish that may be unique in all of Cody's vast correspondence, he drew a rebus on the line above their route number -- a tree, the word "go," and a tepee -- "Trego home." One of Cody's letters to "Dear Charlie & Carrie" written in 1910 closes with "You know I love you both." That it was not simply a commonplace is demonstrated by the extraordinary letter Cody wrote to them on June 5, 1914, while appearing with the Sell-Floto Circus, his unhappiest season in show business. He may also have been feeling his mortality in a way that he hadn't before. Even the salutation is effusive: "My Dear Friends Charlie & Carrie." "...I have a lot of friends and will say sincere ones. But they don't seem to touch the my the [sic] heart like the Tregos. Nothing has ever come into our friendship to give it the least bit of a jar. And I hope it will continue on that beautiful shore beyond the divide..." Cody wrote his last letter to the Tregos on November 3, 1916. Ever the optimist, he told them, "As I've got my health back I am going to try and make some old time money next season." Two months later, on January 10, 1917, he died at his sister's home in Denver. Charlie died at home in Pennsylvania in 1925. He was 66.
Contributor: Jim (48904267) • [email protected]
Son of William and Sarah [Watson] Trego.
Charles Trego and Buffalo Bill.
Charlie Trego was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, in 1856, and he is still a monumental presence in the Philadelphia area. The heroic statue "The Cowboy" in Fairmount Park may be the most dynamic piece of public art in Philadelphia -- it is alive with tension and arrested motion. It has additional stature as the only full-size sculpture ever completed by Frederic Remington. And the cowboy is Charlie Trego. In preparing his model, Remington had Trego pose horseback on the very spot selected for placement of the statue. It was installed and dedicated in 1908. The artist died barely a year later. It is usually suggested that Remington met Trego on one of his western sojourns in Montana, but the facts are even better. They met in the town founded by Buffalo Bill himself, Cody, Wyoming. Remington traveled to Cody during the summer of 1899 to be the guest of Buffalo Bill's daughter, Irma Cody Garlow, on one of the family's ranches (her father was touring with his show) and to go hunting and sketching with the town's co-founder, George Beck. At the time, Charlie Trego was managing some of Buffalo Bill's business interests in Cody, including a rough hotel in which the artist probably stayed one or two nights, and served as one of Remington's hosts on his rides into the mountains. Charles Trego was by this time one of Buffalo Bill Cody's best and most trusted friends. Their business relationship dated from the early 1880s when Trego first went to work on Cody's Scout's Rest Ranch in North Platte, Nebraska. But their friendship may have dated from as early as 1872 when Buffalo Bill first visited the east as a guest of General Philip Sheridan and New York newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett. Before returning to Nebraska he visited the Guss family at West Chester, Pennsylvania, his mother's family whom he had never met. The Trego farm was nearby, and it is not hard to imagine that Charlie as a youngster met and perhaps idolized Cody, already becoming noted as a western hero. Two years later, as Buffalo Bill pursued his stage career, the Cody family lived for several months near West Chester before moving on temporarily to Rochester, New York. Almost certainly it was at Cody's invitation that the 23- or 24-year-old Trego found his way to North Platte. There he befriended such other future stars of Buffalo Bill's Wild West as Buck Taylor who gained fame with the show as the first "King of the Cowboys." (Taylor later moved to Downington, Pennsylvania, where he and the Tregos resumed their friendship.) Though Charlie traveled as a cowboy with the Wild West show for a few years, Cody found the young man's organizational and management skills too valuable to allow him to stay on the road. He made Trego foreman of Scout's Rest Ranch forcing Charlie to miss, to his regret, the Wild West's triumphal visit to England in 1887. Through the mid-1890s Cody's son-in-law Horton Boal was nominal manager of Scout's Rest, but it was Charlie Trego whom he trusted to make the place run. After Boal's death in 1902, another Cody son-in-law, Fred Garlow, took over management, and Charlie gradually bowed out, returning by 1907 to run the family farm in Pennsylvania. For Buffalo Bill and Charles Trego, 1894 was a pivotal year in their developing relationship. First, Cody's profits from the spectacular success of his show during Chicago's World Fair the year before were burning holes in his pockets, and he began investing in Wyoming. Second, his partner, Nate Salsbury, fell seriously ill and had to give up an active role in management. With the burden of putting the show in winter quarters falling entirely on his shoulders at the end of the 1894 season, he looked to Trego for help. Cody needed a place not far from New York with sufficient forage for all the livestock, including draft horses and buffalo, ample room to store the wagons and coaches, and convenient access to a railhead. The solution? The Trego farm met all the requirements, and for almost two decades Chester County, Pennsylvania, was home to a bit of the Wild Wild West. Charlie himself handled much of the logistics of moving and accommodating the show properties and animals those first years. Buffalo Bill and some of his cowboys became frequent visitors to the Trego home. A photograph that accompanies this lot shows Cody and a few of his personnel (including chief cowboy Si Compton) with Charlie and Carrie, Charlie's folks, and a group of their friends and neighbors. Meanwhile, Buffalo Bill was pouring money into the development of the town of Cody. He acquired several
ranches, including his sanctuary thirty miles southwest of Cody, the TE. He built a livery stable and barn, a newspaper, a simple frame hotel (the Irma came along only in 1902), and a fire hall. The most expensive project was a canal -- "the ditch" mentioned in so many of Cody's letters to Trego -- to carry water from the Absaroka Mountains to the potential farm lands south and northeast of town. George Beck supervised the canal construction, but the other interests were run by old cronies of Buffalo Bill such as the former Indian Wars scout Frank Grouard. In late 1895 or early 1896, Cody sent Trego to take charge. Since there was not even a post office yet in Cody, Charlie had to fetch his mail at Corbett, nothing more than a ford across the Stinking Water River (whose name was changed in 1899, for obvious reasons, to the Shoshone River) with a general store and rowdy house known locally as Corbett's Shebang. Trego put down deep enough roots to build a house west of town at the confluence of the North and South Forks of the Stinking Water, in an area called Marquette. A photograph (included here) shows a group of Trego friends gathered on the porch of the newly completed house. The picture looks north toward Rattlesnake and Logan Mountains. Marquette had to be abandoned after 1905 when the Shoshone Dam (in 1946 renamed Buffalo Bill Dam) was built downstream. Back in 1894, Charlie had made a life-changing decision of his own. From Philadelphia he brought his beloved, Carrie Ash, out to Nebraska where in November they were wed (their marriage certificate is part of this lot). Cody couldn't be there, but he was well-represented. The witnesses to the wedding were his wife, Louisa, and his best friend in North Platte, John Boyer. The newlyweds made their home at Buffalo Bill's Scout's Rest Ranch. How close were the Tregos and the Codys? The letters included in this lot span two decades beginning in 1896. In 1913 Buffalo Bill's Wild West went bankrupt in Denver, and the old scout returned to his namesake town, seeing it during the summer for the first time. Among the other irons he inevitably had in the fire was a movie-making venture with Chicago's Essanay Films. They were to shoot a feature-length (five-reel) saga in the Black Hills on the Indian Wars. The Wild West's failure enabled them to get an early start, and the Essanay crew met Buffalo Bill in Cody in August. Since they were ahead of schedule, they shot a couple of one-reel shoot-em-ups on the dirt streets of the town. The films do not survive, but fortunately a photographer made some stills. They show a couple of abandoned shacks at the east end of Main Street decorated with crudely lettered signs, "old West" style. One of the signs is deliberately misspelled "Salune." The other? It is a humorous reference to one of Charlie's jobs during the town's earlier pioneer days: "Hotel de Trego." Cody's genuine affection for Charlie and Carrie, and his comfort with their friendship is revealed on one of the envelopes in the grouping contained within this lot. In a playful flourish that may be unique in all of Cody's vast correspondence, he drew a rebus on the line above their route number -- a tree, the word "go," and a tepee -- "Trego home." One of Cody's letters to "Dear Charlie & Carrie" written in 1910 closes with "You know I love you both." That it was not simply a commonplace is demonstrated by the extraordinary letter Cody wrote to them on June 5, 1914, while appearing with the Sell-Floto Circus, his unhappiest season in show business. He may also have been feeling his mortality in a way that he hadn't before. Even the salutation is effusive: "My Dear Friends Charlie & Carrie." "...I have a lot of friends and will say sincere ones. But they don't seem to touch the my the [sic] heart like the Tregos. Nothing has ever come into our friendship to give it the least bit of a jar. And I hope it will continue on that beautiful shore beyond the divide..." Cody wrote his last letter to the Tregos on November 3, 1916. Ever the optimist, he told them, "As I've got my health back I am going to try and make some old time money next season." Two months later, on January 10, 1917, he died at his sister's home in Denver. Charlie died at home in Pennsylvania in 1925. He was 66.
Contributor: Jim (48904267) • [email protected]
Charles Trego and Buffalo Bill.
Charlie Trego was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, in 1856, and he is still a monumental presence in the Philadelphia area. The heroic statue "The Cowboy" in Fairmount Park may be the most dynamic piece of public art in Philadelphia -- it is alive with tension and arrested motion. It has additional stature as the only full-size sculpture ever completed by Frederic Remington. And the cowboy is Charlie Trego. In preparing his model, Remington had Trego pose horseback on the very spot selected for placement of the statue. It was installed and dedicated in 1908. The artist died barely a year later. It is usually suggested that Remington met Trego on one of his western sojourns in Montana, but the facts are even better. They met in the town founded by Buffalo Bill himself, Cody, Wyoming. Remington traveled to Cody during the summer of 1899 to be the guest of Buffalo Bill's daughter, Irma Cody Garlow, on one of the family's ranches (her father was touring with his show) and to go hunting and sketching with the town's co-founder, George Beck. At the time, Charlie Trego was managing some of Buffalo Bill's business interests in Cody, including a rough hotel in which the artist probably stayed one or two nights, and served as one of Remington's hosts on his rides into the mountains. Charles Trego was by this time one of Buffalo Bill Cody's best and most trusted friends. Their business relationship dated from the early 1880s when Trego first went to work on Cody's Scout's Rest Ranch in North Platte, Nebraska. But their friendship may have dated from as early as 1872 when Buffalo Bill first visited the east as a guest of General Philip Sheridan and New York newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett. Before returning to Nebraska he visited the Guss family at West Chester, Pennsylvania, his mother's family whom he had never met. The Trego farm was nearby, and it is not hard to imagine that Charlie as a youngster met and perhaps idolized Cody, already becoming noted as a western hero. Two years later, as Buffalo Bill pursued his stage career, the Cody family lived for several months near West Chester before moving on temporarily to Rochester, New York. Almost certainly it was at Cody's invitation that the 23- or 24-year-old Trego found his way to North Platte. There he befriended such other future stars of Buffalo Bill's Wild West as Buck Taylor who gained fame with the show as the first "King of the Cowboys." (Taylor later moved to Downington, Pennsylvania, where he and the Tregos resumed their friendship.) Though Charlie traveled as a cowboy with the Wild West show for a few years, Cody found the young man's organizational and management skills too valuable to allow him to stay on the road. He made Trego foreman of Scout's Rest Ranch forcing Charlie to miss, to his regret, the Wild West's triumphal visit to England in 1887. Through the mid-1890s Cody's son-in-law Horton Boal was nominal manager of Scout's Rest, but it was Charlie Trego whom he trusted to make the place run. After Boal's death in 1902, another Cody son-in-law, Fred Garlow, took over management, and Charlie gradually bowed out, returning by 1907 to run the family farm in Pennsylvania. For Buffalo Bill and Charles Trego, 1894 was a pivotal year in their developing relationship. First, Cody's profits from the spectacular success of his show during Chicago's World Fair the year before were burning holes in his pockets, and he began investing in Wyoming. Second, his partner, Nate Salsbury, fell seriously ill and had to give up an active role in management. With the burden of putting the show in winter quarters falling entirely on his shoulders at the end of the 1894 season, he looked to Trego for help. Cody needed a place not far from New York with sufficient forage for all the livestock, including draft horses and buffalo, ample room to store the wagons and coaches, and convenient access to a railhead. The solution? The Trego farm met all the requirements, and for almost two decades Chester County, Pennsylvania, was home to a bit of the Wild Wild West. Charlie himself handled much of the logistics of moving and accommodating the show properties and animals those first years. Buffalo Bill and some of his cowboys became frequent visitors to the Trego home. A photograph that accompanies this lot shows Cody and a few of his personnel (including chief cowboy Si Compton) with Charlie and Carrie, Charlie's folks, and a group of their friends and neighbors. Meanwhile, Buffalo Bill was pouring money into the development of the town of Cody. He acquired several
ranches, including his sanctuary thirty miles southwest of Cody, the TE. He built a livery stable and barn, a newspaper, a simple frame hotel (the Irma came along only in 1902), and a fire hall. The most expensive project was a canal -- "the ditch" mentioned in so many of Cody's letters to Trego -- to carry water from the Absaroka Mountains to the potential farm lands south and northeast of town. George Beck supervised the canal construction, but the other interests were run by old cronies of Buffalo Bill such as the former Indian Wars scout Frank Grouard. In late 1895 or early 1896, Cody sent Trego to take charge. Since there was not even a post office yet in Cody, Charlie had to fetch his mail at Corbett, nothing more than a ford across the Stinking Water River (whose name was changed in 1899, for obvious reasons, to the Shoshone River) with a general store and rowdy house known locally as Corbett's Shebang. Trego put down deep enough roots to build a house west of town at the confluence of the North and South Forks of the Stinking Water, in an area called Marquette. A photograph (included here) shows a group of Trego friends gathered on the porch of the newly completed house. The picture looks north toward Rattlesnake and Logan Mountains. Marquette had to be abandoned after 1905 when the Shoshone Dam (in 1946 renamed Buffalo Bill Dam) was built downstream. Back in 1894, Charlie had made a life-changing decision of his own. From Philadelphia he brought his beloved, Carrie Ash, out to Nebraska where in November they were wed (their marriage certificate is part of this lot). Cody couldn't be there, but he was well-represented. The witnesses to the wedding were his wife, Louisa, and his best friend in North Platte, John Boyer. The newlyweds made their home at Buffalo Bill's Scout's Rest Ranch. How close were the Tregos and the Codys? The letters included in this lot span two decades beginning in 1896. In 1913 Buffalo Bill's Wild West went bankrupt in Denver, and the old scout returned to his namesake town, seeing it during the summer for the first time. Among the other irons he inevitably had in the fire was a movie-making venture with Chicago's Essanay Films. They were to shoot a feature-length (five-reel) saga in the Black Hills on the Indian Wars. The Wild West's failure enabled them to get an early start, and the Essanay crew met Buffalo Bill in Cody in August. Since they were ahead of schedule, they shot a couple of one-reel shoot-em-ups on the dirt streets of the town. The films do not survive, but fortunately a photographer made some stills. They show a couple of abandoned shacks at the east end of Main Street decorated with crudely lettered signs, "old West" style. One of the signs is deliberately misspelled "Salune." The other? It is a humorous reference to one of Charlie's jobs during the town's earlier pioneer days: "Hotel de Trego." Cody's genuine affection for Charlie and Carrie, and his comfort with their friendship is revealed on one of the envelopes in the grouping contained within this lot. In a playful flourish that may be unique in all of Cody's vast correspondence, he drew a rebus on the line above their route number -- a tree, the word "go," and a tepee -- "Trego home." One of Cody's letters to "Dear Charlie & Carrie" written in 1910 closes with "You know I love you both." That it was not simply a commonplace is demonstrated by the extraordinary letter Cody wrote to them on June 5, 1914, while appearing with the Sell-Floto Circus, his unhappiest season in show business. He may also have been feeling his mortality in a way that he hadn't before. Even the salutation is effusive: "My Dear Friends Charlie & Carrie." "...I have a lot of friends and will say sincere ones. But they don't seem to touch the my the [sic] heart like the Tregos. Nothing has ever come into our friendship to give it the least bit of a jar. And I hope it will continue on that beautiful shore beyond the divide..." Cody wrote his last letter to the Tregos on November 3, 1916. Ever the optimist, he told them, "As I've got my health back I am going to try and make some old time money next season." Two months later, on January 10, 1917, he died at his sister's home in Denver. Charlie died at home in Pennsylvania in 1925. He was 66.
Contributor: Jim (48904267) • [email protected]
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