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result of the slavery fight, the violence went far beyond simple murder. Beatings and death threats were pervasive. Not far from the Cody claim was the base of the Kickapoo Rangers, a paramilitary gang hell-bent on driving Free Soil settlers from eastern Kansas, and whose members included Charles Dunn, their father’s attacker. 44
    Amidst the continuing fury of this unofficial war, Mary Cody faced what was probably the greatest challenge of her life. Like other young widows, she was constrained by a society that required a woman of good reputation to work at home. Farm women made sizable contributions to their families’ economic well-being, but they did not usually take up wage labor. Such activities were for lower-class women, or women of dubious reputation. As Julia recalled, “Now Brother Willie and I would get out together and plan what he must do to help take care of Mother and the 3 sisters and little brother Charlie....” 45 William was barely eleven, but he was the only male capable of outdoor work. He became the family’s primary wage earner.
    From boyhood, then, William Cody was drawn into a commercial revolution that was sweeping the Plains, and which was impossible to ignore around Leavenworth. Kansas was a western territory, but it was no backwater. Most early settlements were trail towns, along migration routes where the ubiquitous travelers—emigrants, tourists, salesmen, surveyors, and soldiers, to name a few—created a lively commerce. Residents prospered by selling supplies by the trails. When trails shifted, townspeople on occasion jacked up whole towns and moved them on rollers to new settings where they could better exploit the trade of passing pioneers. 46
    Leavenworth, at the junction of the Missouri River and various routes west, was the biggest trail town of all. Some paths actually predated the town. Wagons carrying goods had been plying the Santa Fe Trail between Missouri and northern New Mexico since 1821. By 1855, $5 million in commerce was making its way along the Santa Fe Trail each year, and Leavenworth was only a short distance north of Independence, Missouri, the trail’s eastern terminus. 47 Still another trail wound west as handfuls of emigrants to Oregon, and more Mormons bound for Utah, began trundling up the Platte River road in the 1840s. Then, in California, in 1848, John Marshall reached for a glittering nugget in John Sutter’s mill race. In the next five years, some 165,000 people traveled this westerly route to seek their share of the gold rush. 48
    From the day in 1854 that Leavenworth was founded along the Platte River road to California, passersby dwarfed the resident population, and as migrations increased, so did the town’s economy. Between 1854 and 1860, 80,000 emigrants passed near or through Leavenworth on their way to California. 49 Many of them traveled in small groups from various points to the east, and then stopped in eastern Kansas, where they organized into wagon trains and waited for the spring grass to mature enough to feed the livestock on the Plains crossing. Julia Cody later recalled that when the Cody family arrived in the Salt Creek Valley of Kansas in 1854, “it was filled with Trains and cattle and mules running around. There must have been Hundreds of White covered wagons waiting there to make up their Trains and start West.” Little Will Cody “got just wild with Excitement” and said, “Oh, my, that is what I am going to do as soon as we get moved over here in this beautifull place.” 50
    The continual cavalcade through Leavenworth increased yet again, in even more dramatic fashion, with another gold strike, this time in Colorado, in 1858. Before then, there had been only the sparsest white settlement along the Platte River road, mostly at trading posts, where traders solicited Indian commerce in buffalo robes and beaver hide. Suddenly, in the spring of 1859 alone, over 100,000 emigrants