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headed to the Colorado mines. 51
    California and Utah had been so far away that only the most valuable and nonperishable goods could be supplied overland. But Denver was only six hundred miles away, and as the center of the new emigration, it rapidly developed a consumer market which had to be provisioned by wagon. Teamsters drove more than 15 million pounds of goods to Denver in 1860. By 1866, over 100 million pounds of goods found their way to the Queen City of the Rockies, and much of it passed through the vicinity of Leavenworth. 52
    As important as supplying Denver was satisfying the wants and needs of emigrants. By 1860, there were primitive hotels along the entire route, so that one could journey from Leavenworth to Denver in virtually any kind of weather without ever sleeping under the stars. Road ranches, whiskey holes, and general provisioners sprung up along the main routes. From their adobe hovels, tents, or frame houses, these entrepreneurs offered a wide range of consumer commodities: wheel rims, ax handles, clothes, hats, matches, whiskey, horseshoes, tobacco, baking supplies, liniments, and more, all of which had to be hauled out to these trailside outposts on freight wagons. 53
    So emigrant wagons and freight-hauling “prairie schooners” crowded onto the trails alongside a burgeoning form of passenger transport, stagecoaches. By 1857, stages already ran from Leavenworth north into Nebraska Territory along the Platte River, to Kearny and on to Laramie. Stimulated by the surge of emigrants to the Colorado goldfields, in 1859 Leavenworth’s premier transport capitalist, William Russell, joined up with a new partner and created the Leavenworth and Pikes Peak Express, running a faster, more direct route (it took about a week) between Leavenworth and Denver via the Smoky Hill River in western Kansas. Russell and his partners expended vast sums to lay out the route and build the twenty-seven stage stations needed along the way, and the new, more direct connection thrilled emigrants with its possibilities. In Denver, the arrival of the new company’s first stage on May 7 was greeted with all the joy that three hundred residents could muster. But their party at the foot of the Rockies was eclipsed by the huge celebration in Leavenworth when the stage returned on May 20. Banner headlines announcing the linkage to the Colorado mines were followed by two days of parades, dinners, and bloviating speeches. 54
    Kansas settlers could not ignore the prodigious expansion of Leavenworth’s freight and transport industry, especially Russell, Majors, and Waddell. The company was said to employ 6,000 teamsters and 45,000 oxen. One historian calls Russell, Majors, and Waddell “the Mayflower Van Line of their time,” and however many people they really employed, their facilities were awesome in 1859. That year, one traveler extolled their Leavenworth company yard: “Such acres of wagons! such pyramids of axeltrees! such herds of oxen! such regiments of drivers and employees!” 55
    These developments were not lost on the Cody family. Isaac had not only driven a stage between Chicago and Davenport, he also conducted various side businesses with Russell and Majors before his death. 56 Leavenworth was only a few miles from the family home. Trains of two dozen or more freight wagons were a frequent impressive sight. Teams of up to twenty oxen hauled wagons, with iron-covered wheels as tall as a man, loaded with up to seven thousand pounds of goods. Each train was accompanied by a small herd of horses, necessary for herding the extra oxen. Prairie schooners dwarfed emigrant wagons. From miles away, their canvas-covered bows bulked over the horizon like the sails of a ship on the sea. The teamsters who drove these outfits swaggered beside the wagons, and their mastery of the long whips they cracked over the backs of animals, and of an extraordinary lexicon of profanity, made them both frightening and