Edward Zane Carroll Judson lived a life that’s almost beyond belief, except the details of his numerous exploits have been confirmed and are recounted in The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline, by Julia Bricklin (© 2020; a TwoDot Book; 180 pp + 32 pages of notes and index).
The author claims that Judson, better known by his pseudonym of Ned Buntline, “paved the way for authors such as Zane Grey” (the author of many Western novels, including Riders of the Purple Sage).
Buntline was known as “The King of the Dime Novel.” He was incredibly prolific and was the creator of western clichés such as “head ‘em off at the pass,” although he never saw the West except for long train rides to and from California in 1868-69.
Historian/writer Clay Reynolds described Judson’s fiction as “utterly horrid” but typical of the period: “corny, over-written, tritely plotted, naïve, ill-informed and highly romantic.” Nonetheless, Judson “constitutes an important literary bridge between the early frontier novels of James Fenimore Cooper (The Last of the Mohicans and The Deerslayer) and Owen Wister (The Virginian).”
Mark Twain referenced one of Buntline’s works in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Judson is best known for his creation of the celebrity William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody – who by the turn of the 20th century was perhaps the most famous American in the world – and to a lesser extent “Wild Bill” Hickok and John Baker “Texas Jack” Omohundro.
“From his youthful exploits as a stowaway and sailor to his brief career as a midshipman, a kind of mountebank and raconteur on riverboats, to a supporter of the Cuban revolution, champion of the Seminoles, to duelist and accused and lynched murderer to broadside pundit to instigator of major city riots, to temperance leader to drunk, loyal family man and bigot, braggart, master of disguise, soldier, nativist, political pundit, patriot, adventurer, impresario, actor, outdoorsman, politician, journalist, philanthropist, and tireless author, he was like a dozen or more individuals rolled into one.”
Judson was born in New York state in 1821 and left home at age 15 to join the Navy. On a U.S. man-of-war he sailed for the Caribbean; the Navy then sent him to Florida, where he was assigned to a cutter that patrolled southern Florida battling Seminole Indians.
About that time Judson created his pen name “Ned Buntline” (a buntline is one of the ropes attached to the foot of a square sail) and wrote of his swashbuckling adventures in stories such as A Chase in the Everglades. He detached from the Navy in 1845.
In Nashville, Tennessee, in 1846, Judson shot and killed the husband of a teen with whom he allegedly had been having “criminal intercourse.” A mob tried to lynch him “but the rope broke and he managed to escape,” Bricklin relates.
In New York City he wrote dozens of novels that “turned him into a household name and a wealthy man.”
Although Judson was married to a woman from a respectable family in lower Manhattan, a well-known madam accosted him in the middle of Broadway in April 1849, “cussed him out, then thrashed him with a horse whip until he needed medical attention,” Bricklin writes. The woman “had no compunction whatsoever” about running a brothel, but she took umbrage at Buntline’s description of her as “the infamous cast-off mistress of a deceased gambler…”
A month later Judson instigated a bloody riot in New York City – because a British actor was appearing in a performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth at a theater and Judson thought the part should have gone to an American-born actor.
Thousands of people rioted, and two divisions of National Guard infantry and a company of mounted troops were called out. When the smoke cleared, “hundreds of people lay on the streets dead, dying or maimed.” Many were injured by thrown rocks or other debris or had been trampled; others had been shot.
Buntline was convicted later that year of instigating the NYC riot and he was sent to prison for a year. And his wife divorced him.
After his release from prison, Buntline spent the next 20 years crisscrossing the United States “as the human embodiment of contradictions,” Bricklin writes.
He “delivered fiery temperance lectures” but “drank to excess for days at a time and then spent an equal number of days completely sober, unable to stop chastising any family or friends who dared have so much as a brandy after dinner,” the author reports.
Buntline “proclaimed the virtues of public peace, but … stirred up another riot in St. Louis” in 1852, in which at least three men were killed. “He despaired of social injustice but only reluctantly spoke or wrote against slavery. He admired strong and independent women” but was contemptuous of suffragists. “He professed a sanctimonious devotion to the institutions of chastity and marriage but was a notorious womanizer and married at least nine women – sometimes two, even three, at a time.”
Buntline isolated himself in the Adirondack Mountains, where he “churned out some hundred novels in just a couple of years,” then abandoned that retreat for crowded barracks as a private in the Civil War (1861-65). His real and imagined experiences in the war inspired dozens of potboilers.
He never traveled west of Cincinnati, Ohio, after 1869, when he returned to his home state of New York after a temperance tour in California – which included a stopover in North Platte, Nebraska, where he met Cody for the first time.
Cody got a job in 1867, hunting buffalo to feed construction crews of the Kansas Pacific Railroad. In 1868 Gen. Philip Sheridan made Cody chief scout for the 5th Cavalry.
Judson found Cody to be “engaging, talkative and believable.” Most importantly, he deemed Cody to be “the perfect embodiment of righteousness, adventure, and gallantry.” Judson spent several days, perhaps weeks, on the Platte with Cody. When Buntline’s vacation was over, he returned to New York “with his head full of stories.”
In 1872 Judson persuaded Cody to travel east and star in a play Buntline wrote featuring Cody – which provided the template from which Cody developed his popular Wild West show.
When Judson’s experiment with Cody foundered in 1874, he retreated to his mansion in Stamford, New York. By this time, he was earning $10,000 and $20,000 a year from the hundreds of adventure stories he wrote before he ever met Cody and Hickok and the rest. “This amount would place him squarely within millionaire status today,” Bricklin writes.
A contemporary said Buntline’s work was quite popular in his day because although it was “distinctively lowbrow” it “appealed to workers, schoolboys, and people of limited education.”
Judson was a ruffian, a bigamist, slanderer, blackmailer, liar, deadbeat, philanderer, an instigator of riots, and a murderer—who survived a lynching – but he also was a philanthropist, bibliophile, naturalist, and a proponent of law and order.
He died of heart failure in 1886. More than 800 people attended his funeral, according to the New York Times.