by Jill Jonnes
Backstage, Buffalo Bill, show promoter Major Burke, and impresario Nate Salsbury realized something was very amiss when the audience barely responded as the Indians, their bodies vibrant in thick red, green, and blue war paint, roared into the arena, riding bareback and shrieking bloodcurdling whoops as they surrounded and attacked the wagon train pulled by eight mules. When the clarion notes of a trumpet signaled the arrival of the cavalry and the defeat of the Indians, the French again sat largely mute.
This poster promoting the Wild West show was plastered everywhere in Paris. (Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming; 1.69.442)
Buffalo Bill thunders into the arena on his horse.
Buffalo Bill turned to Annie Oakley and told her she was going on next, well before her usual slot. Dressed in her fringed buckskin dress, boots, and cowgirl hat, she made sure her entrance was, “a very pretty one. She tripped in, bowing and waving, and wafting kisses. . . . She was a consummate actress, with a personality that made itself felt as soon as she entered the arena.” On a table a small arsenal of shotguns and rifles awaited. Small, slender, with nerves of steel, Annie Oakley, Little Sure-shot, coolly surveyed the grandstands. “They sat like icebergs at first,” she said. “There was no friendly welcome, just a ‘you must show me’ air.” Major Burke had a few “clackers” whose job was to get the applause going. Oakley told her husband, Frank, to call them off. “I wanted honest applause or none at all.”
A hollow glass ball the size of an orange whizzed through the air and Oakley whirled into action, shooting it precisely. The air was soon alive with flying objects, and Oakley blasted each and every one, tossing her guns on the table as she used up their shots. The aristocratic crowd, ardent hunters and military veterans, could not believe what they were witnessing. Finally came the long-delayed “ahs” and then, as the shots came faster, cries of “Bravo! Bravo!” rang through the smoky air as the applause built louder and louder. Oakley was shooting as fast as the wind, absolute mistress of her guns, turning her back and whipping around to dispatch a number of clay pigeons. As the last hot gun hit the table the crowd roared to its feet, throwing handkerchiefs and sunshades into the arena. Annie Oakley had arrived. “The icebergs were ready to fight for me during my six months’ stay in Paris,” she said later.
“As the cheers kept up I ran to my room, made a complete quick change, jumped onto my wild little horse ‘Billy’ and away we went around the arena at full speed.” Riding swiftly, she aimed true to blast apart yet more glass balls and pigeons and, even more astounding to the audience, shot holes straight through French coins tossed in the air. Finally, Oakley leaned over, jumped off the horse, and bowed. The audience stayed on its feet, proclaiming its delight.
Nate Salsbury, who had discovered Oakley a mere four years earlier, would always credit her with saving the Paris Wild West show, as the won-over French suddenly thrilled to the subsequent numbers involving cowboys and Indians, buffalo, fights, and chases. To the utter delight of the nervous Americans, the Parisians decided that they loved this rollicking pageant of frontier America, Colonel Cody’s romanticized version of taming the West. “A great success in every way,” crowed the Paris Herald, in a front-page story headlined “Carnot Among the Cowboys,” “A Brilliant Gathering,” “The American Colony and All Paris, Political and Social, Muster in Full Force.” Cody himself was amused to see that “fashionable young men bought American and Mexican saddles for their rides in the Bois. Cowboy hats appeared everywhere on the street. Relics from the plains and mountains, bows, moccasins, and Indian baskets sold like hot cakes in the souvenir stores.”
Under Cody’s powerful spell, the French were even willing to try snack ing on the pink and white popcorn balls sold at Wild West refreshment stands. This was no small gustatory concession, for the French had long held that corn was a food fit only for pigs. Many Parisian Americans had been appalled to discover that the just-opened World’s Fair featured an American Corn Palace, located in the agricultural displays near the Trocadéro, where the uses of this Yankee favorite were “to be picturesquely introduced to Europeans.” As the Paris Herald opined of this Western undertaking, “Its success is uncertain.”
Back in 1871, early on in his career, Buffalo Bill had been the western guide for James Gordon Bennett and a sizable party of glamorous New York and Chicago nabobs out to experience the Great Plains and buffalo hunting. Such a “high-toned” group, decided Cody, demanded dazzle. Already rather famous for his Indian-fighting exploits and as a character in Western dime novels, he had donned his best fringed and spangled buckskin coat and pants, a crimson shirt, and a broad sombrero, and then mounted a pure white horse. Buffalo Bill coming into camp had been a vision one of the guests never forgot: “Carrying his rifle lightly in one hand, as his horse came toward us on an easy gallop, he realized to perfection the bold hunter and gallant sportsman of the plains.” The men adored Cody, who over a period of ten days had shown them western life and helped them drive the buffalo nearer to extinction—they collectively slaughtered six hundred beasts, not to mention two hundred elk.
One view from the Eiffel Tower’s first-floor promenade
Buffalo Bill possessed an innate sense of the theatrical. When the Winchester repeating rifle became known as “the gun that won the West,” Bill Cody quickly allied himself with the potent weapon and its famous slogan. In the dime novels that spread his fame, he often used a Winchester. He also appeared in the Winchester Company’s 1875 catalogue testifying, “I have tried and used nearly every kind of gun made in the United States, and for general hunting, or Indian fighting, I pronounce your improved Winchester the boss.”
On Sunday, the day after Buffalo Bill’s brilliant opening performance, happy crowds were still walking up the Eiffel Tower stairways in record numbers. Brief midday rain squalls had given way to idyllic May weather, three of the four first-platform eateries were now open and abuzz with diners, and flocks of university students, young soldiers, and military officers-in-training strolled about. Far below on the boulevards, the city’s famous chestnut trees were in full pink bloom. In the tower’s upper reaches, men were still working away at the as-yet-unfinished details.
At about three o’clock, a Monsieur Paul Angeray, nattily attired in a new gray redingote jacket, trousers, and fine silk top hat, was lingering on the second platform near the offices of Le Figaro when, to his astonishment, he found himself coated head to foot in yellowish paint. Shouts of surprise and dismay rose all about as more than a dozen other ill-fated tourists were splattered to varying degrees with the same thick paint. “We laughed a lot,” wrote the Figaro reporters, “but the monsieur, he was not happy.” It seemed that one of Eiffel’s painters, coating part of an elevator on the intermediate platform, had knocked over his bucket, creating havoc below. The seventeen victims were reimbursed 1,563 francs for their ruined outfits.
The reporters at Le Figaro were far less amused when they later found part of a thin beam had fallen at the same time as the paint and sheared off a cornice by their office. “The platform was at that moment covered with people. It is astonishing that no one was hit,” they observed. On Monday morning, it happened again, and this time the little beam fell near the Bar Jacquet. Then on Tuesday, at about 3:00 p.m. a bolt came hurtling through the glass ceiling of the reporters’ office, piercing the very seat a man had just vacated. The journalists became incensed. “Had he been there, he would have been killed instantly,” Le Figaro reported. “We would like to remind M. Eiffel’s engineers that the tower’s platforms are a promenade, not a battlefield. A fatal accident would badly mar the success of their enterprise. It is a miracle it hasn’t happened yet.” In fact, shortly thereafter, on Friday, May 24, Eiffel Tower worker Angelo Scagliotti died. There is no record of what exactly befell him, but on that day he became the third Eiffel construction fatality. He left behind a wife and three children under the age of five. His widow, Amelia Novarini, who said she would like to return to Italy, was given five hundred francs for
that purpose, as well as a later payment of four thousand francs when she agreed to file no legal action.
A frustrated Gustave Eiffel, meanwhile, was still wrestling with the intractable elevators. On Sunday, May 26, the Roux cog-railroad elevator in the east leg had finally gone into regular operation. Eiffel had become so infuriated at the delayed opening that he had taken the firm to court for missing its February 15 deadline. The Roux made a terrible noise as it clanked its way up and down, but for those not wishing to trudge up 347 steps to the first floor, it was a civilized, modern alternative. The elevator’s hydraulic workings were kept greased with a mixture of pig or ox fat mixed with hemp. On that same Sunday, at seven thirty in the morning, Le Figaro de la Tour proudly reported, its staff had received special permission to ride in the otherwise off-limits Otis elevator to reach their second-platform office.
Eiffel-Otis relations, however, remained badly strained. On the morning of Wednesday, May 29, three days after the Roux lifts went into full service (and a full two weeks after the tower had finally opened to the public), Mr. Brown of the Otis elevator company arrived at the tower. He had once again sailed all the way from New York, this time to be present when his firm demonstrated to the fair committee and Gustave Eiffel once and for all that his company’s elevators were completely safe, for only then could Otis finally put its machines into belated service. The London Times Paris correspondent Henri de Blowitz heard rumors of the test run and hurried over to find workmen filling the Otis double-decker elevator compartments with three thousand kilograms of lead, to simulate a full load of people. Next, the Otis workers fastened the elevators with ordinary thick ropes, removing altogether the usual overhead steel wire cables. “What was to be done,” the reporter explained, “was to cut the ropes, and allow the lift to fall, so as to ascertain whether, if the steel cables were to give way, the brake would work properly and support the lift.” Thirty people were present for the all-important trial, and concern was clear on every face.
After a couple of hours, “two carpenters, armed with great hatchets, had ascended to the lift, and were ready to cut the [rope] cables on a signal to be given by Mr. Brown.” As everyone present understood, if the Otis elevator plummeted to the ground, it would be ruined and there would be no means (for the foreseeable future) for the hordes of fair visitors to reach the second platform—except by foot. This, in turn, would greatly diminish the number of visitors who would take the final elevator to the top. The financial repercussions to Eiffel would be profound. The blow to reputations French and American would be severe. And the enemies of the republic would certainly crow if the tower symbolic of all that was modern offered no easy means to reach its summit. As the moment of truth loomed, Eiffel turned to Mr. Brown and asked, “Are you alarmed?”
Mr. Brown, feeling no fondness for his Gallic client, responded coolly, “Only two things can happen.” He then called out to the carpenters up above, “One, two, three!”
With that, the hatchets swung, and the rope was sliced in a stroke.
Everyone gasped as the enormous fifteen-ton Otis machine began to fall. But then, “the lift began to move more slowly, it swayed for a moment from left to right, stuck on the brake, and stopped.” The thirty men present cheered madly and applauded: The Otis elevator’s safety brakes had stopped it thirty feet above the ground. As Elisha G. Otis had promised all those decades earlier, “All safe, gentlemen.” Later, when Eiffel and Brown inspected the machine, “Not a pane of glass in the lift had been broken or cracked.”
Out in Neuilly, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West had become un succès fou. Twice each day fifteen thousand spectators packed the grandstand, while many were turned away. Among that huge audience sat Paul Gauguin, who was determined to soak up all the exotica of the fair, including these astonishing cowboys and Indians. Toward the end of May, he wrote to Émile Bernard that he must see the show, and urged him to come on Saturday: “You must get to les Ternes by 3 o’clock, otherwise there’s no chance of getting a seat.” Gauguin waited, but Bernard did not arrive. Gauguin later wrote him and chastised him for not showing up. “I was at Buffalo. You absolutely have to come see this. It is hugely interesting. So come this Wednesday to Schuff’s, and we’ll go in the afternoon. Let me know if you can’t.”
The involvement of the Indians in the show suggested they harbored few resentments. Chief Red Shirt had conceded in a London interview that yes, the U.S. government had taken away their land and “white men have eaten up our deer and our buffalo, but the Government now give us food that we may not starve. . . . Our children will learn the whiteman’s civilization and to live like him.” Red Shirt was himself intent on learning about the white man and mastering his ways.
For the French citizen desiring to better understand the mysteries of all things Buffalo Bill and his Wild West, the show offered a fifty-page illustrated program (in French) whose serious and solemn tone alone was sufficient to render much of it unintentionally hilarious. Between the shameless showbiz puffery and the highly embroidered version of Colonel Cody’s life and times, a gullible Frenchman could be forgiven for concluding that Buffalo Bill had almost single-handedly won the American West. A two-page elegy to “Vieux Charlie, Le Cheval qui porta Buffalo Bill 160 kilo-mètres en 9 heures 45 minutes,” as well as all manner of homage to the cowboy, the Indian, the Pony Express, and the Deadwood Stage, made for a peculiar and potent literary brew. The French press freely dipped into it, happy to portray Guillaume Bufle as some sort of musketeer, a western D’Artagnan, complete with the flowing tresses and thigh-high soft leather boots.
Before and after the Wild West shows, the Parisians flocked to the picturesque Wild West encampment, ambling its broad gravel paths, thrilled to examine more closely this exotic slice of disappearing American frontier. The last real French encounter with American Indians had been almost half a century earlier, when artist/showman George Catlin brought twelve Iowa Indians to Paris to stir up interest in his five hundred works of art displayed as the “Indian Gallery.” King Louis-Philippe was enthralled and ordered a command performance of Indian dancing in one of the ornate salles in the Louvre Palace.
Writer George Sand was among the guests at that occasion and was astonished by the sight of the Indians in their full war paint and feathers. Catlin’s paintings she described as “hideous scenes of initiations into mysteries, of agony, torture, of Homeric chases, of deadly combat; in sum, all the testimony and all the fearfully dramatic scenes of savage life.” Charles Baudelaire summed up the general French opinion: “When M. Catlin came to Paris, with his Museum and his Ioways, the word went round that he was a good fellow who could neither paint nor draw, and that if he had produced some tolerable studies, it was thanks only to his courage and his patience.” In fact, asserted Baudelaire, “M. Catlin can paint and draw very well indeed . . . [he] has captured the proud, free character and the noble expression of these splendid fellows in a masterly way.”
That had all been many years ago, and the French were still eager to witness the real denizens of an American West they knew only from stories and paintings. They peered at the cowboys’ spacious tents and lingered about the Indian village with its towering teepees decorated with painted animals and hunting scenes, where lived many handsome women and small children. “The Parisians appear to take a great interest [in the Indians] . . . they require to examine closely the costumes of the warriors in order to be convinced that they are really nothing thicker than paint; the colors are so vivid and boldly applied to all parts of the body that the all but absolute nudity of the Indian is invisible.”
The French mingled with the Indians and with cowboys such as Bronco Bill and Buck Taylor, and took a closer look at the ponies, twenty woolly bison, and the eight Eskimo sled dogs. “The prettiest women of the capital throng the tents of the cowboys,” one American publication proudly reported, “and the most dandy of dandies pet the girls who shoot and ride.” Indeed, wrote The New York Times, “The Indian tents are already a chic attractio
n, however Indian morality may suffer. The braves are courted and feted by the prettiest women in Paris.” The ladies of the demimonde particularly admired the Indians. “Yesterday Valtesse and Depaix carried them cigarettes. Wherever you go you hear of nothing but ‘Buffalo Beel.’ ”
Nor was it just the ladies of the demimonde who were taken with the Indians. When Boulanger’s great patroness, the Duchesse d’Uzès, announced that she would lead a stag hunt in the Versailles woods one Sunday “for the benefit of the Berck Hospital for Scrofulous Children,” part of the draw was that “Buffalo Bill’s Indians are to take part.” And there were the inevitable scandals. Within weeks, the wife of a French nobleman had run off with one of the Wild West Indians, and the York Weekly Post reported their arrival in London: “The irate husband is on their track and arrived at Charing Cross on Sunday night in hot pursuit of the guilty couple, and he vows that he will kill them both. Their destination is said to be America. The wife has succeeded in securing several millions of francs in convertible securities—‘to the bearer.’ The couple propose to go West, buy a ranch, and settle in Columbia, where the Indian came from. The Liver-pool steamers are being closely watched.”
The Wild West show Indians at the camp in Neuilly, outside Paris
