Studley’s performance closed on March 30. The next evening, the real Cody opened with Buntline and Omohundro in Scouts of the Prairie at Niblo’s Garden, where they played until mid-April.50 Then, following a brief stint at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Cody’s troupe left New York. A month and a half later, the real Cody was touring the workingmen’s theaters of industrial upstate New York, while, back in the city, Studley was in the Cody role again, at the Theatre Comique.51
The compelling entertainment in this concoction of reality and representation came at least in part from its resonance with a fad for playful imitation which permeated late Victorian America. As manufacturing and mass production came to define the American economy, copies of things increasingly replaced real things. The basis of middle-class culture was imitation of elites. Machine production of goods, cheap but realistic imitations of furniture, clothing, and architecture, allowed middle-class people to appropriate elite fashions easily. Mimicry and copy thus became central to middle-class life.52
In this context, self-styled arbiters of taste like Edith Wharton hewed to the authentic, but to most people, the empowerment of imitation was too great to ignore. If copies of authentic goods allowed middle-class people to express equality with elites on the cheap, why not celebrate imitation? In this spirit, middle-class people intentionally confused the fake and the real as a form of cultural play, turning the imitation into a category of its own. The most daring imitations were those that crossed the line between Nature and Art, mimicking the one with the other. Thus, many middle-class parlors displayed paper flowers mingled with real flowers, wax or marble fruit in bowls of real fruit, real ivy (grown from cuttings in a bottle of water) climbing wallpaper on which were printed realistic ivy patterns, and iron furniture shaped like twigs and branches. This interpolation of fake and real proliferated across American living rooms, a new aesthetic that created enjoyment by fooling the senses, simultaneously celebrating industrial mass production and domesticating it within the parlor, and honoring the skill of the decorator.53
In its cultural implications, it went far beyond living room decor, expressing the playful, entertaining mixture of trick and truth behind the period’s most popular entertainment, the artful deception. It also resonated with the most successful plays and novels, which explored mimicry, doubles, disguises, and imposture at length. Henry James was fascinated with imitation in middle-class life, and Mark Twain’s parade of double identities, fakes, and tall tales wound through every one of his books from Roughing It and Huckleberry Finn to Life on the Mississippi and his own autobiography. 54
Reviews of Buffalo Bill plays are too sparse and fragmentary to allow us insight into the fascinating give-and-take between the real man and his stage imitators. Were there actors who played Buffalo Bill more convincingly than Cody did? We cannot know, but the bait-and-switch of fake and real in the Cody game amounted to playful deception which mimicked and lampooned the more serious deceptions of commerce. Advertisements for dramas starring Cody and Omohundro appeared in long lists of ads for other commodities—umbrellas, skin cream, hair dye, and hats—with the ubiquitous call to brand loyalty, “Accept No Substitutes.” Where New Yorkers had to select the best and most effective products from a host of imitators, the frontier melodrama turned the parade of real and fake into a harmless entertainment. Perhaps there were loyalists who believed Cody was the only acceptable “Buffalo Bill.” But the continuing popularity of the faux Codys suggests that for audiences, the real Cody was a kind of substitute after all, a standin for the dramatic Cody popularized by J. B. Studley and others. A sip of distilled authenticity was refreshing, but the cocktail of dramatic actor and historical actor was what made the show fun. J. B. Studley played Buffalo Bill again in October of 1876, his performance again the “advance Bill” for the real Bill Cody, who appeared in Scouts of the Plains in Brooklyn the following week.55 Frank Dowd (or Doud) played Buffalo Bill at the Theatre Comique early in the summer of 1877; William Cody played in May Cody, or Lost and Won, at the Bowery Theater at summer’s end. 56 Stage mimicry of Buffalo Bill continued even after his stage career ended. As late as 1891, during the peak years of his Wild West show fame, vaudeville theaters were performing short comic plays about his life, such as Buffalo Bill Abroad and at Home, their outrageous fakery a counterpoint to his avowed authenticity.57
But in the late 1870s, professional actors cooled to the role of Buffalo Bill, and by the 1880s, Buffalo Bill stage plays sans the actual William Cody were the exclusive domain of cheap variety theaters. The waning popularity of Cody’s professional imitators can be traced in some degree to the emergence of at least a half-dozen other frontiersmen claiming to be “authentic” scouts, each appearing in melodramas with frontier themes, constituting a genre of performance that Cody’s publicist, John M. Burke, called “the scout business.”58
Although punctuated by the rhetoric of reality, and purveyed by scouts who were themselves symbols of authenticity, the scout business provided mimicry more subtle and entrancing than even the alternating appearance of fake and real Codys. So many scouts moved onto the stage, inspiring so many dime novels and ever more stage plays, that professional actors were no longer necessary to carry off the impression that somebody was being imitated, and somebody might be real. In fact, the genre of frontier melodrama that Cody kicked off spawned so many “real” frontier heroes playing themselves, so thoroughly appropriating the props, gestures, scripts, and even the biographies of one another, that the stars of the entertainment could be seen alternately—or simultaneously—as “genuine” heroes and as imitations of one another. Thus, in October 1874, Donald McKay, an army scout in California’s Modoc War, appeared in a play about the life of Kit Carson, alongside a troupe alleged to consist of real Warm Springs Indians. One month later, McKay himself became the subject of Donald Mackay, a play in which actor Oliver Doud Byron played the California scout.59
There were others. After Cody and Omohundro split with Buntline, the novelist persuaded another resident of North Platte, by this time a primary staging area for western imposture, to take his show east. Thus, Charles “Dashing Charlie” Emmett, a scout for the Second Cavalry, starred as himself in a Buntline play apparently based on the life of scout Frank North. LittleRifle, or, The White Spirit of the Pawnees was successful enough that Emmett took the drama with him when he, too, split with Buntline. Venturing out to impersonate himself (or was it Frank North?) in stage plays, he was buoyed by the company of esteemed actress Alice Placide.60 Emmett played New York City in the spring of 1874, and assisted Cody with a benefit performance in November. Emmett’s Little Rifle followed on the heels of Byron’s Donald Mackay at Wood’s Museum the same month.61
How much the scout business was predicated on scouts imitating one another, to be imitated in turn by actors who sometimes claimed to be “real” western heroes, can be seen in the twisted tale of representation surrounding Cody’s mentor in artful deception, Wild Bill Hickok. As we have seen already, Cody imitated Hickok in his early days, appropriating elements of his biography, such as spying in the Civil War. On the stage, Cody continued to work the Hickok vein. In his first stage appearance, Buffalo Bill fought “Jake McKanlass,” loosely based on one of Hickok’s real-life victims, Dave McCanles, with a bowie knife. By 1874, he was parroting some of Hickok’s other tall tales, claiming to have ridden for the Pony Express. By casting himself and Hickok in Scouts of the Prairie in 1873, he upped the ante in the contest between fakery and reality, with two scouts named Bill who looked and dressed very much alike, each an “original” western hero.
According to Cody, the role of Wild Bill Hickok became a prominent one for professional actors, too, sometimes in unconventional ways. Where scouts represented themselves on the stage and off, professional actors—or confidence men—sometimes took to representing themselves as scouts, both on the stage and off. Thus, Cody relates that after Wild Bill Hickok’s brief tour with his company in 1873–74, a rival stage company hired an act
or to play the role of Hickok onstage, and to impersonate the gunfighter in public venues such as restaurants, saloons, and on the street. In Cody’s account, the last stage appearance of the real Wild Bill Hickok was when he leapt onto the boards and thrashed this impostor in front of a packed house, just before returning to the West.62
Whether or not Cody’s Hickok tale was apocryphal, it captures the heightened tension between fakery and reality that energized frontier melodrama to its core. Before frontier melodrama emerged as its own subgenre, the standard melodrama’s devotion to disguises and masks, with villains, heroes, and long-lost children continually donning new faces and new identities, was central to its appeal for audiences consumed with the artistry of imitation. The obvious impostures provided dramatic irony, allowing the audience insight into the action that the characters did not have, resolving it when the masks came off at drama’s end.63
The story of Hickok in the theater, punching the daylights out of somebody mimicking him, suggests how much the stars of frontier melodrama not only parodied all drama but also performed parodies within parodies. At times, the scouts in the dramas were so similar as to be almost interchangeable, and the genre threatened to swallow the “authentic” men who succeeded in it. There were two Jacks, “Texas Jack” and John “Captain Jack” Crawford (the latter emerged quickly on Omohundro’s coattails in the mid-1870s). To the consternation of both men, audiences and seasoned show troupers alike often confused them.64 Paradoxically, this was an appeal of the frontier or “border” drama. As the number of “real” scouts in “true” border dramas multiplied, myriad variations on the theme of authenticity and fakery permeated the action, making the typical masks and clumsy disguises of ordinary melodrama seem tame by comparison.
Buffalo Bill endured longest in the genre, and came to stand as its most “authentic” product. For this reason, scouts and actors who sought bona fides as frontiersmen attached themselves in one way or another to him. But in fact, he developed his own character by borrowing freely from others, particularly Hickok. For two years, in 1875 and ’76, Cody played the lead in a play originally written for the lawman, Wild Bill, or Life on the Border. Because so many people confused Cody and Hickok anyway, few members of the audience probably realized that he wasn’t the play’s title character. But even if they were ignorant of Buffalo Bill’s imitation of Wild Bill, the play contains dizzying twists on the theme of reality and fakery that pervaded the frontier melodramatic genre. The action swirls around counterfeiters who disguise themselves as Indians. Thus, the real scout plays a scout, opposite actors who play villains who fake Indians who fake money. 65
The denouement of the play resolves the many tensions between the fake and the real in favor of the latter. The character of Bill Cody apprehends the malingerers, and rescues George Reynolds—the father of Cody’s love interest, Emma Reynolds—who has been kidnapped by the counterfeiters. In the end, the counterfeit ceases: the white men no longer play Indians, and they no longer make false money. The true scout, Buffalo Bill, whose fidelity is reinforced by the fact that he is “playing” himself, finds “true” love with virtuous Emma, the “true woman.”
Not all of the mimicry attached to the scout business was playful. On occasion, it veered into fraud, which posed real dangers for the leading lights of the scout business. For the game of authentic-and-copy to work, for audiences to enjoy the artistry of imitation, somebody had to be “the real thing,” that standard of reality against which the imitation could be judged. Cody’s prospects hinged on retaining his status as the “real” Buffalo Bill. Should he lose his grip on that role, there was no other for him. He was not a professional actor.
In this sense, offstage impersonators posed a threat, something Hickok appears to have understood in his violent reaction to his impostor, and something Cody and Omohundro had to confront as well. After their first season together, Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack began carrying endorsements from military officers and western acquaintances, something that they each continued to do throughout their stage careers, because fraudulent theatrical companies, featuring actors claiming to be them, often traveled ahead of their own troupes.66
In other cases, actors who played scouts in productions featuring real scouts like Cody and Omohundro would branch out on their own, trying to sell themselves as authentic frontiersmen. When Texas Jack took a break from the Buffalo Bill Combination in 1874, Cody temporarily replaced him with an actor. His identity remains a mystery, but he appeared as—and claimed to be—Kit Carson, Jr. Mustered out of the company on Omohundro’s return in 1875, he formed his own stage company and set out to make a name for himself in the scout business.67
The efforts of Kit Carson, Jr., were in vain. His combination failed. 68 But he infuriated Cody, a fact that suggests how serious a matter imitation and impersonation could become for the stars of frontier melodrama. The business was fiercely competitive, with so many scouts qua actors and actors qua scouts that enduring as the chief draw required constant attention not only to stage production, but to authentic frontier exploits as well. Cody’s entire stage career depended on his remaining the figure that other figures were imitating, even if much of his stage persona was a skillful imitation of other scouts, like Wild Bill Hickok, and, possibly, of other actors as well. We may assume that it was for this reason that Cody, who regularly made more in a week at the theater than he took home in a whole season of scouting, returned to the West to scout for the army in 1874, on the Big Horn expedition, and again in 1876, as the Great Sioux War burst upon the northern Plains.69
Cody in the stage outfit of black velvet and silver trim in which he killed Yellow Hair (whose name was mistranslated as Yellow Hand). Cody’s the atricalism in Indian war had everything to do with the competitiveness of frontier melodrama. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.
His careful attention to theatrical trappings in the scalping of Yellow Hair had everything to do with the endless one-upmanship of the scout business. Indeed, Cody’s attention to theatrical effect in the killing (his costume, his shout “First scalp for Custer!”) and his realism in staging it (same costume, same shout—and the real scalp, too) entangled event and performance so thoroughly that historians and Cody partisans would debate for decades whether the killing was real or somehow faked. The movement of the encounter from battlefield to stage was so smooth that at least one man swore the enmity between Cody and Yellow Hair actually began in the theater. In 1936, longtime Rochester resident Robert Hicks told historian A. E. Sheldon that Cody had hired Yellow Hair for his stage combination in 1874, but one night Buffalo Bill flattened him with a roundhouse when the Cheyenne drank too much and began insulting ladies backstage. At that moment, claimed the alleged eyewitness, Yellow Hair swore vengeance, and the feud culminated two years later, at Warbonnet Creek.70
In fact, Cody knew the frustrations of Indian fighting well enough to know, the moment he heard that Custer had fallen, that the Indian wars finally had a genuine battlefield martyr, a figure who would stand for the U.S. Army’s conquest of the Plains the way Stonewall Jackson had stood for the Confederate cause in the Civil War. By becoming Custer’s authentic avenger, shedding symbolic first blood and returning with the scalp to the eastern stage, Cody could claim to be the embodiment of the frontier hero, the white Indian who ventures over the line between civilization and savagery to vanquish evil by adapting savage methods, and then ventures back, without ever compromising his innate nobility.71
But timing was as important as symbolism. News of Custer’s death hit the nation’s newspapers on July 4. The Fifth Cavalry was in the field and did not hear till July 7. On July 18, Cody wrote to Louisa that he had taken Yellow Hair’s scalp, and a few days later he sent the scalp, warbonnet, shield, and other trappings to Rochester, where they were displayed in the window of a friend’s shop, with a large poster explaining that Buffalo Bill had killed and scalped Yellow Hair in revenge for Custer’s death. On July 23, the New York Herald ran the story of the Cody�
��Yellow Hair fight.72 Buffalo Bill became not only Custer’s avenger, but the first of those avengers. All others were imitations. Accept No Substitutes.
Yellow Hair’s belongings, on display in a Rochester, New York, storefront. Cody displayed them in the lobbies of theaters, too, but many condemned the practice. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.
In 1877, Cody’s publicist, John Burke, noted privately, and in his typically cascading prose, that “Bill has had every advantage that could possibly assist a man, from the Sioux stirring up a stink, to poor Custer’s misfortune, and Yellow Hand’s [sic] unfortunate accident, with the hirsute incident, a ‘custom more honored in the breach than in the observance’ but very efficient in working up the ‘bauble reputation.’ ”73 Yellow Hair’s scalp became Cody’s trademark, distinguishing him in the scout business so effectively that other scouts’ attempts to mark their own authenticity always seemed to mimic his. The futility of competing with Cody’s brand of authenticity was perhaps most apparent to John “Captain Jack” Crawford, the self-styled “Poet Scout,” who starred briefly in Cody’s combination in 1877–78 before going on to a lifelong rivalry with Buffalo Bill. Crawford was an Irish immigrant and Civil War veteran who emigrated from Pennsylvania to the Black Hills of Dakota Territory in 1874 (a move which may have been inspired by watching Cody’s theatrical troupe perform in his hometown of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, in 1873).74 Crawford became a correspondent for the Omaha Bee and an early settler at Custer City, Dakota Territory, where he set himself up as captain of his own company of volunteer scouts at the beginning of the Sioux War of 1876. Cody met up with Crawford during his scout forays that summer, and threw him an assist by recommending him to the military command as his own replacement when he left the Plains in August.75
Louis S. Warren Page 25