Louis S. Warren

by Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody;the Wild West Show

  The failure to do so would have dire consequences. Cody’s career in the 1870s was a straddling act, in which his theatrical appearances and the dime novels about him appealed to the working classes, but his symbolism as an amateur whose theatrical presentation outstrips the professionals resonated with the middle class. Theatrical tastes had once unified American culture, with classical Shakespeare, turgid melodrama, and popular farces playing at the same theaters—indeed, on the same evening—for audiences made up of every social class. But since Buntline’s incitement to violence outside the Astor Place Theater, class tastes had steadily diverged, with the “better class” of theaters becoming so expensive as to be out of range for middle-class families, and lower-class theaters presenting material that would never be translated into more lucrative middle-class fare.120 Without more purchase on middle-class loyalties, Buffalo Bill faced a working-class future.

  Indeed, as social space, the theater was dubious enough that Cody’s reputation as a lowbrow draw would be almost impossible to escape there. The critics who praised Cody’s late-1870s performances did so with surprise, contrasting this “new” Cody with the one everybody knew—and that Buffalo Bill might have been a symbol to the middle class, but he was clearly a hero to the white working class. Cody usually avoided the bald appeals to nativist bigotry with which Buntline was associated. But there can be little doubt that Scouts of the Prairie, with its native-born scouts fending off Indians, Mormons, and immigrants—savages all—reinforced the nativism of American laborers, who adored it. Even more, there is plenty of evidence that this segment of his audience saw Buffalo Bill as their hero in the struggle against the privileged classes and foreign immigrants. The 1870s were a decade of economic calamity and labor unrest. The Panic of 1873 and the Great Strike of 1877 set labor and capital at each other’s throats, and often pitted laboring American natives against immigrant “scabs.” In the economic downturn that followed 1873, renters in the New York region rose up against the impositions of landlords. The Tenants Mutual Society of Montgomery County, which reportedly “countenanced the burning and destruction of the property of exacting landlords,” included among its members one Charles Montanye, “familiarly called ‘Buffalo Bill.’ ” Montanye was arrested in a civil suit alleging his participation in numerous fires that had scorched the holdings of prominent landowner and rentier George Clark.121

  While one faux Cody allegedly burned property in Montgomery County, another was battling German and Irish rivals for domination of a tenement house in the city slums. In a Hell’s Kitchen rookery lived “a Yankee calling himself ‘the renowned Buffalo Bill’ ” and “a fellow known as ‘Dutch John’ ” who competed “at times very fiercely for the honor of being known as ‘boss’ of this place.” This faux Cody, a teamster, “affects beneath his dirt the appearance and manner of a frontiersman. Slightly but powerfully built, he is 6 feet 2 inches in height, with flowing hair, and weighs a trifle over 200 pounds.” Quarreling over the affections of a woman, Buffalo Bill had stabbed Dutch John several years before, but since the wounded man refused to make a complaint, the police could do nothing. 122

  Like the stage character who was their namesake, both of these faux Codys appeared in the press because of their violence in defense of honor, but unlike him, their victims were not frontier savages, but landlords and immigrants. Where Cody and his professional imitators provided a theater of imitation and an embrace of theatricality in everyday life, these amateur imitators implied an all-too-real connection between Cody’s stage theatrics and working-class violence.

  They might have been case studies for other critics of Cody’s drama, who condemned it for appealing to the passions of working-class natives and rough immigrants whose absence of self-restraint was their primary social failing, and one all too evident in the volcanic labor upheavals of the 1870s. In January 1874, the Hartford Daily Courant wrote that Cody’s play was “the most extreme kind of dime novel dramatized. It draws for the same reason that a dime novel sells.”123 For newspaper readers, the words “sensation” and “thrilling” were code words for appeals to unthinking emotion, so that superficially positive reviews of Buffalo Bill’s drama had, for the discerning reader, a cautionary message. Thus, when a Cincinnati paper reported, “ ‘The Scouts of the Prairie’ have become the lions of the stage among that class of people who delight in thrilling romance,” readers concerned about the social composition of the audience would note the reference to “that class” and “thrilling romance.” The rest of the review would affirm their suspicions: “For a sensation play of blood, scalps, and whooping Indians, ‘The Scouts of the Prairie’ answers every purpose.”124

  Inability to control one’s appetites was a defining condition of barbarism, and a criticism that social observers leveled at Indians and working-class people alike, especially “gallery gods,” the laboring men and boys who took their title from the cheap seats in the galleries of the nation’s theaters. Journalist DeBenneville Randolph Keim, in his memoir of General Philip Sheridan’s 1867–68 winter campaign, indicted the Cheyenne for their “savage natures, incapable of restraint,” which “render them by instinct foes to progress and the cause of humanity.” 125 Only a few years later, the frontier hero who banished Cheyenne barbarism appealed so to the savagery of his theatrical audiences that, in Indianapolis, “the whoop of despair of the dying Indians is answered back by the yell of triumph of the gods of the gallery, who failry [sic ] split their shirts by the convulsive beating of excited lungs.” 126

  The fact that native-born city toughs and rebellious workingmen appropriated the name of Buffalo Bill suggests how much they claimed him as one of their own in their battles against the impositions of landlords, employers, and immigrant rivals. If Cody did not separate himself from his most voluble partisans, he risked slipping into savagery with them, becoming a class renegade. In the combative urban politics of the 1870s, Buffalo Bill was not necessarily a benign figure. Cody’s drama was too subversive ever to be middle-class fun.

  His currency as a popular symbol limited by class friction and audience biases, by the late 1870s Cody was looking for ways to enhance his middle-class reputation. He wrote his autobiography with such a subdued tone, in the summer of 1879, that critics marveled at its avoidance of blood-and-thunder braggadocio. He continued to plan a performance tour of Europe, although it did not come off. Finally, he began to envision a different kind of show altogether. 127

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Indians, Horses

  BY THE LATE 1870S, the quest for a middle-class following and the competition of the scout business drove Cody to new heights of theatrical innovation. His shows grew larger and more complex, his plays not only less violent, but more spectacular. He put horses onstage, decreased the amount of gunplay in the performances, and enhanced special effects such as electrical lighting.

  Most historians trace the origins of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show to the gathering amplitude of these stage productions. But it was Cody’s cultivation of Indian performers in the late 1870s that led most directly to the Wild West arena. This, too, was tied to his search for a better class of customers. For in many ways the boldest and most innovative move he made to capture a middle-class audience was to make Indians more visible, at the same moment that a consciousness of their supposed vanishing—along with all other vestiges of the frontier—became ever more pervasive.

  Although Cody claimed to know a great deal about Indians, the truth was that in the 1870s he knew few Indians, and these but superficially. Pawnees and other detachments of Indian auxiliaries had been his subordinates in scouting parties, but there are no hints of any deeper relationship between them than that of friendly acquaintances. In 1872, journalists credited Cody with convincing Spotted Tail and his warriors to join the buffalo hunt with the Grand Duke Alexis, and they assumed (in keeping with the dime novel frame in which they pictured him) that the white Indian must know Indians from personal experience. In fact, he knew only enough about the Si
oux to defer to those who knew them better. Thus, he approached Todd Randall, “an old frontiersman … who was Spotted Tail’s agent” and who had lived among the band for years and who spoke fluent Lakota, to persuade Spotted Tail to come hunting.1

  On the Plains, then, Cody’s bonds with Indians were less significant than his ties to white men who knew Indians. In fact, most of the Indians who made Cody’s acquaintance did so after the Indian wars, and they did it through show business. Indians had been part of American entertainments for a very long time, and in Cody’s day they frequently appeared as exotic living exhibits or curiosities in circuses and museums. Many of these performers came from the ranks of eastern or midwestern tribes whose autonomy had long since vanished. Thus, a party of Iowa Indians toured with George Catlin in Europe in the 1840s, and midwestern Sac and Fox peoples provided the performers for Barnett and Hickok’s mock buffalo hunt at Niagara Falls in 1872. Battered by the loss of their lands and by waves of epidemic disease, and forced into the wage economy with the worst jobs (if they could get anybody to hire them at all), these people learned American notions of Indians through hard experience. We can only wonder how much they shaped their performances to subvert, reinforce, or otherwise influence American ideas of Indianness.2

  Until 1877, practically all of Cody’s stage Indians were played by “supers,” or white extras. But from the very beginning, a few Indians found their way into Buffalo Bill stage plays, their presence a hint of future possibilities. In 1872, Carlo Gentile, an Italian photographer touring southern Arizona, ransomed—or bought—a captive Yavapai boy from a band of Pima Indians. Gentile subsequently took the boy to Chicago, gave him the name Carlos Montezuma, and hired him out to play the role of Azteka, an Indian boy who shot arrows at Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack in Scouts of the Plains, during its debut performance in Chicago and on tour afterward.3 Grown to manhood, Montezuma would become a physician, a leading Indian intellectual, and a relentless critic of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and its reservation policy.4 As a child onstage, Montezuma took his place amid the fake Indians represented by the supers. Thus the scout business, in its dance of real and fake, featured some mix of real Indians and imitation ones, original and copy. But the mimicry of this spectacle was so poor, the supers so obviously fake, that critics complained. Real Indians were hard to find, though, so Cody dismissed Montezuma and resorted again to supers for the first few years.5

  Cody’s inspiration to hire Sioux performers reflected a shift in performance possibilities for Indians only recently subjugated by the U.S. Army. Where earlier Indian performers came from tribes that had been defeated many years before, Indians who came to the stage in the 1870s increasingly had careers that in some ways paralleled Cody’s, with gutsy leaps from the Far West, and the frontier of combat, to the theater and the melodrama. Their own frontier imposture, in which they combined elements of Indian life and culture with popular expectations, creating new performances that would appeal to American audiences, was something that many of them learned in the West, where Americans flocked to Indian villages and dances. Soldiers watched as Osage scouts performed hours of scalp dances after returning with Custer from the Washita in 1868. Crowds of soldiers and civilians from Fort Laramie gathered to watch the huge Plains Indian powwows during the treaty negotiations of 1867. Residents of Fort McPherson and ranks of itinerant teamsters turned out to watch the Pawnee scouts perform war dances the night before they departed on the Republican River expedition, with the Fifth Cavalry and scout William Cody, in 1869. Watching Sioux dances at Fort Robinson, in Nebraska, was a major social pastime for American soldiers and civilians well into the 1870s.6

  Among the Lakota, dances could be social affairs or sacred rituals, depending on the dancers and the context. Social dances were jovial and festive, and often accompanied by feasts. It did not take long for some Indians to adapt steps from social dances to entertainment, and the American market for public amusement. In 1874, a group of Lakota performers charged settlers for admission to their dances at the opening of a Nebraska county. Selling their performances and images became standard. By 1877, Lakota fresh from their campaigns against the army were charging white photographers $6 each for photographs.7

  Like Cody himself, many of the first Indian performers in frontier melodrama had also been scouts for the U.S. Army, an occupation in which they encountered American fascination for Indian performance. As we have seen, Pawnee scouts had been performing mock Indian battles and mock attacks for hunting parties and railroad executives for over a decade by the time Cody hired some of the tribe to join his theatrical combination. By the late 1870s, there was enough of an entertainment industry swirling around Indians that Indian performers moved fluidly between shows. Some of the Indians in Cody’s troupe came from other theatrical companies, including Donald McKay’s troupe of Warm Springs Indians—who had served as scouts in California’s Modoc War.8

  Cody abandoned the practice of hiring other white scouts after the bitter falling-out with Captain Jack Crawford.9 Immediately thereafter, he began to search out Indian performers, recognizing that his ability to marshal them east and onto the boards heightened his reputation as a white man who “knew Indians.” Of course, the presence of Indians, particularly Lakota Sioux men, so soon after the death of Custer, also charged the rapidly aging scout business with a new bolt of authenticity. Where other combinations required supers to play Indians, real Indians enabled Cody to again assert his prominence as the besieged purveyor of the real, surrounded by faking competitors. Thus, in the fall of 1877, Cody recruited Oglala Sioux Indians from the Red Cloud Agency for his theatrical season.10 As translator, he commissioned John Y. Nelson, a buffalo hunter and fur trapper who lived near Fort McPherson and was married to a Lakota woman from Whistler’s band. The two Sioux men with Cody that year were identified as Man Who Carries the Sword—known as Sword, he was an in-law of Nelson—and Two Bears.11

  Identified only as “Buffalo Bill and Scouts,” this photograph depicts at least two members of the Buffalo Bill Combination of 1877–78: William Cody, center, and George Sword, Lakota warrior and scout-turned-actor, front right. The unidentified Indian man to the left of Sword might be Two Bears. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.

  Sword and Two Bears hailed, respectively, from the Oglala and the Hunkpapa divisions of the larger Lakota tribe, and in that sense, their people were among the most recent enemies of the U.S. Army. But the Lakota had no tradition of central organization or state hierarchy. Even at the peak of the Sioux War in 1876, some Lakotas urged accommodation with the United States. The very reason that Sheridan had chosen Spotted Tail for the Grand Duke Alexis hunt was that Spotted Tail was a strong advocate for peace between Lakotas and Americans. Similarly, both Sword and Two Bears had been prominent peace advocates. Sword was a nephew of Red Cloud, who had encouraged cooperation with the Indian agent at Red Cloud Agency and offered to guide Professor Othniel C. Marsh on his hunt for fossils in the Sioux badlands in 1874. He later scouted for General George Crook, and in 1876 he helped Colonel Randall Mackenzie attack a Cheyenne village. That same year, he sought out Crazy Horse at the behest of the army command, in a vain attempt to persuade the great warrior to surrender.12

  The following year, in 1878, Cody ventured to Indian Territory to hire Pawnee actors, whose acquaintance he had made during his days as hunting guide and scout with Frank North. In subsequent years, he alternated between Pawnee and Lakota actors, with Nelson as his go-between for the Lakotas and Gordon “Pawnee Bill” Lillie as his translator and agent with the Pawnees.13 By this time, numerous Indians who had fought in the Sioux War were performing on eastern stages. Twenty Utes were featured in Barnum’s circus in 1881, and Sioux Indians showed up at Bunnell’s Museum in Brooklyn that same year.14 Sitting Bull himself went on the stage with an “authentic” display of Indian life in 1884, playing to packed houses in New York and Philadelphia.15

  Other than Sitting Bull, we know very little about these Indian performers as indi
viduals, but it seems safe to assume that they came to the stage because it offered a way of earning good money, and making contacts with powerful people to outmaneuver the officials who stifled their autonomy on impoverished reservations. In an interview with a Baltimore newspaper, Sword and Two Bears were pleased to be traveling and seeing the East, “learning the ways of the pale faces” and presumably making a living, too. 16 Accustomed to advocating peace even at times of war, they were Lakota innovators unwilling to accept either armed resistance to the United States or American terms of Lakota defeat. In these ways, Sword and Two Bears were typical of the Indian performers who followed them into Buffalo Bill’s amusements, on the stage and in the arena years later.17

  For many Americans then and now, the idea of Indians reenacting scenes of frontier conquest in these blood-and-thunder, Indian-slaughtering melodramas suggests that impresarios like Cody were exploiting and humiliating them. But Indians were not naive about American desires. Their refusal to assume humiliating roles compelled Cody to commission plots allowing his Indian performers a place of considerable honor, within the constraints of the genre. Thus, Cody pointed out to one interviewer that Sword and Two Bears were his friends in the stage drama of 1877, because “it would hardly be politic to use them” in any other way.18 In May Cody, or Lost and Won, the villains of the piece were Mormons and a band of “bad Indians,” or renegades, played by supers. As with most dime novels, Indian savagery in May Cody was the product of white villainy—the malevolent Mormons, in this case, who entice Indians to attack a wagon train. The noble savages, played by Sword and Two Bears, help Buffalo Bill to recover his sister, vanquish the evil whites, and thereby remove the impulse for any Indians to be bad any longer. A similar plot was to be found in his 1880–81 production, The Prairie Waif, in which relatively few Indians died, but “a half dozen Mormons … are slain whenever the play threatens to grow monotonous.” 19 Civilization marches on, crushing the threats to domestic order in the woman-stealing Mormons while treating Indians fairly—but ushering their primitive world into the abyss, too, in the end.