Louis S. Warren

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

  Similarly, an 1872 columnist covering the hunt with the Grand Duke Alexis described the heroic, virile Buffalo Bill as possessed of “a smile as honest and sweet as that of a love sick maiden.”37 Melodrama, with its emphasis on the salvation of true womanhood and the civilizing influence of domestic harmony, had been an appropriate vehicle for Cody’s stardom precisely because it placed his masculine form in a larger context of feminine virtues. An 1879 interviewer began his description of Cody as flat-out manly—“Tall, straight as a straight line, with magnificent breadth of chest”—then introduced female attributes: “small hands evidently of great power, a remarkably handsome though almost girlish face, hair of which a woman might be proud, and a soft melodious voice.” 38

  Cody’s new extravaganza being an effort to escape the confines of melodrama, its first incarnation abandoned any pretense of domesticity or womanly restraint. Neither Cody nor Carver was much of a manager, and both demanded treatment as stars. Their incompatibility was heightened by the fact that both were masculine sharpshooters, symbolically violent figureheads for a show of race war and high-speed horseback pursuits, the whole infused with copious amounts of gunpowder and testosterone.

  The masculine figureheads led a cast that was entirely, raucously male. Like other westerners, North Platte locals bragged about and bet on their shooting, horse breaking, and steer roping. By 1883, the town had been home to most of the nation’s frontier melodrama stars and many of the “real” dime novel characters, including not only Cody, but also Charles “The White Chief” Belden (who was stationed at Fort McPherson shortly before he was killed in 1870), Texas Jack Omohundro, “Dashing Charlie” Emmett, John Y. Nelson, and of course Doc Carver. Plenty of other locals wanted their chance at frontier imposture. For the first season, Cody and Carver hired a raft of them. These included William Levi “Buck” Taylor, a six-foot-five Texas cowboy who first rode up the trails to Nebraska with a herd of cattle for the Cody-North Ranch on the Dismal River in 1879. Once he signed on with the Wild West show, he took a starring role in frontier melodrama during the off-season, touring with Buffalo Bill’s Dutchman and Prairie Waif Combination in 1885–86, and he ultimately became the subject of several dime novels.39

  Con Groner, billed in Wild West show publicity as “the Cow-Boy Sheriff of the Platte,” had been county sheriff in North Platte since the early 1870s. He was also a physically large man who was said to have apprehended Jesse James (although he had not).40 In addition to Frank North, the impresarios also brought in cowboys from the ranches of western Nebraska, including Jim “Kid” Willoughby, Jim Mitchell, Tom Webb, and roughly two dozen others.

  The show consisted of three categories of acts: races, “historical” scenes, and demonstrations of “real” or “natural” skill, that is, talent derived from workplace necessity, not for entertainment (like the circus). This last category including bronco riding, rope demonstrations, and shooting acts. After opening with a parade of Indians and cowboys, along with elk and buffalo, the action began. The first act was an Indian horse race, with as many as ten Indian competitors. It was followed by a reenactment of the Pony Express, “in which the riding and changing of saddle covers was done with startling rapidity,” according to one reviewer. Next came the attack on the stagecoach, followed by a race between an Indian runner and an Indian horseman (with a turn at fifty yards, it was actually close). Together, these scenes suggested the speed of Indians—and the necessary speed of settlers in outracing them.

  If any observers had anticipated another circus, by this point, they knew the Wild West show was different. In American culture, the presence of Indians had long implied the presence of history. 41 By featuring them in patently “historical” scenes with actual props from western history—the Pony Express mochila, or mail saddle, and the Deadwood coach—the showmen sent a message that this spectacle was neither an “ethnological congress”—a display of exotic primitives adjunct to a menagerie—nor a mere circus-style display of peculiar skills and speed.42 In Cody and Carver’s arena, foot-and horse races established the central ethos of the show as competition, and the overtly historical scenes—the Pony Express and the pursuit of the Deadwood stagecoach—emplotted the performance with American history, here depicted as a grand race, or a running battle, between Indians, whites, and Mexicans.

  These initial racing and historical acts were followed by shooting demonstrations by Buffalo Bill, Doc Carver, and Adam Bogardus, a former market hunter from Illinois who had set many records for competitive pigeon shooting and who was also the developer of the clay pigeon. Seeking to persuade the audience that shooting competitions were more than frivolous or destructive, show publicity transformed guns from implements of destruction to regenerative and constructive tools of frontier development. After all, claimed the program, the bullet was “the pioneer of civilization,” which “has gone hand in hand with the axe that cleared the forest, and with the family bible and the school book.” Without the gun, warned the program, “we of America would not be to-day in the possession of a free and united country, and mighty in our strength.”43

  Beyond its relevance to martial exploits and the “clearing” of the frontier, the sharpshooting of Cody, Carver, and Bogardus was a feat of industrial might that inscribed guns as technological wonders and their operators as almost superhuman masters of machinery. Recounting Carver’s first New York shooting exhibition, the program explained that during the 7 hours and 36 minutes in which he performed, “he raised to his shoulder 62,120 pounds, or 311⁄8 tons in weight,” and while working the lever of his rifle, “he moved 248,480 pounds with the middle finger of his right hand.” Throughout, he “withstood from the recoil an aggregate weight of 298,176 pounds,” or 149 tons.44 The machinery of the gun thus empowered the marksman in unprecedented ways, energizing him to move prodigious amounts of matter and allowing him to innoculate the audience against the epidemic of nervous exhaustion which plagued American manhood.

  Such feats of martial skill and technological mastery were followed by primitive scenes of the white race’s skill at domesticating nature, the “Cowboys Frolic,” in which cowboys rode bucking broncos, and then roped, threw, and momentarily rode Texas steers. Later in the season, they added displays of “picking up.” The penultimate scene, the “Buffalo Chase,” in which cowboys drove buffalo toward the crowd before turning them back to their corral, reinforced the message of the second half of the show: that white male mastery of technology (guns) and of nature (horses, cattle, and buffalo) was self-perpetuating and total. The last act, a furious ride around the arena by the Pawnees, closed the show with a scene of wild nature and real Indians, as if to say that the challenges of conquering the frontier remained, even though Indians were now defeated. The show would go on, redomesticating the wild nature within it in every performance. 45

  Much as this New World historical pageant steered away from the Old World circus, Buffalo Bill’s “thoroughbred Nebraska show” deployed a unifying symbolic device that was ancient and European: the centaur. To sit a horse “like a centaur” was a socially respectable aspiration in the nineteenth century, suggesting a command over animals and manly bearing in the saddle, and comparisons of riders to centaurs was a ubiquitous cliché. In the first season, show programs hailed Buck Taylor as “the Centaur Ranchman of the Plains.”46

  But the most famous centaur in the show was, of course, Buffalo Bill himself. He provided the central historical actor—the authentic American—for the show’s display of history. Beyond his symbolic role, though, it was not clear what Cody would do in the arena. He soon carved out his performance space. When Doc Carver left the crowd restive one day by missing every one of his targets, Cody brought them to their feet by mounting his horse and galloping around the ring, blasting amber balls thrown into the air by an assistant.47 On this day and ever after, he—like other sharpshooters in the show—used birdshot in his rifle, because bullets would have traveled beyond the arena and potentially inflicted damage or casualtie
s. But even so, the feat displayed extraordinary marksmanship. The act was quickly installed as a regular attraction, with Cody labeled “America’s Practical All-Round-Shot.”

  Even without a gun, Cody evoked a wondrous commentary with his riding. In the urban centers where the Wild West show found its most enthusiastic audiences, streets were jammed with horse-drawn vehicles, but few people rode horses, and most urban residents probably never learned to ride. By the 1880s, horseback riding was mostly an elite leisure pursuit, and the image of a single man on a horse evoked memories of a noble, rural past. 48

  Partly for this reason, and partly through his mastery of the gun, which infused him with martial power, the sight of Buffalo Bill on a horse left audiences breathless. Buffalo Bill “rides his horse as if he were a part of the animal,” wrote an 1885 columnist, and in 1886, New York journalist Nym Crinkle called Cody “the complete restoration of the Centaur.” Crinkle’s imagery was so potent that in future years it was reprinted or plagiarized by English publishers, American writers, and Wild West show press agents (who may, in fact, have originated the idea and given it to Crinkle).

  “The Complete Restoration of the Centaur.” Buffalo Bill Cody on horseback, c. 1887. Viewed through a portable “stereoscope,” images like these allowed families to view three-dimensional scenes of the Wild West show and savor Cody’s centaurism in the comfort of their own living rooms. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.

  No one that I ever saw so adequately fulfils to the eye all the conditions of picturesque beauty, absolute grace and perfect identity with his animal. If an artist or riding master had wanted to mould a living ideal of romantic equestrianship, containing in outline and action, the mien of Harry of Navarre, the Americanism of Custer, the automatic majesty of the Indian and the untutored cussedness of the cowboy, he would have measured Buffalo Bill in the saddle.49

  London journalists referred to the Wild West show as a gathering of “Transatlantic Centaurs,” and even before Cody’s arrival in London for the first time, Punch magazine hailed him as “the Coming Centaur.” 50 The centaur reappeared in E. E. Cummings’s 1917 tribute to Buffalo Bill on horseback, shattering onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlike that

  Jesus he was a handsome man.51

  As the mythical creature that marks the ultimate limit between culture and nature, the centaur was in many ways the perfect vehicle for an exposition of frontier life. In the words of one scholar, the centaur represents “the beast within man erupting,” or “the division within man between unreasoning, homicidal monster and angel.”52 The creature’s hybridity—the upper body of a man with the body of a stallion—highlighted its virility. Centaurs of myth were notoriously unreasonable, their masculine lusts and combative instincts overwhelming their human faculties. They were profoundly undomestic, even antidomestic, preferring open spaces and the forest to the constraints of home. They were creatures uncontained, and notoriously unhoused.53

  Through inclusion in a spectacle of race war, the centaur symbol acquired additional layers of meaning. Indians, “savage centaurs,” most approximated the horsemen of myth. The show’s white centaurs, Cody and the cowboys, embodied reasoning attributes of masculinity combined with the stallion’s virility and power. Their presence suggested the need for an infusion of natural power—horse power—into white men to ameliorate their loss of nerve force, declining virility, and other symptoms of overcivilization. Just as the Pony Expressman of earlier decades had come to symbolize the monstrous fusion of polyglot frontier and white manhood, Cody’s centaur, and the ranks of centaurs in the Wild West show, represented not only the domination of the West’s wild nature by Americans, but also the reinvigoration of the white race. Thus, the show’s centaurism complemented the efforts of such organizations and developments as the Boy Scouts, the YMCA, the Boone and Crockett Club, collegiate athletics, and much of the broader conservation movement to instill in American manhood some approximation of natural vigor—what Theodore Roosevelt would call the “strenuous life”—to fend off the neurasthenic effects of modern business and the city.54

  Cody’s monstrous fusion of horse and man arrived in the East to announce the triumph of civilization and the regeneration of white men and the white race through frontier conflict and technological progress. Where Carver mastered the machine of the gun, Cody’s shattering of amber balls from the air with a rifle as he raced around the arena on horseback naturalized the violent technology of the gun through his mastery of the horse. If the image of Buffalo Bill as Winchester-toting centaur heightened Cody’s masculine image in particular—“Jesus he was a handsome man”—it did so in part by connecting that image to a progressive narrative of white Americans as people (Cody himself) who sprang from nature (the horse) to master technology (the repeating rifle). Throughout the performances, wilderness—animals and Indians—continually fell away before the advance of the American centaur, his settlements, and his technological prowess.

  The story of technology and progress mediated by the ancient centaur energized one of the most durable of show scenes, the “Attack on the Deadwood Coach.” The Indian pursuit of the coach, and its rescue by Buffalo Bill and his cowboys, proved as durable as the Pony Express reenactment, and arguably the most thrilling, “never equalled by an act in hippodrome or theater,” in the words of an early reviewer. 55 In this scene, Indian centaurs pursued not just a stagecoach, but an Abbot and Downing Concord coach, a powerful icon of American artisanship. 56

  As early as 1874, a correspondent remarked that “in the far West” the stagecoach “may be called the advance-guard of civilization,” but in most of the eastern states the railroad had already made it “a thing of the past.”57 Just as savagery vanished before the wheels of the stagecoach, so those wheels themselves gave way to machine-powered axles. East and West, anticipation of the coaches’ final passage became widespread by the early 1880s, symbolic of the passing away of the frontier, of master craftsmanship before mechanization (the Concord coach was so meticulously handcrafted that only three thousand of them were ever made), and of horse-drawn conveyance by steam locomotive and electric trolley, the revolutionary technology which, by 1896, was carrying passengers in ninety-three towns where Buffalo Bill’s Wild West appeared.58

  Cody’s show publicists claimed that the coach had begun its career in 1863, journeying from New Hampshire to California by ship, seeing service in California, Oregon, and Utah, before becoming the “original” Deadwood coach, plying the route between the railroad depot at Cheyenne, Wyoming, and the gold-mining town of Deadwood, in Dakota Territory, in 1876. On this final segment of its twentyfive-year odyssey, wrote the publicists, it passed through “Buffalo Gap, Lame Johnny Creek, Red Canyon, and Squaw Gap, all of which were made famous by scenes of slaughter and the deviltry of the banditti.” Ultimately, it was “fitted up as a treasure coach,” carrying gold bullion from the mines and enduring spectacular robbery attempts, including the notorious Cold Spring holdup and another in which Martha “Calamity Jane” Cannary drove it to safety. Allegedly, Buffalo Bill had ridden in this very stagecoach, with Yellow Hair’s scalp and several others in hand, when he returned from his scouting duties in 1876. “When afterwards he learned that it had been attacked and abandoned and was lying neglected on the plains, he organized a party, and starting on the trail, rescued and brought the vehicle into camp.”59 Indians who attacked it in the arena were said to be “the near relations of the Indians” who attacked it on the Plains.60

  Cody anticipated the consignment of all the West’s stagecoaches to history (stagecoaches would not cease the Deadwood run until 1890), then collapsed them and the biographies of show principals all into one coach. In tracing the route of the Deadwood stage through dark places full of evil— Lame Johnny Creek, Squaw Gap—the scene evoked the mythic progress of America through benighted savagery to civilization. At the same time, the symbol of the “vanishing” coach suggested that the era of frontier conquest itself was closing.

  Of course,
even beyond Cody’s fictionalized biography, the fakery of show programs was considerable, and nowhere more so than in the story of this stagecoach. Cody had not ridden out to save the coach from abandonment, but rather had ordered the vehicle from Luke Voorhees, manager of the Cheyenne and Black Hills Stage line, specifically for the show.61 He did not leave the Plains via this coach, or any other, the summer he killed Yellow Hair. Instead, he took a steamer to Bismarck and a train to Rochester. 62 This coach had no steel armor, was never a treasure coach, and had not been the target of the Cold Springs holdup.63

  But through its convergence of historical events and mythic symbolism, the Deadwood stage became an object of near-spiritual veneration for the audience, a select few of whom passed through its doors during each performance. Stagecoach rides for audience members became a premier attraction of the Wild West show in every one of its future years. Pap Clothier’s more amenable successors included countless journalists, local councilmen, and, in 1887, the Prince of Wales and other European nobles, aristocrats, and celebrities who lined up to ride in the vehicle at Earl’s Court, London. In 1890, one of them, Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower, was astonished to come upon Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in Italy. “I made again the circuit of the ring in the Deadwood coach.” Although he “had so often been inside” the vehicle at Earl’s Court, he had not dreamed “that I should repeat the drive under the shadow of Vesuvius.”64