Louis S. Warren
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By entering the coach, audience members became protagonists in the show’s historical narrative, and heirs to its myth. In its confines, they reenacted America’s passage through savage darkness and emerged victorious, like the Americans who had civilized the frontier. And as Americans watched European royals, urban elites, and elected leaders climb eagerly into the coach, they saw their history and a favorite show validated as high culture.
Thus, the Wild West show scene was simultaneously nostalgic, for a racial frontier that was passing, and forward-looking, with the wheels conveying the spectators-turned-passengers away from the primitive past and toward the technological future of wheels and guns that echoed from its driver’s seat. It was both a symbol of progress, looking forward to the passenger trains and the mechanical future that awaited the audience, America, and the world, and an anachronism, a handcrafted marvel in an age of mass production, a historical artifact conveying the lived experience of the frontier for the amusement of the modern city.
DERIVING CULTURAL MESSAGES like these from show scenes helps explain why the Wild West show became such a powerful factory of images and mythology, but it also makes it too easy to overlook Cody’s fundamental audacity, his reach for mythic trajectory in a show based substantially on circus entertainments, which remained far from respectable in middle-class parlors. The circus was “the devil’s playhouse,” wallowing in fraud, graft, and freaks who violated boundaries of all kinds. In their long quest for middle-class acceptance, circus impresarios often used biblical tropes to sell their attractions as moral education. One 1835 showman even staged “A Grand Moral Representation of the Deluge with Appropriate Sacred Music.”65 P. T. Barnum, the sage of Bridgeport whose avoidance of outright fraud earned him a reputation as a “moral” entertainer, made a systematic effort to equate his circus with biblical spectacle. He billed his hippopotamus as the “Behemoth of Holy Writ, spoken of by the Book of Job.” His African warthog became “the Prodigal’s swine,” and his camel “the ship of the desert.” Pastors and reverends trooped to his show for the free passes he distributed to the clergy. The efforts paid off. “The Greatest Show on Earth” was a rollicking success.66
By 1882, Cody had watched Barnum play his hand at the circus game for a decade. No doubt drawn by the comparative softness of press reviews, and by the large and heterogeneous audience, he followed the New Englander’s example. Cody and his partners imitated Barnum’s manner of loading trains. Like Barnum, Cody hired private detectives to patrol the grounds and travel with the show, running off known con men.67
But Cody went Barnum one better, creating a circus that was a distinctively American spectacle. Where clowns and elephants defined the circus, Cody had none. Where the circus was synonymous with the big top, Cody’s Wild West show had an open arena. In later years, he commissioned canvas awnings for the grandstands, but the performance space remained uncovered. The ostensible rationale for the lack of a roof was that shooting acts would quickly destroy a tent. But the view of the sky over the arena also created a symbolic connection to the wide frontier of memory and to nature, which publicists cannily exploited. Rain or shine, Wild Westerners worked beneath an open sky.68
Cody’s masterstroke was to avoid overt religious references in favor of a secular frontier myth with himself—or an artfully constructed version of himself—at the center. Barnum and other impresarios could grasp at the sacred. But overt religiosity was on the decline in the late nineteenth century, as religion permeated secular life and lost much of its power as a separate realm of authority.69 Besides, even for the most devout Christians, the Bible was an Old World text, with no material connection to the New World (a matter which evinced no little spiritual anxiety in America). Even if audiences could have participated in it, the Pentateuch and the Gospels were not easily dramatized by clowns, high-wire walkers, and bearded ladies. For many, Barnum’s piety smacked of a cynical ploy.
Cody’s show forsook conventional religion for nondenominational faith in progress—“ ‘Buffalo Bill’s Wild West’ is not a show in the theatric sense of the term, but an exposition of the progress of civilization.” 70 The effect was to give the circus a makeover so compelling and comprehensive as to make it unrecognizable.71 In its glory years, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West would generate gigantic poster art, including some of the largest show posters ever created. In 1898, one poster depicted the show’s main acts, including the “Attack on the Settler’s Cabin” and the “Charge up San Juan Hill.” It consisted of 108 sheets of poster paper, running 9 feet high and 91 feet long. A few circus competitors produced even bigger advertisements, and Ringling Brothers commissioned a poster more than twice as large. But the Ringlings’ depiction of separate attractions told no story. Impressive as it was, it looked like a big collection of smaller posters. 72
The effect of the advertising was analogous to that of the entertainments. Cody’s attractions included many that could be found in the circus: Indians and cowboys and Texas steers were featured in Barnum’s “Congress of Monarchs” as early as 1874. Not long after 1894, a sideshow of circus freaks was attached to the Wild West show. But in popular memory, even the most discordant Wild West acts could be subsumed into, or obscured by, the narrative arc of progress and frontier development. In contrast, the circuses of Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey, and others remained a pastiche of the weird and the fabulous.
Presenting a national origin myth (one that conveniently elided the origins of slavery and the Civil War of recent memory) and allowing the audience limited participation in it, the Wild West show succeeded in convincing many that it was not a circus at all. Commentators and promoters intuitively grasped the distinctions. “There is as wide a gulf between the ‘Wild West’ and the Circus as there is between a historic poem and the advertisement of quack medicine,” wrote Steele Mackaye.73 The distinction made sense to the public. “ ‘Isn’t this better than the circus, now?’ was the delighted expression heard on every hand,” recounted an 1885 reviewer. So with the critics, who raved. They extolled. They waxed. But their very reluctance to describe the vivid presentation of frontier mythology as a circus in fact proved how successful Cody was at naturalizing the circus on American soil, turning it from a European import to a domestic entertainment. 74
From its opening night in Omaha, Cody and Carver’s Wild West moved on to Council Bluffs, Iowa; Springfield, Massachusetts; then on to Boston; Newport, Rhode Island; and Brighton Beach, New York, before closing out the season at Chicago. Throughout, the success of Cody’s new concoction of frontier, circus, and artful deception could be seen in reviewers’ frequent comparison to the greatest showman of all. “The papers say I am the coming Barnum,” wrote Cody to his sister.75 The Hartford Courant went further, proclaiming that Buffalo Bill had, “in this exhibition, out-Barnumed Barnum.”76
And yet, for all its successes, the Wild West show was a volatile combination of personalities and performance whose future was by no means secure. Carver, the self-styled “Evil Spirit of the Plains,” could be a fine marksman, but he was a third-rate performer. His shooting was uneven, his temper bad. After missing a series of targets one afternoon, he broke his rifle across his horse’s ears and struck an assistant. 77 Such open demonstrations of violence and cruelty were never going to be acceptable in any public entertainment, let alone the family attraction that Cody was trying to build.
On top of the threat of violence, Cody, Carver, and their cowboys drank hard all summer. Many performed badly or missed shows altogether. Later accounts claimed that an entire car of the show train was reserved for liquor. “It was an eternal gamble, as to whether the show would exist from one day to the next, not because of a lack of money but simply through the absence of human endurance necessary to stay awake twenty hours out of twenty-four, that the birth of a new amusement enterprise might be properly celebrated.” 78
What accounts for the management failures of Cody, a stage veteran who over the course of a decade in show business had mastered t
heatrical presentation and the demands of running his own stage company? Although he admitted to heavy drinking at times, he could be tediously pious on the subject of alcohol and performance. “In this business a man must be perfectly reliable and sober,” he lectured a wayward associate in 1879. 79 Why did he fail to follow his own advice at the outset of his new venture?
Partly, his missteps in the summer of 1883 reflected his limitations as a manager. He always had been more performer than manager, but the distinction between these talents became more visible as the size of his cast grew. Where he had directed and organized groups of up to two dozen stage players in the 1870s, now he was responsible for dozens of people, props, animals, and all of their transportation arrangements.
In facing this daunting task, he cannot have been helped by the prospective unraveling of his family. In 1882, he filed suit against a cousin for appropriating and selling a Cody family property that had belonged to his grandfather, the father of Isaac Cody. Since the parcel was in downtown Cleveland, it was worth a great deal of money, and for a time Cody and his sisters anticipated a windfall of fifteen million dollars. They endured legal setbacks throughout 1883, finally losing the case—and all the money William Cody had invested in it—in 1884.80
As his new show wobbled and his lawsuit waned, William Cody’s marriage spiraled downward. Louisa Cody resented his show career almost from the beginning. According to William Cody’s later testimony, she objected to actresses and the mores of the stage. He claimed that she witnessed him kissing his troupe’s actresses goodbye at the end of a season, and her subsequent jealousy throughout his stage career kept him “very much riled up … In fact it was a kind of a cat and dog’s life all along the whole trail.”81
The marital tensions, and the death of little Kit Carson Cody in 1876, may have contributed to her decision, in 1878, to move back to North Platte, away from his stage circuits, which took him through Rochester. He gave her $3,500 to move there, and sent money to support her thereafter. 82 In 1882, as he prepared for his new show of western pioneering, he also publicly reinscribed the show’s myth of advancing civilization back into his own life. Out in Nebraska, he built up his North Platte ranch, “Scout’s Rest,” for public admiration as much as private enjoyment. He expanded his holdings to four thousand acres. The estate supported hundreds of cattle and horses, and an elegant Victorian home, with irrigation ditches, tree plantings, and alfalfa fields. The Cody home in town had been a local tourist attraction before. Now, at the newly expanded holding by the tracks of the Union Pacific railroad, Cody ordered “SCOUT’S REST” painted across the roof of his barn in letters large enough that railroad passengers could read it and recognize the home of the famous Buffalo Bill. The beautiful house and verdant fields proved his powers as domesticator of the savage frontier. 83 People who sat in his show audience might find themselves on the train, there witnessing the “real-life” frontier progress of the scout-turned-rancher-and-family-man as they crossed the Nebraska prairie.
In truth, Scout’s Rest was less evidence of Cody’s home life than it was artful deception. Louisa refused to live there, preferring the family home in the center of town. Even though another daughter, Irma, was born to the couple early in 1883, their mutual suspicions increased. Cody raised money for his new show and his ranch by mortgaging properties, and he was furious when Louisa refused to sign mortgage papers for the home in North Platte. He demanded the money he had sent her, and was astonished to learn she had invested in other properties, which she put in her own name. “Well, I have got out my petition for a divorce with that woman,” he told his sister Julia in September of 1883, in the middle of his first Wild West show tour. “She has tried to ruin me financially this summer,” he went on. “I could tell you lots of funny things how she has tried to put up the horse ranch and buy more property & get the deeds in her name.”84
The divorce was halted by tragedy. In October, daughter Orra suddenly died. Cody left the show and accompanied Louisa, Arta, and Irma to Rochester, where they buried Orra next to her brother, Kit. “If it was not for the hope of heaven and again meeting there,” wrote Louisa, “my affliction would be more than I could bear.”85 Her husband dropped his suit for divorce.
Meanwhile, between the imminent violence, the extravagant debauchery, and the seething jealousy of its principals, the Wild West show threatened to come apart. The combativeness of its stars could only weaken an entertainment based so heavily on a presentation of men from the “half-civilized” West. Popular culture had a long tradition of venerating noble savages, and in this respect there was a script for presenting Indians in ways that could appeal to audiences. But by no means were cowboys universally regarded as heroic. With wide newspaper coverage of fights between farmers and cattle ranches in Kansas, and fierce range wars across much of the Far West, the public knew “cowboys” as rough men who seldom distinguished between herding and rustling.
Such characteristics, it seemed, were only fitting for a group that drew its members from so many races. Most cowboy gear and methods originated among Mexican herders, and what became known as “cowboy culture” emerged from a vigorous interracial exchange of droving skills, terminology, and equipment on the southern Plains. The post–Civil War cattle industry employed many black, Mexican, Mexican American, and mixed-race cowboys alongside the white and tenuously white, particularly the Irish. In 1874, Joseph McCoy, the founder of Abilene, published the first history of the cattle trade, in which he denounced cowboys for their “shiftlessness” and “lack of energy.” He held Mexican cowboys to be cruel, mean, and murderous. But even white cowboys were prime examples of frontier degeneracy, plagued by laziness and an unwillingness to leave the open spaces or even feed themselves properly (McCoy thought the absence of vegetables from their diet problematic). “No wonder the cowboy gets sallow and unhealthy, and deteriorates in manhood until often he becomes capable of any contemptible thing; no wonder he should become half civilized only, and take to whiskey with a love excelled scarcely by the barbarous Indian.” Prone to “crazy freaks, and freaks more villainous than crazy,” these “semi-civilized” brutes rendered it “not safe to be on the streets, or for that matter within a house, for the drunk cowboy would as soon shoot into a house as at anything else.”86
Not surprisingly, the term “cow-boy” was often one of reproach, signifying someone who belonged to a lawless, itinerant, working class that, with its sensual appetites, obvious villainy, and continual threats of violence against civil order and the settler’s home, too much resembled the laboring mobs of the East. In 1883, as if anticipating the great railroad strike that would grip Texas and much of the Southwest a few years later, cowboys in West Texas went on strike in the hopes of securing wages of $50 per month. This and similar efforts later in the decade all failed. But to the managerial classes, the cowboys’ very act of striking seemed to justify the darker warnings about them.87
The Wild West show made cowboys into symbols of whiteness only through a balancing act, combating their border image on the one hand and portraying them as aggressively physical and autonomous on the other. Programs distinguished Wild West show cowboys, “genuine cattle-herders of the reputable trade” from “the cowboys’ greatest foe, the thieving criminal ‘rustler.’ ” At the same time, publicity separated “American cowboys” from “Mexican and mixed race” vaqueros—and left black cowboys out of the picture entirely. Earlier cowboy performers had begun the process of whitening to better market themselves as middle-class attractions, and Wild West show publicists made use of these efforts, notably in an 1877 article by Cody’s erstwhile stage partner, Texas Jack Omohundro. The educated scion of a wealthy Virginia planter, Omohundro had been a Texas cowboy in the 1860s, and later a scout with Cody at Fort McPherson. As he broke away from Cody’s stage combination in the mid-1870s, he shored up his public persona by burnishing the cowboy image in a series of articles he penned for the periodical Spirit of the Times.
Omohundro died in 1880, but w
ith a show full of cowboys to promote, Cody’s publicist, John Burke, republished Omohundro’s cowboy defense in his Wild West show programs. There audiences could read the lament of Cody’s deceased friend about how “sneeringly referred to” and “little understood” cowboys were. Omohundro claimed that cowboys were “recruited largely from Eastern young men,” including “many ‘to the manner born.’ ” Thus the mongrel, violent, degenerate range riders of many accounts became, in Omohundro’s hands, adventurous, entrepreneurial, white youths who succeeded through patience, persistence, and expert horsemanship. Cowboy experience cultivated the “noblest qualities” of the “plainsman and the scout. What a school it has been for the latter!” As white men infused with rugged nature, these protoscouts were on the way to being like Buffalo Bill himself. And like him, they would soon disappear before “modern improvements” encroaching upon the “ranch itself and the cattle trade” that employed them.88 They were the embodiment of American manhood: cultured, vigorous, natural—and vanishing.
But for all Omohundro’s attempts to elevate the social stature of cowboys, their image as frontier degenerates endured. In 1883, the American public was fully saturated with the recent, real-life bloodshed of western range wars. The Tombstone troubles launched that southwestern town’s “cowboy faction” and their opponents, the Earp brothers, to national notoriety, and New Mexico’s Lincoln County War saw the declaration of martial law in southern New Mexico in 1878, and the rise, demise, and apotheosis of William “Billy the Kid” Bonney by 1881. 89 The Wild West show would have to improve the cowboy’s public image if it was to draw respectable audiences. Unless the chaotic energies of the Wild West cast were contained and directed, the show’s short, disastrous career would become a spectacle of frontier savagery triumphant, in which drinking and carousing (followed by bankruptcy) would make it a monument only to the failures of America’s most famous living frontiersman.