Louis S. Warren

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

  More than any event prior to the show’s journey to the United Kingdom, the spectacle of The Drama of Civilization at Madison Square Garden marked the ascension of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West to middle-class entertainment and respected cultural institution, its newfound esteem capped by the warm critical reception of “Custer’s Last Rally,” which was added to the show in January 1887. In adding a historical battle to his more generic representations of “frontier life,” Cody to some degree mimicked other entertainers, who had been reprising historical battles for popular amusement at least since Astley’s circus presented “The Battle of Waterloo” and “The Taking of Seringapatam” in London early in the nineteenth century. In the summer of 1886, audiences flocked to the “The Burning of Moscow” at a New York auditorium. 1

  Of course, Cody had inscribed his own name in the drama of Custer’s death ever since the scalping of Yellow Hair, and his reenactment of this battle therefore had a high degree of authentic resonance. But the Custer segment could easily have been construed as a tasteless attempt to capitalize on a dead hero’s reputation. Instead, it achieved the near-sanctity of ritual, partly through the visual elements Morgan and Mackaye developed. Under Mackaye’s stage direction, with its huge artistic backdrops, The Drama of Civilization, and especially “Custer’s Last Rally,” became practically an animated version of a gigantic panorama painting like “The Battle of Gettysburg” and “The Battle of the Monitor and the Merrimac,” contemporary works that awed audiences with their overwhelming size and visual effects, and their hushed veneration for the fallen.

  Indeed, even before the Madison Square Garden performances, the Wild West show might have been described as a confluence of panorama and live performance. Panoramas had first appeared in the late eighteenth century in Europe, and Americans had been animating them in various ways for decades. In 1846, John Banvard debuted his giant mobile panorama of the Mississippi River. Advertised to be “three miles long” (it was probably no longer than 1,500 feet), this painting unscrolled across a stage before crowds who loved the scale representation of the entire Mississippi River Valley. To watch it was to take a virtual tour of the river. Others soon copied Banvard’s method, and audiences flocked to these moving, “educational,” thoroughly entertaining representations of entire rivers or overland trails. 2 Three themes emerged most often in moving panoramas: travel on the Mississippi, travel overland for exploration and migration, and the growth of San Francisco and the California goldfields.3 Panoramas often highlighted Indians, and some featured displays of Indian artifacts as an adjunct to the main show.4 The shift from geographic journey to historical event was an easy one. “The Mexican War” and a “Mechanical Panorama of Bunker Hill” both proved popular. “Part entertainment and part education, part hyperbolic bluff, and part high-minded instruction, the panoramas engaged topical events as well as escapist fantasies,” writes Martha Sandweiss. They were precursors, she notes, to “public pageants, newsreels, and grade B westerns.” And, we might add, to the Wild West show.5

  Indeed, the close approximation of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West to moving panoramas cannot have been an accident. Like moving panorama paintings, the Wild West show advertised its attractions as a virtual journey to the frontier, “Eclipsing in Animated Scenes a Year’s Visit to the Yellowstone Park.”6 Panoramas were visual products of the artist’s long journey along the frontier, just as the Wild West show was the product of Cody’s frontier life, and both forms of amusement recounted their founders’ adventures and achievements in thick, detailed show programs, which broke the amusement into separate “acts” or “scenes” and explained the historical import of each.7 Both were acclaimed for their “realism,” with the Wild West show endorsed for showing the West “as it was,” and some moving panoramas allegedly were endorsed by riverside inhabitants who recognized their houses, barns, oak trees, and even their individual horses: “[I]f there ain’t old Bally and the white mare, well, it is surprising how the mischief he come to get it so natural I don’t know, stop the boat and let me get out.” 8

  As popular entertainment, moving panoramas were at their apogee in the mid-1840s, when Cody was born. By the 1860s, they had all but vanished from city venues, in part because the expansion of railroads made it possible to encounter a “real” panorama out the window of a train. But their acres of unscrolling canvas continued a lively trade in small towns and at county fairs, where some of their subjects were even closer to Cody’s heart. A “Panorama of the Sioux War” appeared in Minnesota as late as 1870, and “Sioux Outbreak,” presumably depicting the recent Ghost Dance and the Wounded Knee massacre, made its debut in 1892. 9 But for the most part, the genre was dead.

  Whether or not Cody ever saw moving panoramas—and it is difficult to see how he could have avoided them—their influence on his show is unmistakable. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, “Artistically Blending Life-Like, Vivid, and Thrilling Pictures of Western Life,” combined circus-style horse stunts with a living reprise of the moving panorama, adhering so closely to the latter genre that spectators were reassured by its familiarity as they were thrilled by its real action.10

  Indeed, the Wild West show was only one of several entertainments to experiment with visual artistry as a means of recapturing the thrills of moving panoramas. In the early 1880s, at the very moment that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West debuted, new joint stock companies began producing “cycloramas” in the United States. These were static, but gigantic, circular paintings, which spectators entered through a tunnel and stairs to view from an elevated platform in the center of the circle, where the huge richly colored canvas wrapped completely around them. The artists incorporated trompe l’oeil techniques, and extended them by situating earthen landscapes and wooden figures in front of the canvas to merge with the painting; sometimes they provided scented air and “authentic” sounds to blur the boundary between representation and reality. The cycloramas were a new form of visual experience, and observers gasped to find they had “become of a sudden a part of a picture.” 11

  Trompe l’oeil seized the imagination in smaller formats, too. At the very moment that Cody launched his new show, crowds flocked to see the work of William Harnett and other artists whose invisible brushstrokes and attention to shading and texture fooled many observers into thinking that the subjects of their paintings—crumpled letters and tattered banknotes, old books, bleached buffalo skulls, dilapidated hunting gear—were not paintings at all, but cleverly lit arrangements of real objects hanging on a wall.12

  The public’s interest in trompe l’oeil and their vigorous debates over what the paintings represented reflected a combination of nostalgia for a rustic past evoked by the “historical” subjects of these works, and the same eagerness to debate and resolve tricks and hoaxes that P. T. Barnum exploited with his humbug. As historian James W. Cook has written: “For both Barnum and Harnett, the ultimate goal was to produce a highly unstable, perpetually contested brand of verisimilitude,” one that resonated with the visual trickery and confusion of advertising and the modern city. 13 Trompe l’oeil was in keeping, then, with the same tradition of artful deception that ran from western tall tale through Barnum’s FeeJee Mermaid and into the ongoing life and show of William F. Cody.14

  Publicists and reviewers already referred to the Wild West show’s “Pictures of Western Life.” Now the show flowed into the era’s confluence of history, entertainment, and eye-tricking spectacle.15 The show had carried a plywood set of mountains at least since 1885, but they paled before The Drama of Civilization, with its panoramic paintings of forest, plain, and valley of the Little Big Horn as backdrops to its live reenactments. All of the elements used to heighten perceptual confusion in the period’s panoramas and cycloramas were deployed at Madison Square Garden: landscaping in front of the painting to extend its visual deceptions; battered props such as the Deadwood coach, saddles, guns, whips, and other items that seemingly tumbled out of the canvas. To this were added real horses, longhorn cattle, buffalo, and mo
ose, careful lighting to enhance effects such as the prairie fire, real wind to blow real leaves across the stage in the scene of the cyclone. Real shouts and cattle calls and moos and whinnies and bellows echoed from the roof. Authentic smells wafted. On top of all this, the people who acted out the history evoked by the giant painting behind them were “frontier originals,” genuine Indian veterans of the Custer fight and real cowboys, too, and of course, William Cody himself.

  Critics spoke of The Drama of Civilization as a “great living picture,” but they were almost at a loss for words to describe it. Over the next decade, whenever the Wild West show appeared for long stands at suitable venues, Cody continued to utilize panorama backdrops, landscaping, ventilators, lights, smoke, and other special effects in ways that made his show almost as much a visual wonder as a performance.16 The huge painted backdrop and a large forested hill landscaped into the arena inspired London reviewers in 1887 to speak of the show’s “coup d’oeil”—overthrowing of the eye.17 Reviewers at the 1888 winter shows in Manchester, England, were ecstatic over the show’s action “on a huge plain level with the stage and drifting into a perspective upon it.” Indeed, the distance from the extreme end of the auditorium to the back of the stage is so great that a horseman galloping across the whole area diminishes by natural perspective until the spectator is fairly cheated into the idea that the journey is to be prolonged until the rider vanished in the pictured horizon. The illusion, indeed, is so well managed and complete, the boundless plains and swelling prairies are so vividly counterfeited, that it is difficult to resist the belief that we are really gazing over an immense expanse of country from some hillside in the far West.18

  Show reviews and old photographs from the 1890s reveal entryways through the paintings, sometimes at the tops of the hills built up against them. Cowboys, soldiers, Indians, and others burst from the paintings and galloped down the hills, or scaled them at high speed and vanished into them. 19

  A rare photograph of the Little Big Horn reenactment from Ambrose Park shows the cavalry charging into Indians who look too few in number to resist them. Off to the right, barely visible, mounted Indians retreat. But we know that crowds of Indians to ensure the Boy General’s defeat must be about to burst forth from the entryway in the middle of the canvas. What stands out, though, is the painting itself. On a canvas 440 feet long and 49 feet high, the Montana prairie sweeps down to a bend in the Little Big Horn River, bringing the water to the rim of the arena. The river bends at the turn in history; the water laps at performance edge. The painted sky reaches up from river and plain to join with the real sky above; only the protrusion of one tall chimney and the upper story of a distant building above the canvas hinder the effect. The soldiers in the foreground of the photograph charge toward the Indians in the middle ground. Mounted Sioux ride eerily out of the painting, sweeping toward the soldiers whom they will usher into history. The smoke from army guns rises into the Little Big Horn’s cloudless sky. The Indians and soldiers seem almost to have become part of the painting—or to have stepped out of it, into life.20

  Of course, the blue-painted skies of the Wild West contrasted sharply with the roof of Madison Square Garden, and sometimes even with the real sky, which clouded up, and was often dark with soot, especially in industrial London and Brooklyn. But the smudge of gray or black hanging over the giant canvas in a sense heightened the authenticity of the painting and the performance. After all, industrial smoke (like a roof) was another element of Artifice, and if it marred the city sky above the canvas with proof of civilization’s progress, it both validated the show’s teaching—civilization was inevitable—and made the painted frontier Nature on the giant canvas all the more realistic for being pristine and unmarked.

  In reprising Custer’s defeat against this background, Cody rode the wave of “Custer’s Last Stand” paintings, cycloramas, lithographs, drawings, and other reenactments which soon made the battle of the Little Big Horn the single most depicted moment in American history. More, he shaped popular expectations of the scene. Earlier illustrations picture the battlefield as a barren prairie or rocky hilltop. But in 1896, the same bend in the river was incorporated into a lithograph of “Custer’s Last Stand” which, as an advertisement for Budweiser, went into at least 150,000 prints and hung in practically every bar in America.21

  In most years, when Custer’s death was not reenacted, the panorama featured not the Little Big Horn, but towering western mountains. A grainy 1892 photo suggests that the backdrop of that year was a pastiche of fictional and real mountain peaks, which corresponded closely with the way actual mountains were depicted in popular paintings. Thus, the tallest peak soars up to the left, a cross of snow on its granite crown. The image came from Thomas Moran’s 1875 painting, Mountain of the Holy Cross. The actual mountain was so difficult to locate among the many peaks of the Colorado Rockies that for years commentators were not certain whether it was real or not. Moran pictured it soaring above surrounding summits, its white cross a sign of the providential blessings of American expansion, and the image was soon reproduced as a lithograph for middle-class living rooms.22 In Cody’s arena, it was a recognizably authentic frontier image, the cross hanging like God’s own star over the American conquest on the plains below. 23 In other words, the wilderness of the Wild West was realistic in part because it seemed to merge into the space of the arena, and in part because it so closely approximated the visual West already familiar to audiences who had never been west of the Hudson, or the Atlantic.

  “Trick of the Eye.” The Seventh Cavalry charges into the Lakota, who beckon the soldiers into a giant painting of the Little Big Horn battlefield— and into history. Courtesy Denver Public Library.

  Buffalo Bill and his Wild West were astonishing to watch not only as frontier people fading before advancing civilization, but as authentic, historical people in a complex dance with copies of western landscapes so artfully contrived as to confuse the senses. They were thus a commentary on mass production, on manufacturing, on mechanical reproduction of art at every level and of every kind. By dashing in and out of giant paintings, inscribing real deeds and fake ones alike in show programs, and traveling back and forth between “real” West and “show” East, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West invited audiences to draw a line between real and fake, historical and representation. But on another level, they provided a thrilling display of courageous, authentic people who would not quail before a blizzard of representations that threatened to overwhelm them. Photographs, press reviews, colorful posters, panorama paintings, pen-and-ink drawings, show programs, lithographs, history books, and many other media provided “true life” illustrations of western settings and show principals. Much of the fun of the show was seeing the “real” people and measuring how they stacked up against their own images.

  The copies were not always benign, and paradoxically, Cody used copies of himself to wage an ongoing battle against his imitators. By offering an entertainment that resembled Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, performance rivals such as Doc Carver, Adam Forepaugh, Pawnee Bill, and a host of others simultaneously underscored Cody’s status as the “original” and threatened to overwhelm the unique appeal of his entertainment. Cody fought them furiously, plastering his posters over theirs and hauling them to court for trademark infringement when he could.24

  But in many ways, Cody’s artistry was to juxtapose the copy and the original, and then stitch them together with his own person. In later years, movies projected action onto the screen. But they could not replicate the experience of watching the seemingly genuine frontier conquerors move back and forth through painting and landscape, connecting history and the present. As historical people, they came toward the audience through time, out of history and into the modern world of electric trolleys, telegraphs, telephones, and mechanical stuff which sometimes poked out from behind the canvas.

  Just as they darted back and forth between painting and life, so they flickered through the life stories inscribed in show pr
ograms. The biographical and historical “articles” in these dime pamphlets were studded with authentic detail and fictional narrative elements, as illuminating and as deceptive as any brushstroke. They provided a curtain from which the cast advanced and into which they might return, over and over again, in city after city, decade after decade. Was Cody the real Buffalo Bill? Was he really in the Pony Express? Was the Deadwood coach the real Deadwood coach, and had it done all that he said it had? Was Red Shirt really a chief? Were those real cowboys? Had any of these people been at the Little Big Horn, and if so, which ones? Show programs and press agentry, like the visual deceptions of the arena, blurred the line between what really happened on the Great Plains and what the audience wanted to believe had happened. The result was a gigantic show of alternating real and fictional elements with reverberations far beyond the circus or the panorama, encompassing a powerful mythology of national greatness, but one whose meaning was constantly up for grabs.

  IN IMPORTANT WAYS, the show’s visual messages had a political counterpart, providing a space in which to consider and even debate the era’s many political arguments, without necessarily acceding to any single point of view.

  With its narrative of American expansion and Indian war, and its endorsements by military men who were also political figures, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West had a sharper political edge than most other entertainments. The Gilded Age is recalled today as an era of glamour and excess. But it was also a time of fierce partisanship, when the nation was evenly divided between two parties who fought bitterly over every presidential contest, and whose leaders struggled to stem or co-opt popular discontent brought on by rapid industrialization. Disputes between labor and capital, strikes and their armed suppression, riots, and the near shutdown of whole cities followed one after another in the last twentyfive years of the nineteenth century. Between 1881 and 1905, the United States saw nearly 37,000 strikes, involving 7 million workers. In 1893 a fierce depression struck, and by 1894 the Pullman strike paralyzed the railroads. President Cleveland called out the army, placing Chicago under martial law and giving armed escort to the scabs who ran the trains. At the same time, the expansion of farms and mines in the West, “the progress of civilization,” glutted producer markets, forcing crop and mineral prices sharply downward. Western farmers, miners, and laborers united to demand government regulation of market and railroad.