Louis S. Warren

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

  Given the show’s middle-class popularity through cycles of labor uprising and suppression, most historians follow the lead of Richard Slotkin, who sees in the harsh rhetoric of fans like Frederic Remington and Theodore Roosevelt proof that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West taught its public “that violence and savage war were the necessary instruments of American progress.” Whether the enemy were Lakota Sioux or determined strikers, bloodshed was the path to peace.25

  These arguments are not without some truth. Remington himself wrote articles describing the putative heroics of frontier cavalrymen, like the captain of the Seventh Cavalry in Chicago who looked “as natural as when I had last seen him at Pine Ridge, just after Wounded Knee” as he faced down the “anarchistic foreign trash” who manned the barricades of the Pullman strike in Chicago, making the city “much like Hays City, Kansas, in early days.” During the same period, he wrote glowing reviews of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, “an evolution of a great idea,” whose arena he visited to “renew my first love.” 26 A contingent of U.S. cavalry joined the Wild West in 1893, and veterans of Indian war and urban uprising rode side by side in the arena. In 1897, the Wild West camp included a cavalry sergeant—“a slim, quiet young fellow [who] has the bronze medal for bravery at the battle of Wounded Knee”—and an artillery sergeant who “was out at Chicago during the riots.”27 Modern readers, remote from the Indian wars and the political arguments they ignited, are easily convinced that reenacting them was a rightwing celebration of imperialism and bloodshed.

  But rightwing appeal offers at best a partial explanation for the success of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. The show was a mass entertainment. Americans were no more in agreement about the rights of workers than they were on Indian policy. To draw millions of Americans to its bleachers over so long a career, and to achieve consistently glowing reviews from critics and newspapers on different sides of so many political questions, the Wild West show had to reach across deeply etched partisan and ideological lines. How did the show rise above these national divisions?

  Part of the show’s appeal lay in its projected amnesia about the nation’s most recent wounds. “America’s National Entertainment” contained almost no references, visual or literary, to the Civil War. In a period when each party sought traction by blaming the other for that conflict, the war’s absence almost allowed audiences to forget it ever happened.

  Cody preferred that approach himself, and in other ways, too, he avoided party battles. His own commitments to party were highly changeable. A pro-Union Democrat in the Civil War, he ran for office in Nebraska as a Democrat in 1872. He joined a march for Democratic President Grover Cleveland in 1888. Cleveland won the popular vote but lost the electoral college in his reelection bid that year, in one of the hardest-fought contests in memory. Despite the partisan hostility that pervaded the country, in March 1889 Cody was an honored guest—and Louisa a member of the reception committee—at the inauguration of Cleveland’s Republican successor, Benjamin Harrison.28 In 1897, Cody attended the inaugural of Republican William McKinley. That same year, his partners were trying to organize the Democratic Party in his newly founded town in Wyoming.29

  Cody’s nonpartisanship, so atypical for men of his era, was also reflected in his entertainment. Even its ownership was bipartisan, with Cody the Democrat teamed up with Nate Salsbury, an ardent Republican. On a cultural level, Cody appealed across party lines with an amusement that told two layers of stories. The most persistent narrative, what we might call the foundation, was present in every historical scene, and it depicted the progress of civilization. This was a story that was widely accepted to be as true as gravity. Whether one liked it or not, commerce would triumph over savagery.

  Layered on top of that story were many others—about Buffalo Bill, Indians, cowboys, soldiers, cowgirls, animals, hunters, and many other figures and characters—which could be interpreted in many distinct and contradictory ways. Indian conquest could be read as good or bad, or both, and the disappearance of the buffalo could be an occasion for happy reflection on the expansion of pastoralism and commerce or as a sad commentary on the wasteful corruption of modern society—or both. Cody’s press agents, and Cody himself, steered a middle course between narrating civilization’s advancement as inevitable and allowing audiences to make up their own minds about what it meant. The solution, as we shall see, lay less in didactic teachings about the need to shoot leftists than in the appealing to the audience’s own ambivalence about race war, the closure of the frontier, and all the other events that followed in the wake of progress.

  That ambivalence was sorely tested by the events of 1886 as The Drama of Civilization took place. In the first six months of the year, there was a dramatic strike in the coalfields of Pennsylvania, another against McCormick’s reaper works in Chicago, and a streetcar strike in New York that culminated in riots between strikers and police. Beginning in March, the Great Southwestern Strike paralyzed railroads in Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Kansas, and eleven people died in violence between strikers and armed marshals in East St. Louis.30

  The Southwestern Strike failed in early May, but by then, another episode of political violence riveted the public like none in the nation’s history. On May Day, in cities across the country, about 200,000 unskilled laborers, skilled craftsmen, socialists, and anarchists went on strike in support of the eight-hour workday. Violence was minor or nonexistent in most places. But in Chicago, 40,000 strikers paraded the streets before joining the ongoing strike at the McCormick reaper factory. Chicago police opened fire on the crowd, killing four. In response, the International Working People’s Association, a small, mostly German-speaking anarchist group with only a hundred members in the city, called a mass meeting to protest police brutality. Between 2,000 and 3,000 demonstrators turned out to hear speeches the next day, at Haymarket Square.

  The meeting was uneventful till the end, when the remaining three hundred people in the crowd began to disperse as two hundred police suddenly arrived. Then somebody in the crowd threw a bomb into police ranks. The blast was huge. It threw fifty policemen to the ground; eight of them died. The remaining police opened fire on demonstrators, who tried to flee, and in the confusion and panic the police wounded sixty of their own number. How many demonstrators died is unknown, but estimates place the number at seven or eight, with three dozen wounded.

  What inspired the activists upon whom the wrath of the state now descended? Anarchism was often incoherent as a political philosophy, but by 1886 the term generally implied revolutionary socialism. To some degree, the anarchist movement was born of striker frustration at their powerless-ness before armed police and soldiers in the upheaval of 1877, and by authorities’ attempts at denying leftists the handful of election victories which they rightly won thereafter. In 1881, a convention of anarchists in Paris praised the recent assassination of Tsar Alexander II and endorsed the principle of armed insurrection to secure a socialist future.31

  With the Haymarket bombing, anarchists became terrorists in the public mind. Although the identity of the perpetrator was unknown (and strike supporters claimed it was an agent provocateur acting on behalf of factory owners), the immediate consequence of the tragedy was America’s first red scare. The nation’s newspapers published chilling rumors: there was a transatlantic anarchist conspiracy ready to flatten Chicago with thousands of bombs hidden beneath the streets; the Haymarket bomb was the signal for a general uprising; the anarchists would seize control of the country. In the panic, Chicago authorities, industrialists, middle-class residents, and many laborers turned against anyone or anything that suggested immigrants, labor organizers, or radicalism. Police conducted dozens of raids, incarcerating and beating hundreds of unionists, socialists, anarchists, and others.32

  Ultimately, eight defendants went on trial for the Haymarket violence. Testimony placed six of them elsewhere at the time of the bombing. The remaining two were on the speakers’ platform and could not have thrown the bomb. Despite their clear innoc
ence, the jury convicted all eight, sentencing seven to hang. (Four were actually hanged, one died in jail, and the last three were pardoned in 1893.) The verdict was popular during 1886, while the nation’s newspapers were consumed with visions of bearded, bomb-throwing immigrants, and while workers, businessmen, and factory owners closed ranks against leftists of any stripe.

  Comparisons between strike violence and frontier savagery were already a tradition, a way of indicting strikers as “barbarous” aliens. In fact, native-born Americans were among the activists. (One of the Haymarket convicts, Albert Parsons, was practically an alternative William Cody. Born in Texas, as a young teenager Parsons was a scout for the Confederate Army.) 33 But ever since the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, and probably before, Americans had blamed labor unrest on “foreign” ideas rather than workplace conditions, and on inferior immigrant “races”—Irish, Germans, Bohemians, Poles, and others among the working masses. The rhetoric reduced class strife to a racial issue, so that to most of the middle and upper classes, labor trouble meant immigrant trouble, or race trouble, which threatened American civilization as much as Indian resistance did, and which could theoretically be dealt with in the same way. The redeployment of frontier army troops to the nation’s cities in 1877 and to Chicago in 1894, and at other times of labor unrest, and the formation of newly professionalized National Guard units to put down labor rebellions, made comparisons to Indian war easy for journalists, whose coverage of strikers was infused with the rhetoric of “savage” labor.34 Calls for violence against radicals mounted. “There are no good anarchists except dead anarchists,” howled the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.35

  The Drama of Civilization debuted at this moment, and in its presentation of a “natural” history of American expansion, it was indeed a soothing and reassuring spectacle for audiences mostly united in their fear of anarchy and seditious foreigners. The newly designed show featured four “epochs” of American history, the progress of which was narrated and explained by an orator (a feature Mackaye borrowed from moving panoramas and which proved so successful that Cody retained it for the rest of his show’s long career), and which we can follow through the eyes of a reviewer.36 The first scene was the epoch of the Primeval Forest, before the arrival of Columbus. Bear, deer, and elk wandered across the moonlit stage, anticipating the arrival of two Indian tribes—Sioux and Pawnee—who clashed in combat, “and a rough-and-tumble massacre” closed the scene.

  The Prairie epoch followed, in which Buffalo Bill hunted a herd of buffalo while guiding a wagon train of emigrants. A display of camp life was followed by a simulated prairie fire, “the fighting of fire with fire—the stampede—deer, buffalo, mustangs, Indians, and emigrants—all fleeing together.”

  The Cattle Ranch was the next installment, “illustrating the cowboy in his glory, riding the bucking mustang and lassoing the bounding and bumptious steer.” Indians made a surprise attack, but were soon dispatched by Buffalo Bill and a troupe of cowboy reinforcements. The final “epoch,” the Mining Camp, included a duel, the arrival and departure of the Pony Express, and the Deadwood stage (robbed by a party of “road agents” rather than Indians this time). Finally, the giant ventilators roared to life. Dummies soared to the rafters, the mining town of tents collapsed before the cyclone, as the curtain dropped.37

  The Drama of Civilization featured no overt references to strikes, labor unrest, or police brutality. This was part of its appeal, as an escapist departure for an imagined frontier. But, given the pervasive rhetoric equating strikers and savages, and the hysteria over the anarchist specter in 1886, we can be sure that many saw in The Drama of Civilization a parable of antiradicalism.

  In January, Cody, Salsbury, and Mackaye debuted the last addition to The Drama of Civilization, “Custer’s Last Rally.” The army had been in the background of the show from its beginning. Publicists inscribed Cody’s Union army and cavalry scout service record in show programs, and a Union veteran, Sergeant Frederick Bates, presented the American flag during each performance. But “Custer’s Last Rally” represented the first time Buffalo Bill’s Wild West included a scene of the U.S. Army in frontier combat. To a degree, it appealed to the public’s increasing fascination with the professional military. Although the U.S. Army was traditionally shunned in peacetime, American men, as we have seen, were fearful that their neurasthenic bodies would fail before the bristling, uncontained savagery of immigrant workers and increasingly looked to uniforms and military drill—including shooting at targets—to restore their manhood. Amid the widespread fakery of manufactured, middle-class comfort, military combat seemed to offer authentic, “real” experience that modern men lacked.38

  In one sense, “Custer’s Last Rally” seemed even more real than other acts in the Wild West repertoire, representing as it did a specific historical battle, the nation’s most famous Indian encounter, with which Cody had a long and personal affiliation. Where the Deadwood coach and the Pony Express attractions collapsed many events into one simulacrum, this was a purportedly faithful depiction of a single, profound event, the death of America’s foremost martyr to Indian conquest, staged by the man who avenged him.

  The scene opened with a camp of General Custer’s troops, who began the action by marching out of the camp in pursuit of Indians. A scout discovers a Sioux village, where “Sitting Bull and his warriors are apparently engaged in the innocent pastimes of prairie life.” After the scout returns and informs Custer of the Indians’ location, “The sound of a bugle is heard. The Indians instantly prepare an ambush.” Custer’s troops then rush onto the open stage. “The bugler sounds the charge. Custer waves his sword, puts spurs to his charger, and, followed by his men, rides down upon the Indian village like a cyclone.” There surrounded, the Indians overwhelm the troops in hand-to-hand combat. “Custer is the last man killed, and he dies after performing prodigies of valor.” 39

  In reality (as we have seen), Custer had presided over a regiment that resembled the industrial workforce from which they were drawn: Irish, German, Italian, and other immigrants, as well as poor American-born natives. They were restive, prone to desertion and even mutiny. His actual experience as their commander was closer to that of factory owners who faced the constant threat of worker revolt than to the unbesmirched hero of “Custer’s Last Rally.”

  But Cody’s cowboys assumed the role of loyal soldiers and thereby whitened the Seventh Cavalry in memory. In contrast to the ominous “racial” divisions between immigrants and middle-class America which culminated with the Haymarket bombing, “Custer’s Last Rally” emerged as a mythic moment of American unity and self-sacrifice. Conservatives appreciated the scene. Soon after Buffalo Bill’s Wild West closed at Madison Square Garden, New York’s Eden Musee invited patrons to compare two new, side-by-side waxwork dioramas: one was Custer’s Last Battle; the other, The Chicago Anarchists.40 At least one moral message seemed clear. As Theodore Roosevelt told a gathering of New York Republicans that year, “There is but one answer to be made to the dynamite bomb, and that can best be made by the Winchester Rifle.”41

  But Roosevelt was a politician, and reducing the meaning of Cody’s spectacle to a single teaching, especially one so pointed and political, fails to account for the political variability of Cody’s audience. Popular enthusiasm for hanging the Haymarket suspects continued through the winter. But thereafter, passions cooled. Opinions diverged. Influential critics, including the editor of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly, William Dean Howells, began questioning the fairness of the court proceedings and the government’s case. Many labor organizations began demanding a new trial. Most people probably remained in favor of the death sentences, but a vocal and respected portion of the middle class joined working-class activists in opposing them. By December of 1887 the argument about justice and the Haymarket affair had polarized the country. 42

  The continued popularity of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West amid this changing political context, long after the Haymarket hysteria had subsided, suggests t
hat its appeal went beyond any single didactic message. To conclude that its central teaching was that strikes should be met with military response oversimplifies its complex spectacle. Rather, the show sent many different messages simultaneously, and audiences interpreted them in different ways to suit a very wide spectrum of political leanings that developed and changed over time.

  To grasp the complexity of the show’s teachings, we should keep in mind that most people who saw Buffalo Bill’s Wild West did not see the Custer reenactment. Scholars have long assumed that Custer’s death was Cody’s most durable attraction, but it was in fact only a temporary addition, and Cody reprised it infrequently. After showing the scene for two months at Madison Square Garden, the Custer battle was not seen in the United States again until 1893, for the second half of the show season in Chicago. It appeared regularly in 1894, but disappeared again the next year. It featured in some shows, but not others, in 1896 and sporadically again in 1898. After 1898, it was never shown in the United States again.43

  Its placement within the show also reduced its significance. Custer’s death was the climax only in parts of two show seasons: first, in early 1887, and second, from August to October of 1893.44 On the other occasions when it appeared, it was one of the acts in the middle of the show lineup. The show’s regular and most popular climax remained the more domestically oriented “Attack on the Settler’s Cabin.”