Louis S. Warren
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His admiration for the Wild West show is striking in part because Aveling skewered romantic facades in a way few other writers did. During his 1886 tour to investigate the prospects of socialism in America, he never traveled to the West. But his encounters with cowhands in eastern exhibitions led him to become the first writer to describe them as proletarians: “In a word, out in the fabled West, the life of the ‘free’ cowboy is as much that of a slave as is the life of his Eastern brother, the Massachusetts mill-hand. And the slave-owner is in both cases the same—the capitalist.” 66 He joined many others in demanding a new trial for the Haymarket suspects.67 His many interviews of American workers were grist for his subsequent study, The Working-Class Movement in America, which he coauthored with his wife in 1891.68
Aveling’s encounter with the Wild West show began in 1886, at Erastina, after an acquaintance insisted he see it. To the son-in-law of Karl Marx, the show told the story of “life and death in the Rocky Mountains, where the wave of savage life is beating itself out against the rock of an implacably advancing civilization.”69 Cody’s portrayal of social evolution appealed to leftist notions of dialectic and revolution as much as to the social Darwinism of reactionary conservatives. The fascination of it, Aveling wrote, “is in part due to the coming face to face with conditions that in some sense represent our own ancestral ones.” Like pioneers of modern anthropology such as Lewis Henry Morgan (and Karl Marx, too), Aveling looked at primitive peoples and said, “They are what we once were.” Indians embodied the universal primitive. “These dusky Indians … yet remind us of the earlier forms of savage man whence we have evolved, not by any manner of means always in the right direction.” 70
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, with its triumph of cowboys over Indians, pastoralism over hunting, evoked the development of ever more complex civilizations, a process that was, to the minds of all Cody’s contemporaries, of every political stripe, as unstoppable as evolution itself. Capitalists, conservatives, liberals, socialists, and communists fought one another bitterly, but all saw the triumph of commerce over savage chaos as ineluctable. Notions of cultural relativism, which allow Americans to think of other cultures as distinctive, but not inferior, were decades away. Belief in the necessary departure of “primitives” from the face of the earth was practically universal. Capitalists believed the dispossession of Indians paved the way for farming, commerce, and private property. Socialists and communists saw Indian defeat, and the advancement of modern wage work and private property, as inevitable steps in the destruction of feudalism and the emergence of class divisions (which would result, inevitably, in revolution, the abolition of private property, and the advent of proletarian utopia). Where these camps differed was on the question of how civilization should progress once savagery was conquered. But Edward Aveling and Frederic Remington shared a strong enthusiasm for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West because they also shared a deep faith in the defeat of primitives as the necessary price of better worlds to come.
Cody’s patrician kindness and artful pose as a frontiersman allowed Aveling to believe that his consummately modern show—a legal corporation which relied on industrial transport, a wage-earning cast, and steam-powered presses for its colorful posters, newspaper notices, and tickets— was fundamentally premodern, lying outside the contemporary world of wage reductions, workplace mechanization, and surplus labor.71 To Aveling, Cody represented an earlier race of white men fundamentally different from the modern white race of corporate bosses. Cody’s race was “vanishing as the Red Indian, its foe, vanishes.”72 In other words, Cody looked forward to the modern capitalist order, without actually being part of it.
So it was that Aveling, the socialist, practically moved into the Wild West show camp, first at Erastina in 1886, and then in London the following year. He mused on the experience almost as enthusiastically as any Frederic Remington. “Have I not spent days and nights in camp with them; been present at ‘Saddle-Up!’ time, and behind the scenes at the performances; ridden outside the Deadwood coach; slept in Buffalo Bill’s tent?” His list of show acquaintances included many show cowboys, including Jim Mitchell, Buck Taylor, “Bronco Bill” Irving, and “Tony Esquivel, the most handsome, the most charming, the most daring of them all—are not these my friends?”73 The most astonishing of these, to his mind, was William Cody himself: “Very tall, very straight, very strong; the immense frame so perfectly balanced, so cleanly built, knit together so firmly and symmetrically, that until you stood by it and felt it towering over you and, as it were, absorbing your own lesser individuality, you hardly recognized what giant was here.” But no matter the physical description, wrote Aveling, “nothing of this—and, indeed, nothing—can give any idea of the immense personality” of this “extraordinary man.”74
Cody’s energetic charisma flickers through account after account over a century later. Between comparisons to the centaur of old, and testaments to his physical beauty and his “immense personality,” we may yet discern a presence which awed the most jaded reviewers. Advising Mackaye about how to work with Cody, his partner Nate Salsbury—who had a testy relationship with Buffalo Bill even in these most rewarding years—took it upon himself to explain Cody’s genius. “You will find him petulant and impulsive,” wrote Salsbury to Mackaye, “but with good, crude ideas as to what can be evolved from your material.”75 Salsbury resented Cody’s intuitive command of their joint enterprise, and he was both bemused and intimidated by how completely Cody’s presence could control not only a performance but also backstage machinations. “Cody, in many respects, is a man of steam-engine power,” explained Salsbury, in a more thoughtful, private moment. But just as important as his energy, Cody’s physicality seemed to contain the conflicting elements of the show—cowboys and Indians, progress and chaos—within his own body. “In his tremendous physical power, he is the only man who can control, and keep in subjection, the various antagonistic elements of such a show,” wrote the managing partner.76
Steele Mackaye’s son later called The Drama of Civilization “a new form of folk-temple for the worship of a new heroic age,” and there can be little question that the Madison Square Garden season of 1886–87 placed the Wild West show on the horizon of New York audiences as a cultural attraction.77 As with other appearances of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, reviewers had their share of complaints and fun with the Madison Square Garden season, describing the orator’s descriptions as “insufferably long,” denouncing the “lame conclusion” of the prairie fire scene, and providing colorful, and condescending, names for the show Indians.78 But in terms of the show’s acceptance as a historically educational and socially redeeming entertainment, the winter at Madison Square Garden was an overwhelming success, dispelling any lingering doubts about its attractions for “respectable” people. Where The Drama of Civilization looked enough like the Erastina performances to inspire playful or disparaging reviews, the aura of sanctity surrounding the reenactment of “Custer’s Last Rally,” with its visual imagery that seemingly carried the audience right into the painting and into history, upped the show’s cultural capital.
The Wild West show’s acceptance as a suitably domestic exposition of life in the Far West owed much to the incorporation of Annie Oakley, Emma Lake Hickok, and other women into its mythology. In New York, other factors behind the newfound respectability of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West included Steele Mackaye’s direction, Matt Morgan’s paintings, and Nate Salsbury’s business sense. Without the intercession of Libbie Custer, the Wild West show’s signature educational scene, “Custer’s Last Rally,” could not have been staged at all.
But Cody himself remained its central feature. His authenticity relied on many things, especially the participation of Indians in his drama, and we shall explore their motivations in another chapter. But the idea of such a “drama of civilization” without him is unthinkable. New York audiences knew Buffalo Bill from over a decade on the stage. One measure of his new venture’s success was that in contrast to the mostly
working-class fans of his frontier melodramas and his first Wild West show season, audiences at Madison Square Garden in January 1887 included a broad cross-section of New Yorkers. According to one journalist, “statesmen, artists, military men, teachers, writers, musicians, business men, politicians, artizans, mechanics, and others who desire to know as much as possible about the history of their country” flocked to the show, “interested as we never saw an audience before.”79 The patronage of veterans and military officers validated the show as both historically authentic and socially acceptable. Cody’s press agents distributed lists of officers in attendance. General Sherman saw it twenty times.80 It was so popular that branch ticket offices were opened in Brooklyn, Jersey City, and Newark.81 Show management arranged discount ticket prices for members of the Grand Army of the Republic, and schools sent crowds of students to afternoon matinees. 82 A colorful children’s book titled A Peep at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West soon appeared, with the principal lessons of the show explained in simple, awful rhymes.83 Buffalo Bill was, at long last, respectable family entertainment.
Hints in show reviews suggest that the spectacle of Custer’s demise, with Custer “represented by Buffalo Bill, who wore a wig to represent Custer’s auburn locks,” met with near-sacred veneration. Reviews describe audience behavior with numerous references to order and respectfulness, suggesting that during this winter season, the Wild West show left far behind the raucous audiences of Cody’s melodrama days, and approached a kind of incipient high-culture appreciation normally displayed in opera houses and the upmarket theaters that produced Shakespeare.84
Ordinarily, the Wild West show was an outdoor entertainment. But in a sense, its highly successful appearance in Madison Square Garden in the winter of 1886–87 suggests how much its rampant, raucous centaurs had been domesticated for popular entertainment, and how much that domestication allowed its harsher themes of race war to be reconciled with liberal ideals of race reconciliation and the rule of law. Just as the show featured “the pioneers with families at work in sun and shade to open and cultivate the soil, to build and beautify homes,” so too the theater itself was as comfortable as “a cheery parlor.”85 Divided as they were over the question of anarchy and whether it should be met with force or forgiveness, middle-class audiences who were traditionally loath to venture downtown for entertainment could feel safe in venturing into the heart of New York for this nighttime show, where comfort, amusement, and the sacralization of American history flowed together under the guiding hand of America’s most famous westerner.
As the show wound down in February, a new rumor began to circulate through the press. Nate Salsbury had received an inquiry from the organizers of the American Exhibition in London. After a series of telegrams and messages, he and Cody made it official. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was going to Europe.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Wild West London
ON MARCH 31, 1887, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show sailed out of New York Harbor, bound for Great Britain. “There was a dense crowd on the dock, shouting and whooping and gesticulating for dear life,” wrote one observer. The celebrated Cowboy Band played “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” a U.S. Army standard (and the same tune that accompanied Cody and the Fifth Cavalry as they set out to fight the Dog Men in 1869), as the ship State of Nebraska headed out to sea with 209 Wild West show passengers, including more than ninety Lakota Sioux men, women, and children. Below deck were almost two hundred horses, eighteen buffalo, and assorted mules, elk, Texas steers, donkeys, and even deer.1
The crossing was rough, with giant waves, rolling decks, and seasickness. The horses suffered from poor ventilation, and the ship’s captain ordered holes cut in the deck to provide them air. Several buffalo and elk died en route. Show workers threw them into the sea.2
After docking at Gravesend, the Wild West show began rehearsals at the newly constructed showground adjacent to the American Exhibition, in West London, at Earl’s Court. Cody, Burke, and Salsbury had seen to it that the show had some of the best advance press in England’s history, and its arrival was widely anticipated. It did not hurt that Salsbury had arranged for the show to be attached to the American Exhibition, a display of American paintings and manufactured products, and a diorama of New York City— with a scale model of the newly completed Statue of Liberty in the miniature harbor—meant to attract British investment and consumers for American products. It did not hurt, either, that the exhibition itself was timed to coincide with Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, the national celebration of her fiftieth year on the throne. William Gladstone, already a three-time prime minister, visited the show a week before the opening.3 In May, the Prince of Wales attended an advance performance of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. On his recommendation, Queen Victoria commanded a private showing for herself.4
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West cast, 1887, in London. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.
Her visit inspired one of the show’s most enduring legends, inscribed in a new edition of Cody’s autobiography the following year by press agent John Burke. According to Burke, the queen’s visit was an honor of “unique and unexampled character.” Not only was she sovereign of the United Kingdom and Europe’s longest-reigning monarch, but “ever since the death of her husband, nearly thirty years ago,” she had “cherished an invincible objection to appearing before great assemblages of her subjects.” 5 Her stalwart grief proved no match for the glittering allure of the Wild West. On the afternoon of May 11, Queen Victoria arrived at Earl’s Court with a large entourage of “uniformed celebrities and brilliantly attired fair ladies who formed a veritable parterre of living flowers around the temporary throne.”
Victoria’s arrival would have been memorable all by itself, but in Burke’s telling, it was immediately followed by “a very notable incident, sufficient to send the blood surging through every American’s veins at Niagara speed.” Opening the performance, the Wild West show’s standard-bearer presented the American flag, with the orator explaining that it was “an emblem of peace and friendship to the world.”
As the standard bearer waved the proud emblem above his head, Her Majesty rose from her seat and bowed deeply and impressively toward the banner. The whole court party rose, the ladies bowed, the generals present saluted, and the English noblemen took off their hats. Then—we couldn’t help it—but there arose such a genuine heart-stirring American yell from our company as seemed to shake the sky. It was a great event. For the first time in history, since the Declaration of Independence, a sovereign of Great Britain had saluted the star spangled banner, and that banner was carried by a member of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.6
London was awash in Europe’s royals, all of them paying their respects to Victoria. Her endorsement assured their attendance in the coming months. On June 20, the Prince of Wales arrived at the showgrounds, trailing an entourage which included the king of Denmark, the king of Saxony, the king and queen of the Belgians, the king of Greece, and a slew of lesser titles, too. So it was, wrote Burke, that the Deadwood coach “had the honor of carrying on its time-honored timbers four kings and the Prince of Wales that day, during the attack of the redskins.”7 After the show was over, the Prince of Wales joked with the showman, “Colonel, you never held four kings like these before.”
“I’ve held four kings,” replied Cody, “but four kings and the Prince of Wales makes a royal flush, such as no man ever held before.”8
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was a hit in England in 1887, and these stories of Cody’s success have entertained the American public ever since. Much of their appeal, then and now, is in the validation they convey. The queen bows to the American flag, acknowledging the ascent of the former colonies to modern power. The heir to her throne, a nobleman from a great house, takes his seat atop the frontier coach, makes a pun about poker (an American game), and finds himself both entertained and outwitted by Nature’s Nobleman. Queen and prince pay homage to America’s frontier history and American entertainment, to America’s tri
umph over the wilderness and to American culture. If there were any doubts that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was something more than just another cheap show, the imprimatur of Queen Victoria and her family dispelled them.
The royal endorsement of Buffalo Bill’s show proved a marketing bonanza. Cody told the story of four kings riding in the Deadwood coach for years afterward, and so did other members of the show, in Great Britain and elsewhere.9 The Prince of Wales was allegedly so fond of the Deadwood coach joke that he told it on himself, and if he did not, other Londoners soon did.10
For the larger British public, Cody would have been hard to miss even before the queen expressed her pleasure with his show. British readers, like their American counterparts, had been devouring fictional romances about Buffalo Bill since the 1870s, and now he materialized before their eyes. 11 He did not disappoint. “The representative frontiersman of his day” and his touring “exposition” of real Indian warriors, genuine Anglo cowboys, Mexican vaqueros, and women sharpshooters became enormously popular.12 Society columns dubbed him “the lion of the season.” The frontier hero became perhaps the most sought-after party guest among the United Kingdom’s upper classes.
Catapulted to these heights, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West would be a major attraction in Britain for many years, the lights dimming over its last appearance in the United Kingdom only in 1904. By then, the show had become the best-known representation of America. And Cody, the warrior from the frontier West, had become the world’s most famous American.
Particularly in the show’s early years, the American press had a giant appetite for stories of Cody’s European triumphs. Newspapers began publishing them even before Burke ghostwrote them into Cody’s new autobiography in 1888.13 Some Americans sneered that British respect for Cody, a simple showman, reflected their decadence.14 Others were more amused at British credulity in accepting Cody’s show as elite entertainment, like the anonymous poet who composed the following tongue-in-cheek ditty about American entertainers in Britain: