If the novel is a flirtation with the American frontier, it also suggests the frontier is best left alone, and frontiersmen best left out there. In this light romance, it is the English artist-gentleman, Reginald, who embodies the right balance of manly power and gentility. The frontiersman is comical when he is not dangerous, and perhaps his greatest threat is the unreasoning, extreme infatuation he inspires in English womanhood, which causes Esse to wane before she is rescued by the cultured, manly, and very English hero. In fact, Esse’s malady—her pallor, her listlessness, her loss of weight, her increasing detachment, and her inability to think about anything other than the mountain man—mimics the one that strikes the doomed Lucy Westenra after her visit from a frontier hunter who provokes an all-consuming passion in Stoker’s next, and most famous, novel.93
Bram Stoker, 1901. The North American (Philadelphia), November 21, 1901.
The Shoulder of Shasta appeared in October of 1895. Less than two years later, the same publisher issued Dracula, the novel Stoker had been crafting for seven years.94 It was by far his most ambitious work. In his fiction, Stoker had been exploring questions about frontiers and borders for the previous four years. But, speculating on the origins of Dracula, we could do worse than to revisit that coaching party in 1887. It was summer, the coach path winding through the trees. The spontaneous cheers for the men on the box must have seemed as natural as the setting, and perhaps made Stoker ponder—as he often did—the sources of celebrity and its dark power. Perhaps the impromptu performance of these divergent geniuses side by side—Cody in all his unassuming genuineness and Irving in all his imperious assumptions—germinated in Stoker the seed of his Dracula tale. To be sure, the powerful tension between the virtuous frontier hero and the decadent life-draining monster would occupy center stage in his novel.
Stoker’s description of “Grizzly Dick” matched this famous photograph of Buffalo Bill in London, 1887. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.
Of course, the ease with which the Wild West show appealed to English racial fears owes something to the way Cody conceived it as a response to analogous American anxieties.95 As we have seen, in Cody’s hands, the frontier became the setting for a constant race contest, a crucible of American whiteness, where the destiny of Anglo-Saxon America was shored up against the implicit decay of the cities, the Industrial Revolution, new immigration from southern and eastern Europe, and a host of other ill-defined threats and pervasive cultural fears.96
In making the social Darwinist contest between races the center of American and world history, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West discounted and elided issues of class conflict. “Custer’s Last Rally” was not performed in London in 1887. Instead, audiences saw the usual climactic scene, the “Attack on the Settler’s Cabin.”97 By making the salvation of the home its paramount message, the show implied that racial propagation—itself the sign of racial vigor—would go to those who secured the frontier for their families. Burgeoning class tensions in industrial cities, such as London, could be glossed over by an appeal to a mythic natural past of racial conflict in which class simply did not figure.
Cody’s centaur and indeed his company of “Transatlantic Centaurs” were but the latest of many monsters, real and imagined, and mostly malevolent, to invade London in the 1880s. In 1885, two years before the Wild West show made its debut, William Stead caused a major political and social scandal by publishing his Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, an exposé of child prostitution in London in which he depicted the bestial sexuality of the professional class as a minotaur. In 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson electrified the literary world with his portrayal of a doctor caught between his longing for knowledge and his bodily lust in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In 1888, the year after Cody’s departure, mutilated bodies of prostitutes marked the trail of Jack the Ripper, and newspaper coverage of the murders served as a powerful reminder to London women of the dangers of public life, and the supposed safety of the home. Indeed, coverage of the Ripper murders resonated with the imagery of Cody’s own “Attack on the Settler’s Cabin,” wherein a woman is saved from certain debasement only by the shelter of her home and the courage of armed white men. 98
Cody’s centaur was a harbinger of epochal shifts, paralleling his millennial messages in the United States with promises of the triumph of Anglo-American culture, the glories of Western imperial power, and the rebirth of the race in a tide of frontier bloodshed. English enthusiasm for the Wild West show stemmed in no small measure from its depiction of an English diaspora racially resurrected by the frontier. In this sense, the show’s success expressed a gathering transatlantic conviction that the English and the Americans were part of a shared “race empire” of Anglo-Saxon expansion. Historians have explored connections between the Wild West show and the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner, but Turner’s essay would not even be published for six more years. Cody’s extravaganza is more obviously connected to Anglo-Saxonism, which was the most popular historical explanation for America’s frontier success in the 1880s. Anglo-Saxonists conflated race and culture, so that the origins of liberal democracy, constitutional monarchy, representative government, and most other venerable English and American traditions were derived from racial characteristics of ancient tribes—Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Vikings—formed under oak trees in the German forests. According to the theory, these racial attributes hardened in battle with racial inferiors—Romans, Picts, and Celts—during a long process of westward expansion, and were cultivated and preserved from continental decadence in the western bastion of the British Isles and, later, in the United States. By 1887, enthusiasm for such notions had reached near-hysterical proportions. Theories about the common Germanic origins of British and Anglo-American culture and institutions dominated historical writing and reverberated in packed lecture halls on both sides of the Atlantic. At the opening of the American Exhibition, just before Buffalo Bill’s Wild West kicked off its first London performance, Archbishop Farrar prayed “fervently” for the “further development of the two Leviathans of the English-speaking race.”99 To most observers in Britain, the Wild West show was a dramatic reenactment of Anglo-Saxon triumph.100
Anglo-Saxonism was, of course, a variant of Aryanism, which was itself a theory of westering race history, in which Germanic peoples, Teutons, themselves originated on the high plateaus of Asia, as Aryans, who migrated west over millennia. The variations and contradictions of Aryanism did not preclude its appeal, also on both sides of the Atlantic. Americans, from Walt Whitman to General Arthur McArthur, endorsed it as history.101 In Britain, in the very summer that Buffalo Bill’s show received rave reviews in London newspapers, the Aryan myth was still proving useful as a rationale for empire in India, with columnists reinscribing the now-hoary notion that the Raj constituted England’s return to the land of her Asian origins, “charged with conveying Western ideas to the race from whom our civilization came.”102
Bram Stoker turned to Aryanists for crucial background details of Count Dracula’s origins. And Dracula, like many of his other novels, was informed by a popular Anglo-Saxonist tradition that British and Americans were descended from ancient Viking raiders, the berserkers.103 These invocations of mythic race history suggested connections to the American frontier myth; Aryanism and Anglo-Saxonism were coeval with the development of American frontier mythology, and in many respects they were its relatives. In all these myths, the racial energies of white people aged in the East and were renewed through bloody encounters with barbarians in the West. 104 The tale of Aryans passing from Asia to Europe and in the process becoming Britons was as analogous as it was prefatory to the story of Britons migrating west and becoming Americans.
In this sense, Indians in the Wild West show could be seen as at least symbolic standins for Britain’s own “savage” opponents, particularly the Irish. In 1887, the United Kingdom was beset by political controversy over the question of Irish home rule—Gladstone’s signature political issue—and t
he threat of Irish revolutionaries. Two days after her introduction to Red Shirt and the Lakota babies at Earl’s Court, Queen Victoria traveled to London’s East End for another official function. Large cheering crowds lined the route, but “what rather damped the effect,” the queen wrote that night in her journal, were the small number of people “booing and hooting … all along the route … probably Socialists and the worst Irish.” But “considering the masses of Socialists of all nationalities, and low bad Irish, who abound in London,” she judged the outing a success.105
Visitors to the Wild West camp invoked comparisons between the most primitive westerners and Britons. One London cartoonist imagined an Irish woman, a “Hibernian matron,” latching on to an Indian in the Wild West camp as she mistakes him for her runaway husband. “I found ye out at last, Tim, ye blagyard, after lavin’ me an’ yer five childher to the waves iv the worruld. Little I thought iv findin’ ye here—goin’ about like an ould turkey-cock wid yer tail an’ feathers.”106
But as much as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show seemed to resonate with British myths of race origin and race strength, as much as it could be a symbolic crutch for British imperialism, it was simultaneously troubling for audiences concerned about racial decay. On the one hand, the show enhanced the sense of racial kinship between the United States and Great Britain, so that The Times, for example, could intone on the day of its departure, “The Americans and the English are of one stock.” In this vein, columnists suggested that English manhood could take lessons from Cody’s cowboys. 107
On the other hand, such musings often called into question the racial viability of the English. Race, in the nineteenth century, was thought to be inherited through blood, but also subject to change by new environments. 108 “Of one stock” they may once have been, but were the two nations yet of the same race? Or had the frontier experience so altered the Americans that they had become something different? To see cowboys like Buck Taylor and Dick Johnson “amongst a group of self-complacent little City clerks it might be imagined that the individuals belonged to separate species.”109 In 1888, the Metropolitan Police began their search for suspects in the Jack the Ripper murders by interrogating political radicals and racial minorities whose barbarous instincts might have incited the crimes. The Wild West company sailed for New York from Hull on May 11, 1888, inadvertently leaving behind at least four Lakota men who were lost in the city.110 In their search for a way home, they went to London, where they were quickly picked up by the police. “The police questioned us and let us go,” Nick Black Elk recalled many years later. “They had probably blamed us with something that had happened.” 111
In addition to American Indians, police in pursuit of the Ripper interrogated socialists, “Asiatics,” and Greek Gypsies, before moving on to three more of Cody’s own, “persons calling themselves Cowboys who belonged to the American Exhibition,” who had stayed behind in London, and whose racial identity was questionable enough to earn them a place on this list of potential savages.112
After somebody claiming to be the murderer used what might have been American slang in several letters sent to the police and the press, some speculated that the butcher of Whitechapel might be a “Texas rough.” Such images of rough-hewn western violence, of course, resonated to some degree with the recently departed Wild West show and the many references to Texas that it called to mind. Although Cody attempted to fashion an image of his cowboys as “real” frontiersmen and safe, respectable entertainers, the facade was hard to maintain. Cowboys in the camp were on display for hours at a time, and they were often taunted or treated as museum exhibits. Indians and other performers suffered just as much, but white cowboys appear to have been less patient with objectification by fans. Late in 1887, Dick Johnson, the “giant cowboy,” got into a fistfight with another patron at a London pub. When the police arrived, Johnson tried to flee before engaging two constables in a bruising brawl. Although Cody and the Prince of Wales intervened in an attempt to lessen his punishment, Johnson did six months’ hard labor at Pentonville Prison before rejoining the show in Manchester. The event was widely covered, in both the regular and the comic press, as if it confirmed the burgeoning savagery of American white men.113
The conspicuous growth of American cultural and economic power conjured notions of British decline which only enhanced such anxieties about the ascendant “American race.” Even before Buffalo Bill’s Wild West announced it was coming to London, such a flood of American investors, tourists, and entertainers had inundated Britain that critics began to fulminate about the “American Invasion.” Cody’s popularity brought such concerns to a head. In the show business world, theater owners and managers, among them Bram Stoker, read commentary about the threat of competition from American shows. 114 Beyond entertainments and popular amusements, the proliferation of Cody’s image and the symbols of his show announced the penetration of British industry and consumer markets by American capital, goods, and advertising. As one newspaper wit described it,
I may walk it, or ’bus it, or hansom it: still
I am faced by the features of Buffalo Bill.
Every hoarding is plastered, from East-end to West,
With his hat, coat, and countenance, lovelocks and vest.115
One cartoonist drew a montage of cartoons over the caption “The Worship of Yankeedom.” At the top left was Cody, portrayed as a sharp Yankee-gone-West, a spindle-shanked New Englander in a swallowtail coat and cowboy hat, his pockets bulging with coin. “Now I’ve landed the brass I guess I’ll leave you Britishers and skeedaddle across the Herring Pond,” he announces.
Others images evoked the American commercial challenge even more directly. One portrayed a bowler-hatted Londoner confronting a whole series of buildings labeled “stores” and complaining, “Call us a nation of shopkeepers Bah! Why there is not a shop left in the place—they are all Americanised and made into stores.” Another showed a collection of canned goods whose labels identified them as “Preserved Peaches,” “Oysters,” “Prawns,” “Asparagus,” and “Tinned Tomatoes,” with this last can wearing a cowboy hat and announcing to the others, “Well Boys, I think we’ve done the trick anyhow!”116
Such images were adaptations of an older European critique of America’s hard-driving commercialism, a Yankee characteristic which alienated Old World cultural commentators for decades. Charles Dickens had announced years before that Americans were crass, finagling operators and cultural tyrants, and many other Europeans criticized Americans’ relentless pursuit of manufacturing and the dollar to the exclusion of art, poetry, and humanity. America represented a gigantic paradox. Many continued to think of her as a primeval wilderness, where there was no culture, where Indians roamed a vast hinterland and Yankee settlers scrabbled in the forests. At the same time, her manufacturing, fierce market expansion, and corporate capitalism made the United States a metaphor for modernity.117 The American Exhibition of 1887 captured both these facets, with an exhibit of American products joined by a bridge to the Wild West camp. But Cody’s giant commercial success in London, the ubiquity of his advertising and the crowds of paying customers, in a sense made the manufactured exhibits redundant. Buffalo Bill’s commercialism embodied the paradox of America, and captured every single anxiety about a foreign power that seemed both wilderness and commodity, culturally impoverished and perpetually for sale.
Cody’s sexual appeal made the leap from these economic and cultural concerns to issues of biology, or race, that much easier, for the spectacle of an “invader” who was irresistible to English womanhood easily reinforced fears of English racial decline. At least one columnist compared him to Jung Bahadur, a Nepalese warrior prince whose visit to London in the 1850s included an affair with an Englishwoman, a scandalous event long remem bered in bawdy songs at late-night supper clubs.118 Although journalists fixated on Cody’s tent in the show camp, he spent most evenings in a rented London apartment, where another journalist recalled that he was “embarrassed by an overwhelm
ing mass of flowers which come hourly from hosts of female admirers.” 119 Cody, as we shall see, enjoyed the company of women in London. When Bram Stoker received a note from Cody via a young woman, written on the American’s calling card, requesting two seats at the Lyceum for one “lovely little actress,” the manager did not have to wonder who would be sitting in the second seat.120
“The Worship of Yankeedom” criticizes American commercialism. Note the parody of Cody, top left, in which the frontiersman is a money-grubbing Yankee in disguise. Moonshine, October 22, 1887.
Cody’s performance for Queen Victoria was charged with many different layers of irony and tension. Not the least of them centered on his appeal as a manly foreigner amusing the British monarch. His “conquest” of the notoriously reclusive queen sat uneasily with her public, and her patronage of the Paris Hippodrome and the American Wild West embittered British performers who waited in vain for her command. Vesta Tilley, a popular music hall singer, roused her audiences with comical but pointed verse:
She’s seen the Yankee Buffaloes,
The circus, too, from France,
And may she reign until she gives
The English show a chance.
The queen’s long absence from London’s greatest cultural attraction, its theaters, particularly chagrined Londoners. “Her Majesty has honoured the French circus at Olympia and the American boom at the Buffalo Billeries with her presence, but never since the death of her beloved consort has she set foot, even as an august audience of one, in an English show place.” 121 Even performers in working-class music halls, like Vesta Tilley, took this as a slap.
May Queen Victoria Reign
May she with us long remain,
’Til Irving takes rank
With a war-painted Yank,
May good Queen Victoria Reign.122
Louis S. Warren Page 46
