Louis S. Warren
Page 60
But paradoxically, the performance wonders in the Wild West show made audiences and performers alike wonder if they would ever vanish, or even if they should. In 1890, cowboy Warren G. Vincent, from Wyoming, wrote to his father from the show camp in Rome. He had been unable to see his father before he left the United States, and he wanted the older man to know why his son, a hardworking cowboy who loved the range, had done something so odd as to join a traveling show. The first time he saw the show, explained Vincent, he was drawn to its realistic combat, the high drama of horsemen unhorsed, then rising to fight again. “It was the best thing I ever saw in my life to see horses, men, and Indians falling.”
But it was the show’s suggestion of a potential for change and transformation that captivated Vincent. In the Wild West show’s potent mythology, the frontier turned men into horsemen, and lowly country folk like Cody himself into rich showmen. It was a heady vision for a young cowboy, who scraped, scrambled, hustled, and prayed to get enough money for horses, cattle, and some land of his own. And although he had no obvious love for Indians, he well understood how much they sought a new West through this show of the Old West. His reasons for joining the show were in this sense the same as theirs. “I cannot explain the diferant acts,” he told his father, “but if you could see this show it would make you think that cowboys and indians amounted to something.”65
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Buffalo Bill’s America
AFTER WOUNDED KNEE, Cody did not learn he would be allowed to hire Indians again until March of 1891. Salsbury sought out new contingents of racial primitives—other Others—who could replace Indians. By the time the show regrouped in Strasbourg, in the spring of 1891, Salsbury and Cody had incorporated twelve Cossacks and six Argentine gauchos, as well as two detachments of regular European cavalry—twenty Germans, and twenty English—to join twenty Mexican vaqueros, two dozen cowboys, six cowgirls, a hundred Sioux Indians, and a cowboy band of thirty-seven.1
The additions were the culmination of Salsbury’s earlier ideas for a show of world horsemen, paralleling developments in European circuses, which were employing Cossacks, Arabs, and other exotic trick riders and horsemen in Europe in the 1890s.2
This new Wild West show now toured parts of Western Europe. In Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II was a fan. Annie Oakley recalled “at least forty officers of the Prussian Guard standing all about with notebooks” to record the show’s rapid deployment of railroad, horses, and ranks of men in arms. German military interest was echoed across the Atlantic, where the American army was studying circuses for similar reasons.3
After Germany came Belgium and the Netherlands, then a tour of the British provinces. Late in the fall, there was a reprise of The Drama of Civilization at the East End Exhibition Hall in Glasgow.4
Despite the size and military presence of the new Wild West show, Cody found himself ever more besieged behind the lines. Louisa insisted that the newly married Arta and her husband, Horton Boal, assume management of Scout’s Rest Ranch. Cody resisted, for it would mean evicting his sister Julia and her husband, Al Goodman. “I want you to live there just as long as you are contented there,” Cody wrote his brother-in-law. Louisa made life difficult for the Goodmans, and Cody lamented it. “I often feel sorry for her. She is a strange woman but don’t mind her—remember she is my wife—and let it go at that. If she gets cranky just laugh at it, she can’t help it.”5
But after a bitter squabble the Goodmans abandoned the fight and moved back to Kansas. Louisa, whose relations with Julia had always been cool, now had an ally at Scout’s Rest in her daughter Arta. Her victory was short-lived. Arta and Horton abandoned the job within three years. Al Goodman returned to manage the ranch again. But this time, mindful of Louisa’s hostility, Julia stayed away.6
In the spring of 1892, the Wild West show returned to Earl’s Court, London. There was another command performance at Windsor Castle for Queen Victoria, who was enamored of the Cossacks.7 The tour was a success, but the novelty of the Wild West had faded considerably since 1887. To repeat the great fanfare of their London debut five years before, Cody and the company had to wait till the following spring, when the newly christened “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World” opened outside the gates of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
Extensive newspaper coverage of Cody’s European successes heightened popular interest in the show, which had not toured the United States since 1888. In Chicago the new format recharged the show’s authenticity and its frontier myth. Cody’s connection to Sitting Bull and the Ghost Dance troubles, and the continuing presence of Ghost Dancers like Kicking Bear and Short Bull, provided a red-hot connection to the Far West and the American frontier, which in turn facilitated a depiction of the new acts—Cossacks, gauchos, and European cavalrymen—as relics of ancient racial frontiers.
To a degree, the circus roots of the new racial segments suggested the continuing dance of the Wild West show with the big top. Railroad circuses proliferated in the 1890s, until over a hundred of the giant amusements toured the United States after 1900. As modern corporations that displayed exotic peoples for popular amusement, the Wild West show and its circus competitors constituted “a powerful cultural icon of a new, modern nation-state,” in the words of historian Janet Davis.8
But the Congress of Rough Riders also hints at how the show’s extended European sojourns had taught Cody and his publicists to speak of Eurasian and American frontiers in the same breath. When the Wild West cast visited the field of Waterloo in 1891, Cody told a journalist about the “striking resemblance” of this battlefield to the Little Big Horn. (Of course, the comparison allowed readers to make up their own minds about whether Custer was “the Napoleon or the Wellington of the conflict. He looked out for the arrival of Major Reno, who was destined either to be the Blucher or the Grouchy of the close of the fight.”)9
Back in Chicago, the opening at the world’s fair reflected the development of the show’s marketing strategy. By this time, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West practically orbited the world’s fairs and exhibitions which proliferated in the United States and Europe, from the New Orleans Cotton Exposition of 1885 to the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889. As popular celebrations of progress which explored the meaning of national expansion and newfound prosperity, world’s fairs were ideal places for traveling entertainments to pitch their tents, especially a show of the “progress of civilization” like the Wild West show.10
The center of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 was the White City, a group of huge, neoclassical buildings, constructed of wood and plaster on reclaimed marshland along Lake Michigan, symbolizing the glories of America and containing exhibit space for every state and many nations, too. The architectural heart of the fair was the Court of Honor, a grand plaza with a huge pond and a fountain in the middle. Soaring over the watery mirror of the pond was the Statue of the Republic, a sixty-five-foot-tall, gold-plated Lady Liberty. The statue, the gleaming white buildings, the arcing fountains could move visitors to tears with their “inexhaustible dream of beauty,” in the words of poet Edgar Lee Masters. They could also be subjects of ridicule: the statue was widely known as “Big Mary.”11
The Wild West show was not in the White City, but outside the fair proper, along the route to the entrance, on what became known as the Midway Plaisance. Fair organizers reserved this space for exhibits that were too commercial, or too similar to circus or carnival attractions, for inclusion in the edifying White City. But Cody’s success in this location was a finger in the eye of fair officials, who came to regret their decision to exclude him. Because of the joint attractions of the White City, the Wild West show, and the Midway, Cody and Salsbury sold well over three million tickets in 1893, making profits of over a million dollars. It is said that spectators sometimes mistook the Wild West show for the World’s Fair, and went home satisfied.12
In recent years, scholars have followed the crowds to Buffalo Bill’s 1893 sea
son, taking imagined walks up the Midway for lessons in the rise of mass culture and Gilded Age notions of race, conquest, and progress. The kaleidoscopic attractions of the World’s Columbian Exposition in many ways reflected or amplified aspects of Wild West teachings. Exhibits and displays on the Midway were situated so that those featuring the most “primitive” peoples—South Sea islanders and mock Ethiopian villages—were farthest from the White City. As one approached the gates of the exhibition proper, one encountered ever whiter, more “advanced” peoples. The Wild West show was right outside the White City gates. The social evolution of the Midway and the world’s fair echoed the social evolution of Cody’s arena (while inside the fair, one hot July night, historian Frederick Jackson Turner expounded on the role of “free land” in stimulating social evolution along the American frontier). Tickets to the Wild West show announced it as the “Key to All,” as if its story of relentless progress organized the fair’s mysteries and unlocked the narrative which explained them all.13
But for modern readers who want to know how Gilded Age Americans thought about Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, the 1893 season is at best a slippery key to a hall of mirrors. The world’s fair, the Midway, and the Wild West show were infused with so much exhibitionism, outlandish display, performance, exotica, hoax, fraud, artful deception, and amusement as to turn an imaginary trip to Cody’s show into a fun-house tour. The swirling cultural disjunctures of the world’s fair left many observers disoriented even at the time. There were swimming races and boat races in the newly dredged lagoon in Lake Michigan, between Zulus and Turks. Visitors floated by in mock Venetian gondolas, poled by real gondoliers (imported from Venice) in ancient costume. Fair exhibits included a chocolate Venus de Milo, a giant horse and rider made of prunes, and, over in the Wisconsin Pavilion, a 22,000-pound cheese.14 In August, there was a Midway ball—one paper called it the “Ball of the Midway Freaks”—at which a white-clad, fez-wearing George Francis Train (said to have been the inspiration for Phileas Fogg, hero of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days) led a procession of exotic women onto the dance floor at the fair’s natatorium. In short skirts made of tiny American flags, they waltzed and quadrilled with eminent Chicago gentlemen in black dress suits until four-thirty in the morning.15
The image of Cody’s show as a bastion of Americanism and originality in a world of effete culture was already traditional. In 1893, Chicago critics welcomed Buffalo Bill’s Wild West as a natural, American counterpart to all the mock Greek and Roman statues, bone-white neoclassicism, and flat-out weirdness of the White City. “There,” wrote Amy Leslie, pointing to the Wild West, “is the American Exposition.” At Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World, visitors could “find Americans, real Americans … if not in the audience in the performance.” 16
The bizarre distractions of the world’s fair context make it harder to deduce what visitors saw in the Wild West itself, and besides, the show’s whopping 3.8 million admissions were perhaps less significant than they seem. Unknown numbers of those millions were return customers. The show sold 2 million tickets during the 1886–87 appearances at Erastina and Madison Square Garden, when the number of return visitors (who had no Midway Ball, gondolas, or giant cheese to attract them) was probably much lower. 17 In the end, most Americans who saw the show saw it not in Chicago but much closer to home, and the constant cross-references between White City and Wild West in 1893 tell us more about the meaning of the world’s fair than they do about how most Americans understood the Wild West show in its most successful decade.
The Chicago season of 1893, where the Rough Rider spectacle unfolded amidst a global extravaganza, underlies the common historical argument that Cody’s new format infused America’s newfound overseas ambitions with frontier mythology and expressed public sentiment for empire. To be sure, Cody’s show did resonate with U.S. foreign affairs, in complex ways, as we shall see in the next chapter. But public commentary about the show suggests the Rough Rider drama engaged the public on more familiar ground: the challenges of urban living, industrialization, and immigration, all of which touched and shaped daily life for the millions who attended the show in 1893 and after.
In this regard a more revealing season than that of 1893 is the following year’s six-month stand in Brooklyn, which was in many ways the apogee of its long stands. The show’s open-air ambience was in keeping with the way most spectators saw it, whether it was appearing in Elkhart, Indiana, or Stockton, California. Moreover, the venue was an independent, fully industrialized city, allowing us to see how the nostalgic spectacle of the vanishing (or vanished) frontier appealed to the increasingly urban populace. The completion of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883 had initiated a furious expansion. By 1894, Brooklyn’s overall population approached 900,000, and was growing by 25,000 people per year. It was already half the size of New York, which was the nation’s largest city and the destination of most Brooklyn commuters who, six days a week, crossed the new bridge to work. Most of Brooklyn’s buildings were homes, but it was also America’s fourth-largest industrial metropolis. Half the sugar in the United States was refined there. The city’s giant grain elevators had four times the capacity of New York City’s, and its piers unloaded the cargo of four thousand ships a year.18
For our task, the city provides a better indication than a world’s fair of how the show was received. In contrast to the phantasmagoria of the World’s Fair, there were no competing attractions for the Wild West in 1894. Construction of Brooklyn’s legendary amusement parks at Coney Island would not begin for another year.19 The Wild West show’s Brooklyn summer was the culmination of over a decade of show appearances, and it was also the last of the show’s long stands in the United States. Beginning in 1895, a new partnership with James A. Bailey, of Barnum & Bailey, would put the show on the road for one-and two-night stands.20
Historians have often summarized the show’s new format—Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World—as merely an expanded version of the original entertainment. But it was more than that. Judging by the growth in clippings pasted into surviving scrapbooks, the appeal of the Congress of Rough Riders was deeper and broader than the original Wild West show. The crowds who came to see it were distinct from the crowds of the mid-1880s, and they saw it in different ways. Although nostalgia for the frontier was as great as ever, the show was now much more than a spectacle of a vanished world. In surprising ways, audiences drew lessons in the challenges of urban life, and their possible solutions, from this show of frontier drama.
One key to relevance for Cody’s Rough Riders in this urban setting was its gathering of frontier rhetoric and Indian war into a discussion that incorporated many of the immigrants and new Americans who constituted the modern city. As Matthew Frye Jacobson has observed, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, America was preoccupied in part with the necessary import of labor to produce the profusion of goods and services that defined the industrial economy.21 America’s encounter with the world was occurring not only overseas but also within American borders. Cities teemed with strange, sometimes mysterious, and often frightening immigrants and alien neighborhoods. The urban middle classes—white, English-speaking, and educated—felt ever more besieged. The Congress of Rough Riders, combining Eurasian and American riders, whirling with color and martial ardor, and arrayed in a grand historic narrative, provided a story and a means of understanding America’s place in a world that often seemed to be overrunning the United States.
In doing so, the Rough Rider additions layered new meanings onto Cody’s entertainment which few could have foreseen at the debut of the Wild West show a decade earlier. Part of the Rough Riders’ appeal was the way they allowed Americans to experiment with an older tradition of ethnic comparison. As we have seen, Americans compared their frontier horsemen, especially Indians and cowboys, to a host of legendary, exotic riding contingents, including Cossacks, Gypsies, and Turkmen. In the same breath, they compared them to ride
rs in the circus, an amusement which after all was founded by Philip Astley, a cavalry officer from foreign shores, and which often featured exotic (or exotic-looking) trick riders. William Cody ventured a sort of comparison between Cossack riders and American cowboys in an interview with a Philadelphia journalist in 1888: “I don’t know anything about cossack riding, because I never saw any of it, but I will guarantee that our men can do anything that cossacks can do and more, too.”22
Allowing Americans to witness the real riders of legend, and to make their own decisions about which peoples produced the best horsemen, was no small thing. As we have seen, the lone horseman was a fading figure in the modern urban world, but his command of the animal reflected his control of nature and signified the strength or weakness of racial energies. As Frederic Remington observed about the show’s Rough Riders, “The great interest which attaches to the whole show is that it enables the audience to take sides on the question of which people ride best and have the best saddle. The whole thing is put in such tangible shape as to be a regular challenge to debate to lookers on.”23
At another level, Cossack, German, English, and, later, Arab and other Eurasian horsemen provided the show a historical rationale for its journeys in the Old World, at once explaining Cody’s long absence in Europe (the American frontiersman had gone to Europe to see old frontiers) and fending off any suggestion that he or his cast of Nature’s Noblemen had been corrupted by their long sojourn in the halls of Culture. In promoting the Rough Riders, Cody’s publicists played up the imminent danger of war along Europe’s convoluted racial frontiers, and held up the Wild West show as a force for peace. Buffalo Bill maintained amity between his company’s “half-savage” cowboys and Mexicans and its warring Indian tribes (all those “Pawnees,” “Arapahoes,” “Crow,” and “Cheyenne,” who were actually Lakota Sioux). He advanced international arbitration as a means to keep the peace between Britain and the United States in 1887. Now, he presented the Wild West show as a calming influence in Europe’s simmering border contests. In 1890–91, some of the cast had wintered over with the show’s livestock “at the foot of the Vosges Mountains in disputed Alsace-Lorraine,” wrote John Burke. Even in 1890, competing French and German claims to the region (which would contribute to the First World War in 1914) menaced “the peace not only of the two countries interested but of the civilized world… . What a field for the vaunted champions of humanity, the leaders of civilization! What a neighborhood wherein to sow the seeds of ‘peace on earth and goodwill to men.’ What a crucible for the universal panacea, arbitration!” 24