Louis S. Warren
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Nighttime illumination meant the possibility of two shows a day, one in the afternoon and one in the evening, doubling gate receipts without increasing salary outlays. But it had a larger cultural meaning, too. When the show acquired the sanction of leading “scientists” (as electrical engineers were called at the time), it enhanced its mythic relevance for its audiences as both spectacle of the past and harbinger of the future, a complete reenactment of civilization’s rise from nature to technology, the maturation of her people from buffalo hunters to electrical engineers.
Barbershop, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, c. 1890. A widely diverse, orderly company town, the Wild West camp came to represent America itself. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.
The electrification of the Wild West show thus implied a symbolic parallel between show and nation, each of which originated on the frontier and advanced to modernity. The machinery that made the show possible was itself a popular wonder, calling forth a collective emotional and unifying response from observers that approached what the historian David Nye and others call the “technological sublime.”90
In some ways, the Wild West show’s stature was similar to that of the railroad circus. During the 1890s, railroad circuses both imitated and symbolized modern business. They were corporate, technological, hierarchical organizations in which white male owners and operators managed the diverse and the freakish and waged near-constant advertising “wars” in which they plastered entire regions with their posters and handbills, consolidating smaller entertainments beneath ever larger tents and undercutting one another in relentless pursuit of profits. William Cody’s show business career, with its beginnings in a small independent theater company and its culmination in a huge, corporate entertainment, paralleled those of the Ringling brothers, P. T. Barnum, James A. Bailey, W. T. McCaddon, and other circus impresarios who bought, sold, and consolidated traveling road shows in efforts to monopolize the industry. The circus and Wild West show business paralleled still larger developments in the American economy, where smaller concerns and entrepreneurs—shopkeepers and artisans—were shunted aside by the behemoth corporations of Vanderbilt, Morgan, and McCormick in the process that historian Alan Trachtenberg calls “the incorporation of America.”91
Like these monopoly capitalists, Cody was, in the eyes of newspaper correspondents, a captain of industry, a modern business colossus. Nate Salsbury, the managing partner, was responsible for the tedious but essential tasks of routing the show through North America and Europe and tending to its external business matters, such as provisioning and transport. But correspondents preferred Buffalo Bill’s pose as owner, director, and manager of the Wild West show, “the guiding hand of the entire enterprise,” whose “orders were obeyed” with alacrity. His creative vision and control wrought “realism, naturalism, and precision of detail” from a “heterogenous mass of human beings, representing nearly all the nations on the earth.”92 As the 1890s progressed, Cody’s publicists made ever more of his supposed managerial acumen as a “Great Manager,” “the organizer of the great exhibition which bears his name.”93
Other circus owners received similar approbation, and thereby benefited from the era’s fascination with corporate directors, but Cody had a special place. He was a frontiersman, a rustic who through his own efforts rose from common men and frontier nature to command what was at once a nostalgic show of the past and a large, modern business with a sharp technological edge. Electricity at the Wild West show underscored this managerial prowess. Unlike the few surviving scouts and old-time westerners, he was not just an aging frontiersman. He was the boss of his own industrial concern. His employees were at least as alien, recalcitrant, and potentially violent as the slew of immigrants who worked for the industrial barons of the age. And in some ways he was better at managing his crew than they were. In a nation roiled by strikes—the Pullman strike occurred that very summer— Wild West show employees continued to perform. Strikers in Chicago faced off against the U.S. Army. At a camp party to celebrate the elevation of Cody and Salsbury to thirty-second-degree masons in Brooklyn, John Burke joked about a strike at the Wild West show. Salsbury, with the Pullman Strikers in mind, took the opportunity to warn the show’s workers against any similar “disloyalty” to the nation’s armed forces. “He makes the best citizen,” he told the assembled cast, “who is most loyal to his Government. So long as you claim a Government as yours, obey its laws implicity; be loyal to that Government.”94
The fact that Cody had no formal training as a manager, that his attributes were natural genius that came to him through experience with the show, made him all the more alluring for the new generation of white-collar managers who had little in the way of formal business training themselves, whose multiracial subordinates must have seemed at least as unruly, and potentially as violent and dangerous, as Cody’s, and whose jobs were so cerebral and new that many wondered if managing was real work at all. In implying and embodying the modern corporation, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West lent the corporation—this most modern and undemocratic of business organizations—both a profoundly American, frontier past and a glorious future as the culmination of progress. 95
The appeal of this gesture to the public helps to explain Cody’s consistent self-promotion as a businessman. For all his buckskin image, during his Wild West show days Cody usually dressed in fine suits, with pointed-toe boots and a cowboy hat, a western version of the modern man of commerce. Throughout the 1890s, he persistently billed himself not just as a frontiersman, but also as an entrepreneur—which puzzled his handlers. “Cody always deluded himself with the thought that he was a good business man,” recalled press agent Dexter Fellows. “He was as vain as a popinjay over those things about which he had no right to be vain, and modest to the point of absolute silence regarding the things which, by common consent, entitled him to be proud.”96
Such critics failed to grasp the centrality of the businessman imposture to Cody’s middle-class appeal. Far more than during his early careers as scout or stage star, as an impresario he was a modern and modernizing symbol for engineers, managers, and corporate owners, and for all the middle managers and low managers who aspired to join their ranks, including those white-collar new Americans, too. Managers and owners could look to Cody and see managing and owning and directing not as artificial, effeminate, and alien but as natural, manly, and American.
So, too, he naturalized the modern technology that managers relied upon, from the train that delivered the show and the electricity that lit it to that refrigerator and telephone in his tent. A visit to the Wild West show reassured the visitor that all those alienating, often scary, modern urban developments had a frontier origin. Conversely, Cody inscribed a technological modernism into his frontier myth, as if to suggest that the technology which seemingly spelled the end of the frontier paradoxically might also keep its spirit alive to instruct, inform, and invigorate urban audiences. The show drama portrayed a progressive history in which Americans discovered, traveled across, and finally settled the frontier. The electrical illumination of that drama, and of the camp pathways as well, under the guiding hand of America’s preeminent frontier hero, suggested an accompanying natural progression from an open and rustic frontier to an electrically wired world, a profound historical connection between the quintessentially rural history presented in the arena and the undeniably urban context of the arena and the Wild West camp.
FAMILY REMAINED CENTRAL to the image of the heterogeneous Wild West camp as a progressive settlement. At least as much as it was a model city, the show represented a domestic haven, “a big family” or “Col. Cody’s Wild West family,” consisting of “cousins from many lands.” 97 In fact, as the number of “races” in the show increased, they relied ever more on symbols of family to soothe popular anxieties about violence, the shared living and working spaces of divergent races, and to advertise the show’s suitability for family viewing. As husbands and fathers, both Cody and Salsbury were profoundly paternal figu
res. Cody himself was occasionally joined in the camp by at least part of his family. In 1887, Arta had accompanied him to London, kept house for him, and made the rounds of the social circuit with him, too. In 1893, his young daughter Irma and Mrs. Cody had visited him in Chicago. And in the summer of 1894, both Louisa and Irma were with him in Brooklyn. Although the family stayed at the St. George Hotel, they could often be seen in his tent on the grounds.98
But Cody’s family relations were troubled at the best of times, and neither he nor Salsbury could realistically remove their wives and children from their respective homes to be with the show for extended periods. They needed other familial images to anchor the show’s domestication. As in earlier seasons, they found these among the show’s women, including Indian wives and families, and Annie Oakley.99
Further, by 1894, another domesticating female presence had emerged in the camp: Margaret Whittaker, known as “Mrs. Whittaker,” or most tellingly as “Mamma” or “Ma,” the “official matron of the camp.” Her tent was prominently situated, with a white signboard over the doorway proclaiming “Mrs. Whittaker, Matron.” 100 Although she was not nearly as famous as Oakley, journalists spent considerable time and print introducing her to the public. Brooklyn newspaper readers learned that the entire camp staff, “whether it is the old scout Nelson or a nursing papoose,” depended on Ma Whittaker for care and comfort in the event of injury or illness. She sewed curtains for the Irish lancers and bandaged the fingers of Arabs who tried to do their own sewing. Her tent was a haven of domesticity, carpeted and hung with the fashionable portieres and curtains, full of “herbs and bottles of ointment, thread and needles, Bibles, buttons, goodies for the children, and, when she is there, an abundance of good advice.”101
In a show where “real” frontier experience was the defining characteristic of the cast, Ma Whittaker gained her authenticity not from being a genuine frontierswoman but from her real role as nurturer and caregiver to the camp’s many-hued cast, for whom it was said she “comes as near to filling the position of mother” as “any one but their own mothers.”102 Her encounters with journalists were likely scripted; the show publicity department steered columnists to her and likely helped develop her self-presentation. In any case, Margaret Whittaker claimed to be a former physician and druggist from Philadelphia. Her late husband, “Pop” Whittaker, had been manager to P. T. Barnum and an old hand in show business. She had joined the Wild West show in 1883. Like all of the cast, she told stories about her adventures with the show, and hers were particularly important to reinforcing her image as a maternal figure. Journalists frequently portrayed her as ministering to the needs of the show’s young cast, particularly the “girl” sharpshooter Annie Oakley and her “boy” counterpart Johnny Baker (both of whom were, by 1894, married and headed for middle age).103 When Cody’s daughter Irma visited the camp, newspapers depicted “Buffalo Bill’s Sweet ‘Prairie Flower’ Daughter” in front of the tent of “Mrs. Whittaker, Matron.”104
But, the press also maintained that Whittaker’s strongest maternal bonds were with the camp’s Indians. Repeatedly, journalists described her ministering to their medical needs, providing their costumes (in a sense, dressing them), and in return, “the Indians will do anything in their power to serve her.”105
In fact, the adoration of Mrs. Whittaker among the show Indians is perhaps the most consistent observation about her. One of Whittaker’s favorite stories encouraged the idea. According to this yarn, in 1885 she had been aboard the steamboat which was rammed by an iron steamer and sunk on the Mississippi River while it was conveying the show to New Orleans. Nearly drowned, “the only white woman on board” was rescued by the show’s Indians, who carried her on their backs to shore.106 Her rescue by Indians, the very people who acted out attacks on white families and white women in the show arena, suggested that camp life, and particularly the domesticating influence of Ma Whittaker, made Indians loyal to and loving of their white “parents,” herself and Cody and the white nation as a whole.107
By turning white women into “mothers” of Indians in the show camp, publicists obscured the mutual sexual attraction of white women spectators and show Indian men, who often jostled against one another in the arena in ways that would not have been tolerated outside it. White women volunteers from the audience who raced around the arena in the Deadwood stage often thrilled at their pursuit by Indians. In 1893, an Indian rider thrust his arm through the window of the speeding coach and ripped a silver braid from the jacket of Amy Leslie, the prominent woman columnist who was riding inside. According to Leslie, a man in the coach shrieked, and another woman clutched the reporter to her “as if my will had been made in another’s favor,” but both of them were overwrought, for the Indians “were in fun.”108 When two hundred members of the Women’s Professional League of New York visited the Brooklyn showgrounds at Burke’s invitation in 1894, the members who rode in the Deadwood coach were playfully captivated. One correspondent reported that “Kate Bostwick was frightened almost out of her wits by an Indian who wore a shirt of yellow paint” and shook a feather-covered spear in her face. “ ‘Oh,’ she screamed, ‘you brute; take that nasty thing away!’ ”109
The popularity of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West with professional women was a partial reflection of Cody’s support for women reformers. During the Ambrose Park season, he declared himself a supporter of woman suffrage, and of women in the workplace and women’s associations. Such issues often riled middle-class audiences, but when a woman reporter from the New York Recorder asked if he supported woman suffrage, he professed not to have thought much about it, then ventured, “Why not?” The majority of women were “quite as capable as the majority of men” when it came to voting, and for that matter, able to work in traditionally male domains like business offices, “so long as she does her work well and is womanly.”
“Hurrah! Colonel, you’re on our side!”
“Of course, I am.”
“Then you don’t condemn women’s clubs?”
“Far from it. I’d a good deal rather feel that my daughter was at a club with intellectual ladies than out with some men. I think it’s a capital idea.”110
Balancing these endorsements with more conservative views such as enthusiasm for corsets (“They brace a woman up and give her form”) and a denunciation of bloomers (“A woman ought to be shot who wears … those bloomer things. I think skirts are modest and pretty. I prefer something left to the imagination”), Cody’s views on women complemented his persona as patron of professional women performers like Annie Oakley, and it also kept his show on the horizon of middle-class women whose patronage ensured ticket sales to their children and husbands.
In deploying Ma Whittaker as the “mother” of show Indians, Cody and his managers obscured the real Indian family bonds behind the scenes and the important place of Indian women in supporting the show cast on the road. They also reassured visitors that there really was nothing to fear in the arena or in the camp. The reference to Indians as “children” was already an old standby at this time. Because Indians were under the ostensibly benevolent protection of the “Great Father” in Washington, their presence easily suggested a sort of national family structure in which white people were parental figures, who governed peoples of color, the nation’s unruly but well-intended children. Infantilizing show Indians was simultaneously a means of discounting their sensual appeal and suggesting their potential for assimilation.
In this connection, Cody’s paternalism toward Indians provided new ways for show visitors to think about reform projects. One of the most prominent examples of this was in the ways that show proscriptions against alcohol were seen as potential public policy. The sorry role of alcohol in U.S.-Indian relations had long ago given rise to a myth of Indian inability to imbibe without becoming immediately savage. Cody’s show had forbidden alcohol among the Indian contingent (and drunkenness among all contingents) from its very beginning. After some alleged violations in 1894, Salsbury appealed
to Brooklyn authorities to enforce laws proscribing the sale of alcohol to Indians. Journalists went on at length about the travails of “Lo, the Dry Indian,” but more serious minds used it to advance prohibition for all peoples. 111 “I have my doubts,” wrote George R. Scott, “if a drunken Indian is more dangerous than a drunken Englishman, Irishman, German, or American; and I wish that the law was so constructed that it could be applied to the protection of every man, woman, and child in the city, no matter what their color or nationality.” Scott maintained that “what is good law for the Indians ought to be good law for the Whites,” and that “the Red Men are the only ones treated with proper respect and up-to-date civilization.”
Drunkenness and racial violence had a long conjoined history, and reformers saw alcohol as a corrosive that would dissolve the boundary between arena and city, allowing race combat to migrate to the public, where it would begin the race war that always simmered beneath the surface of Brooklyn. Reporter George Scott claimed to have seen three fights “in the neighborhood of the Wild West Show, among Whites and Blacks, that for brutality beat anything that the Indians have as yet exhibited. And drink,” he concluded “was at the bottom of all three of the fights.”112 The logic was inescapable: There are no race fights in the Wild West camp, because there is no alcohol there. Just as banning drink has produced peace in the Wild West show, so can it stem the race war that threatens to erupt in the cities of the Gilded Age.