20. Sayers, Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 66; dimensions are in “Buffalo Bill’s Great Show,” unattributed clipping, Salsbury Scrapbooks, 1894, p. 29, in WH 72, Series 7, Box 4, DPL.
21. Slotkin, Fatal Environment, 14; in 1968, Don Russell turned up 848 different pictures of the fight, in a search he described as “by no means exhaustive.” Don Russell, Custer’s Last (Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter, 1968), 3–5; see also Brian W. Dippie, Custer’s Last Stand: The Anatomy of an American Myth (1976; rprt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), esp. 32–61, and “ ‘What Valor Is’: Artists and the Mythic Moment,” in Legacy: New Perspectives on the Battle of Little Big Horn, ed. Charles Rankin (Helena: Montana Historical Society, 1999), 209–30; Kasson, Buffalo Bill and the Wild West, 245–46.
22. P.6.513 Series XI: H Group Photos, Box 2; Series XI:J Arena Photos, Box 3, P.69.885, P.69.884, P.69.883, P.69.882, BBHC. Paintings by Moran hung beside those of Albert Bierstadt, the nation’s most popular landscape artist, in the art gallery of the American Exhibition, next door to the Wild West arena in London in 1887. Bierstadt’s paintings had become popular in the 1860s, and they were practically passé by 1887; indeed, his work was rejected from the Paris exposition, two years later, for precisely this reason. They were large—seven feet by ten feet—and they so mimicked panoramas that one critic thought audiences would wonder just when “the thing was going to move.” Bierstadt painted both background and foreground in total focus, so that spectators could examine them with opera glasses, as if they were looking at a distant mountain peak (or a theatrical stage). His mountains loomed up so dramatically that upon visiting the real peaks viewers were sometimes underwhelmed. Hassrick, “The Artists,” in Hassrick et al., BuffaloBill and the Wild West, 22–23.
23. The same peak featured often in “stereographs,” specially produced photographs which, when viewed through a small device known as a stereoscope, appeared to be three-dimensional, and which were popular as middle-class home entertainment by the 1850s. Andrew Anker, “Projecting into Space: American Looks Through the Stereoscope,” master’s thesis, School of Architecture, Yale University, 1995; Sandweiss, Print the Legend,136–37.
24. In 1885, he vanquished Doc Carver in a court battle over the rights to the name “Wild West.” In London, he sued a circus impresario, George Sanger, for naming a segment of his show “Scenes from Buffalo Bill.” Back in New York the following year, he took competing shows to court for pirating his posters. Over decades, he dueled with his imitators by commissioning the highest-quality poster art, then covering their advertisements with his posters, billboards, and flyers depicting his Indians, buffalo, cowboys, and especially his face, forcing competitors far afield in search of audiences. Sanger claimed that he was showing this imitation Wild West show for a full year before Cody arrived. “Lord” George Sanger, Seventy Years a Showman (London: J. M. Dent, 1927), 229–33. WFC to Julia Cody Goodman, Aug. 19, 1905, MS 6 Series I:B Css Box 1/21, BBHC.
25. Strike figures from Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 91; quote from Richard Slotkin, GunfighterNation, 77.
26. Frederic Remington, “Chicago Under the Mob,” Harper’s Weekly, July 21, 1894; “Buffalo Bill in London,” Harper’s Weekly, Sept. 3, 1892; “A Gallop Through the Midway,” Harper’s Weekly, Oct. 7, 1893; also, “Chicago Under the Law,” Harper’s Weekly, July 28, 1894; “The Withdrawal of U.S. Troops,” Harper’s Weekly, Aug. 11, 1894; “The Affair of the -th July,” Harper’s Weekly, Feb. 2, 1895, all reprinted in The Collected Writings of FredericRemington, ed. Peggy and Harold Samuels (New York: Doubleday, 1979), 96–98, 111–13, 152–54, 155–59, 164–66, 176–83.
27. “Among the Rough Riders,” Hamilton (Ontario) Spectator, July 17, 1897, clipping in WFC Collection, MS 6, Series VI:G, Box 1, Folder 15, BBHC.
28. For participation in the march, see “Wild with Enthusiasm,” New York Times, Oct. 28, 1888, p. 13; for Harrison inaugural, see “The Ball,” unattributed clipping, n.d., in WFC Scrapbook, 1883–1886–1888, BBHC. Partisan division of the period is in Cherny, AmericanPolitics in the Gilded Age, 86.
29. For McKinley inaugural, see Yost, Buffalo Bill, 275. For Democratic Party organization, see Beck to WFC, July 29, 1896, in G. T. Beck Papers, MS 59, Box 25, 1896 Letterpress Book, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY.
30. Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 40–44.
31. Rauchway, Murdering McKinley, 17, 89–96; Avrich, Haymarket Tragedy, 35–36, 45–51, 59.
32. Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 48–49; Avrich, Haymarket Tragedy, 215–39.
33. Avrich, Haymarket Tragedy, 3–14.
34. Labor unions opposed federal appropriations to the National Guard on the grounds that their own tax dollars were being used to oppress them. See “Education, Not Force,” New York Herald, Jan. 12, 1887, p. 5.
35. Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, 90–91; Slotkin, Fatal Environment, 480–89; Avrich, Haymarket Tragedy, 215–19; Richard Drinnon, “ ‘My Men Shoot Well’: Theodore Roosevelt and the Urban Frontier,” in The Haymarket Scrapbook, ed. David Roediger and Franklin Rosemont (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co., 1986), 129–30.
36. For orator, see Blackstone, Buckskin, Bullets, and Business, 21.
37. All quotes from “Buffalo Bill in Drama,” New York Times, Nov. 25, 1886, p. 5.
38. Lears, No Place of Grace, 98–139.
39. “Custer’s Fate Illustrated,” New York Times, Jan. 4, 1887, p. 4.
40. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 13:537.
41. Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, rev. ed. (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 379.
42. Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 47–50; Avrich, Haymarket Tragedy, 301.
43. Unless otherwise indicated, show programs may be found in collections in MS 6, BBHC, or in M Cody Programs, DPL-WHR. “Programme of Exhibition Before the Queen,” 1887, in Souvenir Album of the Visit of Her Majesty Queen Victoria to the American Exhibition (London, 1887), also BBWW 1887 program, BBHC. After its appearance in New York in early 1887, the Custer fight was not staged again until December, in Manchester, England. See the program for “Inaugural Invitation Exhibition” of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, “under the patronage and presence of His Worship the Mayor of Salford,” on Dec. 17, 1887, at 2:30, in the “New Colossal Building at the Manchester Race Track,” BBHC; BBWW 1888 program, BBHC; the Custer reenactment did not appear in the Paris shows of 1889. See BBWW 1889 program, L’Ouest Sauvage de Buffalo Bill (Paris: Imprimerie Parrot et Cie, 1889), in MS 62 Don Russell Collection, Series I:G, Box 2, Folder 27, BBHC; for the years 1890–94, see the collections of programs in BBHC and DPL-WHR, also Warren Vincent to H. H. Vincent, March 1, 1890, M Cody L Box 1, DPL; BBWW 1895 program, DPL; BBWW 1896 program, DPL and Huntington Library, San Marino, CA; BBWW 1897 program and BBWW 1898 program in BBHC; programs for 1899–1916 in BBHC and DPL. The scene reenacting Custer’s demise was no more common in Europe, where Cody staged it in only three seasons out of ten, and never during its most famous and well-attended stands. After all the work historians have done to connect Custer and Cody, it can be startling to realize who did not see the Custer segment in Cody’s show. The huge London audiences of 1887, which included Queen Victoria, did not see it, nor did the Paris audiences in 1889. The Germans flocked to the show in enormous numbers in 1890, as did the Italians and the Austrians—but not to see “Custer’s Last Rally.” And when Frederick Jackson Turner gave his famous essay at the American Historical Association meeting in a hot tent at the World’s Fair in July of 1893, none of the historians who might have sneaked out of the session to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West would have seen Cody’s Custer. The segment was not added to the show until August. See Wojtowicz, Buffalo Bill Collector’s Guide, 10–47, esp. 19–20; for Chicago shows, see Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 113. The Custer reenactment was a feature during the show’s 1896 weeklong stay in St. Louis, but the act does no
t appear in extant programs. “It Has Made a Hit,” St. Louis Republic, May 21, 1896, clipping in Beck Family Papers, #10386, Box 15/13, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY; Wojtowicz, Buffalo Bill Collector’s Guide, 28–29.
44. See above note 43.
45. Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 121–25; BBWW 1894 program.
46. The New York Society of Decorative Arts was an organization of wealthy New York women—including Mrs. John Jacob Astor; Caroline Belmont, the wife of August Belmont; and Julia Bryant, daughter of poet and New York Evening Post editor William Cullen Bryant—devoted to teaching poor New York women how to make and sell fine needlework at home. Shirley A. Leckie, Elizabeth Bacon Custer and the Making of a Myth (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press), 216, 245.
47. Leckie, Elizabeth Bacon Custer, 233–35. When the Boston Cyclorama Company commissioned E. Pierpont and staff to paint a “Cyclorama of Custer’s Last Fight,” in 1888, they also consulted Mrs. Custer, and she endorsed the project in the twenty-page pamphlet that spectators carried. The painting was displayed in Boston in 1889, then in Detroit, and possibly in Chicago, before it moved on to its last owner in Hollywood. Russell, Custer’s Last, 37.
48. Leckie, Elizabeth Bacon Custer, 242.
49. “Elks at the Wild West,” New York Times, July 15, 1886, p. 8; also “At the Wild West,” The Sentinel, July 17, 1886, and “Mrs. Custer Visits Buffalo Bill,” unattributed clipping, July 17, 1886, both in NSS, 1885–86, WH72, Microfilm 18, Reel 4, Cody Collection, DPL.
50. WFC to Elizabeth Bacon Custer, Aug. 13, 1886, quoted in Leckie, Elizabeth Bacon Custer, 246–47.
51. Steele Mackaye to Salsbury, Oct. 31, 1886, in MacKaye, Epoch, 2:80.
52. Havighurst, Annie Oakley of the Wild West, 93; MacKaye, Epoch, 2:90.
53. Custer family cartoon in Robert Utley and Wilcomb Washburn, The Indian Wars (New York: American Heritage, 1977), 276; Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 122; E. Custer, Following the Guidon, 188.
54. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 133.
55. Elizabeth Bacon Custer, Tenting on the Plains: General Custer in Kansas and Texas (1887; rprt. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 47. Libbie Custer tried to confirm Cody’s claim to having been a scout for George Custer, but inadvertently she undermined it. Eliza, she wrote, “went to Mr. Cody’s tent after the exhibition, to present my card of introduction, for he had served as General Custer’s scout after Eliza left us, and she was, therefore, unknown to him except by hearsay” (p. 46, emphasis added). As we have seen, Cody claimed that he scouted for the Boy General only once, in 1867. Eliza was with the Custers on the Plains in 1867, and did not leave them until 1869. Leckie, Elizabeth Bacon Custer, 122. For other references to Cody’s impersonation of Custer, see “Custer’s Last Rally,” New York Herald, Jan. 4, 1887, p. 2; “Custer’s Fate Illustrated,” New York Times, Jan. 4, 1887, p. 4.
56. Elizabeth Custer to WFC, May 9, no year [1893?], photocopy in WFC Collection, No. 264, American Heritage Center, Box 1, Folder 2, original from William C. Garlow collection, in BBHC.
57. When some critics began to question the propriety of casting Indians in the drama, Cody responded that “there is no law in the land that can prevent an Indian, like any other man, from making his own living and earning money.” “Too Realistic for Comfort,” New York Times, Jan. 16, 1887, p. 3.
58. “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Drama,” Brick Pomeroy’s Democrat, Jan. 5, 1887, p. 16. Emphasis added.
59. “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” 16.
60. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Revenge of Rain-in-the-Face,” in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World, 1898 Show Courier (Buffalo, NY: Courier, 1898), 15.
61. “An Interview with the Hon. W. F. Cody,” Montreal Herald and Daily Commercial Gazette, Aug. 17, 1885, clipping in MS 6, Series VI:G, Box 1, Folder 15, BBHC.
62. MacKaye, Epoch, 2:96–97, 127. In 1887, Mackaye debuted a new play, Anarchy, in which he used a story of the French Revolution to advance his argument that only justice could stem both the violent mobs (strikers) and the excesses of elites (capitalists) that incited them. The hero of his play denounces one villainous aristocrat: “Anarchists are monsters your race bred when it brutalized their mothers.” Steele Mackaye, Paul Kauvar; or, Anarchy,” in Representative Plays by American Dramatists, 1856–1911, ed. Montrose J. Moses (New York: Benjamin Blom, n.d., microfilm), 329. Where Longfellow, the poet, blamed Indian war on American moral failure—“our broken faith”—Mackaye, the playwright, attributed anarchist violence to the excesses of wealthy industrialists. Nate Salsbury was so impressed with the drama that he offered to produce it. Epoch, 15, 24; 2:67–70. Others in the Wild West show’s orbit shared Mackaye’s sentiment. When Cody and Salsbury became partners in 1883, a prominent Illinois lawyer, John P. Altgeld, drew up the paperwork. In 1893, Altgeld became the governor of Illinois, in which position, against a tidal wave of conservative anger, he pardoned the surviving Haymarket suspects and denounced their persecution by police and courts. Avrich, Haymarket Tragedy, 417–27; for Altgeld’s role in Wild West partnership, see Nate Salsbury, “The Origin of the Wild West Show,” typescript, n.d., YCAL MSS 17, Box 2/63, NSP; Russell, Lives and Legends, 300.
63. “Our History,” unattributed clipping, April 17, 1897, in NSS, 1897, DPL-WHR.
64. Aveling, American Journey, 136.
65. Aveling, An American Journey, 146.
66. Aveling’s impressions of proletarianism came mostly from his meeting with “Broncho John,” a cowboy who appeared in a Cincinnati dime museum, where he lectured passionately on “the gross treatment of his class by their bosses, the ranch owners.” In Aveling, An American Journey, 154–55.
67. “[I]t was our business,” Aveling reported, “and we made it our business, to speak at every meeting held in America in favor of a new trial for the condemned anarchists of Chicago.” Aveling, American Journey, 121, 127.
68. Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling, The Working Class Movement in America, ed. Paul Le Blanc, 2nd ed. (1891; rprt. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000).
69. Aveling, American Journey, 146.
70. Aveling, American Journey, 147. Cody’s rise was contemporaneous with the emergence of professional anthropology. One of the field’s seminal studies was by Lewis Henry Morgan, whose Ancient Society, in 1877, argued that Indians were primitive communists whose “advancement” occurred in part through the privatization of communal property. Morgan’s vision of communist Indians—and his millenarian faith that Progress would someday return all the world’s peoples to the peace and harmony Indians once enjoyed— made Indians (and, indeed, Morgan) into powerful symbols for leftists like Aveling. “The Indians,” The Alarm, Nov. 8, 1884; Franklin Rosemont, “Anarchists and the Wild West,” in Roediger and Rosemont, Haymarket Scrapbook, 101–2.
71. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West became a legal corporation in Feb. 1887. “ ‘Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Company’ Incorporated Under the Laws of New Jersey, February 1887,” in YCAL MSS 17, Box 1, Folder 22, NSP.
72. Aveling, American Journey, 150. Emphasis added.
73. Aveling, American Journey, 154.
74. Aveling, American Journey, 150.
75. Nate Salsbury to Steele Mackaye, Nov. 1, 1886, reproduced in MacKaye, Epoch, 2:81.
76. Nate Salsbury to Steele Mackaye, Dec. 17, 1886, reproduced in MacKaye, Epoch, 2:86–87.
77. MacKaye, Epoch, 2:92–93.
78. “Buffalo Bill in Drama,” New York Times, Nov. 25, 1886, p. 5; “Madison Square Garden Thronged,” New York Times, Nov. 30, 1886, p. 2.
79. “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Drama,” Brick Pomeroy’s Democrat, Jan. 5, 1887, p. 16.
80. “The Last of the Wild West,” New York Times, Feb. 23, 1887, p. 2.
81. “Buffalo Bill as General Custer,” New York Times, Jan. 2, 1887, p. 7.
82. “Still Attracting Crowds,” New York Times, Jan. 23, 1887, p. 3.
83. Anonymous, A Peep at Buffa
lo Bill’s Wild West (New York: McLoughlin Bros., 1887), copy in BBHC.
84. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 171–242, esp. 192–93.
85. “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Drama,” Brick Pomeroy’s Democrat, Jan. 5, 1887, p. 16.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: WILD WEST LONDON
1. Quote from “Buffalo Bill’s Goodbye,” New York Times, April 1, 1887. This account says there were 133 Indians. Source for my count is the passenger list of the State of Nebraska, in NSP, YCAL 17, Box 1, Folder 13. Also Russell, Lives and Legends, 327; Cody, Story of the Wild West, 701–4.
2. For holes in deck, see Parker, Odd People I Have Met, 3; for deaths of buffalo and elk, see Ray DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk’s Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 248; also Nicholas Black Elk and John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1972), 219–20. Cody, Story of the Wild West, 706, says there were no animal deaths but for one horse.
3. Illustrated Bits (UK), no. 120, May 14, 1887, p. 4; Alan Gallop, Buffalo Bill’s British Wild West (Thrupp, UK: Sutton Publishing, 2001), 67.
4. The visit of the Prince of Wales is in “Royalty at the Wild West,” The Era, May 7, 1887, p. 15; “Princess and Princesses Among the Squaws,” Pall Mall Gazette, May 6, 1887, p. 10; “The Showman,” Penny Illustrated Paper, May 14, 1887, p. 316.
5. Cody, Story of the Wild West, 734.
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