Louis S. Warren

by Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody;the Wild West Show

  6. Cody, Story of the Wild West, 736–37.

  7. Cody, Story of the Wild West, 742.

  8. The story is widespread, in many versions: Cody, Story of the Wild West, 742–43; Parker, Odd People I Have Met, 92; Russell, Lives and Legends, 331. Agnes Wright Spring, Cheyenne and Black Hills Stage Routes, 359.

  9. Admittedly, these retellings seem only to have mentioned the four kings, but not the alleged joke. See “Clydeside Echoes,” Glasgow Evening News, Nov. 6, 1891, p. 4; “The Mild West,” The Million, Sept. 3, 1892, p. 246.

  10. For Londoners telling the joke, see J. B. Booth, London Town (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1929), 182.

  11. George Gilbertson to WFC, May 26, 1887, Letters and Invitations, 1887–88, BBHC.

  12. Clippings, “Jack and Jill at Play,” n.p., n.d., and “Opening of the American Exhibition. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, n.d. Both in Annie Oakley Scrapbook, 1887, BBHC.

  13. “Buffalo Bill was requested by the Prince of Wales to give a special morning performance… . The prince was very much pleased at the exhibition, and according to the gossipers, this is what he said.” Unattributed clipping, n.p., n.d., BBM.

  14. Untitled clipping, Nottingham Daily Express, JCG Scrapbook, MS 58, NSHS: “ ‘Cody’s social success,’ the Nation observes, ‘like that of Fred. Archer, the jockey, marks the enormous space which pure amusement now occupies in the life of the well-to-do classes in England’; and it adds that ‘Americans who can contribute to this are especially successful in London society. Their stories, their jokes, their songs, their new card tricks, their skill in poker and euchre, supply the place in giving them social consideration of nearly everything else which makes a human being respectable. This is biting, but true; as if sated with our own social follies, we must go out of the way to import those of our Yankee cousins.’ ”

  15. “Circus and Sideshow—At Last!,” title illegible (Eurati?), June 10, 1887, JCG Scrapbook, MS 58, NSHS. Contrasting the fortune Cody amassed during his first British tour with the lesser amounts received by the American tours of Charles Dickens and several other leading British intellectuals, a Chicago Times correspondent remarked, “England cannot point the finger of scorn at America on this account, however. The fact is as discreditable to her as to the people of the United States.” Clipping in E. H. Leog to WFC, May 29, 1888, in WFC Scrapbooks, 1883–1886–1888, BBHC.

  16. For historians who have made this claim, see Russell, Lives and Legends, 330; Kasson, BuffaloBill’s Wild West, 77, 79–81; Gallop, Buffalo Bill’s British Wild West, 96–102; Sell and Weybright, Buffalo Bill and the Wild West, 170, 172. The catalogue of the Royal Armouries Exhibit of 1999 states that the royal appearance of May 11, 1887, was “the first attendance by Queen Victoria at any public event since the death of Prince Albert twenty-six years before.” Martin Pegler and Graeme Rimer, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (Leeds, UK: Royal Armouries Museum, 1999), 24; Walsh and Salsbury, Making of Buffalo Bill, 267, point out that Victoria had been seen at other public functions.

  17. Cody, Story of the Wild West, 735.

  18. The World (UK), June 22, 1887, p. 17.

  19. See “Royalty at the Wild West,” Penny Illustrated Paper, June 25, 1887, p. 407; also “The Daily Telegraph,” n.d., Annie Oakley Scrapbook, 1887, BBHC.

  20. Ian Bevan, Royal Performance: The Story of Royal Theatregoing (London: Hutchinson, 1954), 187–89.

  21. Quoted in Gallop, Buffalo Bill’s British Wild West, 101.

  22. Quotation from The World (UK), May 18, 1887, p. 15; placement of the flag presentation is in “The Queen in London,” Daily Telegraph, May 12, 1887, and “Royal Visit to the Wild West,” Sporting Life, May 12, 1887, both in Annie Oakley Scrapbook, 1887, BBHC; see also “The Queen at the American Exhibition,” The Standard, May 12, 1887, clipping in Johnny Baker 1886–87 Scrapbook, WH 72, Box 4, DPL; “The Queen at ‘Buffalo Bill’s,’ ” Penny Illustrated Paper, May 21, 1887, p. 334; “Victoria at the Wild West Show,” account of the London Daily News, reprinted in New York Times, May 22, 1887, p. 12; also Gower, Old Diaries, 55–56.

  23. The Graphic (London), May 21, 1887, p. 544.

  24. Show locations in 1895 from BBWW Routes 1883–1916, BBHC; posters from Rennert, 100 Posters of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 7, 27, 30, 34–35.

  25. Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, 105–21.

  26. The best example is Don Russell, whose Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill set out to prove the truth of Cody’s frontier biography, then assumed that the legends of the Wild West show were mostly, perhaps entirely, true.

  27. Harris, Humbug, 94–95; Hassrick, “The Artists,” in Hassrick et al., Buffalo Bill and the Wild West, 21; Reddin, Wild West Shows, 35–36.

  28. Reddin, Wild West Shows, 112; Russell, Wild West, 37; “ ‘Mexican Joe’ at Battersea,” The Era, Jan. 7, 1888, p. 14; Harris, Humbug, 274–75.

  29. “ ‘Mexican Joe’ at Battersea,” The Era, Jan. 7, 1888, p. 14.

  30. C. L. Daily to “Dear Folks” [no month] 22, 1889, copy in BBHC; Webb, “Buffalo Bill, Saint or Devil?,” 6.

  31. For an account of Cody’s remonstrations with his cooks, see Luther Standing Bear, My People the Sioux (1928; rprt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), 260–61.

  32. “Scene at the Liverpool Exhibition,” The Era, Sept. 3, 1887, p. 7.

  33. Untitled, The Era, Oct. 1, 1887, p. 13.

  34. Harris, Humbug, 274–75.

  35. Rennert, 100 Posters of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 9, 48.

  36. By 1887, the United States produced machine tools of comparable quality to those in Britain, at half the cost; the small arms industry (for which the Wild West was practically a living advertisement) had been using interchangeable parts since the mid-1800s, and the British had only just begun to do so; the rate of new technology adoption and innovation was much higher in the United States than in Britain, and the United States had a much higher volume of capital investment than Britain. See H. J. Habakkuk, American and British Technology in the Nineteenth Century: The Search for Labour-Saving Inventions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 106, 151, 202–3, 207–8, 212.

  37. Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled, 138.

  38. Quoted in Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled, 137.

  39. As late as 1923, D. H. Lawrence [Studies in Classic American Literature (1923; rprt. New York: Penguin, 1977), 3] felt it necessary to argue the case for American literature in the court of European opinion, where the attitude toward American culture was as follows:

  Where is this new bird called the true American? Show us the homunculus of the new era. Go on, show us him. Because all that is visible to the naked eye, in America, is a sort of recreant European.

  40. Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind. Summarizing the reports, photographs, and paintings from western surveys, one newspaper editor concluded, “Every day seems to bring forth a new wonder, and the time is coming quickly when the tides of health-desiring and wonder-seeking travel will be from Europe to America.” “The Splendor of the West,” New York Herald, Feb. 11, 1872, p. 6.

  41. WFC to “My Dear General,” June 15, 1882, MS 6 Series I:B Css Box 1/7, BBHC.

  42. Harris, Humbug, 282.

  43. The letter was printed in show programs and in advertisements almost immediately after it was received. See the advertisement in Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, Oct. 19, 1884, p. 4.

  44. Twain, Roughing It, 66.

  45. Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled, 57.

  46. Illustrated Bits (UK), no. 115, April 9, 1887, p. 7.

  47. “Palette and Brush,” Court and Society, July 13, 1887, p. 42.

  48. “Palette and Brush,” Court and Society, July 12, 1887, p. 43.

  49. See “Mohawk Minstrels,” The Era, Nov. 13, 1886, p. 7; also “Musical and Dramatic,” Scottish Sport, Sept. 29, 1891; on minstrels and black performers, Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 195–263.

  50
. Orvell, Real Thing, 59–65.

  51. Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (New York: Crown Publishers, 2003), 312.

  52. Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer; Smith, Virgin Land; Deloria, Playing Indian, 10.

  53. John M. Burke, Buffalo Bill from Prairie to Palace (Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1893), 247.

  54. See Nate Salsbury, “At the Vatican,” typescript, n.d., in YCAL MSS 17, Box 2/63, NSP.

  55. “Wild West at the Vatican,” New York Herald, March 4, 1890, reprinted in Burke, Buffalo Bill from Prairie to Palace, 245.

  56. WFC to “My Dear Doctor,” Feb. 15, 1890, MS 6 Series I:B Css Box 1/11, BBHC.

  57. “Wild West at the Vatican,” New York Herald, March 4, 1890, reprinted in Burke, Buffalo Bill from Prairie to Palace, 246.

  58. Bram Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1906), 2: 142; Stoker recalls the outing occurred in the fall, but Irving made the invitation for June, and both he and Stoker were touring the United States after July. See Henry Irving to WFC, May 1887, “Invitations and Letters 1887–95,” Microfilm Reel, BBHC; “Mr. Irving’s Farewell,” The Era, July 16, 1887, p. 13; “Henry Irving’s Farewell,” The Era, July 23, 1887, p. 12.

  59. Maurice Hindle, “Introduction,” in Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897; rprt. ed., New York: Penguin Books, 1993), edited and with notes by Maurice Hindle, vii; David J. Skal, Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of “Dracula” from Novel to Stage to Screen (London: Andre Deutsch, 1990), 28.

  60. Christopher Frayling, “Lord Byron to Count Dracula,” 69–74, in Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula, ed. Christopher Frayling (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1991), 1–84.

  61. Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siecle (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 107–32, esp. 108; Stoker, Dracula, 8; also, Stephen Arata, “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization,” 463–64, in Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal (1897; rprt. New York: Norton, 1997), 462–70.

  62. “The Effect of Town Life on the Human Body,” Islington News (London), Sept. 10, 1887, p. 6.

  63. Arata, Fictions of Loss; Daniel Pick, “ ‘Terrors of the Night’: Dracula and Degeneration in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Critical Quarterly 30, no. 4 (Winter 1988): 71–87, and Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), esp. 155–75; J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander Gilman, Degeneration:The Dark Side of Progress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Matthew Frye Jacobsen expounds on what he calls “variegated whiteness” of Europeans in his Whiteness of a Di ferent Color, 41–52.

  64. Bram Stoker, A Glimpse of America (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1886).

  65. Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms (London: Verso, 1983), 84–96; Clive Leatherdale, Dracula: The Novel and the Legend, rev. ed. (Brighton, UK: Desert Island Books, 1993), 129–36.

  66. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation; Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan(New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); Cynthia A. Freeland, The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000).

  67. Richard White, “Trashing the Trails,” in Trails: Toward a New Western History, ed. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), 26–39; Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987); White, “It’s Your Misfortuneand None of My Own”; James R. Grossman, ed., The Frontier in American Culture: Essays by Richard White and Patricia Nelson Limerick (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); William Truettner, ed., The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier (Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art, 1991); Smith, Virgin Land; Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence.

  68. Richard Davenport-Hines, Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Evil, Horror, and Ruin (New York: North Point, 1998), 257.

  69. Stoker, Personal Reminiscence, 1:31.

  70. Hindle, “Introduction,” xvii–xxx; Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), esp. 48–78; Daniel Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker (London: Michael Joseph, 1975).

  71. Quotes from J. B. Booth, London Town (London: T. Werner and Laurie Ltd., 1929), 43; Phyllis A. Roth, Bram Stoker (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982), 136. Also Farson, Man Who Wrote Dracula, 215–16; David J. Skal, Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen (New York: Norton, 1990), 31. During his career with Irving, Stoker collected what is still the largest body of Irving ephemera. See the Papers of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-on-Avon, UK.

  72. Roth, Bram Stoker, 136; Belford, Bram Stoker, 121, 173–74; Leatherdale, Dracula, 70; Maggie Kilgour, “Stoker’s Defence of Poetry,” 50, in Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis, and the Gothic, ed. William Hughes and Andrew Smith (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), 47–61.

  73. Belford, Bram Stoker, 178–79; Farson, Man Who Wrote Dracula, 84–87.

  74. Belford, Bram Stoker, 270.

  75. Farson, Man Who Wrote Dracula, 164–65. Also Hindle, “Introduction,” xvi–xvii; Kilgour, “Stoker’s Defence of Poetry,” 49–50; Jerrold E. Hogle, “Stoker’s Counterfeit Gothic,” 210, in Hughes and Smith ed., Bram Stoker, 205–24; Nina Auerbach, Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 269–70; Belford, Bram Stoker, 5, 106, 270; Leatherdale, Dracula, 82–83.

  76. “Henry Irving,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 22, 1883, p. 1; “Henry Irving in America,” The Era, Sept. 11, 1886, p. 19; “The ‘Wild West’ Show,” The Era, Sept. 18, 1886, p. 10; Russell, Lives and Legends, 328; Sell and Weybright, Buffalo Bill and the Wild West, 151; Horace Porter to William Cody, Feb. 10, 1887, “Invitations and Letters 1887–1891,” Microfilm Reel, BBHC.

  77. For Cody’s plans to visit the UK, see Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 364. For Irving’s social stature: “Address by Mr. Henry Irving,” Glasgow Evening News, Nov. 10, 1891, p. 7; Jeffrey Richards, ed., Sir Henry Irving: Theatre, Culture, and Society—Essays, Addresses, and Lectures (Keele, UK: Ryburn Publishers, 1994), esp. 7.

  78. Belford, Bram Stoker, 71.

  79. Untitled clipping, The Era, April 23, 1887, Johnny Baker Scrapbook, DPL-WHR.

  80. For Irving at opening day, see “What the World Says,” The World (UK), April 27, 1887, p. 17; “The American Exhibition and Wild West Show,” Pall Mall Gazette (UK), May 10, 1887, p. 11; Irving’s private box is in The World (UK), May 11, 1887, p. 16; for dinner see Illustrated Bits (UK), May 7, 1887, p. 11; Cody also attended dinner backstage during the last night of the Lyceum run in 1887; see “Court and Society,” Court and Society (UK), July 20, 1887, p. 52. For another gathering attended by Irving, Cody, and Stoker, see “Mansion House Dramatic Luncheon, Wednesday, June 15, 1887, Plan of Tables,” in Papers of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, Reel 21, 52/48–49. For invitations, see E. Yates to WFC, June 7, 1887, “Letters and Invitations, 1887–88,” BBHC; photograph in Papers of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry; also Gallop, Buffalo Bill’s British Wild West, 65.

  81. For burlesque and melodrama, see “Yesterday’s Amusements,” Lloyds, Dec. 6, 1887, and untitled clipping, American Register, n.d., and untitled clipping, Penny Illustrated News, June 25, 1887, all in Julia Cody Goodman (henceforth JCG) Scrapbook, MS 58, NSHS; for Gilbert and Sullivan, see Illustrated Bits (UK), Sept. 10, 1887, p. 6.

  82. “Buffalo Bill as a Leader of Fashion,” Birmingham Daily Mail, clipping in JCG Scrapbook, Aug. 15, 1887, MS 58, NSHS.

  83. “The American Exhibition and Wild West Show,” Pall Mall Gazette (UK), May 10, 1887, p. 11.

  84. Illustrated Bits (UK), March 26, 1887, p. 7; Illust
rated Bits (UK), May 21, 1887, 3.

  85. “Texan cow-boy” is in Illustrated Bits (UK), May 28, 1887, p. 4; Cody as Faust in “Waiting Verification,” Punch, May 7, 1887, n.p., clipping in Papers of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, Reel 21, Item 52/19.

  86. Henry Irving to Cody, May [date illegible] 1887, “Invitations and Letters, 1887–1895,”

  Microfilm Reel, BBHC.

  87. See note 58 above.

  88. “The Wild West at Horfield,” Bristol (UK) Evening News, Sept. 28, 1891, Crager Scrapbook, 1891–92, BBHC.

  89. “The Lorgnette,” Glasgow Evening News (UK), Nov. 28, 1891, p. 1.

  90. WFC to Stoker, July 25, 1887; WFC to Stoker, May 6, 1892; WFC to Stoker, n.d., Brotherton Collection, Leeds University; Stoker to Nate Salsbury, Oct. 30, 1893, YCAL MSS 17, NSP.

  91. The story, “The Squaw,” appeared in 1893. Bram Stoker, Midnight Tales, ed. Peter Haining (London: Peter Owen, 1990), 85–97. Both the 1887 London program and Cody’s calling card, which was in Stoker’s possession, informed the public about Cody’s Nebraska home. “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West from the Plains of America,” n.p., M Cody Box 6 Misc., DPL-WHR; WFC to Stoker, n.d., Brotherton Collection, Leeds University. For the connection of “The Squaw” to Quincey Morris, Leatherdale, Dracula, 130; Belford, Bram Stoker, 178.

  92. Bram Stoker, The Shoulder of Shasta, ed. Alan Johnson (1895; rprt. Westcliff-on-Sea, UK: Desert Island Books, 2000), 27–28, 99–100.

  93. See Alan Johnson’s annotations in Stoker, Shoulder of Shasta, 27, 115–17.

  94. Alan Johnson, “Introduction,” in Stoker, Shoulder of Shasta, 15, 17, also 118 n. 1.

  95. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization; Lears, No Place of Grace; G. Edward White, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989); Alex Nemerov, FredericRemington and Turn-of-the-Century America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Truettner, The West as America.

  96. See chapter 9.

  97. See programs for these and other years in DPL-WHR, M Cody Programs, and at BBHC. For composition of show in London, see “The Queen in London. Visit to Westminster and the American Exhibition,” Daily Telegraph (London), May 12, 1887, clipping in Annie Oakley Scrapbook, BBHC, and “Programme of Exhibition Before the Queen,” 1887, in Souvenir Album of the Visit of Her Majesty Queen Victoria to the American Exhibition (London, 1887), copy in BBHC.