56. F. E. Leupp to U.S. Indian Agent, May 14, 1908, in 047 Fairs and Expositions, Box 162, RG 75, NARA-CPR; copy in “Petitions by BBWW Indians,” Association Files, BBHC.
57. Utley, Lance and the Shield, 225–33. Nick Black Elk, who originally joined the show hoping to see the Holy Land whence Jesus came, recalled that when Queen Victoria met the Lakota performers, she said that they had “a Grandfather over there who takes care of you over there, but he shouldn’t allow” the white people “to take you around as beasts to show the people.” DeMallie, Sixth Grandfather, 250. Black Elk’s version of the meeting is highly dubious, but the point is less what Victoria said than how much Indians remembered and appreciated her words as a critique of U.S. Indian policy, something that had considerable weight coming from the sovereign of the world’s largest empire.
58. For Red Cloud’s request of a flag, see Red Cloud to Nate Salsbury, July 18, 1889, Box 1/6, NSP, YCAL 17.
59. U.S. Indian Agent to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, May 18, 1908, in 047 Fairs and Expositions, Box 162, BBWW, RG 75, NARA-CPR; copy in “Petitions from BBWW Indians,” Association Files, BBHC.
60. Charles S. McNichols to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Nov. 16, 1903, in “Encounter Between Sioux Indians of the Pine Ridge Agency, S. Dak, and a Sheriff’s Posse of Wyoming,” Senate Document 128, 59th Congress, Jan. 27, 1904, 14. For a provocative analysis of the events at Lightning Creek, see Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 15–51.
61. A. P. Putnam to Governor Fenimore Chatterton, Nov. 10, 1903, in “Encounter Between Sioux Indians,” 5–7.
62. Two of the most outspoken critics of the government’s failure to punish the murderers of Lightning Creek were veterans of Buffalo Bill’s theatrical show and the Wild West, too: George Sword, Jack Red Cloud, “Statement to the Public by Pine Ridge Indians Relating to Late Trouble in Wyoming,” in “Encounter Between Sioux Indians,” 16. Bull and Blish, A Pictographic History of the Oglala Sioux, 500–1; Roberta Carkeek Cheney, Sioux Winter Count: A 131-Year Calendar of Events (Happy Camp, CA: Naturegraph, 1998), 44; James R. Walker, Lakota Society, ed. Raymond J. DeMallie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 155.
63. U.S. Indian Agent to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, May 18, 1908, “Petitions by BBWW Indians,” Association Files, BBHC.
64. For Brown’s education, see H. D. Gallagher to U.S. Indian Agent, Rosebud Agency, March 20, 1889, RG 75, Pine Ridge, Misc. Letters Sent, 1887–91, vol. 5, p. 193, NARA-CPR.
65. Warren G. Vincent to H. H. Vincent, March 1, 1890, M Cody L Box 1, DPL-WHR.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: BUFFALO BILL’S AMERICA
1. Russell, Lives and Legends, 370–71.
2. Arabs from the Paris Hippodrome, then appearing at the Olympia Theater, visited the Wild West camp in London in 1887; Cossacks, or the Georgian horsemen who pretended to be Cossacks, were appearing in European circuses by the late 1880s. “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” Pictorial News, Nov. 5, 1887, in WFC Scrapbook, Buffalo Bill Museum, Golden, CO; for Cossacks, see Irakli Makharadze and Akaki Chkhaidze, Wild West Georgians (Tbilisi Georgia: New Media, n.d.), 1–2.
3. Oakley’s memory is in Russell, Lives and Legends, 372; U.S. Army and circuses in Davis, Circus Age, 78.
4. Burke, Buffalo Bill from Prairie to Palace, 266.
5. WFC to Al Goodman, Aug. 25, 1891, in Foote, Letters from Buffalo Bill, 37–38.
6. Foote, Letters from Buffalo Bill, 40.
7. Nate Salsbury, “Wild West at Windsor,” typescript, n.d., in YCAL MSS 17, NSP.
8. Davis, Circus Age, 10. In 1891, while the Wild West show was in Glasgow, Salsbury and Cody briefly installed “educated” elephants and a group of “Schuli warriors” from Africa. “Musical and Dramatic,” Scottish Sport (Glasgow), Jan. 22, 1892, p. 14.
9. “The Ladies Expedition,” unattributed clipping, n.d.; also “Brussels Gossip—From Wounded Knee to Waterloo” unattributed clipping, n.d. in G. C. Crager Scrapbook, 1891–92, BBHC.
10. The scholarship on world’s fairs and exhibitions is huge. A good summary of it may be found in Robert W. Rydell, John E. Findling, and Kimberly D. Pelle, Fair America: World’s Fairs in the United States (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), esp. 1–13. Other sources consulted here include Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), and World of Fairs: The Century of Progress Expositions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Burton Benedict, The Anthropology of World’s Fairs (Berkeley, CA: Scolar Press, 1983); Karal Ann Marling, Blue Ribbon: A Social and Pictorial History of the Minnesota State Fair (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1990). For the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, see also Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (New York: Crown, 2003); and Neil Harris, Wim de Wit, James Gilbert, and Robert W. Rydell, Grand Illusions: Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1893 (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1993).
11. Larson, Devil in the White City, 117; Harris et al., Grand Illusions, 81–84.
12. Stanley Applebaum, The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 (New York: Dover, 1980), 103; Larson, Devil in the White City, 250.
13. See Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 80–82; White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,” 7–65; Fabian, “History for the Masses,” 223–39, esp. 223–26.
14. Larson, Devil in the White City, 236; gondolas in Harris et. al., Grand Illusions, 65; J. W. Buel, The Magic City: A Massive Portfolio of the Original Photographic View of the World’s Fair (St. Louis, MO: Historical Publishing Co., 1894), n.p.
15. Swimming races and “Ball of the Midway Freaks” in Larson, Devil in the White City, 311–15; prune rider in Claire Perry, Pacific Arcadia: Images of California, 1600–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 94–95.
16. Amy Leslie [Lilian West Brown Buck], Amy Leslie at the Fair (Chicago: W. B. Conkey, 1893), 20.
17. “The Last of the Wild West,” New York Times, Feb. 23, 1887, p. 2.
18. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 1228–29.
19. Kasson, Amusing the Million, 34.
20. Nate Salsbury, “Contract with Bailey,” typescript, n.d., Box 1/63, YCAL MSS 17, NSP.
21. Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, 14.
22. “Cossack and Cowboy,” unattributed clipping, July 29, 1888, WFC Scrapbook 1883–1886–1888, BBHC.
23. Remington, “Buffalo Bill in London,” 96–98; for an example of the comparison, see Leslie, Amy Leslie at the Fair, 24–25.
24. Burke, Buffalo Bill from Prairie to Palace, 250–51.
25. BBWW 1893 program, 27–28.
26. Quote from Blackstone, Buckskin, Bullets, and Business, 82; Thomas M. Barrett, “Cowboys or Indians? Cossacks and the Internationalization of the American Frontier,” Journalof the West 42: 1 (Winter 2003): 52–59; Makharadze and Chkhaidze, Wild West Georgians.
27. Burke, Buffalo Bill from Prairie to Palace, 50, 55. For horse purchases, see WFC to Frank Hammitt, Dec. 21, 1892, and WFC to Frank Hammitt, Dec. 21, 1894, MS 6, Series I:B, Box 1, BBHC.
28. In 1895, western author Owen Wister published his “Evolution of the Cow-Puncher,” which argued the cowboy was the advance guard of Anglo-Saxon expansion. Owen Wister, “The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1895, in Vorpahl, My Dear Wister, 77–96. Quote from p. 80.
29. Nasaw, Going Out, 1–46.
30. Harold Coffin Syrett, The City of Brooklyn, 1865–1898: A Political History (1944; rprt. New York: Ams Press, 1968), 235–36; there were 89,722 Irish in Kings County (Brooklyn) in 1890, according to “The Historical Census,” online database at
31. Vaudeville theaters charged a dime for admission, and drew immigrant crowds. The cheapest theaters, the so-called “ten-twenty-thirties,” charged ten cents for their upper balcony seats and thirty cents for the best seats in the house. These were popular d
estinations for laborers and low-level clerks, too. Nasaw, Going Out, 40–42.
32. For Germans, see M. B. Bailey, Original Souvenir, 151; “George Hamid,” Philadelphia Bulletin, June 14, 1971, clipping in MS 6, WFC Collection Series VI:B BBWW Personnel Box 1/6, BBHC.
33. Shanton from “How Shantor [sic] Rode the Bear,” Chicago Herald, July 10, 1894, and “The Laramie Kid’s Career,” New York Press, July 8, 1894; McPhee from “Cody’s Bold Cowboys,” New York Advertiser, May 20, 1894, all in NSS, vol. 4, 1894, WH 72, DPL-WHR; these names are drawn from George H. Gooch, ed., Route-Book Buffalo Bill’s Wild West 1899 (Buffalo, NY: Matthews Northrup, 1899), 3–4.
34. “Our Unique Idea,” Morning Journal, May 20, 1894, in NSS, vol. 4, 1894, WH 72, DPL-WHR.
35. Clipping from Deutsche Eindrucke, Aug. 20, 1896, in NSS, 1896, DPL, translation by Warren Dym.
36. Wetmore, Last of the Great Scouts, ix–x. Deloria, Playing Indian, 39–41, 46–47; Fintan O’Toole, The Lie of the Land: Irish Identities (New York: Verso, 1997), 26–28; for jokes, see “Lebkuecher’s Levee,” New Jersey Times, June 23, 1891, clipping in Crager Scrapbook, BBHC; for Tammany members at Wild West show, see “Wild West Open,” Brooklyn Citizen,May 5, 1894, clipping in NSS, vol. 4, 1894, WH 72, DPL-WHR. For Croker’s career with Tammany Hall, see Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 1104–10.
37. Nate Salsbury, “At Police Headquarters” typescript, n.d., in YCAL MSS 17, Box 2/63, NSP.
38. “The Historical Census,” Nov. 1, 2004.
39. E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), 180. Census figures on American-born children of immigrants are as follows: according to the 1890 census, native-born males of foreign parents in Kings County, New York, numbered 157,204; native-born females numbered 164,653. “The Historical Census,” Nov. 1, 2004; Nasaw, Going Out, 43–44.
40. Syrett, City of Brooklyn, 129, 220.
41. Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier, Brooklyn! An Illustrated History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 35. For Forefather’s Day, see “City and Suburban News,” New York Times, Dec. 19, 1886, p. 7. Other historical associations were no more inclusive. The Brooklyn Historical Society began as the Long Island Historical Society in 1863, with quarters in the exclusive Brooklyn Heights neighborhood which was home to most of Brooklyn’s New England descendants. Snyder-Grenier, Brooklyn!, 36.
42. Nasaw, Going Out, 44–45.
43. Nasaw, Going Out, 52–53.
44. “Old-Time Actors with the Indians,” New York Telegram, June 21, 1894, in NSS, vol. 4, 1894, WH 72, DPL-WHR; Keen’s “Dutchman” act is mentioned in various places. See “Rubbart at the ‘Wild West,’ ” The Bailie (Glasgow), Nov. 25, 1891, p. 7.
45. BBWW 1893 program; BBWW 1894 program; Wojtowicz, Buffalo Bill Collector’s Guide, 24–25.
46. BBWW 1894 program; Wojtowicz, Buffalo Bill Collector’s Guide, 25.
47. Roosevelt, Winning of the West, 1: 4.
48. Turner, “Significance of the Frontier in American History”; Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination, 13–31; Cronon, “Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier,” 157–76.
49. Herbert Baxter Adams, Saxon Tithing-Men in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1882), and The Germanic Origin of New England Towns (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1882).
50. Quoted in William Cronon, “Turner’s First Stand: The Significance of Significance in American History,” in Writing Western History: Essays on Major Western Historians, ed. Richard W. Etulain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), 77.
51. For American history departments, Lawrence Levine, “Clio, Canons, and Culture,” Journal of American History 80, no. 3 (Dec. 1993): 849–67, esp. 855–56; for show business, Nasaw, Going Out, 43, n.
52. Gooch, ed., Route-Book Buffalo Bill’s Wild West 1899, 21; George H. Gooch, ed., Route-BookBuffalo Bill’s Wild West 1900 (Kansas City, MO: Hudson-Kimberley Publishing, 1900), 42, in BBHC.
53. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 119–20.
54. NSP, YCAL MSS 17, Box 1, Folder 21, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT; for African Americans in the actual West see Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 17–221.
55. Quoted in Yost, Buffalo Bill, 263–64.
56. WFC to George T. Beck, March 26, 1895, in WFC Letters, No. 9972, Box 1/1, AHC. Census figures from “Historical Census,” March 7, 2005.
57. “These People Making History,” Brooklyn Daily Times, April 12, 1897, in NSS, 1897, DPL-WHR. See also Nate Salsbury to WFC, Oct. 10, 1899, in YCAL MSS 17, Box 1/11, NSP. Nina Silber writes that Black America attracted 200,000 people in Brooklyn, and that it showed in London by the end of 1895. Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 135.
58. I owe this idea of place to William Cronon.
59. “Indians See ‘The World,’ ” The World, June 4, 1894; “New for the Boulevardiers,” New York Herald, June 1, 1894; “Invaded by Riffian Moors,” Brooklyn Eagle, n.d.: “Eleven Texans with Guns,” New York Sun, May 9, 1894. All in NSS, 1894, Microfilm 18, Reel 1, DPL.
60. See tickets to Chicago show and Ambrose Park show, in YCAL MSS 17, Box 1, Folder 23, NSP.
61. “Buffalo Bill ‘At Home’ to Friends,” New York Herald, May 10, 1894, NSS, 1894, p. 30, Series 7, Box 4, DPL.
62. “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Expanded,” New York Telegram, May 5, 1894, p. 28; and “Buffalo Bill in Brooklyn,” New York Mercury and America, May 6, 1894, p. 27, of NSS, 1894, WH 72, Series 7, Box 4, DPL.
63. Remington, “Buffalo Bill in London,” 98.
64. Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, ed. David Leviatin (1893; rprt. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 60; also David Leviatin, “Introduction,” in Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 28.
65. Leviatin, “Introduction,” 48, n. 78.
66. Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 73.
67. “City Camp Life,” Brooklyn Citizen, May 20, 1894, clipping in NSS, vol. 4, Series 7, Box 4, DPL.
68. Untitled clipping, American Hebrew, Aug. 24, 1894, NSS.
69. “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” Recorder, May 10, 1894, in NSS, 1894, p. 29, WH 72, Series 7, Box 4, DPL. BBWW 1910 program (New York: Southern & Co. Publishers), n.p.
70. Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 179.
71. For parks movement, see Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870–1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 252–58. Quotation from “An Army from All Nations,” New York Tribune, May 10, 1894, NSS, vol. 4, Series 7, Box 4, DPL.
72. Remington, “Buffalo Bill in London,” 98.
73. “City Camp Life,” Brooklyn Citizen, May 20, 1894. At least one columnist wrote in 1897 that the show was “Stirring Up Savage Passions in the Rising Generation,” a remark that suggested the show’s usefulness for inoculating boys against neurasthenia. “The Wild West Show,” unattributed clipping, April 14, [no year], NSS, vol. 7, 1897, Series 7, Box 7, DPL.
74. Although not entirely positive. Boys who committed acts of serious violence while playing “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” also appeared in the press. “Played Wild West,” New York Commercial Advertiser, Aug. 29, 1894, NSS, vol. 4, Series 7, Box 4, DPL.
75. “New Wild West Show,” New York Recorder, Aug. 23, 1894, NSS, vol. 4, 1894, Series 7, Box 4, DPL.
76. Deloria, Playing Indian.
77. M. B. Bailey, Official Souvenir, 274; Blackstone, Buckskins, Bullets, and Business, 42–43.
78. See, for example, “Buffalo Bill at Portsmouth,” unattributed clipping, n.d., G. C. Crager Scrapbook, BBHC.
79. Both men claimed the vaccinations were absolutely “not necessary.” “Virus for Heap Big Injun,” Evening World (New York), May 16, 1894, NSS, 1894, Series 7, Box 4, DPL. For the history of urban public health campaigns and the response of immigrant communities, see Charles Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United Sta
tes in 1832, 1849, and 1866, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), esp. 33–34.
80. David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology 1880–1940 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 29–39, and passim.
81. David Nasaw, Going Out, 8.
82. Harold Coffin Syrett, The City of Brooklyn, 1865–1898 ([1944] New York: AMS Press), 166–72, 208–12; David Nye, Electrifying America.
83. Nye, Electrifying America, 96.
84. Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier, Brooklyn! An Illustrated History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 103–4; untitled clipping, Electrical Review, May 23, 1894, in NSS, vol. 4, Series 7, Box 4, DPL.
85. Quote from “Electricity at the Wild West Show,” The Electrical World 24 (1) Sept. 15, 1894, 255; see also “Scientists Visit the Wild West,” New York Times, Sept. 7, 1894; “Electricians at the Wild West,” New York Tribune, Sept. 7, 1894; “Electricians at the Wild West,” New York Press, Sept. 7, 1894; “Electricians Pleased,” New York Recorder, Sept. 7, 1894; “Camp Cody Invaded,” New York Advertiser, Sept. 7, 1894; “Electricians at the Wild West,” Brooklyn Eagle, Sept. 7, 1894; “New York Electrical Society,” New York Electricity, Sept. 12, 1894; “The New York Electrical Society,” The New York Electrical Age, Sept. 15, 1894, all in NSS, vol. 4, 1894, Series 7, Box 4, DPL.
86. “Electricity Is Life,” Brooklyn Weekly, Aug. 18, 1894, in NSS, Microfilm 18, Reel 4, DPL.
87. See the program materials for the Coney Island appearances in WFC Collection, Denver Public Library, WH 72, Box 2/2, DPL.
88. BBWW 1898 Show Courier (New York: Fless and Ridge, 1898), 14; M. B. Bailey, Official Souvenir, 24.
89. Order of parade in M. B. Bailey, Official Souvenir, 37; BBWW 1899 program, n.p.; for electricity in circuses, see Janet Davis, The Circus Age, 251, n. 43.
90. David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), esp. xiii, 1–16; also John Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776–1900 (New York: Penguin, 1977), 162–72; Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 195–207; Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1965), 295–306.
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