91. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 1038; Davis, Circus Age, 39; Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America.
92. “How He Does It,” Brooklyn Standard Union, Aug. 20, 1894, in NSS, vol. 4, Series 7, Box 4, DPL.
93. “Great Managers Join Hands,” in The Frontier Express and Buffalo Bill Wild West Courier, (1895), 7–8; BBWW 1898 Show Courier, 3.
94. “A Happy Strike at the Wild West,” Freemason New York, Aug. 4, 1894, in NSS, WH 72, Series 7, Box 4, DPL.
95. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation.
96. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 140.
97. “Big family” from “The Wild West’s ‘Mama,’ ” Brooklyn Citizen, Sept. 15, 1894; “Farewell to Ambrose Park,” New York Times, Oct. 7, 1894, in NSS, vol. 4, Series 7, Box 4, DPL.
98. “Little Irma Cody,” New York Journal, Aug. 26, 1894, NSS, vol. 4, Series 7, Box 4, DPL.
99. See, for example, “Farewell to Ambrose Park,” New York Times, Oct. 7, 1894, NSS, vol. 4, Series 7, Box 4, DPL.
100. See the illustration in “Little Irma Cody,” New York Journal, Aug. 26, 1894.
101. “The Wild West’s ‘Mama,’ ”; “City Camp Life.”
102. “The Wild West’s ‘Mama.’ ”
103. “With ‘Marm’ Whittaker,” New York Commercial Advertiser, June 16, 1894, NSS, vol. 4, Series 7, Box 4, DPL; for Pop Whittaker, see “Pop Whittaker Buried,” Feb. 16, 1887, New York Times, Feb. 16, 1887, p. 2.
104. “Little Irma Cody.”
105. “The Wild West’s ‘Mama.’ ”
106. “The Wild West’s ‘Mama.’ ”
107. Quotation from “The Wild West’s ‘Mama.’ ” See also “City Camp Life”; “With ‘Marm’ Whittaker.” Whittaker’s intimacy with Indians was potentially subversive, and in some ways it bucked against the dark fears of miscegenation that energized the “Settler’s Cabin” rescue and the show’s many messages of white female vulnerability and Indian savagery. At the same time, the notion of white woman leading Indian man to civilization was a powerful idea with resonances in missionary work and assimilation campaigns as they unfolded both on the reservation and in immigrant ghettoes. When asked what could ensure the “gradual amalgamation” of Indians “with the superior white race,” John Burke raised the example of an unnamed Lakota man who some years before had traveled with the show and married “a Viennese German widow.” Burke was referring to Standing Bear, and he told the press that his example should be followed by recruiting five hundred German peasant women to marry Sioux men, bringing about “the crossing of healthy breeds, the raising of new citizens, who would be imbued with the spirit of arbitration, under the direction of that best of instructors, mother.” See “Major John M. Burke, A Notable Character in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Camp,” New York Recorder, June 24, 1894, NSS, 1894, Microfilm 18, Reel 4, DPL. The suggestion at once embraced arbitration as the union of races and contradicted the show’s teachings of racial segregation as the bulwark against decay. But Burke contained the subversions of his suggestion by proposing union between Indians and lower-class Germans, not Indians and native whites. In some quarters, these were roughly parallel social classes. At one point, the Indian agent at Pine Ridge requested that a Chicago postal inspector track down the parents of Louise Rieneck, who were lost in the city. By this time, many German Americans had become members of the middle class. Nonetheless, the inspector still relegated these recent immigrants to America’s steerage. “I just returned from Chicago where, after two days’ search through the squallor [sic], I found the balance of the relatives of the Standing-Bear-of-the-German-Wife.” Where he located them is not clear, but he judged them “good subjects for a teepee. The old gent is not bad looking if he were polished up somewhat, but, alas! soap and water in anything like a necessary quantity are unknown to the family.” Perceptions of immigrants as filthy savage aliens made them candidates for assimilation campaigns that in some ways resembled those directed at Indians: missionary efforts, sanitation and literacy and civics lessons, and educational programs to stamp out indigenous language. Burke’s proposal—doubly ironic for its origination with an Irish Catholic—reflected the contradictory impulses of the assimilation movement which sought to remove the threat of “primitive” races from civilization, but simultaneously to avoid embracing them too closely through marriage and sexual intimacy with the middle or upper classes. See E. C. Clement to George LeRoy Brown, Feb. 26, 1892, Pine Ridge, Misc. Css. Received, 1891–95, A–C, Jan. 4–May 10, 1892, RG 75, NARA-CPR.
108. Leslie, Amy Leslie at the Fair, 148–49.
109. “Yesterday Was Women’s Professional League Day at the Wild West,” New York Advertiser, July 31, 1894, in NSS, 1894, WH72, Series 7, Box 4, DPL.
110. “Colonel Cody Talks,” New York Recorder, May 22, 1894, clipping in Robert Haslam Scrapbook, CHS.
111. “Lo, the Dry Indian,” unattributed clipping; “Mustn’t Sell Firewater to the Braves,” New York World, June 15, 1894; “Feared Drunken Indians,” New York Evening World, June 17, 1894; “This Is the Toughest Yet,” Brooklyn Times, June 4, 1894, all in NSS, vol. 4, Series 7, Box 7, DPL.
112. George R. Scott, “Prohibition in Brooklyn, N.Y.,” New York Witness, June 20, 1894, NSS, vol. 4, Series 7, Box 4, DPL.
113. All from “Wild West’s Kitchen,” Chicago Evening Post, June 6, 1896, in NSS, 1896, Series 7, Box 4, DPL.
114. Eric Rauchway, The Refuge of A fections: Family and American Reform Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
INTERLUDE: THE JOHNSON BROTHERS
1. Richard E. Jensen, “Introduction,” in Johnson, Happy as a Big Sunflower, xiii–xxiv, 227, n. 2; Owen Wister, “Evolution of the Cow-Puncher,” 80.
2. There were 115,747 foreign-born white males in Nebraska in 1890, and 86,497 foreign-born white females. Native-born white males of foreign parentage numbered 130,246, while native-born white females of foreign parentage numbered 120,174. The total population of Nebraska was 1,058,910. “The Historical Census,” cited Nov. 1, 2004.
3. Johnson, Happy as a Big Sunflower, 53, 159.
4. Johnson, Happy as a Big Sunflower, 54, 57, 187–89.
5. Robert Johnson to “My Dear Robins,” May 4, 1959; Grace Capron Johnson, “George William Johnson,” n.d.; Grace Capron Johnson to Paul Fees, Sept. 3, 1992, in “WW Show Personnel,” Association Files, BBHC. There is another copy of Grace Capron Johnson’s MSS in the Nebraska Prairie Museum, Holdredge, NE.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: EMPIRE OF THE HOME
1. Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 116–17; on industrial armies, see Todd Depastino, CitizenHobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 58–62; Carlos Schwentes, Coxey’s Army: An American Odyssey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985); Lucy Barber, Marching on Washington: The Forging of an American Political Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 11–43.
2. BBWW 1899 program; Gooch, ed., Route-Book Buffalo Bill’s Wild West 1899, 7.
3. Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders (1899; rprt. New York: New American Library, 1961), 14–15.
4. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 101–6; Buck Taylor was one of TR’s Rough Riders, see Roosevelt, Rough Riders, 26; Tom Isbell was a cowboy in Cody’s Wild West and Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, too. See Roosevelt, Rough Riders, 181. For “Theater” Roosevelt, see Aaron Hoffman, “The Speaker of the House: A Monologue,” Pt. 3 1914, in the Library of Congress, on line at
5. BBWW 1900 program, 36, WFC Collection, WH 72, Box 2/34, DPL-WHR.
6. Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, rev. ed. (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 379.
7. Cherny, American Politics in the Gilded Age, 128, 141; Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood; Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 106–7.
8. BBWW 1898 program, BBWW 1899 program, BBWW 1900 program; BBWW 1901 Program (Buffalo, NY: Courier Co); Wojtowicz, Buffalo Bill Collector’s Guide, 30–32.
9. BBWW 1899 program, 63, WFC
Collection, WH 72, Box 2/34, DPL-WHR.
10. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York: 1955), 90–93, 273–74.
11. Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 141–69.
12. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 180–99.
13. Havighurst, Annie Oakley of the Wild West, 203; Reddin, Wild West Shows, 136; Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 86.
14. WFC to George Everhart, April 29, 1898, quoted in Russell, Lives and Legends, 417.
15. Nate Salsbury pencil notes re: complaints about Buffalo Bill Cody, n.d., in NSP, YCAL MSS 17, Box 1/12.
16. WFC to Moses Kerngood, Aug. 3, 1898, WFC Collection, MS 6 Series I:B Correspondence, Box 1/14, BBHC.
17. Russell, Lives and Legends, 417–19.
18. Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 154–57.
19. For 1903 show, see “The Wild West,” Manchester Courier, April 28, 1903, clipping in NSS 1903; quote from BBWW 1907 program (Buffalo, NY: Courier Co., 1907), 6.
20. Foote, Letters from Buffalo Bill, 42–43.
21. Russell, Lives and Legends, 255–56.
22. David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History, 7.
23. Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 91; Davis, Circus Age, 52.
24. Coffee is in Beck Family Papers, No. 10386, Box 15/17, AHC; for guiding services, see Foote, Letters from Buffalo Bill, 41–42. Short Line railroad in Gallop, Buffalo Bill’s British Wild West, 203–5.
25. See the ads in BBWW 1898 program, and BBWW 1899 program, both in Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. Program advertisements varied from one locality to another. For advertising and its significance, see Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 135–39; Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
26. Yost, Buffalo Bill, 170–71, 217.
27. Yost, Buffalo Bill, 259.
28. George Beck, autobiography MSS, in G. T. Beck Papers, No. 59, Box 7/4, AHC, 103.
29. George Beck, autobiography MSS, 104.
30. G. T. Beck to F. W. Mondell, July 26, 1896, in G. T. Beck Papers, No. 59, Box 25, Book 12, Beck Css, AHC.
31. WFC to Mike Russell, July 13, 1895, WA-MSS, S-197, Box 1/5, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. For contributions of Blestein and others, see Beck, autobiography MSS, 103–5.
32. WFC to Mike Russell, July 13, 1895. For Cody’s partnership with Salsbury on the north side, see Robert E. Bonner, “Buffalo Bill Cody and Wyoming Water Politics,” Western Historical Quarterly 32, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 437.
33. BBWW 1896 program; BBWW 1897 program, WFC Collection, WH 72, Box 2/29, DPL.
34. BBWW 1901 program, WFC Collection, WH 72, Box 2/29, DPL.
35. BBWW 1901 program, WFC Collection, WH 72, Box 2/29, DPL. At this point, according to the advertisement, the water rights could be had for $10 per acre, payable in five annual installments at 6 percent interest. City names from “BBWW Routes, 1883–1916,” BBHC.
36. Cody Enterprise, May 5, 1905.
37. “Buffalo Bill,” Manchester Sunday Chronicle (UK), April 19, 1903, clipping in NSS, 1903, DPL. As an example of how much Cody’s irrigation efforts enhanced his reputation and advanced him along a mythic narrative trajectory in the public eye, consider this description of his irrigation efforts in the Big Horn Basin: “The most notable recent enterprise in Wyoming is that undertaken in the Bighorn Basin by the famous scout, William F. Cody… . This energetic and ambitious man, who has twice won fame, first as a daring and successful scout, and then as exhibitor to two continents of the life, people, and customs of the Wild West—has laid broad and deep the foundations of a still stronger claim to remembrance. He conceived the idea of planting civilization in one of the wildest regions which he had first known as hunter and Indian-fighter.” The passage goes on to describe the irrigation project and the promise of the Big Horn Basin: “In time the region must acquire a large population, supporting a many-sided life, and form a very substantial monument to William F. Cody and his work for the West.” William Ellsworth Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America, 2nd ed. ([1899]; Norwood, MA: Norwood Press, 1905), 227–28. Emphasis added. Note that the trajectory here is “scout, exhibitor, planter of civilization.”
38. WFC to W. A. Richards, Sept. 25, 1903, MS 6 Series I:B Css, Box 1/19, BBHC.
39. Gold mines: “We have located four thousand acres of placer mines on the line of our ditch.” WFC to Mike Russell, Feb. 17, 1896, in WA-MSS, S-197, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
40. Photo p. 6.246, MS 6, Series XI, I, Box 4, BBHC; BBWW 1907 program, 14.
41. Alva Adams, a former governor of Colorado, speaking in 1911, quoted in Karen Merrill, Public Lands and Political Meaning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 202, n. 10.
42. Quoted in Danbom, Resisted Revolution, 22; see also Marx, The Machine in the Garden.
43. Emmons, Garden in the Grassland, 137.
44. Lawrence M. Woods, Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin to 1901: A Late Frontier (Spokane, WA: Arthur H. Clarke, 1997), 10.
45. Frederic Remington describes it in Samuels and Samuels, Frederic Remington, 411.
46. William A. Jones, Report upon the Reconnaissance of Northwestern Wyoming Including Yellowstone National Park Made in the Summer of 1873 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1875), 16–17.
47. George Beck, autobiography MSS, 109; for climate, see Woods, Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin, 10.
48. WFC to Beck, Oct. 27, 1895, WFC Letters, No. 9972, Box 1/1, AHC.
49. See Beck to WFC, Aug. 23,1896 ; Beck to WFC, Aug. 26, 1896; Beck to H. C. Alger, Aug. 26, 1896, G. T. Beck Papers, No. 59, Box 25, 1896 Letterpress Book, Beck Css, AHC.
50. Beck to WFC, Aug. 31, 1896, G. T. Beck Papers, No. 59, Box 25, 1896 Letterpress Book, Beck Css, AHC; also for Populists, see Nate Salsbury to George Beck, Oct. 8, 1896, Beck Family Papers, No. 10386, Box 1/8, AHC.
51. Beck to WFC, Oct. 2, 1896, G. T. Beck Papers, No. 59, Box 25, 1896 Letterpress Book, Beck Css, AHC.
52. “William A. Cody and George T. Beck to Phebe A. Hearst, Bond,” Feb. 4, 1897, and “William F. Cody and George T. Beck to Phebe Hearst, Indemnity Bond,” July 12, 1901, in G. T. Beck Papers, No. 59, Doc. 6, Folder 12, AHC. The indemnity bond reveals that they could not pay it off and had to carry the bond over to July 1904.
53. John Erwin Price, “A Study of Early Cody, Wyoming, and the Role of William F. Cody in Its Development,” MA thesis, University of Denver, 1956, 139–41.
54. WFC to Mike Russell, April 9, 1896, in WA-MSS, S-197, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT; for Beck loan to Cody and Salsbury, see Beck, autobiography MSS, 117.
55. In 1870, farms made up 407,735,000 acres; by 1900, 838,592,000 acres were converted to farm. Hoftstadter, Age of Reform, 56.
56. For crop prices, see Cherny, American Politics in the Gilded Age, 139; Hine and Faragher, American West, 347–48; Jeff Ostler, Prairie Populism: The Fate of Agrarian Radicalism in Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa, 1880–1892 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 18; see also Shannon, The Farmer’s Last Frontier; for drought in Nebraska, see Olson and Naugle, History of Nebraska, 235.
57. Laurence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment, 271.
58. Nate Salsbury to George Beck, Aug. 14, 1896, Beck Family Papers, No. 10386, Box 1/8, AHC.
59. Salsbury to Beck, Aug. 14, 1896, Beck Family Papers, No. 10386, Box 1/8, AHC. For corporate perceptions of Bryan generally, see Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 103.
60. Yost, Buffalo Bill, 267, 275.
61. Michael P. Malone and F. Ross Peterson, “Politics and Protests,” 510–11, in The Oxford History of the American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O’Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 501–33.
62. “The Historical Census,” cited Sept. 28, 2004.
63. For the Johnson County War, see Helena Huntington Smith, The War on Powder River: The History of an Insurrection
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 183–242; A. S. Mercer, The Banditti of the Plains; or the Cattlemen’s Invasion of Wyoming in 1892 (The Crowning Infamy of the Ages) (1894; rprt. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954); Merrill, Public Lands and Political Meaning, 49.
64. Karen Merrill, Public Lands and Political Meanings, 49: “… the turn-of-the-century livestock owner was seen as anything but a homebuilder, and before the early 1900s, ranching and homebuilding were culturally and politically viewed as antithetical categories in stories of western development.”
65. T. A. Larson, History of Wyoming (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1965), 121.
66. “The Historical Census” lists 29,347 native-born females and 5,000 foreign-born females in the census of 1900.
67. In the words of one rural historian: “It was in these millions of tiny commonwealths that everything important in life took place.” Danbom, Resisted Revolution, 9.
68. Beck, autobiography MSS, 93.
69. Paul Wallace Gates, “Land Reform Movement” and “Safety Valve Theory,” in The New Encyclopedia of the American West, ed. Howard R. Lamar (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 614–16, 998–99. The most trenchant critic of the safety valve theory is Shannon, The Farmer’s Last Frontier, 356–59; see also his two essays, “A Post-Mortem on the Labor-Safety-Valve Theory,” in Agricultural History, 19 Jan. 1945: 31–37; and “The Homestead Act and the Labor surplus,” in The Public Lands: Studies in the History of the Public Domain, ed. Vernon Carstenson (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1963), 297–313.
70. Smythe, Conquest of Arid America, 1–47; for more on reclamation and irrigation campaigns, see White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own,” 402–6; Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water Acidity and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Donald Pisani, Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 1–31.
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