Louis S. Warren (102 page)

51. Utley,
Life in Custer's Cavalry,
72.

52. Richard Irving Dodge,
Our Wild Indians: Thirty-Three Years' Personal Experience of the Red
Men of the Great West
(1882; rprt. New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 337.

53. Davis, “Summer on the Plains,” 303.

54. Armes,
Ups and Downs of an Army Officer,
193.

55. Armes,
Ups and Downs of an Army Officer,
194.

56. Dodge,
Our Wild Indians,
582.

57. Janet M. Davis,
The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 16.

58. Davis,
Circus Age,
17.

59. Fellows and Freeman,
This Way to the Big Show,
211.

60. Quotes from BBWW 1901 program (Buffalo, NY: Courier, 1901), 3.

61. Cody,
Life of Buffalo Bill,
172; for buffalo horses, see John Ewers,
The Horse in Blackfoot
Indian Culture
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1955).

62. Dodge,
Our Wild Indians,
341–42.

63. Cody,
Life of Buffalo Bill,
269.

64. Davis,
Circus Age,
20.

65. Davis,
Circus Age,
15–36, 39–46.

66. Davis,
Circus Age,
93–94.

67. Fellows and Freeman,
This Way to the Big Show,
106–7, 113–14.

68. Davis,
Circus Age,
31–32.

69. Fellows and Freeman,
This Way to the Big Show,
179–80.

70. Davis,
Circus Age,
7, 21, 39–41, 45.

71. Davis,
Circus Age,
32.

72. Dan Castello was also part of this partnership, but he soon departed. Fellows and Freeman,
This Way to the Big Show,
169–70.

73. “Barnum's Roman Hippodrome,”
New York Times,
April 25, 1874, p. 7.

74. Davis,
Circus Age,
40.

75. Elbert R. Bowen, “The Circus in Early Rural Missouri,”
Missouri Historical Review
47, no. 10 (1952): 1–17; Deahl, “Nebraska's Unique Contribution,” 283–98.

76. Nellie Snyder Yost,
Buffalo Bill,
30–33, 41; also the same author's
The Call of the Range:
The Story of the Nebraska Stock Growers Association
(Denver, CO: Sage Books, 1966).

77. James C. Olson and Ronald C. Naugle, History of Nebraska, 3rd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 190–93.

78. Olson and Naugle,
History of Nebraska,
191–92; John Bratt,
Trails of Yesterday
(Chicago: The University Publishing Co., 1921), 278; lost money is in WFC to Sam Hall, May 9, 1879, MS 6 Series I:B Css Box 1/6, BBHC.

79. Bratt,
Trails of Yesterday,
279.

80. Cody,
Life of Buffalo Bill,
363.

81. Bratt,
Trails of Yesterday,
279.

82. Bratt,
Trails of Yesterday,
279.

83. Richard W. Slatta, Cowboys of the Americas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 141–42.

84. An 1844 pickup contest between Texas Rangers, Indians, and Hispanics in San Antonio was echoed in a similar contest at the Texas State Fair in 1852. Slatta,
Cowboys of the
Americas,
139.

85. In the first few years of the Wild West show, one act featured a cowboy called Mustang Jack, who leapt over a tall horse from a standing start. Such feats were a range standard, too. Cowboy competition extended to physical feats not necessarily associated with cowboy skills. The Dismal River roundup included swimming races. Throughout Mexico and South America, cowboys eschewed walking or running on foot, but in the United States, cowboys not only ran footraces, but challenged one another to jumping contests, including the high jump, the broad jump, and the triple jump (or “hop, step, and jump” as it was known at the time). Slatta,
Cowboys of the Americas,
140–41.

86. Cody,
Life of Buffalo Bill,
362.

87. Yost,
Buffalo Bill,
118–22.

88. Nate Salsbury, “Cody's Personal Representatives,” typescript, YCAL MSS 17, NSP; also Nate Salsbury, “The Origin of the Wild West Show,”
Colorado Magazine
32, no. 3 (July 1955): 205–8, original in YCAL MSS 17, NSP.

CHAPTER NINE: DOMESTICATING THE WILD WEST

1. Yost,
Buffalo Bill,
132–33.

2. For concerns about unsuitable entertainment, see Allen,
Horrible Prettiness;
John F. Kasson,
Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 6–7. “Better class of people” in WFC to W. F. Carver, Feb. 11, 1883, WA MSS S-1621, Beinecke Library, New Haven, CT.

3. For middle-class women in audiences, see Nasaw,
Going Out,
18, 26. For the appeal of the Wild West show to families, see “The Wild West,”
Montreal Herald and Commercial
Gazette,
Aug. 17, 1885, n.p., clipping in Series VI:G Box 1, folder 15, BBHC.

4. The phrase “Westward the Course of Empire,” from an eighteenth-century poem by Bishop Berkeley, was widely used in American painting, and it appeared in Wild West show posters, too. See Jack Rennert,
100
Posters of Buffalo Bill's Wild West
(New York: Darien House, 1976), foldout A. Anxieties about national decay also inspired art. Between 1835 and 1839, Thomas Cole, America's most famous landscape painter, produced a four-part series of paintings which he titled
The Course of Empire.
The paintings illustrated a people's progress from wilderness savagery, through pastoral and commercial stages to imperial grandeur, before falling into decadence and fiery collapse. Based on the experience of Rome, the paintings suggested America's own passage from wilderness beginnings to nascent imperial grandeur.
The Course of Empire
both celebrated progress and questioned its outcome. All eyes turned westward in the nineteenth century, and most remained optimistic. But Cole's
Course of Empire
might just as well have been titled “Downward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.” See Barbara Novak,
Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting,
1825–1875
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 10, 19–20, 110.

5. Quoted in Lears,
No Place of Grace,
50.

6. Bederman,
Manliness and Civilization,
84–88; also Lears,
No Place of Grace,
49–51.

7. Bernard Bailyn, Robert Dallek, David Brion Davis, David Herbert Donald, John L. Thomas, and Gordon S. Wood, The Great Republic: A History of the American People, 2 vols. 4th ed. (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1992), 2:228–29; Matthew Frye Jacobson,
Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encountered Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad,
1876–1917
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 6: “Between 1870 and 1920, some twenty-six million immigrants entered the United States.”

8. See David M. Wrobel,
The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old
West to the New Deal
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993); 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).

9. Robert A. Woods, ed.,
The City Wilderness: A Settlement Study by Residents and Associates of
the South End House
(1898; rprt. New York: Garrett Press, 1970); Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 1174–75; Robert W. Cherny, American Politics in the Gilded Age, 1868–1900 (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson Press, 1997), 136; Eric Rauchway,
Murdering McKinley:
The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 133–35. Also see Katherine Kish Sklar,
Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Women's
Political Culture,
1830–1902
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Victoria Brown,
The Education of Jane Addams
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Rosalind Rosenberg,
Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 25–35.

10. Peggy Samuels and Harold Samuels,
Frederic Remington
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 33; Remington quoted in G. Edward White,
The Eastern Establishment and
the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 109.

11. Remington's painting of Buffalo Bill in 1899 was reproduced in Helen Cody Wetmore's biography of her brother,
Last of the Great Scouts
(1899; rprt. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1918), and on the covers of show programs for 1901, with Remington's permission. See BBWW 1901 program (Buffalo, NY: Courier, 1901).

12. Dr. N. Allen, “Changes in Population,”
Harper's New Monthly Magazine
38, no. 225 (Feb. 1869): 386.

13. Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, 6 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1889–96); Bederman,
Manliness and Civilization,
170–215.

14. “Actresses See Cowboys,”
New York Advertiser,
July 31, 1894, in NSS, 1894, WH72, Series 7, Box 4, DPL.

15. Brick Pomeroy, quoted in BBWW 1899 program, p. 11. For G. Stanley Hall and educational theory, see Bederman,
Manliness and Civilization,
88–101.

16. “Women's Kingdom,”
Chicago Tribune,
Oct. 20, 1883, p. 12; “Female Suffrage and Woman's Advancement,”
Chicago Tribune,
Oct. 21, 1883, p. 4.

17. Jane Tompkins,
West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 23–45; Lears,
No Place of Grace,
103–7; also Halttunen,
Confidence Men
and Painted Women,
56–59.

18. Slotkin,
Gunfighter Nation,
63–87, esp. 77.

19. Orvell,
Real Thing,
77, 101.

20. Bachmann, quoted in Rennert,
100
Posters of Buffalo Bill's Wild West,
4.

21. WFC to Carver, Feb. 11, 1883, WA MSS S-1621, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

22. Buffalo Bill and Dr. Carver Wild West, Rocky Mountain, and Prairie Exhibition Program 1883 (Hartford, CT: Calhoun Printing), n.p., [hereafter BBDC]; BBWW 1885 program, n.p., Cody Collection, WH 72, Box 2/19, DPL-WHR.

23. Quotes from Fellows and Freeman,
This Way to the Big Show,
95, 146; for Matthewson, see “Real Buffalo Bill,”
Chicago Post,
July 14, 1894, and “He Met Buffalo Bill,”
New York
Press,
Sept. 3, 1894, both clippings in NSS, vol. 4; George E. Hyde,
Life of George Bent:
Written from His Letters,
ed. Savoie Lottinville (Norman: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), 268; Yost,
Buffalo Bill,
374–75.

24. See “New Jersey's Farm Work,”
New York Times,
Sept. 16, 1884, p. 8.

25. For a survey of competing Wild West shows, see Don Russell,
The Wild West: A History
of the Wild West Shows
(Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum, 1970); Paul Reddin,
Wild West Shows
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999). For Samuel Franklin Cody, see Garry Jenkins,
“Colonel” Cody and the Flying Cathedral: The Adventures of the Cowboy
Who Conquered Britain's Skies
(London: Simon and Schuster, 1999), esp. 8–12.

26. WFC to William Carver, Feb. 11, 1883, WA MSS S-1621, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

27. Moses,
Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians,
23.

28. Carver's fraudulent biography is in BBDC 1883 program (Hartford, CT: Calhoun, 1883), n.p. Carver paid $200 for 160 acres of North Platte property in 1874. See WA MSS S-1621, Beinecke Library; see also Yost, Call of the Range, 106; and Yost, Buffalo Bill, 126–27. For a full-length biography of Carver which accepts all of his fabrications uncritically, see Raymond W. Thorp, Spirit Gun of the West (Glendale, CA: A. H. Clark, 1957).

29. Cody,
Life of Buffalo Bill,
337.

30. Salsbury, “The Origins of the Wild West Show,” in YCAL MSS 17, NSP, 207. The reference to a piano stool came from Carver's unsuccessful attempt to import a piano to his mother's house near North Platte. See Yost,
Call of the Range,
106.

31. Fellows and Freeman,
This Way to the Big Show,
66.

32. “Carver's Big Rifle Feat,”
New York Times,
July 14, 1878, p. 12; also, “The Great Rifle Shot,”
New York
Times,
July 5, 1878, p. 8.

33. James B. Trefethen, “They Were All Sure Shots,”
American Heritage
(April 1962): 26–32.

34. WFC to W. F. Carver, Feb. 11, 1883, WA MSS S-1621, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

35. WFC to Carver, n.d.; Cody to Carver, Feb. 11, 1883; WFC to Carver, Feb. 28, 1883, in WA MSS S-1621, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

36. George Ward Nichols, “Wild Bill,”
Harper's New Monthly Magazine
(Feb. 1867): 274; also Webb,
Buffalo Land,
145.

37. “The Grand Duke's Hunt—General Sheridan and ‘Buffalo Bill' Lead the Way—At Grand Battue on the Plains,”
New York Herald,
Jan. 14, 1872, p. 7.

38. “Buffalo Bill,” undated clipping, BB Scrapbook, 1879, BBHC.

39. Yost,
Buffalo Bill,
127; Sagala,
Buffalo Bill, Actor,
265.

40. Yost,
Buffalo Bill,
128.

41. Roy Harvey Pearce,
The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953), 49.