Louis S. Warren (113 page)

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.

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 Adver
tiser,
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 <
http://memory.loc.gov
>.

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.