Louis S. Warren (26 page)
Authors: Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody,the Wild West Show
Tags: #State & Local, #Buffalo Bill, #Entertainers, #West (AK; CA; CO; HI; ID; MT; NV; UT; WY), #Frontier and Pioneer Life - West (U.S.), #Biography, #Adventurers & Explorers, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Fiction, #United States, #General, #Pioneers - West (U.S.), #Historical, #Frontier and Pioneer Life, #Biography & Autobiography, #Pioneers, #West (U.S.), #Civil War Period (1850-1877), #Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, #Entertainers - United States, #History
Yet, for all Cody's exposure to theater as an observer, for him to become a stage actor was a daring move. It was one thing to have seen some plays, and to tell stories and dress in costume for tourists and soldiers in Kansas or Nebraska. It was quite another to interpret a script and entertain a packed house in Chicago, New York, or Memphis. Equally important, after a short apprenticeship with a professional (Buntline had adapted numerous novels for the stage, and occasionally acted himself), Cody somehow mastered management of a theatrical company, too.
His autobiography suggests that he found his bridge to stage acting in his experience as a hunting guide. In his early days with Buntline, he adapted his renowned storytelling to stage performance, filling in his acting gaps with his own narrative drama. On his opening night, when Buntline stepped forward in his role as “Cale Durg” and gave Cody his cue, he later recalled, “for the life of me I could not remember a single word” of the script. Buntline then prompted Cody with a different line, “Where have you been, Bill? What has kept you so long?”
At that moment, Cody noticed in the audience one of Chicago's renowned wealthy sport hunters who had been on one of the more colorful hunting trips he had guided. “So I said: âI have been out on a hunt with Milligan.' ” Milligan was a leading light of Chicago's social scene, and the audience roared.
Buntline, never one to stick to a script when a better line appeared, went with the drama Cody was creating: “Well, Bill, tell us about the hunt.” As Cody recounted: “I succeeded in making it rather funny, and I was frequently interrupted by rounds of applause.” Whenever the story wandered off, “Buntline would give me a fresh start, by asking some question.” In this way, Cody wrote, “I took up fifteen minutes, without speaking a word of my part; nor did I speak a word of it the whole evening.”
41
ORIGINAL/COPY
Thus Cody extended and recast the drama he staged around the campfires of his guided hunts, finding in the East a vast, lucrative market for his form of entertainment. Only months before, a newspaper correspondent had described Cody's “wonderful” campfire stories, related “in the presence of all the paraphernalia of frontier life upon the Plains.” On the stage, Cody appropriated the same “paraphernalia of frontier life”âguns, knives, whips, hats, boots, and ropesâand dressed the part, as he had for his hunting clients, in lavish suits of buckskin and velvet and fur, complemented by a broad hat and his hair falling to his shoulders.
42
His manipulation of those props was central to his authentic demeanor, and his stage plays called for his character to demonstrate his abilities with gun and whip, with stunts that would one day become part of his Wild West show. “Mr. Cody's shooting was very fine indeed,” wrote one reviewer in 1879. “He shot an apple from the head of Miss Denier, and then taking a mirror he turned his back to the young lady and shot it from her head again. He also knocked the fire from a cigar which was held in the mouth of Mr. James. His shooting and use of the âcow driver' is simply marvellous.”
43
Historians and critics long ago established that Cody's stage success came from the friction between his frontier authenticity and its context of theatrical fakery. His performance simultaneously validated and called into question his own imposture as a “genuine” frontiersman, delighting audiences who could debate and argue over how “real” Buffalo Bill was. Playwrights often adapted cheap novels for the stage, but in the plays of Buffalo Bill, Texas Jack, and the other stars of frontier melodrama, the heroes were “real” people, and whether or not they believed the hyperbolic publicity, the audience loved the novelty.
44
Thus, the packed houses that greeted Cody, Omohundro, and Buntline in New Haven and other places expressed popular desire to see the heroes they knew from “weekly story papers, and the semi-occasional novelettes” about them, according to a contemporary writer.
45
As Roger Hall has observed, “the presence on stage of an actual participant in frontier events reinforced the vicarious and psychological connection of the audience to those events.”
46
But to describe Cody as authentic, a self-evidently “real” man conveying elements of the real frontier, only scratches the surface of his allure. Historians have carefully retraced nearly every Cody performance. They have analyzed his few surviving scripts, and pored over his advertising. But exclusive attention to the real William Cody has blinded us to the faux Codys, the numerous actors who continued to play “Buffalo Bill” at the same time William Cody did, and for many of the same crowds. Moreover, in addition to professional actors who struck their own poses as the stage character “Buffalo Bill,” a sizable number of frontier scouts followed Cody to the stage and so closely mimicked Cody's scout persona as to make audiences wonder who really was the authentic frontiersman.
“It is within an exuberant world of copies that we arrive at our experience of originality,” writes Hillel Schwartz.
47
And Cody's originality was considerably enhanced by the wide mimicry of his imposture, which placed him less at the center of a theater of the original than in the dance of original
and
copy that defined the essence of frontier melodrama. To be sure, William Cody
was
Buffalo Bill, and this gave the stage character a purchase in offstageârealâlife. But the proliferation of Buffalo Bill impersonators on the stage meant that, in a sense, Buffalo Bill the stage character was both real
and
fakeâand William Cody's achievement was to encompass both sides of that coin.
The theater of mimicry and copy in Cody's stage performance might be said to have begun when he confronted Studley playing the Buffalo Bill role. The two together, Studley and Cody, provided poles of fake and real, a simultaneous display of the copy and the original that resonated with popular fascination for such contrasts, notably by providing space to wonder which was which. Was Studley imitating Cody? Or vice versa?
We may speculate that Cody's continuing presence in New York enhanced the appeal of his stage impersonators by prolonging this tension. The standard run for a new melodrama was two weeks. Studley ran his “Buffalo Bill” for a month. Indeed, immediately after the last curtain fell on Studley's faux Buffalo Bill at the Bowery, the play opened again, on March 18, at the Park Theater, with J. W. Carroll as its faux Cody. The same day, in a sign of Buffalo Bill's popularity, a parodyâa faux faux Buffalo Bill, called
Bill Buffalo, with His Great Buffalo Bullâ
opened at Hooley's Opera House, in Brooklyn.
48
To audiences, Buffalo Bill balanced somewhere between real man and theatrical representation. By venturing onto the stage himself in the fall of 1872, Cody enhanced the tension that charged the character's appeal. If the move made him more popular, it also lent frisson to the performances of fake Codys, particularly in New York. At the beginning of the theatrical season, the drama
Buffalo Bill
played for a week in mid-November, at Wood's Museum, with James M. Ward in the title role. One month later, New York theatergoers could read news coverage of the real Buffalo Bill's performances in Chicago, and as Buntline, Cody, and Omohundro toured the MidwestâSt. Louis, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Toledo, Clevelandâthe actor J. B. Studley began playing Buffalo Bill again in January of 1873, at New York's Bowery Theater, and then again during the last week of March at the Park Theatre.
49
The news of Cody's imminent arrival in New York reinforced the appeal of Studley's Buffalo Bill, making it the advance “bill” for the real Bill.
Studley's performance closed on March 30. The next evening, the real Cody opened with Buntline and Omohundro in
Scouts of the Prairie
at Niblo's Garden, where they played until mid-April.
50
Then, following a brief stint at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Cody's troupe left New York. A month and a half later, the real Cody was touring the workingmen's theaters of industrial upstate New York, while, back in the city, Studley was in the Cody role again, at the Theatre Comique.
51
The compelling entertainment in this concoction of reality and representation came at least in part from its resonance with a fad for playful imitation which permeated late Victorian America. As manufacturing and mass production came to define the American economy, copies of things increasingly replaced real things. The basis of middle-class culture was imitation of elites. Machine production of goods, cheap but realistic imitations of furniture, clothing, and architecture, allowed middle-class people to appropriate elite fashions easily. Mimicry and copy thus became central to middle-class life.
52
In this context, self-styled arbiters of taste like Edith Wharton hewed to the authentic, but to most people, the empowerment of imitation was too great to ignore. If copies of authentic goods allowed middle-class people to express equality with elites on the cheap, why not celebrate imitation? In this spirit, middle-class people intentionally confused the fake and the real as a form of cultural play, turning the imitation into a category of its own. The most daring imitations were those that crossed the line between Nature and Art, mimicking the one with the other. Thus, many middle-class parlors displayed paper flowers mingled with real flowers, wax or marble fruit in bowls of real fruit, real ivy (grown from cuttings in a bottle of water) climbing wallpaper on which were printed realistic ivy patterns, and iron furniture shaped like twigs and branches. This interpolation of fake and real proliferated across American living rooms, a new aesthetic that created enjoyment by fooling the senses, simultaneously celebrating industrial mass production and domesticating it within the parlor, and honoring the skill of the decorator.
53
In its cultural implications, it went far beyond living room decor, expressing the playful, entertaining mixture of trick and truth behind the period's most popular entertainment, the artful deception. It also resonated with the most successful plays and novels, which explored mimicry, doubles, disguises, and imposture at length. Henry James was fascinated with imitation in middle-class life, and Mark Twain's parade of double identities, fakes, and tall tales wound through every one of his books from
Roughing It
and
Huck
leberry Finn to Life on the Mississippi and his own autobiography.
54
Reviews of Buffalo Bill plays are too sparse and fragmentary to allow us insight into the fascinating give-and-take between the real man and his stage imitators. Were there actors who played Buffalo Bill more convincingly than Cody did? We cannot know, but the bait-and-switch of fake and real in the Cody game amounted to playful deception which mimicked and lampooned the more serious deceptions of commerce. Advertisements for dramas starring Cody and Omohundro appeared in long lists of ads for other commoditiesâumbrellas, skin cream, hair dye, and hatsâwith the ubiquitous call to brand loyalty, “Accept No Substitutes.” Where New Yorkers had to select the best and most effective products from a host of imitators, the frontier melodrama turned the parade of real and fake into a harmless entertainment. Perhaps there were loyalists who believed Cody was the only acceptable “Buffalo Bill.” But the continuing popularity of the faux Codys suggests that for audiences, the real Cody was a kind of substitute after all, a stand-in for the dramatic Cody popularized by J. B. Studley and others. A sip of distilled authenticity was refreshing, but the cocktail of dramatic actor and historical actor was what made the show fun. J. B. Studley played Buffalo Bill again in October of 1876, his performance again the “advance Bill” for the real Bill Cody, who appeared in
Scouts of the Plains
in Brooklyn the following week.
55
Frank Dowd (or Doud) played Buffalo Bill at the Theatre Comique early in the summer of 1877; William Cody played in
May Cody, or
Lost and Won, at the Bowery Theater at summer's end.
56
Stage mimicry of Buffalo Bill continued even after his stage career ended. As late as 1891, during the peak years of his Wild West show fame, vaudeville theaters were performing short comic plays about his life, such as
Buffalo Bill Abroad and at
Home, their outrageous fakery a counterpoint to his avowed authenticity.
57
But in the late 1870s, professional actors cooled to the role of Buffalo Bill, and by the 1880s, Buffalo Bill stage plays sans the actual William Cody were the exclusive domain of cheap variety theaters. The waning popularity of Cody's professional imitators can be traced in some degree to the emergence of at least a half-dozen other frontiersmen claiming to be “authentic” scouts, each appearing in melodramas with frontier themes, constituting a genre of performance that Cody's publicist, John M. Burke, called “the scout business.”
58
Although punctuated by the rhetoric of reality, and purveyed by scouts who were themselves symbols of authenticity, the scout business provided mimicry more subtle and entrancing than even the alternating appearance of fake and real Codys. So many scouts moved onto the stage, inspiring so many dime novels and ever more stage plays, that professional actors were no longer necessary to carry off the impression that somebody was being imitated, and somebody might be real. In fact, the genre of frontier melodrama that Cody kicked off spawned so many “real” frontier heroes playing themselves, so thoroughly appropriating the props, gestures, scripts, and even the biographies of one another, that the stars of the entertainment could be seen alternatelyâor simultaneouslyâas “genuine” heroes
and
as imitations of one another. Thus, in October 1874, Donald McKay, an army scout in California's Modoc War, appeared in a play about the life of Kit Carson, alongside a troupe alleged to consist of real Warm Springs Indians. One month later, McKay himself became the subject of
Donald Mackay,
a play in which actor Oliver Doud Byron played the California scout.
59
There were others. After Cody and Omohundro split with Buntline, the novelist persuaded another resident of North Platte, by this time a primary staging area for western imposture, to take his show east. Thus, Charles “Dashing Charlie” Emmett, a scout for the Second Cavalry, starred as himself in a Buntline play apparently based on the life of scout Frank North.
LittleRifle, or, The White Spirit of the Pawnees
was successful enough that Emmett took the drama with him when he, too, split with Buntline. Venturing out to impersonate himself (or was it Frank North?) in stage plays, he was buoyed by the company of esteemed actress Alice Placide.
60
Emmett played New York City in the spring of 1874, and assisted Cody with a benefit performance in November. Emmett's
Little Rifle
followed on the heels of Byron's Donald Mackay at Wood's Museum the same month.
61
How much the scout business was predicated on scouts imitating one another, to be imitated in turn by actors who sometimes claimed to be “real” western heroes, can be seen in the twisted tale of representation surrounding Cody's mentor in artful deception, Wild Bill Hickok. As we have seen already, Cody imitated Hickok in his early days, appropriating elements of his biography, such as spying in the Civil War. On the stage, Cody continued to work the Hickok vein. In his first stage appearance, Buffalo Bill fought “Jake McKanlass,” loosely based on one of Hickok's real-life victims, Dave McCanles, with a bowie knife. By 1874, he was parroting some of Hickok's other tall tales, claiming to have ridden for the Pony Express. By casting himself and Hickok in
Scouts of the Prairie
in 1873, he upped the ante in the contest between fakery and reality, with two scouts named Bill who looked and dressed very much alike, each an “original” western hero.