Louis S. Warren (28 page)

LIVING THE STORY

All stage art is a mimicry of real life, but the scout business so confused the categories of real and fake, action and mimicry, that to one
New York Times
correspondent it seemed to presage a new kind of theater, the “Drama of the Future,” which would “illustrate current history through the painting of actual events, by the real actors in them.” This new art form would “call upon the conspicuous personages of current history, on getting through each marked phase of their careers, to have dramas written describing the same, and go about playing star engagements in the chief character.” Of course, there was a real danger that people would (as Cody did, especially in the case of Yellow Hair) deliberately seek “strange adventures” or even court “deadly perils,” all “with the idea of acquiring attractive material for a success on the boards.” Nonetheless, “the lives of most people are already more histrionic than they think”—or admit. There were, after all, “infinitely more actors and actresses in real life than there can possibly be on the stage.”
⁷⁹

If the “Drama of the Future” never materialized, if those occasions of real people playing scenes from their own life remained the exception and not the rule, in truth the stage plays of Buffalo Bill did not much resemble it, anyway. Although the
Scouts of the Prairie, Knight of the Plains,
and the other Buffalo Bill dramas pretended to mimic Cody's real life, they were elaborate, expansive fictions. Their story lines featured plenty of references to actual people, including the Grand Duke Alexis, Cody's younger sister May, Texas Jack, Wild Bill Hickok, and, of course, Buffalo Bill himself. But beyond these simple allusions, the plays bore almost no relation to Cody's real life. He never foiled a ring of counterfeiters who were dressing as Indians, he never fought Jake McKanlass, or anybody with a similar name, and he never rescued his sister May from Mormons.

The trick of being the “real” Buffalo Bill was, of course, to tie his biography to his stage performances and lend them authentic resonance, especially when they were untrue, which was almost always. Thus, in
May Cody, or Lost
and Won,
his sister is abducted by Mormon patriarch John D. Lee during the historical Mormon attack on an emigrant wagon train at Mountain Meadows. Her brother, Buffalo Bill, disguises himself as an Indian and rescues her. But before they can celebrate, he is arrested at Fort Bridger, and put on trial for being a spy. Ultimately, he is exonerated and the play reaches its happy ending.
⁸⁰

The play was written by Major Andrew Burt, an army officer and friend of Cody's. Like other melodramas and like most dime novels, too, it was a response to recent news events, in this case the 1877 execution of Mormon patriarch John D. Lee for his part in the notorious Mountain Meadows massacre twenty years before. William Cody never claimed that his sister had actually been abducted, but it was at this time that he began to claim that as a boy he had been on a wagon train that was raided by Mormons and forced to retreat to Fort Bridger, and this tall tale became a prominent story in his autobiography, which he published two years later.
⁸¹
For every real event which Cody acted out on the stage, his plays featured dozens that never happened at all. Rather than a drama in which historical people acted out their real accomplishments, Cody's melodramas were more often fictional tales which he appropriated as “true” after starring in them.

Such revelations raise other questions—notably, if Cody was making dramatic fictions into his autobiography, why didn't anybody call him on it? Why did audiences seem unable, or unwilling, to recognize the deception? The answer hinges on the role of the West in melodramatic imagination. The Far West and its peoples were still remote enough that audiences first encountered them through the press. Correspondents like George Ward Nichols and Ned Buntline interpreted the lives of Hickok, Cody, and Omohundro through the lenses of dime novels and melodramas, and often by resorting to the tropes of the genre. The mythology of progress which western events seemed to validate, the clearly visible ascent of civilization, was easily incorporated into melodramas of frontier heroes restoring virtuous women to domestic bliss—which, in the workings of melodrama, was the heart of civilization itself. Melodrama idealized domesticity. In play after play, the melodrama reinscribed the notion that personal happiness, democracy, the future of the republic, and just about every other desirable condition depended on domestic contentment, which in turn depended on chaste marriage, and of course, the “true” and unstained woman. Just as the triumph of civilization over savagery was understood as the triumph of domestic order, the salvation of the settler's cabin, so the melodrama's core plot was the rescue of the virtuous woman and her restoration to the home.
⁸²

Thus, audiences projected melodramatic fantasies onto Hickok, Cody, and Omohundro even before they saw their plays, envisioned them saving white women from Indians even before they “saw” them do just that on the stage. The heroes' appearance in these theatrical performances authenticated the fantasy. Just as important, these figures could continue taking part in the real, offstage adventure of western progress, their exploits perpetuating the blend of authentic and fantastic. Thus, throughout their careers in the public eye, stage scouts sought to embody western progress by carrying on high-profile, self-consciously progressive lives in the offstage West. In addition to fighting Indians through 1876, Cody launched into ranching in northern Nebraska. Omohundro, Crawford, and Hickok sought profits in mining companies.
⁸³
In each case, they entered industries which represented progress, the coming of pastoralism or industry to the savage wilderness. Each skillfully avoided, or avoided publicizing, other ventures less materially tied to progressive mythology, such as managing railroad or stage lines, or opening yet another business in one of the many western towns where saloons, barbershops, and dry goods stores proliferated. Cody turned down an officer's commission in the army.
⁸⁴
Tellingly, none became a farmer in the 1870s, as if the culmination of progress—the redemption of the garden from the wilderness—was too much denouement and insufficiently compelling for the drama they sought to play out. Thus, they inscribed the forward motion of civilization, the advancement of progress, into their life stories. They proved the myth true, thereby heightening the authenticity of the very fictional plays they showed each theatrical season.

Absent the mythology of progress to play out in his offstage life, the stage character of Buffalo Bill might have vanished after brief popularity, or perhaps gone on to become an entirely fictional character, with no appreciable tie to the real William Cody. Such a trajectory obtained in earlier cases of real people represented on the stage. In 1848, New York playwright Benjamin Baker created the character of a heroic fireman named Mose. The character was based on a real person, Mose Humphrey, a typesetter for the
New York Sun
and a volunteer firefighter renowned among the newspaper workers who crowded theater galleries. Represented by a popular actor, Francis “Frank” Chanfrau, who had grown up in the Bowery himself, Mose became a huge draw for theaters. Because he was a “real” person, the character could not be copyrighted. Thus, after 1848, Mose cropped up in numerous novels (at least one of them by Ned Buntline) and plays (at one point, Chanfrau played Mose in two different productions playing simultaneously at rival theaters). Before long, Mose became a kind of folk hero, a Paul Bunyan of Manhattan, who was said to have jumped across the Hudson, to have blown ships back down the East River, and to have carried a streetcar with the horses dangling.
⁸⁵

But by that time, he was no longer attached to his inspiration, the real-life fireman. We may speculate that this separation between myth and man would likely have occurred even if Mose Humphrey had stepped into the role to play himself. After all, firemen were heroes, but they did not represent a moment in a larger progress, except in the most abstract sense. Cody, the hunter and Indian fighter, had initiated the rise of civilization in the West. The mythology was so self-evidently “true” that it played on the stage as well as it supposedly “played” in the West. Theoretically, he could spend his remaining years living out the subsequent stages of civilization's ascent as rancher, farmer, patrician, and revered town founder. Indeed, that is precisely what he attempted to do.

He had more options than people like Mose Humphrey. For the machinists, typesetters, artists, firemen, clerks, and doctors who might have played themselves onstage, the real challenge was less that their lives had no drama than that they could not infuse their offstage lives with the narrative that western progress conveyed, and which made the continuing appearances of western scouts, especially William Cody, so interesting for theatrical audiences. Melodramatic fantasy was harder to sustain around “real” figures from other regions because regional history either fit less comfortably into the mythology of ascendant civilization, or because that history was too remote. There were dramas aplenty about southern life, including wave after wave of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
reprises. But southern history, with its descent into slavery, read more like American-history-gone-wrong. White southerners were too associated with slave owning to allow a single progressive hero to champion the region's regressive story. Northern history was easier to narrate as heroic saga, but its moment of redemption from wilderness was far enough back in time that its protagonists were long since dead.

Frontier melodrama had no such constraints. Its core stories were the rise of white civilization and the restoration of domestic bliss. As a narrative it was vague enough not to offend and yet it resonated with a broad range of urban and small-town concerns, including the need for a civil order, for the protection of the family from hostile forces, and for the continuing dominance of white men in a society ever more diversified by waves of immigration. Indians were too alienated from the civil order to object to dramatic misrepresentation. The melodrama's white and immigrant villains, bent on miscegenation and thievery, went far beyond the bounds of defensible behavior. The frontier's centrality to American ideas of history and progress provided not just a theory of American development, but a powerful story about how people behave and how events unfold. The advancement from primitive hunting to modern commerce, from savage disorder to enlightened civilization, provided a ready-made narrative, a backstory, to every drama set there. In other words, audience expectations of frontier stories were so powerful that they could look past the blatant fiction of these dramas and embrace the “real” frontier heroes as proof that their expectations and assumptions about the frontier were mostly true.

In one more sense did the frontier West have an advantage as a setting that combined real people and mock play: the frontier line had long served as a mythical dividing point between fakery and reality. Frontier melodrama's mixture of fakery and real people was so compelling because the West itself was synonymous with that same mixture. The West was, in a word, a humbug, and if the drama that presented it most truthfully was itself an artful deception, the West in the 1870s, with its many boosters making impossible but still alluring claims for its promise, had itself become an apt symbol for the fakery and irresistibility of the theater, the locus of the actor's outrageous claims and seductive power.

MIDDLE-CLASS SYMBOL, WORKING-CLASS HERO

If the
New York Times
correspondent who predicted the “Drama of the Future” was mostly incorrect about the future shape of American drama, in one respect the prediction expressed a popular, little-appreciated idea which made Cody's stage appearances so satisfying. By asserting that there were “infinitely more actors and actresses in real life than there can possibly be on the stage,” the correspondent touched on pervasive concerns about the imposture of modern living in the 1870s. The interchangeability of original and copy was an entertaining parody of mass production and consumer fashion, but the scout business also resonated with even broader cultural trends toward the acceptance of ordinary people as imitators, or actors, in day-today living. Superficially, Buffalo Bill, Texas Jack, and the other protagonists of frontier melodrama offered a critique of theater by eschewing the title of actor, as if to reinforce traditional prejudice against actors and theatrical drama. “They do not pretend to be actors, i.e. ‘Buffalo Bill' or ‘Texas Jack,' ” wrote one critic; “they simply present to the view of an audience scenes in actual border life, similar to those which they themselves have passed.”
⁸⁶
The deception that he was an actual man, not an actor, was a consistent feature of Cody's career, and a decade later he continued the pretense. “I'm not an actor—I'm a star,” he told an interviewer in 1882. “All actors can become stars,” he explained, “but all stars cannot become actors.”
⁸⁷

The success of the untrained “anti-actor” in a domain of trained professionals was, in a sense, a series of elbow jabs to the ribs, an ongoing inside joke between him and his fans, who adored him less for his acting than for his willingness to send up professional theater itself. Stage drama, after all, depends on a pact between actor and audience: one pretends, the other pretends to believe. By refusing the title of actor, Cody announced his inability to pretend—then went on the stage anyway, as if to say that acting was for professionals, but
imitating
actors was the domain of the natural man. In this sense, his presence on the stage was a parody of the entire theatrical industry.

If the real Cody was no actor, it followed that he was incapable of disguising himself. There was no veil to come off. But once the novelty of seeing Buffalo Bill onstage diminished after the first couple of seasons, Cody began commissioning playwrights to layer more complex impersonations on top of his stage identity, and the character of Buffalo Bill began to take up more complex disguises. In Cody's 1878 production,
The Knight of the Plains,
his character assumed three different identities: an English nobleman, a detective, and a Pony Express rider.
⁸⁸
The “real” William Cody was now assuming new masks which fooled other characters, but not the audience.

The effect was less to renounce acting than to embrace it. Professional thespians in the drama relied on Cody's presence to make these dramas work. They had to pretend to be tricked by his unlikely disguises. The play within the play reinforced the larger message of Cody's stage career: any man can pretend, act, manipulate the professionals, and succeed. White American manliness and imposture were not antithetical. Manly men took to acting like frontiersmen to the wilderness.

Imitations of the “real” Buffalo Bill were one source of Cody's success; the enthusiastic reception of this message—that all white men can be actors—suggests another. Theater was by no means universally respected in the 1870s, but it was accruing acceptance as Americans came to see it as a reflection of new forms of social interaction. The rapidly accumulating wealth of the middle classes in the second half of the nineteenth century led to new forms of conspicuous display, and the development of industrial production placed ever less emphasis on traditional yeomanry and ever more on sales and marketing as pathways to wealth and respectability. Where they had once aspired to a society in which Christian trust was pervasive and one's intentions were self-evident, increasingly Americans “were learning to place confidence in more elaborate forms of self-presentation,” in the words of scholar Karen Halttunen.
⁸⁹
Americans had begun to see their own dependence on manners and middle-class facades as a kind of theater of everyday life. This was the reason for the rising popularity of “parlor theatricals,” elaborate, amateur productions with curtains, painted sets, prompters, dramatic lighting, and a full array of props. Across the country, urban middle-class people staged these shows for friends and neighbors in their living rooms. Such displays expressed middle-class dependence on—and confidence in—complicated manners and social rituals to explain themselves. The message of the parlor theatrical was, essentially, “Life is a charade.”
⁹⁰

In no small measure, Buffalo Bill embodied and expressed the everyday American's facility for theatrical display and upward mobility. Thus, Buffalo Bill's character was not just the exclusive purview of Cody or his professional imitators. Middle-class men across the country took to playing Cody, just like real actors, in parlor theatricals. In 1874, out at Fort Abraham Lincoln, in Dakota Territory, that icon of middle-class manhood, George Armstrong Custer, played the role of Buffalo Bill in his elaborate living room production of Buffalo Bill and His Bride, with Libbie as his leading lady.
⁹¹

Whether or not P. T. Barnum ever saw Buffalo Bill's stage plays, they provided the requisite mix of authenticity and imposture of his own entertainments. Indeed, contemporaries remarked on the similarity between Cody's new art and Barnum's. Back in Nebraska, in her cabin not far from Fort McPherson, Ena Raymonde, a friend of Cody and Omohundro, read reviews of their stage appearances in the fall of 1872. “Verily, life is a humbug, ” she mused, “and he that is the biggest humbug, has the best chance for humbugging the rest of his fellows.”
⁹²

On the frontier, indeed, Buffalo Bill was an object of fascination and dispute. Locals argued about him and Texas Jack much as they argued over Hickok and other artists of western imposture. But his success at integrating himself into the mythology of the West as an icon of middle-class theatricality made him a favorite symbol for settlers by the early 1870s, in ways that Hickok, teetering between lawman and outlaw, could never be. Locals in the vicinity of Fort McPherson ordered Cody's portrait photo from the photographer in North Platte. Ena Raymonde took the time to hand-tint hers.
⁹³
Participants at an 1872 masquerade ball in Wichita, Kansas, ordered their masks from Kansas City. Among the visages that evening were a Spanish cavalier, the goddess of liberty, Satan, and Buffalo Bill.
⁹⁴

It may be, as one scholar has argued, that “personal conduct in societies based on the premise of upward mobility is characterized by a highly theatrical presentation of self.”
⁹⁵
In which case, Cody's appeal as a symbol of theatrical self-presentation, a man who played his “real” self in the theater, was all the more central to his age. So what prompted him to leave the stage after over a decade of astounding success? Why take a risk on a bold new entertainment like the Wild West show, which was so unlike the stage in its size, complexity, and dramatic messages?

In fact, there were reasons aplenty, beginning with the ways the limited appeal of the theater eventually constrained Buffalo Bill's marketability. Antitheatricalism had declined, and the “respectable” middle classes no longer shunned all theaters as disreputable. But theater performances usually appealed to one class or another, and critics encoded the class composition of audiences in their reviews. In general, middle-class, white-collar men would not take their families to productions patronized by working-class men (where prostitutes and lower-class women could also be found). On the other hand, respectable theaters were generally too expensive for middle-class people, and they grew more expensive as the century progressed. “By the mid-1880s,” says David Nasaw, “the average theater ticket cost a dollar, two-thirds of what the nonfarm worker earned in a day.” Most city residents simply could not afford such prices.
⁹⁶
Urban nightlife was ever more the domain of wealthy young sports who had enough fiscal and social capital to afford its corruptions, and lower-class workers, many of them immigrants, who guzzled beer in the concert saloons and vaudeville theaters of the day.
⁹⁷
Museums, which banned drink and prostitution, were more acceptable entertainment venues. But most working- and middle-class people had few or no affordable, reputable nighttime entertainment venues.
⁹⁸

Cody had worked hard to restore himself to the middle class after the Civil War. He kept the middle-class company of officers and entrepreneurs in Kansas and Nebraska, and in Rochester his daughters went to private school, and the Cody family lived in a well-to-do, tree-lined district. As a public figure, he was symbolic of middle-class entertainment with his seamless moves between real guiding, hunting, and Indian fighting and his fictional representations of those same activities.

The Cody family—Arta, Orra, Louisa, and William Cody—as
middle-class bastion, c.
1880.
The theatrical melodrama seldom
drew the crowd to match Cody's aspirations to respectability.
Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.

But in the city, Cody's message seems to have been most empowering, or at least most popular, among working people. They swarmed to the theaters to see Buffalo Bill. His willingness to authenticate the entertainment with his presence invited their own participation, which they proffered in raucous fashion. In Portland, Maine, in 1873, a reviewer related how “an urchin, remembering that one character, at least, in the play yet survived, exclaimed ‘Hold on; wait till the show's through
—Dutchy
ain't dead yet!
” In 1875, an audience member shouted as Buffalo Bill wrestled with a stage bear: “Shoot him, Bill! Run in on him and kill him!”
⁹⁹

In his early days, critics complained that Cody's lowbrow entertainment was displacing the classical theater of Edwin Booth and the French actor Charles Fechter, and Cody himself reportedly joked that he would run Booth and Fechter into New Jersey by playing Shakespeare right through, from beginning to end, with Ned Buntline and Texas Jack to support me. I shall do Hamlet in a buckskin suit, and when my father's ghost appears “doomed for a certain time,” &c., I shall say to Jack, “Rope the cuss in, Jack!” and unless the lasso breaks, the ghost will have to come. As “Richard the Third,” I shall fight with pistols and hunting knives. In “Romeo and Juliet” I shall put a half-breed squaw on the balcony and make various other interpretations of Shakespeare's words to suit myself.
¹⁰⁰

Reviews were often scathing, and left no doubt that Cody's appeal was chiefly to the lower class.
Scouts of the Prairie
was “one of the worse specimens of unmitigated trash we have ever seen on any stage . . . belonging to that order of the drama which finds a home at the Bowery or Wood's Museum,” wrote a New York correspondent, referring to the preferred theaters of working-class audiences. But, he warned, it “would scarcely be tolerated” even there.
¹⁰¹

There were members of the elite in the audience at Cody's first performance: ranks of military officers and sports like Milligan, and many others bought tickets on that night and throughout his career. But critics separated such people from true Buffalo Bill fans, implying that elite enjoyment came less from Cody's drama than from the spectacle of lower-class enthusiasm for it. After panning
Scouts of the Prairie,
another critic summarized, “Thus the lower million are delighted and many of the ‘upper ten thousand' amused.”
¹⁰²

From its beginnings, Buffalo Bill's drama inspired considerable social criticism because of its implied messages to these ardent lower-class followers. Reformers disdained dime novels and cheap melodrama because their lurid violence and appeal to base emotions, their sensationalism, threatened to ignite the barely restrained passions of the laboring masses, who were, after all, thinly disguised savages, many of them from alien shores and prone to strikes and violence.
¹⁰³
“All the small boys (and some of the big ones too) of this city are now practising the Indian war hoop [
sic
] after the style of Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack,” wrote one reviewer. “At all hours of the night the unearthly yells can be heard in our streets, to the disgust of all peaceable citizens.” As if to imply the burden this imposed on law and order, the critic went on: “It is currently reported that one policeman in Station Four has become totally deaf in consequence of those infernal yells.”
¹⁰⁴