Louis S. Warren (33 page)

Even before this, at least one officer who found his own green troopers no match for the “centaurs of the desert” took extraordinary measures. Lieutenant George Armes, commander of the Second Cavalry, sought to remove the lopsided Indian advantage on horseback with new training methods at Fort Sedgewick in 1866. By the time he was finished, crowds gathered to watch his men “stand up on their horse's bare back and ride around the ring at a gallop,” and “spring on and off their horses” at full speed, while the animals leapt over hurdles.
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Armes intended the unorthodox training to enable his men to challenge Indian warriors on open battlefields, but his techniques soon earned the censure of his superiors, who upbraided him for turning his men into “circus riders.”
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The criticism was ironically apt. Training soldiers to victory required, after all, defeating Indians whose thunderous, circling formations resembled nothing so much as “the grand entree of a circus,” in the words of Colonel Richard Irving Dodge.
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Comparisons of Indians and Indian-style riding to circus tricks reflected the widespread notoriety of circus entertainment in the nineteenth century, and the early devotion of the circus to horseback stunts. Generals ridiculed George Armes for creating a training regiment that looked like a circus, but the modern circus was, in fact, birthed by a cavalryman in 1768. It was the brainchild of Philip Astley, a retired English cavalry officer who hit upon the idea of charging admission to the crowds who came to observe students at his London riding school. The diameter of Astley's performance space, forty-two feet, was an accommodation to the minimum needs of horses turning at a gallop, and it became the standard size for the circus ring.
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Circuses had changed considerably by the time Cheyenne and Sioux challenged Americans for control of the Plains. Over the course of the nineteenth century, European and American circuses gradually combined clowning and horseback stunts with menageries, acrobatics, and trapeze acts. In 1796, the elephant made its first appearance in an American circus, and for the next hundred years American impresarios competed to acquire ever more exotic animal attractions.
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P. T. Barnum would say that the elephant and the clown were the pegs on which the circus was hung.
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But cavalry training regiments like the one Armes devised had led Philip Astley to develop the circus in the first place. Now, despite official resistance, riding stunts found a new home in the cavalry as soldiers sought to match Indian horsemen. By the 1890s, horseback acrobatics would be installed as official cavalry drill, and detachments from the trick-riding U.S. Sixth Cavalry appeared regularly in circuses and, most famously, in Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World, where their “military exercises” and “exhibition of athletic sports and horsemanship” included standing up on the backs of running horses.
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Buffalo Bill's Wild West show took the European cultural form of the circus and naturalized it on American soil, reprising it as a horseback spectacle with Indian riders, indigenous American performers whose genuine skills had begged comparison to the circus long before they ever moved into the show arena. Cody's move from theatrical stage to a show arena crisscrossed by galloping horsemen reflected the fascination with horses that he shared with Indians. On the Plains, his buffalo-hunting prowess was reinforced by his use of Indian-trained buffalo horses, animals specially conditioned and taught to mimic the movements of running buffalo as they carried hunters alongside them. He bought his favorite mount, Brigham— “the best buffalo horse that ever made a track”—from a Ute Indian (who presumably demanded a high price for him).
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Through the 1860s, he bought and sold horses to compete in the fervid horse-racing scene at army forts. These contests were a theatrical form in their own right, with visiting Indians, settlers, and scouts challenging tourists, soldiers, and one another to paying races. Riders were known to trumpet their invincibility with mid-race stunts. After one Comanche horse beat army competitors in two races on the same day, his owner cruised to a third victory while facing backward, taunting the trailing soldier and beckoning him closer.
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By the time he was a scout, Cody was not only a racer but a trick rider, too. In the winter of 1869–70, in a race against a soldier at Fort McPherson, Cody “rode the horse bareback; seized his mane with my left hand, rested my right on his withers, and while he was going at full speed, I jumped to the ground, and sprang again upon his back, eight times in succession.” He drew inspiration for this stunt, he said, from the circus, “and I had practiced considerably at it.”
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In 1869, Dan Castello's Circus and Menagerie became the first circus to cross the country on the transcontinental railroad. When it appeared in North Platte, William Cody saw it.
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(Although Cody did not say so, he may have seen the riding stunt before he visited the circus. His opponent in the trick-riding race was from the Second Cavalry, the regiment of “circus riders” trained by George Armes, and for all we know Cody's opponent matched his performance, leap for leap.) The convergence of the railroad circus with William Cody's Plains career was no accident. Circuses were widespread in American life and culture throughout the nineteenth century, but railroad expansion, the rise of corporate investment, and a revolution in print advertising—especially poster production—made for a renaissance of circuses after the Civil War.
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Cody, who rose to fame by engaging the liminal subcultures of scouting and theater, observed another twilight social space beneath the big top. The circus was a morally questionable enterprise, with a long and checkered history. It was indisputably a European cultural form, and its most famous performers were European, or claimed to be.
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With its bizarre freaks, strange animals, and scantily clad men and women—to say nothing of its androgynes and hermaphrodites—it was a disturbing spectacle of ambiguous races and genders, with a wide reputation for criminality. Early circus impresarios frequently cut deals with gamblers, grifters, and confidence men who followed them from town to town. At times, pickpockets plied the crowds so adeptly that few customers had any money to purchase admission from the shortchange artists working the ticket window.
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Circus graft, and circus nonconformity, inspired a great deal of anticircus violence, particularly in rural areas where local men and boys regularly battled circus workers in public brawls.
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An itinerant community that defied conventional social categories, the circus was infused with a carnivalesque spirit, the threat (or promise) of society turned upside down. For these reasons, clergymen often denounced it as the devil's own playhouse, and “respectable” people often avoided it.
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But the circus was a paradox, and by the latter 1870s Cody saw in it the glimmer of an opportunity. Where the crudest stage production was inevitably in the shadow of Shakespearean drama—actors who were not great tragedians would never achieve real praise—circuses had fewer respectable conventions to live up to, leaving reviewers and newspaper editors less constrained in their range of circus writing. In general, their coverage of circuses was so “soft,” or playful, that press agents from other entertainments were often surprised at how easy the art of circus promotion could be. Small-town and big-city editors alike reprinted circus press releases as news items, without comment.
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Although many eschewed the circus as overly European, immoral, and decadent, the railroad allowed for much larger, more dazzling circuses which continued to draw viewers from all social classes, who sat together under one canvas tent. In this sense, a glamorous big top represented a better hope of capturing a democratic audience, including the middle classes, who had had steadily deserted the theater since Ned Buntline led the mobs outside the Astor Place Theater at the middle of the century.
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In 1869, the appearance of Castello's circus in North Platte was so novel that the many social anxieties stirred up by circuses in general remained in the background. But in the 1870s, William Cody, who discerned divisions in popular culture at least as well as he followed the divide on the Plains, witnessed a burgeoning of circus performance, the public concerns attending it, and the efforts of his contemporaries to overcome them. In 1871, the year before he began his stage career in New York, P. T. Barnum, the artful deceiver, recast the circus as middle-class entertainment. Barnum tied his reputation for “moral” entertainments to the brilliant management of W. C. Coup. Together, the two made bold advances in circus showmanship. They solved the problem of loading circuses on trains quickly (devising ramps to load all circus animals, props, and matériel from one end), and turned the traditional one-ring entertainment into a three-ring extravaganza. In New York, they leased the old New Haven railroad station at Madison Avenue and Twenty-seventh (future site of Madison Square Garden) and built upon it the Great Roman Hippodrome.
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There, in 1874, they debuted “The Congress of Nations,” which Cody undoubtedly saw, and in which a parade of simulated royals and lavishly costumed entourages, including the queen of England, the pope, and the emperor of China, led an American contingent of cowboys and Indians into the big top as the opening act of a huge show of elephants and chariot races.
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By 1880, Barnum had merged his spectacle with that of James A. Bailey, making it one of the nation's largest entertainment enterprises.
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The presence of Indians in Barnum's circus, as elsewhere, signified the passage of history. Circuses had borrowed from history before. In 1856, in Missouri, the Mabie Brothers Circus combined with Den Stone's Menagerie and Tyler's Indian Exhibition to present a historical pageant, with reenactments of a buffalo hunt, Indian dances, Pocahontas saving John Smith's life, and a (thrilling?) demonstration of Indians gathering corn.
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Cody's enterprise would work much more directly with historical materials, as we shall see. But in envisioning an entertainment that featured Indians, horses, and himself, it required no great leap to imagine cowboys in the mix. American and Mexican cowboys alike were fond of horseback performance. Americans and Mexicans had herded cattle for centuries by 1860, but it was the post–Civil War American cowboy who became a mythic figure of renown, and the Great Plains was his birthplace. Outfits began driving cattle from Texas to Kansas soon after the Civil War. Relatively few of these cattle made it to Nebraska at first, but the famed rancher J. W. Iliff ranged cattle in the western Platte River valley by the early 1860s, and John Bratt brought Texas cattle to the region in 1869. That same year, Texas Jack Omohundro trailed a herd of cattle from Texas to North Platte, where he sold them all to ranchers, who were now dispersed across western Nebraska. Omohundro took a job tending bar for a local saloonkeeper (Lew Baker, father of Johnny Baker, later the “boy marksman” in the Wild West show) before moving down to Fort McPherson at the urging of his new friend, William Cody, where he became an occasional schoolteacher and a scout.
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In 1874, the Western Trail, which drew cattle from Texas to its northern terminus at Dodge City, Kansas, was extended farther north, to Ogallala, Nebraska, west of North Platte, which became the major railhead for Nebraska cattle outfits. The town of North Platte now sat firmly in the middle of a thriving cattle region, and acquired a thick layer of cowboy culture atop its military and mercantile origins.
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In the late 1870s, Cody became a rancher and saw cowboy horsemanship up close. In partnership with Cody, Frank North and his brother Luther established a large ranch on the Dismal River. The Cody-North Ranch grazed its large herds across the Sand Hills, but lost money due to stock theft and heavy winters. In 1879 Cody and the Norths sold the outfit to John Bratt for $75,000.
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Cody plowed his theatrical profits into ranching, but like most ranch owners, he was an absentee owner who was never a cowboy. When he appeared at annual roundups, other ranchers and roundup bosses indulged the stage star and prominent ranch owner by letting him drive a few steers and dry heifers, but they kept him away from cows and calves, because his penchant for horseback drama made him a poor drover. “When I was bossing the round-up and the bunch became excited,” wrote John Bratt, “I would call Cody out” to get him away from the cattle. This the thespian “took good naturedly, knowing well that rough handling of stock meant loss of flesh and shrinkage in value.”
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For his part, although Cody complained that “there is nothing but hard work on these round-ups,” and that he “could not possibly find out where the fun came in,” he attended because he could make them something of a party.
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For several years, his celebrity, his flamboyant, gregarious manner, and his alcohol—“brought along as an antidote against snake bites, and other accidents”—energized festivities at the Dismal River roundups. “The cowboys were always glad to see the Colonel and the cattle owners and foremen would vie with each other in showing him a good time,” recalled John Bratt, who routinely collected the cowboys' guns in anticipation of the festivities.
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These affairs included spectacular competitive displays of cowboy mastery over animals. Bronco riding, roping contests, horse races, and riding wild steers were primary features of roundups across the West, and the Dismal River roundup was no exception.
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The ethos of competition among cowboys in the United States and Mexico reflected their ongoing effort to turn the drudgery of work into challenging play. Competitions to see who could sit untamed mounts the longest—“bronco busting”—were common wherever cowboys accumulated, and roping contests and horse races were ubiquitous, too.
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A favorite cowboy pastime was “picking up,” originally a Mexican game, in which contestants on running horses picked up coins, handkerchiefs, or virtually any small object placed at a designated spot on the ground.
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Cowboys at the Dismal River roundups played the pickup game, and not surprisingly, it found its way to the Wild West arena as a display of “cow-boys fun.”
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