Louis S. Warren (35 page)

To put it mildly, the suffrage movement had critics. Behind the era's many warnings about overcivilization, neurasthenic collapse, and immigrant takeover of American cities, there lurked a barely concealed revulsion at women's gathering influence. The early Wild West show, in its ardent appeal to masculine, undomesticated emotions, expressed a gathering backlash against the influence of women in literature, theater, and public life. Frederic Remington construed his lust for race war as a healthy corrective to the plague of
womanly
sentiment. In literature and ultimately in film, such ideas would culminate in the supremely anti-domestic genre of the Western, beginning with Owen Wister's novel, The Virginian, in 1902.
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Scholars of western film have penned some of the most trenchant analyses of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. According to its most influential historian, the appeal of Buffalo Bill's spectacle lay in its antidomestic presentation of race war as a solution to the unruliness of cities and savage labor unrest. With Indians standing in for immigrant strikers, and cowboys and cavalry representing the ruling class, the show was a bloodthirsty, reactionary drama. When the Indians slaughtered Custer's cavalry in the arena, and Buffalo Bill took his revenge on Yellow Hair, the spectacle implied that violence against all savages, be they Indians or immigrants, was not only necessary, but a hallowed American tradition.
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Such grim interpretations of the show have some merit, as we shall see. But in 1883, Wister's novel and the birth of “the western” were a full twenty years away. Domesticity yet reigned as a virtue and the bedrock of civilization. Americans of all classes were deeply divided over how best to respond to the era's frequent and sometimes violent confrontations between strikers, factory owners, and the forces of the law. To succeed as middle-class entertainment, Cody's new show would have to appeal across a divided political spectrum. Within a few short years, it did. Wild West show audiences included right-leaning fans like Remington and Roosevelt. But as we shall see, prominent reformers and leftists could also be found there. And, vastly outnumbering all these, there were many middle-class women and families, too.

The key to Cody's achievement in making a mass entertainment out of frontier myth was less in his depiction of racial hostility and free-flowing blood than in the way he framed his spectacle's violence to make it a show that middle-class women could attend. Only through their patronage could he attract their children and their husbands, too. Much as Cody sought a new kind of manly entertainment to escape the bonds of melodrama, the raucous Nebraska dress rehearsal suggested that drawing “the better class of people” might require reassuring the audience of his show's safety and good order. It might require, in other words, a restraining hand.

Cody's previous biographers and Wild West show historians have been loath to trace his tailoring of show attractions to suit his audience, perhaps because so many people claimed to have originated show attractions, and because he left few written clues to his performance ideas. But Cody himself originated most of the show's central features, and he retained creative control over its performances for its entire life. Despite what Frank North is alleged to have said to Cody at the Wild West show's first dress rehearsal— “You want a show of illusion, not realism”—there was less of a barrier between the two categories of experience than we might think. “Realism” has had many meanings, but in terms of visual art, in this period it referred to a mixture of fact and affect in ways that were convincing even if they were not truthful to every detail. In other words, it evoked an emotional response through artful deception. Thus, many “realistic” portrait photographs contained painted backdrops of forests or mountains. Viewers knew that these were studio portraits with landscape paintings in them. Nonetheless, they acclaimed them as realistic because they supposedly conveyed the rugged character of the individual being photographed, whether he was Teddy Roosevelt, William Cody, or an Omaha dentist.
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Working from the rough 1883 beginnings, Cody retained the illusion of realism, to such a degree that not only were fans impressed with the show's authenticity, but even the artist Max Bachmann would call William Cody “the pioneer of realism in American Art,” an accolade which is as indicative of his show's popular reception as it is overstated. Cody's achievement was to temper the show's warrior ethos, making it acceptable to a broad public riven with doubt and discord over the urban, industrial future.
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As much as Americans sought refuge in the mythic West as a masculine space, they remained anxious to protect the home—and civilization—as a bulwark against violence and unbridled passion.

How then, could Americans become domestic, leave the frontier in the past, and yet avoid neurasthenia? How could they retain frontier virtues amid civilization, without decaying into effeminacy or savagery? These were questions which preoccupied Americans, and with which Cody and his managers grappled as they embarked on their new enterprise. If the Wild West show began drawing rave reviews for its express virility only three years after its disastrous dress rehearsal, it did so by containing that virility within a framework of historical progress that culminated in household order. During its most successful years, the show's embrace of race war was balanced by its display of national progress through family and hearth. As Cody was to discover, before the Wild West show could succeed, it had to be domesticated.

CODY'S NEW “ENTERTAINMENT,” as he described it in early 1883, would not “smack of a show or circus.” It would “be on a high toned basis,” and would consist of “representations of life in the far west by the originals themselves.”
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Cody had been projecting an artfully deceptive persona and biography for at least fifteen years. Now, with the help of his talented publicist, John Burke, he distilled his bricolage of feat and fiction into show publicity. The primary vehicles of Cody's publicists were colorful posters and show programs, which were pamphlets running into dozens of closely typed pages, with text that explained the “historic reality” of each show scene and introduced the biographies of the principals. According to the small booklet audiences purchased for a dime, Cody was a “genuine specimen of Western manhood.” A “celebrated Pony Express rider” who became a Nebraska legislator and defeated scout William Comstock in a legendary buffalo-killing contest, he had guided William Sherman on his expedition to negotiate a treaty with the Comanches and the Kiowas (a mission actually performed by Hickok, not Cody), and in serving with the Fifth Cavalry he achieved “intimate associations and contact with” a slew of army officers, including “the late-lamented Gen. Custer.” Buffalo Bill stood before the masses as the embodiment of an idealized life story.
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The seam between truth and fiction, fake exploits and real deeds, was so artfully sewn as to be all but invisible. In a sense, Buffalo Bill was an inversion of a Barnum exhibit, the stitching of his deception culminating not in some freakish monkey-fish or ape-man, but a consummate American man who embodied the progressive mythology of the frontier. Audiences could pick and choose what they were willing to believe, and some were never convinced that Cody was everything he claimed to be. The
New York DramaticNews
referred to Cody as “Blufferblo Bull.”

Indeed, doubts about Cody's history on the frontier followed him throughout his career with the Wild West show, and rumors circulated that he merely lifted the identity of Buffalo Bill from its rightful owner. Some of Cody's Plains contemporaries even advanced such a case. In 1894, his old rival Captain Jack Crawford introduced a newspaper reporter to “the real Buffalo Bill,” one William Mathewson of Wichita, Kansas. A former hide hunter who had become a prominent banker, Mathewson had indeed been one of many to claim the “Buffalo Bill” name before Cody did. Now, he alleged that Cody was nothing but his former employee and grandiose imitator. The subject created a stir in the press. Although Cody's long list of military endorsements and his reputation as a worthy entertainer allowed him to ignore the charges, rumors persisted of some more genuine Buffalo Bill, out there in the West, or perhaps only in memory. But for most, the continuing questions about Cody's history and identity made his convincing imposture all the more remarkable—and amusing. “He is a poseur,” wrote one reviewer, “but he poses impeccably.”
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So with most spectators. Even when they detected the fakery, it was mixed so skillfully with Cody's bona fides as an Indian fighter, buffalo hunter, and scout, so thoroughly obscured by his reputation as an experienced entertainer, and so widely imitated by other impresarios that the emphasis on “originals” took on a double meaning, with Cody once again at the center of a playful interchange of real and fake that quickly outdistanced the tired formulas of the frontier melodrama. Buffalo Bill's performers were the standard from which so many copies were struck that Wild West shows became a subindustry within the larger industry of public amusements, and by 1884 newpapers were already referring to the genre as “Buffalo Bill shows.”
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Cody's many imitators, such as Gordon “Pawnee Bill” Lillie, Nevada Ned, and “Mexican Joe” Shelley, tailored life stories to resemble his, cultivated an appearance like his, assembled similar shows, and in the case of Samuel Franklin Cody (real name: Franklin Samuel Cowdery) even pirated his name, all of which reinforced William Cody's reputation as initiator of frontier simulacrum, the “original” Wild Westerner.
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Among the real westerners on display in the show arena, the most original frontiersmen of all were Indians, who, as indigenous primitives, represented the untamed passions which middle-class audiences feared and, increasingly, coveted. In Cody's earliest plans for the show, Indians were its primary attraction. Even before he had hired any cowboys, Cody wrote to the secretary of the interior about recruiting the best-known Indian of the age. “I am going to try hard to get old Sitting Bull,” he told his partner. The most famous surviving Sioux chief from the battle of the Little Big Horn was a powerful symbol of Indian resistance and savage passion. Only in 1881 had he returned from Canada, where he took refuge after the death of Custer. “If we can manage to get him our ever lasting fortune is made.”
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But the Indian office judged Sitting Bull too dangerous to be allowed off the reservation. Cody turned to the Pawnees. They had done fine work for his stage show, and he hired Frank North, the commander of the battalion of Pawnee scouts, to recruit them.
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Leadership of the new company was another matter. In the spring of 1882, Cody had discussed the idea of partnership in this new venture with actor-manager Nate Salsbury. But that fall, Cody first approached William “Doc” Carver about becoming his partner. Carver was a dentist who had left his home in Illinois and moved to North Platte, Nebraska, in 1872. He bought 160 acres of land on the banks of Medicine Creek, but forsook farming for the vigorous industry of frontier imposture. He practiced marksmanship fervently, sported broad-brim hats and beaded buckskins like the most flamboyant scouts. The Sioux became the subject of his most outrageous lie, in which they allegedly abducted him as a child but eventually became so impressed with his marksmanship, and so fearful of his lust for revenge against them, that they nicknamed him “Evil Spirit of the Plains.”
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Just as Cody entwined his life fictions with Hickok's myth, “Evil Spirit” embroidered his with Cody's. He actually met Cody for the first time in 1874, when Buffalo Bill guided Carver and a party of sports on a hunting trip in Nebraska.
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Soon after, Carver began claiming that he and Buffalo Bill were old friends who had hunted together for years, with Carver (here turning Cody into his own William Comstock) proving himself the superior marksman and champion buffalo hunter of the world.

Cody also approached Salsbury again, but the latter wanted no part of a show with Carver, whom he considered “a fakir in the show business” and who had a reputation for primping (Cody himself had said that Carver “went West on a piano stool”).
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Another critic had said that Carver “had sunk a lead mine trying to learn to shoot.”
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But if that was true, Carver learned, indeed. At his 1878 New York debut (where Texas Jack threw targets for him), he demonstrated marvelous accuracy and endurance, using a rifle to shatter 5,500 airborne glass balls in under 500 minutes. Afterward, Carver's shoulder was so sore he could barely move, and his eyes burned for days.
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Subsequently, he ventured to Europe for several years, where he won shooting titles, awards, and much public acclaim. Upon his return, he billed himself as “Champion Shot of the World.”
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Carver later claimed that he originated all of the ideas for the Wild West show, but Cody's letters to him indicate otherwise. Cody rejected Carver's proposed names for the show—“Cowboy and Indian Combination” and “Yellowstone Combination”—because, as he warned Carver, “the word combination is so old and so many shows use it.” Cody was looking for a “smooth high-toned name” which “will be more apt to catch the better class of people.” He suggested “Cody & Carver's Golden West,” and ultimately the two settled on a longer name, but one that reflected Cody's vision of this amusement as less a “show” than a place: Buffalo Bill and Doc Carver's Wild West, Rocky Mountain and Prairie Exhibition. Throughout the long life of this entertainment, Cody and his managers refused to call it a show, preferring to emphasize its educational value with the word “exhibition.” The word gave it a veneer of middle-class respectability, and offered audiences a way of attending without fear of being corrupted by the notoriously decadent world of show and theater. From its first year, journalists called it “The Wild West.”
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