Louis S. Warren (37 page)

Through inclusion in a spectacle of race war, the centaur symbol acquired additional layers of meaning. Indians, “savage centaurs,” most approximated the horse-men of myth. The show's white centaurs, Cody and the cowboys, embodied reasoning attributes of masculinity combined with the stallion's virility and power. Their presence suggested the need for an infusion of natural power—horse power—into white men to ameliorate their loss of nerve force, declining virility, and other symptoms of overcivilization. Just as the Pony Expressman of earlier decades had come to symbolize the monstrous fusion of polyglot frontier and white manhood, Cody's centaur, and the ranks of centaurs in the Wild West show, represented not only the domination of the West's wild nature by Americans, but also the reinvigoration of the white race. Thus, the show's centaurism complemented the efforts of such organizations and developments as the Boy Scouts, the YMCA, the Boone and Crockett Club, collegiate athletics, and much of the broader conservation movement to instill in American manhood some approximation of natural vigor—what Theodore Roosevelt would call the “strenuous life”—to fend off the neurasthenic effects of modern business and the city.
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Cody's monstrous fusion of horse and man arrived in the East to announce the triumph of civilization and the regeneration of white men and the white race through frontier conflict and technological progress. Where Carver mastered the machine of the gun, Cody's shattering of amber balls from the air with a rifle as he raced around the arena on horseback naturalized the violent technology of the gun through his mastery of the horse. If the image of Buffalo Bill as Winchester-toting centaur heightened Cody's masculine image in particular—“Jesus he was a handsome man”—it did so in part by connecting that image to a progressive narrative of white Americans as people (Cody himself) who sprang from nature (the horse) to master technology (the repeating rifle). Throughout the performances, wilderness—animals and Indians—continually fell away before the advance of the American centaur, his settlements, and his technological prowess.

The story of technology and progress mediated by the ancient centaur energized one of the most durable of show scenes, the “Attack on the Deadwood Coach.” The Indian pursuit of the coach, and its rescue by Buffalo Bill and his cowboys, proved as durable as the Pony Express reenactment, and arguably the most thrilling, “never equalled by an act in hippodrome or theater,” in the words of an early reviewer.
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In this scene, Indian centaurs pursued not just a stagecoach, but an Abbot and Downing Concord coach, a powerful icon of American artisanship.
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As early as 1874, a correspondent remarked that “in the far West” the stagecoach “may be called the advance-guard of civilization,” but in most of the eastern states the railroad had already made it “a thing of the past.”
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Just as savagery vanished before the wheels of the stagecoach, so those wheels themselves gave way to machine-powered axles. East and West, anticipation of the coaches' final passage became widespread by the early 1880s, symbolic of the passing away of the frontier, of master craftsmanship before mechanization (the Concord coach was so meticulously handcrafted that only three thousand of them were ever made), and of horse-drawn conveyance by steam locomotive and electric trolley, the revolutionary technology which, by 1896, was carrying passengers in ninety-three towns where Buffalo Bill's Wild West appeared.
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Cody's show publicists claimed that the coach had begun its career in 1863, journeying from New Hampshire to California by ship, seeing service in California, Oregon, and Utah, before becoming the “original” Deadwood coach, plying the route between the railroad depot at Cheyenne, Wyoming, and the gold-mining town of Deadwood, in Dakota Territory, in 1876. On this final segment of its twenty-five-year odyssey, wrote the publicists, it passed through “Buffalo Gap, Lame Johnny Creek, Red Canyon, and Squaw Gap, all of which were made famous by scenes of slaughter and the deviltry of the banditti.” Ultimately, it was “fitted up as a treasure coach,” carrying gold bullion from the mines and enduring spectacular robbery attempts, including the notorious Cold Spring holdup and another in which Martha “Calamity Jane” Cannary drove it to safety. Allegedly, Buffalo Bill had ridden in this very stagecoach, with Yellow Hair's scalp and several others in hand, when he returned from his scouting duties in 1876. “When afterwards he learned that it had been attacked and abandoned and was lying neglected on the plains, he organized a party, and starting on the trail, rescued and brought the vehicle into camp.”
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Indians who attacked it in the arena were said to be “the near relations of the Indians” who attacked it on the Plains.
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Cody anticipated the consignment of all the West's stagecoaches to history (stagecoaches would not cease the Deadwood run until 1890), then collapsed them and the biographies of show principals all into one coach. In tracing the route of the Deadwood stage through dark places full of evil— Lame Johnny Creek, Squaw Gap—the scene evoked the mythic progress of America through benighted savagery to civilization. At the same time, the symbol of the “vanishing” coach suggested that the era of frontier conquest itself was closing.

Of course, even beyond Cody's fictionalized biography, the fakery of show programs was considerable, and nowhere more so than in the story of this stagecoach. Cody had not ridden out to save the coach from abandonment, but rather had ordered the vehicle from Luke Voorhees, manager of the Cheyenne and Black Hills Stage line, specifically for the show.
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He did not leave the Plains via this coach, or any other, the summer he killed Yellow Hair. Instead, he took a steamer to Bismarck and a train to Rochester.
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This coach had no steel armor, was never a treasure coach, and had not been the target of the Cold Springs holdup.
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But through its convergence of historical events and mythic symbolism, the Deadwood stage became an object of near-spiritual veneration for the audience, a select few of whom passed through its doors during each performance. Stagecoach rides for audience members became a premier attraction of the Wild West show in every one of its future years. Pap Clothier's more amenable successors included countless journalists, local councilmen, and, in 1887, the Prince of Wales and other European nobles, aristocrats, and celebrities who lined up to ride in the vehicle at Earl's Court, London. In 1890, one of them, Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower, was astonished to come upon Buffalo Bill's Wild West show in Italy. “I made again the circuit of the ring in the Deadwood coach.” Although he “had so often been inside” the vehicle at Earl's Court, he had not dreamed “that I should repeat the drive under the shadow of Vesuvius.”
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By entering the coach, audience members became protagonists in the show's historical narrative, and heirs to its myth. In its confines, they reenacted America's passage through savage darkness and emerged victorious, like the Americans who had civilized the frontier. And as Americans watched European royals, urban elites, and elected leaders climb eagerly into the coach, they saw their history and a favorite show validated as high culture.

Thus, the Wild West show scene was simultaneously nostalgic, for a racial frontier that was passing, and forward-looking, with the wheels conveying the spectators-turned-passengers away from the primitive past and toward the technological future of wheels and guns that echoed from its driver's seat. It was both a symbol of progress, looking forward to the passenger trains and the mechanical future that awaited the audience, America, and the world, and an anachronism, a handcrafted marvel in an age of mass production, a historical artifact conveying the lived experience of the frontier for the amusement of the modern city.

DERIVING CULTURAL MESSAGES like these from show scenes helps explain why the Wild West show became such a powerful factory of images and mythology, but it also makes it too easy to overlook Cody's fundamental audacity, his reach for mythic trajectory in a show based substantially on circus entertainments, which remained far from respectable in middle-class parlors. The circus was “the devil's playhouse,” wallowing in fraud, graft, and freaks who violated boundaries of all kinds. In their long quest for middle-class acceptance, circus impresarios often used biblical tropes to sell their attractions as moral education. One 1835 showman even staged “A Grand Moral Representation of the Deluge with Appropriate Sacred Music.”
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P. T. Barnum, the sage of Bridgeport whose avoidance of outright fraud earned him a reputation as a “moral” entertainer, made a systematic effort to equate his circus with biblical spectacle. He billed his hippopotamus as the “Behemoth of Holy Writ, spoken of by the Book of Job.” His African warthog became “the Prodigal's swine,” and his camel “the ship of the desert.” Pastors and reverends trooped to his show for the free passes he distributed to the clergy. The efforts paid off. “The Greatest Show on Earth” was a rollicking success.
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By 1882, Cody had watched Barnum play his hand at the circus game for a decade. No doubt drawn by the comparative softness of press reviews, and by the large and heterogeneous audience, he followed the New Englander's example. Cody and his partners imitated Barnum's manner of loading trains. Like Barnum, Cody hired private detectives to patrol the grounds and travel with the show, running off known con men.
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But Cody went Barnum one better, creating a circus that was a distinctively American spectacle. Where clowns and elephants defined the circus, Cody had none. Where the circus was synonymous with the big top, Cody's Wild West show had an open arena. In later years, he commissioned canvas awnings for the grandstands, but the performance space remained uncovered. The ostensible rationale for the lack of a roof was that shooting acts would quickly destroy a tent. But the view of the sky over the arena also created a symbolic connection to the wide frontier of memory and to nature, which publicists cannily exploited. Rain or shine, Wild Westerners worked beneath an open sky.
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Cody's masterstroke was to avoid overt religious references in favor of a secular frontier myth with himself—or an artfully constructed version of himself—at the center. Barnum and other impresarios could grasp at the sacred. But overt religiosity was on the decline in the late nineteenth century, as religion permeated secular life and lost much of its power as a separate realm of authority.
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Besides, even for the most devout Christians, the Bible was an Old World text, with no material connection to the New World (a matter which evinced no little spiritual anxiety in America). Even if audiences could have participated in it, the Pentateuch and the Gospels were not easily dramatized by clowns, high-wire walkers, and bearded ladies. For many, Barnum's piety smacked of a cynical ploy.

Cody's show forsook conventional religion for nondenominational faith in progress—“ ‘Buffalo Bill's Wild West' is not a show in the theatric sense of the term, but an exposition of the progress of civilization.”
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The effect was to give the circus a makeover so compelling and comprehensive as to make it unrecognizable.
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In its glory years, Buffalo Bill's Wild West would generate gigantic poster art, including some of the largest show posters ever created. In 1898, one poster depicted the show's main acts, including the “Attack on the Settler's Cabin” and the “Charge up San Juan Hill.” It consisted of 108 sheets of poster paper, running 9 feet high and 91 feet long. A few circus competitors produced even bigger advertisements, and Ringling Brothers commissioned a poster more than twice as large. But the Ringlings' depiction of separate attractions told no story. Impressive as it was, it looked like a big collection of smaller posters.
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The effect of the advertising was analogous to that of the entertainments. Cody's attractions included many that could be found in the circus: Indians and cowboys and Texas steers were featured in Barnum's “Congress of Monarchs” as early as 1874. Not long after 1894, a sideshow of circus freaks was attached to the Wild West show. But in popular memory, even the most discordant Wild West acts could be subsumed into, or obscured by, the narrative arc of progress and frontier development. In contrast, the circuses of Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey, and others remained a pastiche of the weird and the fabulous.

Presenting a national origin myth (one that conveniently elided the origins of slavery and the Civil War of recent memory) and allowing the audience limited participation in it, the Wild West show succeeded in convincing many that it was not a circus at all. Commentators and promoters intuitively grasped the distinctions. “There is as wide a gulf between the ‘Wild West' and the Circus as there is between a historic poem and the advertisement of quack medicine,” wrote Steele Mackaye.
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The distinction made sense to the public. “ ‘Isn't this better than the circus, now?' was the delighted expression heard on every hand,” recounted an 1885 reviewer. So with the critics, who raved. They extolled. They waxed. But their very reluctance to describe the vivid presentation of frontier mythology as a circus in fact proved how successful Cody was at naturalizing the circus on American soil, turning it from a European import to a domestic entertainment.
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From its opening night in Omaha, Cody and Carver's Wild West moved on to Council Bluffs, Iowa; Springfield, Massachusetts; then on to Boston; Newport, Rhode Island; and Brighton Beach, New York, before closing out the season at Chicago. Throughout, the success of Cody's new concoction of frontier, circus, and artful deception could be seen in reviewers' frequent comparison to the greatest showman of all. “The papers say I am the coming Barnum,” wrote Cody to his sister.
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The Hartford Courant went further, proclaiming that Buffalo Bill had, “in this exhibition, out-Barnumed Barnum.”
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