Louis S. Warren (41 page)

This might seem a silly novelty, and it might have been intended as a parody of high society. In New York's most elegant ballrooms, quadrilles and other fancy dances were such standards that, in 1883, guests at one elite Manhattan ball performed a quadrille on the backs of hobbyhorses—which were covered with real horsehide—as a joke.
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However Cody visualized it at first, the Virginia reel on horseback became one of the most enduring and consistent of show scenes. In 1887, an English critic, one of the few observers who took the time to write about it, described the spectacle of Buffalo Bill and three cowboys dancing with four young women on horseback, as “a grateful relief” from the “bloodcurdling” attack on the emigrant train which preceded it, “a performance at once pretty, graceful, and pleasing.”
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The dance scene first appeared in 1886, and appears to have been a feature of the show in every year thereafter.
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In its importance, it was not unlike later dance scenes in western movies, from Edwin Porter's
The Great Train Robbery
in 1903 to John Ford's
Fort
Apache
in 1948. In these films, the good guys—white guys—are recognizable as harbingers of civilization in part because they dance with women, particularly white women. Their opponents do not. The forces of Progress in these films often do a Virginia reel or a quadrille, which is an exuberant, community-oriented dance with measured cadence and somewhat specific steps.

Similarly, the Wild West show required the equestrian Virginia reel to remind (and reassure) audiences of the superiority of white people in the making of domestic space, in settling. There were Indian women in the show (and a well-developed Indian domestic order backstage, too). Indians had shaped land to their own uses for millennia. Now, out on their reservations, Indians were busily building new wood-frame houses and cabins. But in the terms of performance, in the story the Wild West show told, Indians were unable to make homes, to settle, to domesticate the land. They represented a kind of
ur
mobility, the embodiment of nomadism, the opposite of settlement.

In the equestrian dance scene, cowboys (centaurs) were allowed by cowgirls (female centaurs) to ritually enter domesticity and community by dancing in an organized if energetic fashion, on horseback. The scene distinguished for audiences the white centaurs—who were capable of making homes, of settling—from their Indian opponents, as well as from Mexican, Cossack, or gaucho riders, whose shortcomings flowed from the classic centaur condition, hypermasculinity leading to savage behavior, all constantly aggravated by the absence of home and family. Indian dances were also featured in the program. Many of these were social dances, such as the Omaha, grass, and corn dances, which Indians traditionally performed for visitors.
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But show publicity emphasized the “war and scalp dances,” whose rhythms marked them as antithetical to the domestic dance that the whites performed. Simply put, the presence of white women allowed white men to “tame” their savage natures, an option Indians, Mexicans, and others ostensibly did not have. Doing it on horseback provided levity for what was no doubt a comical scene, but it also suggested that the male-female bonding which created domestic union, the keystone of settlement, would take place amidst the mastery of nature, represented by the horses beneath the riders.

The presence of white women in the cast thus enabled a range of adjustments to the entertainment which helped to make it a more domesticated, respectable show. It is not too much to say that the prominence of Oakley's sharpshooting act heightened other show attractions. Notably, it charged the “Attack on the Settler's Cabin” with powerful new meanings. The scene of Indian men attacking a cabin was preeminently a display of a vulnerable white woman, usually played in these early days by the show's camp matron, Margaret “Ma” Whittaker. The dramatic tableau enacted the beginning of the recurring American nightmare of Indian captivity, and it resonated with the show's appeal to manly virtues.
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But by ending the show with a depiction of woman powerless and dependent on man, Cody and Salsbury also eased anxieties created by Oakley and other women sharpshooters. By sketching a dangerous landscape of savagery in which the only safe place for a woman was the house and the only safe social condition was dependence on mounted white men, the show cast what one scholar has called a “narrative of sexual danger,” wherein the wider cultural anxieties about women leaving the home were expressed in melodramatic display of female vulnerability.
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In that sense, the “Attack on the Settler's Cabin” made Oakley's act all the more acceptable, and popular. As much as her display reinforced the importance of the marital covenant, we might see the “Settler's Cabin” scene as a symbolic constraining of women for any spectators who still had doubts about the “proper” place of women after watching Oakley raise a gun to her husband. Any anxiety about masculine power remaining from the spectacle of the virginal, girlish, dead-shot Oakley could be put to rest after seeing the savage men driven off by the white men, who arrived just in time to prevent the victimization of the helpless white woman in the show's final scene.
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The scene also appealed to Wild West show audiences for other reasons. Americans may have been enamored of settled homes, but they were also painfully aware of the mobility required for the social and economic advancement that allowed the purchase of homes in the first place. Across all social classes, geographical transience was one of the most salient characteristics of American life.
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By exploiting tensions between mobility and homemaking, and placing those tensions at the center of a progressive myth of American conquest, the show spoke to some of the most prevalent cultural tensions of the age. In essence, by bringing the heroes home at the end of the show, Buffalo Bill's Wild West suggested that the proper return of the conquering hero was to the hearth, and to the settled domestic order.
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The appeal of such a message drew strength from its flexibility. It could be conservative or progressive. Throughout this period, progressive women seized on the icon of the home as their “proper” place, from which they would work to reform society. Women reformers called for “domestication” of urban society, and it was not coincidental that Jane Addams and Florence Kelly sought to transform urban America through the “settlement house” movement. Thus, the connection between women, home, and settlement could be a powerful tool for reformers.
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Just as important, the “Attack on the Settler's Cabin” allowed urban men to think of themselves in new ways, to re-create urban manhood by looking to this simulacrum of the frontier West. As suburban neighborhoods began to draw residents away from the cities in the late nineteenth century, many men were attracted to them because they separated women from the dangers—and diversions—of the city.
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The move to the suburbs, in other words, was a way of keeping women at home, of keeping them literally “domesticated.” According to historian Margaret Marsh, in the suburbs men and women together formed a sort of compromise. Women gave up the city, in return for a kind of “masculine domesticity,” in which men took more of a hand in the running of the home, and in raising children, in part so that their boys would have “manly” role models close by.
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Moreover, just as the Wild West show was conceived as a family entertainment, so too suburban homes were designed to assure, even compel, family togetherness, as an antidote to the ostensibly antifamily city. In this context, Buffalo Bill's Wild West show purveyed family togetherness and wholesome education, and Cody's symbolic act of riding to the home at the end was entirely suitable for middle-class men of the Gilded Age and, later, of the Progressive Era.

Through the “Virginia Reel” and the “Settler's Cabin,” Cody and Salsbury symbolically reminded their audience that the centaur was only the vehicle of progress, not its culmination. The social Darwinism of show teachings, the emphasis on race
progress
through racial
collision,
was underscored by the constant motion, the racing of its many races, including white people. The constant speed of the white cast throughout the show required the show's creators to self-consciously remind audiences that whites, unlike their racial competitors, were bound to become domesticated and settled. Thus, the “Virginia Reel on Horseback” almost always occurred somewhere around the middle of the program and the “Attack on the Settler's Cabin” at the end.
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The show thus reinforced that the story of the West was not just one of Civilization trumping Savagery, and Culture springing from Nature, but Fixity and Settlement triumphing over Mobility and Nomadism, or, better yet, (white) Domesticity as the culmination of American history. For most of its years, the story of the Wild West show ended with a homecoming, a return to the scene of a white family domicile, settled, rural, and virtuous. This, the show seemed to be saying, was where (and how) the Pony Express trail and the Deadwood stage line and, indeed, the history of the West should—would—end.

IN SURPRISING WAYS, Oakley also provided a personal and performance bridge to the show's presentation of Indians. Cody intuited that the more “wild” the Indians in Buffalo Bill's Wild West, the more alluring the show would be. His efforts to recruit Sitting Bull failed in 1883, but in 1885, having acquired the endorsement of General Sherman, he succeeded in gaining the permission of the Indian office to take Sitting Bull on tour.
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Government permission was one thing. Sitting Bull's agreement was another. According to Salsbury, it was only after seeing a postcard of Annie Oakley that Sitting Bull warmed up to the Wild West proposition, because he already knew her. The chief of the Hunkpapa Sioux had seen her perform in 1884, while he was touring with the Sitting Bull Combination in St. Paul. According to Oakley, he nicknamed her “Tatanya Cincila,” or “Little Sure Shot,” and it was in many ways the most important title she earned in all her long years of show business. She claimed Sitting Bull had adopted her as his daughter, a story the Wild West publicity crew trumpeted far and wide.
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The title and the story of Indian adoption suggested that she was an American native, tied to the soil and the continent's first peoples without any sexual implications of captivity or blood mixing.

Whatever Sitting Bull's estimation of Oakley—and we have only Oakley's word for it—her symbolic importance and the implication that she was adopted family of the show's most famous Indian both suggest the importance of family as container for the show's most violent energies. When Sitting Bull joined the show for the 1885–86 season, show publicists used his relationship with Oakley to present him as a suitable family attraction. Similarly, his official adoption of Nate Salsbury extended his kinship to the show's proprietor who most resembled the middle-class, managerial white men in the show's target audience.

Such gestures seem to have been effective. Sitting Bull was still reviled by some as the killer of Custer, but when he first joined the show, at Buffalo, he was “loudly and repeatedly cheered,” according to one eyewitness.
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During that year, he took no part in the reenactments or in any show scenes. He merely rode his horse around the arena in the opening presentation. His own family proved a vital component of his presentation. He sold autographed photos of himself to fans, and cabinet photos of him with wives and children circulated widely. Journalists who interviewed the legendary Sioux warrior saw him alongside his wives and children in the show's tipi village. “Sitting Bull is much better
en famille,
” wrote one critic, “and showing himself just as he is for the benefit of Eastern sight-seers than promoting scalping expeditions in the far west.”
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For the audience, this transition from fearsome enemy to family man and show attraction marked the potential beginning of Sitting Bull's (and other Indians') passage from savagery to civilization. In an age when entertainments were often considered a threat to civil society, Buffalo Bill's Wild West could claim to be doing the work of civilization, bringing primitive Indians into a modern, and domestic, order.

Civilian authorities barred Sitting Bull from returning to the show after 1886, and the public never completely abandoned their perception of him as a savage.
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But the partial and temporary transformation of Sitting Bull's image foreshadowed how Cody and his managers would present the Wild West show as a tool for domesticating the savage nature that appeared there, the wild animals, Indians, Mexicans, and border whites whose frontier energies so often verged on chaos in the show's first season. Annie Oakley functioned as a symbolic restraint on those same energies until she left the show in 1901, after which bronco-busting women like Annie Sheaffer served the same purpose.

By 1886, the show's central pieces were assembled—the frontier scenes of mobility and the domestic scenes of fixity, with Annie Oakley and Frank Butler as the married couple at the center, and Cody as the paterfamilias of the organization. The Wild West was approaching respectability, as Salsbury arranged for a summer-long appearance at Erastina, the newly created amusement grounds on Staten Island. Within access of the crowds and the media markets of New York City, the show became more than a spectacle in the arena. The public read of Indians attending a neighborhood church, and singing “Nearer My God to Thee”—in Lakota. Cody and Salsbury began keeping the camp open on Sundays, and many residents of the greater New York area sought relief from summer heat there. Cowboys, vaqueros, and Indians chatted amiably with families from Manhattan and Queens. Con Groner told tales of prairie fires and outlaws. The Indians acquired hammocks and strung them between trees in the Erastina woods, and had a dog roast while sightseers wandered through the “romantic camp of the Indians and cowboys.”
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By the end of the summer, writes Annie Oakley biographer Walter Havighurst, “newspapers were reporting details of the Wild West as though it were a vital and eventful province of America.”
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