Louis S. Warren (43 page)

In reprising Custer's defeat against this background, Cody rode the wave of “Custer's Last Stand” paintings, cycloramas, lithographs, drawings, and other reenactments which soon made the battle of the Little Big Horn the single most depicted moment in American history. More, he shaped popular expectations of the scene. Earlier illustrations picture the battlefield as a barren prairie or rocky hilltop. But in 1896, the same bend in the river was incorporated into a lithograph of “Custer's Last Stand” which, as an advertisement for Budweiser, went into at least 150,000 prints and hung in practically every bar in America.
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In most years, when Custer's death was not reenacted, the panorama featured not the Little Big Horn, but towering western mountains. A grainy 1892 photo suggests that the backdrop of that year was a pastiche of fictional and real mountain peaks, which corresponded closely with the way actual mountains were depicted in popular paintings. Thus, the tallest peak soars up to the left, a cross of snow on its granite crown. The image came from Thomas Moran's 1875 painting,
Mountain of the Holy Cross.
The actual mountain was so difficult to locate among the many peaks of the Colorado Rockies that for years commentators were not certain whether it was real or not. Moran pictured it soaring above surrounding summits, its white cross a sign of the providential blessings of American expansion, and the image was soon reproduced as a lithograph for middle-class living rooms.
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In Cody's arena, it was a recognizably authentic frontier image, the cross hanging like God's own star over the American conquest on the plains below.
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In other words, the wilderness of the Wild West was realistic in part because it seemed to merge into the space of the arena, and in part because it so closely approximated the visual West already familiar to audiences who had never been west of the Hudson, or the Atlantic.

“Trick of the Eye.” The Seventh Cavalry charges into the Lakota, who
beckon the soldiers into a giant painting of the Little Big Horn battlefield—
and into history. Courtesy Denver Public Library.

Buffalo Bill and his Wild West were astonishing to watch not only as frontier people fading before advancing civilization, but as authentic, historical people in a complex dance with copies of western landscapes so artfully contrived as to confuse the senses. They were thus a commentary on mass production, on manufacturing, on mechanical reproduction of art at every level and of every kind. By dashing in and out of giant paintings, inscribing real deeds and fake ones alike in show programs, and traveling back and forth between “real” West and “show” East, Buffalo Bill's Wild West invited audiences to draw a line between real and fake, historical and representation. But on another level, they provided a thrilling display of courageous, authentic people who would not quail before a blizzard of representations that threatened to overwhelm them. Photographs, press reviews, colorful posters, panorama paintings, pen-and-ink drawings, show programs, lithographs, history books, and many other media provided “true life” illustrations of western settings and show principals. Much of the fun of the show was seeing the “real” people and measuring how they stacked up against their own images.

The copies were not always benign, and paradoxically, Cody used copies of himself to wage an ongoing battle against his imitators. By offering an entertainment that resembled Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, performance rivals such as Doc Carver, Adam Forepaugh, Pawnee Bill, and a host of others simultaneously underscored Cody's status as the “original” and threatened to overwhelm the unique appeal of his entertainment. Cody fought them furiously, plastering his posters over theirs and hauling them to court for trademark infringement when he could.
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But in many ways, Cody's artistry was to juxtapose the copy and the original, and then stitch them together with his own person. In later years, movies projected action onto the screen. But they could not replicate the experience of watching the seemingly genuine frontier conquerors move back and forth through painting and landscape, connecting history and the present. As historical people, they came toward the audience through time, out of history and into the modern world of electric trolleys, telegraphs, telephones, and mechanical stuff which sometimes poked out from behind the canvas.

Just as they darted back and forth between painting and life, so they flickered through the life stories inscribed in show programs. The biographical and historical “articles” in these dime pamphlets were studded with authentic detail and fictional narrative elements, as illuminating and as deceptive as any brushstroke. They provided a curtain from which the cast advanced and into which they might return, over and over again, in city after city, decade after decade. Was Cody the real Buffalo Bill? Was he really in the Pony Express? Was the Deadwood coach the real Deadwood coach, and had it done all that he said it had? Was Red Shirt really a chief? Were those real cowboys? Had any of these people been at the Little Big Horn, and if so, which ones? Show programs and press agentry, like the visual deceptions of the arena, blurred the line between what really happened on the Great Plains and what the audience wanted to believe had happened. The result was a gigantic show of alternating real and fictional elements with reverberations far beyond the circus or the panorama, encompassing a powerful mythology of national greatness, but one whose meaning was constantly up for grabs.

IN IMPORTANT WAYS, the show's visual messages had a political counterpart, providing a space in which to consider and even debate the era's many political arguments, without necessarily acceding to any single point of view.

With its narrative of American expansion and Indian war, and its endorsements by military men who were also political figures, Buffalo Bill's Wild West had a sharper political edge than most other entertainments. The Gilded Age is recalled today as an era of glamour and excess. But it was also a time of fierce partisanship, when the nation was evenly divided between two parties who fought bitterly over every presidential contest, and whose leaders struggled to stem or co-opt popular discontent brought on by rapid industrialization. Disputes between labor and capital, strikes and their armed suppression, riots, and the near shutdown of whole cities followed one after another in the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century. Between 1881 and 1905, the United States saw nearly 37,000 strikes, involving 7 million workers. In 1893 a fierce depression struck, and by 1894 the Pullman strike paralyzed the railroads. President Cleveland called out the army, placing Chicago under martial law and giving armed escort to the scabs who ran the trains. At the same time, the expansion of farms and mines in the West, “the progress of civilization,” glutted producer markets, forcing crop and mineral prices sharply downward. Western farmers, miners, and laborers united to demand government regulation of market and railroad.

Given the show's middle-class popularity through cycles of labor uprising and suppression, most historians follow the lead of Richard Slotkin, who sees in the harsh rhetoric of fans like Frederic Remington and Theodore Roosevelt proof that Buffalo Bill's Wild West taught its public “that violence and savage war were the necessary instruments of American progress.” Whether the enemy were Lakota Sioux or determined strikers, bloodshed was the path to peace.
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These arguments are not without some truth. Remington himself wrote articles describing the putative heroics of frontier cavalrymen, like the captain of the Seventh Cavalry in Chicago who looked “as natural as when I had last seen him at Pine Ridge, just after Wounded Knee” as he faced down the “anarchistic foreign trash” who manned the barricades of the Pullman strike in Chicago, making the city “much like Hays City, Kansas, in early days.” During the same period, he wrote glowing reviews of Buffalo Bill's Wild West, “an evolution of a great idea,” whose arena he visited to “renew my first love.”
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A contingent of U.S. cavalry joined the Wild West in 1893, and veterans of Indian war and urban uprising rode side by side in the arena. In 1897, the Wild West camp included a cavalry sergeant—“a slim, quiet young fellow [who] has the bronze medal for bravery at the battle of Wounded Knee”—and an artillery sergeant who “was out at Chicago during the riots.”
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Modern readers, remote from the Indian wars and the political arguments they ignited, are easily convinced that reenacting them was a right-wing celebration of imperialism and bloodshed.

But right-wing appeal offers at best a partial explanation for the success of Buffalo Bill's Wild West. The show was a mass entertainment. Americans were no more in agreement about the rights of workers than they were on Indian policy. To draw millions of Americans to its bleachers over so long a career, and to achieve consistently glowing reviews from critics and newspapers on different sides of so many political questions, the Wild West show had to reach across deeply etched partisan and ideological lines. How did the show rise above these national divisions?

Part of the show's appeal lay in its projected amnesia about the nation's most recent wounds. “America's National Entertainment” contained almost no references, visual or literary, to the Civil War. In a period when each party sought traction by blaming the other for that conflict, the war's absence almost allowed audiences to forget it ever happened.

Cody preferred that approach himself, and in other ways, too, he avoided party battles. His own commitments to party were highly changeable. A pro-Union Democrat in the Civil War, he ran for office in Nebraska as a Democrat in 1872. He joined a march for Democratic President Grover Cleveland in 1888. Cleveland won the popular vote but lost the electoral college in his reelection bid that year, in one of the hardest-fought contests in memory. Despite the partisan hostility that pervaded the country, in March 1889 Cody was an honored guest—and Louisa a member of the reception committee—at the inauguration of Cleveland's Republican successor, Benjamin Harrison.
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In 1897, Cody attended the inaugural of Republican William McKinley. That same year, his partners were trying to organize the Democratic Party in his newly founded town in Wyoming.
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Cody's nonpartisanship, so atypical for men of his era, was also reflected in his entertainment. Even its ownership was bipartisan, with Cody the Democrat teamed up with Nate Salsbury, an ardent Republican. On a cultural level, Cody appealed across party lines with an amusement that told two layers of stories. The most persistent narrative, what we might call the foundation, was present in every historical scene, and it depicted the progress of civilization. This was a story that was widely accepted to be as true as gravity. Whether one liked it or not, commerce would triumph over savagery.

Layered on top of that story were many others—about Buffalo Bill, Indians, cowboys, soldiers, cowgirls, animals, hunters, and many other figures and characters—which could be interpreted in many distinct and contradictory ways. Indian conquest could be read as good or bad, or both, and the disappearance of the buffalo could be an occasion for happy reflection on the expansion of pastoralism and commerce or as a sad commentary on the wasteful corruption of modern society—or both. Cody's press agents, and Cody himself, steered a middle course between narrating civilization's advancement as inevitable and allowing audiences to make up their own minds about what it meant. The solution, as we shall see, lay less in didactic teachings about the need to shoot leftists than in the appealing to the audience's own ambivalence about race war, the closure of the frontier, and all the other events that followed in the wake of progress.

That ambivalence was sorely tested by the events of 1886 as
The Drama
of Civilization
took place. In the first six months of the year, there was a dramatic strike in the coalfields of Pennsylvania, another against McCormick's reaper works in Chicago, and a streetcar strike in New York that culminated in riots between strikers and police. Beginning in March, the Great Southwestern Strike paralyzed railroads in Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Kansas, and eleven people died in violence between strikers and armed marshals in East St. Louis.
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The Southwestern Strike failed in early May, but by then, another episode of political violence riveted the public like none in the nation's history. On May Day, in cities across the country, about 200,000 unskilled laborers, skilled craftsmen, socialists, and anarchists went on strike in support of the eight-hour workday. Violence was minor or nonexistent in most places. But in Chicago, 40,000 strikers paraded the streets before joining the ongoing strike at the McCormick reaper factory. Chicago police opened fire on the crowd, killing four. In response, the International Working People's Association, a small, mostly German-speaking anarchist group with only a hundred members in the city, called a mass meeting to protest police brutality. Between 2,000 and 3,000 demonstrators turned out to hear speeches the next day, at Haymarket Square.