Louis S. Warren (46 page)

Superficially, Cody's account reads like an endorsement of Indian resistance. But on closer reading, it is arresting how many different moral directions Cody maps out in four sentences: the Sioux faced a hostile invasion; the government failed in its obligations; the Sioux stood up for themselves; the government did all it could do; the invading white men were too energetic and determined to be stopped; the Indians should not be blamed for defending their homes (the attack on the settler's home began with an attack on the Indian's home); but it is all in the past, there is nothing to be done (so come in, enjoy the show).

Cody's ambiguity condenses the Wild West show's version of history into a list of wide-ranging possible readings which, taken together, made it possible for audiences to differ on the morality of Indian conquest without having to cease their enjoyment of the performance. Whether you wanted strikers shot or appeased, there was a seat for you at the Wild West show.

For all the scholarly emphasis on the conservatism of Cody's show, ambiguity was central to its presentation of the march of progress and key to its success in its most popular and profitable years. Divided public opinion on labor strife and political violence made more prescriptive approaches impossible for a mass entertainment. Steele Mackaye himself joined his friend William Dean Howells in condemning the government's handling of the Haymarket trials as “a national folly and a national disgrace.”
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In 1897, when the show's celebration of militarism was at its peak, critics still saw it as a show that allowed audiences to make up their own minds about the morality of Indian conquest. “The admirers of Daniel Boone, the pioneer, and Kit Carson, the scout, readily recognize in the show how courage, determination, keenness of sight, accurateness of aim and unswerving perseverance won for them the names which are idolized,” wrote one reviewer. “Those who have sympathy for the Indian, feeling that the red man has been mistreated by the settlers and the Government,” the same writer continued, “have their hearts warmed at the sight of such a fine collection of them, and rejoice in their feats of horsemanship.”
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It was beloved by conservatives and liberals alike, but perhaps the ultimate proof of the Wild West show's flexible meaning was its appeal to leftists, the most famous of whom was Edward Aveling. An Englishman who was husband to Karl Marx's daughter, Eleanor, Aveling was the kind of revolutionary who made Remington's trigger finger itch. The “riddle of modern society,” wrote Aveling, would only be solved “by the abolition of private property in the means of production and distribution, leading to a communistic society.”
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This same man, socialist and revolutionary, saw Buffalo Bill's Wild West as “the most interesting show in a most interesting country.”
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His admiration for the Wild West show is striking in part because Aveling skewered romantic facades in a way few other writers did. During his 1886 tour to investigate the prospects of socialism in America, he never traveled to the West. But his encounters with cowhands in eastern exhibitions led him to become the first writer to describe them as proletarians: “In a word, out in the fabled West, the life of the ‘free' cowboy is as much that of a slave as is the life of his Eastern brother, the Massachusetts mill-hand. And the slave-owner is in both cases the same—the capitalist.”
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He joined many others in demanding a new trial for the Haymarket suspects.
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His many interviews of American workers were grist for his subsequent study,
The
Working-Class Movement in America,
which he coauthored with his wife in 1891.
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Aveling's encounter with the Wild West show began in 1886, at Erastina, after an acquaintance insisted he see it. To the son-in-law of Karl Marx, the show told the story of “life and death in the Rocky Mountains, where the wave of savage life is beating itself out against the rock of an implacably advancing civilization.”
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Cody's portrayal of social evolution appealed to leftist notions of dialectic and revolution as much as to the social Darwinism of reactionary conservatives. The fascination of it, Aveling wrote, “is in part due to the coming face to face with conditions that in some sense represent our own ancestral ones.” Like pioneers of modern anthropology such as Lewis Henry Morgan (and Karl Marx, too), Aveling looked at primitive peoples and said, “They are what we once were.” Indians embodied the universal primitive. “These dusky Indians . . . yet remind us of the earlier forms of savage man whence we have evolved, not by any manner of means always in the right direction.”
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Buffalo Bill's Wild West, with its triumph of cowboys over Indians, pastoralism over hunting, evoked the development of ever more complex civilizations, a process that was, to the minds of all Cody's contemporaries, of every political stripe, as unstoppable as evolution itself. Capitalists, conservatives, liberals, socialists, and communists fought one another bitterly, but all saw the triumph of commerce over savage chaos as ineluctable. Notions of cultural relativism, which allow Americans to think of other cultures as distinctive, but not inferior, were decades away. Belief in the necessary departure of “primitives” from the face of the earth was practically universal. Capitalists believed the dispossession of Indians paved the way for farming, commerce, and private property. Socialists and communists saw Indian defeat, and the advancement of modern wage work and private property, as inevitable steps in the destruction of feudalism and the emergence of class divisions (which would result, inevitably, in revolution, the abolition of private property, and the advent of proletarian utopia). Where these camps differed was on the question of how civilization should progress once savagery was conquered. But Edward Aveling and Frederic Remington shared a strong enthusiasm for Buffalo Bill's Wild West because they also shared a deep faith in the defeat of primitives as the necessary price of better worlds to come.

Cody's patrician kindness and artful pose as a frontiersman allowed Aveling to believe that his consummately modern show—a legal corporation which relied on industrial transport, a wage-earning cast, and steam-powered presses for its colorful posters, newspaper notices, and tickets— was fundamentally premodern, lying outside the contemporary world of wage reductions, workplace mechanization, and surplus labor.
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To Aveling, Cody represented an earlier race of white men fundamentally different from the modern white race of corporate bosses. Cody's race was “
vanishing
as the Red Indian, its foe, vanishes.”
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In other words, Cody looked forward to the modern capitalist order, without actually being part of it.

So it was that Aveling, the socialist, practically moved into the Wild West show camp, first at Erastina in 1886, and then in London the following year. He mused on the experience almost as enthusiastically as any Frederic Remington. “Have I not spent days and nights in camp with them; been present at ‘Saddle-Up!' time, and behind the scenes at the performances; ridden outside the Deadwood coach; slept in Buffalo Bill's tent?” His list of show acquaintances included many show cowboys, including Jim Mitchell, Buck Taylor, “Bronco Bill” Irving, and “Tony Esquivel, the most handsome, the most charming, the most daring of them all—are not these my friends?”
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The most astonishing of these, to his mind, was William Cody himself: “Very tall, very straight, very strong; the immense frame so perfectly balanced, so cleanly built, knit together so firmly and symmetrically, that until you stood by it and felt it towering over you and, as it were, absorbing your own lesser individuality, you hardly recognized what giant was here.” But no matter the physical description, wrote Aveling, “nothing of this—and, indeed, nothing—can give any idea of the immense personality” of this “extraordinary man.”
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Cody's energetic charisma flickers through account after account over a century later. Between comparisons to the centaur of old, and testaments to his physical beauty and his “immense personality,” we may yet discern a presence which awed the most jaded reviewers. Advising Mackaye about how to work with Cody, his partner Nate Salsbury—who had a testy relationship with Buffalo Bill even in these most rewarding years—took it upon himself to explain Cody's genius. “You will find him petulant and impulsive,” wrote Salsbury to Mackaye, “but with good, crude ideas as to what can be evolved from your material.”
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Salsbury resented Cody's intuitive command of their joint enterprise, and he was both bemused and intimidated by how completely Cody's presence could control not only a performance but also backstage machinations. “Cody, in many respects, is a man of steam-engine power,” explained Salsbury, in a more thoughtful, private moment. But just as important as his energy, Cody's physicality seemed to contain the conflicting elements of the show—cowboys and Indians, progress and chaos—within his own body. “In his tremendous physical power, he is the only man who can control, and keep in subjection, the various antagonistic elements of such a show,” wrote the managing partner.
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Steele Mackaye's son later called
The Drama of Civilization
“a new form of folk-temple for the worship of a new heroic age,” and there can be little question that the Madison Square Garden season of 1886–87 placed the Wild West show on the horizon of New York audiences as a cultural attraction.
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As with other appearances of Buffalo Bill's Wild West, reviewers had their share of complaints and fun with the Madison Square Garden season, describing the orator's descriptions as “insufferably long,” denouncing the “lame conclusion” of the prairie fire scene, and providing colorful, and condescending, names for the show Indians.
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But in terms of the show's acceptance as a historically educational and socially redeeming entertainment, the winter at Madison Square Garden was an overwhelming success, dispelling any lingering doubts about its attractions for “respectable” people. Where
The Drama of Civilization
looked enough like the Erastina performances to inspire playful or disparaging reviews, the aura of sanctity surrounding the reenactment of “Custer's Last Rally,” with its visual imagery that seemingly carried the audience right into the painting and into history, upped the show's cultural capital.

The Wild West show's acceptance as a suitably domestic exposition of life in the Far West owed much to the incorporation of Annie Oakley, Emma Lake Hickok, and other women into its mythology. In New York, other factors behind the newfound respectability of Buffalo Bill's Wild West included Steele Mackaye's direction, Matt Morgan's paintings, and Nate Salsbury's business sense. Without the intercession of Libbie Custer, the Wild West show's signature educational scene, “Custer's Last Rally,” could not have been staged at all.

But Cody himself remained its central feature. His authenticity relied on many things, especially the participation of Indians in his drama, and we shall explore their motivations in another chapter. But the idea of such a “drama of civilization” without him is unthinkable. New York audiences knew Buffalo Bill from over a decade on the stage. One measure of his new venture's success was that in contrast to the mostly working-class fans of his frontier melodramas and his first Wild West show season, audiences at Madison Square Garden in January 1887 included a broad cross-section of New Yorkers. According to one journalist, “statesmen, artists, military men, teachers, writers, musicians, business men, politicians, artizans, mechanics, and others who desire to know as much as possible about the history of their country” flocked to the show, “interested as we never saw an audience before.”
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The patronage of veterans and military officers validated the show as both historically authentic and socially acceptable. Cody's press agents distributed lists of officers in attendance. General Sherman saw it twenty times.
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It was so popular that branch ticket offices were opened in Brooklyn, Jersey City, and Newark.
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Show management arranged discount ticket prices for members of the Grand Army of the Republic, and schools sent crowds of students to afternoon matinees.
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A colorful children's book titled
A Peep at Buffalo Bill's Wild West
soon appeared, with the principal lessons of the show explained in simple, awful rhymes.
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Buffalo Bill was, at long last, respectable family entertainment.

Hints in show reviews suggest that the spectacle of Custer's demise, with Custer “represented by Buffalo Bill, who wore a wig to represent Custer's auburn locks,” met with near-sacred veneration. Reviews describe audience behavior with numerous references to order and respectfulness, suggesting that during this winter season, the Wild West show left far behind the raucous audiences of Cody's melodrama days, and approached a kind of incipient high-culture appreciation normally displayed in opera houses and the upmarket theaters that produced Shakespeare.
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Ordinarily, the Wild West show was an outdoor entertainment. But in a sense, its highly successful appearance in Madison Square Garden in the winter of 1886–87 suggests how much its rampant, raucous centaurs had been domesticated for popular entertainment, and how much that domestication allowed its harsher themes of race war to be reconciled with liberal ideals of race reconciliation and the rule of law. Just as the show featured “the pioneers with families at work in sun and shade to open and cultivate the soil, to build and beautify homes,” so too the theater itself was as comfortable as “a cheery parlor.”
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Divided as they were over the question of anarchy and whether it should be met with force or forgiveness, middle-class audiences who were traditionally loath to venture downtown for entertainment could feel safe in venturing into the heart of New York for this nighttime show, where comfort, amusement, and the sacralization of American history flowed together under the guiding hand of America's most famous westerner.