Louis S. Warren (47 page)

As the show wound down in February, a new rumor began to circulate through the press. Nate Salsbury had received an inquiry from the organizers of the American Exhibition in London. After a series of telegrams and messages, he and Cody made it official. Buffalo Bill's Wild West was going to Europe.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Wild West London

ON MARCH 31, 1887, Buffalo Bill's Wild West show sailed out of New York Harbor, bound for Great Britain. “There was a dense crowd on the dock, shouting and whooping and gesticulating for dear life,” wrote one observer. The celebrated Cowboy Band played “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” a U.S. Army standard (and the same tune that accompanied Cody and the Fifth Cavalry as they set out to fight the Dog Men in 1869), as the ship
State of Nebraska
headed out to sea with 209 Wild West show passengers, including more than ninety Lakota Sioux men, women, and children. Below deck were almost two hundred horses, eighteen buffalo, and assorted mules, elk, Texas steers, donkeys, and even deer.
¹

The crossing was rough, with giant waves, rolling decks, and seasickness. The horses suffered from poor ventilation, and the ship's captain ordered holes cut in the deck to provide them air. Several buffalo and elk died en route. Show workers threw them into the sea.
²

After docking at Gravesend, the Wild West show began rehearsals at the newly constructed showground adjacent to the American Exhibition, in West London, at Earl's Court. Cody, Burke, and Salsbury had seen to it that the show had some of the best advance press in England's history, and its arrival was widely anticipated. It did not hurt that Salsbury had arranged for the show to be attached to the American Exhibition, a display of American paintings and manufactured products, and a diorama of New York City— with a scale model of the newly completed Statue of Liberty in the miniature harbor—meant to attract British investment and consumers for American products. It did not hurt, either, that the exhibition itself was timed to coincide with Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, the national celebration of her fiftieth year on the throne. William Gladstone, already a three-time prime minister, visited the show a week before the opening.
³
In May, the Prince of Wales attended an advance performance of Buffalo Bill's Wild West. On his recommendation, Queen Victoria commanded a private showing for herself.
⁴

Buffalo Bill's Wild West cast,
1887,
in London. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.

Her visit inspired one of the show's most enduring legends, inscribed in a new edition of Cody's autobiography the following year by press agent John Burke. According to Burke, the queen's visit was an honor of “unique and unexampled character.” Not only was she sovereign of the United Kingdom and Europe's longest-reigning monarch, but “ever since the death of her husband, nearly thirty years ago,” she had “cherished an invincible objection to appearing before great assemblages of her subjects.”
⁵
Her stalwart grief proved no match for the glittering allure of the Wild West. On the afternoon of May 11, Queen Victoria arrived at Earl's Court with a large entourage of “uniformed celebrities and brilliantly attired fair ladies who formed a veritable parterre of living flowers around the temporary throne.”

Victoria's arrival would have been memorable all by itself, but in Burke's telling, it was immediately followed by “a very notable incident, sufficient to send the blood surging through every American's veins at Niagara speed.” Opening the performance, the Wild West show's standard-bearer presented the American flag, with the orator explaining that it was “an emblem of peace and friendship to the world.”

As the standard bearer waved the proud emblem above his head, Her Majesty rose from her seat and bowed deeply and impressively toward the banner. The whole court party rose, the ladies bowed, the generals present saluted, and the English noblemen took off their hats. Then—we couldn't help it—but there arose such a genuine heart-stirring American yell from our company as seemed to shake the sky. It was a great event. For the first time in history, since the Declaration of Independence, a sovereign of Great Britain had saluted the star spangled banner, and that banner was carried by a member of Buffalo Bill's Wild West.
⁶

London was awash in Europe's royals, all of them paying their respects to Victoria. Her endorsement assured their attendance in the coming months. On June 20, the Prince of Wales arrived at the showgrounds, trailing an entourage which included the king of Denmark, the king of Saxony, the king and queen of the Belgians, the king of Greece, and a slew of lesser titles, too. So it was, wrote Burke, that the Deadwood coach “had the honor of carrying on its time-honored timbers four kings and the Prince of Wales that day, during the attack of the redskins.”
⁷
After the show was over, the Prince of Wales joked with the showman, “Colonel, you never held four kings like these before.”

“I've held four kings,” replied Cody, “but four kings and the Prince of Wales makes a royal flush, such as no man ever held before.”
⁸

Buffalo Bill's Wild West was a hit in England in 1887, and these stories of Cody's success have entertained the American public ever since. Much of their appeal, then and now, is in the validation they convey. The queen bows to the American flag, acknowledging the ascent of the former colonies to modern power. The heir to her throne, a nobleman from a great house, takes his seat atop the frontier coach, makes a pun about poker (an American game), and finds himself both entertained and outwitted by Nature's Nobleman. Queen and prince pay homage to America's frontier history
and
American entertainment, to America's triumph over the wilderness and to American culture. If there were any doubts that Buffalo Bill's Wild West was something more than just another cheap show, the imprimatur of Queen Victoria and her family dispelled them.

The royal endorsement of Buffalo Bill's show proved a marketing bonanza. Cody told the story of four kings riding in the Deadwood coach for years afterward, and so did other members of the show, in Great Britain and elsewhere.
⁹
The Prince of Wales was allegedly so fond of the Deadwood coach joke that he told it on himself, and if he did not, other Londoners soon did.
¹⁰

For the larger British public, Cody would have been hard to miss even before the queen expressed her pleasure with his show. British readers, like their American counterparts, had been devouring fictional romances about Buffalo Bill since the 1870s, and now he materialized before their eyes.
¹¹
He did not disappoint. “The representative frontiersman of his day” and his touring “exposition” of real Indian warriors, genuine Anglo cowboys, Mexican vaqueros, and women sharpshooters became enormously popular.
¹²
Society columns dubbed him “the lion of the season.” The frontier hero became perhaps the most sought-after party guest among the United Kingdom's upper classes.

Catapulted to these heights, Buffalo Bill's Wild West would be a major attraction in Britain for many years, the lights dimming over its last appearance in the United Kingdom only in 1904. By then, the show had become the best-known representation of America. And Cody, the warrior from the frontier West, had become the world's most famous American.

Particularly in the show's early years, the American press had a giant appetite for stories of Cody's European triumphs. Newspapers began publishing them even before Burke ghostwrote them into Cody's new autobiography in 1888.
¹³
Some Americans sneered that British respect for Cody, a simple showman, reflected their decadence.
¹⁴
Others were more amused at British credulity in accepting Cody's show as elite entertainment, like the anonymous poet who composed the following tongue-in-cheek ditty about American entertainers in Britain:

Our plays put the Londoners all in a rage,
They howled our comedians off of the stage;
Our daintiest actresses met with a groan;
They let our tragedians severely alone,
But Art is triumphant. The city so vast
Bows down to American genius at last!
¹⁵

Still others were genuinely thrilled by the queen's bow to the American banner, and the excitement endures. Buffalo Bill's importance as a vehicle for American renown across the Atlantic has long outlived him. Most Cody biographers and many historians of the show down to the present day relate the four kings joke with the Prince of Wales, and the story of how Buffalo Bill was the first showman in over a quarter century to lure the prince's grieving mother out of her sad palace and into the bright light of the arena, where she bowed to the Stars and Stripes and enjoyed an afternoon of rollicking entertainment.
¹⁶

Heady stuff. Had the events not been real, wrote John Burke, wise men might have “bet that it was a Yankee hoax.”
¹⁷

Burke's choice of terms was practically an elbow to the ribs. The master of the Yankee hoax was P. T. Barnum, and as with his attractions, there is both truth and fiction in these Wild West tales. To be sure, eyewitness accounts confirm that the prince rode on the Deadwood coach that June, and Cody may have been the driver (as he was when the prince's wife returned the following day with most of their children).
¹⁸

But witnesses also agree that the Prince of Wales clambered onto the coach with only one reigning monarch, the king of Denmark. His other companions on the ride were his wife, the Princess Alexandra (who was also the king of Denmark's daughter), and three princes (two of them his own sons, the other the crown prince of Sweden and Norway). The joke about the four kings may be real—there were four kings watching the show, and perhaps the Prince of Wales was referring to Cody having “held” four kings in his audience, rather than in the coach. But there is a lilt to the language, a flowery turn of phrase—“such as no man ever held before”—which hints that Cody's exchange with the Prince of Wales was the product of press agent Burke's fertile imagination.
¹⁹

For her part, the queen did command a performance of the Wild West show on May 11. She commanded personal meetings with Annie Oakley and Lillian Smith, and with Red Shirt, who was advertised as “chief” of the show Indians, too. She burbled over two Lakota babies. Her mere presence was the highest honor a show could receive in Britain, and she really did command a repeat performance shortly afterward, when the prince and his family rode in the coach (although she did not attend). Her enthusiasm for Cody's entertainment played a huge part in its success that season, and in all the years to come.

And yet Burke's puffery twisted some facts and invented others to embellish even this remarkable endorsement. True, Victoria refused to visit the theater until the 1890s, as she mourned the death of her beloved Prince Albert for over three decades. But her Wild West afternoon was not her first venture to a public entertainment, even in 1887. Victoria was an ardent circus fan, and an earlier sign of her emergence from mourning was her attendance at a circus from the Paris Hippodrome, in March 1887, when Cody and Salsbury were still in New York. Just as she would do with the Wild West show at Earl's Court, she attended a private performance of the French circus at the newly constructed Olympia theater, then ordered a repeat performance (perhaps because she had not seen enough of the seesawing elephants Jock and Jenny).
²⁰
For all the red, white, and blue bunting in which Americans draped the Wild West show, for Victoria it was another circus outing. Back at Windsor, she recorded the afternoon in her journal: “An attack on a coach & on a ranch, with an immense deal of firing, was most exciting, so was the buffalo hunt, & the bucking ponies, that were almost impossible to sit.”
²¹

And what of her bow to the American flag? Cody's publicist painted a solemn scene: a “standard bearer” who rode out “during our introduction,” and “waved the proud emblem above his head,” before a monarch who bowed low. The English press who witnessed the scene told a very different story. The American flag did not appear until the middle of the show, between the Indian dances and Emma Lake Hickok's fancy riding, when it was presented to the accompaniment of “Yankee Doodle.” One suspects that protocol dictated that foreign flags should dip before the throne, and that the monarch would acknowledge the gesture with a nod, whereupon the flag could be raised. In any case, this was precisely what happened; according to
The World
newspaper: “When, in the course of the performance, Serjeant [
sic
] Bates brought down the ‘star-spangled banner' . . . and lowered it before the Queen, she inclined her head twice in recognition of the courtesy.”
²²
Another newspaper featured pen-and-ink drawings of the encounter: Old Glory lowered almost to the ground, Cody and the flagbearer bowing their heads, before an all-but-impassive queen.
²³
The musical accompaniment to the gesture suggests a very different story from the legend. “Yankee Doodle” was originally a British song deriding rebel foolishness at the outset of the American Revolution. In the course of the American victory, colonists themselves took up the song as an expression of their courage. When we realize that the banner of the United States was unfurled to the American Revolution's most patriotic tune, and then was lowered in honor of the queen, the scene suggests the
reverse
of the famous legend: not the queen honoring the American flag, but the American showmen symbolically recognizing their debt to Her Majesty for attending.