Louis S. Warren (49 page)

But if America's success marked the path of westward-marching civilization, there was no question that civilization itself hailed from the Old World. In this connection, Americans—who were fascinated by the proliferation of artifice and copy in their Industrial Revolution—were profoundly conscious of their culture as an imitation of Europe's original. America might have taller mountains, wider plains, steel production as great as Britain's or Germany's, and hog-slaughter works that exceeded both. But in music, literature, and drama, she remained indebted to Europe.

On this score, American writers and performers were perennially anxious about their originality. If the real proof of a nation's greatness lay in its art, then critics generally concurred that Americans had precious little to offer.
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“In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book, or goes to an American play, or looks at an American picture or statue?” taunted Englishman Sidney Smith in 1820. The question riled Americans for most of the century. Someday, wrote Walt Whitman, “a great and original literature is sure to become the justification and reliance of American democracy.”
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Despite the novels of Melville, the paintings of Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School, and the poetry of Whitman, a sense that America was the cultural poor relative of Europe long persisted on both sides of the Atlantic.
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Having endured this inadequacy at least since the Revolution, Americans often answered by pointing to the uniqueness of their natural assets, particularly in the West, where natural wonders balanced Europe's cultural treasures. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the monumental landscapes of Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and Yosemite, among others, became widely known for the first time. “Nature's Nation” claimed these landscapes as repositories of natural virtue.
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Buffalo Bill's biography and publicity placed his origins firmly in this natural context. His show programs routinely employed a melodramatic cliché in their accounts of Cody, calling him “Nature's Nobleman,” to suggest that he was a natural-born aristocrat, the quintessential American whose virtues stemmed from regenerative nature rather than from decadent culture. Moreover, the show deployed a full range of natural props to suggest the “natural nobility” of its western cast, including buffalo, elk, deer, and longhorn steers, and the mountain of dirt (planted with trees) abutting the painted mountain landscape of the backdrop. By creating a show about the white race's encounter with nature, Buffalo Bill's Wild West turned America's most risible shortcoming—its predominance of nature and its absence of culture—into a primary show business asset.

As we have seen, the frontier line was symbolically a divide between wilderness Nature and civilized Artifice, the real and the fake. As a show, Buffalo Bill's Wild West came to stand for the world of the natural and the real, a position it constantly reinforced with its heaping portions of authenticity in Buffalo Bill, the show's Indians, and all its western animals and paraphernalia. In this sense, the meeting of Buffalo Bill with European royals symbolized opposing poles of natural man and cultural man. Where Europe was the font of real culture, the frontier was the retreating space of real nature. Buffalo Bill's eastward journey, from America's regenerative and retreating Nature, to Europe, the source of westward-marching culture, reversed the course of conquest and connected the poles of historical reality.

The result was a current of validation unlike anything Americans had experienced. Journeying from lowly frontier origins to European adulation, Buffalo Bill's Wild West symbolized the advent of the United States as a cultural force, not merely a military or economic one. In Buffalo Bill's success, America herself had finally arrived on the world stage. The fact that the stories were partly fiction made no difference. The very fact that the elusive queen had come to his show and liked it was enough to validate it as something more than cheap entertainment, as something at once cultural and natural.

The usefulness of Buffalo Bill's Wild West to Americans anxious to announce their cultural maturity was no accident. Cody designed the show to travel to Europe. In 1879, he ended his autobiography with an announcement that he would take his theatrical combination to Europe. He did not go, perhaps because he recognized that frontier melodrama was not original enough to satisfy his and his country's ambitions for European sanction. In 1882, before he even began to pull the Wild West show together, he was requesting new testimonials to prove his authenticity for European audiences. “I have long had a desire to visit England but have [been] deterred from doing so by the thought that I might be classed among the many impostors who have gone before me claiming to be Scouts and frontiersmen,” he wrote General Miles. “I want to be treated like a gentleman by those I may meet over there and as it is possible that I may make the trip in the near future, I would like to add your testimony to the credentials I am securing from other distinguished officials that I am the veritable W. F. Cody known as Buffalo Bill and have acted as scout and guide for you.”
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Cody and Salsbury, seasoned showmen with over a quarter century of theatrical experience between them, were intimately familiar with their compatriots' anxieties where culture was concerned. Their chief associations were among American actors, singers, dancers, and musicians, and especially reviewers and critics. They crafted Buffalo Bill's Wild West as an answer to the endless lament for an original American performance. As a “historical exhibition” it propagated the American story through dramatic reenactment, and the title they attached to it—“America's National Entertainment”—was an answer to the call of Whitman and others for an art that would express American greatness.

Even prior to its ascent to widespread respectability, Buffalo Bill's Wild West show gained an eminent fan who recognized its potential for overseas validation. In September of 1884, Cody received a letter out of the blue.

Dear Mr. Cody:

I have seen your Wild West show two days in succession, and have enjoyed it thoroughly. It brought vividly back the breezy wild life of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, and stirred me like a war-song. Down to its smallest details, the show is genuine—cowboys, vaqueros, Indians, stage coach, costumes and all; it is wholly free from sham and insincerity, and the effects produced upon me by its spectacles were identical with those wrought upon me long ago by the same spectacles on the frontier. Your pony expressman was as tremendous an interest to me yesterday as he was twenty-three years ago, when he used to come whizzing by from over the desert with the war news: and your bucking horses even painfully real to me, as I rode one of those outrages once for nearly a quarter of a minute. It is often said on the other side of the water that none of the exhibitions which we send to England are purely and distinctively American. If you will take the Wild West show over there, you can remove that reproach.

Truly Yours,
Mark Twain

The endorsement was a rarity, and high praise indeed. P. T. Barnum was a close friend of Twain's, but try as he might, he could never persuade the author to endorse his circus.
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Cody, on the other hand, received Twain's letter unsolicited. Not surprisingly, show publicists reprinted it in newspapers and show programs, for many years.
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How much Twain recognized the artful deceptions of the show is hard to say. But coming from the author who did more than any other to present American identity as an imposture, the letter is as telling for scholars as it was confirming for audiences. Mark Twain himself presented the West as a grand series of adventures, double meanings, and charades in his 1872
Roughing It.
Passing the scene of an 1856 stagecoach massacre, in which all hands but one were killed, Twain noted there must have been some mistake, “for at different times afterward on the Pacific coast I was personally acquainted with a hundred and thirty-three or four people who were wounded during that massacre, and barely escaped with their lives. There was no doubt of the truth of it—I had it from their own lips.”
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Roughing It was devoted in large part to these stories about stories, enhanced by Twain's own talent for the tall tale, which renders the book one giant puzzle, or wonder, through which readers join Twain in the most essential and entertaining of all frontier experiences, trying to separate truth from fiction.

Thus, where many have read his endorsement as proof of the Wild West show's unswerving devotion to an unexpurgated West, Twain's praise reflected his subtle appreciation of the artifice and imposture that went hand in hand with the display of real western figures and all those buffalo, elk, mules, and “painfully real” bucking horses. Like all “realistic” art, it was less devoted to copying every detail of western experience than to producing the same emotions the frontier once did. Thus “the effects produced upon me by its spectacles” were “identical with those wrought upon me long ago by the same spectacles on the frontier.” In other words, Cody's show was a remarkable demonstration of verisimilitude, a displacement of the West via the railroad and the arena that came off as remarkably convincing, “free of sham and insincerity.”

Once we acknowledge the centrality of artful deception to Twain's sense of the “real” frontier, his endorsement of Buffalo Bill's Wild West makes a great deal of sense. In his eyes (one of which was ever winking), the show was a spectacle of real cowboys and real Indians and the nation's most famous scout, all assuming the same poses which one would expect on the real frontier. Like the westerners he had encountered in the West, Cody and his cast claimed to have survived stagecoach attacks, fought Indians (or cowboys, if they were Indians), and tamed bucking broncos. Some of them even had done such things, and replicated it in the arena. They were utterly convincing, whether they were truthful or not. Twain had watched in wry amusement as actual westerners played at being westerners in the West (and as scribe and miner, he joined them). What pleased him was how remarkably well these westerners did it in the East, too.

To Twain, the show of western reality was an imposture of frontier imposture. In recommending that it venture across the water as an “original” entertainment to confront Europe's “real” culture, he was suggesting a benign but elaborate masquerade. America's foremost connoisseur of literary imposture could only find such an idea hilariously appealing.

Americans' profound sense of cultural inferiority was reinforced by a vigorous transatlantic exchange of artists and art. British performers found new audiences for their work among Americans hungry for Europe's “real” cultural products, and the rewards could be lucrative. In 1811, the English actor George Frederick Cooke visited the United States, and for the rest of the century English performers, writers, and painters followed his example. In 1885, Oscar Wilde toured America, to widespread acclaim. As Cody well knew from all his years on the stage, in the United States, English actors routinely drew larger crowds, and earned bigger receipts, than their American counterparts.
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American performers who traveled the opposite direction met with some success—an actor named Joseph Jefferson was a big hit as Rip Van Winkle in London in 1875—but generally the praise and renown they earned was qualified by critics who saw Americans as, at best, imitators of English and Continental art.
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After reviewing the display of American paintings at the American Exhibition that adjoined the Wild West show, one London critic described U.S. painters as having ceased their devotion to English painters only to become followers of the French, so that “nothing very original, nothing pointedly national, has come of it.”
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To be sure, the critics were often wrong. The exhibit which featured “nothing pointedly national” included paintings by Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, whose work has since been venerated as American classic, but which the reviewer discounted for its “false mechanical colour and photographic dulness of mise-en-scene.”
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Snobbery and overstatement aside, America's performance arts were, by and large, still recognizably European in origin. American theater, circus, and even nascent vaudeville too closely resembled European art forms to be distinguished as uniquely American. Minstrelsy was an important exception. Derived from traditions of music and dance among slaves, American minstrels were a popular entertainment in Britain, to which the British had no indigenous counterpart. But by the 1880s, most minstrel acts were comprised of black people, singing tunes made popular by white singers in blackface a generation before. The very fact that it was
black
music and dance meant that white Americans could not easily claim it as their culture. For a white public that saw America as a white nation, the success of minstrelsy overseas was more embarrassment than honor.
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No, in American minds, Europe was the source of real culture. From its capitals in Paris, London, and Rome, art of all kinds flowed westward. The process involved a whole range of cultural products, from plays and operas to frock coats and couches. In all these things, European aristocrats set the standards of fashion, and American elites spent much money copying them. The American middle class, in turn, mimicked elite fashions with cheap imitations, readily available through mail-order houses such as Sears & Roe-buck and Montgomery Ward. (And lower-class people, of course, able only to get the cheapest imitations or used goods, were characteristically “out of fashion.”) Americans could tell a great story about their civilization's triumph over savage wilderness, but they were inevitably conscious that the apparel they wore, the shows they watched, the books they read, and the music that inspired them were either European or copies of European originals. As far as culture was concerned, America herself was a copy. Europe was the anvil of the real.
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