Louis S. Warren (50 page)

The importance of the Wild West show as a natural, or real, symbol of real American culture helps explain why Europe's embrace of it became so important, and why Cody and his partners worked so hard to repeat the patronage of the British crown—and the fanciful tales they spun about it— for years afterward. The 1887 season in Britain was only the beginning of a long European connection. In total, Buffalo Bill's Wild West show spent nine of its thirty-three years, almost a third of its life, in Europe. After a year in the United Kingdom, Buffalo Bill's Wild West toured the United States again in 1888, before venturing to Paris in 1889 for six months at the Exposition Universelle. There followed an exclusive tour of France, Spain, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Germany, which lasted from late 1889 until 1892. After that, the show finally returned to the United States again for its legendary six-month stand outside the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. For the rest of the 1890s, Buffalo Bill's Wild West toured the United States and enjoyed dramatic fame and praise for its “conquest” of the Old World. But even then, its European days were not done. The show returned to Europe again late in 1902, and remained there, touring as far east as Ukraine, through 1906.

The Wild West show's tenure in Europe had a gigantic influence on European perceptions of America. But just as important, its European successes changed the way Americans perceived the Wild West show, the meaning of frontier mythology, and their own history. Cody's reception before “the crowned heads of Europe” gave him cachet as the impresario of a show that was real culture, but it also reinforced the narrative of Cody's life as an ongoing tale of political and social progress. The “representative man” of the American frontier had ventured “from Prairie to Palace.” At a time when American tourism to Europe was surging, encounters of New World travelers and Old World hosts became the subject of numerous novels and nonfiction accounts, including Mark Twain's
The Innocents Abroad
and
Tom
Sawyer Abroad.
After all, it was an American, George Francis Train, who had wagered back in 1870 that he could travel around the world in less than eighty days, and thereby inspired Jules Verne's
Around the World in Eighty
Days.
⁵¹
The travels of Buffalo Bill's Wild West in Europe, and the numerous published accounts of them, provided a vehicle for reflecting on the passage of Americans through Europe as a millennial moment, the meeting of past and future, old civilization and new.

“What, then, is the American, this new man?” asked Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in 1782. The question has been repeated by every generation since, on both sides of the Atlantic.
⁵²
Now Cody tendered his answer: “I am.” The white Indian from the Great Plains was the representative American, and his show was America itself. At its most superficial level, Buffalo Bill's Wild West encouraged Americans to face Europe's history, culture, and monuments with the courage of their origin as frontier people, honest men and women who came by their gentility “naturally,” who need not hide their true natures under the mask of artifice. In the London press, Cody was acclaimed a modest, sincere, authentic hero, whose gracious manners were “natural” products of the frontier, and whose show business success was attributed over and over again to his spectacular “realism.”

Meetings with royalty and other notable Europeans, and also visits to European landmarks, were staged and recounted in ways to enhance these effects, perhaps most famously (after the meeting with Victoria) in Rome. The passage of the Wild West show to Rome, the foundation of Western civilization, “famed of the famous cities,” was anticipated from the time of the show's first success in London. In 1887, a British journalist penned a poem, “Buffalo Bill and the Romans,” that humorously reflected on the rise of Cody's English stardom, the expansion of American power it symbolized, and his destiny in Rome.

I'll take my stalwart Indian braves
Down to the Coliseum
And the old Romans from their graves
Will arise to see'em;
Pretors and censors will return
And hasten through the Forum,
The ghostly Senate will adjourn
Because it lacks a quorum.
And up the ancient Appian way
Will flock the ghostly legions,
From Gaul unto Calabria,
And from remoter regions;
From British bog and wild lagoon,
And Libyan desert sandy,
They'll all come, marching to the tune
Of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
Prepare the triumph car for me
And purple throne to sit on,
For I've done more than Julius C.——
He could not down the Briton!
Caesar and Cicero shall bow,
And ancient warriors famous,
Before the myrtle-bandaged brow
Of Buffalo Williamus

In the final verse, the great civilization of President Grover Cleveland led the triumphant Americans as heirs to the Roman Empire:

We march, unwhipped, through history—
No bulwark can detain us—
And link the age of Grover C.
And Scipio Africanus.
I'll take my stalwart Indian braves
Down to the Coliseum,
And the old Romans from their graves
Will all arise to see'em.
⁵³

The Italian tour, especially its Roman debut, was carefully scripted, and Burke's history of it carefully contrived, to meet these expectations. The same newspaper editor who had been Cody's champion since Sheridan's lavish hunting expedition of 1871, James Gordon Bennett, Jr., now dispatched at least one correspondent to cover Buffalo Bill's Italian adventure. Thus the
New York Herald
apprised American readers of the show's Italian triumphs in 1890. Three years later, when Burke published the company's memoir of the tour in yet another Cody biography, “
Buffalo Bill
”
from Prairie to Palace,
he interspersed his own commentary among reprints of the
Herald
articles. The show did not appear at the Colosseum (“too small for this modern exhibition,” said John Burke), but it did perform before an audience of 65,000 in the amphitheater in Verona (“a rival of the Coliseum itself,” wrote the ecstatic journalist). According to the
Herald
writer, the amphitheater was in fact the largest building in the world, “although the Wild West Show quite filled it.” The account included elements of the arena's venerable history, so American readers could savor the performance of frontier heroism and American progress in a building erected by command of Emperor Diocletian in A.D. 290 and restored at the behest of Napoleon in 1805.

Americans dreamed of visiting the Vatican, and some even did so. But they could only fantasize about meeting Pope Leo XIII as the Wild West company did. Burke related how Cody, with a delegation of cowboys and Indians, attended “a dazzling fete given in the Vatican by his holiness Pope Leo XIII.” Burke made it sound as if the Vatican threw a reception for the Wild West show, and that the crowds who attended, from “the gorgeous Diplomatic Corps” to the ranks of dukes and princes, turned out to see Buffalo Bill. In reality, the crowds and Cody's cast gathered for an anniversary celebration of the pope's coronation.
⁵⁴

With cowboys and Indians, the latter “painted in every color that Indian imagination could devise,” the American press depicted the encounter with the pope as a meeting between Christian pontiff and heathen barbarians. Symbolically, Rome's civilizing project now became America's mission. “The cowboys bowed,” wrote the
New York Herald
correspondent, “and so did the Indians. Rocky Bear knelt and made the sign of the cross. The pontiff leaned affectionately toward the rude groups and blessed them.”
⁵⁵

For Cody himself, the triumph of the show's Roman passage was doubly sweet. Over twenty years before, he had given the name of Rome to his nascent Kansas town, expressing his ambitions as founder of empire and civilization. Even now Cody told the story of how William Webb “made Rome howl” like some savage chieftain when he founded neighboring Hays and withered Cody's dream.

But the Wild West show provided him a theater of civilization and progress like no prairie town could have. On the one hand, cowboys and Indians, whether they appeared before the queen or the pope or simply in the streets of European villages and towns, offered a portable story of progress equally useful, for different reasons, on both sides of the Atlantic. Every American could revel in the ascent of these rustic frontiersmen to the theaters of power and the halls of civilization. Was this not the American story? On the other hand, every European who met the cowboys and Indians could presume to offer lessons in civility and advancement. Was this not Europe's legacy? In an age of colonial expansion, with Britain, France, and Germany appropriating large parts of Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, the spectacle of these “rude” and “primitive” peoples venturing to Europe for money and cultural patronage seemed to confirm Europe's civilizing mission. The sight of Cody's troupe among Europe's ancient ruins and monuments suggested stories so powerful and relevant that their mere appearance in the streets could become newsworthy. As both the impresario of the traveling show and the star of the story it told, Cody was a living conduit of history, embodying a merger of action and representation, Nature and Artifice, so electrifying it was almost impossible not to watch.

Other shows had famous audiences and fabulous endorsements, and at times they perhaps made advertising out of the day a famous person visited or how an endorsement was proffered. But none could make such a potent myth of progress out of those stories as Buffalo Bill's Wild West. Only a show that approximated a popular historical narrative, a “historical exhibition,” could have an accompanying “historical text.” When these newspaper stories of papal benediction and Roman conquest were reprinted in show programs alongside Cody's alleged biography as Pony Express rider, buffalo hunter, and Indian fighter, they seemed to prove America's progress like no other popular entertainment. Small wonder that few questioned the stories of royal bows to the American flag, kings in the Deadwood coach, papal fetes for the Wild West company, or anything else from Burke's purported histories of Wild West conquests. If audiences suspected they might not be completely factual, these meetings with the queen and the pope had been reported in the press when it happened. If the details were not correct, the stories were true enough. None doubted that Europeans saw Americans as possessed of real art, real culture. Buffalo Bill, the self-made man from the frontier, the realm of Nature, had proved it.

As an American impresario who received unprecedented endorsement from European elites, Cody did much to reassure Americans about the distinctiveness and the appeal of American culture in general and his show in particular. Just as Buffalo Bill “naturalized” theatrical entertainment by presenting a real frontiersman in the footlights, just as he made the circus into a domestic entertainment by presenting it as American frontier history, here his European successes validated him, American history, and U.S. entertainments, as bona fide culture. Small wonder that Americans have been grateful to him ever since.

FOR CODY, of course, these were years of personal success and fun. He was not a little impressed with himself. “We leave for Rome on Monday,” he wrote a friend as the crew packed up in Naples. “This has been the trip of my life & I tell you a big undertakeing to take such a big outfit into strange countries. I know of no other managers who dare risk so much.” The show's European triumphs put his rivals to shame. “I guess Barnum is sorry he followed the Wild West across the Atlantic. I see he closes in London today. Well three months was a long stay for a circus. I guess he wishes he had closed two months ago.”
⁵⁶

Cody's victories in the fierce competition of show business proved his supreme abilities as a capitalist and a purveyor of an entertainment product. But more than P. T. Barnum or any other show impresario, he seemed to represent America to the world. If Rome failed him in Kansas, this show of the Kansas plains in Rome gave him the mantle of conqueror and civilizer. That day at the Vatican, the papal blessing was not restricted to his cowboys and Indians. “The Pope looked at Colonel Cody intently as he passed, and the great scout and Indian fighter bent low as he received the pontifical benediction.”
⁵⁷
No showman had ever been so blessed.

WHILE CODY'S success in Europe had many uses for Americans, Europeans did not admire the show simply because they liked Americans. Buffalo Bill's Wild West drew huge crowds in the United Kingdom and on the Continent because of the ways it spoke to European desires and anxieties. A full accounting of the show's meaning for its diverse European audiences would require a book in itself. But Buffalo Bill's debut in London in 1887 opened the doors to its success on the Continent. The story of how Cody's message was received in England reveals the allure of American frontier myth in Britain and Europe, but also the full range of cultural statements the show inspired in its turn. The golden myth of the Wild West offered promise and peril to Victoria's Britain, and how British people responded to its fun and their own forebodings about it can instruct us in the real power and meaning of frontier mythology in Europe as well as in the United States.

IN JUNE, almost two months after the Wild West show docked at Gravesend, Cody took a coach trip in Oatlands Park, London. For all the celebrity sojourns in the Deadwood coach that summer, this little-noticed outing offers clues to the deeper fascination of the Wild West show for English audiences. On this day, Cody was the guest of Henry Irving, England's greatest living actor, as was John Lawrence Toole, a friendly theatrical rival of Irving's. The two renowned actors and the season's social lion, whose posters had made his long black hair and Vandyke beard easily recognizable throughout London, sat together on the box. The three drew gasps and, occasionally, shouts of approval from onlookers.