Louis S. Warren (59 page)

For Gauguin, the symbolist, and Munch, the expressionist, the show meant very different things. Gauguin fancied himself a primitive in the skin of a modern. He spoke of himself as a renegade, an outlaw, and a half-cast (his mother was half Peruvian, and he hinted at a Martinique slave in his ancestry). He blamed the modern world for crushing the creative and benevolent savage who yet coursed in his veins. His longing to escape the stultifying conformity of urban civilization would drive him to Tahiti in 1891.

He was working toward that departure by 1889, and the exposition of 1889 is said to have been his greatest inspiration, particularly the “native villages” from Morocco and Tahiti. If Gauguin walked through Cody's Wild West camp—and it is hard to see how he could have resisted—the celebrated mixed-bloods and “squaw men” such as John Y. Nelson, Bronco Bill Irving, and Billy Bullock, as well as Antonio (Tony) Esquivel and Vincente Oropeza, represented the very men-between-races that Gauguin saw in himself. He adored allegory, and his paintings—one of which was entitled
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
—were intended to be moral and historical fables, and in this limited sense his aims resembled Cody's.
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Munch was a very different painter from Gauguin, and the Wild West show entranced him in different ways. Robert Hughes observes that Munch shared a key insight with his contemporary Sigmund Freud “that the self is a battleground where the irresistible force of desire meets the immovable object of social constraint.”
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This was indeed the paradox at the heart of the mythical white Indian, the figure who synthesized the Indian's wild, anarchic freedom with the constraints of white civilization. The white Indian had been an American icon in Europe at least since the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, and Cody himself represented the figure for French audiences as he did for Americans.

In a sense, Munch's paintings explored the failure of modern people to approximate the white Indian. His stark images presented people tormented, alienated from nature and from communal identity in the modern city. If he did not draw specific inspirations from the Wild West show, we can see why he was impressed enough to mention it in letters to his father. With its holistic, natural world of primitive villages and socially integrated people, on the verge of being swept aside by market and machine, it corresponded with his view of modernism's terrible ascent.
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Compared to the longer, more direct relationship that Bram Stoker had with the Wild West show, the encounters between Gauguin, Munch, and Cody's amusement were brief and fleeting. Cody himself had little patience with symbolists or expressionists. He took a strong interest in representational art. As he told painter Charles Stobie, he liked paintings to be “as near true to nature as possible.”
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This explains his preference for the work of another French painter, Rosa Bonheur, and it suggests why his visual presentation of the vanishing frontier appealed to her. By 1889 Bonheur was a legendary painter of the rustic. She was sixty-seven years old, and something of a recluse at her estate in Fontainebleau. Her favorite subjects were poignant farm scenes and heroic, noble beasts of the field, especially cattle and horses. Her most famous painting,
The Horse Fair,
depicted an auction of Percheron horses, the animals' bobbed tails and gigantic muscles bathed in sunlight. Shortly after the painting's spectacular debut in 1853, Bonheur's fame spread across the Atlantic. By 1859, the
United States Journal,
an American magazine devoted to middle-class readers, was offering a free lithograph of the work with every new subscription. Eventually, Cornelius Vanderbilt acquired the eight- by sixteen-foot canvas, which he donated to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1887. Cody, who was breeding horses at North Platte and who had a lifelong fascination with the animals, probably knew the painting long before he knew its artist. In 1896, for a brief time, he put two hundred Percheron and Norman horses into his arena as a “living tableau” of The Horse Fair.
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Her interests and her technique placed her alongside Cody, firmly in the nineteenth century, as a nostalgist for the organic world of field and farm, which was vanishing before the advent of machine and city.

Bonheur arrived at the Wild West show late in its Paris tenure, in October 1889, and Cody allowed her to paint anywhere she wanted on the showgrounds. She produced at least seventeen paintings from this visit, depicting buffalo, Indians, and—in what became her most famous painting in the United States after
The Horse Fair—
Cody on horseback, a large painting that hung in one of his houses at North Platte for many years. Although Bonheur's reputation has faded since, her fame in 1889 was considerable. Wild West show photographers posed her with Cody, Red Shirt, and Rocky Bear outside Cody's tent, and took other photographs of her as she painted camp scenes. Almost a decade later, Cody incorporated some of these photographs in a show poster that depicted Rosa Bonheur painting him, as if to remind his audience he was not just a showman, but a historical subject in his own right.
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As we have seen, Cody crafted Buffalo Bill's Wild West to be “true to nature,” or realistic, by reworking real elements into an organic simulacrum which evoked the emotional experience of the authentic. In this, he kept company with Bonheur, and differed mightily with Gauguin and Munch, who exaggerated or manipulated the human form to make larger poetic and philosophical statements. But the interest and enthusiasm the Wild West show evoked even from the youthful avant garde imply that its themes and symbols resonated with the most profound cultural questions of the day. Just as Edward Aveling saw in the show a display of social evolution, in Europe its vivid portrayal of primitivism and progress colliding in mythic combat was a living, breathing reprise of the dialectic that created, in Freud's words, “civilization and its discontents.” Buffalo Bill's Wild West simultaneously affirmed the rise of the modern world and entertained some of its most potent critics.
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The political resonances of the show's primitive valor were more far-reaching even than its uses as parody. Buffalo Bill's Wild West returned to Europe early in the twentieth century. In the south of France, in 1905, the show became a fascination for the Marquis Folco de Baroncelli-Javon, who for years afterward corresponded with Lakota performers Jacob White Eyes and Sam Lone Bear, and the vaquero Pedro Esquivel (who answered all Baroncelli's letters in flawless French).
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Baroncelli was a personal friend of the great Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral, with whom he shared a belief that the south of France, and especially his home region of the marshy, sun-splashed Camargue, was a realm of ancient myth and folk traditions which had been all but obliterated by an occupying French government and the Catholic Church. He called the people of the region his “race,” and conjured for them an ancestry that extended to ancient times. Baroncelli referred often to the Albigensian Crusade of the thirteenth century, when the pope unleashed a crusade against the Cathars, a primitivist sect denounced as heretics. The center of the Cathar movement was in the south of France, which became the site of terrible bloodletting and persecution. Baroncelli saw this both as exemplary of his homeland's colonization by Paris, and as a precursor to Sioux experience in the United States. Locating his “noble brothers” among the show's Indians, he took a number of them out for lunch in Marseilles. Subsequently, he dressed in Sioux headdresses and moccasins (which he bought from Indians in the Wild West camp), wrote letters to “my Indian brothers” (sending along an “English translation of the work, in Provençal, of our great national poet, Mistral, to whom we all sent from Marseilles a card which we all signed if you remember”), and pined for an imagined—and lost—regional autonomy (which we may presume in part expressed his aristocratic alienation from democratic Paris).
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Baroncelli and Frédéric Mistral together met Cody, who was described in the local press as having “the build of d'Artagnan and the hat of Mistral,” in 1905, when the show wintered for five months near Marseilles, and Baroncelli continued to visit Indians and cowboys in the camp for months afterward.
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The show's devotion to the mythic centaur found an acolyte in Baroncelli. The marquis was an advocate for the mounted, trident-bearing cattle drovers of the Camargue, the so-called
gardians,
who were celebrated by Mistral and Baroncelli himself as symbols of racial purity and throwbacks to rustic, premodern regionalism, much like the cowboys of Wyoming and Texas. Baroncelli also wrote poems, one of them to the native bull of the Camargue, which he believed was descended—like Aryan people—from forebears who swept westward out of Asia, and which he presented as the source of Europe's ancient bull-monsters, the Minotaur and the god Mithra. (The heroic bull spirit of his poem “Le Taureau” explains his past, “
I
have
known the centaurs.”)
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In fact, under Baroncelli's guidance and the patronage of Mistral, the code of the stalwart, masculine, mounted
gardian
developed contemporaneously with that of the taciturn Anglo cowboy, who was enshrined as America's hero with Owen Wister's
The Virginian
in 1902. As inspiration for the valorizing of a “folk” type, Mistral's poetry was like Wister's work. Just as the American novel helped lure Thomas Edison and others to capture the romance of the Wild West's “vanishing cowboy” on film, so a Paris crew arrived at Baroncelli's estate only shortly after the Wild West company left Marseilles on its 1906 tour. The marquis wrote to his Sioux friends that the firm sought “to cinematograph all the scenes described in this poem and it is I, my guardians, my oxen, and my horses who represented those scenes.”
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The uses of film in extolling revamped folk myths of this sort expanded to western movies, and some of the first films created in France were westerns. One of these was directed by Jean Hamman, who claimed inspiration from Buffalo Bill's Wild West, which he saw in Paris as a child, in 1889. Hamman, also a friend of Baroncelli, began calling himself “Joe” in deference to his cowboy fantasies, and in furtherance of which, in 1904, he went to Montana, where he worked as a cowboy on the Ranch 44. There he met a Cody nephew, Henry Goodman. He returned to France by 1905, where he reunited with Goodman and met Cody when the Wild West show's French tour of that year got under way. Hamman was a painter and a poet, and he soon became a filmmaker, directing one of the first westerns in any country,
Cowboy,
in 1907, in which he featured real
gardians
and which he set in the Camargue. He also produced one of the earliest Buffalo Bill movies, in 1909—while Cody was still performing in the Wild West show—called
Les
Aventures de Buffalo Bill.
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Baroncelli and others denied that Cody shaped the development of
gar
dian traditions, and even suggested that Cody borrowed ideas from them.
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But the question of who influenced whom only distracts from the larger truth: the Wild West's “living pictures” of heroic primitives, fighting a losing battle against the higher civilization and the advent of the modern, exemplified a much larger, transnational search for premodern traditions on which modern national identities paradoxically depended. In this sense, Buffalo Bill's Wild West was one of a large number of thoroughly modern enterprises engaged in what Eric Hobsbawm calls the “mass production of traditions.” By reshaping folk and regional traditions into national myths, Cody joined historians, filmmakers, dramatists, novelists, and poets in providing identities for the citizens of the new constitutional monarchies and nation-states that were so quickly replacing the monarchies and empires of the past.
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But, while his picturesque evocation of the frontier myth provided a unifying story and identity for Americans, its central narrative of beleaguered primitives provided grist, however unintentionally, for a diverse range of people across Europe whose relationships to the modern state ranged from chauvinism to alienation.

In this connection, the show's lasting influence in Germany, as in France, was most directly through its Indians. The nation of Germany was only twenty years old when Buffalo Bill's Wild West debuted there in 1890, and mythic images of the American frontier and its noble savages—and savage savages—had been standards of German art and fiction for most of the nineteenth century.
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George Catlin's Indian Gallery had been popular in Germany four decades before, as were the Missouri River watercolors of the German Swiss artist Karl Bodmer. Long before Cody arrived, a string of German novelists and adventurers produced lurid western tales through which their readers fantasized about America's economic opportunity and freedom from lingering feudalism, and the mythic racial unity of her primitive tribesmen. Of course, large numbers of Germans had emigrated to the United States, and their accounts of the country and its frontier fueled enthusiasm for things western.

Not surprisingly, Indians had become a feature of German amusements well before Cody arrived in 1890. Zoos often incorporated ethnological exhibits, and there was an Indian village at the Dresden Zoo by 1879.
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Buffalo Bill's Wild West so enhanced enthusiasm for the primitive spectacle in Germany that by 1906, when Cody's show made its second tour of Germany, cowboy and Indian performance was a standard offering in circuses. Beginning in 1912, the famed Circus Sarrasani of Dresden began a permanent cowboy-and-Indian feature, “Sarrasanis-Wild-West-Schau.” American Indians found steady employment in Germany, moving through Buffalo Bill's Wild West on a round that took them from show, to circus, to ethnological exhibit, and back again, often selling “authentic” crafts to make extra pay. Edward Two-Two, a Lakota from Pine Ridge, worked this circuit for many years. When he died, in 1914, he was buried in Dresden at his own request (and where his grave is reportedly still tended by hobbyists and descendants of his German friends).
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In 1929, Marquis de Baroncelli received a postcard from his old friend Sam Lone Bear, who was again in Dresden, working for the Circus Sarrasani.
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