Louis S. Warren (71 page)

One key to relevance for Cody's Rough Riders in this urban setting was its gathering of frontier rhetoric and Indian war into a discussion that incorporated many of the immigrants and new Americans who constituted the modern city. As Matthew Frye Jacobson has observed, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, America was preoccupied in part with the necessary import of labor to produce the profusion of goods and services that defined the industrial economy.
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America's encounter with the world was occurring not only overseas but also within American borders. Cities teemed with strange, sometimes mysterious, and often frightening immigrants and alien neighborhoods. The urban middle classes—white, English-speaking, and educated—felt ever more besieged. The Congress of Rough Riders, combining Eurasian and American riders, whirling with color and martial ardor, and arrayed in a grand historic narrative, provided a story and a means of understanding America's place in a world that often seemed to be overrunning the United States.

In doing so, the Rough Rider additions layered new meanings onto Cody's entertainment which few could have foreseen at the debut of the Wild West show a decade earlier. Part of the Rough Riders' appeal was the way they allowed Americans to experiment with an older tradition of ethnic comparison. As we have seen, Americans compared their frontier horsemen, especially Indians and cowboys, to a host of legendary, exotic riding contingents, including Cossacks, Gypsies, and Turkmen. In the same breath, they compared them to riders in the circus, an amusement which after all was founded by Philip Astley, a cavalry officer from foreign shores, and which often featured exotic (or exotic-looking) trick riders. William Cody ventured a sort of comparison between Cossack riders and American cowboys in an interview with a Philadelphia journalist in 1888: “I don't know anything about cossack riding, because I never saw any of it, but I will guarantee that our men can do anything that cossacks can do and more, too.”
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Allowing Americans to witness the real riders of legend, and to make their own decisions about which peoples produced the best horsemen, was no small thing. As we have seen, the lone horseman was a fading figure in the modern urban world, but his command of the animal reflected his control of nature and signified the strength or weakness of racial energies. As Frederic Remington observed about the show's Rough Riders, “The great interest which attaches to the whole show is that it enables the audience to take sides on the question of which people ride best and have the best saddle. The whole thing is put in such tangible shape as to be a regular challenge to debate to lookers on.”
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At another level, Cossack, German, English, and, later, Arab and other Eurasian horsemen provided the show a historical rationale for its journeys in the Old World, at once explaining Cody's long absence in Europe (the American frontiersman had gone to Europe to see old frontiers) and fending off any suggestion that he or his cast of Nature's Noblemen had been corrupted by their long sojourn in the halls of Culture. In promoting the Rough Riders, Cody's publicists played up the imminent danger of war along Europe's convoluted racial frontiers, and held up the Wild West show as a force for peace. Buffalo Bill maintained amity between his company's “half-savage” cowboys and Mexicans and its warring Indian tribes (all those “Pawnees,” “Arapahoes,” “Crow,” and “Cheyenne,” who were actually Lakota Sioux). He advanced international arbitration as a means to keep the peace between Britain and the United States in 1887. Now, he presented the Wild West show as a calming influence in Europe's simmering border contests. In 1890–91, some of the cast had wintered over with the show's livestock “at the foot of the Vosges Mountains in disputed Alsace-Lorraine,” wrote John Burke. Even in 1890, competing French and German claims to the region (which would contribute to the First World War in 1914) menaced “the peace not only of the two countries interested but of the civilized world. . . . What a field for the vaunted champions of humanity, the leaders of civilization! What a neighborhood wherein to sow the seeds of ‘peace on earth and good-will to men.' What a crucible for the universal panacea, arbitration!”
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Back in the United States, the constant reference to armed European frontiers assisted Cody's imposture as world peacemaker, a pose which balanced the show's increasing militarization. The Congress of Rough Riders of the World offered a synthesis of world history, in which mounted race warriors clashed in grand Darwinian combat from the Old World to the New. Its Cossacks, gauchos, and European military riders appeared alongside its premier attraction, the New World cowboys and Indians, reinforcing the show's traditional emphasis on the East-to-West course of American history by suggesting a historical movement of an ancient, ongoing race war from Eurasia to North America, echoing the stories of Anglo-Saxonists and Aryanists alike.

At the most superficial level, the champions of this unending race war were cowboys, the show's version of distilled whiteness, despite all the nonwhite men who actually road as cowboys in the show.
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Whatever the racial composition of the participants, the horseback stunts of the new contingents were so striking that the word “centaur” sprang from publicity even more often than before. The galloping gaucho was “a near approach to the mythical centaur,” like “the North American Indian, the Cowboy, the Vaquero, the Cossack, and the Prairie Scout.” Gauchos wrapped their bolas—leather thongs with iron balls at each end— around posts from sixty feet away, and subdued fierce broncos by riding them in pairs. Cossacks stood on their heads in the saddle, hung off the sides of their horses until their heads brushed the ground, and stood on the backs of galloping horses, slicing the air with powerful sweeps of their swords.

Hailing from the Old World, the show's new racial segments were practically living ancestors of the American cowboys, but they were degraded by miscegenation that blurred the ancient race frontiers they supposedly guarded. Cossacks were widely known in the United States as semi-civilized (or semi-savage) warriors from the Russian Empire. In reality, they were often as racially ambiguous as American range cowhands. But in Cody's show Cossacks were “of the Caucasian line.” They were “the flower of that vast horde of irregular cavalry” that the czar had “planted along the southern frontier of the Russian Empire” to contain Asiatic enemies. But programs also said they miscegenated with Muslim Circassians, until they were “as much Circassian as Cossack.” Exactly how white they remained was left for the audience to decide. One London writer saw through the Cossack disguise, reporting (truthfully), that they were trick riders from the province of Georgia, and not actually “Cossacks” at all. Another, who had substantial experience with Russian Cossacks, surmised, “Their peculiar accent and unmistakeable gestures, as well as certain movements in their dance, created a strong suspicion in me that they are Caucasian Jews.”
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Of the frontier originals on display, the only racially “pure” contingents were cowboys and Indians. The racially degenerate Cossacks, gauchos, and Mexicans suggested the constant threat of race decay that awaited racial enemies who forsook combat long enough to embrace.

The white American cowboy, a master of the frontier whose blood remained unmixed, would conquer the world, ushering in the new millennium of white civilization, itself signified in Buffalo Bill's “conquest” of Rome and the Old World, now recounted in show brochures and memoirs. Cowboy horses were as racially pristine as the cowboys themselves, and publicists went to great lengths developing a theory of equine evolution that paralleled the show's history of frontier whiteness. Each year, Cody replenished the show's stable through off-season purchases of horses that would look right in the ring. But in the Rough Riders' debut season, their horses were said to be a “race” descended from the horses of Cortés, on the backs of which the first conquistador appeared as a “four-legged warrior.” Dissatisfied even with this pedigree, John Burke reached into dim mists of the primeval, to the ancestor of all horses, an animal that was polydactilic, that is, multitoed. “Some instances have been known in modern times, and ancient records give stories, of horses presenting more than one toe. Julius Caesar's horse,” he wrote, “is said to have had this peculiarity.” Caesar's horse inspired ancient Roman soothsayers to predict “that its owner would be lord of the world.” Horses of the Wild West show (newly returned from the conquest of Rome) were mustangs of the Southwest, whose peculiarities similarly portended American power. “Most of the polydactyl horses found in the present day have been raised in the southwest of America, or from that ancestry bred.”
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As racially distilled men, hardened in frontier combat, astride animals in whose veins pulsed the blood of ancient, world-conquering horses, cowboys were bulwarks against the modern age and all its miscegenated, manufactured, and artificial blandishments. They and their nation were bound for glory.

Buffalo Bill's entertainment was only one of many to valorize frontier race heroes as repositories of national virtue in the age of the mongrel city. Novelist Owen Wister contrasted cowboys, “Saxon boys of picked courage,” with immigrants, those “hordes of encroaching alien vermin, that turn our cities to Babels and our citizenship to hybrid farce.”
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The Congress of Rough Riders reinforced white supremacy as the culmination of world history, and thereby affirmed the subordination of immigrant ghettoes, as well as the segregation of races, Jim Crow laws, and the tidal wave of lynchings which swept the nation in the 1890s.

ALL OF WHICH makes surprising how much the show now appealed to immigrants, too. As immigrants and their American-born children increased in numbers, they confronted Anglo-Saxonism and American racism not by demanding separation or cultural exclusiveness, but through rituals of assimilation. One of the most popular ways of asserting American identity was by going to public amusements, where immigrants were so numerous that they were now an economic force.
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A glance at Brooklyn makes this point. In 1890, the U.S. census enumerated 806,343 Brooklyn residents. Over 260,000 of these—one-third of the populace—were foreign-born. One-third of these, the largest immigrant group, were Germans, who numbered 94,000. Another 90,000 were Irish.
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Some saw the show, or heard about it, during its European tours. Even before the show debuted, many were drawn to America partly by fantasies of lawless frontiers (where there were no punitive elites to demand taxes or labor), abundant buffalo (free meat), and easily dispatched Indians (people even lower down the social ladder than European peasants). In the 1880s, the show's best seats cost fifty cents, too much for most immigrants. But the cheap seats, at twenty-five cents, were within reach, if barely.
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Ethnic affinity with Rough Rider contingents increased the show's appeal for Germans, and other immigrants, too. We may speculate that during the show's six-month stay in Brooklyn, German Rough Riders, the cuirassiers, relaxed in Brooklyn's many German beer gardens, and found a semblance of the homeland in the “Klein Deutschland” of the Williamsburgh neighborhood. In Milwaukee, home to a large German population, immigrants jammed the stands and cheered the cuirassiers in 1896. Perhaps there were Arabs, such as the Syrians who moved into lower New York in the 1880s, who forged American identities through the debut appearance of Arabs in the show in 1894. At least one of these performers saw his Wild West tenure as a ritual of Americanization. George Hamid was a Lebanese immigrant and acrobat who became owner of the Hamid Morton Circus, as well as of the Steel Pier in New Jersey and the New Jersey State Fair, on his way to becoming “the king of the carnival bookers” by the 1940s. He traced his success to his first job in American entertainment, in 1906, when he began his stint as a “Riffian Arabian Horseman” in the Congress of Rough Riders (he also told a tall tale about learning to read from Annie Oakley—who had left the show in 1901, and probably never had anything to do with George Hamid).
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The stories of Germans and of Hamid are compelling, but whatever the strength of ethnic bonds between immigrant audiences and their Wild West counterparts, some immigrants—especially the Irish and Germans—were drawn also to American performers as naturalizing symbols. Where Remington and Wister saw cowboys and soldiers as a last bastion of Anglo-America in an immigrant world, the cowboy and army contingents fairly bristled with Irish and German names like McCormack, Gallagher, Ryan, McPhee, Shanton, Schenck, Franz, and Kanstein.
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Irish and non-Irish readers alike could imagine themselves as frontier Indian fighters, when “Trumpeter Connolly, of the Seventh Cavalry,” recounted his sanguine experience at Wounded Knee for a newspaper reporter. These ethnic names reflected the presence of Irish and German immigrants in the actual West, and the maturation of their descendants as Americans.
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The challenges of becoming native to a new country seem to have been on the minds of Germans in another way. A few surviving reviews from the German American press suggest that the presence of German soldiers, who are barely mentioned, was less important to German immigrants than the show's tour of Germany, which was recounted in detail. In a sense, the show's tenure in Germany gave the Wild West a cachet with German immigrants through a naturalizing process that mirrored what German immigrants hoped to experience in the United States. One reviewer explained, with some enthusiasm, that the show had recently wintered over in Bennefeldt, in Alsace Lorraine. The following spring, “when Col. Cody returned to Bennefeldt, his cowboys had almost become German.” At the same time, Cody's press agents reached out to Germans by speaking of German American cities as worthy counterparts to citadels of German culture in Europe. “Milwaukee is the only city in the United States that can be compared to a German city,” John Burke flattered the reporter from Milwaukee's
Deutsche Eindrucke,
“and rightly deserves to be called the Munich of America. In no other city do you find the age old German charm that dominates here.”
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