Louis S. Warren (77 page)

The emphasis on abundant meals—everyone was entitled to all they could eat—reflected the show's management ethos. “Feed a man well and you keep him good natured and willing to work—that's the plan upon which this commissary is run.” Unionism was the bugbear of corporate owners, and those managers who could retain managerial control
and
a happy workforce were highly prized. In this respect, Cody's commissary seemed a model for labor relations. At mealtime, hundreds of “happy participants” dined together under one tent, which had “the atmosphere of a perpetual and mammoth pure-food show combined with a protracted Labor Day picnic”—absent the union. The results were noticeable. “They all work hard and this kind of life seems to be good for the appetite.” Or, to employ another metaphor which both discounted a class reading of the show's cast and reemphasized Cody's managerial and paternal prowess, “if ‘table manners' are a true indication of good breeding, Colonel Cody certainly knows how to bring up a family—and a large one, too!”
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HISTORIANS HAVE WRITTEN of the Wild West show as a nostalgic spectacle of a vanished frontier and an icon of Gilded Age imperialism. It was these things. But it was much more. There in Ambrose Park, on the southern tip of Brooklyn, in a lot next to the Thirty-ninth Street ferry dock, sprouted not just a show about race wars past and present. The almost seamless “moving pictures” of the inexorable passage from savagery to civilization suggested that all of these harsh conflicts between white and red, present and past, modern and primitive, could be, and would be, reconciled in the unfurling of the national pageant, as naturally as the flag fluttering from the top of the arena's Rocky Mountains. The show's tenure in Brooklyn, as in other American cities, suggested that America, a new nation sprung from wild nature, would dominate the coming urban and technological age. Her frightening and exploding polyglot cities, clanking, grinding, and spewing the goods and detritus of industry, would be tamed and settled by the same domineering spirit that conquered the frontier, and the same white families who accomplished that tremendous feat would achieve it in America's dark urban spaces.

To be sure, the show's refrain of white mastery can only seem backward today. But, in the end, what is so startling about the Wild West show is how forward-looking a show it was, and how much Buffalo Bill himself represented a harbinger of future events as much as the embodiment of historical development. Many of the more visionary camp observers would see the camp's organization projected into real politics shortly after 1900. As recent historians of the Progressive era have observed, reformers cloaked American problems and potential solutions in the rhetoric of family, much as the Wild West show had done in the early 1890s.
¹¹⁴
From public health to prohibition, electrification to professional social management, a great deal of modern America seemed to swirl out of this spectacle of American history. There was something more than the past circulating around the timeless race wars between cowboys, Indians, Cossacks, and Mexicans. Between the garden plots and the electrical generating plants that lit the grounds, in the spaces between Cody's modern tent with its telephone and office furniture and the smoky Indian tipis, something else flitted about. There, in sparkling and alluring fragments, at the corner of our vision, the future glimmered.

The Johnson Brothers

BETWEEN 1852 AND 1854, 10,000 Swedes emigrated to the United States. They came for land. Among them were John Johnson and his wife, Karen Svenson Johnson. John worked years in Chicago as a hack driver before he could take up a farm. His son, Rolf, was born in 1856. In 1868, George was born. By this time, their family farm was in the Swedish settlement surrounding Altona, in northwest Illinois. But the droughts of 1874 nearly wiped them out. When two agents from the Union Pacific arrived, touting the benefits of relocating to thinly populated Phelps County, Nebraska (population 110), the Johnsons listened carefully. The family moved to Nebraska with dozens of other Swedes, most of whom took up residence along “the Divide,” a high plateau of rich farmland running diagonally across Phelps County. Ultimately, there were seven children, five sons and two daughters. The Johnsons spoke Swedish at home, and like many of their fellow Swedes in Nebraska, they were strong Lutherans. Of an evening, they took turns reciting Bible verses in Swedish around the kitchen table. In some ways, it was an insular life. The Swedes of Phelps marshaled their own political party, taking over the county government from native-born English-speakers in a thunderous victory in 1879.

Nebraska's Swedes were legendary farmers. Through drought, prairie fires, and plagues of locusts, they persevered. Someday, their devotion to farming would become a symbol of Americanness itself. But at the time commentators saw Swedes as weaker immigrant stock. They were unadventurous, cautious, and without the risk-taking attributes of genuine, hard-driving white folks who became cowboys. “Even in the cattle country the respectible Swedes settle chiefly to farming, and are seldom horsemen,” sighed novelist and nativist Owen Wister.
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Perhaps partly for this reason, each of the Johnson boys grew dissatisfied with farming. By 1890, almost one in five Nebraskans was an immigrant, and if the American-born children of immigrants were added to the mix, the immigrants made up almost half the state's population.
²
Like many of these, the Johnsons each hungered for a ritual to identify himself as American. Each “went west” in symbolic, spectacular ways. In 1877 and again in 1879, young Rolf, then in his early twenties, left home to travel through Nebraska, New Mexico, and Colorado. He tried his hand at trapping beaver. His camp was overrun by stampeding cattle. He hunted buffalo—and just about everything else. Rolf Johnson was an avid reader, and in diaries and letters, he noted his meetings with famous westerners in terms that suggest his own mythic quest for an encounter with nature that would make him into the quintessential American. Thus he recorded his encounters with Bill Doyle, the “noted plainsman,” Pony Rogers, a “famous frontiersman,” and Ash-Hollow Jack, “the famous scout, hunter, guide, and champion pistol shot of the plains.”
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But his most famous acquaintances needed no introduction. In passing Red Willow Creek, he described it as “a place where ‘Buffalo Bill' and ‘Texas Jack' distinguished themselves in battle with Indians about eight years ago.” Later, he stopped in North Platte to see Buffalo Bill's house, met Captain Jack Crawford in the Black Hills and on the streets in Denver, and saw Texas Jack at a Denver theater in
The Trapper's Daughter.

Having soaked up a good deal of the West, both real and imagined, Rolf had his picture taken in a Denver studio. He dressed “in true western fashion”: his long golden hair down to his shoulders, a wide-brimmed hat with the brim peeled back in the front, a kerchief around his neck and a sporty jacket with a handkerchief in the pocket. The glowing innocence of that photograph shines through today, as does its uncanny resemblance to the many photos of scout dramatists like Texas Jack, Captain Jack, and the inevitable Buffalo Bill. Rolf settled down to marriage in 1882 and traveled no more.
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Young George, twelve years his junior, was fascinated with horses. He was raised on a farm north of Holdredge; his mother recalled that by the age of seven he would be found standing too close to the unbroken ponies his father had bought, no matter how many times she warned him to stay away.

He grew up in the saddle, and like Rolf, he went “West.” By this time, the country where Rolf had hunted buffalo was ranch country, whose cowboys had moved from outcasts to heroes. In 1890, George Johnson was cowboying on a spread belonging to Francis Warren, Wyoming's governor. When an uncle advised him that Buffalo Bill Cody was at his North Platte ranch, hiring new cowboys for a revamped Wild West show, Johnson took a trip down to North Platte and tried out. Cody was impressed with Johnson's riding, and with his personable demeanor. He invited the young man to stay at his house in North Platte, which he did for four days. By the summer of 1893, Johnson was part of the dazzling Rough Rider crew that entranced the million-plus visitors to the showgrounds at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The show may have belonged to Buffalo Bill, but Johnson used it to stage his own frontier imposture. George Johnson, son of immigrants, traveled to the city of immigrants, where as show cowboy and Rough Rider, he was America's native son and natural man.

The American Rough Rider received letters from his mother in Swedish. Indeed, though he was often far from home, the strength of his family bonds was almost otherworldly. When a sister-in-law back in Nebraska unwrapped the newsprint from an item she had bought at the store, she was surprised to find herself holding a page from a New York newspaper. Smoothing it out to read it, her eye was attracted to a brief item relating how a cowboy in Buffalo Bill's show, one George Johnson, had hurt his finger during a roping act but kept right on with the performance. The show was dangerous work, but Johnson was lucky. In eight years as a leading Rough Rider, he sustained only that one injury.

In 1896, Buffalo Bill's Wild West show came to North Platte, Nebraska. The town's population was 3,500. The stands had a capacity of 10,000. The countryside emptied out on the day of the show, as the people of the hinterlands poured into North Platte, eager for Nebraska's own Buffalo Bill, and for the local boys in his entourage. The Johnson family arrived in force, elated at seeing George, who “came riding out and did all his performing right in front of us.” To his family, and to George, too, the imposture of Rough Riding was no fraud. That George could take part in Cody's show was proof of the larger opportunity of America. After all, had not the Johnsons, the poor immigrants, become established, all through their own hard work? Was not Buffalo Bill's show, with its optimistic story of American greatness, based on truths like this?

During one of the show's long stands at Madison Square Garden, George met a young woman named Mary A. Moore. She gave him a small Bible. He promised to read it every night. When he returned home to Nebraska, he told his mother about Mary Moore, and soon the two women were regular correspondents. George Johnson and Moore had plans.

The young man, now thirty years old, resigned from the show soon after. Cody and Salsbury were reluctant to lose him. Always an operator, Salsbury had the idea to hire Johnson as a cowboy on his gigantic Square Butte ranch in Montana. Perhaps he could be persuaded to return to the show later.

Johnson went back to Nebraska, and invited his little brother, Robert, to join him in “a trip to the West.” So Robert Johnson followed his brother, the local hero who rode with Buffalo Bill, to Montana. They worked on different ranches, George on the Square Butte, Robert with a neighboring outfit. In the ranch bunkhouse, George Johnson was a friendly, mentoring presence. Long after, cowboys remembered him as the smiling, genial top hand who every evening read a chapter of the small Bible he kept by his bed. He didn't care if everybody saw him.

In the fall of 1899, George and Robert rode in the seasonal roundup together. On the morning of November 12, George rode past his brother, smiled, and remarked, “Red brought me a letter from Mother, but I have not had time to read it.” Moments later, he roped a steer. Just as the rope tightened, his horse stepped into a gopher hole. Robert recalled, “At the speed he was going it jerked the horse high in the air and he hit the ground with his feet in the air and George tight in the saddle.”

They carried George Johnson to the camp on a piece of canvas. Within hours, he was dead.

If a man can be judged by how warmly and richly remembered he is, George Johnson must have been a good man indeed. Nate Salsbury and the other owners of the Square Butte ranch paid for a copper and brass casket, and a gigantic gravestone made of Vermont granite. Cowboys sent along the pair of antelope legs that hung over the bunkhouse door where Johnson slept. Mary Moore sent a fan of palm leaves, which would hang on the wall in the Johnson family home for decades. Back in Nebraska, his was the first funeral held in the new church. The congregation sang “Hah Skall Oppna Parleporten”—He Will Open the Pearly Gates. Over a hundred teams of horses escorted his body from the church to Moses Hill Cemetery, where they laid his body in the ground.

Buffalo Bill's Wild West cowboys, Chicago,
1893.
Note the racial mixture of
the cowboy cast. George Johnson, son of Swedish immigrants, is in the back
row, fourth from the left (under the X and the arrow drawn by a proud rel
ative). Note the Mexican cowboys, too. Courtesy Phelps County Historical
Society/Nebraska Prairie Museum, Holdredge, Nebraska.

SIXTY YEARS AFTER George died, an elderly Robert Johnson recalled his journey west with his brother in a letter to his extended family. It was not as fresh or as wide-eyed as Rolf's western diaries, but it marked the story of his own western migration, his rite of passage into the heart of America. Robert Johnson explained again how George had died, how he, Robert, had taken his body fifty miles, to Fort Benton, Montana, and then traveled with it on the train to Holdredge. He recalled how devastated he was to meet his mother and sisters on the platform, their faces wet with tears.

Now across the great divide and at the home ranch door
I know he will meet and warmly greet the Boys who have gone before.

But as if to capture some glimmer of the optimism that was in George, the still-grieving brother retrieved some of the Rough Rider's old stationery, which he had saved all those years. The relatives who received his Christmas letter in the age of
Sputnik
and Elvis Presley were surprised to see the bold, elegant letterhead—“Buffalo Bill's Wild West”—with the preprinted date line, “Chicago, 1893,” and over it, in Robert's emphatic block numbers, “1959.” Robert Johnson remembered his brother, the son of Swedish immigrants and farmers, through the Wild West show, its cowboys, and its glorious Chicago season. He inscribed across its page his own memory of his brother and their trip to the mythic outpost of the vestigial West. Over four decades after the show had closed for good, family memories of George Johnson yet traveled through the medium of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, which would be a part of the Johnson family saga as long as there was a Johnson family.

Robert Johnson's resort to Wild West show stationery was a nostalgic gesture of hope in a hard season. Remembering George still made him tearful. “My heart is heavy to night,” he wrote to his relatives. Maybe he was just depressed, an old man, his farm parched in what seemed to be an emerging drought. Only a quarter inch of moisture had fallen so far that year. His letter complete, he went to bed. When he awoke, he found the day unexpectedly bright. He scribbled one last note in the margin beneath that flamboyant letterhead: “I have two inches water in my rain gauge. Wonderful.”
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Then he mailed the letter.