by David Wolman
The situation went from tense to critical in a flash. A bullock caught the cowboys’ scent and panicked, setting off a stampede. Eben leapt sideways into the brush to avoid being flattened.
As soon as they passed, Eben stood and fired into the sky to warn the others. He followed the cattle and emerged from the forest certain he was too late and that he would soon come upon James’s trampled corpse. But a moment later he heard a “voice of triumph” and rode quickly to the source. It was James Purdy, shirt torn and hat gone, standing over a huge bullock tied up at his feet.
They killed the animal, cut it into quarters, and hung them from the limb of a koa tree, out of reach of wild hogs. Later, they packed the hide and kidney fat home. In his journal, Eben gushed about James Purdy: “My joy for this man and his marvelous work and marvelous ride was beyond understanding.”
While many paniolo fit the cowboy stereotype of taciturn men of action, Eben was an extrovert who seemed to have a limitless capacity for grandstanding. He even made sure to look the part, with his horseshoe mustache and, in some photos, a holstered six-shooter, a weapon paniolo had little use for.
Eben loved his job, but he also saw the impact ranching and wild cattle were having on his beloved island, and he worried about the long-term environmental consequences more than most of his contemporaries. He had good reason to: by 1900, fully one-third of the land area of the Hawaiian archipelago was allocated for rangeland. “Forests everywhere have decreased and some seem to be drying up,” Eben wrote. “This is a sad sight.” Cattle browsed new vegetation before it could grow, and their hooves tore up the ground, hastening erosion. One turn-of-the-century scientist noted: “I doubt that anything in nature, axe and fire included, would have in the same space of time brought the once densely clothed Islands to the present condition . . . The changes have been brought to the benefit of the very few, to the detriment of the whole Islands and community.”
Yet in Eben’s view, it was greed and the “desire for ‘civilized’ ways” that were to blame for Hawaii’s ravaged beauty, not ranching itself. His thinking revealed the unique relationship Hawaiians had with cattle. They may be an invasive species in the textbook sense, but they also had a kind of exalted status, tracing back to their origins as the king’s cattle. They had survived to become the foundation of an industry and proud Hawaiian subculture that Eben Low, like Jack Purdy before him, represented with verve.
Meanwhile, a world away in North America, another larger-than-life character, an impresario in the saddle, was turning cowboy culture into mainstream entertainment. In so doing, he would embed the sport of rodeo and the cowboy spirit in the soul of America.
7
Showtime
IF THERE WAS A single living person who embodied the idea of the American West, it was William Frederick Cody. He was born in February 1846 near the hamlet of Le Claire in the Iowa Territory, just west of the Mississippi River. His parents, Isaac and Mary, came from pioneer families. Continuing this tradition, the Codys uprooted from Le Claire in 1853 and moved to a dirt-floor cabin in Kansas. There Isaac scraped together a living supplying lumber and other goods to nearby Fort Leavenworth and local tribes. As Cody put it later, “I spent all my spare time picking up the Kickapoo tongue from the Indian children in the neighborhood, and listening with both ears to the tales of the wide plains beyond.” Willie’s life was full of contradictions: one minute his father would be conducting peaceful business with the Kickapoo; the next saw him happily negotiating with troops who were the tip of the spear in the U.S. Army’s campaign against native tribes.
If that wasn’t confusing enough, his family was torn apart by the issue of slavery. His father was a staunch abolitionist, while his father’s brother owned slaves. When Willie was ten, his father was stabbed after giving an antislavery speech, and died of his injuries.
Instead of being consumed by tragedy, Cody turned to a life of adventure. By the age of fifteen, he had already worked on a wagon train to Wyoming, had prospected for gold in Colorado, and was alleged to have ridden for the Pony Express. After serving as a scout for the 7th Volunteer Kansas Infantry during the Civil War, he took a job hunting buffalo to supply railroad workers with meat.
Shooting North America’s largest land mammal from the back of a galloping horse was as difficult as it was dangerous. Bison can weigh over two tons, and a stampeding herd raised a massive dust cloud that made it impossible to avoid holes and other hazards. But Cody was a natural: he claimed 4,280 kills in 18 months, most using a .50 caliber Springfield rifle he named Lucretia Borgia. This broke all previous records and earned him the nickname he would carry to worldwide fame: Buffalo Bill.
Cody’s résumé grew more extensive by the year. He worked as a scout for the U.S. 5th Cavalry, receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor for his service in 1872. In between missions, he guided famous clients like Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich of Russia and George Armstrong Custer on hunting trips.
His charisma and knack for promotion made the transition to show business almost inevitable. By age twenty-six, he had gained enough fame to start playing a stage version of himself in productions in the East, starting with a role in a melodrama called The Scouts of the Prairie; or, Red Deviltry As It Is. Audiences were hungry for anything having to do with a romanticized version of the briskly changing West, even as the messy reality was still unfolding. It was the dawn of the dime novel, inexpensive books that told sensationalized tales of outlaws, lawmen, and other denizens of the Wild West. Cody—or, more accurately, the character “Buffalo Bill” Cody—eventually starred in some 1,700 of them.
In 1883, Cody organized a traveling theatrical production that would turn him into one of the first true global superstars. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was a shelf of dime novels brought to life. It featured reenactments of famous events—Custer’s Last Stand, the Pony Express, the Deadwood stagecoach—with enough grit, noise, color, and excitement to keep crowds riveted.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West had more than five hundred performers, including famed sharpshooter Annie Oakley and entire families of Native Americans. The full production, complete with bison, elk, and horses, filled eighty-two train cars. The show toured Europe and the Americas, performing for presidents, royalty, and the occasional pope, and eventually ran for almost thirty years.
Cody had lived through many of the historical events his showcase portrayed, and that firsthand experience, combined with his thespian instinct, was a formula for winning fans and making money. If doing so meant sanding away reality’s rough edges so that the final product, the entertainment, bore only a surface resemblance to what had actually happened, so be it. Cody didn’t obsess over authenticity like we might today, perhaps because he knew that achieving it was impossible—reenactment, by definition, means exiting the realm of the real.
Nonetheless, Cody saw his Wild West performances more like a living history lesson than a “show” or, God forbid, a circus. Those were real bullets in Annie Oakley’s rifle and live bison in the “buffalo hunt,” although those guns fired blanks. (Cody boasted, apparently without irony, that there were “not so many buffaloes on the whole American continent” as he had on display.) Some of the Lakota Sioux who performed in the dramatization of Custer’s Last Stand had even taken part in the actual battle twenty-two years earlier; no wonder the performance was said to have moved Custer’s widow, Elizabeth, to tears.
In the end, the (white) heroes always defeated the (Indian) villains; the stagecoach always made it through; and cowboys dazzled with their horsemanship and roping wizardry. This version of history had no drudgery, poverty, drunkenness, or disease—just wilderness and wildness tamed by the forces of civilization and progress. It was the West that audiences wanted, even dreamed about, and they couldn’t get enough. Year after year, in arena after arena throughout the continent and beyond, sold-out crowds gobbled up Cody’s easily digestible stories of bravery and conquest.
BY 1898, AMERICA WAS
in a particularly martial mood. The Spanish-American War had raged for nearly four months over the spring and summer, with fighting from the Philippines to Guantánamo Bay. Some of the American soldiers who walked the streets of Cheyenne—and some of Cody’s performers—bore battle scars from places like Manila and San Juan. Just a few weeks before Cody opened the second Frontier Days celebrations, representatives from the United States and Spain signed a Protocol of Peace in Washington, D.C., that ended the fighting.
That same day, August 12, 1898, the Newlands Resolution came into effect, beginning the annexation process that would establish Hawaii as a U.S. territory. In contrast to the violent battles to “win” the frontier, the takeover of Hawaii was almost entirely peaceful, the end result of decades of slow-burn economic influence and political manipulation.* By the end of the 1800s, the vise of imperialism was tightening fast. Attempts to assert sovereignty, including creating a Hawaiian flag and issuing a Hawaiian currency, fell flat or were simply steamrolled by outside interests.
In the United States, advocates of expansion like Teddy Roosevelt believed it was America’s time to take the lead on the global stage. “If we are to be a really great people,” Roosevelt wrote, “we must strive in good faith to play a great part in the world.” The particularly American blend of capitalism, democracy, and religion seemed to be working so well that it was hard for some to understand why more “backward” places wouldn’t welcome this new and visionary formula for governance and prosperity.
Opponents of Manifest Destiny questioned the morality of taking over foreign lands and pointed out the heavy costs of administering an empire. Mark Twain, one of imperialism’s most vocal critics, imagined a future United States “returning, bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in Kiao-Chou, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pockets full of boodle, and her mouth full of hypocrisies. Give her soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass.” Besides, if any people had an insight into the tendency of colonies to revolt, it was Americans.
In 1891, Hawaii’s queen Lili‘uokalani tried to give native Hawaiians the right to vote. That was one step too far for Hawaii’s white businessmen, who overwhelmingly favored annexation. Under the pretense of protecting American lives and property, they organized a coup. John L. Stevens, the U.S. minister to Hawaii, was fully behind the action, writing that “the Hawaiian pear is now fully ripe and this is the golden hour for the United States to pluck it.”
On January 17, 1893, 162 U.S. Marines and Navy sailors occupied ‘Iolani Palace in Honolulu. One of the occupiers pried the jewels off the former king’s crown and later gambled them away playing dice. Hoping to avoid violence, the queen stepped down. The only casualty of the whole overthrow was a police officer who was shot in the shoulder.
Lili‘uokalani wrote to President Benjamin Harrison, pleading for him to “right whatever wrongs may have been inflicted upon us.” In due time, she wrote, “the true facts relating to this matter will be laid before you, and I live in the hope that you will judge uprightly and justly between myself and my enemies.” There is no record of a response. Sam Parker, John Palmer Parker’s grandson and a prominent political figure in the islands, was among those who added their signatures to the queen’s letter.
Over the following years, tensions grew between Hawaiian nationalists and foreigners who seemed to be almost itching for a fight. In 1893, a dozen Americans in Hawaii wrote to Sanford B. Dole, president of the American-dominated provisional government, volunteering to take up arms if necessary. But the only other violence was an abortive counterrevolution in January 1895. Several people were killed during three days of fighting, but the provisional government put down the uprising and placed the queen under house arrest in the palace for her alleged role in the plot. When a court found her guilty of treason, she had little choice but to abdicate and dissolve the monarchy to avoid further bloodshed.
The next big question in Washington was whether the United States would annex the islands. In 1897, tens of thousands of native Hawaiians signed a petition opposing annexation, which they considered illegal. Although the paniolo didn’t leave the ranches to take up arms and kept working for ranch owners who were mostly white, there are clues about their feelings regarding Hawaii’s political fate. Many paniolo signed the petition, including Ikua Purdy and much of the Parker Ranch crew. In the town of Hauula on Oahu, a man named George Parker (no relation to John Palmer Parker) was shown a “fine time” by local cowboys because of his support for a pro-Washington candidate: paniolo lassoed Parker and dragged him through the streets as policemen scrambled to defend him from a mob. “The cowboys rode in on their horses and with whoops, yells and lassoes proceeded to show the people that it was wise to vote the Home Rule ticket,” reported the local paper.
Around the same time, well-to-do foreigners were offering their opinions to Congress. William R. Castle, the former Hawaiian minister in Washington, declared that Americans in Hawaii “earnestly desire” annexation, as do “most thoughtful Hawaiians . . . [and] many other different nationalities.” Without this foothold in the Pacific, he said, “American ideas and European enlightenment must succumb to orientalism.” Events during the Spanish-American War had also convinced the U.S. military of Hawaii’s strategic value for a naval base and resupply station, and the quick victory against Spain had stoked imperialist sentiment in Washington. In 1898 alone, the United States would grab the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and part of the Samoan archipelago, and assume authority over Cuba.
On August 12, 1898, a ceremony took place at ‘Iolani Palace formalizing Hawaii’s annexation as a territory of the United States. Most native Hawaiians stayed home, including the royal family. Anyone who ventured out wore an ilima blossom, a symbol of support for the monarchy. The Royal Hawaiian Band played “Hawai‘i Pono‘ī,” the national anthem, as the Hawaiian flag was lowered over the palace for the last time and replaced with the Stars and Stripes.* The event epitomized the credo of Manifest Destiny—white Americans’ God-given right and duty to assert dominion over everywhere west of Plymouth Rock.
THE FLAGS IN CHEYENNE snapped in a knife-edged wind as the 1898 Frontier Days showcase got under way. “The beauties of a Wyoming climate were not apprciated [sic] by the visitors from Colorado,” wrote one local reporter, “especially the ladies who came to the celebration with no wraps and only a thin shirt waist to cover their bare arms.” At least one vendor at the park was undeterred, advertising “Ice cream cones—freeze your teeth and give your tongue a sleigh ride!”
Native Americans played a major role in the festivities, thanks in large part to the sixty Sioux who came to perform with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Ten Shoshone and ten Arapaho had also come to Cheyenne from Fort Washakie Reservation near Casper, which was home to about 2,000 men, women, and children. Early in the day, members of the three once-warring tribes met to share a peace pipe, shake hands, and exchange gifts. One of the Arapaho discovered that one of the Sioux was his uncle.
Cody’s relationship with Native Americans was inconsistent. In an 1866 battle, he killed a Cheyenne warrior named Tall Bull, leader of the Dog Soldiers, the most feared of the tribes’ warrior societies. Three weeks after Custer and his 7th Cavalry Regiment were annihilated at the Battle of Little Big Horn, Cody killed and scalped a Cheyenne warrior named Yellow Hair in the Battle of Warbonnet Creek in northwest Nebraska. In typical Cody style, he called it the First Scalp for Custer, and later made it a popular part of his show.
Yet Cody treated his Native American employees with a measure of respect. They had steady wages, which was no small thing at a time when tribes were languishing, even starving, on reservations. In his printed programs he tried to educate his audiences about the lives and customs of the Plains Indians. As he massaged the narrative of aggressors and victims, Cody still tried to ensure that his “exhibitions” didn’t cross the line into mockery like the popular minstrel shows of the time. During Frontier Days and other Wild W
est shows, local tribes performed dances and ceremonies. Native Americans also competed in horse and foot races, although the prize money was always less than what whites earned.
Still, Wild West shows were inherently one-sided and exploitative, even infantilizing. By presenting Native Americans as the antagonists in his grand pageant of the West, Cody reinforced negative views held by much of white America. And he certainly demonstrated a proprietary attitude toward his native employees; when the Bureau of Indian Affairs decided in 1890 that tribe members couldn’t leave their reservations anymore “for exhibition purposes”—the commissioner thought performing for paying customers could have “a demoralizing tendency and retard Indian progress”—Cody complained it would ruin his business.
It’s difficult to imagine the emotions of Native American dancers, actors, and athletes performing at Frontier Days or other Wild West shows and rodeos. The horrors of the Indian Wars were barely in the past; the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in which the U.S. 7th Cavalry killed some two hundred Sioux, had occurred less than a decade earlier. Now here they were, singing and acting out the tragedies that had befallen their people.
Among Cheyenne’s locals, the prevailing attitude toward Native Americans was characterized by fascination, with undercurrents of titillation and contempt. “Thirty years ago a telegram conveying intelligence of the approach of Indians would have caused great alarm and apprehension,” wrote the Daily Sun-Leader. Now, however, “they were not received by enraged citizens with Winchester rifles, but by a quite curious crowd, who followed the little band up town.”