by Jill Jonnes
Although much of the actual exhibition was far from ready, the grounds alone were an amazing enough creation to satisfy most early visitors. Trilled one American reporter, “The walks are broad, the trees numerous, the grass luxuriant and green, the fountains always bursting with their stores of molten silver, the birds vocal with glad songs, and the cafés flowing with absinthe and beer. For now the Frenchman drinks his Munich beer without bitter recollections of German insolence. . . . Everywhere the finger tips are kissed at you and you breathe in the spirit of the merry chanson. The Eiffel Tower has character. It is distinctly French. It kisses its finger tips at you. It is nothing if not light, airy, volatile. It strikes one as being even effervescent. It seems as if it might in the dead hours of the night, when no one was looking, pick up its short skirts and dance the pastoral version of the can-can trimmed with the waltz.”
For American tourists there were other de rigueur attractions in Paris—the Louvre, where you might buy a painting from the dozens of copyists busy at their easels; the city’s ancient monuments and churches; cafés; jar-dins ; the twice-daily fashionable cavalcade at the Bois de Boulogne; the horse races; and above all, shopping for all those irresistible bibelots, perfumes, and gowns from the House of Worth or the less well known Monsieur Arnaud. Gastronomes settled into leisurely meals at the Grand Véfour, Ledoyen on the Champs-Élysées, or Lapérouse.
Oddly, for decades the standard American tour had also required a grisly stop at the Paris morgue, conveniently near Notre Dame. “We stood before a grating,” related the dutiful Mark Twain, “and looked through into a room which was hung all about with the clothing of dead men; coarse blouses, water-soaked; the delicate garments of women and children; patrician vestments, flecked and stabbed and stained with red; a hat that was crushed and bloody. On a slanting stone lay a drowned man, naked, swollen, purple.” It was also still possible, Americans learned from the ever-alert New York Herald, to see a French criminal guillotined. On Thursday, May 23, in the Place de la Roquette, a soldier who had murdered an old woman had been so dispatched before a small crowd of “horror seekers.”
And then there was the somewhat more daring side of Parisian tourism, outings to bohemian Montmartre, where Rodolphe Salis ran the fashionable cabaret Le Chat Noir. Here “actors and singers kept up a stream of mockery and invective aimed at society, politicians, the rich and the demi-monde,” the very audience who jammed the cabaret. Even more sensational and beloved was singer-poet Aristide Bruant, who performed at his cabaret, Le Mirliton. A burly man with thick dark locks, Bruant always strode onto the floor about 11:00 p.m., dressed in his signature look: black corduroy jacket, pants, scarlet flannel shirt, black neck scarf, and black boots. “He would gaze disdainfully at his audience for a few moments and then announce the title of his new number: ‘Now, I’m going to sing you à Saint Lazare!’ and then exhort his listeners to join in: ‘As for you, herd of camels, try to bray together in tune, will you?’ ” One Paris critic described “an arrogant and brutal voice which penetrated into your soul like the stab of a flick-knife into a straw dummy.” For several hours Bruant would keep the audience mesmerized, mixing his working-class songs with insults and an easy geniality. For tourists whose taste ran to racier entertainment, there were nightclubs such as the Folies Bergère.
An American gentleman sitting by himself at a sidewalk café might soon find discreetly slipped onto his table a scented pink visiting card with a female name and address “and the hint ‘tout confort’ or ‘discretion assured.’ Some were more eloquent, promising such delights as ‘tableaux vivants’ and all the refinements of ‘modern science.’ ” Far more open were the city’s two hundred or so brasseries filles, spots such as the Café du Gaulois and the Brasserie Moderne, where foreigners might drop in not just for a beer but also to order up one of the serving girls for a paid assignation in an upstairs room. The brasseries operated somewhat sub rosa, avoiding the strict government rules for brothels.
For those with more money, Paris of 1889 offered far more elaborate and luxurious sexual scenarios than waitresses of easy virtue. The city had seventy-five licensed brothels, identifiable by their extra-large illuminated street numbers. One of the most famous high-class bordellos was the Chabanais, whose reception room was decorated with “antique furniture, gilt and inlaid panelling and 18th-century paintings.” Once the customer had selected his partner, he had the choice of “the Japanese, Spanish or Directoire rooms or the astonishing ‘Moorish’ room in imitation of the Alhambra at Granada, the Chambre Louis XVI with painted medallions in the style of Boucher, or its extraordinary ‘Pompeian saloon’ for which Toulouse-Lautrec had painted some medallions. Finally, as an added attraction for those drawn to the ‘English vice,’ it had ‘the prettiest torture chamber in Paris.’ ”
As evening fell on Friday, May 10, Buffalo Bill and his Wild West cowboys and Indians crowded the rails on the upper decks of the Persian Monarch, scanning the horizon for signs of France and terra firma. After violently tempestuous days at sea, the troupe was more than eager to reach Le Havre. For many of the Indians, wrapped against the cold in colorful blankets, their long hair braided with feathers and beads, this had been their first ocean voyage. When Lakota holy man Black Elk crossed the “big water,” he wrote of fears that the boat “might drop off where the water ended.” When storms struck, “we were all in despair and many were feeling so sick that they began to sing their death-songs.” Now the Atlantic was calm, the sky indigo blue, and the first stars just coming out.
Closer to Le Havre, a tugful of French reporters had been scanning the horizon for the Persian Monarch since late afternoon. The reporters had begun their day in Paris, boarding two saloon carriages chartered by the Wild West show, well stocked, reported The Herald, with “an elegant cold collation . . . washed down with some of Moët et Chandon’s dryest. The journey was enlivened by Mr. Crawford’s many anecdotes of the harassing trouble he had had with French authorities before he could obtain permission to open the show.” Nate Salsbury and T. C. Crawford had been in Paris since January, negotiating a site for the Wild West camp, getting it prepared, laying the groundwork with the press, and making sure the city was plastered with the “JE VIENS” posters. Salsbury had been awaiting the reporters at the Le Havre terminal, and by midafternoon they were cruising the waters beyond the port in their tug and ready to greet the Persian Monarch. Ferdinand Xau of the Écho de Paris stared through his binoculars, raising a fuss at every fishing boat that passed off in the distance.
Five o’clock came and went. Six o’clock. The ocean was placid but empty of any sign of the Persian Monarch. The reporters were getting restive. At around seven o’clock Xau swore he saw smoke on the horizon. Forty-five minutes later, the Wild West’s green ocean liner finally loomed into sight, steaming toward the port and the tug. The French press and Crawford and Salsbury all began to yell and wave. Colonel Cody’s answering shouts set the cowboys and Indians to whooping and yelling. The Cowboy Band struck up “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and followed up with “La Marseillaise.” As the tug came up alongside the steamship, its passengers were informed that no one could board before the French health authorities had inspected the ship. The reporters settled in for another wait, until finally, at eight o’clock, another tug arrived with the inspectors. The tide was now going out, and so the leviathan ship couldn’t enter port until the following day. The health inspectors decided to postpone their work, saying they would return in the morning at six o’clock.
Colonel Cody was not pleased, for the delay meant he would miss that night’s press banquet. Nate Salsbury had the press tug draw alongside the Persian Monarch, and only he was allowed to clamber up a swaying rope ladder so he could join Buffalo Bill aboard. As the press tug pulled away at nine o’clock under a rising moon, the frustrated French reporters saw the Indian men on deck starting to dance, while the women sang and chanted, making a sound the French heard as “hou, hou.” Charmed and tantalized by this brief encounter, the report
ers salved their disappointment at a sumptuous Wild West-hosted banquet in town, presided over by U.S. consul Monsieur Dufais, replete with many champagne toasts and uneasy jokes about Indians and scalping.
As dawn broke on Saturday, the Wild West steamship was escorted by tugs into port amid a frenzy of debarkation preparations. Le Havre’s morning newspapers had stirred up a sensation with their descriptions of Guillaume Buffalo et ses peaux rouges, garçons de boeuf et incroyable bufles. The whole town wanted a glimpse of these mythic beings from the New World. Even the large, jovial Major John Burke, Wild West company manager, could not believe his eyes as they docked in the harbor. “There must have been fifty thousand people there. They were on all the docks, in the rigging of the ships near by, even on the nearest housetops.” The Paris press was once again assembled, still anxious to board the Persian Monarch, its decks “crowded with strange, weird-looking Indians of all sorts of hues, wrapped in queer-looking blankets.” The American correspondents watched with amusement as the French newsmen rushed up the gangplank, and Ferdinand Xau, prince of Paris reporters, boldly shouted in English as he seized Colonel Cody’s hand, “How are you?”
Buffalo Bill and Major Burke squired the reporters around, starting with the menagerie in the now-pungent stalls belowdecks. Twenty buffalo were recumbent, placidly chewing their cud. “They had been the best sailors of the whole lot,” said Cody. “Nothing seemed to upset them. When the ship rolled they simply lay down and rolled with her.” The horses had not fared as well, with two of the two hundred dying during the storm-tossed crossing. Then Cody led the reporters back up on deck to meet several dozen of the one hundred Indians. He introduced various Sioux chiefs, strapping men wrapped up against the early-morning chill in their heavy blankets, striking with their high-cheekboned faces, stoic reserve, and many tattoos.
A century had passed since the French roamed North America as trappers and colonists, and now they mainly knew of les Peaux Rouges through James Fenimore Cooper’s elegiac Last of the Mohicans, the hugely popular Western novels of the late French adventurer and author Gustave Aimard, and Chateaubriand’s romantic 1801 novel, Atala, set in the New World. The French press gawked and marveled that the Indians really did have bronze-red skin. Meanwhile, the health inspectors asked them various questions, decided that the Indians had to be inoculated against smallpox, and proceeded to give them all shots.
The reporter for Le Figaro found the Indians “majestic and proud.” Both men and women, he noted, dressed in much the same clothes—buckskin pants, a long loose overshirt with colorful fringe. Both favored long hair. He was startled to find, when he opened his cigarette case, “twenty hands covered with tattoos made for the case. I gestured certainly. In the blink of an eye, the cigarette case was empty. But I was repaid by the Indians’ owah! owah! of satisfaction.”
Bronco Bill Nelson, a lanky white man married to an Indian, stepped forward to serve as interpreter, making special introductions to the chiefs Red Shirt, Rocky Bear, Eagle Man, Black Hawk, and No Neck. Red Shirt, tall, handsome, and noble, and a veteran of the London trip, was in charge of the Wild West Indians. His wife was among the numerous women and children traveling with the troupe. The paternalistic U.S. Office of Indian Affairs took a dim view of Wild West shows, and had only reluctantly allowed the Sioux to go overseas, as the Indian commissioners thought their charges should be home on reservations adjusting to their new lives as farmers. Families had come along to maintain moral tone. Cody had posted a $20,000 cash bond with the government to guarantee proper treatment, while every Indian on deck that day had had to get the local Indian agent to sign off on his contract.
The French reporters then met Annie Oakley, and found this demure young woman hard to reconcile with guns or marksmanship. The press was thrilled to find a few French-speaking Canadian trappers in the troupe, reminders of the old days of French empire in America. The best known was Gabriel Dumont, lieutenant to Louis Riel, who had been hanged in 1885 for leading the North-West Rebellion in Manitoba against the British. As Cody introduced the Canadians, Annie Oakley disappeared down to her cabin, where she was soon busy filling hot-water bottles with fifty pounds of her favorite Schultze gunpowder. French customs had just informed her that she could not bring in the English gunpowder she swore by, so she was forced to improvise a smuggling scheme. When it came time to debark, each of the show’s four cowgirls figured out how best to keep a powder-filled water bottle hidden under her dress bustle as she walked smilingly off the Persian Monarch and onto the busy quay. “We sure did attract some attention,” said Oakley later, “as we went down that gang plank, for although the bustle originated in France it was going out about that time.”
Annie Oakley
The next morning in Paris, the Wild West’s special train pulled into a station in leafy Batignolles, near Montmartre, a rustic quarter of cottages, gardens, and windmills popular with artists and writers. Here all the cowboys and Indians debarked before a curious crowd of onlookers and began leading the horses and buffalo off the railroad cars. The Indians boarded three large brake carriages, while each cowboy and cowgirl mounted a horse and led several others. This “curious cavalcade,” reported The New York Herald, proceeded up “the route de la Révolte to the ‘camp’ at Neuilly. . . . The buffaloes were driven along in leash. A large and gradually increasing crowd assembled round the station and along the line of route. Shortly after leaving the station, one of the buffalo managed to get loose and started for a run on his own account, to the great dismay of the crowd. He was, however, deftly lassoed in the twinkling of an eye by a watchful cowboy. . . . After this . . . the whole company arrived in camp without further incident. Large furniture vans followed with the tents and baggage.”
The camp, situated inside the crumbling ruins of the Porte de Ternes fort, was surrounded by towering old shade trees. All spring, Salsbury and Crawford had been preparing the grounds for this day, when the Wild West troupe would arrive to pitch its two hundred tents and fill the corrals with horses and buffalo. The whole camp had been encircled by a western-style stockade fence, and beautifully landscaped with broad red gravel paths, greenswards, and flowering bushes and shrubs. Up on the old fortifications, hundreds of curious French had gathered to watch this strange spectacle of the American West setting up camp in their suburb, the cowboys erecting the spacious square living tents and the huge outdoor mess hall, while the Indians pitched and secured their large teepees decorated with paintings of buffalo and hunting. The horses, mules, and buffalo were let loose to graze in separate corrals.
The French would soon learn that the mysterious but wonderfully handsome Buffalo Bill was one of America’s more famous western army scouts, a rider for the brief-lived Pony Express, a celebrated buffalo hunter and wilderness guide, an occasional Indian fighter, and a man immortalized in hundreds of cheap dime novels about western exploits. In recent years, “Guillaume Buffalo” had been the successful star and promoter of a new kind of entertainment, the Wild West show, a nostalgic celebration of the often-brutal settling of the fast-vanishing American frontier.
Charismatic and outgoing, Colonel Cody was also optimistic, far too generous, and highly fond of a drink. “Buffalo Bill was one of the world’s great men. I don’t mean wise, but I do mean great,” said Johnny Baker, a boy whom Cody and his wife, Lulu, took in and helped raise after they lost their own young son. Baker, a sharpshooter in the Paris show (“Petit Jean Tireur”), spoke for almost all who knew Cody. “His heart was as big as his show tent, and as warm as a ranch house cookstove. Around his supple body there was an aura that people loved to share.”
And while Buffalo Bill had certainly been an Indian fighter (who proudly displayed in his luxurious tent the purported scalp of the Cheyenne Indian Yellow Hand), he had a sympathy for the Indians’ plight that was rare at the time. “In nine times out of ten,” Cody was fond of saying, “where there is trouble between white men and Indians, it will be found that the white man is responsible.” Wrote Cody biogr
apher Louis S. Warren, “Often, [Buffalo Bill] buttressed this political commentary with references to Indian nobility. ‘Indians expect a man to keep his word. They can’t understand how a man can lie. Most of them would as soon cut off a leg as tell a lie.’ He routinely criticized the failure of Americans to abide by their treaties, warning that ‘there is just one thing to be considered’ where the ‘management of Indians’ was concerned: ‘That is, that when you promise him anything you must keep your word; break it, and the trouble commences at once. . . . Although I have had many a tough fight with the red man my sympathy is with him entirely, because he has been ill-used and trampled on by those whose duty it was to protect him.’ ”
Although Cody himself was a master of organization and a natural showman, it was when Nate Salsbury came aboard as the outfit’s manager in 1884 that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was catapulted into new realms of celebrity. Salsbury brought on the excellent Cowboy Band, discovered the show’s biggest single draw, Annie Oakley, and created a coherent narrative that distinguished the show from a half-dozen competitors. In recent seasons the Wild West show had made significant money, which the big-hearted Cody quickly spent. “Where did the money go?” asked biographer Warren. “He invested much of it in Scout’s Rest and his other properties. The rest seemed to vanish. He had a taste for fine belongings, like the extravagant four-in-hand coach which he ordered and which he drove around North Platte with crowds of elegant guests.” Buffalo Bill also gave loans (rarely repaid) to almost any comer, supporting numerous family members, and investing “wildly in mines, irrigation schemes, hotels (usually in places tourists had no interest in going), and even products such as White Beaver’s Cough Cream, the Great Lung Healer.”