by Jill Jonnes
On January 16, the outgunned Ghost Dancers and their followers formally surrendered to Miles, who rode through the camp near Pine Ridge on his black horse accompanied by Cody. Miles had spent his career fighting Indians, yet found the surrender of this proud and warlike people “weird and in some respects desolate.” For Cody it was a strange gift: he and his Indians had been spared any actual warfare, even as his own credentials as a bona fide Indian fighter and frontiersman had been nicely burnished.
More fortuitous yet, when the general returned to Fort Sheridan outside Chicago with twenty-three Ghost Dancing ringleaders as prisoners, he proposed exiling them all to Europe with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Under relentless political pressure, the Bureau of Indian Affairs grudgingly lifted its performance ban in March, giving permission not only to the prisoners, but to another seventy-five Sioux who wished to sign on with Cody. By April 1, 1891, a jubilant Major Burke was busy at the Philadelphia docks hustling the Indians on to the Red Star steamer Switzerland before the permits could be revoked.
Nate Salsbury, who had been left in charge of the Wild West all that winter in Benfeld in Alsace-Lorraine, had had no reason to believe that the Sioux would be allowed to return, and had therefore been busy assembling a gigantic new spectacle, an equestrian extravaganza of the highest order, showcasing the most exotic and colorful horsemen he could engage: Russian Cossacks, Argentine gauchos, and English, German, and U.S. cavalry. The Mexican vaqueros and American cowboys and cowgirls had all remained with the show, as had star sharpshooters Annie Oakley and Johnny Baker. When Major Burke and the Indians arrived, the company swelled to an amazing 640 people.
The familiar Wild West show was now interwoven with astounding feats of foreign horsemanship, above all by the bearded Cossacks. Outfitted with high conical hats, knee-length belted coats crisscrossed with ammunition sashes, and tall leather boots sporting huge silver spurs, these soldiers of the Russian steppes looked exotic and ferocious with their great curved daggers, thirty-two-inch muzzle-loading pistols, and long rifles. When the Cossacks raced into the arena, artist Frederic Remington, who was in the audience, marveled to see the acrobatics they performed atop their horses. “They stand on their heads, vault on and off, chase each other in a game called chasing the handkerchief.” The Argentine gauchos astounded by hurling bolas, iron balls on rawhide thongs, across the arena with a deadly accuracy. The new show, billed as “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World,” was an immense success, playing to sold-out houses in Germany, Holland, and the British Isles. It would establish the Wild West format for the next decade.
By late August, Cody was in Nottingham, England, writing his brother-in-law back at Scout’s Rest, “From the time I enter my grounds in the morning until I leave after the night show it’s a continual strain, and I am becoming very nervous, although stranger to say I am shooting better than I ever did in my life.” Wherever he was traveling, Cody was always thinking of his ranch and how to improve it. He now dreamed of an additional barn: “All I want is shelter enough to keep all our stock home this winter. I thought I would like to have the new Barn painted white. Then in the spring we could put a fresh coat of red paint on the Big Barn, and paint the House blue with green borders and it would look nice. Red White & blue. . . . I want to try a hundred acres of Alfalfa. Do you know of a good farmer I can hire by the year?”
The poster for the show in the 1890s
Three years after the 1889 Exposition Universelle, James McNeill Whistler and his wife had relocated to Paris, swayed in part by official French hommage. “The dreariness and dullness of London was at last too depressing for anything,” Whistler wrote a friend; “. . . I could at last come to this land of light and joy where honors are heaped upon me, and Peace threatens to take up her abode in the garden of our pretty pavilion.” The republican government had not only “knighted” Whistler, by making him a chevalier in the Legion of Honor, but they had also purchased, at the urging of Stéphane Mallarmé and other artists, his painting Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother to hang in the Louvre. Whistler finally had the official acclaim for which he had yearned.
The Master and Trixie happily nested at 110 rue du Bac in the ground floor of a seventeenth-century house, where a “reception room, painted blue and white and with a carpeting of blue matting, [was] furnished with a few Empire chairs, a couch, a grand piano and a table usually littered with newspapers. On a wall was an early Whistler. Near the fireplace was a writing table with inkwell, papers, and pens, where Whistler would often sit with a cup of coffee and a cigarette while he pondered a barbed note to an editor.” When the couple needed fresh air and greenery, they merely had to open the French doors and step out into a spacious old garden with huge trees and graveled paths. At its far end, beyond a high stone wall, a seminary’s muted bells marked the hours, while in the evening the faint sounds of a chanting choir floated over. Ever the social butterfly, Whistler often sat under the trees holding court for his many visitors. Among a certain set, Whistler had now become the most famous American in Paris.
At fifty-seven, he basked in his new status and renown. And to his glee, for the first time in his career his work commanded big prices. The city of Glasgow had purchased his portrait of Carlyle for a thousand guineas, while the American millionaire Charles Freer eagerly paid top dollar to assemble a serious collection of Whistler’s art, from oil paintings to lithographs. Isabella Stewart Gardner of Boston came calling to The Master’s new studio on rue Nôtre Dame des Champs, determined to own Harmony in Blue and Silver, a portrait of the beach at Trouville. Whistler was invited to show three paintings with the British at the upcoming Chicago World’s Fair. Of course, he still relished verbal sparring and contretemps, though Edgar Degas wondered why, saying, “What a pity! He should paint with his tongue: then he might be a genius.”
And what, in these years after the fair, had come of all the talk about “Out-Eiffeling Eiffel” with a structure taller than his Tour en Fer? The English got so far as starting construction in June of 1893 of an iron tower in Wembley Park, near London, but when it reached several hundred feet, it rose no farther. It was in the United States, where Chicago had won the right to host America’s Columbian Exposition, that the contest heated up. The Chicago Tribune held a competition that attracted all manner of unpromising proposals, including one from the Chicago-Tower Spiral-Spring Ascension and Toboggan Transportation Company, which envisioned “a tower with a height of 8,947 feet, nearly nine times the height of the Eiffel Tower, with a base one thousand feet in diameter sunk two thousand feet into the earth. Elevated rails would lead from the top of the tower all the way to New York, Boston, Baltimore, and other cities. Visitors ready to conclude their visit to the fair and daring enough to ride elevators to the top would then toboggan all the way back home.” Stranger yet was a proposed four-thousand-foot tower anchoring a two-thousand-foot rubber cable with a car attached to its end. “The car and its passengers would be shoved off a platform and fall without restraint to the end of the cable. . . . The engineer urged that as a precaution the ground ‘be covered with eight feet of feather bedding.’ ”
Before Gustave Eiffel had been engulfed by the Panama scandal, he had proposed to out-Eiffel himself, contacting the Chicago fair’s directors in August 1891 to see if they would be receptive to a taller version of his Paris monument. As word of the inquiry raced around, American engineers expressed outrage that a Frenchman should dare try to claim so American a prize, and Eiffel’s offer was politely declined. Other strange and impractical proposals filtered in, including a log-cabin tower constructed of tremendous trees, like some giant’s creation. The men running the Chicago fair were getting worried. They had designed a classical, ethereal Beaux Arts White City set in a verdant landscape of elegant lakes and canals, but where was the American engineering marvel to equal, much less eclipse, the Eiffel Tower?
In mid-December of 1892, they had their answer: George Washi
ngton Ferris proposed erecting not a tower but a gigantic revolving wheel. “This wheel would carry thirty-six cars, each about the size of a Pullman, each holding sixty people and equipped with its own lunch counter, and when filled to capacity the wheel would propel 2,160 people at a time three hundred feet into the sky over Jackson Park, a bit higher than the crown of the now-six-year-old Statue of Liberty.”
When the Ferris wheel was up and running, it did not, in truth, out-Eiffel Eiffel. It never came close to rivaling the tower’s elegance, much less its almost instant fame and iconic status. Still, the towering device had the inherent charm of the gigantic, and its novelty and originality provided its own enchantments. At night, it glittered in the sky, its slowly revolving structure and shiny Pullman cabins outlined with three thousand shimmering lights. More than a million fair visitors (less than half of Eiffel’s gate) paid fifty cents to board and make two stately revolutions high up in the air, enjoying the views of nearby smog-enshrouded Chicago and, beneath their feet, the fair’s fairy-tale grounds. As they circled slowly up and then down, the Ferris wheel riders could see just below the exotic Turkish village, the delightful German beer garden, and the Cairo street (shades of Paris 1889) with its camels, minareted mosque, and Egyptian tombs.
The Chicago fair’s directors had rejected not only a larger tower by Eiffel, but also Buffalo Bill’s bid for a spot inside the fairgrounds. In response, Salsbury secured fourteen strategic acres opposite the fair’s main entrance, and by late March 1893 Cody had arrived to set up camp and build an arena. He reported that summer to his sister, “I am doing the business of my life,” and indeed, the Chicago World’s Fair run would be one of the most successful seasons of Cody’s career. A North Dakotan named P. B. Wickham had managed to obtain Sitting Bull’s cabin, with its bullet-riddled front door, as well as his sweat lodge, and had Chief Rain-in-the-Face living there, a prime authentic Midway attraction.
When the fair managers, struggling to recoup construction costs, refused Chicago mayor Carter Harrison’s request to allow the city’s poor children free admission for one day to the fair, it was once again Buffalo Bill to the rescue. He proclaimed Waif’s Day at the Wild West. As Erik Larson recounts in The Devil in the White City, his wonderful history of the 1893 fair, Cody “offered any kid in Chicago a free train ticket, free admission to the show, and free access to the whole Wild West encampment, plus all the candy and ice cream the children could eat.
“Fifteen thousand showed up.”
It is probably safe to say that while the Chicago run was Cody’s most lucrative—he reportedly cleared $1 million in profits—the Paris World’s Fair still remained the high point of his professional life. Not only had he been the toast of the world’s most cosmopolitan city, the darling of aristocratic French hostesses, and the most lionized American in Paris (at least until Edison appeared), he also had served all through the fair as a genuine cultural ambassador, introducing the American frontier (however sanitized) to enthralled audiences from around the globe. In Chicago, Cody’s role was more that of a familiar and lovable showman, there to make money.
Annie Oakley’s conquest of Europe only amplified her celebrity at home. Now thirty-three, she had become a huge star. At the fair, on June 28, Ohio governor William McKinley presided over a reception at the Ohio State Building in honor of this local girl made good. Like Buffalo Bill, Oakley exemplified the American Dream: an individual of humble origins who had achieved the heights of success by hard work and talent. Oakley also personified the emerging spunky modern woman—self-reliant, as good as (in fact, far better than) most men at guns and shooting. In Glasgow, she had purchased and begun riding a bicycle, thus adding to her image as an up-to-the-minute new woman. She had always encouraged women to master shooting, hunting, and other outdoor pursuits, personally instructing thousands in gun skills over the years.
At the same time, in her home life Oakley remained the happily married Mrs. Butler. Part of her considerable charm was the simplicity of her ways and person. “There is not a nicer wife or woman in the land than Annie Oakley,” wrote one Chicago reporter. “When she was in Europe royalty courted her and she accepted it as she would the complacent attentions of the village quilting party.” She liked nothing better than being out in nature. “Truly, I long for the day when . . . I can take to the field and stream as often as true inclination may lead me there.”
On August 30, 1893, Paul Gauguin returned to France from Tahiti, hoping for the fame and success that had eluded him at the 1889 fair. He debarked the steamer Armand Béhic onto the dock in Marseilles with four francs in his pocket and sixty-six paintings. His disciple Sérusier wired 250 francs to pay for his hotel and a train ticket to Paris, where other old friends rallied round with loans, a tiny apartment, the share of a studio, and meals on credit at the local crémerie. After several rebuffs at other galleries, Durand-Ruel agreed to give Gauguin a show, but only if he fronted the considerable costs of framing and publicity. On November 9 the aesthetes and artists of Paris streamed in to see the forty-four paintings and many wooden sculptures they had heard so many rumors about. Gauguin, very much the rebel artist in a long navy blue cape, bold-checked trousers, and a pleated astrakhan hat, yearned to make a sensation. Instead, the show yielded respectful notices and meager sales. His main solace was Degas’s purchase of two paintings.
Once the Durand-Ruel show ended, Gauguin followed the example of Theo van Gogh and in early 1894 created his own permanent one-man exhibit on the bright yellow walls of his spacious new studio at 6 rue Vercingétorix, south of the Gare Montparnasse. There ensued a jumbled period of love affairs, one with an odd Javanese girl; an interest in wooden sculptures and a new rough style of woodblock prints; street brawls that left Gauguin with an injured ankle; and the loss of his Pont-Aven paintings, which had been entrusted to his old landlady. Any dealings with his wife, Mette, in Denmark just resulted in mutual rancor. Gauguin concluded that the life of a Paris artist was not for him, and on September 5, 1895, he set sail again to work in Polynesia.
Whistler’s charmed Paris period did not last long. In the spring of 1894, Trixie’s health had begun to decline, even as Whistler was threatening lawsuits against George du Maurier for the Whistler-like character in his popular novella Trilby. Some days that summer and fall, Trixie was so fatigued that she did not leave their wondrous sleigh bed, a carved-and-lacquered Louis XVI Empire antique with swans’ heads ornamenting each corner. The bedstead had been partial payment for Whistler’s full-length portrait of their friend Count Robert Montesquiou. By Christmas Whistler had decided Trixie needed further medical attention and the company of her family. They accordingly closed up the rue du Bac apartment and sailed across to England, where London doctors diagnosed her with cancer.
For the next two years, as Whistler wrote to one friend, “We have wandered from home and work—going from town to country, and from doctor to doctor. Living in hotels, and leaving behind us the beautiful place you know so well in Paris.” By spring of 1896 they were staying out in the pure air of Hampstead Heath, but Whistler acknowledged, “We are very, very bad.” By mid-May, Trixie was dead. Devastated, Whistler buried his grief in his work, even starting an art atelier in Paris for a few seasons. By 1899 he had drifted back to London and taken up residence in the spacious, fashionable flat of his publisher, William Heinemann. Though only in his mid-fifties, Whistler found that his artistic drive and ambition had ebbed, and he was often ill. His friends watched sadly as he faded, succumbing at age fifty-nine to a final bout of pneumonia on July 17, 1903.
Whistler outlived Paul Gauguin, fifty-four, by a mere two months. After Gauguin’s return to the Pacific, despite steady bouts of poor health he turned out large ambitious paintings. Isolated and desperate for money, he wrote to a friend in Paris, “If I can no longer paint, I who love only that—neither wife nor children—my heart is empty. AmIacriminal? I don’t know. I seem condemned to live when I have lost all moral reasons for living.” Gauguin was as yet unaware th
at he had become the toast of artistic Paris for a show of his Tahitian paintings at the gallery of dealer Ambrose Vollard.
Having failed to make any real mark at the 1889 Paris fair, Gauguin then hoped to ride his new prominence at long last to a place of artistic honor at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. Instead, his large shipment of paintings was waylaid and not retrieved until the fair was over. Close to an invalid now and seeking a change, he moved to the tiny island of Hivaoa, in the Marquesas. Vollard was sending a monthly stipend, but Gauguin was rarely well enough to paint or create art. He was found dead in the squalor of his house on May 8, 1903, like Theo van Gogh, a victim of tertiary syphilis. Back in the halcyon days of the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, Thomas Edison had often bragged that Americans were certain to best Eiffel by building a tower twice as tall, a boast he repeated while regaling the New York reporters about his triumphant visit to Paris. But once back at the laboratory in West Orange, Edison found himself beset by troubles. J. P. Morgan, his biggest Wall Street backer, had been busy machinating to sell Edison’s electric company out from under him, and by 1892, without so much as a word to the great inventor, Morgan merged Edison Electric into a more profitable entity he rechristened General Electric.