Louis S. Warren

by Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody;the Wild West Show

  The grand duke’s hunt provided New Yorkers with their most vivid version of Cody before he arrived in their town. Although his role in the expedition was minor and he was overshadowed by Custer, he received his best coverage in the New York Herald, whose reporter took time out to consider “the genial and daring Buffalo Bill,” a “genuine hero of the Plains.” Even at this point, much of the fun in watching Cody came from his verve in assuming the costume of romantic hero to please the crowd, and his amusement at his own audacity. When the medical doctor attending the Grand Duke Alexis asked Cody if he always dressed in the “spangled buckskin suit” of that morning, related the correspondent, Cody grinned. “No, sir; Not much.” He went on, wrote the reporter: “ ‘When Sheridan told me the Duke was coming I thought I would throw myself on my clothes. I only put on this rig this morning, and half the people in the settlement have been accusing me of putting on airs,’ and then Bill laughed heartily, and so did the Doctor, the Duke, and the whole imperial crowd.” 22

  In February, at least two events reminded New Yorkers of the recently completed tour of the grand duke. The first was the debut of a new act, “The Grand Goat Alexis,” at a prominent burlesque theater, in which a goat rode a horse around a ring, with a monkey thrown on his back, “and the horse thus bears a couple of stories of animals round and round the ring, amid the wildest shouts of laughter.”23 The second, of course, was the arrival of Buffalo Bill.

  Throughout his visit to New York, his representation in the press and on the stage could be measured against his real person, a kind of interplay between dramatic Cody and real Cody, the former on the stage at the Bowery, the latter frequently sighted in downtown New York, at the Union Club, the Leiderkranz masked ball, and at the fashionable racetracks.

  New Yorkers could continue this Cody game even after the man left the city. Almost as soon as he went back to Nebraska, Ned Buntline published a new Buffalo Bill novel, Buffalo Bill’s Best Shot, which continued to work the line between truth and fiction with a romance inspired by the hunt with the Grand Duke Alexis. Even if they passed up the chance to read it, New Yorkers saw announcements of it over three successive days in the New York Times and elsewhere.24

  Once he moved onto the stage, Buffalo Bill Cody would be a news staple for the rest of his life, moving back and forth over the line dividing the real and the fake, Nature and Artifice, his stature as a “real westerner” underscoring the interplay of the two. Synopses of his plays and reviews of the dime novels about him appeared in the same newspapers that reported “real” news about his cattle drives at his Nebraska ranch, his guided hunting expeditions with English aristocrats, and his Indian fights across the Plains. To audiences, then, Buffalo Bill’s life was a fascinating mixture of theatrical romance and bloody reality, much like the West itself.25

  CODY’S OCCUPATIONS on the Plains had all been tied to the expanding railroad, and his stage stardom, too, was partly a product of the railroad and the ways it revolutionized the theater. In earlier days, a theater owner (often a renowned actor) would hire a company of actors to work in residence, performing plays in repertory for a whole season. After the Civil War, the railroad made sedentary companies obsolete. Now, theatrical stars became the center of companies known as “combinations.” Opening at a prominent theater in New York, usually in early autumn, the combination then went on tour via the nation’s new railroad networks, performing a selection of plays in many different cities and towns. Troupes disbanded at the end of the season, usually in late June. The promoter, or star, could then begin the process of hiring anew and commissioning new plays for the next season. As New York historians have observed, “The city had become a manufacturer of dramatic commodities,” and theater was becoming at least as much an industry as an art.26

  Buffalo Bill’s fame grew as he grafted his earlier guiding and scouting persona onto this new form of commodity production. To say the least, the theatrical career was an unlikely turn. “That I, an old scout who had never seen more than twenty or thirty theatrical performances in my life, should think of going upon the stage, was ridiculous in the extreme.” 27 But if the frontiersman’s metamorphosis into stage star seems counterintuitive, in another respect the stage was a fitting venue. Actors, like spies and scouts, were traditionally a marginal class in America. Professional deceivers, they were reviled by the Puritans as liars and blasphemers, and by subsequent generations of Americans for their suspicious facility with disguise. In the many warnings that moralists and urban reformers issued about the confidence man, the theater figured prominently as one of his preferred venues for the introduction of virtuous youth to urban sin and decadence. After all, the confidence man, the consummate seducer, was himself a skilled actor. 28

  These prejudices against the theater had weakened considerably by the 1870s, by which time successful actors were no more unpopular than successful lawyers (conversely, low-rent thespians were every bit as reviled as hack attorneys). But suspicion of actors as disreputable and their entertainments as immoral remained a backdrop for Cody’s entire career.29 Nate Salsbury, Cody’s managing partner for many years in the Wild West show, began his show business career as an actor after the Civil War, at which time his cousin warned him that “the majority of the American people think that a man who is talented lowers himself by going on to the stage.”30

  Thus, Cody’s new appeal was in some ways analogous to his appeal as a scout. Just as surrounding himself with socially dubious mixed-bloods and Indians made him stand out as a white guide and tracker, by entering the arena of actors—professional impostors—he both compounded the layers of skepticism around his own persona and simultaneously enhanced the currency of his authentic hunting, scouting, and Indian fighting. Meeting a genuine frontiersman who seemed to embody the progress of the nation was one thing, but seeing him in a context of outright fakery, supporting a drama in which he banished the savagery of the frontier, upped the value of his real biography.

  Just as important, Cody’s stage debut was not accidental, but a calculated development of his entertainment product. Out on the Plains, the western show that Hickok, Cody, and others crafted for tourists—tall tales, shooting exhibitions, hunting displays, and the projection of a heroic persona in keeping with popular expectations—begged a central question: if the audience was coming west on the train to see the performance, why not put the show on the train and send it east? Showmen had staged frontier exhibitions before. P. T. Barnum’s failed New Jersey buffalo hunt of 1843 was a prime example. The transcontinental railroad made such attempts easier, at least potentially. Thus, in 1872, while Buffalo Bill was visiting New York, museum impresario Sidney Barnett hired Cody’s friend and neighbor in Nebraska, Texas Jack Omohundro. The Texan was to accompany a herd of buffalo and a group of Pawnee Indians to upstate New York, where they would perform a mock buffalo hunt for tourists at Barnett’s museum. Although Omohundro and several others put in much time and effort capturing buffalo, government agents refused to allow the Pawnees to travel east. Texas Jack backed out, too. Nonetheless, the staged hunt went forward. In August of that year, Wild Bill Hickok served as master of ceremonies for Barnett’s show, in which a delegation of cowboys joined a party of Sac and Fox Indians from Oklahoma. The crew performed a mock buffalo pursuit on the grassy foreground of America’s most renowned wilderness monument, Niagara Falls. But the event proved difficult and expensive to stage. Barnett lost money and folded the show.31 Still, few doubted that moving the show of western progress to the East had a future. The question was how to make it happen.

  At the time of Hickok’s appearance at Niagara Falls, Cody’s first theatrical performance in Chicago, with Texas Jack Omohundro, was only three months away. Theatrical drama had the advantage of being far more familiar to audiences than the kind of outdoor arena exhibition that Barnett and Hickok were presenting, and on the stage Cody could incorporate rope tricks, shooting displays, and other aspects of western show spectacle which he would one day display in an arena. Read
carefully, Cody’s protestations of dramatic ignorance in fact suggest the omnipresence of theater on the frontier, and its familiarity to him. The “old scout” (he was twenty-six) “had never seen more than twenty or thirty theatrical performances.” 32 It might seem a sizable total by today’s standards, but Cody’s estimate was probably low (the better to emphasize the implausibility of his career turn). Frank North, legendary scout and friend of Cody’s, lived in Colville, Nebraska, where he kept a journal during 1869. It was a busy year for the young North family. There was not only a new baby at home, but also a lumber business and rental properties to tend, two major expeditions to fight the Cheyenne, and a social calendar packed with reading circles, dances, and concerts. Nonetheless, Frank North saw fourteen plays at Omaha theaters in 1869 alone.33

  Although its inclusiveness had faded in previous decades, theater was traditionally the nation’s foremost democratic entertainment, presenting a large variety of productions for all classes, and in all regions. Even in Iowa, at the time Cody was born, theatrical troupes performed in English and German.34 On the Great Plains, theaters were among the first buildings erected in new towns. Stage drama, in fact, preceded the stages. In Kansas, as on earlier frontiers, soldiers often entertained each other and surrounding settlers with dramatic companies at their posts. Traveling dancers, singers, magicians, jugglers, and acting troupes made their way along the trail to Denver by 1859, frequently stopping to perform in Leavenworth and other Kansas towns.35 Major E. W. Wynkoop, who fought in the Plains Indian wars with Cody in the late 1860s, became founding president of the Amateur Dramatic Association of Denver in 1861.36 Theaters operated in Leavenworth right through the Civil War (the esteemed John Wilkes Booth even appeared there).37

  By 1867, William Cody had named his favorite buffalo rifle “Lucretia Borgia.” Some speculate that he heard of the famous Italian poisoner and erotomaniac from the play of the same name, a popular nineteenth-century offering which was showing in St. Louis when Cody was stationed there with the Union army in 1864. But it is just as likely that he saw the play in Denver, where it was playing when the fourteen-year-old Cody was there in the winter of 1860.38 In the Kansas cow towns, minstrel shows and burlesque proliferated, along with opera and melodrama.39 By the time Cody arrived at Fort McPherson, there was a post theater in operation there, too.40

  Yet, for all Cody’s exposure to theater as an observer, for him to become a stage actor was a daring move. It was one thing to have seen some plays, and to tell stories and dress in costume for tourists and soldiers in Kansas or Nebraska. It was quite another to interpret a script and entertain a packed house in Chicago, New York, or Memphis. Equally important, after a short apprenticeship with a professional (Buntline had adapted numerous novels for the stage, and occasionally acted himself), Cody somehow mastered management of a theatrical company, too.

  His autobiography suggests that he found his bridge to stage acting in his experience as a hunting guide. In his early days with Buntline, he adapted his renowned storytelling to stage performance, filling in his acting gaps with his own narrative drama. On his opening night, when Buntline stepped forward in his role as “Cale Durg” and gave Cody his cue, he later recalled, “for the life of me I could not remember a single word” of the script. Buntline then prompted Cody with a different line, “Where have you been, Bill? What has kept you so long?”

  At that moment, Cody noticed in the audience one of Chicago’s renowned wealthy sport hunters who had been on one of the more colorful hunting trips he had guided. “So I said: ‘I have been out on a hunt with Milligan.’ ” Milligan was a leading light of Chicago’s social scene, and the audience roared.

  Buntline, never one to stick to a script when a better line appeared, went with the drama Cody was creating: “Well, Bill, tell us about the hunt.” As Cody recounted: “I succeeded in making it rather funny, and I was frequently interrupted by rounds of applause.” Whenever the story wandered off, “Buntline would give me a fresh start, by asking some question.” In this way, Cody wrote, “I took up fifteen minutes, without speaking a word of my part; nor did I speak a word of it the whole evening.”41

  ORIGINAL/COPY

  Thus Cody extended and recast the drama he staged around the campfires of his guided hunts, finding in the East a vast, lucrative market for his form of entertainment. Only months before, a newspaper correspondent had described Cody’s “wonderful” campfire stories, related “in the presence of all the paraphernalia of frontier life upon the Plains.” On the stage, Cody appropriated the same “paraphernalia of frontier life”—guns, knives, whips, hats, boots, and ropes—and dressed the part, as he had for his hunting clients, in lavish suits of buckskin and velvet and fur, complemented by a broad hat and his hair falling to his shoulders.42

  His manipulation of those props was central to his authentic demeanor, and his stage plays called for his character to demonstrate his abilities with gun and whip, with stunts that would one day become part of his Wild West show. “Mr. Cody’s shooting was very fine indeed,” wrote one reviewer in 1879. “He shot an apple from the head of Miss Denier, and then taking a mirror he turned his back to the young lady and shot it from her head again. He also knocked the fire from a cigar which was held in the mouth of Mr. James. His shooting and use of the ‘cow driver’ is simply marvellous.”43

  Historians and critics long ago established that Cody’s stage success came from the friction between his frontier authenticity and its context of theatrical fakery. His performance simultaneously validated and called into question his own imposture as a “genuine” frontiersman, delighting audiences who could debate and argue over how “real” Buffalo Bill was. Playwrights often adapted cheap novels for the stage, but in the plays of Buffalo Bill, Texas Jack, and the other stars of frontier melodrama, the heroes were “real” people, and whether or not they believed the hyperbolic publicity, the audience loved the novelty. 44 Thus, the packed houses that greeted Cody, Omohundro, and Buntline in New Haven and other places expressed popular desire to see the heroes they knew from “weekly story papers, and the semi-occasional novelettes” about them, according to a contemporary writer.45 As Roger Hall has observed, “the presence on stage of an actual participant in frontier events reinforced the vicarious and psychological connection of the audience to those events.”46

  But to describe Cody as authentic, a self-evidently “real” man conveying elements of the real frontier, only scratches the surface of his allure. Historians have carefully retraced nearly every Cody performance. They have analyzed his few surviving scripts, and pored over his advertising. But exclusive attention to the real William Cody has blinded us to the faux Codys, the numerous actors who continued to play “Buffalo Bill” at the same time William Cody did, and for many of the same crowds. Moreover, in addition to professional actors who struck their own poses as the stage character “Buffalo Bill,” a sizable number of frontier scouts followed Cody to the stage and so closely mimicked Cody’s scout persona as to make audiences wonder who really was the authentic frontiersman.

  “It is within an exuberant world of copies that we arrive at our experience of originality,” writes Hillel Schwartz.47 And Cody’s originality was considerably enhanced by the wide mimicry of his imposture, which placed him less at the center of a theater of the original than in the dance of original and copy that defined the essence of frontier melodrama. To be sure, William Cody was Buffalo Bill, and this gave the stage character a purchase in offstage—real—life. But the proliferation of Buffalo Bill impersonators on the stage meant that, in a sense, Buffalo Bill the stage character was both real and fake—and William Cody’s achievement was to encompass both sides of that coin.

  The theater of mimicry and copy in Cody’s stage performance might be said to have begun when he confronted Studley playing the Buffalo Bill role. The two together, Studley and Cody, provided poles of fake and real, a simultaneous display of the copy and the original that resonated with popular fascination for such cont
rasts, notably by providing space to wonder which was which. Was Studley imitating Cody? Or vice versa?

  We may speculate that Cody’s continuing presence in New York enhanced the appeal of his stage impersonators by prolonging this tension. The standard run for a new melodrama was two weeks. Studley ran his “Buffalo Bill” for a month. Indeed, immediately after the last curtain fell on Studley’s faux Buffalo Bill at the Bowery, the play opened again, on March 18, at the Park Theater, with J. W. Carroll as its faux Cody. The same day, in a sign of Buffalo Bill’s popularity, a parody—a faux faux Buffalo Bill, called Bill Buffalo, with His Great Buffalo Bull—opened at Hooley’s Opera House, in Brooklyn.48

  To audiences, Buffalo Bill balanced somewhere between real man and theatrical representation. By venturing onto the stage himself in the fall of 1872, Cody enhanced the tension that charged the character’s appeal. If the move made him more popular, it also lent frisson to the performances of fake Codys, particularly in New York. At the beginning of the theatrical season, the drama Buffalo Bill played for a week in mid-November, at Wood’s Museum, with James M. Ward in the title role. One month later, New York theatergoers could read news coverage of the real Buffalo Bill’s performances in Chicago, and as Buntline, Cody, and Omohundro toured the Midwest—St. Louis, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Toledo, Cleveland—the actor J. B. Studley began playing Buffalo Bill again in January of 1873, at New York’s Bowery Theater, and then again during the last week of March at the Park Theatre.49 The news of Cody’s imminent arrival in New York reinforced the appeal of Studley’s Buffalo Bill, making it the advance “bill” for the real Bill.