Cody’s authenticity as scout and race hero was such that when the war against the Sioux continued in 1877, he did not bother to join. Crawford signed on as scout for the army again, and his military career culminated at the battle of Slim Buttes, where many of the Sioux who vanquished Custer were finally subdued. Crawford was reported to have killed and scalped a Sioux warrior during the battle. But, whether it was because of his own reticence about the deed or his inability to attach a name to his victim, or because it was too much a copy of Cody’s “original” act of the year before, as a publicity device the scalp proved of limited use in his subsequent theatrical career.76
In the fall of 1877, Crawford joined Cody’s stage troupe, playing Yellow Hair in the reenactment of the fight on Warbonnet Creek. Seriously injured in a stage mishap, he soon decided to form his own theatrical company, letting it be known that he felt abandoned and manipulated by Buffalo Bill. Cody was angry and told Crawford that “had the accident not occurred I think you had [already] made up your mind to start out for yourself.” Cody’s ire suggests how jealously he guarded his own authentic status, but it also hints at how difficult the scout business was. “People have flattered you until you think … that you are a great man. Jack, go ahead,” Cody urged. “You will find out that all that glitters is not gold.” 77 Nonetheless, Cody would not try to stop him. “I wish you success and I will never do a thing to hurt you.” The two men remained friends, but Crawford’s jealousy at Cody’s success made him bitter as old age approached. In bringing Buffalo Bill to stage stardom, he wrote on one occasion, “Ned Buntline created the most selfish and brutal fake hero ever perpetrated on the American people.”78 Crawford’s accusations notwithstanding, the fakery of Buffalo Bill paled beside the fakery of his many imitators, like Crawford, whose jealousy and mimicry of Cody only enhanced Buffalo Bill’s claim to being “the real thing.”
LIVING THE STORY
All stage art is a mimicry of real life, but the scout business so confused the categories of real and fake, action and mimicry, that to one New York Times correspondent it seemed to presage a new kind of theater, the “Drama of the Future,” which would “illustrate current history through the painting of actual events, by the real actors in them.” This new art form would “call upon the conspicuous personages of current history, on getting through each marked phase of their careers, to have dramas written describing the same, and go about playing star engagements in the chief character.” Of course, there was a real danger that people would (as Cody did, especially in the case of Yellow Hair) deliberately seek “strange adventures” or even court “deadly perils,” all “with the idea of acquiring attractive material for a success on the boards.” Nonetheless, “the lives of most people are already more histrionic than they think”—or admit. There were, after all, “infinitely more actors and actresses in real life than there can possibly be on the stage.”79
If the “Drama of the Future” never materialized, if those occasions of real people playing scenes from their own life remained the exception and not the rule, in truth the stage plays of Buffalo Bill did not much resemble it, anyway. Although the Scouts of the Prairie, Knight of the Plains, and the other Buffalo Bill dramas pretended to mimic Cody’s real life, they were elaborate, expansive fictions. Their story lines featured plenty of references to actual people, including the Grand Duke Alexis, Cody’s younger sister May, Texas Jack, Wild Bill Hickok, and, of course, Buffalo Bill himself. But beyond these simple allusions, the plays bore almost no relation to Cody’s real life. He never foiled a ring of counterfeiters who were dressing as Indians, he never fought Jake McKanlass, or anybody with a similar name, and he never rescued his sister May from Mormons.
The trick of being the “real” Buffalo Bill was, of course, to tie his biography to his stage performances and lend them authentic resonance, especially when they were untrue, which was almost always. Thus, in May Cody, or Lost and Won, his sister is abducted by Mormon patriarch John D. Lee during the historical Mormon attack on an emigrant wagon train at Mountain Meadows. Her brother, Buffalo Bill, disguises himself as an Indian and rescues her. But before they can celebrate, he is arrested at Fort Bridger, and put on trial for being a spy. Ultimately, he is exonerated and the play reaches its happy ending.80
The play was written by Major Andrew Burt, an army officer and friend of Cody’s. Like other melodramas and like most dime novels, too, it was a response to recent news events, in this case the 1877 execution of Mormon patriarch John D. Lee for his part in the notorious Mountain Meadows massacre twenty years before. William Cody never claimed that his sister had actually been abducted, but it was at this time that he began to claim that as a boy he had been on a wagon train that was raided by Mormons and forced to retreat to Fort Bridger, and this tall tale became a prominent story in his autobiography, which he published two years later.81 For every real event which Cody acted out on the stage, his plays featured dozens that never happened at all. Rather than a drama in which historical people acted out their real accomplishments, Cody’s melodramas were more often fictional tales which he appropriated as “true” after starring in them.
Such revelations raise other questions—notably, if Cody was making dramatic fictions into his autobiography, why didn’t anybody call him on it? Why did audiences seem unable, or unwilling, to recognize the deception? The answer hinges on the role of the West in melodramatic imagination. The Far West and its peoples were still remote enough that audiences first encountered them through the press. Correspondents like George Ward Nichols and Ned Buntline interpreted the lives of Hickok, Cody, and Omohundro through the lenses of dime novels and melodramas, and often by resorting to the tropes of the genre. The mythology of progress which western events seemed to validate, the clearly visible ascent of civilization, was easily incorporated into melodramas of frontier heroes restoring virtuous women to domestic bliss—which, in the workings of melodrama, was the heart of civilization itself. Melodrama idealized domesticity. In play after play, the melodrama reinscribed the notion that personal happiness, democracy, the future of the republic, and just about every other desirable condition depended on domestic contentment, which in turn depended on chaste marriage, and of course, the “true” and unstained woman. Just as the triumph of civilization over savagery was understood as the triumph of domestic order, the salvation of the settler’s cabin, so the melodrama’s core plot was the rescue of the virtuous woman and her restoration to the home.82
Thus, audiences projected melodramatic fantasies onto Hickok, Cody, and Omohundro even before they saw their plays, envisioned them saving white women from Indians even before they “saw” them do just that on the stage. The heroes’ appearance in these theatrical performances authenticated the fantasy. Just as important, these figures could continue taking part in the real, offstage adventure of western progress, their exploits perpetuating the blend of authentic and fantastic. Thus, throughout their careers in the public eye, stage scouts sought to embody western progress by carrying on high-profile, self-consciously progressive lives in the offstage West. In addition to fighting Indians through 1876, Cody launched into ranching in northern Nebraska. Omohundro, Crawford, and Hickok sought profits in mining companies.83 In each case, they entered industries which represented progress, the coming of pastoralism or industry to the savage wilderness. Each skillfully avoided, or avoided publicizing, other ventures less materially tied to progressive mythology, such as managing railroad or stage lines, or opening yet another business in one of the many western towns where saloons, barbershops, and dry goods stores proliferated. Cody turned down an officer’s commission in the army.84 Tellingly, none became a farmer in the 1870s, as if the culmination of progress—the redemption of the garden from the wilderness—was too much denouement and insufficiently compelling for the drama they sought to play out. Thus, they inscribed the forward motion of civilization, the advancement of progress, into their life stories. They proved the myth true, thereby heightening the authenticity
of the very fictional plays they showed each theatrical season.
Absent the mythology of progress to play out in his offstage life, the stage character of Buffalo Bill might have vanished after brief popularity, or perhaps gone on to become an entirely fictional character, with no appreciable tie to the real William Cody. Such a trajectory obtained in earlier cases of real people represented on the stage. In 1848, New York playwright Benjamin Baker created the character of a heroic fireman named Mose. The character was based on a real person, Mose Humphrey, a typesetter for the New York Sun and a volunteer firefighter renowned among the newspaper workers who crowded theater galleries. Represented by a popular actor, Francis “Frank” Chanfrau, who had grown up in the Bowery himself, Mose became a huge draw for theaters. Because he was a “real” person, the character could not be copyrighted. Thus, after 1848, Mose cropped up in numerous novels (at least one of them by Ned Buntline) and plays (at one point, Chanfrau played Mose in two different productions playing simultaneously at rival theaters). Before long, Mose became a kind of folk hero, a Paul Bunyan of Manhattan, who was said to have jumped across the Hudson, to have blown ships back down the East River, and to have carried a streetcar with the horses dangling. 85
But by that time, he was no longer attached to his inspiration, the real-life fireman. We may speculate that this separation between myth and man would likely have occurred even if Mose Humphrey had stepped into the role to play himself. After all, firemen were heroes, but they did not represent a moment in a larger progress, except in the most abstract sense. Cody, the hunter and Indian fighter, had initiated the rise of civilization in the West. The mythology was so self-evidently “true” that it played on the stage as well as it supposedly “played” in the West. Theoretically, he could spend his remaining years living out the subsequent stages of civilization’s ascent as rancher, farmer, patrician, and revered town founder. Indeed, that is precisely what he attempted to do.
He had more options than people like Mose Humphrey. For the machinists, typesetters, artists, firemen, clerks, and doctors who might have played themselves onstage, the real challenge was less that their lives had no drama than that they could not infuse their offstage lives with the narrative that western progress conveyed, and which made the continuing appearances of western scouts, especially William Cody, so interesting for theatrical audiences. Melodramatic fantasy was harder to sustain around “real” figures from other regions because regional history either fit less comfortably into the mythology of ascendant civilization, or because that history was too remote. There were dramas aplenty about southern life, including wave after wave of Uncle Tom’s Cabin reprises. But southern history, with its descent into slavery, read more like American-history-gone-wrong. White southerners were too associated with slave owning to allow a single progressive hero to champion the region’s regressive story. Northern history was easier to narrate as heroic saga, but its moment of redemption from wilderness was far enough back in time that its protagonists were long since dead.
Frontier melodrama had no such constraints. Its core stories were the rise of white civilization and the restoration of domestic bliss. As a narrative it was vague enough not to offend and yet it resonated with a broad range of urban and small-town concerns, including the need for a civil order, for the protection of the family from hostile forces, and for the continuing dominance of white men in a society ever more diversified by waves of immigration. Indians were too alienated from the civil order to object to dramatic misrepresentation. The melodrama’s white and immigrant villains, bent on miscegenation and thievery, went far beyond the bounds of defensible behavior. The frontier’s centrality to American ideas of history and progress provided not just a theory of American development, but a powerful story about how people behave and how events unfold. The advancement from primitive hunting to modern commerce, from savage disorder to enlightened civilization, provided a ready-made narrative, a backstory, to every drama set there. In other words, audience expectations of frontier stories were so powerful that they could look past the blatant fiction of these dramas and embrace the “real” frontier heroes as proof that their expectations and assumptions about the frontier were mostly true.
In one more sense did the frontier West have an advantage as a setting that combined real people and mock play: the frontier line had long served as a mythical dividing point between fakery and reality. Frontier melodrama’s mixture of fakery and real people was so compelling because the West itself was synonymous with that same mixture. The West was, in a word, a humbug, and if the drama that presented it most truthfully was itself an artful deception, the West in the 1870s, with its many boosters making impossible but still alluring claims for its promise, had itself become an apt symbol for the fakery and irresistibility of the theater, the locus of the actor’s outrageous claims and seductive power.
MIDDLE-CLASS SYMBOL, WORKING-CLASS HERO
If the New York Times correspondent who predicted the “Drama of the Future” was mostly incorrect about the future shape of American drama, in one respect the prediction expressed a popular, little-appreciated idea which made Cody’s stage appearances so satisfying. By asserting that there were “infinitely more actors and actresses in real life than there can possibly be on the stage,” the correspondent touched on pervasive concerns about the imposture of modern living in the 1870s. The interchangeability of original and copy was an entertaining parody of mass production and consumer fashion, but the scout business also resonated with even broader cultural trends toward the acceptance of ordinary people as imitators, or actors, in day-today living. Superficially, Buffalo Bill, Texas Jack, and the other protagonists of frontier melodrama offered a critique of theater by eschewing the title of actor, as if to reinforce traditional prejudice against actors and theatrical drama. “They do not pretend to be actors, i.e. ‘Buffalo Bill’ or ‘Texas Jack,’ ” wrote one critic; “they simply present to the view of an audience scenes in actual border life, similar to those which they themselves have passed.”86 The deception that he was an actual man, not an actor, was a consistent feature of Cody’s career, and a decade later he continued the pretense. “I’m not an actor—I’m a star,” he told an interviewer in 1882. “All actors can become stars,” he explained, “but all stars cannot become actors.” 87
The success of the untrained “anti-actor” in a domain of trained professionals was, in a sense, a series of elbow jabs to the ribs, an ongoing inside joke between him and his fans, who adored him less for his acting than for his willingness to send up professional theater itself. Stage drama, after all, depends on a pact between actor and audience: one pretends, the other pretends to believe. By refusing the title of actor, Cody announced his inability to pretend—then went on the stage anyway, as if to say that acting was for professionals, but imitating actors was the domain of the natural man. In this sense, his presence on the stage was a parody of the entire theatrical industry.
If the real Cody was no actor, it followed that he was incapable of disguising himself. There was no veil to come off. But once the novelty of seeing Buffalo Bill onstage diminished after the first couple of seasons, Cody began commissioning playwrights to layer more complex impersonations on top of his stage identity, and the character of Buffalo Bill began to take up more complex disguises. In Cody’s 1878 production, The Knight of the Plains, his character assumed three different identities: an English nobleman, a detective, and a Pony Express rider.88 The “real” William Cody was now assuming new masks which fooled other characters, but not the audience.
The effect was less to renounce acting than to embrace it. Professional thespians in the drama relied on Cody’s presence to make these dramas work. They had to pretend to be tricked by his unlikely disguises. The play within the play reinforced the larger message of Cody’s stage career: any man can pretend, act, manipulate the professionals, and succeed. White American manliness and imposture were not antithetical. Manly men took to acting like frontiersmen to the wilderne
ss.
Imitations of the “real” Buffalo Bill were one source of Cody’s success; the enthusiastic reception of this message—that all white men can be actors—suggests another. Theater was by no means universally respected in the 1870s, but it was accruing acceptance as Americans came to see it as a reflection of new forms of social interaction. The rapidly accumulating wealth of the middle classes in the second half of the nineteenth century led to new forms of conspicuous display, and the development of industrial production placed ever less emphasis on traditional yeomanry and ever more on sales and marketing as pathways to wealth and respectability. Where they had once aspired to a society in which Christian trust was pervasive and one’s intentions were self-evident, increasingly Americans “were learning to place confidence in more elaborate forms of self-presentation,” in the words of scholar Karen Halttunen.89 Americans had begun to see their own dependence on manners and middle-class facades as a kind of theater of everyday life. This was the reason for the rising popularity of “parlor theatricals,” elaborate, amateur productions with curtains, painted sets, prompters, dramatic lighting, and a full array of props. Across the country, urban middle-class people staged these shows for friends and neighbors in their living rooms. Such displays expressed middle-class dependence on—and confidence in—complicated manners and social rituals to explain themselves. The message of the parlor theatrical was, essentially, “Life is a charade.”90
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