In no small measure, Buffalo Bill embodied and expressed the everyday American’s facility for theatrical display and upward mobility. Thus, Buffalo Bill’s character was not just the exclusive purview of Cody or his professional imitators. Middle-class men across the country took to playing Cody, just like real actors, in parlor theatricals. In 1874, out at Fort Abraham Lincoln, in Dakota Territory, that icon of middle-class manhood, George Armstrong Custer, played the role of Buffalo Bill in his elaborate living room production of Buffalo Bill and His Bride, with Libbie as his leading lady.91
Whether or not P. T. Barnum ever saw Buffalo Bill’s stage plays, they provided the requisite mix of authenticity and imposture of his own entertainments. Indeed, contemporaries remarked on the similarity between Cody’s new art and Barnum’s. Back in Nebraska, in her cabin not far from Fort McPherson, Ena Raymonde, a friend of Cody and Omohundro, read reviews of their stage appearances in the fall of 1872. “Verily, life is a humbug, ” she mused, “and he that is the biggest humbug, has the best chance for humbugging the rest of his fellows.”92
On the frontier, indeed, Buffalo Bill was an object of fascination and dispute. Locals argued about him and Texas Jack much as they argued over Hickok and other artists of western imposture. But his success at integrating himself into the mythology of the West as an icon of middle-class theatricality made him a favorite symbol for settlers by the early 1870s, in ways that Hickok, teetering between lawman and outlaw, could never be. Locals in the vicinity of Fort McPherson ordered Cody’s portrait photo from the photographer in North Platte. Ena Raymonde took the time to hand-tint hers.93 Participants at an 1872 masquerade ball in Wichita, Kansas, ordered their masks from Kansas City. Among the visages that evening were a Spanish cavalier, the goddess of liberty, Satan, and Buffalo Bill.94
It may be, as one scholar has argued, that “personal conduct in societies based on the premise of upward mobility is characterized by a highly theatrical presentation of self.”95 In which case, Cody’s appeal as a symbol of theatrical self-presentation, a man who played his “real” self in the theater, was all the more central to his age. So what prompted him to leave the stage after over a decade of astounding success? Why take a risk on a bold new entertainment like the Wild West show, which was so unlike the stage in its size, complexity, and dramatic messages?
In fact, there were reasons aplenty, beginning with the ways the limited appeal of the theater eventually constrained Buffalo Bill’s marketability. Antitheatricalism had declined, and the “respectable” middle classes no longer shunned all theaters as disreputable. But theater performances usually appealed to one class or another, and critics encoded the class composition of audiences in their reviews. In general, middle-class, white-collar men would not take their families to productions patronized by working-class men (where prostitutes and lower-class women could also be found). On the other hand, respectable theaters were generally too expensive for middle-class people, and they grew more expensive as the century progressed. “By the mid-1880s,” says David Nasaw, “the average theater ticket cost a dollar, two-thirds of what the nonfarm worker earned in a day.” Most city residents simply could not afford such prices.96 Urban nightlife was ever more the domain of wealthy young sports who had enough fiscal and social capital to afford its corruptions, and lower-class workers, many of them immigrants, who guzzled beer in the concert saloons and vaudeville theaters of the day.97 Museums, which banned drink and prostitution, were more acceptable entertainment venues. But most working-and middle-class people had few or no affordable, reputable nighttime entertainment venues. 98
Cody had worked hard to restore himself to the middle class after the Civil War. He kept the middle-class company of officers and entrepreneurs in Kansas and Nebraska, and in Rochester his daughters went to private school, and the Cody family lived in a well-to-do, tree-lined district. As a public figure, he was symbolic of middle-class entertainment with his seamless moves between real guiding, hunting, and Indian fighting and his fictional representations of those same activities.
The Cody family—Arta, Orra, Louisa, and William Cody—as middle-class bastion, c. 1880. The theatrical melodrama seldom drew the crowd to match Cody’s aspirations to respectability. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.
But in the city, Cody’s message seems to have been most empowering, or at least most popular, among working people. They swarmed to the theaters to see Buffalo Bill. His willingness to authenticate the entertainment with his presence invited their own participation, which they proffered in raucous fashion. In Portland, Maine, in 1873, a reviewer related how “an urchin, remembering that one character, at least, in the play yet survived, exclaimed ‘Hold on; wait till the show’s through—Dutchy ain’t dead yet! ” In 1875, an audience member shouted as Buffalo Bill wrestled with a stage bear: “Shoot him, Bill! Run in on him and kill him!” 99
In his early days, critics complained that Cody’s lowbrow entertainment was displacing the classical theater of Edwin Booth and the French actor Charles Fechter, and Cody himself reportedly joked that he would run Booth and Fechter into New Jersey by playing Shakespeare right through, from beginning to end, with Ned Buntline and Texas Jack to support me. I shall do Hamlet in a buckskin suit, and when my father’s ghost appears “doomed for a certain time,” &c., I shall say to Jack, “Rope the cuss in, Jack!” and unless the lasso breaks, the ghost will have to come. As “Richard the Third,” I shall fight with pistols and hunting knives. In “Romeo and Juliet” I shall put a half-breed squaw on the balcony and make various other interpretations of Shakespeare’s words to suit myself.100
Reviews were often scathing, and left no doubt that Cody’s appeal was chiefly to the lower class. Scouts of the Prairie was “one of the worse specimens of unmitigated trash we have ever seen on any stage … belonging to that order of the drama which finds a home at the Bowery or Wood’s Museum,” wrote a New York correspondent, referring to the preferred theaters of working-class audiences. But, he warned, it “would scarcely be tolerated” even there.101
There were members of the elite in the audience at Cody’s first performance: ranks of military officers and sports like Milligan, and many others bought tickets on that night and throughout his career. But critics separated such people from true Buffalo Bill fans, implying that elite enjoyment came less from Cody’s drama than from the spectacle of lower-class enthusiasm for it. After panning Scouts of the Prairie, another critic summarized, “Thus the lower million are delighted and many of the ‘upper ten thousand’ amused.” 102
From its beginnings, Buffalo Bill’s drama inspired considerable social criticism because of its implied messages to these ardent lower-class followers. Reformers disdained dime novels and cheap melodrama because their lurid violence and appeal to base emotions, their sensationalism, threatened to ignite the barely restrained passions of the laboring masses, who were, after all, thinly disguised savages, many of them from alien shores and prone to strikes and violence.103 “All the small boys (and some of the big ones too) of this city are now practising the Indian war hoop [sic] after the style of Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack,” wrote one reviewer. “At all hours of the night the unearthly yells can be heard in our streets, to the disgust of all peaceable citizens.” As if to imply the burden this imposed on law and order, the critic went on: “It is currently reported that one policeman in Station Four has become totally deaf in consequence of those infernal yells.”104
Cody made efforts to turn his plays into middle-class family entertainment almost from his earliest days on the stage, and there were hints of their potential to become a unifying national art. Buffalo Bill’s early appearances alongside the ex-Confederate Texas Jack Omohundro earned praise as a gesture of national reconciliation. In the words of one critic, “here was the ‘blue and the gray’ blended together in one harmonious strain of good fellowship … a bright example to the rising generation.” 105
Cody’s break with Buntline, after his first season on tour, ref
lected his impulse to steer clear of the writer’s well-earned reputation for class antagonism and anti-immigrant violence. In a long and tumultuous literary and political career, Buntline had scaled impressive heights as rabble-rouser and nativist. He was a founder of the anti-immigrant American Party, commonly called the Know-Nothings, in the early 1850s. Prior to that, in 1849, he was a ringleader of the Astor Place Riot, a melee between thousands of working-class New Yorkers and the state militia outside a production of Macbeth which starred an English actor. Buntline and the other leaders of the fracas intended to send a political warning about the dangers of Anglophilia and un-American class hierarchies. But the riot grew so violent that the militia fired repeatedly on the crowd, killing thirty-one people and wounding over a hundred.106
The Astor Place Riot is the very conflagration which historians credit with driving a wedge between the dramatic tastes of upper-class theatergoers and their lower-class counterparts, thereby dividing the market for theatrical offerings. Buntline’s violence, then, helped to create the genus of lower-class entertainment to which Cody was routinely consigned, and from which he fought to escape throughout his stage career. Buntline served a year in prison for his role at Astor Place, but he was hardly finished. In 1852 he fled St. Louis after being indicted for sparking bloody anti-German riots during that year’s election. Twenty years later, he was finally arrested for that crime during his sojourn in the city with Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack. This embarrassing moment gave acerbic critics an opening they did not need, but could not forsake: “It is said that Buntline’s participation in the little affair here some twenty years ago was merely the advance advertisement of the appearance, this week, with his troupe.”107
For the first year and a half of her husband’s stage career, Louisa Cody sometimes served as troupe seamstress. She accompanied Buffalo Bill on the road, with their three children, Arta, Orra, and Kit.108 If, as seems likely, the presence of his own middle-class family reinforced Cody’s longing to make his entertainment palatable for middle-class family audiences, he was frustrated. He and Buntline tried various methods of luring respectable women to the drama, including the staging of matinees—daytime performances appealed to family audiences—and offering free cabinet photographs of Texas Jack, Morlacchi, Ned Buntline, and Buffalo Bill to every “lady” who attended.109
Endeavoring as he was to fashion his melodramas into family entertainment as early as his first year on the stage, we can only wonder what possessed Cody to invite the broody brawler Wild Bill Hickok to join the troupe in the following year. Hickok’s reputation for bloodshed was exaggerated, but Cody knew it was not groundless. Out west, Hickok was a gunfighter and a bona fide killer. He fought often with his fists, many times against the odds, and he usually won. In Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska he had killed several men in gunfights.110
In contrast with Hickok’s frequent dark moods, Cody was unfailingly cheerful and gregarious. He rarely fought with his fists, and when he did, accounts are in disagreement about how the fights ended. When journalists asked Hickok how many white men he had killed, he gave them vastly inflated totals or demurred, muttering words to the effect that “I never killed a man who didn’t need killing.” In 1875, a lawyer in Westchester, New York, asked Cody if he had ever shot anyone, by which he meant anyone other than an Indian. Cody grew dark with anger. “No! What do you ask me such a thing for?”111
Hickok’s addition to the company thus was hardly in keeping with Cody’s goals for respectable entertainment. There are hints that it did not sit well with the Cody family, either. To be sure, how the Prince of Pistoleers and Mrs. Cody fared as melodramatic troupers sharing the same trains, carriages, hotels, and backstages we shall never know. Shortly after William Cody’s death, Louisa Cody dictated her own memoirs, in which she recalled the tour as yet another blissful episode in her long (and in reality, troubled) marriage. As she recalled it, Hickok arrived during a performance, and Cody was out on the stage. Hickok, “stumbling about in the darkness, looked out and gasped as he saw Cody. ‘For the sake of Jehosaphat!’ he exclaimed, ‘What’s that Bill Cody’s got on him out there?’ ”
From left to right: Wild Bill Hickok, Texas Jack Omohundro, and William F. Cody, 1873. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.
Louisa asked if he was referring to Cody’s clothes, but “Wild Bill shook his head and waved his arms. ‘No,’ he was growing more excited every minute, ‘that white stuff that’s floating all around him.’ ”
“Why, Mr. Hickok,” she explained, “that’s limelight.”
“Wild Bill turned and grabbed a stage-hand by the arm,” she remembered, “then he dragged a gold piece from his pocket. ‘Boy,’ he commanded, ‘run as fast as your legs will carry you and get me five dollars’ worth of that stuff. I want it smeared all over me!’ ”
The account is fictional (Hickok knew what limelight was, and craved it), but it captures the friction Louisa witnessed that year. Indeed, reading between the lines of William Cody’s autobiography suggests the Cody-Hickok stage venture was an uneasy arrangement. Hickok, increasingly jealous of Cody’s success, got less compliant as the tour continued. He brawled with billiard room toughs even when Cody implored him to avoid public violence for the sake of the troupe—and presumably, for the sake of the Cody family. He tortured the actors who played Indians in the drama, intentionally firing his pistol blanks so close to their bare legs as to burn them. “Bill’s conduct made me angry,” recalled Cody some years later, “and I told him he must either stop shooting the ‘supers’ or leave the company.” 112
Hickok left. Cody was genuinely sorry to see Wild Bill go, but Hickok’s unwillingness to modify his violence for the sake of the combination’s image made him a dubious theatrical partner at best. Cody told the tale as if he gave Hickok the chance to stay, and he may have, but evidence suggests that his departure was only part of a wider shake-up in the company. Hickok departed the company at Rochester, on March 11, 1874—the very day that Louisa and the children separated from the company for a home in that city. Hickok and Louisa, respective embodiments of rough-hewn brawler and middle-class domestic order, likely disembarked at the same platform. One wonders if they were speaking.113
But for all his labors, Cody’s imposture as the ideal Indian fighter was not easily transported to the stage as respectable entertainment, in part because the American public was itself divided on questions of Indian policy, and in part because literary and artistic notions of Indian fighting were not easily made real without creating controversy. In taking Yellow Hair’s scalp, Cody situated himself in a liminal position, as the civilized man driven to scalping and savage war by the excesses of the Indians who had “massacred” Custer. As the white Indian, he could ostensibly cross the line into savagery and defeat Indians with their own methods, while retaining civilized virtues so as to avoid becoming savage himself. By and large, as we have seen, the maneuver was successful, with the “first scalp for Custer” reaffirming his status as white Indian and theatrical star.
But his descent into Indian modes of combat came with a cost. To Americans, scalping was generally barbaric, a savage gesture beneath civilized society, and beneath professional soldiers, who mostly abhorred the practice. His display of Yellow Hair’s scalp and personal belongings at theaters sometimes brought public condemnation, particularly in the strongholds of reformers in New England. The scalp display was banned in Boston, and even in the heated aftermath of Custer’s death, his most ardent press supporters, the editors of the New York Herald, condemned it as “a disgrace to civilization.” 114 Some fans chided these critics for their sentimentalism, but not all of them were so easily dismissed. Even one Fifth Cavalry trooper, Chris Madsen, a Danish immigrant, was horrified when Cody scalped Yellow Hair, and asked him why he did it. Cody responded that the Cheyenne had a woman’s scalp at his waist and an American flag for a loincloth.115 In other words, the Indian’s offenses were so far beyond the pale as to require a savage response. The rationale ma
y have let some critics rest easier with Cody’s bloody trophy, but the very fact that an explanation was necessary suggests how troubling Buffalo Bill’s “real-life” heroism could become for a public continually roiled by arguments over violence and bloodshed in civic life and in war.
By the late 1870s, Cody parried some of his critics’ barbs with a gentler drama. Sometimes reviewers even encouraged the “better class” of theatergoers to attend. In Buffalo Bill at Bay, a reviewer reported, “The orchestra is excellent… . There is no gun firing, except when Bill gives his [shooting] exhibition,” at the middle of the drama, and there was “no slaughtering, so that timid women need feel no aversion to attending.” 116 His Knight of the Plains drew a moderate amount of praise, too, both for the improvement in Cody’s acting and the absence of gratuitous violence, so that “this new departure is drawing everywhere large audiences of ladies, and the best show-going people.”117 Wrote another critic, the play was “a vast improvement over all others in which this star has appeared.”118
By this time, Cody had already outlived his biggest competitors. Wild Bill Hickok had married Agnes Lake, a prominent circus owner, and might have launched an early Wild West show had he not been murdered in 1876. Texas Jack died of pneumonia in Leadville, Colorado, in 1880. Captain Jack was reading his execrable poetry and had all but abandoned the stage. William Cody was seemingly secure as the supreme frontier melodramatist. He was on the verge of respectability.119
And yet Cody’s very success at domesticating his drama threatened to undo him. The fun of Buffalo Bill, after all, had been the interplay between the fake and the real, anchored by his authenticity as the original frontier hero. The death of prominent scouts, and the absence of frontier war to produce any more, removed much of the imitation and took away, too, much of the genre’s fun. Just as significant, if Cody’s plays were coming to resemble the upmarket version of western melodrama, more like Across the Continent and Horizon, then he was simply becoming more like other actors. The energizing element of his presence, his symbol as a common man who made a stage career out of fooling professional actors, would vanish the minute he gained critical acceptance as an actor. In this sense, for all his success on the boards, there was not much chance that he could ever translate it into solid middle-class family entertainment.
Louis S. Warren Page 27