Coming from commanders who routinely defended soldiers for killing Indian women and children, such sentiments might seem contradictory. But the ambivalence was genuine, deeply rooted, and widespread. Preparing to kill Indians in combat, soldiers (and their families) denounced Indians as bloodthirsty savages who merited destruction. Removed from imminent battle, soldiers valorized their opponents as noble, stalwart defenders of home and family, more primitive but still honorable versions of themselves.44
Of course, such sentiments said more about soldiers than Indians. Only a valiant soldier could defeat a valiant enemy. Venerating their opponents as noble savages allowed officers to claim the status of alienated men of honor in a dishonorable age. To their way of thinking, the Plains Indian wars were mostly the result of greedy frontier settlers, merchants, and their cronies, who manipulated a distant, disengaged Washington bureaucracy into declaring war on victimized, misunderstood Indians, all in an effort to grab Indian land and army supply contracts.45
Cody’s complaint about white thieves who supplied the “regular market” for stolen Indian horses thus echoed the complaints of many army officers who saw Americans, particularly of the lower-class variety, as the real savages of the frontier. Consistently, his stage plays borrowed from dime novel conventions and military rhetoric that placed Indians at the mercy of evil whites. “General, it is not the Indians who are the first cause of difficulties,” Buffalo Bill asserts in Life on the Border. “It is the white men who disguise themselves as Indians and commit these depredations, then the Indians are to blame for it. Then away goes the military for them and that brings on an Indian war.” 46
There was truth to the contention. American criminals who disguised murders and thefts by planting Indian clues—moccasin prints, arrows, unshod horse tracks—were common on the frontier. But white settlers who stole from Indians were even more widespread, and officers castigated them. Captain John Bourke, a veteran of the U.S. Army’s Apache campaigns, denounced reckless, idle, and “dissolute” settlers for starting Indian wars. In Texas, officer James Parker wrote his mother, “I would like to go on a scouting expedition after renegade Texans and hang up every scoundrel I caught,” for the horse thieving, rapine, and murder they visited upon Indians. Major Alfred Lacey Hough denounced Colorado’s “wholly unscrupulous” frontier settlers for being “ambitious men who care only for their own interests” and who stirred up trouble with Indians to bring on a federal Indian war and an infusion of federal dollars into the local economy.47
As enlightened as such views seem, they were also self-serving. Where the army’s war on Indians verged on atrocity, officers (and scouts like Cody) held themselves blameless, and pointed at settlers, bureaucrats, or Indians for starting the conflagration into which duty thrust them. 48 Thus, in the minds of officers, at least, the army did the nation’s dirty work. When they were not in combat, the army stood between frontier settlers and Indians, and they understood their role as protectors of each from the other.
If the Indian wars were bereft of honor, why did Cody and so many officers fight them? Why not resign? Simply put, resisting duty would not have improved matters. Popular Darwinian and Anglo-Saxonist ideologies found numerous exponents among the educated and comparatively well-read officer corps. To them, the march of the white race and its higher civilization made the destruction of Indian culture—the Indian “race”—inevitable. For Indians to surrender to the farms and industry of the higher American civilization was the only possible outcome of the race confrontation described by the frontier line. Lieutenant Colonel George Forsyth, in a typical statement of this widespread philosophy, acknowledged that “the Indian has been wronged, and deeply wronged, by bad white men.” Nonetheless, “it must always be borne in mind that, cruel as the aphorism is, ‘the survival of the fittest’ is a truism that cannot be ignored or gainsaid and barbarism must necessarily give way before advancing civilization.”49
If warfare and skullduggery were the means through which civilization triumphed, as far as the army was concerned, that was the fault of distant bureaucrats or greedy settlers. Officers usually saw themselves as honorable mediators between civilization and savagery, even when they had to fight Indians who had been wrongly provoked. By vanquishing their Indian opponents as quickly as possible, and moving them expeditiously to reservations, they were giving the Indians a peaceful home—in which they could pass quietly into oblivion.
In reality, of course, Indians were not about to vanish. Their survival strategies included performing dances and other cultural practices for cash, something Cody’s stage shows and his Wild West show facilitated. But the belief that they were about to disappear, in a development that was as inevitable as it was unfortunate, remained a dominant stream of American thought well into the twentieth century.
Indians, indeed, were only the most prominent of the “vanishing” peoples, landscapes, tools, trades, occupations, and customs that preoccupied nineteenth-century Americans. The rhetoric of vanishment described categories of beings or things that disappeared to make way for more highly developed successors. It was central to the ideology of progress, and woven through contemporary notions of biology, industrial development, and politics. Naturalists, like officers, influenced Cody’s views on retreating Indians, buffalo, and the frontier. In the late 1860s Cody hunted buffalo “specimens” for America’s leading taxidermist, Professor Henry A. Ward of Rochester (with whom he frequently socialized afterward, as a resident of that city), and in 1871 he guided Professor Othniel C. Marsh, of Yale University (whose continuing search for dinosaur bones was later assisted by another guide, George Sword). Ward, Marsh, and others related the region’s ancient past in stories of brutal competition, violent extinction, and the ineluctable ascendance of higher orders. According to Cody, Marsh “entertained me with several scientific yarns, some of which seemed too complicated and too mysterious to be believed by an ordinary man like myself; but it was all clear to him.” 50 Whether or not his self-effacing shrug at Marsh’s science was false modesty, Cody understood evolutionary thought at least as well as most Americans did. Darwinian evolution, after all, could be read as a variation on the larger narrative of progress and upward development that had preoccupied American thinking since the beginning of the United States.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show stands in popular memory as a symbol of Gilded Age confidence. But the centrality of Indians to it, as noble savages doomed to vanish, in truth reflected the conflicted views of most Americans on the subject of the frontier, which they loved and destroyed through their own progress. Cody’s exposure to Darwinism, the theory of civilization, and the army command provided him with a ready rhetoric of Indian vanishment, a development so preordained and inevitable that it rendered Indian hating not only distasteful, but excessive. In time, he adapted this language to his Wild West show as a whole. The show, like the Indians, was predicted to disappear as time swept away the “originals” who represented life in the show’s Far West. In adapting the sentiments of officers and scientists for his own needs, Cody borrowed a language that combined scientific prediction with certainty about the political advent of the United States in the Far West, but which was also shot through with profound uncertainty about the moral quality of that succession. Even as Americans swept out across the Plains to force the ineluctable conclusion of progress, Cody remained less convinced of its righteousness than of its inevitability.
Ambivalence: this was the defining characteristic of American sentiment on westward expansion. And ambivalence was where Cody arrived after searching for the right language to tell stories to the public about real Indians, initially Sword and Two Bears, ultimately all the others who followed in the decades after his stage season of 1877.
As Indians became essential to the spectacle of Buffalo Bill, the need to expand the performance space from stage to arena became increasingly evident. For if Indianness were to be put on display, Indians would have to be on horses.
On horseback, P
lains Indians were both enemies and inspirations. Cavalrymen, who venerated great horsemanship, were astounded at Cheyenne, Lakota, and other Indians who galloped bareback amid stampeding buffalo, firing continuous streams of arrows without putting hand to reins. In warfare, their horsecraft was awesome. Hooking one heel over a horse’s back, they clung to the sides of their mounts and used the animals’ bodies as shields from enemy fire, and the showier men even returned fire from under their horse’s necks. They could retrieve fallen comrades from teeming battlefields, at top speed and without dismounting. (Alternatively, one shocked officer reported that a Cheyenne brave scooped up a soldier’s corpse at full gallop, stripped him naked, dashed out his brains, and discarded the body— without even slowing down.)51 “Having never seen the riding of Arabs, Turcomans, Cossacks” or other “world renowned riders,” wrote one officer, “I cannot say how the Indian compares with them, but I am satisfied that he is too nearly a Centaur to be surpassed by any.” 52
The appellation “centaur” was a popular compliment in the nineteenth century, often used to reflect the manly bearing of a gentleman on horseback. Indian centaurism simultaneously invited and compelled soldiers to master horses in new ways. After fighting a Cheyenne war party in 1868, one troop of soldiers “were seen to mount from the right-hand side, Indian fashion; others to get on their horses’ backs by catching hold of the animals’ tails and giving a spring—also an Indian fashion. There was not a trooper in camp who had not made an effort to ride beneath his horse instead of above him.”53
Even before this, at least one officer who found his own green troopers no match for the “centaurs of the desert” took extraordinary measures. Lieutenant George Armes, commander of the Second Cavalry, sought to remove the lopsided Indian advantage on horseback with new training methods at Fort Sedgewick in 1866. By the time he was finished, crowds gathered to watch his men “stand up on their horse’s bare back and ride around the ring at a gallop,” and “spring on and off their horses” at full speed, while the animals leapt over hurdles.54
Armes intended the unorthodox training to enable his men to challenge Indian warriors on open battlefields, but his techniques soon earned the censure of his superiors, who upbraided him for turning his men into “circus riders.”55 The criticism was ironically apt. Training soldiers to victory required, after all, defeating Indians whose thunderous, circling formations resembled nothing so much as “the grand entree of a circus,” in the words of Colonel Richard Irving Dodge.56
Comparisons of Indians and Indian-style riding to circus tricks reflected the widespread notoriety of circus entertainment in the nineteenth century, and the early devotion of the circus to horseback stunts. Generals ridiculed George Armes for creating a training regiment that looked like a circus, but the modern circus was, in fact, birthed by a cavalryman in 1768. It was the brainchild of Philip Astley, a retired English cavalry officer who hit upon the idea of charging admission to the crowds who came to observe students at his London riding school. The diameter of Astley’s performance space, forty-two feet, was an accommodation to the minimum needs of horses turning at a gallop, and it became the standard size for the circus ring. 57
Circuses had changed considerably by the time Cheyenne and Sioux challenged Americans for control of the Plains. Over the course of the nineteenth century, European and American circuses gradually combined clowning and horseback stunts with menageries, acrobatics, and trapeze acts. In 1796, the elephant made its first appearance in an American circus, and for the next hundred years American impresarios competed to acquire ever more exotic animal attractions. 58 P. T. Barnum would say that the elephant and the clown were the pegs on which the circus was hung.59
But cavalry training regiments like the one Armes devised had led Philip Astley to develop the circus in the first place. Now, despite official resistance, riding stunts found a new home in the cavalry as soldiers sought to match Indian horsemen. By the 1890s, horseback acrobatics would be installed as official cavalry drill, and detachments from the trick-riding U.S. Sixth Cavalry appeared regularly in circuses and, most famously, in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World, where their “military exercises” and “exhibition of athletic sports and horsemanship” included standing up on the backs of running horses.60
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show took the European cultural form of the circus and naturalized it on American soil, reprising it as a horseback spectacle with Indian riders, indigenous American performers whose genuine skills had begged comparison to the circus long before they ever moved into the show arena. Cody’s move from theatrical stage to a show arena crisscrossed by galloping horsemen reflected the fascination with horses that he shared with Indians. On the Plains, his buffalo-hunting prowess was reinforced by his use of Indian-trained buffalo horses, animals specially conditioned and taught to mimic the movements of running buffalo as they carried hunters alongside them. He bought his favorite mount, Brigham— “the best buffalo horse that ever made a track”—from a Ute Indian (who presumably demanded a high price for him).61 Through the 1860s, he bought and sold horses to compete in the fervid horse-racing scene at army forts. These contests were a theatrical form in their own right, with visiting Indians, settlers, and scouts challenging tourists, soldiers, and one another to paying races. Riders were known to trumpet their invincibility with mid-race stunts. After one Comanche horse beat army competitors in two races on the same day, his owner cruised to a third victory while facing backward, taunting the trailing soldier and beckoning him closer.62
By the time he was a scout, Cody was not only a racer but a trick rider, too. In the winter of 1869–70, in a race against a soldier at Fort McPherson, Cody “rode the horse bareback; seized his mane with my left hand, rested my right on his withers, and while he was going at full speed, I jumped to the ground, and sprang again upon his back, eight times in succession.” He drew inspiration for this stunt, he said, from the circus, “and I had practiced considerably at it.”63
In 1869, Dan Castello’s Circus and Menagerie became the first circus to cross the country on the transcontinental railroad. When it appeared in North Platte, William Cody saw it.64 (Although Cody did not say so, he may have seen the riding stunt before he visited the circus. His opponent in the trick-riding race was from the Second Cavalry, the regiment of “circus riders” trained by George Armes, and for all we know Cody’s opponent matched his performance, leap for leap.) The convergence of the railroad circus with William Cody’s Plains career was no accident. Circuses were widespread in American life and culture throughout the nineteenth century, but railroad expansion, the rise of corporate investment, and a revolution in print advertising—especially poster production—made for a renaissance of circuses after the Civil War.65
Cody, who rose to fame by engaging the liminal subcultures of scouting and theater, observed another twilight social space beneath the big top. The circus was a morally questionable enterprise, with a long and checkered history. It was indisputably a European cultural form, and its most famous performers were European, or claimed to be.66 With its bizarre freaks, strange animals, and scantily clad men and women—to say nothing of its androgynes and hermaphrodites—it was a disturbing spectacle of ambiguous races and genders, with a wide reputation for criminality. Early circus impresarios frequently cut deals with gamblers, grifters, and confidence men who followed them from town to town. At times, pickpockets plied the crowds so adeptly that few customers had any money to purchase admission from the shortchange artists working the ticket window.67 Circus graft, and circus nonconformity, inspired a great deal of anticircus violence, particularly in rural areas where local men and boys regularly battled circus workers in public brawls.68 An itinerant community that defied conventional social categories, the circus was infused with a carnivalesque spirit, the threat (or promise) of society turned upside down. For these reasons, clergymen often denounced it as the devil’s own playhouse, and “respectable” people often avoided it.69<
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But the circus was a paradox, and by the latter 1870s Cody saw in it the glimmer of an opportunity. Where the crudest stage production was inevitably in the shadow of Shakespearean drama—actors who were not great tragedians would never achieve real praise—circuses had fewer respectable conventions to live up to, leaving reviewers and newspaper editors less constrained in their range of circus writing. In general, their coverage of circuses was so “soft,” or playful, that press agents from other entertainments were often surprised at how easy the art of circus promotion could be. Small-town and big-city editors alike reprinted circus press releases as news items, without comment.70 Although many eschewed the circus as overly European, immoral, and decadent, the railroad allowed for much larger, more dazzling circuses which continued to draw viewers from all social classes, who sat together under one canvas tent. In this sense, a glamorous big top represented a better hope of capturing a democratic audience, including the middle classes, who had had steadily deserted the theater since Ned Buntline led the mobs outside the Astor Place Theater at the middle of the century.71
In 1869, the appearance of Castello’s circus in North Platte was so novel that the many social anxieties stirred up by circuses in general remained in the background. But in the 1870s, William Cody, who discerned divisions in popular culture at least as well as he followed the divide on the Plains, witnessed a burgeoning of circus performance, the public concerns attending it, and the efforts of his contemporaries to overcome them. In 1871, the year before he began his stage career in New York, P. T. Barnum, the artful deceiver, recast the circus as middle-class entertainment. Barnum tied his reputation for “moral” entertainments to the brilliant management of W. C. Coup. Together, the two made bold advances in circus showmanship. They solved the problem of loading circuses on trains quickly (devising ramps to load all circus animals, props, and matériel from one end), and turned the traditional onering entertainment into a three-ring extravaganza. In New York, they leased the old New Haven railroad station at Madison Avenue and Twenty-seventh (future site of Madison Square Garden) and built upon it the Great Roman Hippodrome.72 There, in 1874, they debuted “The Congress of Nations,” which Cody undoubtedly saw, and in which a parade of simulated royals and lavishly costumed entourages, including the queen of England, the pope, and the emperor of China, led an American contingent of cowboys and Indians into the big top as the opening act of a huge show of elephants and chariot races.73 By 1880, Barnum had merged his spectacle with that of James A. Bailey, making it one of the nation’s largest entertainment enterprises.74
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