Louis S. Warren
Page 31
The presence of Indians in Barnum’s circus, as elsewhere, signified the passage of history. Circuses had borrowed from history before. In 1856, in Missouri, the Mabie Brothers Circus combined with Den Stone’s Menagerie and Tyler’s Indian Exhibition to present a historical pageant, with reenactments of a buffalo hunt, Indian dances, Pocahontas saving John Smith’s life, and a (thrilling?) demonstration of Indians gathering corn.75
Cody’s enterprise would work much more directly with historical materials, as we shall see. But in envisioning an entertainment that featured Indians, horses, and himself, it required no great leap to imagine cowboys in the mix. American and Mexican cowboys alike were fond of horseback performance. Americans and Mexicans had herded cattle for centuries by 1860, but it was the post–Civil War American cowboy who became a mythic figure of renown, and the Great Plains was his birthplace. Outfits began driving cattle from Texas to Kansas soon after the Civil War. Relatively few of these cattle made it to Nebraska at first, but the famed rancher J. W. Iliff ranged cattle in the western Platte River valley by the early 1860s, and John Bratt brought Texas cattle to the region in 1869. That same year, Texas Jack Omohundro trailed a herd of cattle from Texas to North Platte, where he sold them all to ranchers, who were now dispersed across western Nebraska. Omohundro took a job tending bar for a local saloonkeeper (Lew Baker, father of Johnny Baker, later the “boy marksman” in the Wild West show) before moving down to Fort McPherson at the urging of his new friend, William Cody, where he became an occasional schoolteacher and a scout.76 In 1874, the Western Trail, which drew cattle from Texas to its northern terminus at Dodge City, Kansas, was extended farther north, to Ogallala, Nebraska, west of North Platte, which became the major railhead for Nebraska cattle outfits. The town of North Platte now sat firmly in the middle of a thriving cattle region, and acquired a thick layer of cowboy culture atop its military and mercantile origins.77
In the late 1870s, Cody became a rancher and saw cowboy horsemanship up close. In partnership with Cody, Frank North and his brother Luther established a large ranch on the Dismal River. The Cody-North Ranch grazed its large herds across the Sand Hills, but lost money due to stock theft and heavy winters. In 1879 Cody and the Norths sold the outfit to John Bratt for $75,000. 78
Cody plowed his theatrical profits into ranching, but like most ranch owners, he was an absentee owner who was never a cowboy. When he appeared at annual roundups, other ranchers and roundup bosses indulged the stage star and prominent ranch owner by letting him drive a few steers and dry heifers, but they kept him away from cows and calves, because his penchant for horseback drama made him a poor drover. “When I was bossing the roundup and the bunch became excited,” wrote John Bratt, “I would call Cody out” to get him away from the cattle. This the thespian “took good naturedly, knowing well that rough handling of stock meant loss of flesh and shrinkage in value.”79
For his part, although Cody complained that “there is nothing but hard work on these roundups,” and that he “could not possibly find out where the fun came in,” he attended because he could make them something of a party.80 For several years, his celebrity, his flamboyant, gregarious manner, and his alcohol—“brought along as an antidote against snake bites, and other accidents”—energized festivities at the Dismal River roundups. “The cowboys were always glad to see the Colonel and the cattle owners and foremen would vie with each other in showing him a good time,” recalled John Bratt, who routinely collected the cowboys’ guns in anticipation of the festivities.81
These affairs included spectacular competitive displays of cowboy mastery over animals. Bronco riding, roping contests, horse races, and riding wild steers were primary features of roundups across the West, and the Dismal River roundup was no exception.82 The ethos of competition among cowboys in the United States and Mexico reflected their ongoing effort to turn the drudgery of work into challenging play. Competitions to see who could sit untamed mounts the longest—“bronco busting”—were common wherever cowboys accumulated, and roping contests and horse races were ubiquitous, too.83 A favorite cowboy pastime was “picking up,” originally a Mexican game, in which contestants on running horses picked up coins, handkerchiefs, or virtually any small object placed at a designated spot on the ground.84 Cowboys at the Dismal River roundups played the pickup game, and not surprisingly, it found its way to the Wild West arena as a display of “cowboys fun.”85
He may have been bored by the work, but Cody left the Dismal River roundups impressed with their exhibition of “most magnificent horsemanship” by cowboys who possessed “the greatest dexterity and daring in the saddle.”86 The Sand Hills roundups inspired his organization of the Old Glory Blowout, the Fourth of July celebration which he organized at North Platte in 1882. Because the spring roundup for western Nebraska was occurring at the same time, the widely advertised event drew many cowboys, who were enthusiastic contestants for its cash prizes. After a morning parade, which terminated at a private racetrack, the program went forward with songs and speeches. Once the formal events were over, cowboys took turns roping and riding several buffalo and Texas steers that Cody had procured for the event, in a raucous spectacle that delighted the crowd. There was also a full slate of horse races, including not only cowboy-style free-for-alls but elegant trotting competitions in which horses belonging to Cody and other well-to-do merchants and ranchers faced off. That night, there were fireworks. 87
Scholars often credit the Old Glory Blowout with inspiring the Wild West show. Others credit Nate Salsbury, who was Cody’s partner in the show from 1884 to 1902. Late in life, Salsbury claimed to have envisioned a show of horsemanship as early as 1876. He recounted an 1882 meeting at a Brooklyn restaurant at which he and Cody agreed to join forces. “I invented every feature of the Wild West Show that has had any drawing power,” he wrote.88
We shall see below what Salsbury’s influence on the Wild West show actually was. But he never claimed to have proposed more than a show of cowboys and “Mexican riders.” Not even in his defensive, self-aggrandizing memoirs did he remember himself as having brought Indians into the conversation with Cody. There were no Indians in the Old Glory Blowout, either. In reality, since the day he became a scout, Cody had been revising, recasting, and exploring the boundaries of his frontier imposture by following Indians. He posed as the white Indian by getting close to them (but not too close) on the Plains. He shored up his melodrama and his frontier authenticity by bringing Indians to the stage in the East. Now, he imagined them as the center of a new drama that would allow them to perform the horsecraft that awed him and so many of his contemporaries. The resulting entertainment would offer new opportunities to more Indians than Cody or they imagined. And before they were done, over three decades later, it would offer not just Indians and cowboys, and Cody, but many others, too, new ways to imagine themselves and America in the modern world.
CHAPTER NINE
Domesticating the Wild West
THE FIRST-EVER dress rehearsal of the Wild West show occurred in 1883, at Colville, Nebraska, the home of Frank North and the Pawnees who made up the show’s Indian contingent that year. According to eyewitness L. O. Leonard, when the Deadwood stagecoach trundled into the arena, Buffalo Bill invited the town council, including the mayor, a beloved but notorious blusterer named “Pap” Clothier, to ride in the coach. For the first two passes around the showgrounds, the coach rolled merrily along, and its occupants waved to the crowd.
On the third pass, the Pawnees swept into the arena. The coach passengers were expecting it, but “the mules had not been advised of this part of the program, nor had they been trained to Indian massacre.” The animals surged forward, the Indians in hot pursuit, the driver barely able to keep the coach’s wheels on the ground as it rounded the turn. When Buffalo Bill and his cowboys suddenly went into the action as the rescue party, nobody had told the Indians to break off the attack. Terrified by several dozen howling men on horseback and the thunder of guns, the mules stepped up t
he pace. “As the coach, Indians, scouts, and Cody swept past the crowd again, the mayor stuck his head out the window, waved his hands frantically, and shouted, “Stop: Hell: stop—let us out.”
But the driver had all he could do to keep the stage on its circular course without rolling it over. The mules did not halt until they were thoroughly winded. At that point, the enraged mayor “leaped out of the coach and made for Buffalo Bill, ready for a fight.”
Fortunately, before Clothier could reach Cody, a local wit named Frank Evors climbed to the top of the coach. “Look at them, gentlemen.” Pointing to the dazed town council and the infuriated mayor, Evors declaimed his pride in these men who “risked their lives … for your entertainment.” Clothier now turned back to the coach and went after Evors, who escaped. Meanwhile, Frank North rode up to Cody with some advice: “Bill, if you want to make this damned show go, you do not need me or my Indians… . You want about twenty old bucks. Fix them up with all the paint and feathers on the market. Use some old hack horses and hack driver. To make it go you want a show of illusion not realism.”1
In an era riven with concern over the bawdy or otherwise “unsuitable” content of public amusements, the dress rehearsal was an inauspicious beginning for an entertainment Cody hoped would “catch the better class of people.” 2 He was hunting for the elusive treasure sought by many other entertainers: middle-class women, and the family audiences their patronage assured. Thus he had a dilemma on his hands.3 A tamer spectacle was necessary. However, the Wild West show’s commitment to borderline violence— gunplay, horse breaking, and other physically dangerous performances—was central to its attraction as a “true” picture of “life in the Far West.”
From 1883 until its last days, the authenticity of Wild West performers was a major audience draw. In many ways, the show’s high-speed simulacrum of combat, animal mastery, and marksmanship was a spectacle of “real” historical actors whose virility was a bulwark against the artificiality and decadence of modern civilization. Throughout the 1870s, on his forays as hunting guide, Cody had crafted himself as an antidote to the anxieties of city sports seeking manly restoration in wilderness pursuits. In the 1880s, his show addressed an emergent and popular obsession with the supposed decay of American civilization. True, Americans celebrated westward expansion in literature and paintings on the theme “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” (a line from an eighteenth-century poem by Bishop George Berkeley, on the inevitability of civilization’s westward march). Some of these paintings were appropriated and mimicked in the colorful posters of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. But Americans of the Gilded Age were also highly conscious of what we might call the law of social gravity: a society that traveled up the arc of progress must eventually come down.4 The popular rationale for Indian wars had been the need to restrain savage passions and advance the cause of progress. But as the Indian wars ended, the very restraining hand of civilization seemed to be “overcivilizing” white American manhood, snuffing it out, burdening masculine energies until they became perverted and feminized.
The most coherent statement of these popular fears came in 1880, when the physician George M. Beard catalogued a host of symptoms for what he identified as a new malady in his book, American Nervousness. In company with many other medical professionals of his day, Beard saw an epidemic of strange anxieties gripping American men, including extraordinary “desire for stimulants and narcotics … fear of responsibility, of open places or closed places, fear of society, fear of being alone, fear of fears, fear of contamination, fear of everything, deficient mental control, lack of decision in trifling matters, and hopelessness.”5 He gathered these disparate, neurotic symptoms under the rubric of a single illness, which he gave the name “neurasthenia.” In his view, neurasthenia afflicted the civilized whose work required “labor of the brain over that of the muscles.” Thus its most common victims were white, middle-and upper-class businessmen and professionals. Overtaxed by commercial and managerial demands, their neurasthenic bodies were rendered “small and feeble.” An epidemic brought on by the civilizing process run amok, neurasthenia represented something more than a psychological condition. By undermining virility, it endangered the future of the white race and its civilization. In Beard’s words, “there is not enough force left” in neurasthenics “to reproduce the species or go through the process of reproducing the species.”6
The impact of Beard’s work was widespread, and the specter of neurasthenia subverting and corrupting white America aggravated other racial fears that became pronounced in the 1880s. Immigration from Germany, Ireland, and other northern European countries had provoked social anxiety and political upheaval for over a generation when the river of immigrants suddenly acquired new tributaries. In the decade following 1880, almost a million, mostly Catholic and Jewish, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe joined the nearly four million from western and northern Europe. Increasingly, the proportion of Slavs, Russian Jews, Italians, Poles, and other eastern and southern Europeans surpassed that of northern Europeans.7
Since the days in the 1840s, when Ned Buntline rallied his first anti-immigrant mob, native-born Americans had feared their Anglo-Saxon, Protestant republic was becoming a polyglot nation. The so-called “new immigration” ramped up those fears. To many observers, the new immigrants were base savages, like Indians. Although their large numbers of children proved their biological fertility, they were short on “manly” attributes such as sobriety, thrift, and self-control. The United States was in the process of becoming an urban nation even without the new immigrants. After the Civil War, native-born Americans migrated to the cities in such numbers that by 1920 the farmer’s republic was truly a thing of the past. But the cities that were coming to define American life were also immigrant bastions, especially in the tenement districts teeming with crime, squalor, poverty, and vice. If the cities were the future, they were also a savage frontier poised to swallow white America.
At this moment of urban peril, the other frontier, in the Far West, finally closed. With the U.S. Census Bureau’s 1890 declaration that the frontier no longer existed, a defining condition of American life blinked out. Cultural and political responses ranged from attempts to preserve wilderness landscapes in national parks to elegiac paintings and novels. The gathering sense that the future would be more urban, less natural, more corporate, and less individualistic pervaded American culture.8
In cultural terms, frontier and city had long been mirrors which reflected and sometimes inverted each other. Many saw urban disorder as displaced frontier savagery. As the cities grew larger and more diverse, and as the frontier receded further into memory, Americans adapted the rhetoric of frontier conquest to metropolitan problems. Beginning in 1886, urban reformers, many of them educated women, sought to domesticate what they called the “city wilderness” through the establishment and administration of “settlement houses.” These were centers providing immigrants with child care and with education in the rudiments of civility, including the English language, civics, the arts, and personal hygiene. Situated in the most “savage” urban districts, they were in a sense an urban analogue to frontier missions among the Indians. 9
At the same time, artists and writers increasingly—and paradoxically— presented white virtues as products of frontier struggle and the westward movement of Anglo-Saxondom. The shift ran counter to frontier realities, of course. Throughout the nineteenth century, miscegenated scouts, Mexicans, “half-breed” renegades, Indian captivity, and traditions of intermarriage among settlers and Indians had contributed to an image of the frontier as a place of sexual decadence and racial decay. The Americans who actually conquered the polyglot West, as we have seen, included a multiracial, multi-ethnic army, Indian and mixed-blood auxiliaries, and a diverse group of settlers, too.
But now, at least in the minds of many thinkers, the relatively empty spaces of the trans-Missouri West became a final, fading crucible of whiteness which stood in gleaming contrast
to the mongrel city. Frederic Remington, a Yale dropout who was born and raised in rural New York state, first went west in 1881, when he took a temporary job on a Montana ranch. He became one of the most influential and dyspeptic artists of the era, his oil-painted, vanishing West an antidote to a modern, degenerate America that was overrun with “Jews, Injuns, Chinamen, Italians, Huns—the rubbish of the earth I hate.” His fantasies verged on ethnic cleansing. “I’ve got some Winchesters and when the massacring begins, I can get my share of ’em, and what’s more, I will… . Our race is full of sentiment. We’ve got the rinsin’s, the scourin’s, and the Devil’s lavings to come to us and be men—something they haven’t been, most of them, these hundreds of years.”10
Whether depicting eastern strike or Indian war, Remington’s sketches, paintings, and essays (including images and musings on Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show) were suffused with a sense that white American racial strengths were frontier virtues, and that they were about to be lost amid rapidly multiplying and unmanly immigrants.11 He had much company in these views. While immigrants soared in numbers, the declining fecundity of native-born Americans furrowed the brows of social observers. As early as 1865, the state census chief for New York concluded that there was “no natural increase in population among the families descended from the early settlers.” In 1869, another observer noted the speed with which Americans and Europeans alike were pouring into the cities. “But the most important change of all,” he concluded, “is the increasing proportion of children of a foreign descent, compared with the relative decrease of those of strictly American origin.”12