Louis S. Warren
Page 35
HOMEWARD BOUND: SALSBURY, OAKLEY, AND THE RESPECTABLE WILD WEST
Unable to resolve his many differences with his new partner, Cody was barely breaking even by the end of the summer.90 The show’s tempestuous, overly masculine cast attracted a crowd that resembled it. In late October 1883, the Chicago Tribune reported that five thousand people turned out to see the Wild West show, and dropped hints aplenty that the audience was not quite respectable. Although all entertainers hoped to attract as big an audience as possible, “decent” people were likely to avoid a crowd that was racially mixed. And so it was at Buffalo Bill’s show, where “the crowd was a mixed one, and the newsboys and bootblacks formed a large and important element of it.” In the Wild West camp, “ferocious-looking prairie-terrors” lassoed “the ubiquitous gamin.”91 The reviewer, in fact, seemed as preoccupied with the show’s youthful, impoverished enthusiasts as with the entertainers.
They had seen the parade of the buckskin-clad heroes and painted savages, and their thoughts turned toward the interior of the yellow-covered novels and five-cent libraries through which they had waded in company with daring scouts. Their energy in selling papers and giving shines was redoubled, and one would have thought to see them all over the track that there was not a gamin in the city.92
The reference to dime novels was a coded warning, much like the hidden clues to the disreputable crowd at Cody’s theatrical performances. Newspapers and other organs of culture regularly condemned dime novels as lurid, violent inducements to crime. In the same column as the above review, the Chicago Tribune reported on two teenage thugs who beat and robbed two men on a streetcar, under the headline “The Dime Novel. Two of Its Heroes on Trial for Highway Robbery.” 93 The reviewer’s description of a destitute army of youthful crime enthusiasts swarming to a show of prairie bad men can hardly have been reassuring for prospective middle-class customers.
Nate Salsbury saw the show in Chicago and predicted it would fail. Within days, Cody gave him the opportunity to prevent it. According to Salsbury, “Cody came to see me, and said that if I did not take hold of the show he was going to quit the whole thing. He said he was through with Carver, and that he would not go through such another summer for a hundred thousand dollars.” 94
In Salsbury, Cody sought out one of the most experienced and successful theatrical managers in the country. Born in 1845, Nathan Salsbury was an orphan by the time he was fifteen, when he joined the Union army. He fought at Chickamauga and Nashville, among other battles, and was eventually taken prisoner. After the war, he entered the stage, playing with various minstrel companies before forming his own Salsbury’s Troubadors in 1874.
Beginning with this small-scale variety show of songs, dances, and comedy routines, Salsbury became a primary developer of what became known as musical comedy. Where variety performers presented unrelated routines of singing, dancing, and comedy on the same stage, Salsbury placed them together in a unified narrative, a simple play about a picnic, entitled The Brook. In the course of an afternoon outing, a cast of characters ventured out on a picnic, where each character performed her or his routines, then returned home again. As one theater historian has observed, this was “hardly an earth-shaking plot,” but it nonetheless “revealed the possibility of stringing an entire evening of variety upon a thread of narrative continuity instead of presenting heterogenous acts.”95 It was extremely popular. For twelve years, Salsbury’s Troubadors toured the United States, Australia, and Great Britain, to considerable fame and a not inconsequential fortune. They earned something approaching middle-class respectability. The same newspaper that warned readers about the Wild West show also condemned the clumsy play that Salsbury’s Troubadors performed in Chicago (My Chum, by Fred Ward), but the reviewer’s complaint was that the drama was beneath the talents of these “genial people” whose successes with The Brook and other comedies had fulfilled their mission of “amusing the public.”96
Many modern readers, understandably ignorant of how Cody was inspired by his experiences on the Plains, have accepted Nate Salsbury’s self-aggrandizing claim to have created all of the major attractions of the Wild West show. Salsbury’s overstatement is so crude it barely requires refuting. Most of the show’s enduring scenes, including the “Pony Express” and “Deadwood Stagecoach Attack,” appeared in the first season, as did various versions of the Buffalo Hunt. So, too, did demonstrations of cowboy skill, and Cody’s own display of horseback shooting, not to mention the exhibition of Indian dances and combat between Indians and cowboys: all were part of the 1883 season, before Salsbury joined. Cody had been developing an entertainment based on Indians and real frontiersmen—especially himself—for over a decade. Before Salsbury came along, most of the elements for a successful show were on hand.
Still, Salsbury’s contribution was significant. His earlier success flowed from his ability to make narrative drama from distinct entertainments. In his hands, skits of dancing, singing, and juggling became related “acts” of a larger story, such as The Brook. In contrast, Cody’s experience was in melodrama, a genre which came with one-size-fits-all narrative about restoration of the true woman to home and domestic bliss. His new arena presentation being in part an effort to escape the constraints of melodrama for frontier history, but it left him flailing for a new narrative structure. The Wild West was already exciting and dramatic, but its lack of clear direction was apparent in its narrative confusion, notably the absence of a suitable ending. As spectacular as the buffalo hunt was, it failed to resolve the combative drama of the earlier white-versus-Indian scenes, and therefore proved anticlimactic. Cody’s efforts to rectify the situation resulted in some bloody spectacles indeed. Perhaps in an artistic expression of what it felt like to run the Wild West show during its first season, the final act of the Chicago show program for 1883 was “a grand realistic battle scene depicting the capture, torture, and death of a Scout by the savages.” This was followed by a vengeful conclusion, which veered close to the degenerative Indian hating Cody had scrupulously avoided: “The revenge, recapture of the dead body, and victory of the Cowboys and Government Scouts.”97
Cody and Carver had an acrimonious falling-out at the end of the 1883 season, and in 1885 Cody finally won a subsequent lawsuit over who was entitled to use the name “Wild West.” Meanwhile, Salsbury had joined the Wild West show, catching up with the encampment in the spring of 1884 at St. Louis. He later recalled that he found Cody leaning against a fence in plug hat, “boiling drunk,” surrounded by “a lot of harpies called ‘Old Timers’ who were getting as drunk as he at his expense.” According to Salsbury, Cody’s spree “lasted for about four weeks,” when he became so ill “he was knocked out and had to go to bed.”98
Salsbury’s first demand was sobriety. Cody agreed. “I solemnly promise you that after this you will never see me under the influence of liquor… . [T]his drinking surely ends today and your pard will be himself. [A]nd be on deck all the time.” The partners demanded temperance among their employees, too, and devoted much of their publicity to the “orderliness” and sobriety of the camp.99 Although he occasionally strayed, in future years Cody generally was sober during the show season.100
Salsbury next applied his sharp sense of drama to Cody’s alluring but incoherent assemblage. Although it is not clear when the Cowboy Band came on board, Salsbury’s career had been in musical theater, and it seems likely he exerted his influence in this respect. By 1885 the show had an orchestra consisting of several dozen professional musicians dressed as cowboys. Like the bands that accompanied circuses, the Cowboy Band provided musical pacing for show acts. Beginning each show with “The Star-Spangled Banner” as an overture (although the song would not become the national anthem until 1931), their music set the mood during each act and then provided bridges between them.101
Salsbury’s arrival also coincided with the addition of one new “tableau,” which would play a major role in the show’s success. Beginning in 1884, and continuing almost every year thr
ough 1907, the climactic scene of Cody’s show was the spectacle of a house in which a white family, sometimes a white woman and children, took refuge from mounted Indians who rode down on the building. The attackers were in turn driven off by the heroic Buffalo Bill and a cowboy entourage.102
The “Attack on the Settler’s Cabin” tapped into a set of profound cultural anxieties. For nineteenth-century audiences a home, particularly a rural “settler’s” home, was imbued with much symbolic meaning.103 The home itself presupposed the presence of a woman, particularly a wife. The home conveyed notions of womanhood, domesticity, and family. When the Indians rode down on the settler’s cabin at the end of the Wild West show, they were attacking more than a building with some white people in it. To many in the audience, the piece conveyed an attack on whiteness, on family, and on domesticity itself. With its new ending, the Wild West show adapted the melodramatic rescue of the home for arena performance, allowing the cowboys and their leader, the scout (a famous melodrama star, after all) to rescue the nation’s domestic unity from the threat of Indian captivity, and thereby bring the furious mobility of the show—the constant racing of its races—to a rest.
Middle-class people distinguished themselves from other classes partly by their emphasis on private, quiet home life, on what the historian Mary Ryan has called “entrenched domesticity.”104 By putting home salvation and family defense at the center of the show’s climax, Cody and Salsbury made their performance resonate with widespread middle-class concerns, and began the work of coaxing middle-class urbanites away from their homes long enough to see the show.
The guiding hand of Salsbury thus steadied the show combination in the 1884–85 season. Salsbury continued to appear with his Troubadors, leaving Cody to manage the show from day to day, until he and Cody could be certain the new venture would succeed. After opening in New York to great fanfare late in the summer of 1884, the Wild West show floated on steam boat down the Mississippi, playing small towns along the way. The venues were hardly suitable for so large and expensive a show, and the audiences could not cover expenses. Calamity struck when the show’s boat collided with another craft. The cast and crew escaped unhurt, and they saved the Deadwood stage and the bandwagon. But the rest of the equipment was lost, along with most of the animals. In Denver, Nate Salsbury was about to appear onstage to sing a comic opera when he received a telegram: OUTFIT AT THE BOTTOM OF THE RIVER WHAT SHALL I DO. CODY. Salsbury replied: GO TO NEW ORLEANS AND OPEN ON YOUR DATE. HAVE WIRED YOU FUNDS. SALSBURY.105
“Attack on the Settler’s Cabin.” The finale of the Wild West show for most of its years, a symbol of white family defense against threats to domestic order and femininity. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West 1885 Program, author’s collection.
It is testament to Cody’s abilities as manager that he was able to do so. Within two weeks, he had bought new livestock, including buffalo, and was showing in New Orleans. Indeed, he saw the show through its worst-ever season: forty-four days of straight rain. “The camel’s back is broken,” he wailed. “We would surely have played to $2000 had it not been so ordaned [sic] that we should not,” he told Salsbury. “I am thoroughly discouraged. I am a damn condemned Joner,”—and, like Jonah, a curse to his partner— “and the sooner you get clear of me the better.”106 But managing to retain twentyfive Indians, eight cowboys, and seven Mexicans, he saw the show through the New Orleans season.107
Bolstered by Cody’s die-hard persistence, he and Salsbury continued their effort to balance the Wild West’s centaurism with domestic themes. That year, Salsbury honored a request for an audition by a lissome, diminutive woman. In no small measure, her addition to the Wild West show would contain its heaving masculinity and establish it as an enduring success. Her name was Annie Oakley.
Born Phoebe Ann Moses in Darke County, Ohio, in 1860, she was the fifth child of a twice-widowed mother. She was also a natural with guns who excelled at the common childhood practice of hunting for the family table. Indeed, the girl produced extra meat for sale to hotelkeepers. When she was fifteen, during a visit to a sister in Cincinnati, one of her customers arranged a shooting match with a traveling trick shooter named Frank Butler. The event left Butler beaten—and smitten. He and the four-foot-eleven-inch huntress married a year later. Having abandoned the surname of Moses, which she had never liked, she took the stage name Oakley. Butler became her manager, and they were practically inseparable until their deaths within three weeks of each other in 1926.108
In the era of the artful deception, many shooting acts were stage trickery, with candles snuffed out, matches lit, and apples split by hidden devices rather than closely aimed bullets. In this sense, all shooting acts walked a line between trickery and authentic skill, and audiences wondered at them just as at magic shows and card tricks.109
In contrast, Oakley’s shooting was genuine, and remarkable. In April 1884, at Tiffin, Ohio, she wielded a .22-caliber rifle against 1,000 glass balls thrown in the air—and broke 943 of them. In February 1885, she loaded her own shotguns in a nine-hour marksmanship marathon that saw her shatter 4,772 glass balls, out of 5,000 thrown. Three years later, at Gloucester, New Jersey, she took a $5,000 bet that she could not shoot 40 of 50 pigeons released from 30 yards away. She downed 49.110
Although she took much satisfaction in her new life in public entertainment, her performance venues usually failed to please her. Shooting acts were often staged in theaters, where they served as filler, appearing between the farce and the main feature, for example. But the 1870s, the very moment when Oakley began appearing on stages, witnessed a kind of sexual insurrection with the advent of burlesque. Although later audiences would equate burlesque with strip shows, the earlier form of burlesque was distinctive for its all-female companies (indeed, the most famous burlesque companies were owned by women). Burlesque troupes normally staged parodies, and their stars played roles formerly reserved for men, often addressing the audience with witty political puns and risqué dialogue. All of these innovations shocked conventional morality.111 By 1875, burlesque performance and shooting acts alike were moving to variety and vaudeville theaters, where a series of separate routines—a boys’ choir, snake charming, a juggler, a one-act comedy, a shooting demonstration, a magic show—followed one upon the other. Many of these theaters played to working-class male audiences, especially immigrants. They sold alcohol on the premises, and shows were even more risqué than the original burlesque.
Oakley had a profound aversion to burlesque, lowbrow variety theaters, and their “blue” shows. With Butler, she sought out vaudeville theaters that courted “respectable” women for their audiences with “ladies’ nights” and free sewing kits, dresses, or other “domestic” prizes, and with “clean” shows—no liquor on the premises, no dirty jokes, and a reticence about bare flesh on the stage.112 Vaudeville impresario Tony Pastor was one of the first to attempt this strategy. Oakley preferred his theaters over most others, but her opportunities there were limited. In 1884, when she and Butler went to see Cody’s show in New Orleans, her act was a feature of the Sells Brothers Circus, an amusement about which she was less than enthusiastic.113
In the beginning, Annie Oakley was drawn to the Wild West show for many of the same reasons that other Americans bought tickets to see it: it was wholesome entertainment. Unlike the circus, the Wild West show featured a romantic frontier hero as its star attraction, and for all its dubious male swagger, it was missing much of the liminal sexual content of circuses, burlesque, and other traveling amusements. Salsbury’s reputation for “clean” shows, and the progressive narrative and open-air setting of the performances, reinforced these characteristics. By 1884, the show was already advertising itself as “America’s National Entertainment,” and billing its attractions as educational and suitable for children.114 The “Attack on the Settler’s Cabin,” after all, carried a clear message that Buffalo Bill stood for family preservation, making the Wild West show an outpost of family entertainment in a wilderness of decadent urb
an amusements.
It was in early 1885, during the awful New Orleans stint, that Salsbury watched Oakley run through her routine. Adam Bogardus—sick, soaked, and depressed—had just quit the show. In discussions with Cody, Salsbury recommended trying Oakley as a replacement for Bogardus, for three days at Nashville. Her ascent to a stardom that rivaled Cody’s began when, at the end of her trial period, Salsbury and Cody hired her and then ordered $7,000 worth of poster, billboard, and herald art touting her act.115
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show rarely advertised individuals, and the heavy commitment to publicizing Oakley’s presence suggests that the owners understood she was more than a novelty. For an entertainment chock-full of shooting acts, the twentyfive-year-old woman provided gallons of symbolic glue that both contained the show’s violence and bonded its gunplay to family. Buffalo Bill’s gun-toting centaur combined with Adam Bogardus’s stalwart blasting of clay pigeons were impressive, but even with show programs touting “The Rifle as an Aid to Civilization,” men with guns were borderline figures. Shooting, after all, was destructive, not productive. Gunmen suggested war, and in a show that staged race war as amusement, the predominance of shooting stars pushed the envelope of acceptable chaos to its limit.
As we have seen, marksmanship implied industrial efficiency and technological reinvigoration, but it had wider resonances, too. Crowds were drawn to shooting acts by the almost magnetic tension between the explosive destruction of the gun and the controlling hand of the shooter. In eschewing waste—of bullets, or energy—the symbol of the marksman resonated with the rhetoric of capitalism and civilization. Corporate moguls of the late nineteenth century trumpeted new efficiencies as they consolidated and monopolized whole industries in the 1880s and ’90s. The ability of American settlers to support more people on less land was a primary rationale for the conquest of the West which the show depicted. Mastery of guns suggested the precise deliverance of death; it implied flawless justice, and the ultimate harnessing of nature to human ends.