To be sure, audiences may have connected the show’s generic imagery of Indian war with the challenge of labor unrest even without the Custer sequence. Cody’s target audience was middle class, not working class. Perhaps he synchronized performance of this most military “tableau” with shorter moments of public outrage against strikers, as in early 1887, when anti-anarchist sentiment was at its peak, and in late 1893 and in 1894, when most middle-class voters seem to have supported the use of federal troops, including the Seventh Cavalry, to break the Pullman Strike (and when genuine Seventh Cavalry veterans—and Sitting Bull’s horse—were included in the battle of the Little Big Horn sequence).45
But neither Cody nor his managers left any trace of the motivations and considerations that went into the making of show acts. The timing of the Custer reenactment probably reflects Cody’s intuition more than any conscious strategy.
Moreover, the story of how the Custer segment came to be staged at Madison Square Garden in 1886 highlights the mythic domesticity that tempered its more reactionary messages. For all the scene’s masculine heroics, the development of “Custer’s Last Rally” hinged on the intercession of another woman. Cody had many endorsements from army officers. But none had quite the elevating power of the one he secured from the widow of the Little Big Horn herself, Elizabeth Bacon Custer.
SHE WAS CALLED LIBBIE, and by 1886, she was America’s most famous widow, a national icon of bereaved devotion. She was not only a woman. She was a lady. The daughter of a well-to-do Michigan lawyer, she struggled financially after the death of her husband. Publicly, her elegance, and her careful balance of veneration for her husband’s memory with charitable public service, made her a well-respected figure in New York society. She was trustee of a women’s hospital, a board member of the Bellevue Training School of Nurses, and secretary for the New York Society of Decorative Arts.46
Since 1876, Libbie Custer had crusaded to elevate George Custer’s image out of the morass of controversy which threatened to engulf his battle standard. She lent private papers to hagiographic writers, lobbied behind the scenes to ostracize surviving junior officers whom she blamed for her husband’s destruction, and asserted a near-proprietary interest in Custer memorials. When wealthy backers erected a statue of Custer at West Point without consulting her, she led the successful campaign for its removal. Afterward, no one contemplating a public tribute to George Custer could ignore her.47
Early in 1885, she published the first of three memoirs about her married life, Boots and Saddles: Life in Dakota with General Custer. The book obscured the couple’s often troubled marriage with a portrayal of their household as a bulwark of domestic unity and peace on a frightening frontier. It sold 15,000 copies in the next nine months, inspiring Libbie Custer to write “a boy’s book that I may implant my husband in the minds of the coming generation.”48
That book was slow to be written, perhaps because she began to suspect it was unnecessary. She watched Buffalo Bill’s Wild West at Erastina the following July, announcing “she was much pleased” with the exhibition. 49 In August, she received a letter from William Cody requesting her permission to stage the reenactment of her husband’s death, promising to “spare no expense to do credit to our exhibition and deepen the lustre of your glorious husband’s reputation as a soldier and a man.” The educational scene, he wrote, would acquaint the audience with “the valor and heroism of the men who have made civilization possible on this continent.” 50
Convinced that Cody’s reenactment would raise the general’s reputation, she endorsed it, and frequented Madison Square Garden during rehearsals for the January debut of the Custer sequence. Show producers made skillful use of her presence to sanctify their popular entertainment as respectful history. Libbie Custer had never seen the Little Big Horn battlefield. Nonetheless, “she will be announced as superintending the picture of the spot where her husband was killed,” wrote Steele Mackaye.51 She was often sighted at rehearsals. She befriended and socialized with Annie Oakley. On opening night, she observed “Custer’s Last Rally” from a private box.52
The presence of Custer’s widow at the premiere ensured its acceptance as both an accurate representation and a respectful gesture to a fallen hero, but it contained other messages, too. Most obviously, Libbie Custer’s very public involvement reinforced the show’s family appeal.
In a sense, even while he lived, Custer’s Indian war was a family show. The general had a huge public reputation and a well-crafted public persona, and his marriage was a prominent feature of both. Libbie followed him to the Plains. Their nieces often camped and hunted with the glamorous couple, along with an ever-present entourage of young officers, tourists, and well-connected reporters. Tom Custer, George Custer’s brother, was a decorated army captain serving on George Custer’s staff. Still more Custers joined the Indian fighting forays of the Seventh Cavalry as civilians on a lark, binding command and kin in the popular imagination. At the Little Big Horn, fallen clan members included not only George Custer, but also his brothers Tom and Boston Custer, Autie Reed, his nephew, and his brother-in-law Lieutenant James Calhoun, the husband of his sister, Margaret. For the public, his defeat was not just a military debacle. It was the fall of the House of Custer. Cartoons depicted Indians holding scalps of “the Custer Family.” If Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull did not complete the drama by capturing Libbie and the other Custer women, the public nonetheless saw Custer’s collapse as conjoined family and national disasters, a material realization of the abstract cultural links between frontier war and the threat to the family.
Custer’s family image grew in the decades after his death in large part through Libbie Custer’s exertions, especially her elegiac memoirs and lectures which memorialized him through his marriage to her. In her hands, the violent, mercurial, and libidinous officer became an icon of fidelity and chivalric manliness, a man who paced the floor for hours with a sick puppy in his arms and changed the route of his march to protect the nest of a prairie hen and her brood.53 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show ascended to the pinnacle of American show business as the Custer memoirs flew out of bookstores, in the 1880s and ’90s. By including the Custer reenactment along with the “Attack on the Settler’s Cabin” (and in some cases substituting one for the other), Cody tied frontier race war firmly to white family protection, and both of them to his own persona.
The resonance of “Custer’s Last Rally” with urban race war and industrial violence no doubt explains some of its popularity. But Libbie Custer’s embrace of this spectacle also sent a powerful, countervailing message about the limitations of vengeance for civilized people. Urban, middle-class families, who saw the home as a bulwark against the violence and alienation of the city, sat awed before the spectacle of the Custer family sacrificing themselves for the containment of savagery, reenacted under the guiding hand and imprimatur of Mrs. Custer. At least as much as “Custer’s Last Rally” linked cavalry and public order, the centrality of family in this epic of the civilizing process validated spectators’ own domestic longings.
We can only wonder—as New Yorkers must have—how Libbie Custer brought herself to view the reenactment of her husband’s death, starring some of the Sioux men who exchanged fire with Custer’s men that day. Years later, when Buffalo Bill’s Wild West visited Custer’s hometown of Monroe, Michigan, the show’s Indians received a visit from Nevin Custer, the only Custer brother who was not at the Little Big Horn. “When Cody explained to them through an interpreter that the man with him was General Custer’s brother,” recalled press agent Dexter Fellows, “the older of the red men stepped a pace backwards. Mr. Custer looked at them for a few seconds and walked away.” Men “such as these” had killed his brothers, Nevin Custer told Cody, with tears in his eyes, “but I suppose they thought they were right.”54
Lakotas showed extraordinary courage in their show travels, but rarely did it take anything like emotional courage for a spectator to attend. Nevin Custer’s effort to meet the Sioux men wh
o fought the war and to see the war from their point of view was in keeping with his bereaved sister-in-law’s stance in 1886, and it underscores what many Americans intuited upon taking a seat in the Wild West show audience. To watch “Custer’s Last Rally” was in some way to join Libbie Custer in grief, and to assert willingness to sacrifice for civilization. But just as important, it was also a gesture of reconciliation, and forgiveness.
Securing Libbie’s endorsement provided Cody a success that was astounding on several levels. He had had nothing to do with Custer on the Plains. The martinet of a general who had refused the society of the scout was now memorialized by him. For her part, Libbie Custer knew of Cody’s differences with her husband. She could be militant in continuing George Custer’s many grudges long after he was in the grave. But when Cody asked her permission to reenact the battle, if the memory of George Custer’s coolness to Cody gave her any pause, she gave in to the man most ideally situated to sanctify her husband’s memory.
Cody took the step of impersonating Custer himself, donning a wig and taking up the sword (although Custer had cut his hair short before the 1876 campaign, and he did not carry a sword that year). In future years he assigned the Custer role to Buck Taylor and other cast members, freeing himself to stage a highly fictitious, futile dash to Custer’s rescue by Buffalo Bill, followed by his signature “First Scalp for Custer” reenactment. But that January of 1887, there was no revenge scalping. Instead, the show allowed space for Indian valor, as it heightened Custer’s heroic image. Cody’s assumption of the Custer role for the opening weeks of “Custer’s Last Rally” meant the blond, balding, angular general suddenly appeared taller, broader, darker, and far more handsome than the real Custer had ever been. The widow certainly appreciated the display. In the second volume of her memoirs, Tenting on the Plains, she praised Cody’s performance, although she camouflaged her own thoughts by putting them in the mouth of her black servant, Eliza. “Well, Miss Libbie, when Mr. Cody come up, I see at once his back and hips was built precisely like the Ginnel, and when I come on to his tent, I jest said to him: ‘Mr. Buffalo Bill, when you cum up to the stand and wheeled round, I said to myself, “ Well, if he ain’t the ’spress image of Ginnel Custer in battle, I never seed any one that was.” ’ ”55
Libbie Custer expressed her ambitions for the performance, and her gratitude to Cody, in a subsequent letter commending him for “teaching the youth the history of our country, where the noble officers, soldiers, and scouts sacrificed so much for the sake of our native land.” Just as she linked scouts to officers, and thereby assisted Cody’s ongoing effort to raise the reputation of frontier guides, she thanked him “from my heart for all that you have done to keep my husband’s memory green. You have done so much to make him an idol among the children and young people.” 56
As much as The Drama of Civilization resonated with middle-class fears of labor violence, it could only do so by symbolically resolving industrial discontent, making strikes vanish through Progress. If the vanquishing—and, ultimately, vanishing—of Indians was inevitable, so, too, was the disappearance of troublesome labor.
Just as Henry Morton Stanley and dozens of army officers eschewed the extermination of Indians as beneath American civilization, so the Custer reenactment, in featuring genuine Indian opponents of the fallen general, suggested that Indians—and by extension—immigrants, could be included in popular education and entertainment, turned into cooperative wage laborers, and thereby incorporated into the nation. Self-restraint was the essence of civilized manliness. If civilized people demonstrated firmness (military force) combined with mercy and justice, even the bitterest enemies of Progress, men such as Sitting Bull (who had been with Buffalo Bill just eighteen months before, and whose role as the mastermind of Custer’s defeat was played by another Oglala man in 1886) and Gall (who had ridden down on Custer’s command in 1876, and was now appearing at Madison Square Garden) could be persuaded to submit, and to become loyal employees in the grand pageant of American history.57
By January of 1887, there could be no doubt that the Indian presence in Madison Square Garden contained a liberal message as much as a reactionary one, a prescription for national self-restraint in the ongoing confrontation with savages, be they immigrants or Indians. In The Drama of Civilization, wrote journalist Brick Pomeroy, “we see the entire West with its great dramatic history that pioneers, indians, cow boys, home builders and all are making, and see it as a wonderful picture, backed by the grandest and most extensive and expensive scenery and stage appliances ever witnessed in this country.”58
Libbie Custer’s poignant, devoted forgiveness warns us against seeing the fight against Indians as a validation of anti-labor violence, since Americans were so divided on the morality of Indian conquest in the first place. As we have seen, army officers and Cody himself frequently denounced the nation’s treatment of Indians as unfair and unbefitting a great nation. Brick Pomeroy, whose enthusiasm for the show’s masculinity reached a fever pitch in 1887, wrote that spectators at The Drama of Civilization would see not only heroic “pioneers” in the “primeval wilderness,” but Indians, those “wily savages whom the whites with their lies, tricks, and avarice have made alert even to cruelty.”59
Wild West show publicists quoted or reprinted Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem about the battle of the Little Big Horn, “The Revenge of Rain-in-the-Face.” Although in reality it was Custer who attacked a peaceful Sioux village, Longfellow’s verse contains many allusions to Indian savages who ambush the heroic General Custer (as they did in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West); Rain-in-the-Face himself cuts out Custer’s heart, and
As a ghastly trophy, bore
The brave heart, that beat no more
For spectators seeking to blame Indians (and strikers) for their own destruction, the poem had much to offer.
But there was a profound ambivalence even here. Longfellow’s poem was partly a meditation on the timing of Custer’s thunderous defeat, which came during 1876, the centennial of the Declaration of Independence, the “Year of a Hundred Years.” The poem’s last verse contained a stark message about where the moral blame for Custer’s demise must fall:
Whose was the right and the wrong?
Sing it, O funeral song,
With a voice that is full of tears,
And say that our broken faith
Wrought all this ruin and scathe
In the Year of a Hundred Years.60
For those who saw Indian anger and Custer’s death as the result of America’s dishonorable breaking of treaties, Longfellow’s poem was an affirmation. It turned “Custer’s Last Rally” into a thrilling (and entertaining) demonstration of the tragedy that ensues from “broken faith.”
The poem complemented the rhetoric of ambivalence Cody had developed since the 1870s to explain the presence of Indians in his entertainments—and perhaps to articulate his own beliefs. In 1885, he explained Sioux war aims to a newspaper correspondent. “Their lands were invaded by the gold seekers, and when the U.S. Government failed to protect them they thought it was time to do it themselves. The Government did all they thought they could do, but the white men wouldn’t be held back. No one can blame the Indians for defending their homes. But that is all passed.”61
Superficially, Cody’s account reads like an endorsement of Indian resistance. But on closer reading, it is arresting how many different moral directions Cody maps out in four sentences: the Sioux faced a hostile invasion; the government failed in its obligations; the Sioux stood up for themselves; the government did all it could do; the invading white men were too energetic and determined to be stopped; the Indians should not be blamed for defending their homes (the attack on the settler’s home began with an attack on the Indian’s home); but it is all in the past, there is nothing to be done (so come in, enjoy the show).
Cody’s ambiguity condenses the Wild West show’s version of history into a list of wide-ranging possible readings which, taken together, made it possib
le for audiences to differ on the morality of Indian conquest without having to cease their enjoyment of the performance. Whether you wanted strikers shot or appeased, there was a seat for you at the Wild West show.
For all the scholarly emphasis on the conservatism of Cody’s show, ambiguity was central to its presentation of the march of progress and key to its success in its most popular and profitable years. Divided public opinion on labor strife and political violence made more prescriptive approaches impossible for a mass entertainment. Steele Mackaye himself joined his friend William Dean Howells in condemning the government’s handling of the Haymarket trials as “a national folly and a national disgrace.”62 In 1897, when the show’s celebration of militarism was at its peak, critics still saw it as a show that allowed audiences to make up their own minds about the morality of Indian conquest. “The admirers of Daniel Boone, the pioneer, and Kit Carson, the scout, readily recognize in the show how courage, determination, keenness of sight, accurateness of aim and unswerving perseverance won for them the names which are idolized,” wrote one reviewer. “Those who have sympathy for the Indian, feeling that the red man has been mistreated by the settlers and the Government,” the same writer continued, “have their hearts warmed at the sight of such a fine collection of them, and rejoice in their feats of horsemanship.”63
It was beloved by conservatives and liberals alike, but perhaps the ultimate proof of the Wild West show’s flexible meaning was its appeal to leftists, the most famous of whom was Edward Aveling. An Englishman who was husband to Karl Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, Aveling was the kind of revolutionary who made Remington’s trigger finger itch. The “riddle of modern society,” wrote Aveling, would only be solved “by the abolition of private property in the means of production and distribution, leading to a communistic society.” 64 This same man, socialist and revolutionary, saw Buffalo Bill’s Wild West as “the most interesting show in a most interesting country.” 65
Louis S. Warren Page 40