Louis S. Warren

by Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody;the Wild West Show

  Our plays put the Londoners all in a rage,

  They howled our comedians off of the stage;

  Our daintiest actresses met with a groan;

  They let our tragedians severely alone,

  But Art is triumphant. The city so vast

  Bows down to American genius at last!15

  Still others were genuinely thrilled by the queen’s bow to the American banner, and the excitement endures. Buffalo Bill’s importance as a vehicle for American renown across the Atlantic has long outlived him. Most Cody biographers and many historians of the show down to the present day relate the four kings joke with the Prince of Wales, and the story of how Buffalo Bill was the first showman in over a quarter century to lure the prince’s grieving mother out of her sad palace and into the bright light of the arena, where she bowed to the Stars and Stripes and enjoyed an afternoon of rollicking entertainment.16

  Heady stuff. Had the events not been real, wrote John Burke, wise men might have “bet that it was a Yankee hoax.”17

  Burke’s choice of terms was practically an elbow to the ribs. The master of the Yankee hoax was P. T. Barnum, and as with his attractions, there is both truth and fiction in these Wild West tales. To be sure, eyewitness accounts confirm that the prince rode on the Deadwood coach that June, and Cody may have been the driver (as he was when the prince’s wife returned the following day with most of their children).18

  But witnesses also agree that the Prince of Wales clambered onto the coach with only one reigning monarch, the king of Denmark. His other companions on the ride were his wife, the Princess Alexandra (who was also the king of Denmark’s daughter), and three princes (two of them his own sons, the other the crown prince of Sweden and Norway). The joke about the four kings may be real—there were four kings watching the show, and perhaps the Prince of Wales was referring to Cody having “held” four kings in his audience, rather than in the coach. But there is a lilt to the language, a flowery turn of phrase—“such as no man ever held before”—which hints that Cody’s exchange with the Prince of Wales was the product of press agent Burke’s fertile imagination. 19

  For her part, the queen did command a performance of the Wild West show on May 11. She commanded personal meetings with Annie Oakley and Lillian Smith, and with Red Shirt, who was advertised as “chief” of the show Indians, too. She burbled over two Lakota babies. Her mere presence was the highest honor a show could receive in Britain, and she really did command a repeat performance shortly afterward, when the prince and his family rode in the coach (although she did not attend). Her enthusiasm for Cody’s entertainment played a huge part in its success that season, and in all the years to come.

  And yet Burke’s puffery twisted some facts and invented others to embellish even this remarkable endorsement. True, Victoria refused to visit the theater until the 1890s, as she mourned the death of her beloved Prince Albert for over three decades. But her Wild West afternoon was not her first venture to a public entertainment, even in 1887. Victoria was an ardent circus fan, and an earlier sign of her emergence from mourning was her attendance at a circus from the Paris Hippodrome, in March 1887, when Cody and Salsbury were still in New York. Just as she would do with the Wild West show at Earl’s Court, she attended a private performance of the French circus at the newly constructed Olympia theater, then ordered a repeat performance (perhaps because she had not seen enough of the seesawing elephants Jock and Jenny).20 For all the red, white, and blue bunting in which Americans draped the Wild West show, for Victoria it was another circus outing. Back at Windsor, she recorded the afternoon in her journal: “An attack on a coach & on a ranch, with an immense deal of firing, was most exciting, so was the buffalo hunt, & the bucking ponies, that were almost impossible to sit.” 21

  And what of her bow to the American flag? Cody’s publicist painted a solemn scene: a “standard bearer” who rode out “during our introduction,” and “waved the proud emblem above his head,” before a monarch who bowed low. The English press who witnessed the scene told a very different story. The American flag did not appear until the middle of the show, between the Indian dances and Emma Lake Hickok’s fancy riding, when it was presented to the accompaniment of “Yankee Doodle.” One suspects that protocol dictated that foreign flags should dip before the throne, and that the monarch would acknowledge the gesture with a nod, whereupon the flag could be raised. In any case, this was precisely what happened; according to The World newspaper: “When, in the course of the performance, Serjeant [sic] Bates brought down the ‘star-spangled banner’ … and lowered it before the Queen, she inclined her head twice in recognition of the courtesy.”22 Another newspaper featured pen-and-ink drawings of the encounter: Old Glory lowered almost to the ground, Cody and the flagbearer bowing their heads, before an all-but-impassive queen.23 The musical accompaniment to the gesture suggests a very different story from the legend. “Yankee Doodle” was originally a British song deriding rebel foolishness at the outset of the American Revolution. In the course of the American victory, colonists themselves took up the song as an expression of their courage. When we realize that the banner of the United States was unfurled to the American Revolution’s most patriotic tune, and then was lowered in honor of the queen, the scene suggests the reverse of the famous legend: not the queen honoring the American flag, but the American showmen symbolically recognizing their debt to Her Majesty for attending.

  The artful deceptions of the Wild West show’s not-quite-true royal stories, and their enduring uncritical acceptance even by the sharpest American historians, suggests the potency and sophistication of the multilayered entertainment that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West provided by the time of its European debut. The show had thrilled audiences with a story in the arena for some years already. With its European tours, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West garnered press and a new following at home through stories about encounters between Cody, his cast, and their far-flung audiences. For the rest of its days, much of its fascination for the public lay in the ocean of newspaper accounts that explored less the drama of arena performance than the show community’s passage through the world. Americans read about Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in Europe in newspapers, in the two books which John Burke produced to memorialize the tours, and in show programs which breathlessly recounted European adventures.

  Cody never allowed his American audiences (or his European ones, for that matter) to forget his royal successes, which were emblazoned across show posters, some of them gigantic. One 1895 poster, plastered across fences and walls from Waterville, Maine, to Montgomery, Alabama, featured a blue map of the North Atlantic world, with ships and a red line demarcating the show’s progress through western Europe, the “World’s Wondrous Voyages” of the Wild West show. “From Prairie to Palace Camping on Two Continents Distance Travelled, 63,000 Miles, or nearly three times around the globe.” In the margins were inset images of Earl’s Court, “Buffalo Bill and the First American Indians That Have Visited the Adriatic,” as well as common postcard images of Glasgow, London, Hamburg, and other cities. The poster was part advertisement, part scrapbook, allowing viewers to savor the travels of the Wild West show as they might imagine the Grand Tour of a relative or neighbor, and to see them as the embrace of America’s story—and her culture—by an enthralled Old World. Other posters were even more direct in turning royal and official show visits into endorsements. Two more posters depicted “Distinguished Visitors to the Wild West,” with portraits and titles of each royal or official visitor—

  “King of Sweden,” “W. E. Gladstone,” “Duchess of Leinster,” and “H.M. the Queen” (Victoria, of course), arrayed around the portrait of Buffalo Bill. Still another depicted the 1903 visit of King Edward VII (who, as the Prince of Wales, had ridden on the Deadwood coach in 1887) to the Wild West camp in London. At least one 230-square-foot billboard depicted Cody doffing his hat in gratitude for the adulation of European “Presidents, Pope and Potentates, Statesmen and Warriors.” 24

  The presen
ce of “primitive” Wild Westerners, especially the show’s Indians, invited press agents and other correspondents to invert standard American travel writing. Usually, American traveler-authors like Theodore Roosevelt, Richard Harding Davis, and Mark Twain recounted the adventures of civilized, democratic white Americans in backward, colonial regions, or in the aristocratic halls of Europe. Such accounts showcased white American courage and energy and proved America’s parity with the great European powers and her progress over savagery. American fascination with travel writing, as with the Wild West’s tours of Europe, came amid an aggressive American push for overseas markets. In this connection, published accounts of European adventures of the Wild West cast poked fun at Europeans for being so impressed with barbarism, while they established Americans, especially Cody, as past masters at the ultimate containment of savagery: its scripting into a public amusement, its packaging as a safe, respectable entertainment, and its marketing as a commodity. 25 Thus the Wild West show was both an entertainment export and an ongoing American tour which fans could follow through numerous press accounts and show publicity. In encounters between Cody and the queen, and between Wild Westerners and the Old World in general, loomed tales full of meaning about America’s place in the world.

  “The Queen’s Visit to the Wild West Show.” Old Glory lowered almost to the ground, before an all-but-impassive Queen Victoria, from The Graphic, May 21, 1887.

  In this respect, as his career in show business continued, Cody’s emphasis on his string of “real” frontier exploits was an ever bolder sleight of hand. Like a magician who distracts with the left while he acts with the right, Cody in his frontier biography kept his contemporaries and his historians focused on history and the Far West, while he enhanced his reputation by playing fast and loose with the facts of his show career across the Atlantic, enhancing his reputation in ways that have fooled the most serious historians and writers for over a century. People searching to debunk Cody have assumed that his most outlandish fabrications concerned the fights with Tall Bull or Yellow Hair. Perhaps they did. But the fact remains that while reams have been written reinforcing or discounting Cody’s Indian war record, few have examined the powerful legends of his show career. 26

  And yet, this careful perusal of Wild West lore is vital to understanding how and why William Cody assumed the stature he did as an American entertainer and an “authentic” hero. We might dismiss the “inaccurate” stories about Cody and the queen as typical show business excess. In some measure, every traveling entertainment blew its own trumpet with fabrications. But the power of these carefully contrived stories to entrance the American public then and now speaks to the symbolic facility of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West at representing the United States overseas in ways that no circus or theatrical company could.

  Indeed, Cody was hardly the first American to entertain the English royal family. American artists from Joaquin Miller to Mark Twain had traveled to Europe before. George Catlin presented his “Indian Gallery”—a show of paintings, artifacts, and Ojibway Indians in live reenactments of frontier scenes—to Queen Victoria at Windsor Palace in 1843. P. T. Barnum brought Tom Thumb to her in 1844.27

  These predecessors were not Cody’s most immediate concern. The Wild West show’s quick, astonishing success, avidly reported in the United States, drew a host of imitators across the Atlantic in his wake. In late 1887, a showman named Joe Shelley brought “Mexican Joe’s Wild West” to the United Kingdom, where it toured the provinces. Doc Carver, who had toured Europe as a sharpshooter in the 1870s, teamed up with a new partner in 1889 to star in a show called “Wild America,” with which he toured Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Warsaw, and parts of Russia and Sweden before venturing to Australia in 1890. In 1889, P. T. Barnum would bring his “Greatest Show on Earth” to London.28

  But none of the Americans who preceded or followed Cody could match the Wild West company when it came to generating stories merely by their presence. There were several reasons for this. Most immediately, in Britain, as in America, all the shows that followed him moved in his shadow. “The programme” of Mexican Joe’s Wild West, wrote one reviewer, “contains many of the features already made familiar to our readers by a long course of ‘Buffalo Bill.’ ”29 As in the United States, Cody’s show of “frontier originals” proved alluring not only because of their authenticity as Indians, cowboys, and scouts, but because they were members of the acclaimed first, or “original,” show to bring the frontier to Europe.

  But just as important, the quality of arena performance and public deportment by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was very high. Cody was not only a terrific sharpshooter from the back of his horse, not only a superb presence during the show’s introduction and other points when he appeared. He was also a savvy, demanding, hands-on director. Cast members recall him as mostly friendly, genial, even kind. But they also remember him keeping a close eye on every performance, frequently “raking up” any performer who failed to please him.30 He was equally demanding of his staff, too, ensuring that they furnished timely, adequate salaries, comfortable housing, and abundant food in the cook tent.31

  Cody’s energetic attentions helped distinguish his show as more thrilling, its performers more polished, and better motivated. Cody, not Salsbury, chose the show’s cowboys, Indians, and other performers. He was careful to have experienced stage drivers at the reins and seasoned cowboys in the arena, and he put a premium on hiring performers who were not only skilled but easygoing. That Mexican Joe was less attentive on this last score would help to explain the very public brawl in his dining tent in September 1887, during which cowboys and cooks brandished knives, revolvers, and a meat cleaver.32 Cody’s close management was a major factor in the show’s avoidance of the disasters visited upon Shelley and other reckless impresarios. During Mexican Joe’s appearance at the Liverpool Exhibition in October, their “Tombstone Coach” was racing “full speed” through the city when it overturned. The spectacular crash threw two women passengers and a good portion of the band into the street, smashing all their instruments. Four people were rushed to the hospital with severe injuries. 33

  Over more than three decades on the road, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West had its share of arena accidents, train wrecks, severe injuries, and even deaths in the ring. But the fact remains that in thirty-three years of performance, no public calamity of this order befell the show’s signature Deadwood coach. Cody’s careful attention to hiring only skilled drivers (and driving himself when the most prestigious passengers were aboard) ensured a spectacle that was as remarkably smooth and safe as it was thrilling.

  Barnum was every bit the professional Cody was, and his show, too, had a certain resonance as an American symbol. Its size—three rings to the traditional one of the European circus—and its frenetic activity called to mind an American factory in the mind of at least one critic. 34 But Cody presented a show not of circus weirdness, but of history in which he had been more or less a participant. He was therefore more authentic, his show more real. Even among the crowd of aspiring Wild West show directors, he had the most extensive frontier biography, in addition to a decade and a half of press notices for his performances. He had been featured in dime novels for almost twenty years. Finally, no other impresario had his military accolades. An 1887 poster which Cody and Burke designed for their London publicity campaign depicted Cody’s face surrounded by images of American army officers over the title “Some of the Famous Generals of the U.S. Army Under Whom Buffalo Bill Has Served.” Each officer (they were not all generals, in fact) appeared above his testimonial to Cody’s courage and daring, and each testimonial bore its author’s signature. Pedestrians who paused to admire its fine detail could savor the face of Cody and each man who praised him:

  “A cool, brave man of unimpeachable integrity.”

  —P. H. Sheridan, Lieutenant General

  “As an Indian scout, he is king of them all.”

  —Eugene A. Carr, General, U.S.A.

  “Your Serv
ices on the frontier were invaluable.”

  —Nelson A. Miles, Brigadier General, U.S. Army

  Cody’s usefulness to the American army was perhaps at its peak, and the officers on the poster did not hesitate to attach their name to his standard. (Or at least the living ones did not; Custer was also featured, but with no endorsement.) Given the high social position of officers in the British army, the popular assumption in Britain was that Cody was a high-ranking officer, or at least upper class. This highbrow validation was plastered all over London and surrounding towns. In subsquent years it was reprinted in show programs and pasted to billboards and walls across the United States and Europe.35

  But of all the reasons for Cody’s success at instilling his European tour in American memory, none is so important as his extraordinary ability to tap American longings for cultural and political validation. The patronage of the Wild West by European elites provided that validation, and it was one of the primary reasons for taking Buffalo Bill’s Wild West to Europe in the first place. In traveling the Old World with his entertainment, Cody sought not only to make money, but to acquire a new layer of elite approbation which would protect him and his show from the stigma of circus and carnival back in the United States. Success in Europe would compound the middle-class appeal he had gained with The Drama of Civilization.

  This ambition in particular reflected his intuitive grasp of America’s ongoing cultural inferiority complex, and his sharp artistic sensibilities about how he could address it. To be sure, Americans prided themselves on many things in 1887. American engineers had distinguished themselves technologically, with rates of shipbuilding, railroad production, and mechanization that placed them on par with transatlantic rivals.36 The rise of the United States from humble frontier origins to modern industrial nation was a powerful story, and Americans were ever pleased to tell it (as they did in the show of canned goods, false teeth, and other American manufactures on display in the American Exhibition, across the “Washington Bridge” which connected Buffalo Bill’s showgrounds to the exhibition hall).