Louis S. Warren
Page 44
Will arise to see’em;
Pretors and censors will return
And hasten through the Forum,
The ghostly Senate will adjourn
Because it lacks a quorum.
And up the ancient Appian way
Will flock the ghostly legions,
From Gaul unto Calabria,
And from remoter regions;
From British bog and wild lagoon,
And Libyan desert sandy,
They’ll all come, marching to the tune
Of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
Prepare the triumph car for me
And purple throne to sit on,
For I’ve done more than Julius C.——
He could not down the Briton!
Caesar and Cicero shall bow,
And ancient warriors famous,
Before the myrtle-bandaged brow
Of Buffalo Williamus
In the final verse, the great civilization of President Grover Cleveland led the triumphant Americans as heirs to the Roman Empire:
We march, unwhipped, through history—
No bulwark can detain us—
And link the age of Grover C.
And Scipio Africanus.
I’ll take my stalwart Indian braves
Down to the Coliseum,
And the old Romans from their graves
Will all arise to see’em.53
The Italian tour, especially its Roman debut, was carefully scripted, and Burke’s history of it carefully contrived, to meet these expectations. The same newspaper editor who had been Cody’s champion since Sheridan’s lavish hunting expedition of 1871, James Gordon Bennett, Jr., now dispatched at least one correspondent to cover Buffalo Bill’s Italian adventure. Thus the New York Herald apprised American readers of the show’s Italian triumphs in 1890. Three years later, when Burke published the company’s memoir of the tour in yet another Cody biography, “ Buffalo Bill” from Prairie to Palace, he interspersed his own commentary among reprints of the Herald articles. The show did not appear at the Colosseum (“too small for this modern exhibition,” said John Burke), but it did perform before an audience of 65,000 in the amphitheater in Verona (“a rival of the Coliseum itself,” wrote the ecstatic journalist). According to the Herald writer, the amphitheater was in fact the largest building in the world, “although the Wild West Show quite filled it.” The account included elements of the arena’s venerable history, so American readers could savor the performance of frontier heroism and American progress in a building erected by command of Emperor Diocletian in A.D. 290 and restored at the behest of Napoleon in 1805.
Americans dreamed of visiting the Vatican, and some even did so. But they could only fantasize about meeting Pope Leo XIII as the Wild West company did. Burke related how Cody, with a delegation of cowboys and Indians, attended “a dazzling fete given in the Vatican by his holiness Pope Leo XIII.” Burke made it sound as if the Vatican threw a reception for the Wild West show, and that the crowds who attended, from “the gorgeous Diplomatic Corps” to the ranks of dukes and princes, turned out to see Buffalo Bill. In reality, the crowds and Cody’s cast gathered for an anniversary celebration of the pope’s coronation.54
With cowboys and Indians, the latter “painted in every color that Indian imagination could devise,” the American press depicted the encounter with the pope as a meeting between Christian pontiff and heathen barbarians. Symbolically, Rome’s civilizing project now became America’s mission. “The cowboys bowed,” wrote the New York Herald correspondent, “and so did the Indians. Rocky Bear knelt and made the sign of the cross. The pontiff leaned affectionately toward the rude groups and blessed them.” 55
For Cody himself, the triumph of the show’s Roman passage was doubly sweet. Over twenty years before, he had given the name of Rome to his nascent Kansas town, expressing his ambitions as founder of empire and civilization. Even now Cody told the story of how William Webb “made Rome howl” like some savage chieftain when he founded neighboring Hays and withered Cody’s dream.
But the Wild West show provided him a theater of civilization and progress like no prairie town could have. On the one hand, cowboys and Indians, whether they appeared before the queen or the pope or simply in the streets of European villages and towns, offered a portable story of progress equally useful, for different reasons, on both sides of the Atlantic. Every American could revel in the ascent of these rustic frontiersmen to the theaters of power and the halls of civilization. Was this not the American story? On the other hand, every European who met the cowboys and Indians could presume to offer lessons in civility and advancement. Was this not Europe’s legacy? In an age of colonial expansion, with Britain, France, and Germany appropriating large parts of Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, the spectacle of these “rude” and “primitive” peoples venturing to Europe for money and cultural patronage seemed to confirm Europe’s civilizing mission. The sight of Cody’s troupe among Europe’s ancient ruins and monuments suggested stories so powerful and relevant that their mere appearance in the streets could become newsworthy. As both the impresario of the traveling show and the star of the story it told, Cody was a living conduit of history, embodying a merger of action and representation, Nature and Artifice, so electrifying it was almost impossible not to watch.
Other shows had famous audiences and fabulous endorsements, and at times they perhaps made advertising out of the day a famous person visited or how an endorsement was proffered. But none could make such a potent myth of progress out of those stories as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Only a show that approximated a popular historical narrative, a “historical exhibition,” could have an accompanying “historical text.” When these newspaper stories of papal benediction and Roman conquest were reprinted in show programs alongside Cody’s alleged biography as Pony Express rider, buffalo hunter, and Indian fighter, they seemed to prove America’s progress like no other popular entertainment. Small wonder that few questioned the stories of royal bows to the American flag, kings in the Deadwood coach, papal fetes for the Wild West company, or anything else from Burke’s purported histories of Wild West conquests. If audiences suspected they might not be completely factual, these meetings with the queen and the pope had been reported in the press when it happened. If the details were not correct, the stories were true enough. None doubted that Europeans saw Americans as possessed of real art, real culture. Buffalo Bill, the self-made man from the frontier, the realm of Nature, had proved it.
As an American impresario who received unprecedented endorsement from European elites, Cody did much to reassure Americans about the distinctiveness and the appeal of American culture in general and his show in particular. Just as Buffalo Bill “naturalized” theatrical entertainment by presenting a real frontiersman in the footlights, just as he made the circus into a domestic entertainment by presenting it as American frontier history, here his European successes validated him, American history, and U.S. entertainments, as bona fide culture. Small wonder that Americans have been grateful to him ever since.
FOR CODY, of course, these were years of personal success and fun. He was not a little impressed with himself. “We leave for Rome on Monday,” he wrote a friend as the crew packed up in Naples. “This has been the trip of my life & I tell you a big undertakeing to take such a big outfit into strange countries. I know of no other managers who dare risk so much.” The show’s European triumphs put his rivals to shame. “I guess Barnum is sorry he followed the Wild West across the Atlantic. I see he closes in London today. Well three months was a long stay for a circus. I guess he wishes he had closed two months ago.”56
Cody’s victories in the fierce competition of show business proved his supreme abilities as a capitalist and a purveyor of an entertainment product. But more than P. T. Barnum or any other show impresario, he seemed to represent America to the world. If Rome failed him in Kansas, this show of the Kansas plains in Rome gave him the mantle of conqueror and civilizer. That day at the Vat
ican, the papal blessing was not restricted to his cowboys and Indians. “The Pope looked at Colonel Cody intently as he passed, and the great scout and Indian fighter bent low as he received the pontifical benediction.”57 No showman had ever been so blessed.
WHILE CODY’S success in Europe had many uses for Americans, Europeans did not admire the show simply because they liked Americans. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West drew huge crowds in the United Kingdom and on the Continent because of the ways it spoke to European desires and anxieties. A full accounting of the show’s meaning for its diverse European audiences would require a book in itself. But Buffalo Bill’s debut in London in 1887 opened the doors to its success on the Continent. The story of how Cody’s message was received in England reveals the allure of American frontier myth in Britain and Europe, but also the full range of cultural statements the show inspired in its turn. The golden myth of the Wild West offered promise and peril to Victoria’s Britain, and how British people responded to its fun and their own forebodings about it can instruct us in the real power and meaning of frontier mythology in Europe as well as in the United States.
IN JUNE, almost two months after the Wild West show docked at Gravesend, Cody took a coach trip in Oatlands Park, London. For all the celebrity sojourns in the Deadwood coach that summer, this little-noticed outing offers clues to the deeper fascination of the Wild West show for English audiences. On this day, Cody was the guest of Henry Irving, England’s greatest living actor, as was John Lawrence Toole, a friendly theatrical rival of Irving’s. The two renowned actors and the season’s social lion, whose posters had made his long black hair and Vandyke beard easily recognizable throughout London, sat together on the box. The three drew gasps and, occasionally, shouts of approval from onlookers.
But some of the most important, and least noticed, influences of the Wild West show involved a fourth passenger, one who was probably unknown to most observers that day. Large and red-haired, engaging and solicitous, Bram Stoker, the future author of Dracula, was also aboard with Cody, Toole, and Irving.58
This probably was not Stoker’s first meeting with Cody. The two had likely met in the United States at least a year before. Stoker corresponded with Cody and with the showman’s staff. He most likely attended the Wild West show in London. Henry Irving was Cody’s most renowned social patron that summer, and Bram Stoker, who followed Irving’s every move, had a front-row seat at the American’s conquest of London society.
In 1897, ten years after Buffalo Bill’s London premiere and at the height of his fame, Bram Stoker introduced another frontier figure to the English capital. Commander of the Christian forces against the Ottoman Turks hundreds of years before, the “bravest and most cunning of Transylvania’s sons” on the Turkish frontier, his purpose in London was very different from Buffalo Bill’s. So was his reception. After turning one wealthy young woman into a vampire and nearly snagging another, he was chased out of the capital by an international posse of English, Dutch, and American men, who tracked this nemesis to Transylvania, vanquished his Gypsy bodyguards, and killed him within sight of his castle.
Unlike William Cody, Count Dracula was, of course, an entirely fictional creation. This did not prevent his becoming an object of immense fascination. Among the reading public, the count would become almost as popular as Buffalo Bill. Appearing for the first time in 1897, the novel Dracula was in paperback by 1900. It has never been out of print since, and the count’s many film incarnations have made him the preeminent nineteenth-century monster. 59
Superficially, the contrast between Cody and the count could not be greater. Benign hero and malign villain, one is the center of a progressive myth of regeneration and renewal; the other embodies the decadence and the terrifying power of the gothic imagination. It is well established that Stoker’s monster had many inspirations and literary precursors, including a century of bloodsucking forebears.60 Less recognized is how much Stoker’s masterpiece turns on the frontier mythology of Buffalo Bill.
Weird as it may seem, Buffalo Bill and his Wild West show were important inspirations for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In Cody’s drama, as in Dracula, the frontiers of racial encounter were invested with the possibility of degeneration and the necessity of race war. Tracing Stoker’s famous novel to its roots in Cody’s spectacle illustrates how late-nineteenth-century progressive frontier myth and the literature of gothic horror represented fictional worlds that were homologous—that is, divergent but sprung from common origins, on mythic race frontiers. Cody himself saw his creation as historical epic, which joined the white race to the spilling of blood across the frontier. We shall see that Dracula, although a novel set in the world’s largest city, is also, crucially, a frontier tale. For showman and author both, continual westward expansion and continual race war secured the racial destiny of white people. But they differed, ultimately, on the promise of frontier warfare. Cody believed in it as the salvation of the white race; Bram Stoker’s view, shared by many compatriots, was much gloomier. In his most famous novel, frontiers became almost as dangerous to the race as vampires.
The connections between Buffalo Bill and Count Dracula take us well beyond the popularity of American frontier myth in late Victorian England. Dracula, as literary scholar Steven Arata has written, is a novel of reverse colonization, in which “the colonizer finds himself in the position of the colonized, the exploiter is exploited, the victimizer victimized.” In this analysis, the powerful Count Dracula invades imperial England and comes very close to reducing it to his “imperial” domain. By removing the race essence of his victims, their blood, he turns them into vampires and extends, in the words of the novel’s chief monster hunter, his “vampire kind.” In a fundamental way, he underscores the racial weakness of his victims and the transformative racial power of his own monstrosity. 61
The appeal of Cody’s Wild West show for English audiences flowed in part from their own obsession with racial decay, which was at least as great as that of the Americans. The late nineteenth century saw widespread concern in Britain about slowing birth rates, the steady loss of international competitiveness, the growing ranks of the city poor and of a combative, strike-prone industrial working class, the continued shrinking of rural villages, and a general decline of English political and industrial power, all accented by the diminishing fortunes of the nation’s aristocracy and upper classes. To many observers, progress seemed in danger of stopping and reversing itself.
The most popular explanation for these complicated developments was the weakening of the Anglo-Saxon race. In September, as Cody prepared to take his show north to Manchester for a winter of indoor performances, one Dr. Joseph Milner gave a lecture on the condition of the English people at the Islington Agricultural Hall. Warning that Britain’s increasingly urban people were ill-nourished and smaller than their rural ancestors, Milner postulated that they were degenerating, moving backward down the evolutionary ladder, in “a reversion towards an earlier and lowlier ethnic form. While the residents in the country remained Anglo-Danes, town dwellers approached the smaller, darker Celto-Iberian race.” To see the frightening truth, one need only compare the scurrying little workers in London’s East End with “the massive folk seen in country towns on market day,” or visit the wax museum of Madame Tussaud and compare “the crowd of small dark living beings with the substantial fair personages sitting there in effigy.”62
Milner echoed widely held views, which were pervasive in the literature of the period, notably Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887), and the fiction of Rudyard Kipling, all of which explored the implications of diminishing white manhood, adrift in a world of rough, industrial cities and dark, menacing colonies.63
To be sure, Britain and other nations of western Europe in general saw themselves as exemplars of progress and apogees of civilization, just as the United States did. Belief in the redemptive value of civilization for the poor benighted savages of the world energ
ized their imperial expansions and their nationalism, both of which grew dramatically in these years.
But the dramatic demographic changes and political strife that came with industrialization made Europeans, like Americans, highly sensitive to the darker aspects of Progress. Since civilization itself was racial (the gift of white people to the world), it was almost impossible to understand the decay of civilization as anything but the decay of the race (although French, English, Germans, and others differed on exactly who was “white”). Just as Americans began romanticizing the “barbarian virtues” of dark people, and trying to find ways to infuse white manhood with them, Europeans contemplated the decay of civilization and the corruption of the modern with meditations on barbarism and the nobility of the primitive.
This gigantic project encompassed many aspects of European art and culture, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West resonated with them in dramatic, even inspirational ways. London commentators were bedazzled by the many rhetorical tropes and images which flowed from the Wild West show’s vibrant tension between primitive and progressive energies, but no theme was so pronounced in the show’s reception as the fear of racial decay. For this reason, most commentators were lavish in their praise of Cody and his show in 1887. Its drama was overtly optimistic, depicting white Americans—Anglo-Americans—invigorated and racially empowered by the experience of conquering the frontier. And yet, between the lines of adulatory show reviews lurked an abiding ambivalence, even a fear, of the powerful American virility on display in Buffalo Bill’s arena. Amid all the English enthusiasm for the Wild West show’s regenerative promise of frontier warfare glimmered a specter of reverse colonization by racially powerful frontier warriors, the Americans, which observers seemed unable to escape completely.
For all the differences between the Wild West show and Dracula, there can be little question that Stoker had the American West on his mind as he composed the novel, in which his representative American was an almost-cowboy from the far western frontier named Quincey Morris. A Texan, he joins the tale’s European protagonists. Stoker had traveled in America, and seems to have admired the place.64 But reading between the lines of the novel, one has to wonder how deep his admiration ran. Of the three young male protagonists who chase Dracula down and dispose of him, Morris is disturbingly incompetent. His trigger-happiness and poor aim endanger his friends, he fails in simple assignments to follow the vampire, and in the attempted capture of Dracula in London, the count escapes when Morris bungles. So consistently does he parade his ineptitude that other questions arise. Why did Stoker make his representative American, his westerner, such a fool? For that matter, is Morris just a buffoon? Or are his numerous blunders a mask for a deeper malevolence? He is presented as a racial relative of the book’s English protagonists, and in a crucial scene his blood is transfused into one of the count’s English victims—who then becomes a vampire. Whose side is the American on?65