Louis S. Warren
Page 49
Like those who worried that Americans might be too close to nonwhite peoples, to the frontier, to remain white, the novel Dracula depicts the frontier as the near edge of a racial transformation which threatens British civilization. In Stoker’s vision, miscegenation leads to the replacement of weaker races by the stronger, to the triumph of the frontiersman over the city dweller.173 The racial frontier is thus key to understanding the real danger of the count, to seeing the monster who is in fact either absent or invisible for much of the book. What makes him so very dangerous is that he has a lust for blood befitting a frontier warrior, and that good people cannot tell he is a monster. The source of these talents is the too-permeable frontier line, that too-fragile division between light-skinned civilizers and dark-skinned savages, whose congenital race hatreds can give way without notice to interracial sex. Thus he is a savage, a dark-hearted villain, and yet he is wrapped in skin so white that he seems to be “without a speck of color about him anywhere.” Neither red, nor brown, nor yellow, he is “of extraordinary pallor.” 174 The most deadly monster to emerge from the frontier is neither an Indian nor a Turk. He appears as a very white man, but is in fact a frontier miscegenate from the ancient past, able to extend his “vampire kind” through his own desire. Unless the novel’s protagonists stop this embodiment of the frontier, he is the vision of their racial future.
Westering race myth is in this sense the deeper context of the novel, its genetic bed, just as it was for the Wild West show, with its relentless westward march of Progress and Civilization.175 Derived from Europe’s mythic race frontiers, the war between westering Vikings and Asiatic Huns, Dracula is not just some relic of another country’s barbaric heritage, but an inverted race hero who comes straight out of the Anglo-Saxon past. Far to the east, Dracula’s kin began the westward progression of Teutonic civilization which Morris is completing. Thus, the centaur and the vampire are not mere symbolic opposites. Rather, Dracula and Quincey Morris, or Dracula and Buffalo Bill, mark the beginning and ending of a mythic drama: the epic birth of Western civilization.
This interpretation explains the curious ending in which the American’s death, not Dracula’s, signals the novel’s climax. The killing of the two race frontiersmen, one from the East—the land of the past—and the other from the West—the land of the future—terminates the thirst for blood and the threat of race mixture that the ancient race wars bequeathed to the English, the virtuous sons of the berserkers. In the capable and dispassionate hands of the bourgeois and racially pure Englishmen who return Mina to England, the nation can become modern, and yet remain progressive and free. Away from the racial frontier, there is still hope for blood purity, restrained passion, and enduring civilization.
The novel thus mimics social evolutionary scholarship of the period in utilizing the frontier as both a historical and a predictive tool. To social evolutionists, the frontier line was, among other things, a purported division between primitive and modern. By looking from metropolis to frontier, cosmopolitans could locate “primitives” and say, “They are what we once were.”176 Stoker suggests that Morris is what Dracula once was; and Dracula is what Morris will become. The relief at the novel’s conclusion, where Dracula turns to dust and Morris lies buried, flows in part from this final resolution of the vampire’s curse, which itself stems from a frontier that remains open for too long, warping the race that wins it.
While Cody trafficked in nostalgia for frontiers and race wars well into the twentieth century, the novel Dracula burst forth at the end of the nineteenth century to issue a warning about them. Perhaps the frontier wars were glorious, Stoker says, but the closure of the frontier is not all for the worse. The frontier is where Dracula comes from, where the dark desires of his eternal longings were cloaked in a white skin. It whetted his bloodthirst, fired his blood passion, and, before that, begat the blood mixing that in turn begat him. Frontiers that do not close bring consummate bloodletting. Frontier wars that do not end require Faustian bargains. They nurture vampires.
Given that the novel Dracula plays on pervasive fears of race weakness, Stoker’s reliance on myths of race origin for his tale’s deep historical context is understandable. Since those myths were characterized by the centrality of frontier warfare, his resort to frontier settings, frontier tropes, and frontier warriors to carry the tale makes a great deal of sense. That he drew on the most famous Anglo-Saxon frontier hero of his day, Buffalo Bill Cody, as an inspiration for his fictional frontiersmen, Count Dracula and Quincey Morris, is hardly surprising, particularly given his obsession with his benefactor’s social life and Irving’s close attachment to Cody during the years Stoker was working on the novel. Popular doubts about Cody’s racial identity, combined with his physical beauty, his “irresistibility,” his military prowess, and his ability to master savages and savage nature, all suggest that the novel Dracula is a fantasy of the ambivalences that made Buffalo Bill such a figure of power and fascination in late-nineteenth-century London, played out on the dark side.
As an artistic statement, the novel exceeds its origins to become much more than the sum of its parts. Until Stoker’s time, most literary vampires were women. For most of the nineteenth century, from Polidori’s The Vampyre to Le Fanu’s Carmilla they were eastern, sexy, and very thirsty. 177 In making his vampire a masculine figure, a frontier warrior spawned from a mythic collision of races in the ancient past and out to conquer London, Stoker both inverted Buffalo Bill and imitated his method. As Buffalo Bill had done with the Wild West, he connected his “show,” his monster, to the origins of Europe, and his mission to a widely perceived crisis, racial degeneration. The result was to suggest that the ancient vampire is profoundly entangled in the modern English world.
As much as Cody embodied a frontier myth of individual achievement and redemption, the noisy triumphalism of that myth was a counterpoint to its own dark baggage: the lurking fear of the frontier as a place of racial monstrosity and moral decay. Cody’s frontier centaur symbolized the transformative power of the frontier, the way that going west and conquering could potentially make of Americans something new, something more free and powerful. The vampire was Bram Stoker’s dark vision of the same frontier transformation, the shifting of Self into Other, the loss of will and restraint before a new self that was soulless, consuming, and irresistible.
The connections between Cody and the count suggest how very plastic the frontier mythology of the Wild West show could be for cultural commentators and artists in the countries it visited. The myth of the American frontier became a touchstone for understanding other national histories and contemporary crises. But they also suggest how much the Wild West show itself borrowed from European traditions of race, empire, and warfare to weave its New World spectacle into Old World epic. The progressive dream of Cody’s show in fact provided fertile ground for cultural consideration of its darker counterpart, the fear of frontier monstrosity and decay that had long preoccupied Europeans and Americans alike. Thus Cody’s appeal to myths of centaurs and race wars as the birthing process of nations found resonance in European concerns with racial degeneration and cultural decline, nowhere better evidenced than in the use of the frontier myth by Bram Stoker, England’s greatest gothic novelist.
Broncho Charlie Miller
IT WAS 1887 when the London reporter met the slight young cowboy in the camp of the Wild West show. His name, he said, was Charlie Miller, and his was a simple story of emigrants and settlers. His father was a Scotsman who emigrated to New York, where he married Charlie’s mother, herself an immigrant from England. They followed the gold rush west in 1849, and built a home at Hat Creek, in northern California. Their son Charlie was born eleven years later. Charlie was seven years old when local Indians, tired of being dispossessed and killed with impunity, rose up. The Miller home was among their targets. Charlie escaped, and his mother and his brother “only got away almost by a miracle.” His father was not so fortunate, and his killing left Charlie’s mother without sup
port.
So the family moved to San Francisco, where Charlie attended school for a couple of years. By 1870, the problem of money must have troubled Mrs. Miller, for she sent him to work. He was only nine. But like thousands of other frontier children, including William Cody in Kansas, Charlie herded livestock. His employer, a rancher named Thompson, kept him on for four years, “doing anything and everything about the ranch that a boy could.” In 1874, he helped drive two thousand cattle to market in Sacramento, where he met a man named Summercamp. By this time, Miller was “a pretty smart boy on a horse.” Just as a Kansas teamster had hired ten-year-old Will Cody to drive horses from Leavenworth to Laramie, so Summercamp hired this thirteen-year-old boy to join him and two other men driving a herd of horses seven hundred miles to Idaho. There were sporadic Indian attacks on other parties along the route, and progress was slow. “At one place, Camp Watson, on Big Meadow Creek, we had to lay up three weeks before we could get along.” But in the end, “we never came to close quarters with them,” and the party arrived at the ranch in safety. Charlie was soon known as “Broncho Charlie,” and he broke horses for Summercamp for the next four years.
The horses Charlie handled, along with other settler livestock in southern Idaho, devastated the camas plants on which the Bannock Indians at Fort Hall depended. Facing starvation, the Bannock and their Paiute allies went to war in 1878. There was panic in Idaho and Oregon, and many settlers joined volunteer militias. But soon the combined Bannock and Pauite forces all but collapsed.
Even by his own account, Charlie Miller’s involvement in the fighting was small. He was a civilian dispatch carrier on a few occasions for the army, he said, but he admitted he saw no action until near the war’s end. Then, at Blue River, with a party of ranch hand volunteers and professional soldiers, Charlie found himself in an Indian battle. Historians, when they recalled the fight at all, described it as a skirmish. But like so many men who sweat through fights their people soon forget, Charlie Miller remembered it all too well. “This was the first big Indian fight I had been in, and you bet I was pretty well scared to death.” He fired his gun a great deal, as did everyone else, but when dusk came, “the Indians went, and we didn’t follow them.” Their casualties were too high. “We had twenty-one killed and wounded,” he recalled, and the Indians took theirs away, “so it is impossible to say what they numbered.” The ranch hands and soldiers claimed victory. Charlie thought it a draw.
The Bannocks returned to Fort Hall. Charlie broke horses in Idaho until 1884, when he moved to Colorado to work for a horse dealer named John Witter. Two years later, in September of 1886, a horse “bit me clean through the hand, tearing the sinews and muscles to ribbons.” Unable to work, he turned to his remaining family. By this time, his mother had moved back to New York, where Charlie found her. He stayed with her until February 1887, when he visited the Wild West show at Madison Square Garden. He was soon working for Buffalo Bill’s show as a bronco rider and, sometimes, in the reenactment of the Pony Express. That spring, he set sail for London with the rest of the cast.
For a ranch hand and horse breaker, the show was more than a paycheck. Charlie’s western work was often dreary, usually exhausting, and always underpaid, but he enjoyed the sense of building up a country that it gave him. As he told the reporter, when he first went to Idaho, “it was was a wild, barren desert country.” But he and other cowboys who worked there spread word of its minerals, “with the result that to-day the echoes of the hills are awakened,” with sound of steam-driven stamp mills, “crushing ore of all kinds.” Charlie helped bring the pastoral wave that replaced the primitive hunters; industry and commerce followed. Now, Idaho was “covered with towns and schools; colleges and churches are to be found all over the place.” Civilization had come to Idaho, and the fatherless boy who made his way breaking horses had helped to bring it. Charlie Miller was a protagonist of Progress.
It was a simple, gritty story the London reporter heard. How much of it was true is open to question. Charlie Miller’s real name was Julius Mortimer Miller, and his descendants believe that he was born in New York and sailed to California as a boy deckhand.
But whatever his origins, and whatever the quantum of truth in his first published stab at an autobiography, Charlie Miller honed the skills of a tall-tale narrator over the course of a very long life. Some of his later stories were true. He and fellow Wild West cowboy Marve Beardsley really did ride in a six-day endurance race against two bicyclists at the Agricultural Hall in Islington. But Miller soon polished old rumors into gleaming facts, then spun them into glittering stories. In the summer of 1887, London gossip had it that Red Shirt, the “chief” of the show Indians, and the Sioux translator, William “Bronco Bill” Irving, were to be invited on a weekend fox hunt at an estate in Hertfordshire. The hunt never came off, but a cartoonist published a humorous series of sketches depicting the imaginary outing, and they made a hit among the show’s cowboys. Broncho Charlie made them real in his reminiscences, substituting himself, Broncho Charlie, for Bronco Bill. He told a naive New York journalist about how he barely stopped his good friend Red Shirt from roping a fox during a hunt with some nobility on a huge Leicestershire estate, after which they went to dinner at the Dean of Windsor’s house.
By the 1940s, he had convinced many an author that he was the youngest, last, and (by that time) sole surviving rider on the legendary Pony Express (which terminated the year after he was born). In others’ tales, some more true than others, Miller joined the Wild West show in 1885 (and knew Sitting Bull); was the pet of Oscar Wilde’s cousin, Alice Hayes; met Teddy Roosevelt at his ranch in Dakota Territory and barely missed being in the Rough Riders; became an evangelist on horseback, known as the Converted Cowboy, for the Salvation Army in New York; and fought in the Canadian army in World War I (at the age of fifty-four).
He made remarkable wood carvings, and as an old man in the 1930s, he entertained crowds of Boy Scouts with his mastery of a twenty-foot-long bullwhip, with which he could light matches clenched in the teeth of quivering twelve-year-olds. “He seemed older than god,” recalled one awed scout. “I was sitting in the first row on the ground with carrot-colored hair and freckles and he was drawn to me like a magnet. Though petrified, I was too shy to say no when he lifted me to my feet. I became even more petrified when he explained what he was about to do.” When Miller lit the match with the whip, “I was so glad to feel the flame under my nose I almost forgot to spit out the match. I asked him if he would a hold a match for me so I could light it with my .22 caliber rifle, which I had done, though not under someone’s nose. He declined, saying he had lived so long by not being stupid, and that I didn’t look like Annie Oakley to him.”
Of course, Miller’s language turned into a highly colored vernacular, full of ki-yi-yi’s and whoopie-ti-yo’s. He was the subject of articles, interviews, even a children’s book celebrating his alleged Pony Express career, and was a featured guest in community parades. When he died, in 1955, he was wheelchair-bound at Bellevue Hospital, where he received up to fifty letters a day, many addressed only to “Broncho Charlie.”
Where some wrote breathless summaries of Miller’s true-to-life adventures, other less credulous observers marveled at the art of his deception. It might even have been Miller’s wide New York press coverage that inspired—or appalled—New York novelist Thomas Berger to conjure a suspiciously similar, albeit fictional character, a man of almost-impossible vintage named Jack Crabb. In two novels and one movie (starring Dustin Hoffman), protagonist Crabb, better known as Little Big Man, danced across an imaginary stage as Cheyenne renegade, gunfighter, sole white survivor of the battle of the Little Big Horn … and veteran of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.
Miller’s audacity of later years drew inspiration from many sources, but there can be no doubt his apprenticeship with the West’s most artful deceiver was his mainspring. His mastery of the whip and wood-carving was the real foundation on which he built the fantasies his audiences so en
joyed. But compared to the yarns of his later years, the life story he told that London reporter in 1887 was a mild-mannered synopsis. With Cody’s exhibition, Miller found both validation for his life and instruction in entertainment. On the one hand, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West gave him the chance to perform his horse breaking as a moment in the march of Progress, making it an important piece of American history. Miller was inspired and grateful. On the other hand, the Wild West show taught Charlie Miller that when it came to the West, people want to hear tales that are nearly unbelievable, but not quite. William Cody’s show, after all, was the story of a western life—or so the showman said. So why not make your own show, with an all-but-unbelievable version of your life as the central attraction? In 1887, he was a little abashed to be so bold, but he was learning a lot from Buffalo Bill. “I think it is the only show on earth,” he told the London correspondent. “I dare say you will laugh at this, but I think so, nevertheless.” Being at the camp, he once remarked, was “was just like gettin’ home.” In fact or in spirit, for the rest of his extraordinary days, Charlie Miller was never far from that Wild West community of Indians, cowboys, and consummate showmen.1