Louis S. Warren
Page 50
CHAPTER TWELVE
Wild West Europe
THE SUCCESSFUL British year closed in May 1888, when the Wild West show sailed directly to Staten Island and opened a two-month stand at Erastina soon thereafter. Salsbury had already arranged for a return to Europe. In 1889, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West opened at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, where the new Eiffel Tower provided a startling view of Paris and an ironic backdrop for photographs of Indians and cowboys. The Paris season was almost as successful as the London debut year. Sadi Carnot, the president of France, attended the show, as did the shah of Persia.
For more than a year, Cody and the Wild West show remained on the Continent. After closing in Paris in November, the show headed south, to Lyon and Marseilles. By New Year’s Day, they were performing in Barcelona, Spain. Gate receipts were not good in Spain, where epidemics of Spanish influenza and typhoid kept crowds light. Frank Richmond, the show’s noted orator, died in Barcelona, as did at least four Indians. Cutting the Spanish tour short, Cody and Salsbury ushered the Wild West show to Naples, Italy, for three weeks. There followed three weeks more in Rome, and two-week stands in Florence, Bologna, Milan, and Venice. In late April 1890, the show ventured into Germany and Austria, with two-week stays in Munich and Vienna. Through late October, they played Dresden, Leipzig, Magdeburg, Hanover, Braunschweig, Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, and Stuttgart, where the 1890 season finally came to a close.1
FOR ALL THE GLAMOUR of the European tour, and for all the sensual mystique of his public image, Cody’s private life was lonely and troubled. His settler’s cabin had long since expanded to a house of many rooms, but the strife between him and Louisa threatened to blow it apart. He had forsaken divorce when Orra died, but he kept it in mind. In 1885, and for most of 1886, he and Louisa kept separate homes in North Platte, with him out at Scout’s Rest Ranch and her at the older home in town known as the Welcome Wigwam.2 Their daughter Arta tried to heal the breach between them in long letters to her father, sent from the finishing school she was attending in Chicago. “I would give anything if our home was bright and cheerful,” she wrote. “Do not blame or feel angry toward dear mamma… . Do not say, dear papa, that you will go to Europe, and never return, for that is not right. You know you love your native land and will be glad to return to it, when you come back, covered with victory.” 3
In 1885, during an appearance with the show in Illinois, Cody met a Kentucky widow named Mollie Moses. She was an artist, and presented him a picture of him she had drawn. They struck up a correspondence. In the beginning, he told Moses he was a bachelor. “My wife and I have separated but no divorce yet,” he explained, after she confronted him. “Thats what I meant by saying as yet I am a single man.” Writing from Scout’s Rest in 1886, he invited Moses to a rendezvous at the St. James Hotel, in St. Louis. “I have got you the white horse and a fine saddle. Suppose you have your habit.” They exchanged letters and small gifts, but their separations were long. Moses pined. She asked to join the show. He was indulgent on many scores—“Yes, little girl, just as soon as I can I will send you the locket with the picture”—but on this, he turned her down. The letters ceased.4
Cody’s disputes with Louisa continued. In 1886, he went directly from Erastina to Madison Square Garden, until late February 1887. Then he departed for England at the end of March. In London and Manchester, William Cody wrote many letters to his sister Julia and to her husband, Al Goodman, who managed his ranch. But there were none to Louisa, and the family was roiled by the continuing threat of divorce.5
Perhaps because his real family relations were so tenuous, he shored up his family image with public displays of sincere paternal devotion. He took twenty-one-year-old Arta with him to London, where she kept house for him and accompanied him on many public outings. He sent her on a tour of the Continent with Ed Goodman, Julia and Al’s son, and at the end of 1887 Arta and William Cody took a two-week tour of Italy together.6
In Britain, Cody’s real social life revolved less around royalty than around the theater, which was after all the world he knew best, and where he could be found most evenings. Irving and lesser dramatists were his most constant companions. While Arta enjoyed the Continent, Cody consorted with an American actress named Katherine Clemmons. He may have met her as early as 1886, in New York. Cody allegedly called her “the finest looking woman in the world,” but she had little talent. She posed for pictures with the Wild West camp in London, and traveled with them off and on during their European tours.7 She soon had a financial stake in her relationship with Cody. In the fall of 1891, she persuaded him to lend her the services of the Wild West managerial staff, some of the trained horses, and a dozen Indians for a melodrama called White Lily. He saw the play on his return to Britain, and he paid for the company’s tour of the English provinces. Reviews were mediocre. The drama closed without ever playing London. But Cody and Clemmons remained lovers and business partners for two more years.8
Although Louisa Cody knew about her husband’s affairs, money had been at the center of the Codys’ disputes from their earliest days together. And, for all the barbs of London critics about the sharp Yankee who was flush with British gold, money remained their prime point of contention. Many newspapers reported exorbitant show profits. Some claimed it made one million dollars in London. “If you see any place where I can invest some money, I can send it—for we have a few scads now,” Cody wrote to his brother-in-law in July 1887. “There is lots of money to be had in this country for 3 percent—and if you hear of a big syndicate that has got a good thing that requires a lot of money, I believe I could float it over here.”9
However much Cody made—and he made a lot—the wealth never lasted. His inability to save for the future contributed to his legend as a show business tragedy, a frontier ingenue with childish enthusiasms, who could never quite grow up and sit on his bankbook. Where did the money go? He invested much of it in Scout’s Rest and his other properties. The rest seemed to vanish. He had a taste for fine belongings, like the extravagant four-in-hand coach which he ordered and which he drove around North Platte with crowds of elegant guests.10 In addition to maintaining two homes in the town, investing much money in his ranch, and supporting his sister Julia and her husband, he also gave money to his other siblings, and to his friends. His generosity with business partners, family, and employees played a large role in draining his accounts by the end of his life.
But there is more to the story than Cody’s profligacy, for Wild West profits were stunningly uneven. One month Cody could be swimming in cash. The next, he could be seeking lenders in desperation, trying to buy replacement animals, transportation, or lodging for the cast and crew. Canvas rotted, trains crashed. The constant drain of salaries, food for cast and feed for livestock, could bankrupt the show if unforeseen expenses emptied the cash box. His most recurrent emergency was competition from rival circuses and shows. Publicity costs spiked whenever other shows competed for audiences in the same markets, a situation which required heavy poster production, extra bill posters, and more advance men—all of which came at a high price. Thus, even as crowds flocked to Erastina, in the summer of 1888, Cody was scrambling for cash to pay off loans in North Platte. “This big fight against opposition has taken all our ready cash for a while,” he complained to his brother-in-law. “Business is not good.” He had borrowed $5,500 from a banker in North Platte, and the note was due in a week. “I don’t know how I will come out.” He longed to mortgage his property to raise twenty thousand dollars for a two-year term, but he was constrained by Louisa, whose signature was required because her name was on the real estate deeds. “If Lulu would only help me a little I could tide over like a flirt, but she won’t sign her name to anything.” 11
Publicly, this most wealthy of North Platte couples seemed happy. Whenever he returned, he was well received among the merchants, lawyers, and doctors of the town. Together, he and Louisa made the rounds of dinner parties and receptions in h
is honor, as well as operas, dances, and socials. They even attended the Omaha inaugural ball of the Republican governor, John Thayer, in 1886.12
But his extended absences must have galled Louisa. With the show in Paris, he missed Arta’s wedding to Horton Boal, a young Englishman who had recently relocated from Chicago to North Platte, where he opened an insurance business.13
Cody’s visits to North Platte were tense. One winter night in late 1889, he appeared in the ranch manager’s house, where sister Julia lived with her husband.
“Al, Julia, are you awake?” he asked.
“What do you want, Willie?”
“Get up, come out here, and talk.”
The Goodmans rose, and sat with him in the dining room.
“How can I stand it?” he asked. “I can’t stay over there in peace with her. I want you to tell me what to do. It is more than I can stand. I don’t want to leave my children.” He was crying.
“Willie, it will soon blow over, never mind,” Julia comforted. Al Goodman took Cody out for a carriage ride in the cold night. When they returned, an hour later, Cody slept at the ranch house. The next day, his sister and brother-in-law urged him not to separate from Louisa. By the end of the day, he had gone back home to his wife and daughters. 14
His stay was fleeting. He departed for Europe again in early 1890.
WE HAVE SEEN how uneasy the London public could be with the juxtaposition of Cody, the ever-so-visible American, and Queen Victoria, the monarch whose reclusivity betokened British decline. In Paris, in 1889, Buffalo Bill was almost as popular as he was in Britain. Although there was no French counterpart to Anglo-Saxonism that allowed Parisian fans to claim a racial bond with Americans, France, too, was captivated by progress, civilization, and the banishment of savagery from the globe. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West also narrated the progress of Western civilization in general, and the romantic trappings of Cody’s white Indian, especially his long hair and goatee, invited comparisons to d’Artagnan, the heroic musketeer of Alexandre Dumas.
But even here, there were surprising applications of his image to contemporary politics, as Buffalo Bill became a parody of a political figure who had recently been undone by his self-promotion as centaur-hero. The politics of Paris were superheated for three full years before Cody’s arrival. In 1886, the nation’s minister of war, General Georges Boulanger, exploited his position to create a gigantic cavalry review on Bastille Day. He was handsome, charming, and he rode a stunning black stallion named Tunis. The public—or part of the public—was entranced.
Subsequently, Boulanger manipulated public longing for national greatness by maneuvering his country to the brink of war with Germany, from which France pulled back only after President Jules Grévy pushed Boulanger from office. A crowd of twenty thousand rallied on Boulanger’s behalf, singing songs about his virtues and cheering his name. As an active military officer he could not hold elective office, so throughout 1887 he kept his face before the public with a modern publicity campaign, emblazoning his image across posters, clothing, candy, and even imitation coins. In 1888, he was discharged from the army for his intrigues. He turned the tables on his opponents by winning election to the Chamber of Deputies, with a two-to-one majority in Paris. A hundred thousand people gathered to cheer him. His allies urged him to seize the moment, and stage a coup d’état.
But Boulanger dithered. His enemies mobilized. He soon fell from favor as he was pursued to Brussels and then London on charges of plotting to overthrow the government. As his face disappeared from billboards, Buffalo Bill’s face went up.
Quickly, commentators began comparing the two men. Both were handsome and charming. Both looked good on a horse—so good, in fact, they evoked the tradition of the “man on a horse,” the empire builder Napoleon, whose militarism and grand ambitions were disgraced in terrible defeat. One humorist wrote an exposé in which he revealed that Buffalo Bill was Boulanger in disguise, with a horse that mysteriously changed colors (Cody’s horse was white, of course). In lyrics sung to the tune of a song that was originally composed as a tribute to Boulanger, satirists suggested the French officer was only a showman, whose place in the hearts of his countrymen had been taken by a more benign amusement:
Brave General, farewell.
Your prestige is no longer,
Our delight, we hasten to tell, is the hero of the Wild West.
All here is decadence, military and civil—
Hurrah for our France
And long live Buffalo Bill.15
Cody’s usefulness as a parody of Boulanger only begins to suggest the wide resonances the Wild West show had for fin de siècle Parisians. At the Exposition Universelle in 1889, its fans included at least two painters who would soon ascend to world renown. “I have been to Buffalo’s,” wrote Paul Gauguin to his friend Emil Bernard. “You must make all efforts to come to see it. It is of enormous interest.” Another, very different painter, Edvard Munch, was also drawn to the show of the man he called “Bilbao Bill,” whom he recorded as “the most renowned trapper in America.” As Munch told his father, “He has come here with a large number of Indians and trappers and has set up an entire Indian village outside Paris.” 16
For Gauguin, the symbolist, and Munch, the expressionist, the show meant very different things. Gauguin fancied himself a primitive in the skin of a modern. He spoke of himself as a renegade, an outlaw, and a half-cast (his mother was half Peruvian, and he hinted at a Martinique slave in his ancestry). He blamed the modern world for crushing the creative and benevolent savage who yet coursed in his veins. His longing to escape the stultifying conformity of urban civilization would drive him to Tahiti in 1891.
He was working toward that departure by 1889, and the exposition of 1889 is said to have been his greatest inspiration, particularly the “native villages” from Morocco and Tahiti. If Gauguin walked through Cody’s Wild West camp—and it is hard to see how he could have resisted—the celebrated mixed-bloods and “squaw men” such as John Y. Nelson, Bronco Bill Irving, and Billy Bullock, as well as Antonio (Tony) Esquivel and Vincente Oropeza, represented the very men-between-races that Gauguin saw in himself. He adored allegory, and his paintings—one of which was entitled Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?—were intended to be moral and historical fables, and in this limited sense his aims resembled Cody’s.17
Munch was a very different painter from Gauguin, and the Wild West show entranced him in different ways. Robert Hughes observes that Munch shared a key insight with his contemporary Sigmund Freud “that the self is a battleground where the irresistible force of desire meets the immovable object of social constraint.”18 This was indeed the paradox at the heart of the mythical white Indian, the figure who synthesized the Indian’s wild, anarchic freedom with the constraints of white civilization. The white Indian had been an American icon in Europe at least since the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, and Cody himself represented the figure for French audiences as he did for Americans.
In a sense, Munch’s paintings explored the failure of modern people to approximate the white Indian. His stark images presented people tormented, alienated from nature and from communal identity in the modern city. If he did not draw specific inspirations from the Wild West show, we can see why he was impressed enough to mention it in letters to his father. With its holistic, natural world of primitive villages and socially integrated people, on the verge of being swept aside by market and machine, it corresponded with his view of modernism’s terrible ascent.19
Compared to the longer, more direct relationship that Bram Stoker had with the Wild West show, the encounters between Gauguin, Munch, and Cody’s amusement were brief and fleeting. Cody himself had little patience with symbolists or expressionists. He took a strong interest in representational art. As he told painter Charles Stobie, he liked paintings to be “as near true to nature as possible.”20
This explains his preference for the work of another French painter, Rosa Bonheur, and it suggests wh
y his visual presentation of the vanishing frontier appealed to her. By 1889 Bonheur was a legendary painter of the rustic. She was sixty-seven years old, and something of a recluse at her estate in Fontainebleau. Her favorite subjects were poignant farm scenes and heroic, noble beasts of the field, especially cattle and horses. Her most famous painting, The Horse Fair, depicted an auction of Percheron horses, the animals’ bobbed tails and gigantic muscles bathed in sunlight. Shortly after the painting’s spectacular debut in 1853, Bonheur’s fame spread across the Atlantic. By 1859, the United States Journal, an American magazine devoted to middle-class readers, was offering a free lithograph of the work with every new subscription. Eventually, Cornelius Vanderbilt acquired the eight-by sixteen-foot canvas, which he donated to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1887. Cody, who was breeding horses at North Platte and who had a lifelong fascination with the animals, probably knew the painting long before he knew its artist. In 1896, for a brief time, he put two hundred Percheron and Norman horses into his arena as a “living tableau” of The Horse Fair.21 Her interests and her technique placed her alongside Cody, firmly in the nineteenth century, as a nostalgist for the organic world of field and farm, which was vanishing before the advent of machine and city.
Bonheur arrived at the Wild West show late in its Paris tenure, in October 1889, and Cody allowed her to paint anywhere she wanted on the showgrounds. She produced at least seventeen paintings from this visit, depicting buffalo, Indians, and—in what became her most famous painting in the United States after The Horse Fair—Cody on horseback, a large painting that hung in one of his houses at North Platte for many years. Although Bonheur’s reputation has faded since, her fame in 1889 was considerable. Wild West show photographers posed her with Cody, Red Shirt, and Rocky Bear outside Cody’s tent, and took other photographs of her as she painted camp scenes. Almost a decade later, Cody incorporated some of these photographs in a show poster that depicted Rosa Bonheur painting him, as if to remind his audience he was not just a showman, but a historical subject in his own right.22