Louis S. Warren

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

  Cody’s show of the 1890s encouraged similar sentiments. The Rough Rider display parodied none of its members, but the Wild West show gestured to vaudeville in ways that suggest its ethnic and “racial” teachings should be understood in a spirit of vaudeville unification. Jule Keen, the Wild West show treasurer, was a vaudeville veteran who played a comic German on the stage, and he sometimes inserted the act into the Wild West show (where his rustic German brought laughs to the mining camp just before it was destroyed by cyclone in The Drama of Civilization). 44

  Thus, direct ethnic connections to Rough Riders were important, but specific cultural bonds were likely less significant than the wide range of possibilities for affinity and identity created by the show’s ethnic and racial variety. In 1893, the show’s opening number, a “Grand Review of Rough Riders of the World,” consisted of a high-speed, choreographed equestrian display in which “Fully Equipped Regular Soldiers of the Armies of America, England, France, Germany, and Russia” galloped through the arena. By 1894, that opening was itemized more variously. The “Grand Review” now introduced “Indians, Cowboys, Mexicans, Cossacks, Gauchos, Arabs, Scouts, Guides, American Negroes, and detachments of the fully equipped Regular Soldiers of the Armies of America, England, France, Germany, and Russia.”45

  Even where they had no direct linguistic or other cultural tie to these Rough Rider contingents, the kaleidoscopic, multiracial Rough Rider spectacle provided an increasingly diverse public with a visual frontier myth extending beyond the Anglo-Saxon-versus-Dark-Savage narratives of earlier writers and artists, and far beyond the Plymouth Rock fetish of New Englanders. To be sure, the show walked a fine line, confirming for white Americans that their cowboys reigned supreme, but presenting European contingents as progressive, noble warriors and descendants of historic frontiersmen. Whether one had been born in Europe or in America, to see the Congress of Rough Riders was to imagine one’s people as hardy, powerful, armed horsemen.

  In 1894, the show still included many of its Wild West acts, such as the “Attack on the Deadwood Coach,” “Cowboy Fun,” shooting by Annie Oakley, the “Battle of the Little Big Horn,” the “Attack on the Settler’s Cabin.” But it also incorporated a military musical drill, featuring the Seventh U.S. Cavalry (Custer’s regiment, which also appeared in the “Battle of the Little Big Horn”), and the British, French, and German contingents. The “Riffian Arabian Horsemen” performed high-speed riding and juggling of rifles and swords, along with tumbling displays. The old horse races between cowboys, Mexicans, and Indians now featured “a Cowboy, a Cossack, a Mexican, an Arab, a Gaucho, and an Indian.”

  The effect was not only to Americanize the global frontier, justifying American empire, but also to internationalize the American frontier, inviting once-excluded peoples into the American myth. With the cowboy reigning supreme, the Indian the lowest on the ladder, and everybody else somewhere in between, the Congress of Rough Riders expressed the white supremacy and national chauvinism of most Americans.46 Just as the cowboy conquered Indians, so he had conquered the world. And yet, by bringing more people under its awnings and into its mythological canvas, the show provided the diverse residents of the divided city of Brooklyn, and other cities where it played, a powerful sense of belonging, or at least the potential for belonging, to their new nation, its history, and its public.

  In this sense, Cody’s development of the Congress of Rough Riders paralleled the work of scholars and writers who were broadening American history to incorporate generations of immigrants traditionally excluded from Anglo-Saxonist narratives. Inoculating himself against the sting of Anglo-Americanism in his six-volume Winning of the West, Theodore Roosevelt wrote his forebears from the Netherlands into the ancient tribes of Anglo-Saxons whose descendants settled the United States.47

  More significant for the development of American history as a discipline was the work of Frederick Jackson Turner, who delivered his classic essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” at the same Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition where the Congress of Rough Riders debuted in 1893. In an exploration of the frontier and its recent closure, Turner argued that “free land” was the defining condition of American history, and that along its westward-moving edge American society went through a continual process of social evolution, from hunter to industrialist. The essay caught the era’s intellectual anguish over the rapid modernization of America, but it also shaped a generation of historical scholarship, making the history of the American West into a major academic field.48

  In the decades since, critics have rightly taken Turner to task for his overemphasis on manly white actors and for his vague and contradictory use of terms. But none of that detracts from how adventurous he was in opening his historical frontier to people who were not Anglo-Saxon. His mentor, Herbert Baxter Adams, had extolled, in essays like “Saxon Tithingmen in America” and “The Germanic Origin of New England Towns,” the wonders of Saxon institutions as they were transported to the United States. Adams was, in a sense, writing from the same script as the New England Society of the City of Brooklyn, making the Puritans into hardy Anglo-Saxons, both fulcrum and lever of American history.49

  Turner turned the story of American history around, arguing that Norwegians, Swedes, Germans, English, and others had been transformed into Americans by the process of “winning a wilderness.” Among its inspirations were Turner’s vivid memories of his hometown of Portage, Wisconsin, which was surrounded by Norwegian, Scottish, Welsh, and German settlements, and whose townspeople, as he knew them in the 1870s and ’80s, were a “real collection of types from all the world, Yankees from Maine & Vermont, New York Yankees, Dutchmen from the Mohawk, braw curlers from the Highlands, Southerners—all kinds.”50 Turner’s “types from all the world” look substantially white to modern readers, but they were only tenuously white in the days their ships were docking at Ellis Island, and they had little or no claim to Anglo-Saxon traditions. True, Turner removed Indians from his story except as an obstacle to be overcome, and his frontier thesis had no place for Mexicans, nor for the mostly urban “new immigrants” from southern and eastern Europe, nor for the Chinese or other Asians. But even so, “The Significance of the Frontier,” like Cody’s Congress of Rough Riders, was a myth-busting punch at the Anglo-Saxonist orthodoxy, an attempt to broaden American history beyond its narrow racial tie to Britain, and to incorporate at least some American-born children of immigrants into national history and myth.

  The revamping of historical myth in Cody’s arena suggests how much the quest for larger audiences has shaped portrayals of the American past. The discipline of American history emerged in American universities only in the last few decades of the nineteenth century, at the same moment that the term “show business” was invented to describe the emergent industry of entertainment.51 Turner and Cody were on opposite sides of the same historical coin.

  On the facts, the Congress of Rough Riders was no more persuasive than Turner’s thesis. The notion that all peoples were “warriors” embroiled in ceaseless race conflict was a social Darwinist conceit with little connection to the lives of real, mostly urban immigrants and their children. Cody’s new story had no place for any ethnic group that had no horseback tradition. Except for the brief exceptions like the inclusion of the “Magyar Gypsy Cizkos” in 1897, which may have beckoned to eastern Europeans, the show was far more inviting to northern and western European immigrants, like the Irish and Germans, than it was to the “new immigrants” from southern and eastern Europe. (Cossacks, after all, were shock troops of the czar and persecuted many Russian Jews who emigrated to America.) But none of this detracted from its appeal as a somewhat more inclusive visual myth of global frontiersmen, so varied and diverse that one could see the show as a template or reflection of polyglot America, the enactment of a more democratic myth for a more diverse nation.

  And yet, there were limits to the show’s ability to influence popular historical narratives. Sitting a horse in t
he Rough Rider show proved no guarantee of a place in popular western myth. The absence of historical consciousness about one Rough Rider contingent remains striking. Show programs note the appearance of “American Negroes” in 1894 and 1895. In 1899, black veterans of the Cuba campaign reenacted their exploits in the “Battle of San Juan Hill.” Show programs mention “American Negroes” through the early 1900s, suggesting that African Americans have a history in the show that awaits further research. In 1900, two white soldiers from the show’s U.S. Artillery detachment were shot and wounded in a brawl with town police in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin.52 Dexter Fellows, a Wild West show press agent, recalled that the fight erupted when a white U.S. cavalryman, a German cuiriassier, and “a burly black in charge of a detachment of Negroes from the Ninth Cavalry” were challenged by a drunken deputy constable “who could barely speak English.” Fights between circus performers and local police were hardly news, but since barely restrained violence and gunplay were more central to Wild West appeal than to other traveling amusements, this explosion of public violence threatened to frighten crowds away. Fellows worked overtime to soothe excited correspondents after the episode.53

  The mix of immigrant, native white, and native black figures in this incident (and the absence of Indians from it) suggests a complex mixing of messages about possibilities for American identity within the show. The immigrant deputy constable hints at that rising generation of immigrant children who were increasingly in evidence among the audience.

  But what did the presence of black U.S. soldiers among the Rough Riders say to the audience about African Americans in American history? Show publicity barely mentions them. Newspaper correspondents spoke of them almost not at all, and scholars of the show seem to have overlooked them entirely. There are many photographs of cowboys, Indians, Cossacks, and a few of Mexicans in the show. Images of cowgirls are not rare. But a paltry handful record the presence of the buffalo soldiers. Did African Americans attend the show? If so, we may assume they were segregated, as they were at circuses and other traveling amusements. But why did so few notice their presence in the arena? Why have these Wild Westerners been largely forgotten?

  The most likely answer is that African Americans had no story of their own in the Wild West myth, which was essentially made of three strands. Indians were the dispossessed noble savages who once roamed the prairies. Mexicans were the descendants of the first people to encounter Indians, the Spanish who fell into decadent race mixing and failed to properly conquer them. Cowboys were the vanguard of the white race who succeeded Mexicans, and finally brought progress and civilization west.

  There was no black component to that tripartite narrative, and Cody’s modification of his message in the 1890s did not address that shortcoming. The Congress of Rough Riders gave every detachment a genealogy that originated among ancient horsemen—gauchos from Spanish conquistadors, Cossacks from “the Caucasian line,” Arabs from the horsemen of the desert who appeared even in the Old Testament. But not black soldiers. They merely appeared in the show lineup, with little or no explanation.

  In real life, blacks had fought Indians, trapped beaver, hunted buffalo, cowboyed cattle, built homesteads, and run almost every form of commercial outpost in the U.S. West. They had also joined Indian tribes, married Indians, and fought American expansion. They had, in other words, done everything that whites and Mexicans had done (there were black Mexicans, too) and sometimes more. Their absence from narratives of western history would become a standard failing in academic halls and popular culture alike. With the Old West as the crucible of white American virtues, and with western mythology an escape hatch from the contemporary political impasse of Reconstruction and the segregation of Jim Crow, blackness was not something easily incorporated into the western story.

  All of which makes it even more interesting that Cody tried to put blacks into the show at all. He seldom spoke of black people. He scouted for black cavalry detachments in the West, and he knew their virtues. But his autobiography derided black soldiers as cowardly and childlike. Neither Cody nor Salsbury ever explained why they incorporated buffalo soldiers into the Wild West show in 1894 and after.

  But if the Congress of Rough Riders represented a savvy attempt to keep pace with an ethnically expanding public, there are some pretty good clues that the proprietors foresaw black spectators as potentially a large part of that public, too. Like the Rough Rider appeal to immigrants and firstgeneration Americans, such a gesture would need to be shrouded in white supremacy. But if blacks could be included in a way that did not offend whites, there was a possibility of drawing even bigger crowds.

  These may have been the considerations that motivated Cody and Salsbury to plan a new show of African American history in 1894, hoping it would appeal to black audiences and the public at large. Black America opened at Ambrose Park in 1895. The attraction was billed as a “Gigantic Exhibition of Negro Life and Character,” showing “the Negro as he really is … placed in the amusement world as an educator with natural surroundings.” With a display of black people moving from “savage, to slave, to soldier, to citizen,” the show rationalized slavery as the necessary passage for savage people (featuring “reproductions of life in Africa,” complete with “native African dances”) but also valorized black fighters for the Union during the Civil War. Urged the poster, “Come and see the best drilled cavalry company in the United States.” 54

  Cody himself was excited by the new enterprise, which he described in terms suggesting that it would combine minstrelsy and history. “Negro humor and melody will in this show reach the acme of perfection,” he told a newspaper reporter. The spectacle would feature “phases of plantation life.” Presumably, some of these were happy enough to allow audiences to enjoy the singing. Others would show “the auction block and the whipping post.”55

  Unidentified Wild West show buffalo soldier, c. 1900. Cody and Salsbury introduced African American cavalry veterans, “buffalo soldiers,” to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World in 1894. Because they didn’t have a thread of their own in the mythic tapestry, the press seldom recognized them, and their contributions to western settlement and the Wild West show both have been largely forgotten. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.

  Black America failed, and it is not hard to see why. The humor and condescension of minstrelsy allowed little pathos on the issue of slavery. The show’s comic elements sat uneasily alongside representations of black misery (and white savagery) at the whipping post and auction block, and of black valor and heroism in the fight for the Union and emancipation. In the Wild West show, Indians were easily admired. White homeowners and job seekers in Brooklyn and elsewhere did not compete against Indians. Moreover, since Indians were vanishing, they would not need to compete against them in the future, either.

  But black people coming into their own in Black America were another matter. African Americans competed with immigrants and whites for jobs in urban New York. There were just over 11,000 black people in Brooklyn, and 24,000 in Manhattan. Resisting black advancement was a primary criterion of whiteness. An amusement depicting black people making progress, showing their advance, hinted that they might have an equal right to some share of wealth in greater New York. Even if African Americans found some attraction in it, it was likely too expensive for most, and in any case its cast of six hundred was too expensive to support on a relatively small segment of the mass public. (There were only 70,000 African Americans in all of New York state.) For true believers in white racial identity, a show of black progress made no sense. Blacks had no history. Whiteness claims history for its own.

  Black America lost money. Cody urged Salsbury to give it more time. “I am putting every dollar I make” with the Wild West show “into Black America,” he wrote.56 But within weeks, the show closed. A newspaper correspondent later reported that Nate Salsbury “spent enough money to free Ireland in organizing ‘Black America,’ with which he thought to charm the people
of the North.” Instead, “the venture … cost him $110,000 and convinced him that the white man has no use for his colored brother except for the twelve hours immediately preceding the closing of the polls on election day.” 57

  Unidentified buffalo soldier and cowboys emerging from Wild West show tent, c. 1900. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.

  FOR ALL ITS APPEAL to immigrants and firstgeneration Americans, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West targeted the urban middle class who were, to say the least, extremely enthusiastic about the addition of the Congress of Rough Riders. The long stand of 1894 provided the public with opportunities for return visits, and more newspaper commentary than when the show was traveling. Cody and Salsbury chose the Ambrose Park showground for its accessibility to large audiences and the press. Seeking to replicate the success of the 1893 summer in Chicago, Salisbury cut a deal with the Thirty-ninth Street Ferry company to lease a twenty-four-acre parcel next to the ferry docks in south Brooklyn. For six months, spectators steamed from Manhattan or any of the other New York communities directly to Ambrose Park, or they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and made their way south to the showground on the trolley line. The result was an outpouring of journalist commentary on Buffalo Bill, his Wild West show, and his colorful, heroic cast and their camp, which was dutifully preserved by show personalities who jammed their scrapbooks full to bursting with newspaper clippings. In earlier years, reviews focused on the arena performance and on the adventures of cast members, especially Cody, in the cities the show visited. But by this time, the Wild West camp itself had become a place, a space understood through stories told about it. In 1894, with six months of exposure to the camp, journalists delved deep into the show’s symbols and meaning.58

  We must be wary of reading too much into those stories. Many of them were planted by John Burke, Cody’s longtime press agent and every journalist’s best friend, who sat with press delegations telling stories and amusing anecdotes and the history of the show for hours on end, day after day. Sometimes Burke concocted new stories; other times he encouraged journalists to recycle other writers’ material. Sometimes correspondents came up with original stories (which Burke then read and, if he liked, trumpeted as his own). His blustery, jovial narratives inspired miles of newspaper columns, which transmitted the show’s messages to the hinterlands. These accounts were the dominant mode of understanding Buffalo Bill’s Wild West even for people who only got to spend one afternoon with Cody and his massive entourage, and for those who never saw it at all.