Much press commentary focused, as it always had, on the savage and semisavage Wild Westerners and their encounters with the city. Indians, gauchos, “Riffian Moors,” and cowboys ventured to schools, newspaper offices, and other modern venues, always in awe, in recurring expression of the civilizing virtues of the city, and the wide-eyed wonder of rustics at the fast pace of urban progress.59
But by 1894, more than in previous years, the show camp itself was the main attraction. Show tickets and other publicity encouraged spectators to arrive up to two hours early and tour the bizarrely placid settlement which was no mere agglomeration of people, but a living representation of progress, against which audiences could measure the historical, social, and political advancement and meaning of their own communities.60 Here they could see buffalo, Indians, cowboys, and perhaps meet Annie Oakley or any of the other leading lights of the show.
In 1894, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West had (or claimed to have) a population of 680 people, including performers and support staff. Journalists called it “a little tented city.”61 Some called it “the White City,” as if the World’s Columbian Exposition’s moral messages about the supremacy of American civilization and its greater destiny were now conveyed by the Wild West show.62
Indeed, Buffalo Bill’s frontier simulacrum seemed to anticipate the modern city at least as much it recalled the vanished frontier. In London, in 1892, Frederic Remington mused on the meaning of the Wild West camp for modern urbanites. “As you walk through the camp you see a Mexican, an Ogallala, and a ‘gaucho’ swapping lies and cigarettes while you reflect on the size of the earth.”63 The catalogue of disparate races, thrown together in one place, implied violence and primitivism—but it also echoed a standard device of writers seeking to convey the racial anarchy of the modern city. The reformer Jacob Riis published his photographic exposé of immigrant ghettoes, How the Other Half Lives, in 1890, the very year the U.S. Census Bureau declared the frontier closed. He spoke of the tenements—“where all influences make for evil”—as a kind of replacement frontier.64 (Indeed, Riis himself was an immigrant from Denmark, and such a fan of James Fenimore Cooper that when he arrived in America in 1870, he strapped a giant navy revolver to the outside of his coat—à la Hickok—and sauntered up Broadway, expecting to find “buffaloes and red Indians charging up and down.”) 65 In lower Manhattan, he wrote, one could find “an Italian, a German, a French, African, Spanish, Bohemian, Russian, Scandinavian, Jewish, and Chinese colony … The only thing you shall vainly ask for in the chief city of America is a distinctively American community.”66
When Riis searched for a “distinctively American community,” he meant a neighborhood of English-speaking, native-born Americans. Cody’s “little, tented city” was not that. But, as Amy Leslie and other critics had observed at the World’s Columbian Exposition, it represented, for all its racial primitivism, a kind of ideal American community: a spectacle of racial anarchy wrought into progressive order by American frontier genius.
“The Little Tented City.” The Wild West camp became the premier attraction of the show, tantalizing visitors with a view of America, its frontier past, and its technological, professionally managed future. Note the electric generator in the foreground, not far from the buffalo pen, suggesting the fusion of nature and technology in Cody’s entertainment. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West 1898 Courier, author’s collection.
The Wild West camp consisted of rows of tents along paved streets and cinder walkways between and among flower beds and small gardens, and to tour it was to contemplate both the frontier past and the urban future. 67 The disparities between Indian tipis and the modern amenities of Cody’s tent— “the size of a small farm house,” and divided into rooms, according to one reviewer—were themselves a lesson in the material advantages of civilization and progress. In Cody’s tent, “we see a telephone, curtains, bric-a-brac, carpets, pictures, desks, lounges, easy chairs, an ornate buffet, refrigerator, and all the furnishings of a cozy home.” By contrast, in a tipi standing nearby “we see a circular board floor (it should be dirt) within a ring of canvas. On a sheet of metal are the smouldering embers of a fire that makes a tepee at once a home and a chimney.” To visit first one and then the other “is to be able to compare the quarters of a modern general with the refuge of a Celtic outlaw in the seventeenth century. By just so much have we advanced; by just so much has the Indian stood still.”68
But there was more than frontier history on display. The construction work required by the show was touted as an achievement and spectacle in its own right, a display of the show’s ability to transform the city.
In 1894, the camp’s transformation of south Brooklyn also conveyed important messages about the show camp’s civilizing mission. “The interior of the grounds was a surprise,” wrote one visitor, “for on the large plot of waste land there has been laid out a beautiful summer park, with trees, shrubbery, flowers, and beautiful paths.”69 At various times, the Wild West appeared not only near but in gardens, as in its appearance at London’s International Horticultural Exhibition in 1892. Although modern readers might find the pairing of broncos and buttercups an odd contrast, in the late nineteenth century they were bookends for the story of civilization, which began in savage nature and culminated in the garden. Proximity of show to gardens echoed its domestic culmination, the salvation of the settler’s cabin and the replacement of the wilderness with the pastoral, and for this reason, landscape gardening was a major activity amid show tents and tipis.
The mix of urban and pastoral at Ambrose Park resembled what many urbanites desired for their own exploding industrial cities. New York’s reformers often pointed to the city’s lack of parks and greenery as a source of social degeneracy. According to Jacob Riis, the common street urchin, that “rough young savage” who so terrified civil society, became a sweet-natured child in the presence of flowers. “I have seen an armful of daisies keep the peace of a block better than the policeman and his club, seen instincts awaken under their gentle appeal, whose very existence the soil in which they grew made seem a mockery.”70 Park landscapes and urban gardens, like New York’s Central Park, helped soothe the city’s rough modernity. So journalists exulted that “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Company has made a garden spot where a few months ago was the dumping ground of South Brooklyn.”71 Where the Wild West show portrayed the settling of the hostile western frontier, the camp’s balance of Artifice and Nature symbolically “settled” the darker edges of the city.
The bucolic landscaping was a powerful contrast to the supposedly simmering violence of Wild Westerners, which press agents constantly highlighted. Managing Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was nothing like “the management of a light-opera company on the road,” for “the people of the Wild West show … are all schooled in the theory that it is the proper thing to run a ten-inch knife into the anatomy of anyone who does not agree with ‘their particular whim,’ ” wrote Frederic Remington.72
Given these popular fixations, we might expect that the show’s large, multiracial cast would foment anxieties about social disorder. But for the most part, the show’s violence did not concern social critics except for its alleged effects on small boys. The boy who sees the show “wakes up the family by uttering weird coyote yells in his sleep. He lassoes a bedpost and the family cat, and fires a toy pistol at imaginary objects while riding the back fence at full speed.”73 The Gilded Age middle class saw rough outdoor play as contributing to the development of manly, entrepreneurial characteristics like social aggression and risk taking, and as protection against “overcivilization.” In any case, the violence of middle-class boys was constrained by the watchful authority of parents and family, so such influences were largely construed as positive. 74
Indeed, in the minds of many, the ways that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West incited such childhood play helped to naturalize urban neighborhoods through an old American ritual: playing Indian. Many reporters echoed the one who described numerous “Indian tribes” of seven-year-
old boys along Brooklyn’s upper Seventh Avenue. Here, clotheslines had disappeared as boys made them into lassoes for roping little girls, the trolley became “the Deadwood Stage,” and Tiger Claws, Bounding Elks, Scar-on-Necks, Black Bears, Howling Antelopes, Bounding Eagles, “and other Lilliputian savages” rampaged mischievously through the streets.75 By inspiring such frolicsome “Indianness,” Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show assisted in the transformation of city children into adults who retained frontier virtues.76
Beyond its impact on boys, the show’s seamless performance and generally law-abiding cast provided a spectacle of urban order to audiences concerned about the social chaos of their own city. The contradictions between the primitivism on display and the modern science and technology which made it safe and accessible for audiences created a tension that was dramatic and fascinating in its own right, and a constant feature of press coverage. For most of its life, the Wild West show, like circuses and other large traveling amusements, moved about by rail. During the 1890s, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West required three trains to move cast, animals, support staff, and props. In addition to its hundreds of Indians, cowboys, gauchos, Cossacks, vaqueros, European cavalrymen, and other performers, the show employed ranks of skilled and unskilled laborers. Everywhere the Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders went, they brought along wheelwrights, harnessmakers, blacksmiths, ticket sellers, watchmen, butchers, cooks, pastry cooks, wood choppers, porters (to tend employees on the trains), drivers (to transport cast members and other workers from train to showgrounds and back again), canvasmen, and stake drivers, among others. All told, the Wild West show required almost 23,000 yards of canvas and twenty miles of rope.77
Correspondents at home and abroad seemed never to tire of watching crews load and unload the cars, which was a popular diversion and a means of thinking about the show as a modern organization, as hundreds of men raced back and forth unloading materials and animals, erecting tents, stabling horses, and installing the traveling kitchen in a whir of precision that evoked nothing so much as a factory.78 Newspapers extolled the wonders of Wild West show mobility during the 1880s, and after 1894, as the show went on the road for one-and two-night stands in towns across the country, its spectacle of a community-on-the-move became a major attraction again.
Meanwhile, in Brooklyn and at other long stands, public attention to the camp’s technology, social engineering, and scientific management underscored the modern relevance of a show featuring premodern conflict. A few examples make the point. Hoping to avert the harrowing losses from disease which plagued the camp during the European tours, Cody and Salsbury ordered vaccinations of the show cast in Brooklyn, making the Wild West camp a model of modern public health for some observers. “Cleanliness and perfect order are two cast-iron rules in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West camp,” wrote a reporter on the visit by doctors from the Brooklyn Health Department to administer the “cosmopolitan vaccinating bee.”
Columnists lionized Buffalo Bill Cody and Nate Salsbury for this scientific attention to public and employee welfare. But just as significant, the response of the show’s cast to the vaccinations provided lessons for the larger city. Although the Indians were “so full-blooded that the least scratch will cause a profuse flow,” they submitted willingly. Cossacks, gauchos, cowboys, and “half a dozen Arabs, and as many beautiful Arabian women, negro cooks, and helpers” also went calmly to the needle. The bravado, or at least acquiescence, of the Rough Rider camp stood in sharp contrast to the response of Brooklyn’s immigrant neighborhoods in recent vaccination campaigns. During various public health alerts, authorities in greater New York attempted to vaccinate whole neighborhoods. Immigrants distrusted both vaccination and city authorities, and their response was not always cooperative. In Williamsburgh, Brooklyn’s large German neighborhood, immigrants hurled “hot water and ‘cuss’ words” at doctors who tried to vaccinate them.
The cooperation of the Wild West camp suggested that the most primitive and potentially violent of peoples could be brought to the benefits of public health through the governance of white men like Cody and Salsbury.79 Most of all, the complacent acceptance of the needle among the show’s Germans, Indians, and other “savage” or “half-civilized” peoples implied messages for the white-collar enterpreneurs and managers who were the show’s primary audience. Brooklyn’s troublesome immigrants might yet be brought into the new medical and scientific order which the city’s English-speaking professional bureaucracy were applying to the cities. For the reading public, the multiracial and potentially violent city teeming at the show gates could also be tamed by the proper application of authority, managerial skill, and frontier spirit.
The popular interest in public health was accompanied by professional interest in the show’s infrastructure. In the historical narrative of the show’s arena, old technologies like the Deadwood Stage rumbled their last before crowds anticipating new technologies. But that story came to the public through application of those new technologies, and fascination with them made Cody’s camp seem both an exhibit of the primitive and a cutting-edge outfit, particularly in its use of the revolutionary technology of electricity.
Buffalo soldiers, vaqueros, Indians, and the rest of the cast in 1896. The diningtent was the center of the show community and a frequent subject of commentary, as a place where the heterogeneous community of the Wild West show was welded into social order. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.
Edison, Westinghouse, and others began to light up the cities during the early years of Cody’s show. Urban dwellers had once feared nighttime in the city as frightening, dangerous, and potentially lewd. Then, in 1886, the Statue of Liberty lit up with electric light (as did the stage lighting in Cody’s Drama of Civilization, at Madison Square Garden), and in 1893 the electrical lighting and electrical amusement rides of Chicago’s White City startled and impressed millions of visitors, and thousands of columnists.80
Electrification of the city engendered a new order of night life and public entertainments. Not only did lights make the city safer, but they created a new landscape of visual wonder, brilliant electric advertisements and white illumination which simultaneously brought new attractions into being and seemingly cleansed the city of grit and dirt which so alarmed reformers during daylight hours. In important ways, urbanites knew the working hours were over, and the time for entertainment and leisure had arrived, when the city’s new electric lamps blinked on, creating the nighttime, illuminated world of “the Great White Way.”81
In Brooklyn, electric lighting had begun to alter the city’s nightscape by the early 1880s, and shortly before the Wild West show came to Ambrose Park, in the early 1890s, electric trolleys began to run on Brooklyn’s busy streets.82 The trolley was the vehicle of the modern era (the name “trolley” came from the device that conveyed the electric current from wires overhead to the car), and it soon became a ubiquitous feature of the urban landscape in Brooklyn as elsewhere. New York City had 776 miles of trolley track by 1890, and even St. Louis had 169. By 1902, Americans took 4.8 billion rides on the trolley.83
The transformation was not easy. Because trolleys were both faster and quieter than stage coaches, wagons, and the old horse cars, pedestrians often misjudged them and paid with their lives. In 1893–94, seventeen people were killed by Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue Rapid Transit Railroad alone, and public anxieties about the new technology ran high. Ultimately, it gave rise to the nickname “trolley dodgers” for Brooklynites (later inscribed into the city’s public amusements when it was applied to their baseball team, the Brooklyn Dodgers). Nonetheless, electrification continued, and Brooklynites could take the Third and Fifth Avenue trolley lines to the Wild West show’s front gates.84
In fact, a not insubstantial crowd of observers made this trip to see the show’s electrical works. The Wild West show, exhibition of vanishing skills and organic technique, was literally, and paradoxically, a beacon for electrical engineers. More than two hundred members of the New York Electr
ical Society accepted invitations to tour the camp’s electrical works and watch the show under its new floodlights, installed and maintained by the Edison Electrical Illuminating Company. Popular newspapers and journals of electrical associations alike recounted these visits and explored the electrical circuitry of the show—“The grounds are lighted by seventy seven 2,000-c.p. [candle power] incandescent arcs, while the buildings and tents require over 800 16-c.p. incandescent lamps.”85 As newspaper writers were fond of reporting, the “Texas,” the electrical generating plant at Ambrose Park, was “said to be the largest for the purpose in the world.” Given the size of the area to be illuminated (the arena comprised two acres), the challenge of providing illumination had been especially great, and the generators reportedly cost $30,000.86
The skillful attentions to the show’s electrical apparatus were the culmination of efforts made by Cody and Salsbury at least since the 1880s. Circuses attempted the use of electrical generators as early as 1879, but they soon abandoned them because they were too difficult to transport. In his earliest letters to Doc Carver, Cody had broached the subject of electrical lighting for the show as a way of making more money, and their performance at Coney Island in 1883 included “Grand Pyrotechnic and Electric Illuminations.”87 The show incorporated electric lights at long stands in Europe, in London and in Glasgow, but the 1894 season marked the beginning of the show’s almost consistent electrification. By 1896, Cody and Salsbury acquired electric generators to travel with the show, and the Wild West “Electrical Department” employed eleven people. In cast parades through the streets, the mobile, gleaming, steam-powered electrical generating plants, called the “Buffalo Bill” and the “Nate Salsbury,” rolled along between contingents of frontiersmen. “The enormous double electric dynamos used to illuminate the Wild West performances are well worth inspecting, as a scientific and mechanical triumph,” trumpeted the 1898 show program. “They are the largest portable ones ever made.”88 Even on the road, managers arranged tours of the electrical equipment, followed by performances, for visiting groups of electrical engineers and utility company officers.89
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