Louis S. Warren

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

  The hero of the “Settler’s Cabin” was an outcast.

  Adele Von Ohl Parker

  SHE WAS A VAUDEVILLE PLAYER with a string of stage ponies when she arrived in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929, and discovered there was no place left to show. Keith’s Palace Theater had shut its doors for good, finally bowing to the competition of the movies. But Adele Von Ohl Parker never let anything so trivial as an obstacle get in her way. She found an abandoned stockyard, opened a riding school, and taught her pupils to handle both horses and the business, too.

  “Something of a gypsy” was the way one former pupil described her. They say she came from Plainfield, New Jersey, where she was born in 1886, and grew up teaching herself to stand atop a galloping horse and winning in horse shows and riding competitions. She clung to the back of a horse as it dived into a tank of water on the shore in Atlantic City. She claimed to be the first show cowgirl to perform “picking up.” Whether that was true or not, she rode with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West late in his career, in 1908 and for a few years after that, then took what she learned into silent movies and the circus, Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey.1

  Cleveland marked the end of her circus and movie trail, but not of her performance. Soon after her riding school began, she located property in nearby North Olmsted and moved her outfit there. Her brochures advertised “Parker’s Ranch” as a place to educate children in riding, as well as archery, crafts, carriage driving, and gardening (students worked her vegetable patch). In subsequent decades, her business repeatedly veered toward insolvency, only to be rescued by friends and neighbors whose generosity and admiration allowed her to continue teaching crowds of children.

  That she attracted so many students requires some explanation. A tall, imperious, eccentric woman, she lived alone except for her many animals, the drifters who happened by looking for work, and the down-and-out circus players who came her way, looking for a place to rest, or a place to die. She raised foals in the living room, chickens in the bathtub. Once, an old acquaintance arrived with elephants from a lately busted circus. “We had real elephants to ride,” recalled a former student. After the animals demolished her stock of hay, Parker and the children took them to the park, where they swam in the river, until “the park commissioner came up screaming about crazy calls he got that there were elephants in his park.”

  An unmarried old woman from the circus, she opened her house to all; it was a continual shambles that was anything but domestic. But Cleveland parents warmed to her when they saw the magic she worked with children on horseback. Many of her students came back summer after summer. Grown to adulthood, they looked back fondly on her rare blend of stern instruction and whimsy. Robert Hull recalled teenage days playing capture-the-flag on horseback, feeling “so slapdash almighty man and horseman” with the flag in hand until Adele Parker “came busting out of the woods on [that] George Hanover horse of hers and down you went off your animal, kicking in the shale and wondering what hit you and how you lost the flag.”2

  Of all the activities her students adored—the three-day ride to other towns, the overnight stay on her ranch—the most spectacular was her annual Buffalo Bill Wild West show. A thundering spectacle of stagecoach robbery (she kept a coach half repaired for the show), “Custer’s Last Stand” (with Parker herself in the title role), and riding stunts, all performed on the high school track. “Complete and utter pandemonium,” was the way one woman recalled it many years later. “I rode and shot a bow and arrow. This was part of her training. ‘Just hold on with your legs and thighs dear… .’ ”

  In 1955, she received a letter from some of Buffalo Bill Cody’s descendants, who tracked her down and invited her to come out to Cody, Wyoming, and visit the Buffalo Bill Museum. She wrote back with enthusiasm: “Long time I have been wanting to keep the name of Buffalo Bill alive and loved, he was the father of the West. Have hoped that I could put on a show to play where he played—a very small show but good stuff—to make enough money to pay for a statue—bronze—or picture—to be put in every library… . ‘The Spirit of Buffalo Bill.’ ”

  As she described it, her life was every bit as happy as her students thought. Like Buffalo Bill, she was an entrepreneur with a colorful outfit, and she kept an eye on the bottom line which seemed always to slip out from under her. “I have 60 horses—and am in great condition—ride harder now than ever. I am alone—and am very comfortable and happy—with a wonderful business—but I would be happy if it would mean business for the both of us to do all I can for the museum.”3

  She went to Cody, rode in the Wild West show parade, and “gave a superb demonstration of horsemanship in the arena at the Wild West Show on Tuesday Evening,” reported the town paper.4

  That fall, she added to her already legendary reputation as teacher and rider with a display of courage. The sixty-nine-year-old horsewoman was driving eighteen Girl Scouts and three women on a hayride when a drunk driver plowed into the wagon. The impact threw Parker into the street. None of the passengers was hurt, but the horses bolted and the wagon lurched forward. Parker, like the professional she was, had clutched the reins even as the collision tossed her from the wagon. Now, as the horses dragged her along on her belly in the street, she could see that the main beam beneath the wagon was broken in half. If the horses continued to pull, the wagon would come apart, and this small accident might become a real tragedy. Without hesitation, she jammed her arm through the spokes of the nearest wheel, stopping the wagon—and shattering her arm. “Don’t worry about me,” she told a journalist in the hospital, “I’m tough as a pine knot.”5

  She survived that episode, and lived another dozen years. When she died, her funeral was packed with children. Nobody was quite certain how old she was—some said eighty, others eighty-five—and the many stories about this daring western rider swirled through an America transfixed by the civil rights struggle and a failing war in the jungles of Vietnam. Her legend seemed to transcend the real world, until, like Buffalo Bill himself, her public wondered if she had been real, or if they had somehow dreamed her up. “In so many ways, Parker’s Ranch was symbolic of a lot of things that don’t happen anymore,” wrote Robert Hull. “As the years wore on, Mrs. Parker became definitely larger than life—a prodigious teacher, a strangely regal creature, and a character of such darting impulses that half of North Olmsted is less than certain she really existed.” 6

  Adele Von Ohl Parker, “Picking Up,” 1919. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.

  Of Adele Parker’s adventure, only some mostly forgotten stories and a few photographs remain. One of these is a magnificent 1919 image of the cowgirl on a galloping horse, doing the “pick up” that was her specialty. She wears a cowboy hat and chaps. Her seat has left the saddle and is now planted on the horse’s side. Her thighs clutch the animal with such power, and her body swings from the horse’s flanks with such grace, that it looks almost as if gravity has failed. Her left hand grips the reins, her right hand reaches to pluck a hat from the ground. Her face is lit with joy.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  End of the Trail

  FOR TWO YEARS following the trial, Cody toured Europe, in a figurative exile that largely kept him from the public eye in the United States. In France, where he took up the reins of the Wild West show immediately after Judge Scott rendered his decision, divorce and extramarital affairs were less stigmatized, and details of his personal life were less renowned. In fact, 1905 was the third year of a four-year European tour arranged by managing partner James A. Bailey (whom many suspected of keeping the Wild West show in Europe to protect his American circus, Barnum & Bailey, from competition). In 1903, the Wild West show had opened at the Olympia Theatre in London. After two weeks, the show moved to Manchester for three weeks, then went to Liverpool for three more, and on to a tour of the provinces that lasted until October. The year 1904 saw Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World in Wales, Scotland, and smaller English cities, inscribing the legend of Buffa
lo Bill in places like Penrith, Rochdale, and Macclesfield. In 1905, the show opened in Paris, then moved into the French countryside—Cholet, Vannes, Chateauroux— finishing in November in Marseilles. There, the Marquis Folco de Baroncelli and the poet Frédéric Mistral met Buffalo Bill and Pedro Esquivel, and Baroncelli began his long friendship with Jacob White Eyes and Sam Lone Bear.

  In 1906, Cody—still following Bailey’s schedule—stayed clear of the American scene again. Opening in Marseilles, the company toured the south of France, then Italy and Austria-Hungary (with ten days in Budapest and brief appearances in Temesvar, Ungvar, and Brasso). There was a brief foray into today’s Ukraine and Poland, with a stop in Kraków, and then a return swing through Germany and Belgium.1

  These appearances were by no means unsuccessful. Cody donated $5,000 to the survivors of the Mt. Vesuvius eruption in 1906, and $1,000 to the victims of the San Francisco earthquake.2 But that year, an epidemic of glanders struck the show horses in France. Show handlers had to destroy two hundred animals.

  On top of these losses came the death of James A. Bailey, whose heirs found in his papers a note for a $12,000 loan to William F. Cody. The note was several years old, and Cody claimed he had paid it. But if he had, Bailey’s heirs insisted he do so again. Buffalo Bill would not be retiring anytime soon.3

  In 1907, the Wild West show finally returned to the United States, where it played the remainder of its days. The show was still a large draw, and newspaper reviews mostly ignored Cody’s scandalous divorce trial. Instead, they portrayed the aging showman as a venerable, fading entertainment. They asked if this was his farewell tour. When he replied it was not, they treated it like one anyway.4 In part, they responded to his appearance. He looked old. Although journalists still described his hair as long, the tresses were a wig. Outside the arena, he often went without it, his bald pate covered only by a hat.

  But the emphasis on Cody’s imminent vanishing was also a way of diminishing the controversy around him. He could not be a disruptive force if he was about to disappear, and over the last decade of his life, the dominant theme of his newspaper coverage was his approaching death.

  His persona underwent a subtle shift, seemingly at his own direction. After his return from Europe, his show programs dropped all mention of his role as domesticator. There were no references to his family, no illustrations of Scout’s Rest Ranch, no poetry about Buffalo Bill and his babies. Indeed, show publicity referred only vaguely to the details of his private life at all. Programs no longer spoke of him as the embodiment of progress. In 1907, audiences read about his frontier heroics, his business and show successes, especially the show’s European travels. There was also a two-page spread on Cody town and “The Cody Trail through Wonderland,” with “Views of Yellowstone Park—Now Accessible on South via Cody by C. B. & Q. R. R.”5

  The show itself did reprise elements of Cody’s old frontier heroics, with his first-ever recreation of “The Battle of Summit Springs” which both complemented the show finale of the “Attack on the Settler’s Cabin” and offered audiences a bridge to a distant, frontier past that preceded the recent scandals. Show programs gave a detailed history of the battle, and the now-aged General Eugene Carr even ventured a personal testimonial in which he averred for the first time that Cody had killed Tall Bull. 6 At some point after 1907, Thomas Edison filmed the tableau, and the clip survives:

  Two white women arrive in the arena with the victorious Cheyenne, who sing and thrust their lances at the sky. Tipis go up as the two captives recline nervously on the ground, watching the activity around them. Two Cheyenne women rouse the white women and try to shove them into a tipi. They resist. A chief comes along, and shoves them in. They emerge, arms flailing at their captors. The chief pushes them back inside. Then comes the cavalry charge, the Indians are routed, and Buffalo Bill himself, now an old man, dismounts to shake the hands of the liberated captives.7

  But the search for an ending which now dominated Cody’s life began to permeate the entertainment. Had Cody retired with founding a town he could have made his life correspond to myth, with settlement and fixity succeeding the nomadism of his show career.

  Instead, he scripted his now-anticlimactic life back into his show, abruptly abandoning the domestic finale just as he had left Louisa. After twenty-three years of marking the show’s climax, the “Attack on the Settler’s Cabin” disappeared. Never again would audiences watch the old scout ride through circling Indians to rescue the little pioneer family. The show’s culminating attractions in subsequent years included “auto polo,” riding tricks of different nations, and, reflecting the rise of collegiate athletics as manly training and entertainment, football games on horseback between cowboys and Indians (with a round ball some five feet in diameter).

  As unsatisfying as these finales were, Cody’s search for an ending in a sense reflected both his attempted divorce and shifting public attachments to the West which the old performer probably sensed. The show increasingly competed with movies, and among the earliest of these were what became known as “westerns.” The Great Train Robbery was released in 1903, and was popular enough to generate many imitators. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was among them: the 1907 show included a segment called “The Great Train Hold-Up and Bandit Hunters of the Union Pacific,” featuring an automobile mocked up as a locomotive, in front of a giant panorama of Pike’s Peak.8

  Although many assume that western films were merely Wild West shows brought to the screen, there were significant differences between them, which suggest some of the challenges Cody faced in his effort to compete with them. The films built on the literary structure of the western novel, which dates its birth to 1902, the year Owen Wister published The Virginian. Wister’s novel became the template for the western genre prior to World War II. The Virginian made many contributions to western mythology, not the least of them a distancing of western heroes from domesticity. We may attribute the western’s antidomestic leanings to a reaction against the domestic novel and reform Christianity, as Jane Tompkins has argued, or we may take the view that Wister sought to reassure men that they remained firmly in charge even in “the Equality State” of Wyoming, where women had the vote, as Lee Clark Mitchell suggests. Either way, The Virginian ’s plot turns on a new kind of subordination of the independent woman to the novel’s hero.9

  In Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, and in many nineteenth-century dime novels, heroes raced to rescue women bodily from the clutches of evil. The woman in the settler’s cabin, or the women in the wagon train, supported the armed combat of their men without hesitation. The alternative was abduction and subordination to a primitive and racially “other” regime.

  William Cody, c. 1915. Almost bald, Cody wore a wig in the arena, probably from the 1890s onward. But he did not try to cover up outside the show and often dressed like the financier and successful capitalist he longed to be. Courtesy Denver Public Library.

  With The Virginian, the central trope of the western becomes a hero who ventures out to battle evil against the wishes of the good woman. In fact, his passage to the showdown is marked by his turning away from the woman, who is left indoors and who has announced that she will leave him if he insists on fighting. By venturing out the door, and into the street, the hero announces that he will forsake the woman and the domestic order she represents in order to defend the honor he embodies. In the western, heroes must renounce domesticity to fight villainy.

  Sometimes, this development is resolved by the reassertion of domestic harmony, but only on the hero’s terms. After killing the bad man, the Virginian is taken back by his love, Molly Wood. Thus, she validates his violation of her wishes.

  In westerns throughout the twentieth century, the climactic scene of The Virginian, with its domestic gender war followed by a showdown, was repeated in various forms. It was vitally different from the climax of the Wild West show. Where the heroes triumphed over nomadic savagery in the Wild West show, they were energized by the domesticating influence of
women. Indeed, as we have seen, the presence of white women was the signature “racial” characteristic that allowed white men to vanquish Indians in the first place.

  In the western, on the other hand, the protagonist vanquishes not one but two very different adversaries: the woman, who must be refused, and the villain, who must be killed. Indeed, the refusal of the woman’s wishes is the necessary precondition for the killing. Thus, the modern western emerges as a symbolic defense of manly honor in ways that require denial of the constraining power of home and womanhood. Indeed, the domesticating influence of woman becomes a chief threat to the hero, who needs violence to underscore honor and integrity and—though she does not understand this—to defend the woman’s honor, too. Indeed, her moral blindness to the need for killing is a sharp contrast to the moral clarity of the hero’s vision. 10

  Of course, in a thousand ways, the picture of western centaurs racing home could still resonate with this myth (picture the desperate race to the cabin in John Ford’s The Searchers). But a symbolic homecoming of western heroes, like the finale of the Wild West show, perhaps brought the scout and his cowboys too close to home to be comfortable after 1907. It certainly clashed with the needs of the western as it developed in the twentieth century: thus the final scene of so many westerns, echoed and reasserted in The Searchers, when the hero, having restored the abducted woman to her family, walks away from the cabin and back into the wilderness.

  Given his genius for tuning his mythology to national longings, it would be hard to imagine that Cody was completely unaware of these shifting cultural predilections. He practically voiced them himself, when he explained his reasons for wanting a divorce from Louisa in 1904, vowing to make a new home in the solitude, in “that new wild country” where he could “be away from trouble—domestic trouble.”11