89. Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 188.
90. Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 185–88.
91. Jay Monaghan, Custer: The Life of General George Armstrong Custer (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1959), 358.
92. Ena Raymonde Ballantine Journal, Dec. 30, 1872, MS 1730, NSHS.
93. Ena Raymonde Ballantine Journal, Oct. 4, 1872, MS 1730, NSHS.
94. Everett Dick, Sod House Frontier, 367.
95. The quote is Halttunen, summarizing Goffman, in Confidence Men and Painted Women, 186.
96. David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 13.
97. Nasaw, Going Out, 14.
98. Nasaw, Going Out, 18.
99. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 59–60, 132.
100. Untitled clipping, n.d., n.p., WFC Scrapbook, Stage Plays and Theater Reviews, 1875–80, BBHC; for complaints of critics see no title, n.d., n.p., WFC Scrapbook, Stage Play Notices and Reviews, 1875–80, BBHC.
101. “The Scouts at Niblo’s,” n.d., n.p., WFC Scrapbook, Stage Play Notices and Reviews, 1875–80, BBHC.
102. “Niblo’s Garden,” n.p., n.d., clipping in WFC Scrapbook, Stage Play Notices and Reviews, 1875–80, BBHC.
103. Denning, Mechanic Accents, 47–61; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 88–97.
104. “Big Indians,” n.d., n.p., clipping in WFC Scrapbook, Stage Play Notices and Reviews, 1875–80, BBHC.
105. “The Opera House,” n.d., n.p., WFC Scrapbook, Stage Play Notices and Reviews, 1875–80, BBHC.
106. Richard Moody, The Astor Place Riot (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958), 12.
107. The significance of Astor Place Riot is in Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled, 67–75; Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 63–69; Buntline’s sentence is in Moody, Astor Place Riot, 236. Quote from “The Great Scalpers on the Warpath—What a Gory Ink-Slinger Considers a ‘Gentlemany Intimation’—SCALPS BY THE BALE,” St. Louis Post Dispatch, n.d., WFC Scrapbooks, BBHC.
108. Entry for March 7, 1874, James Johnson Collection, MSS 1175, Colorado State Historical Society, Denver, CO; WFC testimony, March 23, 1904.
109. “Amphitheatre Play Bill,” n.d., n.p., in WFC Scrapbook, Stage Play Notices and Reviews, 1875–80.
110. Rosa, West of Wild Bill Hickok, 61.
111. Quoted in Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 130. In important ways, Hickok was heir to an earlier form of violence than Cody. Backcountry brawlers and “rasslers” had long been lower-class heroes, and their better-armed successors in Kansas and Nebraska, Hickok among them, appealed to the same hardscrabble lot. In this sense, he was less suited to be the hero of the predominantly northern and midwestern audience of the mass-market press. Middle-class readers of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine enjoyed lurid characters and episodes, but their tastes ran to more reluctant heroes, in part because of gathering anxieties about working-class violence in the exploding cities. Elliot Gorn, “Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry,” American Historical Review 90, no. 1 (Feb. 1985): 18–43. For examples of backcountry wrestling and fighting in Kansas, see Nyle H. Miller and Joseph W. Snelly, Why the West Was Wild (Topeka: Kansas State Historical Society, 1963); in Nebraska, see Johnson, Happy as a Big Sunflower, 102, 107.
112. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 333; see also Louisa Frederici Cody and Courtney Riley Cooper, Memories of Buffalo Bill (D. Appleton and Co., 1919), 255–56; WFC testimony, March 23, 1904.
113. For Hickok’s departure, see entry for March 11, 1874, in James Johnson Collection, MSS 1175, CHS. Cody notes that Hickok left at Rochester in Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 332–33. For Cody’s family moving to Rochester, see Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 102–3. Cody testified in 1904 that Louisa moved to Rochester when the combination played there in 1874, which makes the date of her move March 10–11. See WFC testimony and Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 331.
114. “A Disgrace to Our Civilization,” New York Herald, Aug. 11, 1876, p. 4.
115. Controversy in King, Campaigning with Crook, 39: Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 73; and Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 142. Madsen’s conversation is related in Homer Croy, Trigger Marshall: The Story of Chris Madsen (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1958), 12; also Homer Croy, “How Buffalo Bill Killed Chief Yellow Hand,” The American Weekly, June 8, 1958, pp. 11–13, clipping in MS 62 Don Russell Collection, Series 1:R, Military, Box 7/3, BBHC.
116. “Buffalo Bill,” n.d., n.p., Notices of Buffalo Bill, 1879–80, BBHC.
117. “The Knight of the Plains,” n.d., n.p., Notices of Buffalo Bill, 1879–80, BBHC.
118. “Buffalo Bill,” Notices of Buffalo Bill, 1879–80, p. 25, BBHC.
119. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill, 238; John Culhane, The American Circus: An Illustrated History (New York: Henry Holt, 1990), 92; Miller, Captain Jack Crawford, 87–111.
120. Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled; Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow; for prices and affordability (or lack thereof) in the theater, see Nasaw, Going Out, 13–24.
121. “Another AntiRent League,” New York Times, Aug. 1, 1878, p. 8.
122. “A Notorious Locality,” New York Times, Sept. 1881, p. 2. Another Buffalo Bill, a man named Horton, ran a boardinghouse and stabbed a man named Grau in a fight over an alleged insult Grau had made to Horton’s wife. “A Serious Stabbing Affray,” New York Times, Sept. 23, 1875, p. 2.
123. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 97.
124. “Cincinnati,” n.d., n.p., “Pike’s Opera-House,” n.d., n.p., WFC Scrapbook, BBHC.
125. Keim, Sheridan’s Troopers on the Borders, 3.
126. “Indianapolis,” Acadamy [sic] of Music, n.p., n.d., WFC Scrapbook, Stage Play Notices and Reviews, 1875–80, BBHC.
127. Reviews of Cody’s autobiography are in “Notices of Buffalo Bill Season of 1879–80,” BBHC, 60, 61, 64. Typical is the reviewer who writes that Cody tells his experiences “in a plain straight-forward manner and with no effort at braggadacio [sic].” Trip to Europe is in Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 365; and WFC to Robert Haslam, June 20, 1883, Robert Haslam Scrapbook, CHS.
CHAPTER EIGHT: INDIANS, HORSES
1. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 297. It is also likely that Cody’s friend John Y. Nelson, who was married to a Lakota woman and spoke fluent Lakota, may have played a role. Nelson’s home was at the winter village of Whistler’s band, not far from the fort; local settlers sometimes called the tipi encampment “Sioux City.” Ena Ballantine Papers. Whistler was a leading chief of Spotted Tail’s Brulés. George Hyde, Red Cloud’s Folk: A History of the Oglala Sioux Indians (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1937) , 85.
2. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 57–58; Reddin, Wild West Shows, 1–52.
3. Cesare Marino, The Remarkable Carlo Gentile: Pioneer Italian Photographer of the American Frontier (Nevada City, CA: Carl Mautz Publishing, 1998), 45.
4. Peter Iverson, Carlos Montezuma and the Changing World of American Indians (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982).
5. Marino, Remarkable Carlo Gentile, 45.
6. Keim, Sheridan’s Troopers on the Borders, 123–24; Stanley, My Early Travels and Adventures, 279; Roger T. Grange, “Fort Robinson, Outpost on the Plains,” Nebraska History 39, no. 3 (Sept. 1958): 217–18; James T. King, “The Republican River Expedition, June–July 1869,” Nebraska History 41, no. 3 (Sept. 1960): 173.
7. James R. Walker, Lakota Society, ed. Raymond J. DeMallie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 65–66; West, Contested Plains, 325; Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 134.
8. “An Indian Skirmish,” New York Times, Dec. 11, 1881, p. 13.
9. WFC to Sam Hall, July 5, 1879, MS 6 Series I:B Css, Box 1/6, BBHC: “I did say that I would never again have another Scout or a western man with me that is one [illeg.] I would work up. for just as soon as they see their names in print a few times
they git the big head and want to start a company of their own. I will name a few. Wild Bill. Texas Jack. John Nelson. Oregon Bill. Kit Carson. Capt. Jack. etc. all busted flat before they were out a month and wanted to come back because I would not take them then they talked about me.”
10. Russell, Lives and Legends, 258.
11. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 163.
12. Spotted Tail’s moderate stance toward the United States eventually contributed to his murder at the hands of another Lakota. For Spotted Tail and Sword, see Carl Waldman, Biographical Dictionary of American Indian History, rev. ed. (New York: Facts on File, 2001), 369–71; Hyde, Red Cloud’s Folk, 174, 223, 226. Also for Sword, see Harvey Markowitz, “George Sword,” in Encyclopedia of North American Indians, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996),
13. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 364; Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 320–28.
14. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 11: 365.
15. Utley, Lance and the Shield, 263.
16. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 163.
17. Moses, Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians.
18. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 164.
19. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 223.
20. Robert Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: Images of an Idea from Columbus to the Present (New York: Afred A. Knopf, 1978).
21. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 139; Sell and Weybright, Buffalo Bill and the Wild West, 147.
22. “Buffalo Bill,” unattributed clipping, n.d., WFC Scrapbook 1879, BBHC.
23. “Buffalo Bill,” unattributed clipping, n.d., WFC Scrapbook, 1879, BBHC.
24. Quoted in Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 185.
25. Joe Starita, The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge: A Lakota Odyssey (1995; rprt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 150–51, 173.
26. Vine Deloria, Jr., “The Indians,” in Hassrick et al., Buffalo Bill and the Wild West, 49–50.
27. Untitled clipping, n.d., n.p., in WFC Scrapbook, Stage Play Notices and Reviews, 1875–80, BBHC.
28. Daryl Jones, The Dime Novel Western (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1978), 28–34.
29. Jones, Dime Novel Western, 28–34.
30. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Clyde Griffen, “Reconstructing Masculinity from the Evangelical Revival to the Waning of Progressivism: A Speculative Synthesis,” in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 183–204; Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: Norton, 2000), 151–52.
31. Stanley, My Early Travels and Adventures, 154.
32. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 140.
33. Agnes Wright Spring, Cheyenne and Black Hills Stage and Express Routes (Glendale, CA: Caxton Press, 1948), 62. Cody met with Sioux diplomats who traveled to Washington about the matter, and likely tried to convince them to sign away the land (p. 64).
34. “An Interview with the Hon. W. F. Cody,” Montreal Herald and Daily Commercial Gazette, Aug. 17, 1885, clipping in Series VI:G, Box 1, Folder 15, BBHC.
35. See the article on David L. Payne in BBWW 1884 program (Hartford, CT: Calhoun Printing, 1884), n.p.
36. Russell, Lives and Legends, 305; Arrell Morgan Gibson, Oklahoma: A History of Five Centuries,2nd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1981), 173–78; Carl Coke Rister, Land Hunger: David L. Payne and the Boomers (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1942).
37. Smith, View from Officers’ Row, 92–93.
38. Smith, View from Officers’ Row, 92–93; Utley, Frontier Regulars, 188–92.
39. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 82.
40. For quote, see Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 185.
41. Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 180.
42. Quoted in Utley, Frontier Regulars, 111.
43. Quotes from Crook, Howard, and Miles from Smith, View from Officers’ Row, 118–21, 125; Sheridan from Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 182–83.
44. Smith, View from Officers’ Row, 114.
45. Smith, View from Officers’ Row, 113–38.
46. Life on the Border role book, MS 126, WFC Collection, Box 1, Folder 4, CHS.
47. All quotes from Smith, View from Officers’ Row, 118–21.
48. Smith, View from Officers’ Row, 125.
49. Smith, View from Officers’ Row, 134–35.
50. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 280. For Henry A. Ward, see Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 308. For Sioux hostility to Marsh, see Spring, Cheyenne and Black Hills Stage and Express Routes, 45–46.
51. Utley, Life in Custer’s Cavalry, 72.
52. Richard Irving Dodge, Our Wild Indians: Thirty-Three Years’ Personal Experience of the Red Men of the Great West (1882; rprt. New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 337.
53. Davis, “Summer on the Plains,” 303.
54. Armes, Ups and Downs of an Army Officer, 193.
55. Armes, Ups and Downs of an Army Officer, 194.
56. Dodge, Our Wild Indians, 582.
57. Janet M. Davis, The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 16.
58. Davis, Circus Age, 17.
59. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 211.
60. Quotes from BBWW 1901 program (Buffalo, NY: Courier, 1901), 3.
61. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 172; for buffalo horses, see John Ewers, The Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1955).
62. Dodge, Our Wild Indians, 341–42.
63. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 269.
64. Davis, Circus Age, 20.
65. Davis, Circus Age, 15–36, 39–46.
66. Davis, Circus Age, 93–94.
67. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 106–7, 113–14.
68. Davis, Circus Age, 31–32.
69. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 179–80.
70. Davis, Circus Age, 7, 21, 39–41, 45.
71. Davis, Circus Age, 32.
72. Dan Castello was also part of this partnership, but he soon departed. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 169–70.
73. “Barnum’s Roman Hippodrome,” New York Times, April 25, 1874, p. 7.
74. Davis, Circus Age, 40.
75. Elbert R. Bowen, “The Circus in Early Rural Missouri,” Missouri Historical Review 47, no. 10 (1952): 1–17; Deahl, “Nebraska’s Unique Contribution,” 283–98.
76. Nellie Snyder Yost, Buffalo Bill, 30–33, 41; also the same author’s The Call of the Range: The Story of the Nebraska Stock Growers Association (Denver, CO: Sage Books, 1966).
77. James C. Olson and Ronald C. Naugle, History of Nebraska, 3rd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 190–93.
78. Olson and Naugle, History of Nebraska, 191–92; John Bratt, Trails of Yesterday (Chicago: The University Publishing Co., 1921), 278; lost money is in WFC to Sam Hall, May 9, 1879, MS 6 Series I:B Css Box 1/6, BBHC.
79. Bratt, Trails of Yesterday, 279.
80. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 363.
81. Bratt, Trails of Yesterday, 279.
82. Bratt, Trails of Yesterday, 279.
&nb
sp; 83. Richard W. Slatta, Cowboys of the Americas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 141–42.
84. An 1844 pickup contest between Texas Rangers, Indians, and Hispanics in San Antonio was echoed in a similar contest at the Texas State Fair in 1852. Slatta, Cowboys of the Americas, 139.
85. In the first few years of the Wild West show, one act featured a cowboy called Mustang Jack, who leapt over a tall horse from a standing start. Such feats were a range standard, too. Cowboy competition extended to physical feats not necessarily associated with cowboy skills. The Dismal River roundup included swimming races. Throughout Mexico and South America, cowboys eschewed walking or running on foot, but in the United States, cowboys not only ran footraces, but challenged one another to jumping contests, including the high jump, the broad jump, and the triple jump (or “hop, step, and jump” as it was known at the time). Slatta, Cowboys of the Americas, 140–41.
86. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 362.
87. Yost, Buffalo Bill, 118–22.
88. Nate Salsbury, “Cody’s Personal Representatives,” typescript, YCAL MSS 17, NSP; also Nate Salsbury, “The Origin of the Wild West Show,” Colorado Magazine 32, no. 3 (July 1955): 205–8, original in YCAL MSS 17, NSP.
CHAPTER NINE: DOMESTICATING THE WILD WEST
1. Yost, Buffalo Bill, 132–33.
2. For concerns about unsuitable entertainment, see Allen, Horrible Prettiness; John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 6–7. “Better class of people” in WFC to W. F. Carver, Feb. 11, 1883, WA MSS S-1621, Beinecke Library, New Haven, CT.
3. For middle-class women in audiences, see Nasaw, Going Out, 18, 26. For the appeal of the Wild West show to families, see “The Wild West,” Montreal Herald and Commercial Gazette, Aug. 17, 1885, n.p., clipping in Series VI:G Box 1, folder 15, BBHC.
4. The phrase “Westward the Course of Empire,” from an eighteenth-century poem by Bishop Berkeley, was widely used in American painting, and it appeared in Wild West show posters, too. See Jack Rennert, 100 Posters of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (New York: Darien House, 1976), foldout A. Anxieties about national decay also inspired art. Between 1835 and 1839, Thomas Cole, America’s most famous landscape painter, produced a four-part series of paintings which he titled The Course of Empire. The paintings illustrated a people’s progress from wilderness savagery, through pastoral and commercial stages to imperial grandeur, before falling into decadence and fiery collapse. Based on the experience of Rome, the paintings suggested America’s own passage from wilderness beginnings to nascent imperial grandeur. The Course of Empire both celebrated progress and questioned its outcome. All eyes turned westward in the nineteenth century, and most remained optimistic. But Cole’s Course of Empire might just as well have been titled “Downward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.” See Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 10, 19–20, 110.
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