Louis S. Warren
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5. Quoted in Lears, No Place of Grace, 50.
6. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 84–88; also Lears, No Place of Grace, 49–51.
7. Bernard Bailyn, Robert Dallek, David Brion Davis, David Herbert Donald, John L. Thomas, and Gordon S. Wood, The Great Republic: A History of the American People, 2 vols. 4th ed. (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1992), 2:228–29; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encountered Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 6: “Between 1870 and 1920, some twenty-six million immigrants entered the United States.”
8. See David M. Wrobel, The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993); G. Edward White, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989).
9. Robert A. Woods, ed., The City Wilderness: A Settlement Study by Residents and Associates of the South End House (1898; rprt. New York: Garrett Press, 1970); Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 1174–75; Robert W. Cherny, American Politics in the Gilded Age, 1868–1900 (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson Press, 1997), 136; Eric Rauchway, Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 133–35. Also see Katherine Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830–1902 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Victoria Brown, The Education of Jane Addams (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Rosalind Rosenberg, Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 25–35.
10. Peggy Samuels and Harold Samuels, Frederic Remington (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 33; Remington quoted in G. Edward White, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 109.
11. Remington’s painting of Buffalo Bill in 1899 was reproduced in Helen Cody Wetmore’s biography of her brother, Last of the Great Scouts (1899; rprt. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1918), and on the covers of show programs for 1901, with Remington’s permission. See BBWW 1901 program (Buffalo, NY: Courier, 1901).
12. Dr. N. Allen, “Changes in Population,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 38, no. 225 (Feb. 1869): 386.
13. Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, 6 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1889–96); Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 170–215.
14. “Actresses See Cowboys,” New York Advertiser, July 31, 1894, in NSS, 1894, WH72, Series 7, Box 4, DPL.
15. Brick Pomeroy, quoted in BBWW 1899 program, p. 11. For G. Stanley Hall and educational theory, see Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 88–101.
16. “Women’s Kingdom,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 20, 1883, p. 12; “Female Suffrage and Woman’s Advancement,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 21, 1883, p. 4.
17. Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 23–45; Lears, No Place of Grace, 103–7; also Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 56–59.
18. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 63–87, esp. 77.
19. Orvell, Real Thing, 77, 101.
20. Bachmann, quoted in Rennert, 100 Posters of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 4.
21. WFC to Carver, Feb. 11, 1883, WA MSS S-1621, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
22. Buffalo Bill and Dr. Carver Wild West, Rocky Mountain, and Prairie Exhibition Program 1883 (Hartford, CT: Calhoun Printing), n.p., [hereafter BBDC]; BBWW 1885 program, n.p., Cody Collection, WH 72, Box 2/19, DPL-WHR.
23. Quotes from Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 95, 146; for Matthewson, see “Real Buffalo Bill,” Chicago Post, July 14, 1894, and “He Met Buffalo Bill,” New York Press, Sept. 3, 1894, both clippings in NSS, vol. 4; George E. Hyde, Life of George Bent: Written from His Letters, ed. Savoie Lottinville (Norman: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), 268; Yost, Buffalo Bill, 374–75.
24. See “New Jersey’s Farm Work,” New York Times, Sept. 16, 1884, p. 8.
25. For a survey of competing Wild West shows, see Don Russell, The Wild West: A History of the Wild West Shows (Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum, 1970); Paul Reddin, Wild West Shows (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999). For Samuel Franklin Cody, see Garry Jenkins, “Colonel” Cody and the Flying Cathedral: The Adventures of the Cowboy Who Conquered Britain’s Skies (London: Simon and Schuster, 1999), esp. 8–12.
26. WFC to William Carver, Feb. 11, 1883, WA MSS S-1621, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
27. Moses, Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 23.
28. Carver’s fraudulent biography is in BBDC 1883 program (Hartford, CT: Calhoun, 1883), n.p. Carver paid $200 for 160 acres of North Platte property in 1874. See WA MSS S-1621, Beinecke Library; see also Yost, Call of the Range, 106; and Yost, Buffalo Bill, 126–27. For a full-length biography of Carver which accepts all of his fabrications uncritically, see Raymond W. Thorp, Spirit Gun of the West (Glendale, CA: A. H. Clark, 1957).
29. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 337.
30. Salsbury, “The Origins of the Wild West Show,” in YCAL MSS 17, NSP, 207. The reference to a piano stool came from Carver’s unsuccessful attempt to import a piano to his mother’s house near North Platte. See Yost, Call of the Range, 106.
31. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 66.
32. “Carver’s Big Rifle Feat,” New York Times, July 14, 1878, p. 12; also, “The Great Rifle Shot,” New York Times, July 5, 1878, p. 8.
33. James B. Trefethen, “They Were All Sure Shots,” American Heritage (April 1962): 26–32.
34. WFC to W. F. Carver, Feb. 11, 1883, WA MSS S-1621, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
35. WFC to Carver, n.d.; Cody to Carver, Feb. 11, 1883; WFC to Carver, Feb. 28, 1883, in WA MSS S-1621, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
36. George Ward Nichols, “Wild Bill,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (Feb. 1867): 274; also Webb, Buffalo Land, 145.
37. “The Grand Duke’s Hunt—General Sheridan and ‘Buffalo Bill’ Lead the Way—At Grand Battue on the Plains,” New York Herald, Jan. 14, 1872, p. 7.
38. “Buffalo Bill,” undated clipping, BB Scrapbook, 1879, BBHC.
39. Yost, Buffalo Bill, 127; Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 265.
40. Yost, Buffalo Bill, 128.
41. Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953), 49.
42. The ethnological congress was pioneered by a German circus owner, Carl Hagenbeck, in 1874. Davis, Circus Age, 118.
43. BBDC 1883, n.p.
44. BBDC 1883, n.p.
45. This synopsis and quote are from Yost, Buffalo Bill, 134–36.
46. BBDC 1883, n.p.
47. Russell, Lives and Legends, 295.
48. Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, “The Centrality of the Horse in the Nineteenth-Century American City,” in The Making of Urban America, ed. Raymond Mohl, 2nd ed., (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1997), 109.
49. “Pictures of the Plains,” The World (New York), July 16, 1886, p. 3. Within months, the tribute was reprinted in the London dramatic publication The Era (“The ‘Wild West’ Show,” The Era, Sept. 18, 1886, p. 10). Less than two years later, John Burke, Cody’s ghostwriter, repeated it for an American readership in Story of the Wild West and Camp-FireChats (1888; rprt. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 714–15. The description was imitated and plagiarized thereafter, as when Percy MacKaye described Cody as “veritably a Centaur,” in 1927, and when Stella Foote recalled him as “the complete restoration of the Centaur,” in 1954. MacKaye, Epoch, 2:91; Foote, Letters from “Buffalo Bill,” 15.
50. “Transatlantic Centaurs,” see The Era, April 23, 1887, clipping in Johnny Baker Scrapbook, DPL-WHR. For “coming centaur,” see Cody, Story of t
he Wild West, 721.
51. Firmage, E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1904–1962, 90.
52. J. Michael Padgett, quoted in “Human Fate: Part Beast, Part Angel,” New York Times, Oct. 31, 2003, p. B42.
53. Page DuBois, Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1982), 25–42.
54. See Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 16; Deloria, Playing Indian, 107–9; Herman, Hunting and the American Imagination, 237–69. Remington himself played football at Yale in 1880. See Samuels and Samuels, Frederic Remington, 26–27.
55. Yost, Buffalo Bill, 135.
56. Handcrafted, individually numbered and named (“The Deadwood,” “The Wyoming”), ornamented with hand-painted scrollwork and original landscape paintings on their doors, these coaches were frontier “originals” in two ways: each was unique, and no other company could afford to mimic their master craftsmanship (which was so painstaking that only three thousand of them were ever manufactured). Spring, Cheyenne and Black Hills Stage Routes, 88–89, 334; also “Stagecoach,” in New Encyclopedia of the American West, 1074–75.
57. “Staging in the Far West,” Harper’s Weekly, July 4, 1874, p. 556.
58. In 1884, the owners of the Cheyenne and Black Hills Stage Line sold out when the railroad extended from Cheyenne to the Black Hills. In 1887, the new owner of the line, Russell Thorp, “staged” a final journey of the Deadwood stage for paying customers in Cheyenne, with passengers, driver, and vehicle posing for a famous photograph of “the last coach out” just before they departed. “Days of ’49” was a popular miners’ song in the Black Hills. See Rodman W. Paul, Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 1848–1800 (1973; rprt. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1974), 178–79; for “last coach out,” see Spring, Cheyenne and Black Hills Stage Routes, 334–35. For trolleys, see Wild West Diary of 1896, M. B. Bailey, reprinted in Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 352.
59. BBDC 1883 program, n.p.
60. “The Wild West Show,” clipping attached to sketch of Deadwood stage pursuit, in WFC Scrapbook, 1887, Buffalo Bill Museum, Lookout Mountain, CO.
61. Russell, Lives and Legends, 295; Spring, Cheyenne and Black Hills Stage and Express Routes, 359.
62. Cody himself described his route out of the Plains in Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 359; he recounted it again in WFC testimony, March 6, 1905, Folder 13, 18–19, in CC.
63. In other ways, too, its real history diverged considerably from show accounts. If this coach was named “The Deadwood,” it was only one of several dozen to ply the route between Deadwood and Cheyenne. The Cheyenne and Black Hills Stage Line, the original proprietor of this coach, owned thirty Abbot and Downing Concords. When he established the line at the beginning of the Black Hills gold rush in 1874, Luke Voorhees ordered new coaches (not veterans dating from 1863). Later, he outfitted two so-called “treasure coaches,” Concord coaches with steel plates bolted to the inside of their compartments, and small portholes for windows—through which guards fired their weapons. During the Cold Spring holdup, a steel-plated coach named “The Monitor” was attacked by a gang of bandits who killed one guard and wounded others before finally seizing the coach. The famed “Deadwood” of Buffalo Bill’s arena had no steel plates, no portholes—and no connection to the Cold Spring holdup. Spring, Cheyenne and Black Hills Stage and Express Routes, 248–49, 265–75.
64. Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower, Old Diaries, 1881–1901 (London: John Murray, 1902), 107–8.
65. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 180.
66. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 180.
67. Although he toyed with the idea of commissioning gamblers to play the crowd, he turned away from it. In future years, whenever small-money shell games and faro dealers became too numerous on the fringes, Cody would send out show cowboys to break their equipment—and their noses, too. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 117–18.
68. “Over the arena proper where the exhibition is given there is nothing but the blue vault of the sky,” claimed Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World 1898 Show Courier (New York: J. A. Rudolph, 1898), 32.
69. Lears, No Place of Grace, 23.
70. Nate Salsbury, “A Card from Nate Salsbury,” The Frontier Express—Buffalo Bill Wild West Courier 12, no. 95 (1895), BBHC.
71. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, “in no wise partaking of the nature of a ‘circus,’ will be at once new, startling, and instructive,” claimed Wild West show programs, and publicists never tired of contrasting the Wild West with the “old played out circus-menagerie combination.” John Burke, “Salutatory” in BBWW 1885 program (Hartford, CT: Calhoun Printing, 1885), n.p.; “played out circus-menagerie” in “The Wild West,” Montreal Herald,Aug. 12, 1885, in NSS, vol. 1, 1885–86, DPL.
72. Rennert, 100 Posters of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 5.
73. Steele Mackaye, quoted in Walter Havighurst, Annie Oakley of the Wild West (1954, rprt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 86.
74. “The Wild West,” Free Press and Times, Aug. 6, 1885; in NSS, vol. 1, 1885–86, DPL.
75. Route from Russell, Lives and Legends, 295–99; quote from WFC to Julia Cody Goodman, Aug. 16, 1883, in Foote, Letters from “Buffalo Bill,” 20.
76. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 68–69;
77. Russell, Lives and Legends, 297.
78. Courtney Riley Cooper, quoted in Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 69.
79. Cody to Sam Hall, Sept. 2, 1879, MS 6 Series I:B Css Box 1/6, BBHC.
80. “Finding a Fortune,” transcript of article from Denver Tribune, March 28, 1882, in MSS 126, Box 1, CHS; also WFC to Al Goodman, Feb. 12, 1882, MS 6 Series I:B Css Box 1/7, BBHC. The pattern of legal fights with extended relatives was something of a family tradition. After Isaac Cody died, his brothers, Joseph and Elijah, battled each other in a suit over unpaid debts, tying up Isaac Cody’s estate in probate court. See Leavenworth County Probate Court, Case File: Joseph Cody v. Elijah Cody, June 8, 1857, KSHS, Topeka, KS.
81. WFC testimony, Denver, March 23, 1904, p. 11; CC Folder 13; also Russell, Lives and Legends, 257–58.
82. WFC testimony, March 23, 1904, Folder 2, p. 13.
83. Yost, Buffalo Bill, 154–55; Foote, Letters from “Buffalo Bill,” 22.
84. WFC to Julia Cody Goodman, Sept. 24, 1883, in Foote, Letters from “Buffalo Bill,” 21. For birth of Irma, see Yost, Buffalo Bill, 126.
85. Yost, Buffalo Bill, 142.
86. McCoy, Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade, 202, 204; Terry Jordan, North American Cattle Ranching Frontiers: Origins, Diffusion, Differentiation (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1997), 210–11, 232–34.
87. Robert Zeigler, “The Cowboy Strike of 1883: Its Causes and Meaning,” West Texas HistoricalAssociation Year Book 47 (1971): 33; Don D. Walker, Clio’s Cowboys: Studies in the Historiography of the Cattle Trade (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 141; Hine and Faragher, American West, 322.
88. BBWW 1885 program, n.p.; 1893 program, 25–26. Omohundro’s article originally appeared as “The Cow-Boy,” Spirit of the Times, March 24, 1877. See Herschel C. Logan, Buckskin and Satin (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Co., 1954), 26–30.
89. Robert Utley, Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989); Casey Tefertiller, Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend (New York: John Wiley, 1997).
90. WFC to “Dear Sister and Brother,” Sept. 24, 1883, in Foote, Letters from “Buffalo Bill,” 21.
91. “The Wild West,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 18, 1883, p. 3. On dime novels and crime, see “Sunday Tribune,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 20, 1883, p. 4. “The life of ‘Red Bill,’ alias ‘Razor Joe,’ a thief who has just died in a Philadelphia prison, is printed in another column. It is recommended to the young as less likely to inspire a criminal inclination than the current histories of Jesse James and ‘Cowboy Charley.’ �
�� See also Denning, Mechanic Accents.
92. “The Wild West,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 18, 1883, p. 3.
93. “The Dime Novel,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 18, 1883, p. 8.
94. Salsbury, “The Origin of the Wild West Show,” in YCAL MSS 17, NSP Box 2/63.
95. Cecil Smith, “The Road to Musical Comedy,” Theatre Arts, Nov. 1947, pp. 57–58.
96. “Salsbury’s Troubadors at the Grand Opera House,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 16, 1883, p. 5.
97. BBDC 1883 program, M Cody Box 6, DPL.
98. Nate Salsbury, “Long Hair and a Plug Hat,” typescript in YCAL MSS 17, NSP.
99. See, for example, Cody’s own celebration of the fact that his show cast was “everywhere acclaimed gentlemen,” and “free of impure associations,” in “The Wild West,” Montreal Herald and Commercial Gazette, Aug. 17, 1885, n.p., clipping in Series VI:G, Box 1, Folder 15, BBHC.
100. WFC to Nate Salsbury, n.d., YCAL MSS 17, NSP, Box 1, Folder 4.
101. Sarah J. Blackstone, Buckskin, Bullets, and Business: A History of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 54.
102. For descriptions of the scene, see “Royalty at the ‘Wild West,’ ” The Era, May 7, 1887, p. 15; “Buffalo Bill,” The Globe (Toronto), Aug. 19, 1885, clipping in Series VI:G, Box 1, Folder 15, BBHC. In those few cases when it was not the show finale, it was almost always included earlier in the program. Alternative finales included a cyclone during parts of the 1886 and 1887 seasons, the battle of Tsien-Tsin in 1901, and an avalanche in 1907. BBWW 1886 (Madison Square Garden Program), Inaugural Invitation Exhibition of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” (Manchester, UK: Guardian Printing Works, 1887), n.p., M Cody Box 6, DPL-WHR; BBWW 1907, various programs, MS 6:VIA, BBHC.