Louis S. Warren
Page 86
103. Richard White has noted that by the 1890s the log cabin served as an icon of progressive history, the humble origins of a great nation. White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,” 19–26.
104. David Nasaw, Going Out, 15: “The home—not the club, the saloon, the firehouse, or the theater—was the heart and soul of middle-class existence.” Mary Ryan, Cradle of the MiddleClass, 155–85; Richard Sennett, Families Against the City: MiddleClass Homes of IndustrialChicago, 1872–1890 (New York, 1974), 52–53, 224.
105. Nate Salsbury, “A Dilemma,” typescript, n.d., YCAL MSS 17, NSP, Box 2163; Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 70–71.
106. WFC to N. Salsbury, Feb. 14, 1885, YCAL MSS 17, NSP, Box 1/4.
107. WFC to N. Salsbury, March 9, 1885, YCAL MSS 17, NSP, Box 1/4.
108. Russell, Lives and Legends, 311–13.
109. Discussion of the merits of shooting skill, as opposed to stage tricks, was widespread. See “The Referee,” n.d., n.p., clipping in Annie Oakley Scrapbook, 1887, BBHC.
110. Russell, Lives and Legends, 315.
111. Allen, Horrible Prettiness.
112. Nasaw, Going Out, 26.
113. Glenda Riley, The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 22–26.
114. See the advertisement for the Wild West show in the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, Oct. 19, 1884, p. 12.
115. Russell, Lives and Legends, 314.
116. The theory of “male essence” was articulated by George H. Naphey, The Transmission of Life: Counsels on the Nature and Hygiene of the Masculine Function, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: H. C. Watts, 1878). For further discussion, see Bram Dijkstra, Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 48–49, 80–90; see also Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1978); Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 112–16.
117. Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 15–18.
118. Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 22; Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 33–35.
119. “Marksmanship of the Militia,” New York Times, Sept. 12, 1877, p. 4.
120. Cody, Life of Buffalo Bill, 202; Utley, Frontier Regulars, 147–48.
121. Warren, Hunter’s Game, 45, 71–105.
122. BBWW 1884 program (Hartford, CT: Calhoun Printers, 1884), n.p.; James W. Wojtowicz, The W. F. Cody Buffalo Bill Collector’s Guide with Values (Paducah, KY: Collector Books, 1998), 13.
123. Mexican displays of skill were restricted to rope tricks. Indians were marvelous riders, and seem to have carried guns some of the time, but had no room to display marksmanship in the show. In the buffalo hunt they carried lances. For buffalo hunt and Custer’s Last Stand photos, see Isabelle S. Sayers, Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (New York: Dover Publications, 1981), 65–66.
124. BBWW 1884 program; Wojtowicz, Buffalo Bill Collector’s Guide, 13.
125. See the ad in Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, Oct. 19, 1884, p. 12.
126. Walter Havighurst, Annie Oakley of the Wild West, 9; Annie Fern Swartout, Missie: An HistoricalBiography of Annie Oakley (Blanchester, OH: Brown Publishing Co, 1947), 3–34; see also Riley, Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley; Sayers, Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. For much of the discussion that follows, I am indebted to Christine Bold, “Introduction,” in Walter Havighurst, Annie Oakley of the Wild West, ix–xvii.
127. “Camp Sketches No. IV: Annie Oakley,” The Topical Times (UK), June 23, 1887, clipping in Julia Cody Goodman Scrapbook, MS 58 Box 1, NSHS.
128. Even Oakley’s niece, Annie Fern Swartout, in a loving biography, refers to Oakley’s fixation with the name as “an obsession,” and concludes “my dear aunt was utterly in the wrong” to expunge it from family records. Swartout, Missie, 41–42. Also Russell, Lives and Legends, 312.
129. Not even family members could explain why Oakley chose this name. Swartout, Missie, 68.
130. Indeed, her extended family reviled her for becoming an entertainer. Swartout, Missie, 68.
131. Russell, Lives and Legends, 315.
132. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 73.
133. Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 181. For wives and the restraint of male sexuality, see John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 179.
134. “Women and the home represented stability in a rapidly changing society, and women were forced into a more circumscribed position to facilitate the transition to an industrial society.” Joyce Warren, quoted in Tracy Davis, “Annie Oakley and Her Ideal Husband of No Importance,” p. 302, in Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 229–312.
135. Other scholars have argued that Annie Oakley’s act was in fact a conservative spectacle for being a complete inversion of domestic norms, therein heightening awareness and sensitivity to the “normal” domestic order. See Tracy C. Davis, “Shotgun Wedlock: Annie Oakley’s Power Politics in the Wild West,” p. 153, in Gender in Performance: The Presentation of Difference in the Performing Arts, ed. Laurence Senelick (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992), 140–53.
136. The Courier of London, n.d., Annie Oakley Scrapbook, 1887, BBHC.
137. Unattributed clipping, n.d., MS 126 WFC Collection, Box 2, Folder 19, CHS. For a sample of how reformers saw the bicycle, see Frances E. Willard’s 1895 memoir of bicycle riding and social advocacy. Originally published under the title A Wheel Within a Wheel, it is available in revised form as How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, ed. Carol O’Hare (Sunnyvale, CA: Fair Oaks Publishing, 1991).
138. Bold, “Introduction,” xii.
139. Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 72–73.
140. C. L. Daily to “Dear Folks,” n.d., Neuilly, France, 22nd (no month), 1889, copy in BBHC; there is a photo of Princess Winona in William Cody Bradford Scrapbook, P. 6.612.20A, BBHC.
141. For Smith’s years with the show, see BBWW, 1886–89, BBHC; Wojtowicz, Buffalo Bill’s Collector’s Guide, 14–17. Georgia Duffy was with the show as early as 1886. She was married to Tom Duffy, one of the show’s cowboys. See “Pictures of the Plains,” The World (NY), July 16, 1886, p. 3; and berth assignments for the 1887 trip to London in “W. F. Cody Scrapbook, 1883–1886–1888,” BBHC.
142. For family, see Swartout, Missie, 79–80; for resentments, see Bold, “Introduction,” xv: “She seems to have regarded the other white female performers in the Wild West … as rivals to be vanquished, not sisters to be embraced.”
143. Cody, Story of the Wild West, 737.
144. Havighurst, Annie Oakley of the Wild West, 207–8.
145. Rennert, 100 Posters of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 8, 46.
146. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 1072.
147. “The Wild West,” (illegible attribution) clipping in WFC Scrapbook, 1887, Buffalo Bill Museum, Lookout Mountain, CO.
148. See the show programs, 1886–1916, in BBHC and DPL, or see the show program summaries in Wojtowicz, Buffalo Bill Collector’s Guide, 14–47. The frequency of the Virginia reel or quadrille on horseback scene is difficult to judge, given that it was often incorporated into the “Attack on the Emigrant Train” scene and not mentioned separately. For connection of the dance and emigrant train scenes, see BBWW programs for 1886, 1888, 1898, 1902, 1903, 1910. Wojtowicz, Buffalo Bill Collector’s Guide, 15–16.
149. See for example “Programme, Subject to Changes and Additions,” in the opening pages of BBWW 1885 program (Hartford, CT: Calhoun Printers), n.p.; also Rocky Bear, quoted in Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wil
d West, 212.
150. For Ma Whittaker in the Wild West show, see “The Wild West’s ‘Mamma,’ ” Brooklyn Citizen, Sept. 15, 1894; “City Camp Life,” Brooklyn Citizen, May 20, 1894; “With ‘Marm’ Whittaker,” New York Commercial Advertiser, June 16, 1894; all in NSS, vol. 4, CC, Series 7, Box 4.
151. Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-VictorianLondon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
152. In this sense the scene harkened to traditions of American melodrama. See Grimstead, Melodrama Unveiled; also Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 81–87. Thanks to Karen Halttunen for the insight.
153. In the words of one study, “Population movement was ubiquitous” in the nineteenth century. Michael Katz, Michael J. Doucet, and Mark J. Stern, The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), 113, 119.
154. The fact that the settler’s cabin itself occupied a prominent place in the arena throughout the show, so that all other acts swirled around it, suggested too that the home anchored the drama, and that all of the movement and energy on display in the arena would in fact end up there. See the arena photos, Series XI:J, Box 2, BBHC.
155. Rauchway, Murdering McKinley, 133–35.
156. Margaret Marsh, Suburban Lives (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 67–74; also Margaret Marsh, “Suburban Men and Masculine Domesticity, 1870–1915,” in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 111–28.
157. Marsh, Suburban Lives, 79.
158. In other ways, the show was at pains to remind people that the white people were only temporary nomads. Thus, in the 1887 season, the wagons were loaded with white families, as well as furniture and household effects, the very stuff of domesticity. For families, see “The Wild West Show,” The Era, May 14, 1887, Annie Oakley Scrapbook, 1887, BBHC. For furniture, see “Royal Visit to the Wild West,” The Sporting Life, May 12, 1887, Annie Oakley Scrapbook, BBHC.
159. For Cody’s correspondence requesting Sitting Bull for his show, see WFC to J. O. Lamar, April 29, 1885, Letters Received, 1881–1907, Box 239, no. 9492, RG 75, NARA; WFC to Secretary Lamar, May 2, 1885, Letters Received, 1881–1907, no. 10488, Box 241, RG 75, NARA. Sherman’s endorsement—“Sitting Bull is a humbug but has a popular fame on which he has a natural right to ‘bank’ ”—is in Utley, Lance and the Shield, 264.
160. Swartout, Missie, 91–92; “Camp Sketches—No. VII,” Topical Times (London), Aug. 13, 1887, in Annie Oakley Scrapbook, 1887, BBHC.
161. “Greek Meets Greek,” Buffalo Courier, n.d., reprinted in BBWW 1885 program, n.p. For sitting Bull’s adoption of Salsbury, “The Wild West,” Boston Daily Advertiser, July 28, 1885, NSS, vol. 1, 1885–86.
162. The Daily Witness, Aug. 12, 1885, clipping in NSS, vol. 1, 1885–86, DPL; the cabinet photograph is in BBHC, p. 69. 1844.
163. Utley, Lance and the Shield, 266.
164. Untitled clipping, New York Herald, July 12, 1886; “Happy Wild West Redmen,” The Sun, July 11, 1886; “The Sioux Dog Feast,” The Mail and Express, July 7, 1886; “Sioux Hymn Singers,” The Morning Journal, July 5, 1886; “A Fire on the Plains,” Telegram, June 28, 1886; all NSS, vol. 1, 1885–86, Microfilm 18, Reel 1, in WFC Collection, Western History Collection, DPL.
165. Havighurst, Annie Oakley of the Wild West, 85.
CHAPTER TEN: THE DRAMA OF CIVILIZATION:
VISUAL PLAY AND MORAL AMBIGUITY
1. For “Burning of Moscow,” see “Amusements,” The World (New York), July 17, 1886, p. 5; “Amusements This Evening,” New York Times, July 16, 1886, p. 4. For London precursors, see Henry Llewellyn Williams, Buffalo Bill: A Full Account of His Adventurous Life with the Origins of His “Wild West Show” (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1887), 191; also Rupert Croft-Cooke and W. S. Meadmore, The Sawdust Ring (London: Odhams Press, 1951).
2. My treatment of panorama paintings is based on the following sources: Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 48–86; Cook, Arts of Deception, 227–30; Stephan Oetterman, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (New York: Zone Books, 1997); Bernard Comment, The Panorama, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (London: Reaktion Books, 1999).
3. Sandweiss, Print the Legend, 57.
4. Oetterman, Panorama, 339–40.
5. Sandweiss, Print the Legend, 52.
6. William Cody Collection, WH 72, Box 2/2, Brighton Beach, Coney Island, DPL-WHR.
7. These striking similarities of presentation matched, and perhaps required, similar methods of production. The paintings took years to produce, with artists and support staff traveling, sketching, or even daguerreotyping, then painting and refining the separate “scenes,” before conjoining them and emblazoning the final result on thousands of square feet of canvas. The final work subsequently went on tour, sometimes across the Atlantic. Thus moving panorama, like the Wild West show, required corporate organization of investors who put up large amounts of capital to see it through. (Consequently, the panorama industry, like Wild West shows, was characterized by widespread allegations of conceptual theft among impresarios, various of whom claimed they originated ideas for the most popular depictions.) Moving panorama, like the Wild West show, depended on notices and advertising in the mass press to draw audiences, and it depended on modern transportation to make its progress through the amusement world and bring audiences to it. In a remarkable precursor to Wild West show organization, some impresarios even arranged special excursion fares on the railroad for their audiences, thereby expanding their appeal beyond the city and capturing the amusement traffic of a whole region. Sandweiss, Print the Legend, 49; Oetterman, Panorama, 334, 342.
8. Oettermann, Panorama, 335.
9. Oetterman, Panorama, 341.
10. BBWW 1885 program (Hartford, CT: Calhoun Printing).
11. Cook, Arts of Deception, 229.
12. The most influential of these was William Harnett, who produced four versions of After the Hunt between 1883 and 1885. The work of a Harnett disciple suggests the thrill of visual play and historical representation which connected trompe l’oeil and the Wild West. George W. Platt’s Vanishing Glories was a rendering of a buffalo skull fastened to an old barn door, on which hung a lariat, pistols, a Winchester, and a large hat, “all that was once the necessary outfit of the Western cowboy,” in the words of one reviewer. As with Harnett’s work, observers gathered in front of Platt’s painting to debate his method and the reliability of their own sense of sight. Of the thousands of paintings and other items on display at the St. Louis Exposition of 1888, Vanishing Glories became one of the most controversial—and popular. “A great many people think the picture is painted on an old barn door, and others think that the artist has simply painted well the old weather beaten pine.” The painting was, in fact, on canvas. Cook, Arts of Deception, 238–42.
13. Cook, Arts of Deception, 225.
14. Cody himself admired trompe l’oeil painting enough to hang a work that resembled Platt’s Vanishing Glories in his Wyoming hotel in 1902. Titled Relics of the Past, it depicted a buffalo head mounted on a board, above which was tacked a calling-card photograph of Cody himself, and around which were arrayed Indian war clubs and more photographs, of Wild Bill Hickok, Red Cloud, Gall, and scout Frank Grouard. Relics of the Past is in the collection of the Whitney Gallery of Western Art, BBHC. Artists incorporated trompe l’oeil techniques into the cyclorama paintings of the 1880s, in which the most popular subjects were historical, as in Paul Philippotteaux’s Siege of Paris and his gigantic Battle of Gettysburg. This last work appeared in Chicago as Cody’s show made its first appearance in that city in 1883, and it may have been the cyclorama visited by show Indians and cowboys in Philadelphia in 1885. Havighurst, Annie Oakley of the Wild West, 74–75. Visitors made their way through “a nar
row wooden labrynth” to a small platform where they found themselves “in the clouds,” smack in the middle of the fifty-foot-high painting, a “circular wall of canvas” four hundred feet in circumference, which presented the dramatic, bloody action of the Civil War’s greatest battle. Adjacent stage props augmented the visual effects of paint and perspective. “Where it touches the ground theatrical properties are joined on in a way that defies discovery by the eye of the place where, say a rail-fence loses the essence of reality and becomes simply a painting.” Untitled editorial, Chicago Tribune, Oct. 21, 1883, p. 4; also, “Gettysburg,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 21, 1883, p. 14; see also Oetterman, Panorama, 343.
15. BBWW 1885 program, frontispiece.
16. “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Drama,” Brick Pomeroy’s Democrat, Jan. 5, 1887, p. 16.
17. “The Wild West Show,” The Era, May 14, 1887, p. 9; “The American Exhibition,” The Penny Illustrated Paper, May 7, 1887, p. 298; see also “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West from the Plains of America,” M Cody Box 6, DPL-WHR. “The arena in front of this stand is about one-third of a mile in circumference. The scenery which surrounds this is painted on canvas, and extends to a great height, shutting out the neighboring houses. It is merged at the bottom into rocks, trees and shrubbery, giving a realistic representation of a rocky pass in the mountains through which the scouts and Indians defile upon the plains, represented by the arena.”
18. Cody, Story of the Wild West, 751; also, “Inaugural Invitation Exhibition of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” Dec. 17, 1887, in M Cody Programs, Folder 2, DPL.
19. The combination of panorama painting and live action was reprised so often before such large crowds—at Paris in 1889, at Glasgow in 1891, at Chicago in 1893, at Ambrose Park, Brooklyn in 1894, at annual Madison Square Garden shows in the 1890s, at the Olympia Theater in London in 1903, and even as late as 1916, when Cody was reduced to appearing with the Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch Wild West—that it created a visual memory of a kind of trompe l’oeil show, begging observers to parse the line between history and the present, the arena and the West. For Glasgow, see “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” Glasgow Herald, Nov. 17, 1891, p. 3. For other dates, see Reddin, Wild West Shows, 90; and P. 69.1300, in Series XI:I, Arena Photos, Box 4, BBHC.