Louis S. Warren

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

  98. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight; Hindle, “Introduction,” x.

  99. Untitled, The World (UK), May 11, 1887, p. 10.

  100. Richard White compares the frontiers of Turner and Cody in White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill.” For Anglo-Saxonism: Anderson, Race and Rapprochement, 1–70, esp. 39–45, 57–61; Frank N. Hankins, The Racial Basis of Civilization: A Critique of the Nordic Doctrine (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), 159–63; Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 62–97; Roosevelt, Winning of the West; Owen Wister, “The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher,” Harper’s Magazine 91 (1895): 610, reprinted in Ben Merchant Vorpahl, My Dear Wister: The Frederic Remington–Owen Wister Letters (Palo Alto, CA: American West Publishing Co., 1972), 77–96.

  101. The late Victorian scholarship on Aryanism is enormous. The best history of the myth itself is Leon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe, trans. Edmund Howard (London: Chatto Heinemann for Sussex University Press, 1974). Other sources consulted include Isaac Taylor, The Origin of the Aryans (New York: Humboldt Publishing Co., 1890); Charles Morris, The Aryan Race: Its Origin and Its Achievements (Chicago: S. C. Griggs and Company, 1888); V. Gordon Childe, The Aryans: A Study of Indo-European Origins (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926); Joseph P. Widney, Race Life of the Aryan Peoples (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1907), 2 vols., esp. vol. 1, 10–25; Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1918), esp. 169–70, 233; Hankins, Racial Basis of Civilization, esp. 20–32. For the impact of the Asian origins thesis on American thought generally, see Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 34–36; and Smith, Virgin Land, 37. Walt Whitman’s Aryanism is expressed in his 1860 poem “Facing West from California Shores,” in Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 92. Stoker was a devoted reader and defender of Whitman from his college days, particularly Leaves of Grass. “Bram Stoker’s Correspondence with Walt Whitman,” in Stoker, Dracula, 487–97. For views of Arthur MacArthur, see Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building, rev. ed. (1980; New York: Schocken Books, 1990), 317–18.

  102. “The Jubilee,” The World (UK), June 22, 1887, p. 5. The theory was a common rationalization for the British acquisition of India. Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 81–86.

  103. Stoker was acquainted with premier Aryanists of his day, including Max Muller and Armenius Vambery. For Muller, see Frayling, Vampyres, 343; Clemens Ruthner, “Blood-suckers with Teutonic Tongues: The German-Speaking World and the Origins of Dracula,” 60–61, in Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow, ed. Elizabeth Miller (Westcliff-on-Sea, UK: Desert Island Books, 1998), 54–65. For Vambery: Stoker, Dracula, 309, 518, n. 125; Belford, Bram Stoker, 260. For Anglo-Saxonism: Quincey Morris is hailed as “a moral Viking” in the pages of Dracula, and Harold An Wolf, the English hero of Stoker’s 1905 novel, The Man, finds that sea voyages in stormy weather revive “the old Berserker spirit.” Stoker endorsed the theories of the period’s most popular Anglo-Saxonists, John Fiske and Edward Freeman, in Bram Stoker, A Glimpse of America (London: Sampson Low and Marston, 1886), 30–31. For Viking fixations in Britain, see Poliakov, Aryan Myth, 39; Andrew Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2000); Paul C. Sinding, The Northmen (New York: published for the author, 1880), 19–20. For Stoker and storms, Belford, Bram Stoker, 194. To Stoker, racial alliance could mitigate racial decay. Thus, in his novels Lady Athlyne, The Mystery of the Sea, The Lady of the Shroud, and The Man, and in Dracula, we find Stoker’s English, German, American, and Dutch characters reenergizing their flagging bloodlines through infusions of “pioneer blood,” often Viking blood, from racial relatives. William Hughes, Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and Its Cultural Context (New York: St. Martins Press, 2000), 59. Stoker’s beliefs in the advantages of miscegenation between “the right races” were in keeping with contemporary racial thought, which held that race mixing among purer Aryan descendants was one way of ensuring the continued viability of Aryan civilization. Thus, the English themselves were a mix of Viking, Celt, and other white races, as were the Americans in the works of Frederick Jackson Turner and Theodore Roosevelt. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization,179; Roosevelt, Winning of the West, vol. 1.

  104. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 34–36; Smith, Virgin Land; Poliakov, Aryan Myth, 197–99.

  105. George Earle Buckle, ed. The Letters of Queen Victoria, 1886–1901, 3rd series, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1930), 1: 308.

  106. “Mistaken Identity,” untitled cartoon, in JCG Scrapbook, MS 58, Box 1, NSHS.

  107. Untitled clipping, The Times, Nov. 1, 1887, “Letters and Invitations, 1887–88,” BBHC;

  “The Wild West Show,” The Era, April 23, 1887, Johnny Baker Scrapbook, DPL-WHR. 108. George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 64, 106;

  Anderson, Race and Rapprochement, 67; Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 179; Roosevelt, Winning of the West, 1:23. Even before he began writing Dracula, Stoker’s thought about Americans was informed by a sense that the American environment had formed them into a new race. In his 1886 essay, “A Glimpse of America,” he outlined the “social conditions” that brought about “distinct methods of race development,” making Americans a more inventive and energetic race than the British. Stoker, Glimpse of America, 12–23, 47–48. 109. “The Wild West Show,” The Era, April 23, 1887, Johnny Baker Scrapbook, DPL-WHR.

  110. “Round the Coast with Buffalo Bill,” Hull News (UK), May 12, 1888, copy of clipping in Association Files, “Europe: BBWW,” BBHC.

  111. DeMallie, Sixth Grandfather, 251–52.

  112. Stephen Knight, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (London: Panther Books, 1976), 59; also Tom A. Cullen, When London Walked in Terror (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 106.

  113. “A ‘Wild West’ Cowboy,” The Era, Aug. 20, 1887, p. 11; “The Giant Cowboy at the Middlesex Sessions,” Islington News (London), Aug. 27, 1887, p. 3; “Our Weekly Whirligig,” Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday, Sept. 3, 1887, p. 285; Gallop, Buffalo Bill’s British Wild West, 122–23.

  114. “Incognita,” Court and Society Review, July 6, 1887, p. 12; Stoker saved a cartoon of “The American Invasion of England,” Funny Folks, Oct. 7, 1886, in Papers of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, Reel 21, 51/57.

  115. Russell, Lives and Legends, 328.

  116. “The Worship of Yankeedom,” Moonshine, Oct. 22, 1887, clipping in JCG Scrapbook, MS 58, Box 1, NSHS.

  117. Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War, trans. Diana M. Wolf (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 20–21.

  118. “Topics of the Week,” The Graphic, May 14, 1887, p. 502; F. C. Burnand, Records and Reminiscences, 2 vols. (London: Methuen and Co., 1904), 1:238. I am indebted to Bruce Rosen for the vital source on Jung Bahadur’s significance. Bruce Rosen, “Love for Sale: Victorian Paramours and the Marriage Market,” paper given at the Victorian Studies Association Conference, Canterbury University, Christchurch, N2, Feb. 1997.

  119. R. D. Blumenfeld, R. D. B.’s Diary, 1887–1914 (London: Heinemann, 1930), 3.

  120. WFC to Stoker, n.d., Brotherton Collection, Leeds University.

  121. Illustrated Bits (UK), May 28, 1887, p. 4.

  122. Ian Bevan, Royal Performance: The Story of Royal Theatregoing (London: Hutchinson, 1954), 187–89; Gallop, Buffalo Bill’s British Wild West, 103.

  123. Gallop, Buffalo Bill’s British Wild West, 102.

  124. Illustrated Bits (UK), May 28, 1887, p. 4.

  125. “The Jubilee,” The World (UK), June 22, 1887, p. 5.

  126. David Cannadine, “The Context, Performance, and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition,’ c. 1820–1977,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Teren
ce Ranger (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 101–64.

  127. “Respectful Remonstrance,” Illustrated Bits (UK), June 25, 1887, p. 10. The editorial appeared earlier, as “Respectful Remonstrance,” in The World, May 18, 1887, p. 8.

  128. “Jubilation,” The World (UK), June 15, 1887, p. 5.

  129. “What the World Says,” The World (UK), May 18, 1887, p. 10.

  130. “Buffalo Bill on His Visit to London,” The Era, Aug. 27, 1887, p. 13.

  131. Illustrated Bits (UK), May 21, 1887, p. 3.

  132. Contemporaries commented occasionally on Cody’s infidelities. See Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 137–41. For Englishmen’s fears: Ben Shephard, “Showbiz Imperialism: The Case of Peter Lobengula,” 102, in Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. John Mackenzie (Dover, NH: Manchester University Press, 1985), 94–112; Fraser Harrison, The Dark Angel: Aspects of Victorian Sexuality (London: Sheldon Press, 1977), 123.

  133. Illustrated Bits (UK), July 9, 1887, p. 3.

  134. Arata, Fictions of Loss, 2–3.

  135. Untitled clipping, Sunday Chronicle, July 24, 1887, Annie Oakley Scrapbook, 1887–1925, BBHC.

  136. “The American Exhibition and the Wild West,” Sporting Life, May 10, 1887, Annie Oakley Scrapbook, 1887–1925, BBHC.

  137. Arata, Fictions of Loss; also, David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society (1971; rprt. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984); Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (1990; rprt. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

  138. Paul Reddin, Wild West Shows (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 92.

  139. “Our Drawing-Room Pets,” Punch, July 2, 1887, 322, clipping in JCG Scrapbook, MS 58, Box 1, NSHS.

  140. “Buffalo Bill,” unattributed clipping, n.d., in Johnny Baker Scrapbook, 1886–87, WH 72, DPL.

  141. At least two columnists made the connection between WFC and Cetshwayo. See “General Chatter,” The People, May 22, 1887, Annie Oakley Scrapbook, 1887–1925, BBHC; also “Topics of the Week,” The Graphic (UK), May 14, 1887, p. 502.

  142. Anderson, Race and Rapprochement, 62; Arata, Fictions of Loss, 216, n. 44; Stoker, Glimpse of America, 8–9.

  143. The Times, Nov. 1, 1887, “Letters and Invitations, 1887–88,” BBHC.

  144. In the original notes for the novel, Stoker intended the posse to carry a Maxim gun, but dropped it for the American weapon. For Maxim gun, see Bram Stoker, “Dracula” MS, p. 34b, Rosenbach Museum, Philadelphia. For Winchester in the Wild West show, see “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, from the Plains of America,” 1887, M Cody Box 6, DPL-WHR, and the longer 1887 program, including an ad for Winchester guns, in “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” 1887 program, DPL-WHR.

  145. Leatherdale, Dracula, 129–36.

  146. Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders, 84–96; Leatherdale, Dracula, 130–31; Stoker, “Dracula” MS, Rosenbach Museum, Philadelphia.

  147. Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders, 84–96; Arata, Fictions of Loss, 129.

  148. Stoker, Dracula, 225.

  149. Russell, Lives and Legends, 162–84.

  150. Stoker wrote “The Squaw” in the mid-1890s, shortly before publishing Dracula, based on notes made years before. Charles Osborne, ed., The Bram Stoker Bedside Companion (London: Victor Gollancz, 1973), 11.

  151. Stoker, Dracula, 309.

  152. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 33, in Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner, ed. John Mack Faragher (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 31–60; Kerwin Lee Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narratingthe European Conquest of Native America, 1890–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 18–20; William Cronon, “Revisiting Turner’s Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner,” Western Historical Quarterly 18 (April 1987): 157–76; John T. Juricek, “American Usage of the Word ‘Frontier’ from Colonial Times to Frederick Jackson Turner,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 110 (Feb. 1966). For European concepts of frontier, see Anderson, Race and Rapprochement, 18–19; Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 35. Jack D. Forbes pointed out the similarity between Turner’s frontier and European frontiers forty years ago. Jack D. Forbes, “Frontiers in American History,” Journal of the West 1 (July 1962): 63–71; also Jack D. Forbes, “Frontiers in American History and the Role of the American Historian,” Ethnohistory 15 (Spring 1968): 203–35.

  153. “Our London Letter,” and “Arrest of M. Schnaebele of the Franco-German Frontier,” in Penny Illustrated Paper, May 7, 1887, pp. 290, 292–93; see also “France and Germany on the Frontier,” Pall Mall Gazette, April 29, 1887, p. 11.

  154. Transylvania was well-known to the English public from newspaper coverage about the “Eastern Question,” the issue of how Britain should respond to the endemic racial strife of the Carpathians and the region of Europe adjoining the Ottoman Empire. Arata, Fictionsof Loss, 113. For wilderness, see a book that Stoker consulted in his research for Dracula: Anonymous (A Fellow of the Carpathian Society), Magyarland: Being the Narrativeof Our Travels Through the Highlands and Lowlands of Hungary, 2 vols. (London: Sampson Low, 1881), esp. 1:25–27. As late as the 1870s, English observers suggested an English diaspora as a way of wresting Transylvania from the twin scourges of barbarism and inefficiency. See Andrew F. Crosse, Round About the Carpathians (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1878), esp. 197–98, but also 141–42, 156, 229, 287, 352–53. Some of the more telling references to racial segmentation and race strife from other works Stoker consulted: E. C. Johnson, On the Track of the Crescent: Erratic Notes from the Piraeus to Pesth (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1885), 149; Emily Gerard, The Land Beyond the Forest: Facts, Figures, and Fancies from Transylvania, 2 vols. (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1888), 2: 86–87, 112–13.

  155. “Cupid at Wild West,” unattributed clipping, Thursday, April 15, 1897, “These People Make History,” Brooklyn Daily Times, April 12, 1897, clipping, in NSS, 1897, DPL-WHR.

  156. Bram Stoker, “Dracula” MS, Rosenbach Museum, Philadelphia. Stoker, Dracula, 9, 59.

  157. Stoker, Dracula, 42–43.

  158. Stoker, Dracula, 43.

  159. BBWW 1885 program (Hartford, CT: Calhoun Co., 1885), n.p.; “every phase of border life” is in “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, from the Plains of America,” 1887, M Cody Box 6, DPL-WHR; Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 75–76.

  160. Hindle, “Introduction,” ix.

  161. Stoker, Dracula, 43.

  162. The quotation is from the character of Dr. Van Helsing. Stoker, Dracula, 308.

  163. BBWW 1893 program, 6, 18.

  164. The Era, April 23, 1887, clipping in Johnny Baker Scrapbook (microfilm), DPL-WHR.

  165. Stoker, Dracula, 42–43.

  166. Stoker, Dracula, 309.

  167. David Mogen, “Wilderness, Metamorphosis, and Millennium: Gothic Apocalypse from the Puritans to the Cyberpunks,” 94, in Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature, ed. David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993), 94–108.

  168. Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence; 116–45, 219–22.

  169. Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, esp. 219–22. Racial degeneracy was only part of a wider anxiety about the inherent political, social, and economic degeneracy of colonial societies. See Anthony Pagden, “Identity Formation in Spanish America,” 76, in Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 51–93.

  170. “Unfit amalgamation” from McCoy, Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade, 80. Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, 136–37; Bancroft, California Pastoral, 263–65, 284. For Philippines: Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Po
litics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 180–99.

  171. Stoker, Dracula, 79, 417.

  172. At the time Stoker wrote Dracula, the Huns were still recalled as Asiatic barbarians who invaded the West. “Hun,” Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 3993.

  173. Arata, “Occidental Tourist,” 466.

  174. Stoker, Dracula, 25, 28.

  175. So linked was the American frontier to the original frontier of Anglo-Saxon expansion that scholars on both sides of the Atlantic split their studies of Anglo-Saxon race history into two volumes: one for Europe, the other for America. For Theodore Roosevelt, the conquest of the American West essentially began on “the day when the keels of the Low-Dutch sea-thieves first grated on the British coast.” Roosevelt, Winning of the West, 6:4.

  176. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 169–79; Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis is perhaps the clearest example. Turner, “Significance of the Frontier in American History.”

  177. See the chart in Frayling, Vampyres, 42–63.

  INTERLUDE: BRONCHO CHARLIE MILLER

  1. Sources for this account are as follows: The earliest account of Charlie Miller’s life is from “Camp Sketches No. X, Broncho Charlie,” Topical Times, Sept. 3, 1887, clipping in JCG Scrapbook, MS 58, NSHS, in which readers will note that Miller claims 1860 as his year of birth and makes no mention of being a Pony Express rider; Miller’s tall autobiography is Gladys Shaw Erskine, Broncho Charlie: A Saga of the Saddle—The Life Story of Broncho Charlie Miller, the Last of the Pony Express Riders (1935; rprt. New York: Thomas Crowell, 1939). For parade participation, see Greater Astoria Historical Society website, “Daily Star,” March 1944,