eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Buffalo Bill's Wild West presents a fascinating analysis of the first famous American to erase the boundary between real history and entertainment
Canada, and Europe. Crowds cheered as cowboys and Indians--and Annie Oakley!--galloped past on spirited horses, sharpshooters exploded glass balls tossed high in the air, and cavalry troops arrived just in time to save a stagecoach from Indian attack. Vivid posters on billboards everywhere made William Cody, the show's originator and star, a world-renowned figure.
Joy S. Kasson's important new book traces Cody's rise from scout to international celebrity, and shows how his image was shaped. Publicity stressed his show's "authenticity" yet audiences thrilled to its melodrama; fact and fiction converged in a performance that instantly became part of the American tradition.
But how, precisely, did that come about? How, for example, did Cody use his audience's memories of the Civil War and the Indian wars? He boasted that his show included participants in the recent conflicts it presented theatrically, yet he also claimed it evoked "memories" of America's bygone greatness. Kasson's shrewd, engaging study--richly illustrated--in exploring the disappearing boundary between entertainment and public events in American culture, shows us just how we came to imagine our memories.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466895379 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 06/04/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 337 |
| Sales rank: | 587,939 |
| File size: | 20 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Buffalo Bill's Wild West
Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History
By Joy S. Kasson
Hill and Wang
Copyright © 2000 Hill and WangAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-9537-9
CHAPTER 1
INVENTING THE WILD WEST 1868–86
William Cody was not always an icon of historical memory. He began his career on the fringes of respectability, engaged in activities that already challenged the boundaries between accomplishment and self-promotion, and he entered show business as one struggling pitchman among many. Cody tried a variety of forms of stage acting before developing the successful formula for his Wild West exhibition, and his experiments reveal the fluidity of nineteenth-century American performance culture. Leaving behind associates in the small-time arena of humbug and braggadocio and enlisting the help of experienced actors and inspired publicists and writers, William Cody became world famous; his tools for self-transformation included written texts, visual images, new performance practices, and a resonant connection with a national sense of destiny. The success of Buffalo Bill's Wild West was a triumph of good luck, good management, and good timing.
PLAINS SHOWMAN
Born in a log cabin in Iowa in 1846, Cody grew up in Kansas, where his father became embroiled in Free Soil politics and died when his son was eleven. Young Cody worked as an ox-team driver, as a messenger for the firm that later operated the pony express, and on numerous wagon trains. He prospected for gold and went on trapping expeditions, became a good hunter, and had a number of encounters with Indians and border ruffians. During the Civil War he served as an army scout and guide, and then enlisted with the Seventh Kansas regiment. At the war's end, he married Louisa Frederici, a girl he had met in St. Louis, and returned to the West, where he tried to run a hotel once owned by his mother, then joined a partnership attempting to develop a town on the Kansas Pacific Railroad line. He worked on contract for the U.S. Army and for the railroad as a buffalo hunter and a scout. By the early 1870s, he was well known among army and border men, displayed considerable frontier skills, and made a desultory living for his growing family.
Although his publicity would later present him as a solid citizen — a family man, cattle rancher, and development advocate — his early career on the plains suggests a person with itchy feet and an inability to find a permanent job. Like numerous friends and competitors, he tried his hand at various occupations in the postbellum years, looking for adventure, recognition, and cash. In the process of becoming an international celebrity, Cody both followed and diverged from familiar pathways in the search for success and respectability that led many others to debt, obscurity, and failure.
The U.S. Army was Cody's most important employer in the decade after the Civil War. Although he had returned to civilian life at the end of the war, he possessed skills and knowledge that were important to American military leaders, who were pouring their talents and ambitions into the Indian wars. Like many other plainsmen, Cody worked on short-term contract as a civilian scout for the army, guiding troops through unmapped terrain, hunting for meat, carrying messages, tracking Indians, and participating in military encounters. Official reports show that Cody was liked and respected by the officers he worked for. After successfully completing a series of punishing rides as a messenger for General Philip Sheridan, he was appointed chief of scouts for the Fifth Cavalry in 1868; later that year, he reached the highest level of pay for scouting and received an extra one hundred dollars in an order approved by the Secretary of War. In 1872 he was awarded the Medal of Honor for his scouting and combat skills at the Loup River in Nebraska. Working for the army was exciting, and it gave Cody recognition and contacts that would open further opportunities for him.
Cody also detected the promise held out by the rowdy world of leisure, entertainment, and communication services that surrounded the army on the Western plains. Long before he became involved in more conventional kinds of entertainment, Cody excelled at what we might call plains showmanship. A trail of paper and archaeological evidence links him by 1868 to horse races, buffalo-shooting contests, and hunting excursions on the plains. In these activities, he displayed his prowess before spectators who might be insiders (soldiers, plainsmen, settlers) or outsiders (tourists, visitors); he was rewarded by prizes, money earned by betting, and prestige. Plains showmanship mingled business with pleasure, compounded feats of skill with acts of self-promotion, and made frontier life inseparable from its embodiment as a spectacle.
Newspaper accounts gathered by Cody's biographers show that he raced his buffalo-hunting horse, Brigham, against Thoroughbreds, led dudes on buffalo hunts, and rounded up a band of robbers to local acclaim. More difficult to document, but intriguing for many reasons, was a shooting contest Cody allegedly held with a fellow scout, Billy Comstock, in 1868. According to later accounts, the match was organized for the amusement of officers from two Kansas army posts, Fort Hays and Fort Wallace, who put up the prize money, and it attracted a local audience of scouts and frontiersmen as well as an audience of city folk. Louisa Cody told of seeing a poster in St. Louis promoting the event: "Grand Excursion to Fort Sheridan, Kansas Pacific Railroad. Buffalo shooting match for $500 a side and the championship of the world between Billy Comstock (the famous scout) and W. F. Cody (Buffalo Bill), famous buffalo killer for the Kansas Pacific Railroad." Although the advertisement has never been authenticated, the rhetoric she reported rings true. In this freewheeling world of self-promotion, anyone who could pay for an advertisement could describe himself as famous, and the winner of any contest could proclaim himself champion of the world. Though at this early date Cody was identified as an employee of the Kansas Pacific Railroad, the army officers who watched the match were also his once and future employers. Winning could lead to more work, as well as enhancing his reputation, and, of course, gaining him the prize money. Recounting this later, Cody remembered a hundred spectators, including his wife and daughter, arriving on a special train from St. Louis, and archaeological evidence — hand-blown beer and champagne bottles uncovered at the purported site nearly a century later — suggests a daylong event that included eating and drinking. Cody says he won the match, shooting sixty-nine buffalo to Comstock's forty-six, with the final kill taking place "close to the wagons, where the ladies were" — a dramatic conclusion to the spectacle. Real buffalo were being shot, but the event itself was pure entertainment.
Plains showmanship also manifested itself in the well-documented celebrity buffalo hunts in which Cody soon participated. As a sport, hunting has always involved ritual and display, and mingled spectatorship with participation. Furthermore, as the historian John MacKenzie has pointed out, by the mid-nineteenth century, the ethics and ethos of the hunt had also come to define a leadership class for Britain's developing worldwide empire. British sportsmen had mounted big-game excursions on the Western plains as early as 1853, when Sir George Gore brought two hundred men to hunt buffalo, elk, deer, and antelope. He was followed in 1869 by Sir John Watts Garland and Lord Adair, the Earl of Dunraven, for whom Cody served as a guide on several occasions. Perhaps the spectacles staged by visiting British nobility helped to awaken American public figures to the symbolic uses of the hunt. In 1871, General Sheridan organized a hunting party for a group of American business and civic leaders whose support he desperately wanted to win as the United States Army struggled to define its post–Civil War status. Sheridan spared no expense and effort to give a dozen guests a thrilling but safe experience in the West, assigning to them a hundred-man escort from the Fifth Cavalry and providing army vehicles and supplies including sixteen wagons (one loaded with ice), three army ambulances, and carpeted tents for the travelers and their servants. Sheridan chose Cody to serve as guide for the group.
A privately published memoir, written as a souvenir of the hunting trip by one of its participants, gives a taste of its atmosphere. The author of Ten Days on the Plains, Henry Eugene Davies, was no tenderfoot, having fought with Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley. Participants from New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago included present and former army officers (one of whom was Sheridan's future father-in-law), as well as experienced hunters and horseback riders. But Davies described his group as "tame citizen[s] of the East" who were venturing West to see "the region we had been taught by our early studies in geography to describe as the Great American Desert." The group hoped for a colorful experience of the exotic, a firsthand encounter with landscape and people both known and unknown. And the trip served Sheridan's purpose, suggesting the possibilities for tourism in the land the army was rapidly making secure for Euro-Americans; it also revealed the tremendous hunger for the experience of the West that Cody would later draw upon.
While offering participants the opportunity to test their physical prowess on the plains, the hunting party also surrounded them with the amenities of urban life. When the group gathered in Chicago to embark for the West, Davies writes, "the large hall of the hotel was encumbered with a pile of gun cases, hunting boots, ammunition boxes, champagne baskets, demijohns and other necessities for a hunting campaign, that astonished and bewildered even the people of Chicago, accustomed as they are to shooting and to drinking at discretion." At Fort McPherson, Nebraska, they were met by a group of "ladies in carriages and on horseback," who joined them at a ball "until a very late hour of the night." Not surprisingly, life on the trail with this party was luxurious; as Cody later described the trip,
There were none of the discomforts of roughing it upon that expedition. A [multi-]course dinner of the most delicious viands was served every evening by waiters in evening dress, and prepared by French cooks brought from New York. The linen, china, glass, and porcelain had been provided with equal care. ... For years afterward travelers and settlers recognized the sites upon which these camps had been constructed by the quantities of empty bottles which remained behind to mark them.
Thus the hunting party viewed the Western landscape, with its wildlife and even its threats of hostile Indians, from the safe vantage point of privilege; their adventure offered diversion and pleasure, but no hardship. Yet at the same time, this leadership elite hoped for some of the same imaginative benefits Frederick Jackson Turner would soon claim for the frontier: "rebirth ... fluidity ... simplicity." As Davies put it at the beginning of his account,
The man whose days were passed in the excitements of Wall street could find in the congenial society of buffalo bulls and grizzly bears an agreeable change from the ordinary associations of his life. ... The man who had nothing to do could look forward to the prospect of abundant occupation, and he who at his home believed himself to be overworked could imagine in such a trip a period of idleness and ease.
As Americans began to prosper in the postwar years, and as prosperity brought nervous strain to the lives of successful city dwellers, the West was already identified with recreation, escapism, and renewed masculinity.
The convivial Cody found it easy to respond to his audience's hunger for a Western experience. He never seemed to lose his sense of wonder when he found himself "trotting in the first class, with the very first men of the land," as he put it in a letter to his brother-in-law in 1896, but his charm and sense of humor served him well too. Members of Sheridan's hunting expedition seemed to appreciate his good-natured showmanship. As Davies expressed it, the tourists had expected to meet "the typical desperado of the West, bristling with knives and pistols, uncouth in person, and still more disagreeable in manners and address." Instead, they were pleased to find "William Cody, Esquire," to be "a mild, agreeable, well-mannered man, quiet and retiring in disposition, though well informed and always ready to talk well and earnestly upon any subject of interest. ... Straight and erect as an arrow, and with strikingly handsome features, he at once attracted to him all with whom he became acquainted." Davies praised Buffalo Bill for his ability to shoot, manage horses, and build bridges, but it was clearly as a symbol of the frontier that Cody most impressed his Eastern audience. On the morning they left Fort McPherson, Buffalo Bill rode up with a flourish, "dressed in a suit of light buckskin, trimmed along the seams with fringes of the same leather, his costume lighted by the crimson shirt worn under his open coat, a broad sombrero on his head, and carrying his rifle lightly in his hand." Davies commented that "as his horse came toward us on an easy gallop, he realized to perfection the bold hunter and gallant sportsman of the plains."
This could be considered Buffalo Bill's first dramatic entrance; later he would open performances by galloping in on an attractive horse, sweeping off his broad-brimmed hat, and bowing to set his show in motion. When he wrote his autobiography in 1879, he described the encounter with Sheridan's hunting expedition as if it were a performance:
As it was a nobby and high-toned outfit which I was to accompany, I determined to put on a little style myself. So I dressed in a new suit of light buckskin, trimmed along the seams with fringes of the same material; and I put on a crimson shirt handsomely ornamented on the bosom, while on my head I wore a broad sombrero. Then mounting a snowy white horse — a gallant stepper — I rode down from the fort to the camp, rifle in hand. I felt first-rate that morning, and looked well.
Memories of performer and audience seem to mesh perfectly — until we realize that Cody had Davies's book at hand when he wrote or dictated his autobiography.
Cody's success with Sheridan's Eastern tourists made him a natural choice for Sheridan to request as a guide for an even more thoroughly publicized celebrity hunt that departed from Fort McPherson a few months later: the visit of Grand Duke Alexis, son of the Russian Czar. This event was widely reported in American newspapers and magazines, perhaps because Sheridan had done such a good job of interesting influential publishers in the romance of plains showmanship. Visits from foreign dignitaries, let alone royalty, were rare enough in nineteenth-century America, and President Grant wanted to offer a warm welcome to the Russian prince in order to cement the cordial relations that had led Russia to support the Union during the Civil War and had resulted in the purchase of Alaska in 1867. Diplomatic relations in Washington were not running smoothly, and Grant relied on Sheridan to provide the twenty-one-year-old visitor with an entertaining experience. Sheridan, for his part, had been smarting from criticism of his handling of relief efforts after the great Chicago fire in October 1871 and was eager for positive publicity and recognition. The general used army resources lavishly, detailing two companies of infantry, two of cavalry, and the regimental band to accompany the hunting party, bringing its number to more than five hundred. He made special arrangements to release Cody from his commitment to follow the Fifth Cavalry to Arizona, and he brought Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer from Kentucky to take part. Cody gave the grand duke buffalo-hunting lessons and let him ride his horse, Buckskin Joe. Several hundred buffalo were killed during the five-day excursion, and the grand duke traveled on to Denver with apparent satisfaction.
With so many interests committed to making the royal hunt a success, Cody stood to reap some of its reflected glory and to learn even more about what made a frontier spectacle work. Apparently it was Sheridan who had the idea of recruiting Indians to join in the hunt and to give demonstrations of their ritual songs and dances, but it was Cody who had the task of finding appropriate participants and overseeing them. Scouting had brought Cody into contact with various hostile and friendly Indian groups, so presumably it was his scouting connections that led him to persuade the Brulé Sioux Spotted Tail, with a hundred of his band, to participate in the hunt. The presence of the Indians made the press accounts and illustrations more picturesque; when Frank Leslie's weekly magazine published a story about the hunt, the accompanying engraving showed the grand duke firing at a buffalo, followed by Custer and Buffalo Bill, with Indians in feathers galloping up behind. Press stories detailed the Indians' feats, including an arrow shot that passed through a buffalo's body and out the other side. One journalist wrote that the visitors "were favored with a splendid view of a scene that few white men, who have lived many years upon the plains, have ever witnessed." Plains showmanship acquired an air of hyper-reality, assumed to be authentic but more "splendid" than ordinary experience.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Buffalo Bill's Wild West by Joy S. Kasson. Copyright © 2000 Hill and Wang. Excerpted by permission of Hill and Wang.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Introduction: Showmanship and Memory,
PART ONE: PERFORMANCES,
1: Inventing the Wild West, 1868–86,
2: The Wild West Abroad, 1887–92,
3: At the Columbian Exposition, 1893,
4: Buffalo Bill and Modern Celebrity,
PART TWO: PERSPECTIVES,
5: American Indian Performers in the Wild West,
6: Memory and Modernity,
Conclusion: Performing National Identity,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
List of Illustrations,
Index,
About the Author,
Also by Joy S. Kasson,
Copyright,