God Bless Buffalo Bill

Joy S. Kasson. Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000. ix + 319 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $27.00

Paul Reddin. Wild West Shows. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. xvi + 312 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $21.95.

William F. ("Buffalo Bill") Cody gave Americans a "real" version of the West that depicted Indians as raw savages, cowboys as chivalrous knights, and both as products of nature. Courageous pioneers versus savage Indians seemed as natural an opposition as sun and moon. The Wild West (the term "show" was omitted from the title to indicate that this was no fantasy), announced Cody's publicists, "is not the result of rehearsal, it is not acting, it is nature itself" (Reddin, p. 61). Perhaps that is indictment enough against Cody and his Wild West show. Both Cody and his show sponsored, celebrated, and commemorated a racialized form of imperialism.

Yet, as Joy Kasson (professor of American studies and English at the University of North Carolina) and Paul Reddin (professor of history at Mesa State College in Colorado) show in two new books on wild west shows, Buffalo Bill leaves us in a quandary. It is impossible to celebrate Buffalo Bill wholeheartedly; yet it is impossible to condemn him outright. He did, after all, give Americans and Europeans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries first-rate modern spectacles. Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows involved constant action, horsemanship, sharp shooting, and glitter enough for the Grand Ole Opry, putting the Wild West show in a league with P.T. Barnum's circuses. More important, who would condemn a man who apologizes to a friend for being slow to respond to a letter because he had been "in a hell of a toot" (i.e., drunk), and who shouts to his wife in the middle of a third-rate stage melodrama, "Hello Mama! Oh, but I'm a bad actor" (Reddin, p. 57)? Buffalo Bill was an ingenuous soul, at least in the early stages of his entertainment career, and he defies simple judgment.

The resurrection of Buffalo Bill, if he needs resurrecting, is far from complete, yet the more human he seems, the more likable he becomes. L.G. Moses began the process of rejuvenating Buffalo Bill in the scholarly imagination (Cody having never lost popularity among lay Americans) with his Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 1883-1933 (1996). Taking a cue from Vine Deloria, Moses argued that "show Indians" participated in Wild West shows not because Buffalo Bill compelled them to do so but because they were paid to do what they enjoyed: ride, shoot, and see the world. Indians did not benefit from racial slurs flung at them by patrons of the shows, nor did they benefit from diseases that plagued them on the road. Yet despite protests from Bureau of Indian Affairs officials who complained that wild west shows discouraged Indians from becoming Christian farmers and portrayed Indian culture in the worst possible light, Indians signed on eagerly with Buffalo Bill's Wild West. By "playing Indian," Moses argued, performers repudiated the do-gooders who sought to "civilize" them. Indeed, the exposure to the outside world afforded by the Wild West's travel schedule, far from challenging Indians' worldviews, made them more committed to their own cultural attitudes and beliefs.

Indians also signed on because Buffalo Bill (and some other purveyors of wild west entertainments, though not all) treated them fairly and honorably, paid them decent wages, and provided them for the most part with decent accommodations, good food, and a measure of freedom. Though Moses did not set out to resuscitate the image of Buffalo Bill--Moses wrote about wild west shows from the points of view of Indians themselves--Buffalo Bill came off well in Moses's book.

In other scholarly works of the 1990s, Buffalo Bill fared less well. Richard Slotkin, in Gunfighter Nation (1992...