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237 THE WILD WEST SHOW Unlike other great powers in the nineteenth century, the United States had ‘‘free land’’ to acquire immediately adjacent to its settled border. England and France annexed huge areas overseas in Africa and Asia; America found its ‘‘empire’’ beyond the Atlantic’s hinterland, and moved rapidly to the Mississippi, the Rocky Mountains, and the Pacific. Europeans brought home ‘‘tribesmen,’’ ‘‘natives,’’ and ‘‘jungle’’ animals as imperial trophies and exhibits for fairground sideshows; Americans had their ‘‘Indians,’’ ‘‘cowboys,’’ and captive buffalo. In the 1830s and 1840s, in New York, London, and Paris, George Catlin staged dances of a few ‘‘wild’’ midwestern Indians against a backdrop of their authentic artefacts and his paintings of their camps and customs. Dime showmen often included western ‘‘warriors’’ among their human oddities, but only in the 1880s did a fully fledged ‘‘Wild West’’ show emerge. Its personnel were billed as distinctively American, demonstrating New World skills of horsemanship with the guns of conquest. Where Catlin used drama to enliven his lectures and art, the new wild west shows relegated education to the program, not the platform. What interested audiences in the West performed was not homesteads and harvests, grain silos and gold mines, plows and Pullmans, but Fenimore Cooper’s woodsmen modernized as American knights of the plains. No one was more instrumental in promoting this American historical drama than Buffalo Bill. William Frederick Cody transformed history into myth. His real-life exploits in the 1860s and 1870s were the stuff of frontier romance. He was a Pony Express rider, a buffalo hunter for the Kansas Pacific railroad construction gangs, and a scout with the Fifth Cavalry in the Indian campaigns on the Great Plains. In November 1869 Ned Buntline published Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men in the New York Weekly. It became a Bowery Theatre play two years later, but was regarded as lighthearted fantasy; within a month it was burlesqued in Hooley’s Opera House in Brooklyn as Bill Buffalo, with His Great Buffalo Bull. The larger-than-life adventures of ‘‘Buffalo Bill’’ Cody were promoted by the Weekly serial’s editors as ‘‘The Greatest Romance of the Age.’’ Dozens of dime novels followed. National fame launched Cody’s second career as an entertainer and impresario of frontier skills. Gradually he THE WILD WEST SHOW 238 learned the arts of showmanship. In 1872, with official permission from the U.S. Army, he organized a hunting expedition for the Grand Duke Alexis of Russia, in which he included a demonstration of a hundred Brulé Sioux, led by Spotted Tail, using bow and arrow to kill buffalo. In the fall and winter of 1872 he toured eastern theaters as a performance artist, and in 1873 he formed his own company, the Buffalo Bill Combination. For ten years Cody and other authentic westerners, dressed in elaborately fringed buckskin out- fits, and occasionally genuine Indians, played themselves in action-melodramas contrived by Buntline. These were pure sensation-spectacles, dime novels animated, with little dialogue of consequence. The Scouts of the Prairie; or Red Deviltry As It Is was typical. The nonsensical plot involved fights with outlaws, horses on stage, shooting, a prairie fire, and a Scalp Dance; the loveinterest was the exotic Dove Eye, a former ballerina from The Black Crook, described not unkindly by the Chicago Tribune critic as ‘‘a beautiful Indian maiden with an Italian accent and a weakness for scouts.’’1 Soon, life and art became indistinguishable. In 1876, while serving as an army scout, Cody killed the Cheyenne warrior, Yellow Hand. The gaudy vaquero costume of black velvet with silver buttons and lace trim which he had worn during that Nebraska campaign became a genuine prop for his theatrical performances. Within a few months, he was using it, and Yellow Hand’s hair as trophy, in The Red Right Hand: or, Buffalo Bill’s First Scalp for Custer. Cody moved on to grander performances. On July 4, 1882, he arranged the ‘‘Old Glory Blow-Out,’’ an Independence Day celebration in his home town of North Platte, Nebraska. It incorporated the staples of his entertainment package for the next decade—genuine Indians, a buffalo chase, and ‘‘cow-boy’’ skills of roping, riding, and shooting. In May 1883 Cody joined Dr. William Frank Carver in Omaha in the Wild West, Rocky Mountain and Prairie Exhibition. The partnership foundered after a few months, and Cody teamed up with actor-manager Nate Salsbury to form Buffalo Bill’s Wild...

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