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Chapter 14. The Buffalo Bill Show’s Rough Ride Across the Bridge from Old History to New Myths, Featuring Annie Oakley, Sitting Bull, Queen Victoria & Walt Whitman
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177 Chapter 14 The Buffalo Bill Show’s Rough Ride Across the Bridge from Old History to New Myths, Featuring Annie Oakley, Sitting Bull, Queen Victoria & Walt Whitman Cross cut: outside the Fair grounds. Cross cut: Outside the grounds of the sprawling Buffalo Bill Show, close enough to The White City to benefit by proximity & compete for the discretionary leisure dollar. WELLBOURNE: Woozy, his feet hot, tired, watches the unsupervised dark eyed foreigners, sweat-wage hirelings & less-fettered coloreds swagger, raucous, through the post bellum streets of abject infamy, humming, whistling, fiddling, dancing, singing, fabricating gerrymandered enclaves of self-determined fun. Change was upon A-merica, & it was not without form, for upon its face & its Spirit It was hot & it was dark. Wellbourne enters { Bill Harris } 178 “America’s National Entertainment” but judged too lowbrow to share in the Fair, opens with his Cow-Boy Band’s rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. Note: Its melody appropriated by Francis Scott Key’s (1779– 1843) from the English drinking song. Buffalo Bill William Frederick Cody, a.k.a. “Buffalo Bill” [1846–1917], the Wild West’s showmanship answer to P. T. Barnum. Former frontier army scout & buffalo killer for the railroads & theatrical performer. That combination again— show business & “history” maker. Liberty taker. Fact faker. Truth shaker. Reality breaker. Cody. Known. Far. Wide. Revered. Buffalo Bill’s WILD WEST CONGRESS OF ROUGH RIDERS Of The WORLD America’s Family Show Since 1823 ••• [52.207.218.95] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:03 GMT) { Birth of a Notion: Or, The Half Ain’t Never Been Told } 179 Top. Bottom. Side to side. Endeavored, while playing (nudge nudge) cowboys & Native Americans, in his How the West Was Won fable, to manufacture, for the consumptive pleasure of eagerly paying Eastern pale faces, a sanitized, homogenized, romanticized redskin product as needsome & to their liking, as had been the line of meek & contented coons contrived for them during Minstrelsy. A double-faced sleight of hand that abracadabraed the cowboy from its farthest back notion of a Revolutionary War bunch, “who were exceedingly barbarous in the treatment of their opponents,” into the symbol of the A-merican pioneer spirit & can-do character; even wholesome, with just the hint of an edge: “A man employed to take care of grazing cattle on a ranch . . . and leads a hard rough life, which tends to make him rough and wild in character” (O.E.D.). With Bill himself the most symbolic of the symbols & shining star of stars. Carefully self-concocted mixture of smooth & rough, charm & mayhem, savvy & myth, show & man, then & now; any how they wanted, whatever they needed at whatever time. + cast of an amalgam of 600: Scouts & Soldiers, Cossacks & Gauchos & Russians, Arabs, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, Arapahos & Cheyenne & Sioux . . . & 400 horses starring in his “historical” show of life on the range, homestead; buffalo hunt; pony express, stage coach robbery; loads of horse riding, roping & racing, rooting, tooting & shooting & parades with military pomp, plus a prime attraction, Annie Oakley, née Phoebe Mozee, a.k.a. Mauzy, a.k.a. Mosey, a.k.a. Moses (1860–1926). “The Peerless Lady Wing-Shot.” With hourglass figure, but prim & refined as a parson’s wife; packaged her as the woman of the Western Plains, but ’d been born & reared in the Ohio woods, Doodah, & had, like Bill before her, killed to earn her daily bread. { Bill Harris } 180 Strung on her belt, wild fowl’d swung, feathered testaments to steely hand & eye sure as shooting. She could & did with shotgun or sidearm perforate a playing card’s heart, plug falling dimes—from 30 yards away, shoot the ash off a cigarette, shatter tossed clay pigeons to dust & colored glass balls the size of tangerines to a sparkling shower, like confetti from a rainbow. “Little Sure Shot” Sitting Bull said of her. Annie (nudge nudge) hit the spot. Picture one of Bill’s “dramatic spectacles”: the prairie: little house. “Settlers.” Young Ma, with hair the color of noon straw, the young’n’s, Pa, solid as his clenched jaw peaceful as Sunday pie. Of a sudden a cyclone of dust: full tilt stampede of unprovoked blood-curdling yelping, circling, near naked, bronze, painted faced demon bucks attacking thick & fast in full hostility. Boo. Hiss. Sweeps the crowd like small pox. Savage red savages savaging innocent, put upon white homesteaders seeking simply to settle, the announcer megaphones. Smoke. Flames. Mayhem. Hiss. Boo. Then: “Buffalo Bill” (played by Colonel W. F. Cody himself), “The dime novel brought to life,” enters. [52.207.218.95] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01...