Buffalo Bill on Stage

4: Border Life Onstage

• 61 • • C h a p t e r f o u r • BorderLifeOnstage •••• From the rising of the curtain in the first act, until the final drop, the audience were wild with enthusiasm. —Dayton Daily Journal, March 6, 1875 Wild Bill Hickok’s unexpected departure had no effect on the popularity of Cody’s combination. Publicity prepared in advance continued to advertise his presence, but most reviewers failed to notice he was not onstage. Did it matter that only two scouts saved the damsels in distress? Some critics mention Hickok in their reviews as though he were still with the troupe; one of the supporting actors may have assumed his role and made himself up to look like him. Continuing the circuit along the Great Lakes, the troupe filled Erie’s Park Opera House in mid-March. The melodrama “would fall far below mediocrity” were it not for Cody and Texas Jack, assumed the reviewer. Another asked by what critical canon they were to analyze its construction? “By none,” he answered himself, because “it has no likeness to anything else, it is unique, sui generis, and ‘naught but itself can be its parallel.’”1 Scouts of the Plains eclipsed all previous melodramas in sheer number of incidents. Where the others had one death, Scouts had twenty; “where chapter four 62 • they used their popping iron in the cause of crime, this fires a whole volley in the interests of virtue.” The nearly constant firing kept up from first act to last impressed one critic, who worried that “[t]he drain on the treasury for gunpowder must be fearful.”2 No reviewer ever complained of boredom. “[T]hrilling incidents, blood curdling situations and harrowing details” kept the audience on the edge of their seats. The scouts mete out justice to Daws and his cowardly cohort Tom Doggett and many Comanche braves bite the dust, while “the apportionment of the girls among their lovers is satisfactory.”3 When the Indians tie Texas Jack to the death stake, he defies his tormentors , laughing as Buffalo Bill shoots down each brave attempting to light the fire around Jack’s feet. Playgoers thundered their response to the Indians’ antics. One critic believed that after all the war dances, fires, and deaths, the entire company must have been killed three times over. His tally of the slain reached thirty-seven before he ceased counting. Yet, even with the incredible slaughter, he advised that, because “the proprieties are never outraged, and many a fashionable play has more immorality in a line than could be educed from the whole performance,” “ladies need not fear to go.”4 In the nineteenth century, men considered middle- and upper-class women “endangered” and warned them away from the theatre and the kind of people who attended it and performed in it. Proper ladies, reassured of the wholesomeness of Cody’s drama and able to afford frequent theatrical amusements, were seated in the parquet. On the other hand, wives of working-class men led confined lives. After household and child care chores, they had little time or money left for leisure, so their attendance was limited. Single working women, who reveled in their autonomy and splurged on theatre offerings, participated in the sense of community prevalent in proletarian theatres, where everyone joined in the hissing or cheering and in warning the scouts of impending danger.5 Frequent Indian conflicts and failure of the government’s Indian policy provided fodder for playwrights. Strewn among the bloodied scouts and Indian characters was Quaker Jebadiah Broadbrim. Most often played by Alfred Johnson with his “true nasal twang,” the Quaker role incorporated humor into the otherwise serious business of annihilating the redskins. The burlesque role of the government peace commissioner Ebenezer Langlank also received his share of plaudits. The satirical role placed the government’s peace policy in a well-deserved ridiculous light.6 Of all government departments, the one most ridden with corruption Border Life Onstage • 63 was the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). From early in the century, lawmakers had reserved large tracts of western lands for the exclusive use of Indian tribes. After the Civil War, policy goals had been to imbue Indian people with European manners and values, then integrate them into mainstream American life. Understandably, Indians never budged from their position that they were a separate people with rights of cultural and political selfdetermination . By 1870, however, hordes of...