Wild West Children: Performing the Frontier

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was a milestone in the development of American popular culture, a late Nineteenth century phenomenon that enshrined the frontier as an enduring symbol of national progress and prosperity. Existing scholarship ably assesses the show’s contributions to emergent mass culture and its ideological framing of frontier mythology. However, current scholarship largely ignores the importance of childhood and child performers to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. This paper examines how Buffalo Bill and his partners drew on ideations of childhood in crafting their show and analyzes the complex ways child performers responded to the Wild West’s dominant narratives.