Abstract

ABSTRACT:

About 25 million people visited Chicago in 1893 for the World's Fair. Many of them took in performances staged by Buffalo Bill Cody, a legendary entertainer and army scout. Cody capitalized on a pervasive sense that a long era of territorial conquest and settlement was coming to an end, and he charmed audiences with a tribute to the closing of the frontier. A case of former cavalrymen, cowboys, and Native performers reenacted "Custer's Last Fight" at the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn, where Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors repelled a U.S. battalion. The Natives' victory appealed to spectators because it was ephemeral, and seemed to jusify what followed; Cody also imagined the American frontiersman as a global leader, galloping ahead of a parade of "Rough Riders of the World." In the words of the historian Richard Slotkin, "history, translated into myth, was re-enacted as ritual."

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