Becoming Western: Stories of Culture and Identity in the Cowboy State

2. The West, the East, Buffalo Bill, and a Horse

BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 33 / / Becoming Western / Liza J. Nicholas 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 [First Page] [33], (1) Lines: 0 to 17 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [33], (1) The West, the East, Buffalo Bill, and a Horse In June 1924, an equestrian statue of Buffalo Bill was unveiled on a picturesque site on the outskirts of Cody, Wyoming. Against an appropriately vast western outline of red buttes and stark bluffs, ten thousand locals joined by eastern notables braved the drizzling rain and cool temperatures to watch the statue’s unveiling. The statue, “The Scout,” captured Buffalo Bill in his younger days, replete with his buckskin scouting regalia. His rifle held high above his head in signal to his fellow scouts, the twelve-foot-high, thirteen-foot-long, thirteen-ton statue depicts Cody restraining his excited horse and scouring the path below him for Indian tracks. Of the dedication, the local paper noted: “In a true western setting midst the rock and sagebrush, while a gentle rain like a benediction from Heaven falling upon the largest crowd ever assembled at Cody, the heroic equestrian statue of Buffalo Bill was dedicated with proper and impressive ceremony.”1 Buffalo Bill’s equestrian likeness represented much more than a local tribute to a western hero, however. In fact, powerful cultural ideas about nativism and regional identity have circulated around it ever since the statue’s unveiling. The townspeople of Cody celebrated the statue as a source of regional pride, a proud expression BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 34 / / Becoming Western / Liza J. Nicholas 34 | The West, East, Buffalo Bill, and a Horse 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 [34], (2) Lines: 17 to 23 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [34], (2) of their western identity. To its national fund-raisers, however, it represented something even broader. To many in the crowd that day, the statue of Buffalo Bill held the potential to tutor recent arrivals in the ways of America. To them, Buffalo Bill symbolized not just westernness, but true Americanness, the embodiment of independence, self-sufficiency, and freedom. These were the attributes they hoped the statue would impart to those Italians, Slavs, and Greeks who had been flooding onto America’s shores in recent years and who represented threats, the fund-raisers believed , to the already disappearing America that Buffalo Bill incarnated . The statue gave westerners a national role as emblems of how America “used to be,” and through Buffalo Bill’s commemoration, the values the statue embodied became naturalized in westerners’ own identity as individualistic symbols of the nation’s past. The statue of Buffalo Bill and how it came to be illustrate that identities and memories, as John Gills writes, are things we think with and not just about, a phenomenon that makes the memories we choose all the more significant.2 The two people primarily responsible for the creation of this potent representation of the quintessential western male were both women. As author, newspaper editor, and determined promoter of the “Old West,” Caroline Lockhart devoted much of her life to guaranteeing that cowboys, ruggedness, and the past would forever be associated with Wyoming. As Frederic Remington and Owen Wister had before her, Caroline Lockhart promoted and represented a distinctive western identity, one that would come to dominate the public’s notion of Wyoming. Like Miss Lockhart, the heiress and famed sculptress Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney employed western symbols to further her own artistic career. In doing so, she assisted Caroline Lockhart in her quest to promote the West in the nation’s consciousness as a place distinct from the East, forever untamed and representationally American. In their partnership to commemorate Buffalo Bill, these two American women perpetuated a western image that was traditionally associated with masculinity and its accompanying traits of primitivism and domination.3 BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 35 / / Becoming Western / Liza J. Nicholas The West, East, Buffalo Bill, and a Horse | 35 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8...