Wild West shows played a significant role in imaging the West by transforming the plethora of confusing and conflicting information about life on the western plains into orderly and predicable acts that spectators found informative and entertaining. These shows brought before American and European audiences the representative people and animals of the West and reproduced the sights and sounds of the Plains frontier. Entertainers carefully crafted the "Wild West" as a place where everything was extraordinarily exciting and distinct from the civilized parts of the world. Because these shows emphasized things uniquely "American"—the landscape, the native people, and the triumph of civilization over "savagery"—they became a forum for ideas about the meaning of the American experience and the West's place in national identity. While many such shows existed, William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody, the Miller Brothers of the 101 Ranch in Oklahoma, and Tom Mix dominated the business in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.
BUFFALO BILL'S WILD WEST SHOW
Buffalo Bill (1846–1917) began his Wild West show in 1883, and he remained prominent in the business until his death. His career spanned an age when Americans were intensely curious about the West. Dime novels first brought Cody's name before the public, and from 1883 to 1887, in shows designed specifically for American audiences, he celebrated Manifest Destiny with a potent mixture of history, patriotism, and the blood-and-thunder dime novel tradition. While these elements would remain in the show, its temper changed significantly in 1887, when Cody took the Wild West show first to England and then France, Spain, Italy, Austria, and Germany. His goals were to showcase western hardihood and to make the Old World "esteem us better." Mark Twain (1835–1910), for one, saw Buffalo Bill's Wild West show as a uniquely American enterprise, wished it well, and speculated that it would teach Europeans a thing or two about the New World.
The European tour changed the show as well as the kind of literature it inspired. Buffalo Bill's Wild West show's reputation as "America's national entertainment" made it a spectacle perfectly suited for examining the persistent question, raised by Henry James and others, about what happened when Americans transported themselves and their traditions to the Old World. Buffalo Bill's show played first in London at a world's fair called Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in 1887. There it stood adjacent to the United States' official exhibits advertising the nation's progress in the arts and sciences. Observers noted that these two American exhibitions were complementary: one showcased American cultural and technological progress, and the other celebrated the "Wild West" and its people. Making all of this even more intriguing was that these "American" things stood in an ancient European city. American newspapers carried detailedaccounts of the Wild West show's success in London and on the rest of the European tour. Mark Twain and Bret Harte apparently followed the journalists' observations carefully, because their fiction mirrored the opinions often articulated in the press.
The proposition of an American dropped into English antiquity intrigued Mark Twain, and he explored it in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). Hank Morgan, the novel's protagonist, would have smiled approvingly at the array of mechanical inventions in the official American exhibit at the fair. In the book he pits American technology, western skills, and simple virtue against Arthurian England's entrenched religious cupidity and corrupt codes of honor. The cultural conflict comes to a climax in the chapter "The Yankee's Fight with the Knights," where the Wild West usurps a medieval tournament. In it, Morgan dispatches his opponents with Wild West show skills, including lassoing and shooting that had captivated audiences at the jubilee.
Perhaps it was Buffalo Bill's return to Europe for a second tour that inspired Twain to return to the idea of Americans in Europe in "A Horse's Tale" (1906). Soldier Boy, Buffalo Bill's favorite horse, narrates much of this account, which explores the civilization-versus-savagery theme. In this short story, "Little Cathy," a diminutive and precocious bundle of energy and civilization from Spain, arrives in the West to live with her uncle and immediately attracts the attention of Cody, who teaches her western skills. As a reward for mastering the ways of the West, he gives her Soldier Boy. Then Cathy's uncle returns the girl to her family in Spain. In this "safer" and more "civilized" country, Soldier Boy is stolen, mistreated, nearly starved, and eventually sold to a scoundrel who puts him in a bull-fight. Cathy, who is a spectator there, attempts to rescue her purloined pet, but the girl and her beloved horse die in the arena. In this story Twain makes it very clear that "savage" and "uncivilized" apply more accurately to the Old World than the American West. This story reflects questioning remarks about bullfighting that Buffalo Bill had made when his show played in Barcelona in 1889 and then repeated during the Spanish-American War.
Buffalo Bill's Wild West show also inspired Twain's friend Bret Harte (1836–1902) to explore the American in Europe theme. In Harte's "The Strange Experience of Alkali Dick" (1898), a rambunctious cowboy finds Europe too confining for his western independence, gets in trouble with the law, and leaves the show while it is at the Exposition Universal in Paris in 1889. At a time when the image of the Wild West show cowboy focused on his natural "nobility," Harte contrasts that nobility with the Old World variety. The story centers on an accidental and innocent encounter between Alkali Dick and Mademoiselle Fontonelles that raises questions about the virtue of the young lady. Enamored of the woman but chivalrous to the end, the American cowboy defends the honor of the young woman and leaves the country because his presence might fuel more speculations about the aristocratic young woman having a "lover." The story demonstrates the superiority of western American nobility over a French "nobility" that is mired in hoary antiquity, despotism, and maintaining appearances.
The cowboy as the prototypical American became a focal point when Buffalo Bill's Wild West show returned from its first European tour and played at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. At this world's fair Cody heralded his tour of Europe as a triumph of Americanism and endorsed the cowboy as a "nature's nobleman" and the representative American westerner. Buffalo Bill interpreted thewinning of the West as a Darwinian struggle that proved the superiority of Americans and prepared it to meet the challenges of the twentieth century. This and all else that was good about the heroic cowboy figure had settled comfortably on a Wild West show performer named "Buck" Taylor, billed as "King of the Cowboys."
Owen Wister (1860–1938) modeled the protagonist in The Virginian (1902) after Buck Taylor. The Virginian encapsulates the Wild West show cowboy; he is a nature's nobleman whose rangy and athletic frame is a joy to behold. Like cowboys in Wild West show arenas, he rarely tends cattle, opting instead for exciting "Wild West" tasks such as taming bucking broncos and defending justice. At the end of the novel the Virginian becomes a successful entrepreneur, something that an elderly Cody might have inspired with his well-publicized investments in mining and irrigation. With The Virginian the Wild West show cowboy achieved immortality and transcended the entertainment business.
WOMEN AND WILD WEST SHOWS
Buffalo Bill's Wild West show included women; perhaps a dozen had gone as performers on the first trip abroad, but none had attracted as much attention or adoration as Annie Oakley (1860–1926). While show publicity and journalists' accounts adulated her during her Wild West show career, it was not until the 1920s that the Oakley legend achieved its full stature. During this time the Miller Brothers' 101 Ranch Wild West show successfully promoted the "cowgirl" as a worthy counterpart to the cowboy. Show publicity said that cowgirls and flappers shared a strong sense of independence, but it always argued that the vigorous and salubrious western life made its "girls" more wholesome, athletic, and attractive than their sisters in the cities.
The 1946 Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun, for example, is a title that almost every American recognizes and associates with Annie Oakley. Her image has endured because she embodied so many things: simple western virtue, athleticism, marksman-ship (considered a man's domain in her lifetime), independence, wifely devotion, and celebrity status softened with gentleness and humility. What fault could people in any age find with such a woman?
TOM MIX: FROM WILD WEST PERFORMER TO MOVIE STAR
Like that of Annie Oakley, the Tom Mix (1880–1940) legend moved gracefully from Wild West show arenas to motion pictures. He began his career in the Miller Brothers' 101 Ranch show and then transplanted the Wild West show cowboy into movies in the 1920s, a time when Americans devoured the escapist novels of Zane Grey. Mix's showmanship, boyish good looks, flamboyant clothing, and simple plots in which good triumphs over evil suited most Americans. Other moviemakers adopted these trademarks and added singing when sound became popular. However, the stock market crash in 1929 ushered in a new age that brought economic hardship and despair to America, causing Mix's popularity to plummet. In the era of the Great Depression, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) reflected the national mood more than Wild West shows and Mix's breezy movies.
THE LEGACY OF WILD WEST SHOWS
Despite going out of fashion in the Great Depression, the shows left a lasting legacy. Cowboys in the style of Tom Mix and the Wild West show dominated western movies into the 1950s. Rodeos, comic books, Indian powwows, pulp magazines, advertising, television, radio, and Euro Disney all owe much to Wild West shows. They provided authors with important themes, such as Americans in Europe, the conflict between civilization and "savagery," "nature's nobleman," and the meaning of "American" as seen in the cowboys and cowgirls. Wild West shows expanded the world's lexicon with the term "Wild West," enriched literature about the West, and added texture to the broad scope of American literature.
SCHOLARLY INTERPRETATIONS OF WILD WEST SHOWS
Because Buffalo Bill was the preeminent figure in Wild West shows, much of the scholarly literature about this entertainment has focused on him. For a number of years The Making of Buffalo Bill (1928) by Richard Walsh was the most referenced work about Cody. It treated Buffalo Bill as an undistinguished scout made famous by dime novelists and the popularity of his Wild West show. Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950) demonstrated that ideas and images of the West changed over time and that dime novels about Buffalo Bill reflected an evolving process of imaging the West. Don B. Russell's The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill (1960) refocused attention on Buffalo Bill himself and depicted him as a truly heroic man who deserved his legendary status. The New Western Historians, such as Richard Slotkin in Gunfighter Nation (1993), argued that such men as Cody exemplified the violence, environmental destruction, and subjugation of native peoples. While recognizing other shows, Leonard G. Moses in Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians (1996) revised the New Western History perspective by focusing on Buffalo Bill's WildWest show and arguing that it did not exploit Indians but instead provided employment that allowed them to keep alive significant aspects of their culture.
Other scholars have approached the shows as reflections of American values. In this regard Richard White's "Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill," in The Frontier in American Culture (1994), credits the shows with creating cultural icons such as the log cabin, a prop in Wild West show acts that became a symbol of the home ownership segment of the American dream. Paul Reddin's Wild West Shows (1999) studies several representative shows and treats them as a century-long experiment to attune the western theme to changes in popular culture and evolving American ideals. Glenda Riley's The Life and Legend of Annie Oakley (1994) contains an excellent chapter on the Oakley legend. While all the works above recognize the connections between Wild West shows and imaginative literature, most focus on the dime novel tradition.
See alsoCircuses; Dime Novels; Theater; The Western
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Works
Harte, Bret. "The Strange Experience of Alkali Dick." In Tales of Trail and Town, 1898. Reprinted in The Writings of Bret Harte 16:338–360. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1907.
Twain, Mark. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. New York: Charles A. Webster, 1889.
Twain, Mark. "A Horse's Tale." 1907. In The CompleteShort Stories of Mark Twain, edited by Charles Neider, pp. 523–561. Garden City, N.Y.: Hanover House, 1957.
Wister, Owen. The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains. 1902. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969.
Secondary Works
Moses, L. G. Wild West Shows and the Images of AmericanIndians, 1883–1933. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.
Reddin, Paul. Wild West Shows. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
Riley, Glenda. The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.
Russell, Don B. The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960.
Russell, Don B. The Wild West. Fort Worth, Tex.: Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, 1970.
Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of theFrontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.
Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West asSymbol and Myth. New York: Random House, 1950.
Walsh, Richard J., in collaboration with Milton S. Salsbury. The Making of Buffalo Bill: A Study in Heroics. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1928.
White, Richard. "Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill." In The Frontier in American Culture, edited by James R. Grossman, pp. 7–65. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Paul Reddin
