Buffalo Bill’s Wild West

Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History

Joy Kasson

Joy Kasson (b. 1944), author of several books on American history, is professor of American studies and English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She received her BA from Radcliffe College and her PhD from Yale University and was a Fulbright Scholar. Following is an excerpt from the concluding chapter, “Performing National Identity,” from her book Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (2000).

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West helped to shape both the substance of an American national identity and the tools for its cultural dissemination. Before Frederick Jackson Turner wrote a word about the frontier, and before Theodore Roosevelt established that the virtues of the strenuous life should be the basis for national pride and political success, Buffalo Bill had brilliantly propounded the thesis that American identity was founded on the Western experience: triumphant conquest of wildness through virtue, skill, and firepower. At the same time, and equally important, the Wild West sanitized this narrative. In its fictionalized historical representation, Americans could savor the thrill of danger without risking its consequences, could believe that struggle and conflict inflicted no lasting wounds, and could see for themselves that the enemy “other” would rise from the dust, wave to the crowd, and sell souvenir photographs at the end of the day.

Buffalo Bill’s frontier thesis was never an explicit, coherent theory about what America was. Rather, its power came from being a spectacle so gripping, so encompassing, so sensuous that it became part of its spectators’ own experience. Buffalo Bill’s showmanship created American memory through the medium of popular entertainment. In doing so, it heralded the opening of a new age in mass communications in which both political and economic authority would accrue to those who could most effectively spin a message, sell a product, and shape popular perceptions. Not only did Buffalo Bill’s Wild West promulgate a particular interpretation of American identity, but it also demonstrated the power of mass media to formulate values.

The substance of Buffalo Bill’s frontier thesis infused American thinking for most of the twentieth century. From patriotic parades to football cheers, from tourist promotions to cigarette advertising, the image of the virile Western hero never lost its allure as a symbol of the American spirit. A recent book featuring beautiful photographs of artifacts from the largest private collection of Buffalo Bill memorabilia makes plain its authors’ nostalgia for the Wild West’s notion of American life. The authors acknowledge their love for the “romance and ethos of the Old West.” That ethos seems to them still operative: “Not only is American culture the richer and more fascinating because of [Buffalo Bill’s] unique legacy, but so is the rest of the world’s.” At the same time, these admiring collectors specifically associate the legacy of the Old West with a set of values threatened by late-twentieth-century transformations, those of their own childhood, when nation and family seemed to follow the script so carefully crafted by Cody and his associates: “an age of heroes, when there was still widespread respect for parental authority.”¹ As the authors tacitly acknowledge, the considerable cynicism in public life in the late twentieth century worked against the tradition of uncritical hero worship. A chorus of voices raised questions about the values that underlay the romance of the Old West—from Stanley Kubrick, whose Dr. Strangelove envisioned the doomsday nuclear bomb falling with a hat-waving cowboy riding it like a bucking bronco, to critics of the Vietnam War who associated American military arrogance with the Wild West Texas drawl of President Lyndon Johnson.² Yet Ronald Reagan, the most popular of American presidents after the Vietnam War, took office on the strength of a cowboy image and a promise to make America ride “tall in the saddle” once again… .

The romance of the West has also been memorably transmitted to the present through twentieth-century America’s most influential medium: motion pictures. More than seven thousand Western films and thousands more television Westerns have been produced, viewed, and re-viewed around the world.³ Not only did Cody participate in the making of early Westerns himself, but the plot, characters, incidents, and personnel of the Wild West made an almost seamless leap from the arena to the early film studio. Edwin Porter’s 1903 Great Train Robbery drew on the familiar Wild West story of the robbery of the stagecoach. Scenes from the Indian wars, narratives of captivity and rescue, Indian attack and cavalry charge, all set pieces from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, formed the backbone of many early film Westerns.

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Similarly, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West provided many of the performers for early Western films. Not coincidentally, a leading producer named his company the Bison Company when it moved its operations to California in 1909. Its paraphernalia and personnel were supplied by an entertainment organization that drew upon and competed with Cody’s exhibitions, the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Wild West Show, based in Oklahoma. Miller Brothers hired many show Indians from the same Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations where Cody recruited.⁴ Within a few years, Bison productions were also using the same stock and materials spectators had seen in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Miller Brothers and Bison were among the major buyers of animals and equipment at the bankruptcy sale after the failure of the Two Bills show.⁵

The marks of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West are everywhere on the film Western. The generalized “Indian” dressed in feather headdress, war paint, and mounted on a racing pony moved directly into film from the Wild West, where differences between tribes were minimized and all Indians took on a generalized Plains Indian identity. The Stetson hat, which Buffalo Bill popularized (and advertised), became part of the standard costume for the Western film star. As Western films took on a life of their own at the mid-century, they began to depart from the Wild West’s cast of characters. The figure of the cowboy, the focus for Western films and novels, had occupied a relatively small place in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, and the gunfighter, a Western film and television staple, never appeared. But to the extent that he was heroic, the Western film protagonist presented the frontier virtues that Buffalo Bill’s performances had made famous: masculinity, courage, self-possession. As the critic Lee Clark Mitchell has written, the Western film is defined by “a set of problems recurring in endless combination: the problem of progress,…the problem of honor,…the problem of law or justice,…the problem of violence,…and subsuming all, the problem of what it means to be a man.”⁶ Thematically, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West had set the stage for all these preoccupations… .

The substance of Buffalo Bill’s legacy, then, lies in the dramatization of the cultural issues that have been basic to American national identity: the use of violence and conquest in the formation of the American nation, Americans’ love-hate relationship with unspoiled nature and native peoples, gender and the meaning of heroism, and the role of the individual in an increasingly urban, industrial, and corporate society. But the Wild West’s importance also lies in its very form: a mass medium that blurs the lines between fact and fiction, history and melodrama, truth and entertainment. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West became the truth about America when it was believed as the truth by Americans and others around the world.

The organizers and promoters of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West understood and deployed techniques of image creation, salesmanship, and promotion that would soon become standard for everything from breakfast cereal to political candidates. They created a thoroughly modern celebrity and made him into a brand name, instantly recognizable around the world. The sophisticated mass media of the twentieth century extended and elaborated upon the Wild West’s ability to convince viewers they had seen “the real thing.” By the time of Cody’s death, Edward L. Bernays had embarked on his trailblazing career in “publicity direction,” and the advertising boom of the 1920s transformed the ways in which products were marketed and designed… .

Despite his claims to historical significance, Buffalo Bill finally knew that he would be remembered as a showman: “Let my show go on,” he was supposed to have said on his deathbed.⁷ Certainly, Cody tried until the very end to keep alive not only his mortal body but his heroic self as well. Always hoping a fortune would be just around the corner, always eager to provide a good show and to connect with the public, he played those last seasons not just to pay the bills but, perhaps more importantly, to sustain the narrative of his life. Performing in Iowa in 1915, Cody gallantly stayed in the ring to help spectators endangered by a sudden flood while four hundred workers and performers fled to higher ground.⁸ If the real man had become the stage persona, the opposite was also true.

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Cody’s position, subsumed into his own constructed image, was remarkably modern, a fact that was recognized in a tribute by one of the most self-conscious of modernist poets, E. E. Cummings. One of Cummings’s first published poems, printed in the Dial in January 1920, was an elegy to Buffalo Bill:

Buffalo Bill’s

defunct

who used to

ride a watersmooth-silver

stallion

and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat

Jesus

he was a handsome man

and what i want to know is

how do you like your blueeyed boy

Mister Death⁹

Manuscript pages of notes show that Cummings began the poem early in 1917, probably in response to a newspaper headline announcing Buffalo Bill’s death.¹⁰ As a child, Cummings had gone to circuses and made up his own animal acts. His library included a book about Buffalo Bill, and his childhood drawings included a picture of Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill.¹¹ The poem evokes the energy and glamour of the Wild West, and suggests his own childhood fascination with performance and a willingness to be swept up in the excitement. The coinage watersmooth-silver suggests both the color and the rippling motion of Cody’s big gray horse, Isham, his favorite mount in his later years, and the run-on phrases onetwothreefourfive and pigeonsjustlikethat suggest the breathlessness of an admiring fan.

The poem, simple and straightforward as it may first appear, resonates with the complexity of Buffalo Bill’s own position in American culture. Cummings opens the poem with a worldly, ironic, modern voice. The word defunct, with its detached, clinical sound, also seems deflationary and harsh. Cummings’s notes show that he first jotted down the phrase “Buffalo Bill is Dead,” which he could have read in a newspaper.¹² The poem’s terse, gruff opening refuses to participate in the heroic vocabulary with which Buffalo Bill identified himself with his own myth or in the gushingly sentimental accounts of his death.

But in the final three lines the irreverent modernist creates his own mythicized fantasy, imagining Buffalo Bill entering the afterlife, still the favored, blue-eyed boy, now performing not for the cheering public but for the mysterious “Mister Death.” The famous buffalo hunter and Indian fighter has always been the killer, but now he has become the prey. Yet the star is not knocked off his horse, dragged unceremoniously offstage and deprived of a red flannel scalp. In the courtly formality of the final phrase, Cummings suggests a Buffalo Bill whose heroism survives his death. Not a defunct corpse now but a handsome man who will be a blue-eyed boy forever, Cummings’s hero rides offstage, radiating complexity, not unlike the living showman. Lighting out for the territory like Huck Finn, “going West” in the colloquial sense of dying, Cummings’s Buffalo Bill is indeed an apt hero for the modern era, an age when images have become indistinguishable from what they purport to represent and the content of national identity seems identical to its performance.

Notes

1. R. L. Wilson, with Greg Martin, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, An American Legend (New York: Random House, 1998), pp. vii, 256.

2. Stanley Kubrick, dir., Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 1964; J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (New York: Random House, 1967).

3. Edward Buscombe, ed., The BFI Companion to the Western (London: André Deutsch, Ltd., 1988), p. 13.

4. L. C. Moses, Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians 1883–1933 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), p. 179.

5. Don Russell, The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960), p. 456.

6. Lee Clark Mitchell, Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 3.

7. Russell reports this claim, but doubts its accuracy, in Lives and Legends, p. 473.

8. Ibid., p. 460.

9. E. E. Cummings, Complete Poems: 1904–1962, Edited by George James Firmage (New York: Liveright, 1923, 1951, 1991), p. 90. Reprinted by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

10. Rushworth M. Kidder, “‘Buffalo Bill’s’—An Early Cummings Manuscript,” Harvard Library Bulletin 24 (Oct. 1976), pp. 373–80.

11. Richard S. Kennedy, Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings (New York: Liveright, 1980), pp. 23, 31, 32.

12. Kidder, “‘Buffalo Bill’s.’” plate 1.

(2000)