Chapter 21
World’s fairs have witnessed marvelous debuts—and observed melancholy demises. On September 6, 1901, at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, President William McKinley (shown here at the expo) was shaking hands with admiring attendees in the Temple of Music, unaware that his term in office was about to come to an abrupt end.
Anarchist Leon Czolgosz, pistol in hand, reached through the crowd of well-wishers and aimed his .32-caliber Iver Johnson revolver at the twenty-fifth president and shot him twice, in the chest and abdomen. Immediately taken to the fair’s emergency hospital—little more than a makeshift first-aid station for cuts and bruises—McKinley was laid out on a table while Dr. Matthew Mann, a Buffalo surgeon of skilled repute, was hastily sent for. With the day’s light fading to dusk, Mann and a trio of assistants operated on the president using sunlight reflected by hand mirrors to guide their efforts.
“Expositions are the timekeepers of progress,” said McKinley in his last public speech, given at the expo. “They record the world’s advancements. They stimulate the energy, enterprise, and intellect of the people, and quicken human genius. They go into the home. They broaden and brighten the daily life of the people.”
Brighten daily life the expo did, with 240,000 eight-watt lights stippling the grounds and the buildings which were done in a Spanish Renaissance style. The Electric Tower, a 391-foot-tall beacon/centerpiece designed by John Galen Howard, president of the Beaux-Arts Society of New York, accounted for 44,000 of those lights, which glimmered like a painter’s palette in the dark.
Yet the lights were more decorative than functional, with few, if any, able to provide the focused wattage the surgeons needed to properly explore POTUS’s wounds. Unable to find the one bullet that had torn into his stomach, the doctors cleaned out his abdominal cavity and sewed it back up. And all the time, the technology to save him was just a few feet away. Had doctors taken him to the X-ray machine, made by Thomas Edison and displayed at the expo, to assess the internal damage and locate the bullet, McKinley might have lived.
Soon after the shooting, Clarence Madison Dally, a glassblower and assistant to Thomas Edison (and eager X-ray guinea pig), was asked to travel to Buffalo to set up the X-ray machine in Millburn House, the mansion where McKinley had been staying. While McKinley lingered, Dally waited for the go-ahead to scan the president for the missing bullet. But the physicians, worried that moving him to the X-ray machine would only hasten his demise, refused to permit it. On September 14, after steadily declining, and with no other medical options appearing viable to the physicians, President McKinley died.
Soon after, on the morning of October 29, 1901, Czolgosz sat down in an electric chair at New York’s Auburn State Prison where officials ran 1,700 volts through his body until he died. (The documentary film of the execution, supposedly shot by Edison, was only a reenactment produced by Edison’s company, with Edwin S. Porter, who would later make “The Great Train Robbery,” handling the cinematography.)
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
McKinley’s bloody death and Czolgosz’s electrically powered demise were quick, but the frontier’s was not. Even with modern marvels, such as an electric kitchen, a prototype lawn mower, a telephone switchboard, shoe-making machines, and, of course, the X-ray, it was a relic of a fading frontier that was arguably one of the biggest and most poignant draws at the fair.
Recruited by an expo publicity department rep who found her drunk in a Montana brothel, Martha Jane Canary, aka Calamity Jane, helped draw thousands to the fair’s Wild West show. Her resume—pony express rider, scout for General Custer, significant other of Wild Bill Hickok—was often as credible as an e-mail from Nigeria. Yet she possessed the kindness of a mother nursing a child, caring for miners in Deadwood, South Dakota, quarantined during an outbreak of smallpox. “Her purse was always open to help a hungry fellow,” went one remembrance.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Appearing alongside other legends like Geronimo at the fair, the big-boned, buckskinned legend dazzled the crowds with a showmanship that belied her chronic alcoholic haze. Two years later, she died in a hotel room in the small mining village of Terry, South Dakota. The Society of Black Hills Pioneers saw to it that she was buried in Mount Moriah Cemetery in Deadwood, next to Wild Bill Hickok, in a funeral that possessed the nuance and gravity of a Super Bowl halftime show. Maudlin poems (“But just a coffin black and cold/Holds the form once fair and bold”) and lionizing tributes followed her death, an echo in situ of the disappearing West itself. There, as Maxwell Scott puts it in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” No wonder even cowgirls get the booze.