Chapter 10

Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?

By 1893, the American West was riding into the sunset. Its protagonists—Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Daniel Boone—were now almost as mythic as Jason, Odysseus, and Achilles. Dodge City was our Athens, and Little Big Horn our Thermopylae. When the two million people streamed through Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World near the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition fairgrounds, they witnessed nineteen choreographed vignettes—e.g., “A Prairie Emigrant Train Crossing the Plains,” the “Capture of the Deadwood Mail Coach by the Indians,” and, the cherry on top of the soldierly sundae, “The Battle of the Little Big Horn, Showing with Historical Accuracy the Scene of Custer’s Last Charge”—that starred forty-six cowboys and ninety-seven Cheyenne and Sioux Indians whose faces bore slashes of war paint like a Matisse canvas. The based-on-a-true-story (kind of) approach to history included supporting roles by Sioux warriors who had actually fought in the battle of Little Big Horn.

Known for supposedly taking “the first scalp for Custer,” just 10 days after the Little Big Horn debacle, Cody was never officially part of the fair (high-minded organizers of the expo either turned down Cody because of his appeal to the lowest common denominator, or Cody rejected acquisitive fair organizers who offered to take 50 percent of his receipts). As sharp a businessman as he was a cowboy, Cody set up shop on a 14-acre tract near the fairgrounds’ entrance to siphon off thousands of the 27 million who visited. By the expo’s end, he had raked in $1 million profit.

When Cody waved his white sombrero to initiate the Little Big Horn vignette, it was as if John Wilkes Booth had lived and been sentenced to a theatrical purgatory of re-enacting the assassination of Lincoln to cheering crowds. The audience already knew the ending as if history had served them a spoiler alert. Cody’s Wild West Show embedded American psyches with universal imagery of Indians as shrieking, howling savages on horseback who wore colorful feathers, and who, in a constant state of aroused bloodlust, perforated settlers’ wagons with arrows and put their cabins to the torch. Over the years, the reenactments of the Battle of the Little Big Horn often included various Indians Cody claimed were the actual “Killer of Custer.”

These were myths, in the sense that the fourth-century writer Sallustius meant when he wrote, “Myths are things that never happened but always are.” Nowhere was that message clearer than a short distance away from the dust and the cheers of the Wild West Show in the newly built Art Institute. The building housed the fair’s World’s Congress Auxiliary where 224 congresses, on subjects stretching from Temperance to Woman’s Progress, were held, with 4,822 speakers giving 5,978 addresses.

Instead of whoops of delight, there were quiet coughs of boredom in the room as a few remaining scholars from the American Historical Association listened to the last paper of the night presented by a nobody named Frederick Jackson Turner.

Turner, a University of Wisconsin professor of history, stood in the dusky light of a steaming auditorium, where the 31-year old scholar gave the fifth and last address on a sweltering July night. He had built his “frontier thesis” on data from the 1890 United States Census, which, based on the statistics from that tally, declared the frontier—officially defined as land with fewer than two inhabitants per square mile—was closed. That meant the hope of new riches, new settlements, new worlds to conquer—everything that made Americans American—was a thing not of the present, but of the past as much as the pyramids or Stonehenge. He ended his presentation with a sentence he wore like a mourning band: “The frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”

But the end was clearly near. In 1893, Theodore Roosevelt’s nostalgic articles in Century magazine pondered the disappearing “Cowboy Land.” That same year, Harper’s Monthly magazine sent Owen Wister out West in search of fodder for “short stories of Western life which is now rapidly disappearing.” Wister’s odyssey resulted in “The Virginian,” the classic novel about cowboy life in whose introduction Wister lamented, “[The West] is a vanished world.”

Even the Columbian Exposition itself seemed to want to confirm Turner: Sitting Bull’s cabin was there on display, punctured with bullet holes from the firefight that resulted in his death just three years before, the same year the census said the frontier was finished and buried.

To quote Hans Gruber in Die Hard, “And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.” Alexander may have wept but the historians listening to Turner’s thesis yawned. His proposition, that the frontier shaped us as much as Michelangelo shaped David, excited neither attention nor arguments. One Chicago newspaper mentioned his talk in passing, while the official AHA report of the meeting shunned Turner completely. Other papers presented that night are academic dust, long since swept aside and forgotten.

Historians now treat Turner much as psychiatrists treat Freud, as an easy-to-hit target of derision and scorn. The muzzles of many academic rifles have sniped at him in the 120-plus years since he addressed the expo, mocking the idea that to understand the frontier was to understand America. Immigration, slavery, the Civil War, and the attempted erasure of indigenous people were far more profound influences than a romanticized version of quick-draw duels, dance-halls girls, and prairies of purple sage. Yet Turner’s thesis was the Mona Lisa of American history, instantly recognizable despite its shortcomings. It reigns as a standard, a monument, a legacy of the fair that looms no less large than the Ferris wheel.