CHAPTER TEN

The Drama of Civilization: Visual Play and Moral Ambiguity

THE SHOW FINALLY CLOSED at Erastina in late September. Normally, the properties would then have gone into winter storage, and the cast would have gone home. But Salsbury had made other arrangements, renting Madison Square Garden for a winter performance season. Because the venue was indoors, and because New York audiences had already seen Buffalo Bill’s Wild West during its months at Erastina, Cody and Salsbury commissioned a new artistic director, noted New York dramatist Steele Mackaye, to develop a new attraction. Mackaye adapted and reshuffled the usual acts of the show, telling the entire story of American pioneering and settlement from the beginning of the American colonies to the mining towns of the Far West, calling the production The Drama of Civilization.

Mackaye also hired British artist Matt Morgan to paint scenery for the Madison Square Garden shows. Morgan had just completed a series of twelve Civil War battle paintings. They were on display in St. Louis, and they were huge: 27 feet high and 45 feet long. Mackaye specified that each painting for The Drama of Civilization was to be even larger—40 feet high and 150 feet in length—and curved. With the show’s action encompassed by these gigantic, vivid renderings of forest, prairie, and mountain scenes, the blurring of history, nature, and action would convey an unprecedented sense of realism.

More than any event prior to the show’s journey to the United Kingdom, the spectacle of The Drama of Civilization at Madison Square Garden marked the ascension of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West to middle-class entertainment and respected cultural institution, its newfound esteem capped by the warm critical reception of “Custer’s Last Rally,” which was added to the show in January 1887. In adding a historical battle to his more generic representations of “frontier life,” Cody to some degree mimicked other entertainers, who had been reprising historical battles for popular amusement at least since Astley’s circus presented “The Battle of Waterloo” and “The Taking of Seringapatam” in London early in the nineteenth century. In the summer of 1886, audiences flocked to the “The Burning of Moscow” at a New York auditorium. ¹

Of course, Cody had inscribed his own name in the drama of Custer’s death ever since the scalping of Yellow Hair, and his reenactment of this battle therefore had a high degree of authentic resonance. But the Custer segment could easily have been construed as a tasteless attempt to capitalize on a dead hero’s reputation. Instead, it achieved the near-sanctity of ritual, partly through the visual elements Morgan and Mackaye developed. Under Mackaye’s stage direction, with its huge artistic backdrops, The Drama of Civilization, and especially “Custer’s Last Rally,” became practically an animated version of a gigantic panorama painting like “The Battle of Gettysburg” and “The Battle of the Monitor and the Merrimac,” contemporary works that awed audiences with their overwhelming size and visual effects, and their hushed veneration for the fallen.

Indeed, even before the Madison Square Garden performances, the Wild West show might have been described as a confluence of panorama and live performance. Panoramas had first appeared in the late eighteenth century in Europe, and Americans had been animating them in various ways for decades. In 1846, John Banvard debuted his giant mobile panorama of the Mississippi River. Advertised to be “three miles long” (it was probably no longer than 1,500 feet), this painting unscrolled across a stage before crowds who loved the scale representation of the entire Mississippi River Valley. To watch it was to take a virtual tour of the river. Others soon copied Banvard’s method, and audiences flocked to these moving, “educational,” thoroughly entertaining representations of entire rivers or overland trails. ² Three themes emerged most often in moving panoramas: travel on the Mississippi, travel overland for exploration and migration, and the growth of San Francisco and the California goldfields.³ Panoramas often highlighted Indians, and some featured displays of Indian artifacts as an adjunct to the main show.⁴ The shift from geographic journey to historical event was an easy one. “The Mexican War” and a “Mechanical Panorama of Bunker Hill” both proved popular. “Part entertainment and part education, part hyperbolic bluff, and part high-minded instruction, the panoramas engaged topical events as well as escapist fantasies,” writes Martha Sandweiss. They were precursors, she notes, to “public pageants, newsreels, and grade B westerns.” And, we might add, to the Wild West show.⁵

Indeed, the close approximation of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West to moving panoramas cannot have been an accident. Like moving panorama paintings, the Wild West show advertised its attractions as a virtual journey to the frontier, “Eclipsing in Animated Scenes a Year’s Visit to the Yellowstone Park.”⁶ Panoramas were visual products of the artist’s long journey along the frontier, just as the Wild West show was the product of Cody’s frontier life, and both forms of amusement recounted their founders’ adventures and achievements in thick, detailed show programs, which broke the amusement into separate “acts” or “scenes” and explained the historical import of each.⁷ Both were acclaimed for their “realism,” with the Wild West show endorsed for showing the West “as it was,” and some moving panoramas allegedly were endorsed by riverside inhabitants who recognized their houses, barns, oak trees, and even their individual horses: “[I]f there ain’t old Bally and the white mare, well, it is surprising how the mischief he come to get it so natural I don’t know, stop the boat and let me get out.” ⁸

As popular entertainment, moving panoramas were at their apogee in the mid-1840s, when Cody was born. By the 1860s, they had all but vanished from city venues, in part because the expansion of railroads made it possible to encounter a “real” panorama out the window of a train. But their acres of unscrolling canvas continued a lively trade in small towns and at county fairs, where some of their subjects were even closer to Cody’s heart. A “Panorama of the Sioux War” appeared in Minnesota as late as 1870, and “Sioux Outbreak,” presumably depicting the recent Ghost Dance and the Wounded Knee massacre, made its debut in 1892. ⁹ But for the most part, the genre was dead.

Whether or not Cody ever saw moving panoramas—and it is difficult to see how he could have avoided them—their influence on his show is unmistakable. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, “Artistically Blending Life-Like, Vivid, and Thrilling Pictures of Western Life,” combined circus-style horse stunts with a living reprise of the moving panorama, adhering so closely to the latter genre that spectators were reassured by its familiarity as they were thrilled by its real action.¹⁰

Indeed, the Wild West show was only one of several entertainments to experiment with visual artistry as a means of recapturing the thrills of moving panoramas. In the early 1880s, at the very moment that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West debuted, new joint stock companies began producing “cycloramas” in the United States. These were static, but gigantic, circular paintings, which spectators entered through a tunnel and stairs to view from an elevated platform in the center of the circle, where the huge richly colored canvas wrapped completely around them. The artists incorporated trompe l’oeil techniques, and extended them by situating earthen landscapes and wooden figures in front of the canvas to merge with the painting; sometimes they provided scented air and “authentic” sounds to blur the boundary between representation and reality. The cycloramas were a new form of visual experience, and observers gasped to find they had “become of a sudden a part of a picture.” ¹¹

Trompe l’oeil seized the imagination in smaller formats, too. At the very moment that Cody launched his new show, crowds flocked to see the work of William Harnett and other artists whose invisible brushstrokes and attention to shading and texture fooled many observers into thinking that the subjects of their paintings—crumpled letters and tattered banknotes, old books, bleached buffalo skulls, dilapidated hunting gear—were not paintings at all, but cleverly lit arrangements of real objects hanging on a wall.¹²

The public’s interest in trompe l’oeil and their vigorous debates over what the paintings represented reflected a combination of nostalgia for a rustic past evoked by the “historical” subjects of these works, and the same eagerness to debate and resolve tricks and hoaxes that P. T. Barnum exploited with his humbug. As historian James W. Cook has written: “For both Barnum and Harnett, the ultimate goal was to produce a highly unstable, perpetually contested brand of verisimilitude,” one that resonated with the visual trickery and confusion of advertising and the modern city. ¹³ Trompe l’oeil was in keeping, then, with the same tradition of artful deception that ran from western tall tale through Barnum’s FeeJee Mermaid and into the ongoing life and show of William F. Cody.¹⁴

Publicists and reviewers already referred to the Wild West show’s “Pictures of Western Life.” Now the show flowed into the era’s confluence of history, entertainment, and eye-tricking spectacle.¹⁵ The show had carried a plywood set of mountains at least since 1885, but they paled before The Drama of Civilization, with its panoramic paintings of forest, plain, and valley of the Little Big Horn as backdrops to its live reenactments. All of the elements used to heighten perceptual confusion in the period’s panoramas and cycloramas were deployed at Madison Square Garden: landscaping in front of the painting to extend its visual deceptions; battered props such as the Deadwood coach, saddles, guns, whips, and other items that seemingly tumbled out of the canvas. To this were added real horses, longhorn cattle, buffalo, and moose, careful lighting to enhance effects such as the prairie fire, real wind to blow real leaves across the stage in the scene of the cyclone. Real shouts and cattle calls and moos and whinnies and bellows echoed from the roof. Authentic smells wafted. On top of all this, the people who acted out the history evoked by the giant painting behind them were “frontier originals,” genuine Indian veterans of the Custer fight and real cowboys, too, and of course, William Cody himself.

Critics spoke of The Drama of Civilization as a “great living picture,” but they were almost at a loss for words to describe it. Over the next decade, whenever the Wild West show appeared for long stands at suitable venues, Cody continued to utilize panorama backdrops, landscaping, ventilators, lights, smoke, and other special effects in ways that made his show almost as much a visual wonder as a performance.¹⁶ The huge painted backdrop and a large forested hill landscaped into the arena inspired London reviewers in 1887 to speak of the show’s “coup d’oeil”—overthrowing of the eye.¹⁷ Reviewers at the 1888 winter shows in Manchester, England, were ecstatic over the show’s action “on a huge plain level with the stage and drifting into a perspective upon it.” Indeed, the distance from the extreme end of the auditorium to the back of the stage is so great that a horseman galloping across the whole area diminishes by natural perspective until the spectator is fairly cheated into the idea that the journey is to be prolonged until the rider vanished in the pictured horizon. The illusion, indeed, is so well managed and complete, the boundless plains and swelling prairies are so vividly counterfeited, that it is difficult to resist the belief that we are really gazing over an immense expanse of country from some hillside in the far West.¹⁸

Show reviews and old photographs from the 1890s reveal entryways through the paintings, sometimes at the tops of the hills built up against them. Cowboys, soldiers, Indians, and others burst from the paintings and galloped down the hills, or scaled them at high speed and vanished into them. ¹⁹

A rare photograph of the Little Big Horn reenactment from Ambrose Park shows the cavalry charging into Indians who look too few in number to resist them. Off to the right, barely visible, mounted Indians retreat. But we know that crowds of Indians to ensure the Boy General’s defeat must be about to burst forth from the entryway in the middle of the canvas. What stands out, though, is the painting itself. On a canvas 440 feet long and 49 feet high, the Montana prairie sweeps down to a bend in the Little Big Horn River, bringing the water to the rim of the arena. The river bends at the turn in history; the water laps at performance edge. The painted sky reaches up from river and plain to join with the real sky above; only the protrusion of one tall chimney and the upper story of a distant building above the canvas hinder the effect. The soldiers in the foreground of the photograph charge toward the Indians in the middle ground. Mounted Sioux ride eerily out of the painting, sweeping toward the soldiers whom they will usher into history. The smoke from army guns rises into the Little Big Horn’s cloudless sky. The Indians and soldiers seem almost to have become part of the painting—or to have stepped out of it, into life.²⁰

Of course, the blue-painted skies of the Wild West contrasted sharply with the roof of Madison Square Garden, and sometimes even with the real sky, which clouded up, and was often dark with soot, especially in industrial London and Brooklyn. But the smudge of gray or black hanging over the giant canvas in a sense heightened the authenticity of the painting and the performance. After all, industrial smoke (like a roof) was another element of Artifice, and if it marred the city sky above the canvas with proof of civilization’s progress, it both validated the show’s teaching—civilization was inevitable—and made the painted frontier Nature on the giant canvas all the more realistic for being pristine and unmarked.

In reprising Custer’s defeat against this background, Cody rode the wave of “Custer’s Last Stand” paintings, cycloramas, lithographs, drawings, and other reenactments which soon made the battle of the Little Big Horn the single most depicted moment in American history. More, he shaped popular expectations of the scene. Earlier illustrations picture the battlefield as a barren prairie or rocky hilltop. But in 1896, the same bend in the river was incorporated into a lithograph of “Custer’s Last Stand” which, as an advertisement for Budweiser, went into at least 150,000 prints and hung in practically every bar in America.²¹

In most years, when Custer’s death was not reenacted, the panorama featured not the Little Big Horn, but towering western mountains. A grainy 1892 photo suggests that the backdrop of that year was a pastiche of fictional and real mountain peaks, which corresponded closely with the way actual mountains were depicted in popular paintings. Thus, the tallest peak soars up to the left, a cross of snow on its granite crown. The image came from Thomas Moran’s 1875 painting, Mountain of the Holy Cross. The actual mountain was so difficult to locate among the many peaks of the Colorado Rockies that for years commentators were not certain whether it was real or not. Moran pictured it soaring above surrounding summits, its white cross a sign of the providential blessings of American expansion, and the image was soon reproduced as a lithograph for middle-class living rooms.²² In Cody’s arena, it was a recognizably authentic frontier image, the cross hanging like God’s own star over the American conquest on the plains below. ²³ In other words, the wilderness of the Wild West was realistic in part because it seemed to merge into the space of the arena, and in part because it so closely approximated the visual West already familiar to audiences who had never been west of the Hudson, or the Atlantic.

“Trick of the Eye.” The Seventh Cavalry charges into the Lakota, who beckon the soldiers into a giant painting of the Little Big Horn battlefield— and into history. Courtesy Denver Public Library.

Buffalo Bill and his Wild West were astonishing to watch not only as frontier people fading before advancing civilization, but as authentic, historical people in a complex dance with copies of western landscapes so artfully contrived as to confuse the senses. They were thus a commentary on mass production, on manufacturing, on mechanical reproduction of art at every level and of every kind. By dashing in and out of giant paintings, inscribing real deeds and fake ones alike in show programs, and traveling back and forth between “real” West and “show” East, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West invited audiences to draw a line between real and fake, historical and representation. But on another level, they provided a thrilling display of courageous, authentic people who would not quail before a blizzard of representations that threatened to overwhelm them. Photographs, press reviews, colorful posters, panorama paintings, pen-and-ink drawings, show programs, lithographs, history books, and many other media provided “true life” illustrations of western settings and show principals. Much of the fun of the show was seeing the “real” people and measuring how they stacked up against their own images.

The copies were not always benign, and paradoxically, Cody used copies of himself to wage an ongoing battle against his imitators. By offering an entertainment that resembled Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, performance rivals such as Doc Carver, Adam Forepaugh, Pawnee Bill, and a host of others simultaneously underscored Cody’s status as the “original” and threatened to overwhelm the unique appeal of his entertainment. Cody fought them furiously, plastering his posters over theirs and hauling them to court for trademark infringement when he could.²⁴

But in many ways, Cody’s artistry was to juxtapose the copy and the original, and then stitch them together with his own person. In later years, movies projected action onto the screen. But they could not replicate the experience of watching the seemingly genuine frontier conquerors move back and forth through painting and landscape, connecting history and the present. As historical people, they came toward the audience through time, out of history and into the modern world of electric trolleys, telegraphs, telephones, and mechanical stuff which sometimes poked out from behind the canvas.

Just as they darted back and forth between painting and life, so they flickered through the life stories inscribed in show programs. The biographical and historical “articles” in these dime pamphlets were studded with authentic detail and fictional narrative elements, as illuminating and as deceptive as any brushstroke. They provided a curtain from which the cast advanced and into which they might return, over and over again, in city after city, decade after decade. Was Cody the real Buffalo Bill? Was he really in the Pony Express? Was the Deadwood coach the real Deadwood coach, and had it done all that he said it had? Was Red Shirt really a chief? Were those real cowboys? Had any of these people been at the Little Big Horn, and if so, which ones? Show programs and press agentry, like the visual deceptions of the arena, blurred the line between what really happened on the Great Plains and what the audience wanted to believe had happened. The result was a gigantic show of alternating real and fictional elements with reverberations far beyond the circus or the panorama, encompassing a powerful mythology of national greatness, but one whose meaning was constantly up for grabs.

IN IMPORTANT WAYS, the show’s visual messages had a political counterpart, providing a space in which to consider and even debate the era’s many political arguments, without necessarily acceding to any single point of view.

With its narrative of American expansion and Indian war, and its endorsements by military men who were also political figures, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West had a sharper political edge than most other entertainments. The Gilded Age is recalled today as an era of glamour and excess. But it was also a time of fierce partisanship, when the nation was evenly divided between two parties who fought bitterly over every presidential contest, and whose leaders struggled to stem or co-opt popular discontent brought on by rapid industrialization. Disputes between labor and capital, strikes and their armed suppression, riots, and the near shutdown of whole cities followed one after another in the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century. Between 1881 and 1905, the United States saw nearly 37,000 strikes, involving 7 million workers. In 1893 a fierce depression struck, and by 1894 the Pullman strike paralyzed the railroads. President Cleveland called out the army, placing Chicago under martial law and giving armed escort to the scabs who ran the trains. At the same time, the expansion of farms and mines in the West, “the progress of civilization,” glutted producer markets, forcing crop and mineral prices sharply downward. Western farmers, miners, and laborers united to demand government regulation of market and railroad.

Given the show’s middle-class popularity through cycles of labor uprising and suppression, most historians follow the lead of Richard Slotkin, who sees in the harsh rhetoric of fans like Frederic Remington and Theodore Roosevelt proof that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West taught its public “that violence and savage war were the necessary instruments of American progress.” Whether the enemy were Lakota Sioux or determined strikers, bloodshed was the path to peace.²⁵

These arguments are not without some truth. Remington himself wrote articles describing the putative heroics of frontier cavalrymen, like the captain of the Seventh Cavalry in Chicago who looked “as natural as when I had last seen him at Pine Ridge, just after Wounded Knee” as he faced down the “anarchistic foreign trash” who manned the barricades of the Pullman strike in Chicago, making the city “much like Hays City, Kansas, in early days.” During the same period, he wrote glowing reviews of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, “an evolution of a great idea,” whose arena he visited to “renew my first love.” ²⁶ A contingent of U.S. cavalry joined the Wild West in 1893, and veterans of Indian war and urban uprising rode side by side in the arena. In 1897, the Wild West camp included a cavalry sergeant—“a slim, quiet young fellow [who] has the bronze medal for bravery at the battle of Wounded Knee”—and an artillery sergeant who “was out at Chicago during the riots.”²⁷ Modern readers, remote from the Indian wars and the political arguments they ignited, are easily convinced that reenacting them was a right-wing celebration of imperialism and bloodshed.

But right-wing appeal offers at best a partial explanation for the success of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. The show was a mass entertainment. Americans were no more in agreement about the rights of workers than they were on Indian policy. To draw millions of Americans to its bleachers over so long a career, and to achieve consistently glowing reviews from critics and newspapers on different sides of so many political questions, the Wild West show had to reach across deeply etched partisan and ideological lines. How did the show rise above these national divisions?

Part of the show’s appeal lay in its projected amnesia about the nation’s most recent wounds. “America’s National Entertainment” contained almost no references, visual or literary, to the Civil War. In a period when each party sought traction by blaming the other for that conflict, the war’s absence almost allowed audiences to forget it ever happened.

Cody preferred that approach himself, and in other ways, too, he avoided party battles. His own commitments to party were highly changeable. A pro-Union Democrat in the Civil War, he ran for office in Nebraska as a Democrat in 1872. He joined a march for Democratic President Grover Cleveland in 1888. Cleveland won the popular vote but lost the electoral college in his reelection bid that year, in one of the hardest-fought contests in memory. Despite the partisan hostility that pervaded the country, in March 1889 Cody was an honored guest—and Louisa a member of the reception committee—at the inauguration of Cleveland’s Republican successor, Benjamin Harrison.²⁸ In 1897, Cody attended the inaugural of Republican William McKinley. That same year, his partners were trying to organize the Democratic Party in his newly founded town in Wyoming.²⁹

Cody’s nonpartisanship, so atypical for men of his era, was also reflected in his entertainment. Even its ownership was bipartisan, with Cody the Democrat teamed up with Nate Salsbury, an ardent Republican. On a cultural level, Cody appealed across party lines with an amusement that told two layers of stories. The most persistent narrative, what we might call the foundation, was present in every historical scene, and it depicted the progress of civilization. This was a story that was widely accepted to be as true as gravity. Whether one liked it or not, commerce would triumph over savagery.

Layered on top of that story were many others—about Buffalo Bill, Indians, cowboys, soldiers, cowgirls, animals, hunters, and many other figures and characters—which could be interpreted in many distinct and contradictory ways. Indian conquest could be read as good or bad, or both, and the disappearance of the buffalo could be an occasion for happy reflection on the expansion of pastoralism and commerce or as a sad commentary on the wasteful corruption of modern society—or both. Cody’s press agents, and Cody himself, steered a middle course between narrating civilization’s advancement as inevitable and allowing audiences to make up their own minds about what it meant. The solution, as we shall see, lay less in didactic teachings about the need to shoot leftists than in the appealing to the audience’s own ambivalence about race war, the closure of the frontier, and all the other events that followed in the wake of progress.

That ambivalence was sorely tested by the events of 1886 as The Drama of Civilization took place. In the first six months of the year, there was a dramatic strike in the coalfields of Pennsylvania, another against McCormick’s reaper works in Chicago, and a streetcar strike in New York that culminated in riots between strikers and police. Beginning in March, the Great Southwestern Strike paralyzed railroads in Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Kansas, and eleven people died in violence between strikers and armed marshals in East St. Louis.³⁰

The Southwestern Strike failed in early May, but by then, another episode of political violence riveted the public like none in the nation’s history. On May Day, in cities across the country, about 200,000 unskilled laborers, skilled craftsmen, socialists, and anarchists went on strike in support of the eight-hour workday. Violence was minor or nonexistent in most places. But in Chicago, 40,000 strikers paraded the streets before joining the ongoing strike at the McCormick reaper factory. Chicago police opened fire on the crowd, killing four. In response, the International Working People’s Association, a small, mostly German-speaking anarchist group with only a hundred members in the city, called a mass meeting to protest police brutality. Between 2,000 and 3,000 demonstrators turned out to hear speeches the next day, at Haymarket Square.

The meeting was uneventful till the end, when the remaining three hundred people in the crowd began to disperse as two hundred police suddenly arrived. Then somebody in the crowd threw a bomb into police ranks. The blast was huge. It threw fifty policemen to the ground; eight of them died. The remaining police opened fire on demonstrators, who tried to flee, and in the confusion and panic the police wounded sixty of their own number. How many demonstrators died is unknown, but estimates place the number at seven or eight, with three dozen wounded.

What inspired the activists upon whom the wrath of the state now descended? Anarchism was often incoherent as a political philosophy, but by 1886 the term generally implied revolutionary socialism. To some degree, the anarchist movement was born of striker frustration at their powerless-ness before armed police and soldiers in the upheaval of 1877, and by authorities’ attempts at denying leftists the handful of election victories which they rightly won thereafter. In 1881, a convention of anarchists in Paris praised the recent assassination of Tsar Alexander II and endorsed the principle of armed insurrection to secure a socialist future.³¹

With the Haymarket bombing, anarchists became terrorists in the public mind. Although the identity of the perpetrator was unknown (and strike supporters claimed it was an agent provocateur acting on behalf of factory owners), the immediate consequence of the tragedy was America’s first red scare. The nation’s newspapers published chilling rumors: there was a transatlantic anarchist conspiracy ready to flatten Chicago with thousands of bombs hidden beneath the streets; the Haymarket bomb was the signal for a general uprising; the anarchists would seize control of the country. In the panic, Chicago authorities, industrialists, middle-class residents, and many laborers turned against anyone or anything that suggested immigrants, labor organizers, or radicalism. Police conducted dozens of raids, incarcerating and beating hundreds of unionists, socialists, anarchists, and others.³²

Ultimately, eight defendants went on trial for the Haymarket violence. Testimony placed six of them elsewhere at the time of the bombing. The remaining two were on the speakers’ platform and could not have thrown the bomb. Despite their clear innocence, the jury convicted all eight, sentencing seven to hang. (Four were actually hanged, one died in jail, and the last three were pardoned in 1893.) The verdict was popular during 1886, while the nation’s newspapers were consumed with visions of bearded, bomb-throwing immigrants, and while workers, businessmen, and factory owners closed ranks against leftists of any stripe.

Comparisons between strike violence and frontier savagery were already a tradition, a way of indicting strikers as “barbarous” aliens. In fact, native-born Americans were among the activists. (One of the Haymarket convicts, Albert Parsons, was practically an alternative William Cody. Born in Texas, as a young teenager Parsons was a scout for the Confederate Army.) ³³ But ever since the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, and probably before, Americans had blamed labor unrest on “foreign” ideas rather than workplace conditions, and on inferior immigrant “races”—Irish, Germans, Bohemians, Poles, and others among the working masses. The rhetoric reduced class strife to a racial issue, so that to most of the middle and upper classes, labor trouble meant immigrant trouble, or race trouble, which threatened American civilization as much as Indian resistance did, and which could theoretically be dealt with in the same way. The redeployment of frontier army troops to the nation’s cities in 1877 and to Chicago in 1894, and at other times of labor unrest, and the formation of newly professionalized National Guard units to put down labor rebellions, made comparisons to Indian war easy for journalists, whose coverage of strikers was infused with the rhetoric of “savage” labor.³⁴ Calls for violence against radicals mounted. “There are no good anarchists except dead anarchists,” howled the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.³⁵

The Drama of Civilization debuted at this moment, and in its presentation of a “natural” history of American expansion, it was indeed a soothing and reassuring spectacle for audiences mostly united in their fear of anarchy and seditious foreigners. The newly designed show featured four “epochs” of American history, the progress of which was narrated and explained by an orator (a feature Mackaye borrowed from moving panoramas and which proved so successful that Cody retained it for the rest of his show’s long career), and which we can follow through the eyes of a reviewer.³⁶ The first scene was the epoch of the Primeval Forest, before the arrival of Columbus. Bear, deer, and elk wandered across the moonlit stage, anticipating the arrival of two Indian tribes—Sioux and Pawnee—who clashed in combat, “and a rough-and-tumble massacre” closed the scene.

The Prairie epoch followed, in which Buffalo Bill hunted a herd of buffalo while guiding a wagon train of emigrants. A display of camp life was followed by a simulated prairie fire, “the fighting of fire with fire—the stampede—deer, buffalo, mustangs, Indians, and emigrants—all fleeing together.”

The Cattle Ranch was the next installment, “illustrating the cowboy in his glory, riding the bucking mustang and lassoing the bounding and bumptious steer.” Indians made a surprise attack, but were soon dispatched by Buffalo Bill and a troupe of cowboy reinforcements. The final “epoch,” the Mining Camp, included a duel, the arrival and departure of the Pony Express, and the Deadwood stage (robbed by a party of “road agents” rather than Indians this time). Finally, the giant ventilators roared to life. Dummies soared to the rafters, the mining town of tents collapsed before the cyclone, as the curtain dropped.³⁷

The Drama of Civilization featured no overt references to strikes, labor unrest, or police brutality. This was part of its appeal, as an escapist departure for an imagined frontier. But, given the pervasive rhetoric equating strikers and savages, and the hysteria over the anarchist specter in 1886, we can be sure that many saw in The Drama of Civilization a parable of antiradicalism.

In January, Cody, Salsbury, and Mackaye debuted the last addition to The Drama of Civilization, “Custer’s Last Rally.” The army had been in the background of the show from its beginning. Publicists inscribed Cody’s Union army and cavalry scout service record in show programs, and a Union veteran, Sergeant Frederick Bates, presented the American flag during each performance. But “Custer’s Last Rally” represented the first time Buffalo Bill’s Wild West included a scene of the U.S. Army in frontier combat. To a degree, it appealed to the public’s increasing fascination with the professional military. Although the U.S. Army was traditionally shunned in peacetime, American men, as we have seen, were fearful that their neurasthenic bodies would fail before the bristling, uncontained savagery of immigrant workers and increasingly looked to uniforms and military drill—including shooting at targets—to restore their manhood. Amid the widespread fakery of manufactured, middle-class comfort, military combat seemed to offer authentic, “real” experience that modern men lacked.³⁸

In one sense, “Custer’s Last Rally” seemed even more real than other acts in the Wild West repertoire, representing as it did a specific historical battle, the nation’s most famous Indian encounter, with which Cody had a long and personal affiliation. Where the Deadwood coach and the Pony Express attractions collapsed many events into one simulacrum, this was a purportedly faithful depiction of a single, profound event, the death of America’s foremost martyr to Indian conquest, staged by the man who avenged him.

The scene opened with a camp of General Custer’s troops, who began the action by marching out of the camp in pursuit of Indians. A scout discovers a Sioux village, where “Sitting Bull and his warriors are apparently engaged in the innocent pastimes of prairie life.” After the scout returns and informs Custer of the Indians’ location, “The sound of a bugle is heard. The Indians instantly prepare an ambush.” Custer’s troops then rush onto the open stage. “The bugler sounds the charge. Custer waves his sword, puts spurs to his charger, and, followed by his men, rides down upon the Indian village like a cyclone.” There surrounded, the Indians overwhelm the troops in hand-to-hand combat. “Custer is the last man killed, and he dies after performing prodigies of valor.” ³⁹

In reality (as we have seen), Custer had presided over a regiment that resembled the industrial workforce from which they were drawn: Irish, German, Italian, and other immigrants, as well as poor American-born natives. They were restive, prone to desertion and even mutiny. His actual experience as their commander was closer to that of factory owners who faced the constant threat of worker revolt than to the unbesmirched hero of “Custer’s Last Rally.”

But Cody’s cowboys assumed the role of loyal soldiers and thereby whitened the Seventh Cavalry in memory. In contrast to the ominous “racial” divisions between immigrants and middle-class America which culminated with the Haymarket bombing, “Custer’s Last Rally” emerged as a mythic moment of American unity and self-sacrifice. Conservatives appreciated the scene. Soon after Buffalo Bill’s Wild West closed at Madison Square Garden, New York’s Eden Musee invited patrons to compare two new, side-by-side waxwork dioramas: one was Custer’s Last Battle; the other, The Chicago Anarchists.⁴⁰ At least one moral message seemed clear. As Theodore Roosevelt told a gathering of New York Republicans that year, “There is but one answer to be made to the dynamite bomb, and that can best be made by the Winchester Rifle.”⁴¹

But Roosevelt was a politician, and reducing the meaning of Cody’s spectacle to a single teaching, especially one so pointed and political, fails to account for the political variability of Cody’s audience. Popular enthusiasm for hanging the Haymarket suspects continued through the winter. But thereafter, passions cooled. Opinions diverged. Influential critics, including the editor of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly, William Dean Howells, began questioning the fairness of the court proceedings and the government’s case. Many labor organizations began demanding a new trial. Most people probably remained in favor of the death sentences, but a vocal and respected portion of the middle class joined working-class activists in opposing them. By December of 1887 the argument about justice and the Haymarket affair had polarized the country. ⁴²

The continued popularity of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West amid this changing political context, long after the Haymarket hysteria had subsided, suggests that its appeal went beyond any single didactic message. To conclude that its central teaching was that strikes should be met with military response oversimplifies its complex spectacle. Rather, the show sent many different messages simultaneously, and audiences interpreted them in different ways to suit a very wide spectrum of political leanings that developed and changed over time.

To grasp the complexity of the show’s teachings, we should keep in mind that most people who saw Buffalo Bill’s Wild West did not see the Custer reenactment. Scholars have long assumed that Custer’s death was Cody’s most durable attraction, but it was in fact only a temporary addition, and Cody reprised it infrequently. After showing the scene for two months at Madison Square Garden, the Custer battle was not seen in the United States again until 1893, for the second half of the show season in Chicago. It appeared regularly in 1894, but disappeared again the next year. It featured in some shows, but not others, in 1896 and sporadically again in 1898. After 1898, it was never shown in the United States again.⁴³

Its placement within the show also reduced its significance. Custer’s death was the climax only in parts of two show seasons: first, in early 1887, and second, from August to October of 1893.⁴⁴ On the other occasions when it appeared, it was one of the acts in the middle of the show lineup. The show’s regular and most popular climax remained the more domestically oriented “Attack on the Settler’s Cabin.”

To be sure, audiences may have connected the show’s generic imagery of Indian war with the challenge of labor unrest even without the Custer sequence. Cody’s target audience was middle class, not working class. Perhaps he synchronized performance of this most military “tableau” with shorter moments of public outrage against strikers, as in early 1887, when anti-anarchist sentiment was at its peak, and in late 1893 and in 1894, when most middle-class voters seem to have supported the use of federal troops, including the Seventh Cavalry, to break the Pullman Strike (and when genuine Seventh Cavalry veterans—and Sitting Bull’s horse—were included in the battle of the Little Big Horn sequence).⁴⁵

But neither Cody nor his managers left any trace of the motivations and considerations that went into the making of show acts. The timing of the Custer reenactment probably reflects Cody’s intuition more than any conscious strategy.

Moreover, the story of how the Custer segment came to be staged at Madison Square Garden in 1886 highlights the mythic domesticity that tempered its more reactionary messages. For all the scene’s masculine heroics, the development of “Custer’s Last Rally” hinged on the intercession of another woman. Cody had many endorsements from army officers. But none had quite the elevating power of the one he secured from the widow of the Little Big Horn herself, Elizabeth Bacon Custer.

SHE WAS CALLED LIBBIE, and by 1886, she was America’s most famous widow, a national icon of bereaved devotion. She was not only a woman. She was a lady. The daughter of a well-to-do Michigan lawyer, she struggled financially after the death of her husband. Publicly, her elegance, and her careful balance of veneration for her husband’s memory with charitable public service, made her a well-respected figure in New York society. She was trustee of a women’s hospital, a board member of the Bellevue Training School of Nurses, and secretary for the New York Society of Decorative Arts.⁴⁶

Since 1876, Libbie Custer had crusaded to elevate George Custer’s image out of the morass of controversy which threatened to engulf his battle standard. She lent private papers to hagiographic writers, lobbied behind the scenes to ostracize surviving junior officers whom she blamed for her husband’s destruction, and asserted a near-proprietary interest in Custer memorials. When wealthy backers erected a statue of Custer at West Point without consulting her, she led the successful campaign for its removal. Afterward, no one contemplating a public tribute to George Custer could ignore her.⁴⁷

Early in 1885, she published the first of three memoirs about her married life, Boots and Saddles: Life in Dakota with General Custer. The book obscured the couple’s often troubled marriage with a portrayal of their household as a bulwark of domestic unity and peace on a frightening frontier. It sold 15,000 copies in the next nine months, inspiring Libbie Custer to write “a boy’s book that I may implant my husband in the minds of the coming generation.”⁴⁸

That book was slow to be written, perhaps because she began to suspect it was unnecessary. She watched Buffalo Bill’s Wild West at Erastina the following July, announcing “she was much pleased” with the exhibition. ⁴⁹ In August, she received a letter from William Cody requesting her permission to stage the reenactment of her husband’s death, promising to “spare no expense to do credit to our exhibition and deepen the lustre of your glorious husband’s reputation as a soldier and a man.” The educational scene, he wrote, would acquaint the audience with “the valor and heroism of the men who have made civilization possible on this continent.” ⁵⁰

Convinced that Cody’s reenactment would raise the general’s reputation, she endorsed it, and frequented Madison Square Garden during rehearsals for the January debut of the Custer sequence. Show producers made skillful use of her presence to sanctify their popular entertainment as respectful history. Libbie Custer had never seen the Little Big Horn battlefield. Nonetheless, “she will be announced as superintending the picture of the spot where her husband was killed,” wrote Steele Mackaye.⁵¹ She was often sighted at rehearsals. She befriended and socialized with Annie Oakley. On opening night, she observed “Custer’s Last Rally” from a private box.⁵²

The presence of Custer’s widow at the premiere ensured its acceptance as both an accurate representation and a respectful gesture to a fallen hero, but it contained other messages, too. Most obviously, Libbie Custer’s very public involvement reinforced the show’s family appeal.

In a sense, even while he lived, Custer’s Indian war was a family show. The general had a huge public reputation and a well-crafted public persona, and his marriage was a prominent feature of both. Libbie followed him to the Plains. Their nieces often camped and hunted with the glamorous couple, along with an ever-present entourage of young officers, tourists, and well-connected reporters. Tom Custer, George Custer’s brother, was a decorated army captain serving on George Custer’s staff. Still more Custers joined the Indian fighting forays of the Seventh Cavalry as civilians on a lark, binding command and kin in the popular imagination. At the Little Big Horn, fallen clan members included not only George Custer, but also his brothers Tom and Boston Custer, Autie Reed, his nephew, and his brother-in-law Lieutenant James Calhoun, the husband of his sister, Margaret. For the public, his defeat was not just a military debacle. It was the fall of the House of Custer. Cartoons depicted Indians holding scalps of “the Custer Family.” If Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull did not complete the drama by capturing Libbie and the other Custer women, the public nonetheless saw Custer’s collapse as conjoined family and national disasters, a material realization of the abstract cultural links between frontier war and the threat to the family.

Custer’s family image grew in the decades after his death in large part through Libbie Custer’s exertions, especially her elegiac memoirs and lectures which memorialized him through his marriage to her. In her hands, the violent, mercurial, and libidinous officer became an icon of fidelity and chivalric manliness, a man who paced the floor for hours with a sick puppy in his arms and changed the route of his march to protect the nest of a prairie hen and her brood.⁵³ Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show ascended to the pinnacle of American show business as the Custer memoirs flew out of bookstores, in the 1880s and ’90s. By including the Custer reenactment along with the “Attack on the Settler’s Cabin” (and in some cases substituting one for the other), Cody tied frontier race war firmly to white family protection, and both of them to his own persona.

The resonance of “Custer’s Last Rally” with urban race war and industrial violence no doubt explains some of its popularity. But Libbie Custer’s embrace of this spectacle also sent a powerful, countervailing message about the limitations of vengeance for civilized people. Urban, middle-class families, who saw the home as a bulwark against the violence and alienation of the city, sat awed before the spectacle of the Custer family sacrificing themselves for the containment of savagery, reenacted under the guiding hand and imprimatur of Mrs. Custer. At least as much as “Custer’s Last Rally” linked cavalry and public order, the centrality of family in this epic of the civilizing process validated spectators’ own domestic longings.

We can only wonder—as New Yorkers must have—how Libbie Custer brought herself to view the reenactment of her husband’s death, starring some of the Sioux men who exchanged fire with Custer’s men that day. Years later, when Buffalo Bill’s Wild West visited Custer’s hometown of Monroe, Michigan, the show’s Indians received a visit from Nevin Custer, the only Custer brother who was not at the Little Big Horn. “When Cody explained to them through an interpreter that the man with him was General Custer’s brother,” recalled press agent Dexter Fellows, “the older of the red men stepped a pace backwards. Mr. Custer looked at them for a few seconds and walked away.” Men “such as these” had killed his brothers, Nevin Custer told Cody, with tears in his eyes, “but I suppose they thought they were right.”⁵⁴

Lakotas showed extraordinary courage in their show travels, but rarely did it take anything like emotional courage for a spectator to attend. Nevin Custer’s effort to meet the Sioux men who fought the war and to see the war from their point of view was in keeping with his bereaved sister-in-law’s stance in 1886, and it underscores what many Americans intuited upon taking a seat in the Wild West show audience. To watch “Custer’s Last Rally” was in some way to join Libbie Custer in grief, and to assert willingness to sacrifice for civilization. But just as important, it was also a gesture of reconciliation, and forgiveness.

Securing Libbie’s endorsement provided Cody a success that was astounding on several levels. He had had nothing to do with Custer on the Plains. The martinet of a general who had refused the society of the scout was now memorialized by him. For her part, Libbie Custer knew of Cody’s differences with her husband. She could be militant in continuing George Custer’s many grudges long after he was in the grave. But when Cody asked her permission to reenact the battle, if the memory of George Custer’s coolness to Cody gave her any pause, she gave in to the man most ideally situated to sanctify her husband’s memory.

Cody took the step of impersonating Custer himself, donning a wig and taking up the sword (although Custer had cut his hair short before the 1876 campaign, and he did not carry a sword that year). In future years he assigned the Custer role to Buck Taylor and other cast members, freeing himself to stage a highly fictitious, futile dash to Custer’s rescue by Buffalo Bill, followed by his signature “First Scalp for Custer” reenactment. But that January of 1887, there was no revenge scalping. Instead, the show allowed space for Indian valor, as it heightened Custer’s heroic image. Cody’s assumption of the Custer role for the opening weeks of “Custer’s Last Rally” meant the blond, balding, angular general suddenly appeared taller, broader, darker, and far more handsome than the real Custer had ever been. The widow certainly appreciated the display. In the second volume of her memoirs, Tenting on the Plains, she praised Cody’s performance, although she camouflaged her own thoughts by putting them in the mouth of her black servant, Eliza. “Well, Miss Libbie, when Mr. Cody come up, I see at once his back and hips was built precisely like the Ginnel, and when I come on to his tent, I jest said to him: ‘Mr. Buffalo Bill, when you cum up to the stand and wheeled round, I said to myself, “ Well, if he ain’t the ’spress image of Ginnel Custer in battle, I never seed any one that was.” ’ ”⁵⁵

Libbie Custer expressed her ambitions for the performance, and her gratitude to Cody, in a subsequent letter commending him for “teaching the youth the history of our country, where the noble officers, soldiers, and scouts sacrificed so much for the sake of our native land.” Just as she linked scouts to officers, and thereby assisted Cody’s ongoing effort to raise the reputation of frontier guides, she thanked him “from my heart for all that you have done to keep my husband’s memory green. You have done so much to make him an idol among the children and young people.” ⁵⁶

As much as The Drama of Civilization resonated with middle-class fears of labor violence, it could only do so by symbolically resolving industrial discontent, making strikes vanish through Progress. If the vanquishing—and, ultimately, vanishing—of Indians was inevitable, so, too, was the disappearance of troublesome labor.

Just as Henry Morton Stanley and dozens of army officers eschewed the extermination of Indians as beneath American civilization, so the Custer reenactment, in featuring genuine Indian opponents of the fallen general, suggested that Indians—and by extension—immigrants, could be included in popular education and entertainment, turned into cooperative wage laborers, and thereby incorporated into the nation. Self-restraint was the essence of civilized manliness. If civilized people demonstrated firmness (military force) combined with mercy and justice, even the bitterest enemies of Progress, men such as Sitting Bull (who had been with Buffalo Bill just eighteen months before, and whose role as the mastermind of Custer’s defeat was played by another Oglala man in 1886) and Gall (who had ridden down on Custer’s command in 1876, and was now appearing at Madison Square Garden) could be persuaded to submit, and to become loyal employees in the grand pageant of American history.⁵⁷

By January of 1887, there could be no doubt that the Indian presence in Madison Square Garden contained a liberal message as much as a reactionary one, a prescription for national self-restraint in the ongoing confrontation with savages, be they immigrants or Indians. In The Drama of Civilization, wrote journalist Brick Pomeroy, “we see the entire West with its great dramatic history that pioneers, indians, cow boys, home builders and all are making, and see it as a wonderful picture, backed by the grandest and most extensive and expensive scenery and stage appliances ever witnessed in this country.”⁵⁸

Libbie Custer’s poignant, devoted forgiveness warns us against seeing the fight against Indians as a validation of anti-labor violence, since Americans were so divided on the morality of Indian conquest in the first place. As we have seen, army officers and Cody himself frequently denounced the nation’s treatment of Indians as unfair and unbefitting a great nation. Brick Pomeroy, whose enthusiasm for the show’s masculinity reached a fever pitch in 1887, wrote that spectators at The Drama of Civilization would see not only heroic “pioneers” in the “primeval wilderness,” but Indians, those “wily savages whom the whites with their lies, tricks, and avarice have made alert even to cruelty.”⁵⁹

Wild West show publicists quoted or reprinted Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem about the battle of the Little Big Horn, “The Revenge of Rain-in-the-Face.” Although in reality it was Custer who attacked a peaceful Sioux village, Longfellow’s verse contains many allusions to Indian savages who ambush the heroic General Custer (as they did in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West); Rain-in-the-Face himself cuts out Custer’s heart, and

As a ghastly trophy, bore
The brave heart, that beat no more

For spectators seeking to blame Indians (and strikers) for their own destruction, the poem had much to offer.

But there was a profound ambivalence even here. Longfellow’s poem was partly a meditation on the timing of Custer’s thunderous defeat, which came during 1876, the centennial of the Declaration of Independence, the “Year of a Hundred Years.” The poem’s last verse contained a stark message about where the moral blame for Custer’s demise must fall:

Whose was the right and the wrong?
Sing it, O funeral song,
With a voice that is full of tears,
And say that our broken faith
Wrought all this ruin and scathe
In the Year of a Hundred Years.⁶⁰

For those who saw Indian anger and Custer’s death as the result of America’s dishonorable breaking of treaties, Longfellow’s poem was an affirmation. It turned “Custer’s Last Rally” into a thrilling (and entertaining) demonstration of the tragedy that ensues from “broken faith.”

The poem complemented the rhetoric of ambivalence Cody had developed since the 1870s to explain the presence of Indians in his entertainments—and perhaps to articulate his own beliefs. In 1885, he explained Sioux war aims to a newspaper correspondent. “Their lands were invaded by the gold seekers, and when the U.S. Government failed to protect them they thought it was time to do it themselves. The Government did all they thought they could do, but the white men wouldn’t be held back. No one can blame the Indians for defending their homes. But that is all passed.”⁶¹

Superficially, Cody’s account reads like an endorsement of Indian resistance. But on closer reading, it is arresting how many different moral directions Cody maps out in four sentences: the Sioux faced a hostile invasion; the government failed in its obligations; the Sioux stood up for themselves; the government did all it could do; the invading white men were too energetic and determined to be stopped; the Indians should not be blamed for defending their homes (the attack on the settler’s home began with an attack on the Indian’s home); but it is all in the past, there is nothing to be done (so come in, enjoy the show).

Cody’s ambiguity condenses the Wild West show’s version of history into a list of wide-ranging possible readings which, taken together, made it possible for audiences to differ on the morality of Indian conquest without having to cease their enjoyment of the performance. Whether you wanted strikers shot or appeased, there was a seat for you at the Wild West show.

For all the scholarly emphasis on the conservatism of Cody’s show, ambiguity was central to its presentation of the march of progress and key to its success in its most popular and profitable years. Divided public opinion on labor strife and political violence made more prescriptive approaches impossible for a mass entertainment. Steele Mackaye himself joined his friend William Dean Howells in condemning the government’s handling of the Haymarket trials as “a national folly and a national disgrace.”⁶² In 1897, when the show’s celebration of militarism was at its peak, critics still saw it as a show that allowed audiences to make up their own minds about the morality of Indian conquest. “The admirers of Daniel Boone, the pioneer, and Kit Carson, the scout, readily recognize in the show how courage, determination, keenness of sight, accurateness of aim and unswerving perseverance won for them the names which are idolized,” wrote one reviewer. “Those who have sympathy for the Indian, feeling that the red man has been mistreated by the settlers and the Government,” the same writer continued, “have their hearts warmed at the sight of such a fine collection of them, and rejoice in their feats of horsemanship.”⁶³

It was beloved by conservatives and liberals alike, but perhaps the ultimate proof of the Wild West show’s flexible meaning was its appeal to leftists, the most famous of whom was Edward Aveling. An Englishman who was husband to Karl Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, Aveling was the kind of revolutionary who made Remington’s trigger finger itch. The “riddle of modern society,” wrote Aveling, would only be solved “by the abolition of private property in the means of production and distribution, leading to a communistic society.” ⁶⁴ This same man, socialist and revolutionary, saw Buffalo Bill’s Wild West as “the most interesting show in a most interesting country.” ⁶⁵

His admiration for the Wild West show is striking in part because Aveling skewered romantic facades in a way few other writers did. During his 1886 tour to investigate the prospects of socialism in America, he never traveled to the West. But his encounters with cowhands in eastern exhibitions led him to become the first writer to describe them as proletarians: “In a word, out in the fabled West, the life of the ‘free’ cowboy is as much that of a slave as is the life of his Eastern brother, the Massachusetts mill-hand. And the slave-owner is in both cases the same—the capitalist.” ⁶⁶ He joined many others in demanding a new trial for the Haymarket suspects.⁶⁷ His many interviews of American workers were grist for his subsequent study, The Working-Class Movement in America, which he coauthored with his wife in 1891.⁶⁸

Aveling’s encounter with the Wild West show began in 1886, at Erastina, after an acquaintance insisted he see it. To the son-in-law of Karl Marx, the show told the story of “life and death in the Rocky Mountains, where the wave of savage life is beating itself out against the rock of an implacably advancing civilization.”⁶⁹ Cody’s portrayal of social evolution appealed to leftist notions of dialectic and revolution as much as to the social Darwinism of reactionary conservatives. The fascination of it, Aveling wrote, “is in part due to the coming face to face with conditions that in some sense represent our own ancestral ones.” Like pioneers of modern anthropology such as Lewis Henry Morgan (and Karl Marx, too), Aveling looked at primitive peoples and said, “They are what we once were.” Indians embodied the universal primitive. “These dusky Indians . . . yet remind us of the earlier forms of savage man whence we have evolved, not by any manner of means always in the right direction.” ⁷⁰

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, with its triumph of cowboys over Indians, pastoralism over hunting, evoked the development of ever more complex civilizations, a process that was, to the minds of all Cody’s contemporaries, of every political stripe, as unstoppable as evolution itself. Capitalists, conservatives, liberals, socialists, and communists fought one another bitterly, but all saw the triumph of commerce over savage chaos as ineluctable. Notions of cultural relativism, which allow Americans to think of other cultures as distinctive, but not inferior, were decades away. Belief in the necessary departure of “primitives” from the face of the earth was practically universal. Capitalists believed the dispossession of Indians paved the way for farming, commerce, and private property. Socialists and communists saw Indian defeat, and the advancement of modern wage work and private property, as inevitable steps in the destruction of feudalism and the emergence of class divisions (which would result, inevitably, in revolution, the abolition of private property, and the advent of proletarian utopia). Where these camps differed was on the question of how civilization should progress once savagery was conquered. But Edward Aveling and Frederic Remington shared a strong enthusiasm for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West because they also shared a deep faith in the defeat of primitives as the necessary price of better worlds to come.

Cody’s patrician kindness and artful pose as a frontiersman allowed Aveling to believe that his consummately modern show—a legal corporation which relied on industrial transport, a wage-earning cast, and steam-powered presses for its colorful posters, newspaper notices, and tickets— was fundamentally premodern, lying outside the contemporary world of wage reductions, workplace mechanization, and surplus labor.⁷¹ To Aveling, Cody represented an earlier race of white men fundamentally different from the modern white race of corporate bosses. Cody’s race was “vanishing as the Red Indian, its foe, vanishes.”⁷² In other words, Cody looked forward to the modern capitalist order, without actually being part of it.

So it was that Aveling, the socialist, practically moved into the Wild West show camp, first at Erastina in 1886, and then in London the following year. He mused on the experience almost as enthusiastically as any Frederic Remington. “Have I not spent days and nights in camp with them; been present at ‘Saddle-Up!’ time, and behind the scenes at the performances; ridden outside the Deadwood coach; slept in Buffalo Bill’s tent?” His list of show acquaintances included many show cowboys, including Jim Mitchell, Buck Taylor, “Bronco Bill” Irving, and “Tony Esquivel, the most handsome, the most charming, the most daring of them all—are not these my friends?”⁷³ The most astonishing of these, to his mind, was William Cody himself: “Very tall, very straight, very strong; the immense frame so perfectly balanced, so cleanly built, knit together so firmly and symmetrically, that until you stood by it and felt it towering over you and, as it were, absorbing your own lesser individuality, you hardly recognized what giant was here.” But no matter the physical description, wrote Aveling, “nothing of this—and, indeed, nothing—can give any idea of the immense personality” of this “extraordinary man.”⁷⁴

Cody’s energetic charisma flickers through account after account over a century later. Between comparisons to the centaur of old, and testaments to his physical beauty and his “immense personality,” we may yet discern a presence which awed the most jaded reviewers. Advising Mackaye about how to work with Cody, his partner Nate Salsbury—who had a testy relationship with Buffalo Bill even in these most rewarding years—took it upon himself to explain Cody’s genius. “You will find him petulant and impulsive,” wrote Salsbury to Mackaye, “but with good, crude ideas as to what can be evolved from your material.”⁷⁵ Salsbury resented Cody’s intuitive command of their joint enterprise, and he was both bemused and intimidated by how completely Cody’s presence could control not only a performance but also backstage machinations. “Cody, in many respects, is a man of steam-engine power,” explained Salsbury, in a more thoughtful, private moment. But just as important as his energy, Cody’s physicality seemed to contain the conflicting elements of the show—cowboys and Indians, progress and chaos—within his own body. “In his tremendous physical power, he is the only man who can control, and keep in subjection, the various antagonistic elements of such a show,” wrote the managing partner.⁷⁶

Steele Mackaye’s son later called The Drama of Civilization “a new form of folk-temple for the worship of a new heroic age,” and there can be little question that the Madison Square Garden season of 1886–87 placed the Wild West show on the horizon of New York audiences as a cultural attraction.⁷⁷ As with other appearances of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, reviewers had their share of complaints and fun with the Madison Square Garden season, describing the orator’s descriptions as “insufferably long,” denouncing the “lame conclusion” of the prairie fire scene, and providing colorful, and condescending, names for the show Indians.⁷⁸ But in terms of the show’s acceptance as a historically educational and socially redeeming entertainment, the winter at Madison Square Garden was an overwhelming success, dispelling any lingering doubts about its attractions for “respectable” people. Where The Drama of Civilization looked enough like the Erastina performances to inspire playful or disparaging reviews, the aura of sanctity surrounding the reenactment of “Custer’s Last Rally,” with its visual imagery that seemingly carried the audience right into the painting and into history, upped the show’s cultural capital.

The Wild West show’s acceptance as a suitably domestic exposition of life in the Far West owed much to the incorporation of Annie Oakley, Emma Lake Hickok, and other women into its mythology. In New York, other factors behind the newfound respectability of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West included Steele Mackaye’s direction, Matt Morgan’s paintings, and Nate Salsbury’s business sense. Without the intercession of Libbie Custer, the Wild West show’s signature educational scene, “Custer’s Last Rally,” could not have been staged at all.

But Cody himself remained its central feature. His authenticity relied on many things, especially the participation of Indians in his drama, and we shall explore their motivations in another chapter. But the idea of such a “drama of civilization” without him is unthinkable. New York audiences knew Buffalo Bill from over a decade on the stage. One measure of his new venture’s success was that in contrast to the mostly working-class fans of his frontier melodramas and his first Wild West show season, audiences at Madison Square Garden in January 1887 included a broad cross-section of New Yorkers. According to one journalist, “statesmen, artists, military men, teachers, writers, musicians, business men, politicians, artizans, mechanics, and others who desire to know as much as possible about the history of their country” flocked to the show, “interested as we never saw an audience before.”⁷⁹ The patronage of veterans and military officers validated the show as both historically authentic and socially acceptable. Cody’s press agents distributed lists of officers in attendance. General Sherman saw it twenty times.⁸⁰ It was so popular that branch ticket offices were opened in Brooklyn, Jersey City, and Newark.⁸¹ Show management arranged discount ticket prices for members of the Grand Army of the Republic, and schools sent crowds of students to afternoon matinees. ⁸² A colorful children’s book titled A Peep at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West soon appeared, with the principal lessons of the show explained in simple, awful rhymes.⁸³ Buffalo Bill was, at long last, respectable family entertainment.

Hints in show reviews suggest that the spectacle of Custer’s demise, with Custer “represented by Buffalo Bill, who wore a wig to represent Custer’s auburn locks,” met with near-sacred veneration. Reviews describe audience behavior with numerous references to order and respectfulness, suggesting that during this winter season, the Wild West show left far behind the raucous audiences of Cody’s melodrama days, and approached a kind of incipient high-culture appreciation normally displayed in opera houses and the upmarket theaters that produced Shakespeare.⁸⁴

Ordinarily, the Wild West show was an outdoor entertainment. But in a sense, its highly successful appearance in Madison Square Garden in the winter of 1886–87 suggests how much its rampant, raucous centaurs had been domesticated for popular entertainment, and how much that domestication allowed its harsher themes of race war to be reconciled with liberal ideals of race reconciliation and the rule of law. Just as the show featured “the pioneers with families at work in sun and shade to open and cultivate the soil, to build and beautify homes,” so too the theater itself was as comfortable as “a cheery parlor.”⁸⁵ Divided as they were over the question of anarchy and whether it should be met with force or forgiveness, middle-class audiences who were traditionally loath to venture downtown for entertainment could feel safe in venturing into the heart of New York for this nighttime show, where comfort, amusement, and the sacralization of American history flowed together under the guiding hand of America’s most famous westerner.

As the show wound down in February, a new rumor began to circulate through the press. Nate Salsbury had received an inquiry from the organizers of the American Exhibition in London. After a series of telegrams and messages, he and Cody made it official. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was going to Europe.