Two Sides of Buffalo Bill

For the last two years I have been an Associate Editor at the William F. Cody Papers Project. The goal of this project is to encourage scholarship and public understanding of William F. Cody--Buffalo Bill to most of us. Cody was the most famous American in the world for much of his life, and you can explore nearly any topic in late-19th century history through the lens of the Wild West, from the formation of gender to transportation to white-Indian relations.

Part of the project is to gather together as much of the vast contemporary writing by and about Cody that we can. There is also a YouTube channel for sharing video as we find it--such as this snippet below:

 

My current project within the Papers is to gather and edit the writings of Cody's business partner Nate Salsbury. Viewing the Wild West through Salsbury's eyes is showing me that Cody was a hard guy to work with. Below is my preliminary transcription of a letter that William F. Cody wrote to Salsbury in 1884. I have not yet located the letter by Salsbury to which Cody was responding, but you can get the idea:


My Dear Salsbury, 


 Your very sensable [sic] & truly rightful letter has just been read. And it has been the means of showing me just where I stand. And I solemnly promise you that after this you will never see me under the influence of liquor [.] I may have to take two or three drinks to day to brace up. That will be all as long as we are partners. I appreciate all you have done [.] Your judgement and business is good. And from this on I will do my work to the letter. This drinking surely ends today. And your pard will be himself. And be on deck all the time. 


 Yours always, W.F. Cody


[The original letter is at the Yale Beinecke Library]

Cody Blogging: The Town that Couldn't Shoot Straight

I am in Cody, Wyoming this week! I am here as a guest of the Cody Papers Project at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center. The first half of the week will be spent at the amazing McCracken Research Library. Thursday and Friday are devoted to a conference sponsored by the Cody Papers Project: Buffalo Bill and Europe.

I am an Associate Editor on the Papers Project and will try to blog about Cody--the man and the town--every day this week. The video above is of the gunfight that happens every evening at 6 during the tourist season. Tomorrow I'll get a bit more scholarly. Maybe.

Not Everyone Loved Buffalo Bill

"Buffalo Bill is again in this country. Having captured millions of dollars from the fools of England who went crazy over his overdrawn pictures of our western life, he will now try to gull New Yorkers, Brooklynites, and other Eastern people into thinking that the Indians are savage beasts, fit only to be shot down like dogs or to wear paint and feathers to please the eye of an excited crowd. That disgraceful show can do more in six months, to drag the Indian down and give a wrong impression of his real character, than forty Carlisle’s could do in six years to build the Indian up and help him to stand on his own feet, on good solid ground. Buffalo Bill is rapidly tearing down what all good schools for the Indian are building up." --May 25, 1888 INDIAN HELPER

As I have mentioned before, I am teaching a course this quarter on William F. Cody (that's Buffalo Bill to you) and the Wild West. It is a fun class, since it takes in so many aspects of the American West and popular culture. Another enjoyable aspect of the course is finding the connections between Cody and other famous figures, from Calamity Jane to Teddy Roosevelt to the Queen of England. Once you begin looking for Buffalo Bill, you find him everywhere.

Including in the Indian Helper, the newspaper of the Carlisle Indian School, from which the above quote is taken. Many of the Indian reformers who supported the boarding school movement and other efforts to "civilize" American Indians by forcing them to behave more like white people hated Cody and the other entertainers who hired Indians for frontier shows. At the very same time the reformers were trying to confine Indians to reservations where they could be forced to adopt agriculture and Christianity and dress like white people. Cody was hiring Indians (at $25 a month and more!) to travel with him across America and over to Europe, where they would wear traditional costumes, ride horses, and scare big audiences of white people. Reformers repeatedly tried to deny Cody permission to hire reservation Indians for his show, but Cody cultivated powerful political contacts and always got his Indians.

I should also add that modern Indians and historians tend to see Cody as the better friend of the Indians, pointing out that he paid and treated them well and gave at least a few Indians a chance to escape the grinding poverty and cultural oppression of the reservation at a low point in American Indian history. The best single volume on the subject is by L.G. Moses, Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians.

A delightful view of the reformer's anti-Cody propaganda can be found on this web page: References to "Buffalo Bill" in the Carlisle Indian School Newspapers. The above quote is taken from this page. The page was created by public historian Barbara Landis, who also has a nice blog about the Carlisle Indian School. For a different view, see this excellent Wikipedia page on "Show Indians" created by University of Nebraska graduate student Jason Heppler.

[Image: Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill, Montreal, QC, 1885, via WikiMedia Commons.]

Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, Sitting Bull, and . . . Mickey Mouse?

La Legende de Buffalo Bill: "Five thousand miles from Cody, Wyoming, 30 minutes outside Paris, France, there is a man who plays one of the most iconic Western figures in American history." This a fun story about one of the most popular attractions at EuroDisney's Mainstreet USA attraction, a "90-minute dinner performance modeled directly after Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows."

I am not sure what "modeled directly" means in this case, though there are a lot of grainy tourist videos of the show on YouTube (see below). If someone could please watch them all and report back, that would be great. Especially interesting is this nugget from the article:

At the beginning of the show, Vance introduces four different “ranches,” or sections of the arena, each with its own cowboys and Indians. Buffalo Bill greets Sitting Bull, and after a series of rodeo games, Vance gallops in on a white horse to save the guests, who have been robbed in a stagecoach attack.

In its 18 years (Vance performing for 15 of those), the show has only changed once. A little rough around the edges, the show is different than what a typical Disney audience would expect, Vance said. So last year, the management team asked that Mickey, Minnie, Goofy and Chip and Dale be incorporated.

Vance was worried these additions would mess with the integrity of the show. “I wouldn’t have thought it would work, but the way it’s done, because of who we are – we’re just real guys – when you put that out there, we make the characters look more real,” he said. “Instead of us becoming a Disney show, it gives Mickey a bit of an edge.”

Here is a brief video from the show--sans Goofy, alas:

Spring Course: Buffalo Bill and the Wild West

I am really excited about the new course I am teaching at Eastern Washington University in the Spring Quarter: History 498/596: Buffalo Bill and the Wild West. The course will meet Wednesday evenings from 5 until 9:30 p.m.

William F. Cody, aka “Buffalo Bill” was America’s first international celebrity. In a public career spanning more than 40 years he appeared before crowds from Spokane to New York City, and from Glasgow to Moscow. His Wild West show parlayed his early life experiences as a buffalo hunter and Army scout into the most popular public entertainment of his era. Along the way he interacted with Teddy Roosevelt and Sitting Bull, Thomas Edison and the Queen of England. He was America’s first international celebrity and many of our western myths were shaped by his Wild West show. But how much of it was true?

In this exciting course we will discover the realities behind the many myths of Buffalo Bill. We will explore Cody and his world via primary and secondary sources, historic and contemporary film, and archival research.

This course builds on a new partnership between the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming and the Public History Program at Eastern Washington University. Students will get the chance to have their work published in the forthcoming Biographical Encyclopedia of the Wild West.

The course is open to both graduates and undergraduates. For more information contact Professor Larry Cebula at LarryCebula@gmail.com.

Pushaluck's Romance, a Story in Three Acts, Yet Incomplete

I was doing some research this week on Buffalo Bill and the Indians (more on that later) and came across a delightful story in the New York Times that I want to share.

In the summer of 1886 Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show set up camp at Erastina, Staten Island. (The picture on this page is some members of the Wild West show at the Erastina camp in an 1888 tour.) Cody was just back from a triumphant tour of Europe and announced the arrival of the Wild West show in New York with a Manhattan parade. "Everything is on a big scale," The New York Herald enthused, "The arena is like a monster circus ring. Around it the long rows of seats rise high one above another. Gleaming in a grove at one side are the white tents of the Indians, painted over with fantastic designs."

Among these fantastic Indians was a Pawnee man whom the New York Times identified as "Pushaluck." (The name might be comic invention--I can no other references to the man outside of these articles in the Times.) Pushaluck was described as "the best looking fellow in the camp, not excepting the Europeans and Americans." He spoke, the Times noted, "a little English and a great deal of Indian."

Enter romance.

"A comely damsel of 19 summers," (and from New Jersey) began to hang around the camp. She seemed to be "riveted upon the fascinating person" of Pushaluck, who in turn "lingered as near the comely young damsel as duty and fences permitted." The other performers began to fear that their companion "had fallen a victim to New Jersey's charms." But before they could intervene, the unlikely couple slipped out of camp to elope!

Cody, it was reported, was in a "towering rage" when he heard of the elopement--not out of any 19th century opposition to interracial marriage, but because it might worsen his always contentious relationship with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Cody had a contract with the BIA to return his Indian performers to the reservation "in good order" at the end of the season. "To return Pushaluck as a Benedict would not be, in Buffalo Bill's opinion, to return him in good order," the Times noted.

["A Benedict" is 19th century slang for a confirmed bachelor newly married, taken from the character Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing.]

Cody hired detectives to hunt down the lovebirds. In the interlude a Times editorialist took the opportunity to draw a historical lesson from the event in a piece titled "A Modern Indian." "Day by day," the Times declared, "new and touching illustrations of the progress of civilization are made known, and each succeeding edition of the census shows a wider spread of sweetness and light among the people . . . . Already he [the Indian] is the rival of civilized man in his capacity for firewater, and his noble devotion to aged and decrepit silk hats." The writer also praised Indians for their "enterprise in the amusement business . . . digging up the hatchet and gliding through the dizzy mazes of the war dance for a reasonable share of the gross receipts at the box office."

Taking great liberties with the paper's own reporting of the event, the editorialist praised Pushaluck who went "alone to the wigwam of a Newark white chief, sang his song under the window, won the heart of the daughter of the house, and eloped with her after the manner of his good white brothers." After a long passage contrasting this modern development with "the old-time custom as set by trusty authors in graphic tales" the editorial concludes that Pushaluck "may further fit himself for the age and country in which he lives by deserting her and running away with some other gentleman's wife."

Cody's detectives caught up with the pair three days after they disappeared--the searchers finding that "an Indian in native costume, accompanied by a white girl, was not a hard object to trace." The two had been married "in regular orthodox English fashion" in Philadelphia, where they were found honeymooning "in a boarding house on Ninth Street that is much patronized by 'freaks.'"

Pushaluck was convinced to return to the show, and the young woman to her parent's Jersey home. Their separation was a "quite affecting" sight, according to the Times, and the two made plans to reunite at the end of the season and go together to live on the reservation. "Mrs. Pushaluck is reported to have a considerable sum of money, and Pushaluck is looking forward to great honor and many ponies on the reservation," according to the Times. Pushaluck and his bride refused to reveal her maiden name accoring to the Times, and Pushaluck in particular "is not at all inclined to converse about the matter."

And there the story ends--for now. I can find no reference to a Pawnee Indian named Pushaluck anywhere except in these three NY Times articles, and a few secondary sources in Google Books that cite the times articles. Tomorrow I will explore the meaning of the story a little more.

NY Times article #1: Pushaluck's Romance
NY Times article #2: A Modern Indian
NY Times article #3:Won a White Bride