Louis S. Warren Read Free

notoriously enigmatic. His private life, and its relation to his performance career, has eluded most scholars. A key feature of my approach is to explore the most intimate social bond in Cody’s life, his marriage, which began during his time in frontier Kansas and continued through all his years in show business. Having a respectable family was fundamental to Cody’s appeal for his earliest entertainment patrons. As he developed a public image as defender of the white family, his private life as patriarch of a real family became wedded to his authenticity. Thus the tensions and divisions within that marriage, which was often troubled, offer us a valuable, and seldom seen, window into the personal cost of maintaining the illusion of a life lived in accordance with national myth. Although few remember it today, Buffalo Bill Cody sued his wife for divorce in 1904, with calamitous results. The testimony from this courtroom drama provides rare insight into just how commingled public and private life became for the most public of Americans, while illuminating both the opportunities his lifelong performance offered him, and the constraints it ultimately imposed.
    For all the energy and ink I have devoted to explaining how Cody located himself in a national story, learning to perform it on the stage and off, I am equally intrigued by the question of how and why some of America’s most marginalized peoples, including poor cowboys and even poorer Indians, carved out a place for themselves in Cody’s story. This phenomenon was central to Cody’s success. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show could not have functioned had it not become the destination for dozens of Pawnee Indians, and subsequently for hundreds of Lakota Sioux (including Sitting Bull, who toured with the show in 1885). Just as important was the show’s appeal to American cowboys, Mexicans vaqueros, women (including not only Annie Oakley but Indian women, too), and, later, Cossacks, gauchos, and others. These show performers necessarily shaped Cody’s performance imagination, leading him to reshape his personal mythology and his life story accordingly.
    Why would Indians join the Wild West show, where they reenacted their own defeat? For that matter, what led real cowboys and all the other “frontier types” on display in the arena to drop their day-to-day lives and tour with a traveling amusement? Who was Annie Oakley, and how did her own leap into the Wild West show shore up her own career and the profile of the show?
    On the simplest level, all the show’s entertainers needed the money. Other scholars, notably George Moses, have argued that Indians saw the show as a means to perpetuate their traditional culture. 9 In this and in other ways, for Indians as for other cast members, the show’s nostalgic celebration of a mythical, vanished frontier became a limited means to a better future West. Wild West show performance offered Indian and non-Indian alike a host of opportunities for earning money, making political connections, learning new skills, and being or becoming American, a process cast members could be profoundly uneasy about. The Wild West show was partly a product of investor capital and Cody’s genius. But it was also the product of a potent alchemy, in which the limited options facing rural whites, Mexicans, and Indians combined with their longings, which were as limitless as the western horizon.
    Of course, just as the show could not happen without the cast, it was also impossible without the audience. We shall explore who they were, and how show acts appealed to them. For all the thrill of watching the drama in the arena, the camp of the Wild West show became its premier attraction, with hundreds of cowboys, Indians, Mexicans, and later Cossacks, Arabs, Germans, and others living in a mobile village under the management and direction of a frontiersman. This traveling show community, which required three trains to