Louis S. Warren Read Free Page A

move the cast, props, animals, and equipment, including electric generators and a traveling kitchen, was more racially integrated than any real western town.
    To many urban dwellers, it looked oddly familiar. The late nineteenth century saw a vast expansion in the U.S. population, much of it fueled by immigration from eastern and southern Europe. By the 1890s, the need to sell tickets to this increasingly diverse, ethnically divided public inspired Cody to expand and complicate his show drama, and its historical myths, by incorporating phalanxes of new riders from Eurasia and the Americas. As we shall see, his efforts in this direction were in some ways analogous to those of American historians, notably Frederick Jackson Turner, who sought to expand the nation’s historical consciousness beyond the eastern seaboard, and to incorporate at least a limited range of non-English immigrants in national histories and myths.
    Thus, Buffalo Bill’s show community became a touchstone for Americans seeking to understand their own rapidly urbanizing, racially conflicted, industrial communities and country, and for Europeans contemplating a host of concerns, including industrialism, colonialism, race progress, and race decay.
    Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show inspired much criticism as well as elation, and it allowed its audiences to contemplate the downside of progress, and the dark possibilities of Cody’s ambition. Buffalo Bill, the icon of heroism, was also a harbinger of American expansion, which Europeans did not always welcome. As we shall see,
Silence of the Lambs
was not the first time that an artist imagined Buffalo Bill as vampire.
    This is a book, then, about how a man crafted a life and a story to reflect and express one another. It is also a story of how the entertainment he devised allowed others to join him in fitting life to story, story to life, and the many ways the resulting spectacle resonated with a vast transatlantic public. Throughout, I borrow a technique from recent scholarly biographies that situate their subjects in changing social and political contexts, to read the life as, in part, an expression of its era. 10 Thus we shall explore William Cody and the communities he created or moved through, from frontier Kansas to the Wild West show and beyond. Examining Cody on the Plains and on the road in this manner illuminates not only his actual accomplishments, but also the sources of his entertainment inspiration. At the same time, it reveals the simultaneous development of his life narrative and his potent show business product, and the many congruences and conflicts between them.
    This book is divided in three parts. Part I explores the origins of the Wild West show in William Cody’s life on the Great Plains, particularly in the Indian wars. Part II explores his development of frontier melodrama in the theater, and the origins and meaning of his Wild West show. Although modern Americans take for granted the appeal of western mythology, it was no simple proposition to stage western history for the amusement of paying audiences in the early 1880s. Learning from the experience of cast members, who did much to educate the show’s management about how to succeed, Cody and his partners worked hard to create a show that both explained America’s place in the universe and tied it to Cody as a real westerner who lived his country’s seminal adventures.
    Part III, the book’s final section, explores the decline of William Cody and America’s signature entertainment after 1900, when his life increasingly diverged from notions of American progress. His divorce trial presaged the failure of his biggest business ventures, the town of Cody (which succeeded only at the expense of its most famous founder), his mines in Arizona, and ultimately the Wild West show itself. The book closes with an explanation of why the strategies that had won him so much adoration and so much cash should fail him