Wild West Shows

Wild West Shows

Sources

Colorful Effects. From 1883 to 1916 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show enjoyed a place as the “National Entertainment.” Ownership and the show’s title changed several times, but the show always contained cowboys performing feats of skill and daring, stereotyped Indians attacking white settlers, and well-staged battle scenes between the U.S. Cavalry and Indian warriors. After seeing the show Mark Twain wrote: “It brought back to me the breezy, wild life of the Rocky Mountains, and stirred me like a war song.”

Cody’s Achievement. This type of entertainment started as a frontier celebration held in North Platte, Nebraska, in 1882 by William F. Cody. A former army scout and hunter, he claimed to have killed 4,280 buffalo in an eight-month period, thus earning the nickname “Buffalo Bill.” The success of the 1882 performance encouraged Cody and Dr. W. F. Carver, a crack marksman, to organize a travelling show named the Wild West, Rocky Mountain and Prairie Exhibition. The first performance was given 17 May 1883 in Omaha, Nebraska, and featured Capt. A. H. Bogardus and his four sons as a sharpshooting family. By that summer the show was in Brooklyn, New York. The next year Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show was established as a permanent touring show that performed for extended periods in amusement parks, at world’s fairs, and in similar places. In 1885 Annie Oakley joined Cody’s show, as did Sitting Bull. During Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee (1887) the I queen and her family were thrilled by the performers; six years later the show appeared successfully outside the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Makeup of the Show. For almost thirty years the show toured the United States and Europe. It featured horses and riders and held equal appeal for American crowds and European royalty. It was a logistical nightmare transporting, feeding, costuming, and organizing hordes of cowboys, Indians, sharpshooters, horses, buffalo, and hundreds of other elements necessary to evoke a world of parades, races, and reenactments such as stagecoach robberies and Custer’s Last Stand. Later, the show dramatized such historical epics as the Charge at San Juan Hill and the creation of the Congress of Rough Riders of the World.

Western Propaganda. As a master showman, Cody displayed to his audiences that the West was a place of glory and adventure, an enormous territory reserved for the equestrian exercises of Indians, cowboys, and outlaws. As his own best publicist, Cody built on his life as a child of the West and as a genuine scout and hunter, adventures fictionalized in dime novels and in his own embellished autobiographies. His interpretations of the West were accepted as genuine and authentic, especially from audiences on the East Coast and in Europe. It is undeniable that Cody was a friend of the American Indian, but he devised his show to coincide with contemporary opinions of cowboys and Indians; the Wild West Show did little to raise the Indian’s image in the public’s esteem. It has even been argued among historians that the Wild West Show and its portrayal of the Western frontier shaped the American psyche since violence and the “white man’s superiority” were constant themes of the show. This theory has weakened with time, but the stories and legends that Cody and his show perpetuated continue to be a part of the American myth.

“ANNIE GET YOUR GUN”

Phoebe Anne Oakley Moses was born on 13 August 1860 and was one of the most phenomenal shots in the history of firearms. She first gained national attention when she won a shooting match in Cincinnati against a crack shot named Frank E. Butler, whom she later married. Until 1884 she and her husband made tours of vaudeville shows and circuses. In that year Oakley auditioned for Buffalo Biirs Wild West Show. Buffalo Bill was immediately smitten with this pretty but shytwenty-four-year-old woman who could sight with a hand mirror and shoot backward as her husband threw glass balls in the air. (She could also shoot them from the back of a galloping pony.) At thirty paces she could shoot the thin edge of a playing card, a dime tossed in the air, or the lit end of a cigarette. She toured with the Wild West Show for seventeen years, with Buffalo Bill giving her top billing as “the Peerless Lady Wing-Shot.” Buffalo Bill himself called her “Littie Missy” while Sitting Bull, the Lakota tribal leader, adopted her as a member of his tribe, giving her the name Watanya Cicilla, or “Little Sure Shot” During the European tour of the Wild West Show in 1887, the Prince of Wales presented Oakley with a medal. In Berlin she obliged Crown Prince Wilhelm by shooting a cigarette from his lips, (After the prince became Kaiser Wilhelm II and World War I erupted in Europe, Annie was quoted as saying, “I wish Fd missed that day.”) The holes punched into complimentary tickets reminded people of the bullet holes she fired into playing cards, and free tickets became known as “Annie Oakleys.” In 1935, nine years after her death, Hollywood made a movie of her life, and in 1946 Irving Berlin made her the subject of a successful Broadway musical, Annie Get Your Gun.

Sources: John Culhane, The American Circus: An Illustrated History (New York: Holt, 1990);

Shtri Kasper, Annie Qakley (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992).

Sources

Buffalo Bill and the Wild West (Brooklyn, N.Y: Brooklyn Museum, 1981);

Rupert Croft-Cooke and W. S. Meadmore, Buffalo Bill: The Legend, the Man of Action, the Showman (London: Sampson Low, Marston 1952);

The Cultures of Celebrations, edited by Ray B. Browne and Michael T. Marsden (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1994).