Buffalo Bill's Wild West
In 1883, William Cody, an Army scout and buffalo-hunter who was nicknamed Buffalo Bill, founded Buffalo Bill's Wild West, a traveling circus-like show that dominated American popular culture for decades. Buffalo Bill's show featured cowboys and sharp-shooters, Indians attacking stagecoaches and settlers, and mythologized reenactments of Custer's Last Stand and the Rough Riders storming of San Juan Hill. Examine the documents below to see why Buffalo Bill's Wild West captured America's imagination.
Attack on the Burning Cabin.
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The poster reads:
A FEW REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD VISIT ''BUFFALO BILL'S WILD WEST.''
1st Over one million people have set you the example.
2nd Because it is a living picture of life on the Frontier.
3rd It is an opportunity afforded your family but once in a lifetime.
4th You will see Indians, Cowboys, and Mexicans, as they live.
5th You will see Buffalo, Elk, wild horses, and a multitude of curiosities.
6th You will see an Indian village, transplanted from the plains
7th You will see the most Wonderful Riders the world can produce.
8th You will see the greatest marksmen in America.
9th You will see Indian warfare depicted in true colors.
10th You will see the attack on the Deadwood stage coach.
11th You will see the method of capturing Wild Horses AND Cattle.
12TH You will see a Buffalo Hunt in all its realistic details.
13th You will see your neighbors there in full force.
14th You will see Buffalo Bill (Hon. W.F. Cody).
15th You will see an Exhibition that has been witnessed and endorsed by. . . tens of thousands of well-informed people in Every Walk of Life.
Source: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award97/codhtml/hawphome.html
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[Buffalo Bill] presented the West as the proving ground of Anglo-American superiority. . . . The Wild West assumed a clearly stated racial and class hierarchy. To Cody's largely middle-class white audience, the Indians' atrocities and the skill of the cowboys and scouts who defeated them reaffirmed the racial superiority of white Americans over Indian savages and, by extension, over other ‘colored' races. The conquest of the West proved the superiority of white America.
Americans had long memorialized white victimization, virtually ignoring accompanying white atrocities against Indians. Buffallo Bill's Wild West, for example, regularly featured Indian attacks on helpless white settlers but never presented tableaux of white Americans massacring or dispossessing Indians. That was not part of the popular story. The Custer Battlefield became a national monument, the site of the Marias massacre, where U.S. soldiers killed 173 Blackfeet Indians, mostly women and children, in 1870, never even warranted a marker. Western mythologies effectively inverted the story of American conquest. As Richard White [another historian] argues, spectacles like Buffalo Bill's presented the American conquest of the West as a site where whites were victims and Indians aggressors.
Source: Christensen, Bonnie. Red Lodge and the Mythic West. University Press of Kansas, 2002. 21, 22
Questions:
1. Why might people in the 1890’s have been eager to watch reenactments of scenes from the “Wild West?”
2. According to the passage, Buffalo Bill’s show “inverted the story of American conquest.” What does that mean?
