Louis S. Warren (100 page)

Read Louis S. Warren Online

Authors: Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody,the Wild West Show

Tags: #State & Local, #Buffalo Bill, #Entertainers, #West (AK; CA; CO; HI; ID; MT; NV; UT; WY), #Frontier and Pioneer Life - West (U.S.), #Biography, #Adventurers & Explorers, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Fiction, #United States, #General, #Pioneers - West (U.S.), #Historical, #Frontier and Pioneer Life, #Biography & Autobiography, #Pioneers, #West (U.S.), #Civil War Period (1850-1877), #Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, #Entertainers - United States, #History

3. Roger A. Hall,
Performing the American Frontier,
1870–1906
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 28.

4. Russell,
Lives and Legends,
183.

5. Cody recalled bowing from the box, but the
New York Herald
says only that “strange to say, the hero of the play was present in a box, in company with the writer of the story [Ned Buntline], and the dramatizer, Mr. Fred G. Maeder.” “Amusements,”
New York
Herald,
Feb. 21, 1872, p. 5.

6. Cody,
Life of Buffalo Bill,
276–78; Russell,
Lives and Legends,
191.

7. For claims of election to the Nebraska legislature, see Cody,
Life of Buffalo Bill,
319; BBWW 1895 program, 10; for comparisons to Washington, Jackson, and Lincoln, see BBWW 1909, both in WFC Collection, WH 72, Box 3, DPL-WHR.

8. Cody,
Life of Buffalo Bill,
311.

9. Cody,
Life of Buffalo Bill,
324.

10. Cody,
Life of Buffalo Bill,
324–25.

11. Sagala,
Buffalo Bill, Actor,
44–46.

12. Hall,
Performing the American Frontier,
22–48.

13. Cody,
Life of Buffalo Bill,
327.

14.
Chicago Times,
Dec. 18, 1872, quoted in Sagala,
Buffalo Bill, Actor,
46.

15. For stage profits, see Sagala,
Buffalo Bill, Actor,
209.

16. Kit Carson Cody was born on Nov. 26, 1870; Orra Maude on Aug. 15, 1872. See Yost,
Buffalo Bill,
43.

17. WFC testimony, p. 29.

18. Cody recalls they moved to Rochester in 1873, but he missed the date by a year. According to the
Rochester Democrat and Chronicle,
March 11, 1874, the Cody family moved to Rochester that month. WFC testimony, Folder 2, p. 29; Sagala,
Buffalo Bill, Actor,
103.

19. “Sharp Pursuit of Indian Thieves,”
New York Times,
June 9, 1870; “Sheridan's Buffalo Hunt,”
New York Times,
Oct. 7, 1871, p. 11.

20. Webb,
Buffalo Land,
149.

21. Oliver Knight,
Following the Indian Wars: The Story of the Newspaper Correspondents Among
the Indian Campaigners
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960), 321; Beau Riffenburgh,
The Myth of the Explorer: The Press, Sensationalism, and Geographic Discovery
(New York: Belhaven, 1993), 58; Hall,
Performing the American Frontier,
53; David Rains Wallace,
The Bonehunter's Revenge: Dinosaurs, Greed, and the Greatest Scientific Feud of the
Gilded Age
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 4–10.

22. “The Grand Duke's Hunt—General Sheridan and ‘Buffalo Bill' Lead the Way—At Grand Battue on the Plains,”
New York
Herald,
Jan. 14, 1872, p. 7. See also “The Grand Duke's Buffalo Hunt,”
New York Herald,
Jan. 15, 1872, p. 7; “The Imperial Buffalo Hunter,”
New York Herald,
Jan. 16, 1872, p. 7; “Alexis' Grand Hunt,”
New York Herald,
Jan. 17, 1872; “Bos Americanus!,”
New York
Herald,
Jan. 18, 1872, p. 3; “Nimrod Alexis,”
New York
Herald,
Jan. 22, 1872, p. 7.

23. “The Grand Duke,”
New York Herald,
Feb. 13, 1872, p. 3; “Amusements,”
New York Herald,
Feb. 13, 1872, p. 4.

24. “Buffalo Bill's Best Shot,”
New York Times,
March 9, 1872, p. 5; also “Buffalo Bill's Best Shot,” March 10, 1872, p. 5, and “Buffalo Bill's Best Shot,” March 11, 1872, p. 5.

25. “An Immense Cattle Drive,”
New York Times,
July 21, 1880, p. 1; “Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack,”
New York Times,
Oct. 24, 1880, p. 3.

26. Quote from Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace,
Gotham: A History of New York City to
1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 947; Mary C. Henderson, The City and
the Theater: New York Playhouses from Bowling Green to Times Square
(Clifton, N.J.: James T. White and Company, 1973), 135.

27. Cody,
Life of Buffalo Bill,
320.

28. Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 2; Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness:
Burlesque and American Culture
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 46–51.

29. David Grimsted,
Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture,
1800–1850
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 85–86; Allen,
Horrible Prettiness,
51.

30. Hattie C. Fuller to Nate Salsbury, May 7, 1868, Box 1, Folder 2, Papers, in NSP. In the cousin's hometown, in Iowa, “The People generally—with the exception of the lower classes” were “very bitter against it.” Hattie C. Fuller to Nate Salsbury, Jan. 8, 1870, Box 1, Folder 3, NSP.

31. Rosa,
They Called Him Wild Bill,
162–69. For an account of capturing buffalo for Barnett's show, see Ena Raymonde Ballantine Journal, entry of June 15, 1872.

32. Cody,
Life of Buffalo Bill,
320.

33. Frank North, “The Journal of an Indian Fighter: The 1869 Diary of Frank J. North,” ed. Donald F. Danker,
Nebraska History
39, no. 2 (June 1958): 87–178.

34. Lawrence Levine,
Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 21.

35. Melvin Schoberlin,
From Candles to Footlights: A Biography of the Pike's Peak Theatre,
1859–1876
(Denver: Old West Publishing Co., 1941), 50; also Rourke,
American Humor,
108–15.

36. Schoberlin,
From Candles to Footlights,
53.

37. Goodrich,
Black Flag,
114.

38. In
Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill,
86, Don Russell speculates that Cody saw the play in St. Louis. The play's staging in Denver is in Schoberlin,
From Candles to Footlights,
47.

39. C. Robert Haywood, Victorian West: Class and Culture in Kansas Cattle Towns (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), 174–78.

40. Holmes,
Fort McPherson,
73.

41. Cody,
Life of Buffalo Bill,
327.

42. “The Imperial Buffalo Hunter,”
New York Herald,
Jan. 16, 1872, p. 7; also Sagala,
Buffalo
Bill, Actor,
64; Philip J. Deloria,
Indians in Unexpected Places
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 58–60.

43. Undated clipping, “May Cody,” Notices of Buffalo Bill Season of 1879–80, BBHC.

44. Richard Slotkin,
Gunfighter Nation,
70–71; also Peter H. Hassrick, Richard Slotkin, Vine Deloria, Jr., Howard R. Lamar, William Judson, and Leslie Fiedler,
Buffalo Bill and the
Wild West
(Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 1981).

45. “Scouts of the Prairie” n.d., New Haven, CT, clipping in WFC Scrapbooks, Stage Play Notices and Reviews, 1875–80, BBHC.

46. Hall,
Performing the American Frontier,
61.

47. Schwartz,
Culture of the Copy,
212. My discussion of authenticity borrows from Philip J. Deloria,
Playing Indian,
101–5; T. J. Jackson Lears,
No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and
the Transformation of American Culture
(New York: Pantheon, 1981), 57; Miles Orvell,
The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture,
1880–1940
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), xv–xix; Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New
Theory of the Leisure Class
(New York: Macmillan, 1976), 91–107.

48. Odell,
Annals of the New York Stage,
9:168, 218, 225–26.

49. Sagala,
Buffalo Bill, Actor,
329; Odell,
Annals of the New York Stage,
9:278, 290, 349.

50. Odell,
Annals of the New York Stage,
9:276.

51. Sagala,
Buffalo Bill, Actor,
330; Odell,
Annals of the New York Stage,
9:328.

52. Orvell,
Real Thing,
50.

53. Orvell,
Real Thing,
55–56; also Walter Benjamin's “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Walter Benjamin,
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections,
ed. Hannah Arendt (1955; New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217–52; see Jennifer Price,
Flight Maps,
for thoughtful essays on this kind of imitation in the late Victorian age and our own.

54. Orvell,
Real Thing,
57.

55. Odell,
Annals of the New York Stage,
10:217, 328.

56. Roger Hall maintains that the authentic Cody displaced the faux Cody, and that professional actors ceased to play “Buffalo Bill” by the summer of 1873. Hall,
Performing the
American Frontier,
67. Nevertheless, the play was reprised in New York by Studley and Dowd in 1876 and '77, and presumably elsewhere by others. Odell,
Annals of the New
York Stage,
226, 344.

57. In June 1885, A. H. Sheldon and Co., a vaudeville troupe, performed
Buffalo Bill's Last
Shot
at Henry Miner's Theatre in the Bowery (Odell,
Annals of the New York Stage,
12: 531). From September 7 through 12, 1891,
Buffalo Bill Abroad and at Home
was playing at Bennett's Casino, in Brooklyn, a variety house which featured in subsequent weeks a leg-less dancer, a male impersonator, and Irish dialect comedians. Odell,
Annals of the New
York Stage,
15:252–53.

58. J. M. Burke to Jack Crawford, March 5, 1877, M Crawford Box 1, DPL-WHR.

59. Odell,
Annals of the New York Stage,
9:560.

60. Odell,
Annals of the New York Stage,
9:570.

61. Odell,
Annals of the New York Stage,
9:560.

62. Cody,
Life of Buffalo Bill,
335.

63. Grimsted,
Melodrama Unveiled,
195.

64. John Burke to “Captain Jack” Crawford, March 25, 1877, M Crawford L, DPL-WHR.

65. Role book, “Buffalo Bill in Life on the Border,” MS 126, WFC Collection, Box 1, Folder 4, Colorado State Historical Society, Denver, CO.

66. Sagala,
Buffalo Bill, Actor,
131–33.

67. Sagala,
Buffalo Bill, Actor,
117, 129.

68. Kit Carson, Jr.'s prospects were not helped by his arrest for striking his wife with intent to kill in 1879. W. F. Cody to Sam Hall, July 5, 1879, Box 1/6, WFC Collection, MS 6 Series I:B, BBHC.

69. The Buffalo Bill Combination took home profits of $13,000 in 1877, and over $50,000 in 1880. Russell,
Lives and Legends,
257; Sagala,
Buffalo Bill, Actor,
209.

70. Robert Jenkinson Hicks to A. E. Sheldon, June 21, 1936, MS 58 WFC Collection, NSHS.

71. Richard Slotkin,
Gunfighter Nation,
11–16, 74–81.

72. “The Indian War,”
New York Herald,
July 23, 1876, p. 7; Don Russell,
Lives and Legends,
224, n. 11.

73. J. M. Burke to Jack Crawford, March 5, 1877, M Crawford Box 1, DPL-WHR.

74. Darlis A. Miller,
Captain Jack Crawford: Buckskin Poet, Scout, and Showman
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 25.

75. Sagala,
Buffalo Bill, Actor,
143; White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,” 35.

76. See R. B. Davenport to Jack Crawford, March 7, 1877, M Crawford Box 1, DPL-WHR; S. R. Shankland to Jack Crawford, Nov. 5, 1877, M Crawford Box 1, DPL-WHR. Darlis Miller says that Crawford's regrets prevented him from capitalizing on the scalp. Miller,
Captain Jack Crawford,
60–61.

77. WFC to J. Crawford, Aug. 7, 1877, Box 1/3, WFC Collection, WH 72, M Cody L Box 1/3, Western History Collection, DPL-WHR.

78. Jack Crawford to Mrs. Nate Salsbury, March 16, 1907, in NSP.

79. “The Drama of the Future,”
New York Times,
April 6, 1873, p. 4.

80. Sagala,
Buffalo Bill, Actor,
163.

81. Cody,
Life of Buffalo Bill,
73–77.

82. Grimsted,
Melodrama Unveiled,
172, 227–28.

83. Cody,
Life of Buffalo Bill,
362–63; WFC to “Captain Jack” Crawford, April 22, 1879, M Cody L, Box 1, DPL-WHR. Miller, Captain Jack Crawford, 210; Rosa, They Called Him
Wild Bill,
288–89.

84. Cody,
Life of Buffalo Bill,
306.

85. Jay Monaghan,
The Great Rascal: The Life and Adventures of Ned Buntline
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1951), 147–49.

86. “Prairie Scouts,” n.d., n.p., WFC Scrapbooks, Stage Play Notices and Reviews, 1875–80, BBHC.

87. Quoted in Sagala,
Buffalo Bill, Actor,
235.

88. Sagala,
Buffalo Bill, Actor,
180–81, 197.

89. Halttunen,
Confidence Men and Painted Women,
188.

90. Halttunen,
Confidence Men and Painted Women,
185–88.

91. Jay Monaghan,
Custer: The Life of General George Armstrong Custer
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1959), 358.

92. Ena Raymonde Ballantine Journal, Dec. 30, 1872, MS 1730, NSHS.

93. Ena Raymonde Ballantine Journal, Oct. 4, 1872, MS 1730, NSHS.

94. Everett Dick,
Sod House Frontier,
367.

95. The quote is Halttunen, summarizing Goffman, in
Confidence Men and Painted Women,
186.

96. David Nasaw,
Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements
(New York: Basic Books, 1993), 13.

97. Nasaw,
Going Out,
14.

98. Nasaw,
Going Out,
18.

99. Sagala,
Buffalo Bill, Actor,
59–60, 132.

100. Untitled clipping, n.d., n.p., WFC Scrapbook, Stage Plays and Theater Reviews, 1875–80, BBHC; for complaints of critics see no title, n.d., n.p., WFC Scrapbook, Stage Play Notices and Reviews, 1875–80, BBHC.

Other books

Down Among the Dead Men by Michelle Williams
Drop Dead Chocolate by Jessica Beck
Turning Payne by Chantel Seabrook
The Boat of Fate by Keith Roberts
Veteran by Gavin Smith
Heartsong by Debbie Macomber