Louis S. Warren (108 page)

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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

115. Russell,
Lives and Legends,
328.

116. “The Worship of Yankeedom,”
Moonshine,
Oct. 22, 1887, clipping in JCG Scrapbook, MS 58, Box 1, NSHS.

117. Reinhold Wagnleitner,
Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the
United States in Austria after the Second World War,
trans. Diana M. Wolf (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 20–21.

118. “Topics of the Week,” The Graphic, May 14, 1887, p. 502; F. C. Burnand, Records and
Reminiscences,
2 vols. (London: Methuen and Co., 1904), 1:238. I am indebted to Bruce Rosen for the vital source on Jung Bahadur's significance. Bruce Rosen, “Love for Sale: Victorian Paramours and the Marriage Market,” paper given at the Victorian Studies Association Conference, Canterbury University, Christchurch, N2, Feb. 1997.

119. R. D. Blumenfeld,
R. D. B.'s Diary,
1887–1914
(London: Heinemann, 1930), 3.

120. WFC to Stoker, n.d., Brotherton Collection, Leeds University.

121.
Illustrated Bits
(UK), May 28, 1887, p. 4.

122. Ian Bevan,
Royal Performance: The Story of Royal Theatregoing
(London: Hutchinson, 1954), 187–89; Gallop,
Buffalo Bill's British Wild West,
103.

123. Gallop,
Buffalo Bill's British Wild West,
102.

124.
Illustrated Bits
(UK), May 28, 1887, p. 4.

125. “The Jubilee,”
The World
(UK), June 22, 1887, p. 5.

126. David Cannadine, “The Context, Performance, and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition,' c. 1820–1977,” in
The Invention of Tradition,
ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 101–64.

127. “Respectful Remonstrance,”
Illustrated Bits
(UK), June 25, 1887, p. 10. The editorial appeared earlier, as “Respectful Remonstrance,” in
The World,
May 18, 1887, p. 8.

128. “Jubilation,”
The World
(UK), June 15, 1887, p. 5.

129. “What the World Says,”
The World
(UK), May 18, 1887, p. 10.

130. “Buffalo Bill on His Visit to London,”
The Era,
Aug. 27, 1887, p. 13.

131.
Illustrated Bits
(UK), May 21, 1887, p. 3.

132. Contemporaries commented occasionally on Cody's infidelities. See Kasson,
Buffalo Bill's
Wild West,
137–41. For Englishmen's fears: Ben Shephard, “Showbiz Imperialism: The Case of Peter Lobengula,” 102, in
Imperialism and Popular Culture,
ed. John Mackenzie (Dover, NH: Manchester University Press, 1985), 94–112; Fraser Harrison,
The Dark
Angel: Aspects of Victorian Sexuality
(London: Sheldon Press, 1977), 123.

133.
Illustrated Bits
(UK), July 9, 1887, p. 3.

134. Arata,
Fictions of Loss,
2–3.

135. Untitled clipping,
Sunday
Chronicle,
July 24, 1887, Annie Oakley Scrapbook, 1887–1925, BBHC.

136. “The American Exhibition and the Wild West,”
Sporting Life,
May 10, 1887, Annie Oakley Scrapbook, 1887–1925, BBHC.

137. Arata,
Fictions of Loss;
also, David Cannadine,
The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); Gareth Stedman Jones,
Outcast London:
A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society
(1971; rprt. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984); Richard A. Soloway,
Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the
Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain
(1990; rprt. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

138. Paul Reddin,
Wild West Shows
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 92.

139. “Our Drawing-Room Pets,”
Punch,
July 2, 1887, 322, clipping in JCG Scrapbook, MS 58, Box 1, NSHS.

140. “Buffalo Bill,” unattributed clipping, n.d., in Johnny Baker Scrapbook, 1886–87, WH 72, DPL.

141. At least two columnists made the connection between WFC and Cetshwayo. See “General Chatter,”
The People,
May 22, 1887, Annie Oakley Scrapbook, 1887–1925, BBHC; also “Topics of the Week,”
The Graphic
(UK), May 14, 1887, p. 502.

142. Anderson,
Race and Rapprochement,
62; Arata,
Fictions of Loss,
216, n. 44; Stoker,
Glimpse of
America,
8–9.

143.
The Times,
Nov. 1, 1887, “Letters and Invitations, 1887–88,” BBHC.

144. In the original notes for the novel, Stoker intended the posse to carry a Maxim gun, but dropped it for the American weapon. For Maxim gun, see Bram Stoker, “Dracula” MS, p. 34b, Rosenbach Museum, Philadelphia. For Winchester in the Wild West show, see “Buffalo Bill's Wild West, from the Plains of America,” 1887, M Cody Box 6, DPL-WHR, and the longer 1887 program, including an ad for Winchester guns, in “Buffalo Bill's Wild West,” 1887 program, DPL-WHR.

145. Leatherdale,
Dracula,
129–36.

146. Moretti,
Signs Taken for Wonders,
84–96; Leatherdale,
Dracula,
130–31; Stoker, “Dracula” MS, Rosenbach Museum, Philadelphia.

147. Moretti,
Signs Taken for Wonders,
84–96; Arata,
Fictions of Loss,
129.

148. Stoker,
Dracula,
225.

149. Russell,
Lives and Legends,
162–84.

150. Stoker wrote “The Squaw” in the mid-1890s, shortly before publishing
Dracula,
based on notes made years before. Charles Osborne, ed.,
The Bram Stoker Bedside Companion
(London: Victor Gollancz, 1973), 11.

151. Stoker,
Dracula,
309.

152. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 33, in
Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner,
ed. John Mack Faragher (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 31–60; Kerwin Lee Klein,
Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narratingthe European Conquest of Native America,
1890–1990
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 18–20; William Cronon, “Revisiting Turner's Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner,”
Western Historical Quarterly
18 (April 1987): 157–76; John T. Juricek, “American Usage of the Word ‘Frontier' from Colonial Times to Frederick Jackson Turner,”
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
110 (Feb. 1966). For European concepts of frontier, see Anderson,
Race and Rapprochement,
18–19; Horsman,
Race and Manifest Destiny,
35. Jack D. Forbes pointed out the similarity between Turner's frontier and European frontiers forty years ago. Jack D. Forbes, “Frontiers in American History,”
Journal of the West
1 (July 1962): 63–71; also Jack D. Forbes, “Frontiers in American History and the Role of the American Historian,”
Ethnohistory
15 (Spring 1968): 203–35.

153. “Our London Letter,” and “Arrest of M. Schnaebele of the Franco-German Frontier,” in
Penny Illustrated Paper,
May 7, 1887, pp. 290, 292–93; see also “France and Germany on the Frontier,”
Pall Mall Gazette,
April 29, 1887, p. 11.

154. Transylvania was well-known to the English public from newspaper coverage about the “Eastern Question,” the issue of how Britain should respond to the endemic racial strife of the Carpathians and the region of Europe adjoining the Ottoman Empire. Arata,
Fictionsof Loss,
113. For wilderness, see a book that Stoker consulted in his research for
Dracula:
Anonymous (A Fellow of the Carpathian Society),
Magyarland: Being the Narrativeof Our Travels Through the Highlands and Lowlands of Hungary,
2 vols. (London: Sampson Low, 1881), esp. 1:25–27. As late as the 1870s, English observers suggested an English diaspora as a way of wresting Transylvania from the twin scourges of barbarism and inefficiency. See Andrew F. Crosse, Round About the Carpathians (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1878), esp. 197–98, but also 141–42, 156, 229, 287, 352–53. Some of the more telling references to racial segmentation and race strife from other works Stoker consulted: E. C. Johnson, On the Track of the Crescent: Erratic Notes from the Piraeus to
Pesth
(London: Hurst and Blackett, 1885), 149; Emily Gerard,
The Land Beyond the Forest: Facts, Figures, and Fancies from Transylvania,
2 vols. (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1888), 2: 86–87, 112–13.

155. “Cupid at Wild West,” unattributed clipping, Thursday, April 15, 1897, “These People Make History,”
Brooklyn Daily Times,
April 12, 1897, clipping, in NSS, 1897, DPL-WHR.

156. Bram Stoker, “Dracula” MS, Rosenbach Museum, Philadelphia. Stoker,
Dracula,
9, 59.

157. Stoker,
Dracula,
42–43.

158. Stoker,
Dracula,
43.

159. BBWW 1885 program (Hartford, CT: Calhoun Co., 1885), n.p.; “every phase of border life” is in “Buffalo Bill's Wild West, from the Plains of America,” 1887, M Cody Box 6, DPL-WHR; Slotkin,
Gunfighter Nation,
75–76.

160. Hindle, “Introduction,” ix.

161. Stoker,
Dracula,
43.

162. The quotation is from the character of Dr. Van Helsing. Stoker,
Dracula,
308.

163. BBWW 1893 program, 6, 18.

164.
The Era,
April 23, 1887, clipping in Johnny Baker Scrapbook (microfilm), DPL-WHR.

165. Stoker,
Dracula,
42–43.

166. Stoker,
Dracula,
309.

167. David Mogen, “Wilderness, Metamorphosis, and Millennium: Gothic Apocalypse from the Puritans to the Cyberpunks,” 94, in
Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier
in American Literature, ed. David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993), 94–108.

168. Slotkin,
Regeneration Through Violence;
116–45, 219–22.

169. Slotkin,
Regeneration Through Violence,
esp. 219–22. Racial degeneracy was only part of a wider anxiety about the inherent political, social, and economic degeneracy of colonial societies. See Anthony Pagden, “Identity Formation in Spanish America,” 76, in
Colonial
Identity in the Atlantic World,
1500–1800,
ed. Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 51–93.

170. “Unfit amalgamation” from McCoy,
Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade,
80. Dana,
Two
Years Before the Mast,
136–37; Bancroft,
California Pastoral,
263–65, 284. For Philippines: Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the
Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 180–99.

171. Stoker,
Dracula,
79, 417.

172. At the time Stoker wrote
Dracula,
the Huns were still recalled as Asiatic barbarians who invaded the West. “Hun,”
Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 3993.

173. Arata, “Occidental Tourist,” 466.

174. Stoker,
Dracula,
25, 28.

175. So linked was the American frontier to the original frontier of Anglo-Saxon expansion that scholars on both sides of the Atlantic split their studies of Anglo-Saxon race history into two volumes: one for Europe, the other for America. For Theodore Roosevelt, the conquest of the American West essentially began on “the day when the keels of the Low-Dutch sea-thieves first grated on the British coast.” Roosevelt,
Winning of the West,
6:4.

176. Stocking,
Victorian Anthropology,
169–79; Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis is perhaps the clearest example. Turner, “Significance of the Frontier in American History.”

177. See the chart in Frayling,
Vampyres,
42–63.

INTERLUDE: BRONCHO CHARLIE MILLER

1. Sources for this account are as follows: The earliest account of Charlie Miller's life is from “Camp Sketches No. X, Broncho Charlie,” Topical Times, Sept. 3, 1887, clipping in JCG Scrapbook, MS 58, NSHS, in which readers will note that Miller claims 1860 as his year of birth and makes no mention of being a Pony Express rider; Miller's tall autobiography is Gladys Shaw Erskine,
Broncho Charlie: A Saga of the Saddle—The Life Story of
Broncho Charlie Miller, the Last of the Pony Express Riders
(1935; rprt. New York: Thomas Crowell, 1939). For parade participation, see Greater Astoria Historical Society website, “Daily Star,” March 1944, <
http://www.astorialic.org/starjournal/1940s/1944march.shtm
>. Boy Scout reminiscence is in L. I. “Rusty” Heale [actually Haak], “Broncho Charlie Whip-lit Match,” in “Letters to the Editor,”
Cody Enterprise
(Wyoming), May 26, 1997; family lore of Charlie Miller is in tape transcript of interview with Walter Miller, 1987, in “Broncho Charlie Miller,” Association Files, BBHC; also Lois Miller Ellsworth,
Tales of
Broncho Charlie: Youngest Rider of the Pony Express
(Greenfield, MA: Hollis Books, 1999); “just like gettin' home” is in Erskine,
Broncho Charlie,
248. For a measured account of Miller's life, see Christopher Corbett,
Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting
Legend of the Pony Express
(New York: Broadway Books, 2003), 231–45. My suggestion that Miller may have inspired Berger's Jack Crabb comes from my reading of Miller's frequent press, which places him, much like Berger's Crabb, at 104 years of age in 1954, seated in a wheelchair in a rest home, puffing away on cigarettes and telling tall tales. See Charlie Duprez, “Last of the Pony Express Riders,” typescript, n.d., in M206 Broncho Charlie Miller file, DPL-WHR.

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