Wild West Pictures
"Wild West programs had recapped the "touchingly pathetic" story of American Indians, who were slowly but surely "passing from our gaze forever." With one more chance to tell the story, it could be Cody's legacy, his final presentation of the settlement of the West."
(Sagala, 58)
"Wild West programs had recapped the "touchingly pathetic" story of American Indians, who were slowly but surely "passing from our gaze forever." With one more chance to tell the story, it could be Cody's legacy, his final presentation of the settlement of the West."
(Sagala, 58)
The Wild West Pictures interview is also available to view on our YouTube Channel.
pp. 26-29 |
pp. 30-32 |
pp. 58-59 |
As the nineteenth century transitioned to the twentieth, an increasingly popular line of thinking held that the American frontier was no more. According to the 1890 U.S. Census, the American people had sufficiently populated the continent from Maine to California for the government to officially declare that the frontier (calculated as land settled by less than 2 people per square mile) was gone. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) argued that the frontier had been the most important factor in shaping a distinctly American character and differentiating America from Europe. In his 1893 essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History", Turner theorized that once the American frontier disappeared, the American spirit would diminish with it, and the U.S. would cease to be the dynamic country it had been in the past.
Whether Turner was right or not meant little to William F. Cody whose "Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World" celebrated a living, authentic frontier experience for sold-out performances at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago at the same time Turner first presented his "Frontier Thesis." Instead of joining Turner in sounding the alarm about the end of the western frontier, Cody capitalized on popular nostalgia for the region's past. Cody's exploits came not from a purely financial interest, however, but rather from a keen interest in preserving the history of the American West through the education of his audience. Cody recognized parts of the West were being overshadowed by modernism, particularly Native American culture and the acts of “frontier heroes,” the latter being a distinctly American "type" that he counted himself an example of. Rather than let the West, its peoples, and their unique skills be lost to history, Cody included them to the world in his Wild West exhibitions, and later in his films.
Cody's original attempts to educate his audience were very accessible, appealing to the crowd's appetite for non-stop action and the exotic. He incorporated essays regarding Native American culture into the programs for his Wild West show. In one titled “The Indian's Education,” Cody reminded his audience that Indians were “among the survivors of a fast-disappearing race; the true, and genuinely original American” but alas, “doomed... to extinction like the buffalo they once hunted,” thus justifying his inclusion of them in his show (Sagala, 29-30). After all, one could hardly separate American Indians from the West, and smartly, Cody never tried.
Later, Cody's approach was clever but also slightly paradoxical, mixing authenticity with showmanship. As Cody started dabbling in film, he realized that he could faithfully preserve western history through this new medium, which was both highly visual and permanent (Sagala, 58-59). Permanence was something his Wild West Show lacked until Edison and his team committed certain aspects and members of Buffalo Bill's Wild West to film. Cody became increasingly interested in filming re-enactments of his true experiences in the actual western locales with hundreds of Indians, an idea that eventually resulted in his feature film, The Indian Wars. Neither proving nor disproving Turner's Frontier Thesis, Cody preserved the West's dynamic past in film, making him one of the first filmmakers of the twentieth century to do so.
Selected Archival Materials
Films
La Cirque Buffalo Bill: Peaux Rouges (Lumière, 1896).Buffalo Bill's Wild West Parade (American Mutoscope and Biograph, 1901).
Buffalo Bill and Friends Visit Demaris Springs (Filmmaker Unknown, 1902).
Correspondance
Letter from William F. Cody to Clarence W. Rowley (September 24, 1913).Letter from William F. Cody to Clarence W. Rowley (October 4, 1913).
Letter from William F. Cody to Clarence W. Rowley (November 4, 1913).
Letter from William F. Cody to Clarence Buell and wife [1915].
Periodicals
"Untitled [Oh! Blow it!]." The Moving Picture World (September 10, 1910)."The Indian and the Cowboy." The Moving Picture World (December 17, 1910).
"Life of Buffalo Bill Cleaning Up." The Moving Picture World (January 14, 1913).
"Chicago Letter-Theodore Wharton's Big Job." The Moving Picture World (October 25, 1913).
More Sources