Contemporary Images of the Indians in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show

Heather Cox Richardson

I have recently tumbled over two youtube videos that show provocative images of the Indian performers in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. These videos compile images from the collections of the Library of Congress.

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show is well

known. It was William F. Cody’s venture to cash in on the rodeos that were popular across the West. He launched the Wild West Show in 1883, promising to bring the “real” West to customers back east. He showed cowboys and stagecoach robberies and battles between soldiers and Indians, promising to eastern audiences that they were seeing the reality of life in the late nineteenth-century American West.

Historians have torn Buffalo Bill’s claim to shreds, pointing out how carefully Cody crafted the performances to illustrate his own beliefs about the meaning of America and the West. But, “true” or not, the show was a roaring success. In 1887, Cody boasted: “I kick worse than any quartermaster’s mule ever kicked if I don’t clear a thousand dollars a day.” That year, he took the show to England to perform for Queen Victoria.

The Wild West Show was popular enough that Thomas Edison expended some of his early film to record pieces of it. The first video shows images from his experiment spliced together. It reveals the performers parading through a

packed street as they entered a town. Indians and cavalrymen move in a column amid a churning throng of boys and men. It’s a male crowd; only one girl is immediately obvious, and she seems notably uncomfortable in the setting. Many modern Americans forget that, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Indians were not uncommon sights in urban America. This chaotic street scene (complete with boys darting right in front of a horse, which shies away) is an eye-opener.

The rest of the clips on the video show Annie Oakley, a cowboy riding a bronco, and two scenes of Indian dances. The dances are good illustrations that Cody’s “real” West was carefully crafted to show what eastern audiences wanted to see. The filmed dances say far more about racist audiences than Indian cultural practices.

Those dancing scenes contrast powerfully with the still images on this second video. These are photographs taken in the late nineteenth century by artist Gertrude Kasebier. Her goal was to take images of the Lakota in the Wild West Show that would reveal them as individuals. She preferred to capture her subjects at rest, without the accouterments of their stage personas. Her images are quite a contrast to those in the Edison film.

Paean to the Museum of the Fur Trade Quarterly

Heather Cox Richardson

One of my favorite publications—historical or otherwise—is the quarterly magazine of Chadron, Nebraska’s Museum of the Fur Trade. A yearly membership at the museum is $15, and it’s worth every penny, even if, like me, you live two thousand miles away from Chadron, Nebraska. It’s worth it because you get this nifty little magazine.

Nicotiana rustica

The journal is sixteen pages of totally cool information about the artifacts of the fur trade and daily life on the Plains before the twentieth century. It’s always stuff you had never even thought to wonder about. The Fall 2011 issue, for example, has an article by James Hanson on the use of “Circassian Tobacco” in nineteenth-century Russian America. This was apparently an important trade good, exceedingly popular with the Alaskan natives. Turns out it was the same form of tobacco originally cultivated in eastern America. That species, Nicotiana rustica, had been replaced in Virginia by 1620 by a milder South American species, but when eastern Americans abandoned it, Nicotiana rustica traveled to Asia and Europe where its biting flavor remained popular. The article follows Nicotiana rustica through Ukraine and back to Russian America. Five pages of text and photographs and you have learned something you never even thought to wonder about.

But the big news for me—and for anyone who teaches the history of the American West—in the Fall 2011 issue was a wonderful article by W. Raymond Wood exploring the enormous importance of cats on the frontier.

Apparently, the brown rat, also known as the Norway rat, came to the American West with Euroamericans and quickly infested local Indian communities and the frontier forts in their vicinities. In the 1830s, a man at one fort recorded the numbers of rats he trapped: in February 1836 alone he got 89. Mind you, these are just the ones he caught.

In the West, rats and the native field mice decimated stored food. One military leader complained that every day the rats ate five bushels of his fort’s corn supply. Even worse, perhaps, their tunnels undermined any man-made structure, from Mandan earth lodges to military forts.

A detail from George Caleb Bingham's painting

Such a destructive rodent infestation put a premium on cats. Quite literally, for a settler a cat could make the difference between a successful career on the frontier and bankruptcy, because only a cat could protect expensive food supplies. Cats became among the most valued of frontier possessions, as Laura Ingalls Wilder suggested when she recounted the aftermath of a rodent chewing off her father’s hair while he slept. She entitled a chapter of Little Town on the Prairie “The Necessary Cat,” and told how her father paid a small fortune for a newborn kitten to beat back the advancing mice. Thanks to Wood’s article, that passage from Wilder fits into a larger squirming, squeaking story. Now, too, George Caleb Bingham’s famous painting “Fur Traders Descending the Missouri” (1845) makes a great deal more sense . . . and it’s clear that the animal hunched on the bow is a cat, not, as some would have it, a fox.

This magazine is a little gem. I look forward to every issue.

The Plot That Would Have Changed America

Steven Cromack

Last April was the 150th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War. High school social studies teachers of the subject, and many American textbooks for that matter, tend to outline it as a conflict between North and South. In reality, the Civil War was a Western war, and one that redefined an entire nation: North, South, and most importantly, West.

Left out of the history books, and almost completely faded from historical memory, is the curious character of Asbury Harpending (who forgets a name like that?), and a plot by Southern elites that, if it was successful, would have delivered California to the Confederacy in a single move. Such an event would not only have ensured a Confederate victory, but would have fundamentally altered the course of American history.

By the 1860s, San Francisco was the heart of California. In only a decade’s time, San Francisco was the largest city on the West Coast. One historian noted, “What had taken New York 190 years to accomplish, or Philadelphia 120 and Boston 200, San Francisco had achieved only in 8.”[1] The city held three-fourths of the state’s resources and one-fourth of its population. Its manufactures generated significant amounts of goods and its businesses, farms, industries, and merchants, employed the most workers.[2] Finally, making San Francisco vital to California and the Union was the amount of gold leaving the San Francisco Bay. Each ship that left the Bay for the east coast of the United States, carried anywhere from $1 million to $3 million worth in gold. Ulysses S. Grant said, “I do not know what we could do in this great national emergency were it not for the gold sent from California.”[3]

Asbury Harpending arrived in California with nothing more than a revolver and a 5-dollar note. His memoirs, which he wrote at the end of his life, told a tale of a secret society formed San Francisco in 1861. One day, thirty men, all Southern sympathizers, gathered in the home of an unknown wealthy San Franciscan. After swearing an oath of secrecy, the unnamed leader, whom they all called “General,” gave them their orders. Each man was to assemble a band of one-hundred men and “organize an army of Southern sympathizers, sufficient in number to beat down any armed resistance.”[4] Then, together, they would seize the arsenal at Benicia, which housed all of California’s arms and munitions, and Alcatraz Island—the largest military fort west of the Mississippi.

At the start of the war, the Commander of the Pacific was General Albert Sydney Johnston. Johnson was born in Kentucky, a hero of the Texas revolution, and was in a position to hand over the entire Western coast to the Confederacy. Harpending later wrote, “This was the man who had the fate of California absolutely in his hands. No one doubted the drift of his inclinations (35).” Johnson, however, had heard rumors of a plot. According to the Congressional Record, for safekeeping, he ordered the 10,000 muskets, 150,000 rounds of ammunition, and percussion caps located at Benicia Arsenal moved to Fort Alcatraz.

If this plot had been successful, it would have meant a complete capitulation from the people of San Francisco and would have fundamentally altered the course of the war. Putting California in play during the Civil War would have altered Union strategy. Union generals would need to divert troops to California, a lengthy journey by land, and an even longer one by sea, taking soldiers away from the South. In that time, the secessionists could have consolidated their numbers, prepared for their defense, and sat and waited for the Union army. It also would have torn apart California politics, as the Democrats and Copperheads had an active presence in San Francisco and other California cities. With military might behind them, there could have been the possibility for another situation similar to bleeding Kansas. With Alcatraz and Fort Point in the hands of secessionists, nothing remaining could have protected the West Coast. In addition, the gold that exited the Bay would not have made its way to the Northern lines, but down through Arizona, New Mexico, and into Texas and the Confederacy.

Such an event would have altered the course of American history because the Confederacy might have won the war. With the plot dead, the Committee of Thirty disbanded, each going their separate way. “And the rest,” as the cliché goes, “is history.” For other stories from the life of Asbury Harpending, his memoirs, The Great Diamond Hoax and Other Stirring Incidents in the Life of Asbury Harpending, is available on Google Books.

______________

[1] Rodger Lotchin, San Francisco, 1846-1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 30.

[2] T.F. Cronise, The Natural Wealth of California (San Francisco: H.H. Bancroft, 1868), 80. For extensive descriptions of virtually every manufacture, see Chapter XI, page 596.

[3] Qtd. in Leonard Richards, The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2007), 230.

[4] Asbury Harpending, The Great Diamond Hoax and Other Stirring Incidents in the Life of Asbury Harpending (San Francisco: James H. Barry Co., 1913), 26-30.

Key Questions for a World Civ Seminar

Bill McCoy

Today's guest post comes from my Eastern Nazarene College history department colleague Bill McCoy. Bill is a PhD candidate in African history at Boston University, where he is completing his dissertation: "To Heal the Leper: The Mbuluzi Leprosy Hospital in Swaziland, 1948 to 1982." Along with teaching non-western history, McCoy has taught courses on Europe since the middle ages, world political geography, and a Swaziland travel course on the history of missions. Here, McCoy considers something that quite a few of us probably think about: how to frame our courses with key questions in mind.

This coming Fall, I have a chance to teach a course at Eastern Nazarene College titled "Contemporary Questions." It's a seminar for first-year honors students, which will (because I am teaching it) replace their general education history requirement (in our context, a survey called The West in the World Since 1500). In the past, the course has been a replacement for the general education philosophy requirement, and in the future, it might replace a literature requirement or something else, depending on the specialty of the faculty member teaching the course.

So the class is a history class, but instead of the traditional chronological survey approach, I am building the course around significant question for our contemporary world and then trying to help students work through the ways that history helps us answer those questions, even if the questions will not have definitive answers. In the past few weeks, I've been brainstorming the questions that will shape the course syllabus, but I'd love some input from others about this. What questions matter most in the world today? What reading material might students enjoy/get the most out of in a course such as this. To get things started, I'll offer a few examples of questions I've considered; I would love to get reactions to these and, especially, suggestions about other questions to add to the list:

* What is the role of geography and the environment in history?
* Why is there such massive economic inequality in the world?
* What are the causes of horrors like genocide?
* Why do we live in nation-states?
* Is patriotism a virtue?
* Why do so many people live in cities?
* Who makes history? Who matters in history?
* How have humans expressed themselves in the arts?

NPR's Studio 360 Looks at Buffalo Bill and Western Myths

Randall Stephens

This week NPR's acclaimed Studio 360 series looked at Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and some of the enduring myths of the West. The program explored the legend of this major American celebrity and tracked the career of the western, from dime novels to modern incarnations like HBO's Deadwood. A particularly interesting line the that the Studio 360 program took was the decline in the popularity of the western in the 1960s, and the western's reemergence in altered form. Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976) would have been nearly sacrilegious in an earlier era. A drunk, ego-maniacal Buffalo Bill (played by Paul Newman) staggers pathetically through this weird carnival of a film.

Buffalo Bill "was the most famous American in the world," says Studio 360, "a showman and spin artist who parlayed a buffalo-hunting gig into an entertainment empire. William F. Cody’s stage show presented a new creation myth for America, bringing cowboys, Indians, settlers, and sharpshooters to audiences who had only read about the West in dime novels. He offered Indians a life off the reservation — reenacting their own defeats. Deadwood producer David Milch explains why the myth of the West still resonates; a Sioux actor at a Paris theme park loves playing Sitting Bull; and a financial executive impersonates Buffalo Bill, with his wife as Annie Oakley."

Listen to the program here.

See Buffalo Bill-related posters, photographs, and more from the Library of Congress.

Watch the full episode of PBS's Buffalo Bill (American Experience).

Hear the Beatles rehearsal of the Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill (1968) . . . unrelated, but excellent.

The Western Image, Continued

Heather Cox Richardson

The classic version of the American Western hero is Louis L’Amour’s Flint. Flint is a westerner, adopted by a gunslinger, then educated at fancy eastern schools. He plays the eastern game, becoming a rich businessman in the cutthroat world of industry. But his life has a twist. The secret to his eastern success is that he listens to the little guy, the cabbie who hears a stock tip, the waitress who learns about a business takeover. He values them and their hard work; he treats them as equals.

When an eastern doctor incorrectly diagnoses Flint with cancer, he chucks over his fame as a robber baron to go back to his roots. There, he sticks up for the small ranchers against the big guys, backed by the eastern system. He wins, of course. He’s better with cards, guns, and women than any easterner ever born. And he’s a lot smarter.

Does this image still appeal to Americans?

This TV show (below), appropriately named Outlaw, starts this week.

The Western Tradition . . . Continued?

Heather Cox Richardson

When I teach the American West, I always

start the weeks on the American West as entertainment with “When the Work’s All Done This Fall,” the first cowboy song recorded by Carl T. Sprague. Appearing in 1925, it sold close to a million copies and remains a favorite old time western song.

I had always thought the poem on which the song was based reflected late nineteenth-century America, with its quick deaths, poverty, and sentimentality.

So imagine my surprise this summer, when I heard modern western songwriter Slaid Cleaves doing “Horses Quick as Dreams.” This seems almost to be an updated version of the classic song:

Is the song simply part of a musical tradition? Or is it a reflection of modern American culture?

The Enduring Power of the Cowboy Image

Heather Cox Richardson

Many years ago, I had the good luck to hear Werner Sollors illustrate the importance of cultural understanding in interpreting popular history. He did it by describing what a Martian would guess about American life

if his only source of information was The Brady Bunch.

The Martian would assume that American humans in the 1960s reproduced by cloning, Sollors guessed, since it was clear that the adults had no sexual contact. Male clones were always brunette and females blonde. And a Martian could easily conclude that humans kept older members of the species set off from the others in the kitchen, like a sort of pet.

I remembered Sollors’s talk recently when I discovered the new Old Spice advertising campaign. The ads have certainly hit a popular chord; the videos have gotten more than 12 million hits and have boosted sales of Old Spice by more than 107%.

And the ad campaign shows, again, just how much cultural understanding you need to make sense of popular history. This particular image plays on age-old popular stereotypes of the American West, with their heroic men and devoted women. But without that cultural knowledge, what on earth would a Martian examining modern American life through this image conclude?

"I hate history": Thinking of Ways to Get the Average, History-Hating Student Interested in the Study of the Past

Randall Stephens

I'm gearing up to teach a large West in the World since 1500, civ-style class. As usual, I know there will be dozens of students enrolled who care not a fig for history and think historical knowledge is, at best, useless trivia. "I'm a business major. Why do I need to know all this?" My work is cut out for me, as it is for other professors who will be teaching similar gen-ed classes in the fall.

I like to start off course like this with a general "Why study history" lecture. We study the past to know who we are and to know how history still shapes the present, I tell them. History is also our collective memory. Just as we think it is not best for a person to have amnesia, we also think it is best for a society to have a collective memory. I also usually touch on the chief contributions historians have made to our understanding of what it means to be human. And, I spend some time looking at the very different views various historians have concerning the same events.

This year, though, I was thinking about doing something a little different. I plan to pose some general questions/head-scratchers that might get them thinking historically about why things are the way they are and why history matters. So, for example:

In 1931 the historian Carl Becker said: "If the essence of history is the memory of things said and done, then it is obvious that every normal person, Mr. Everyman, knows some history." Do you have a family history? Do things that happened in your family in the past still shape how you interact with your mother, father, sister, brother, cousins, grandparents, aunts, and uncles?

Show the students a map of the world. Ask: Why is it that the northern hemisphere has tended to contain the wealthiest countries in the world? What light might history shed on that development? Explain Jared Diamond's thesis.

Read them a mid-19th century law on the status of women as dependents. Ask: How do we got from that point A to point B today?

Draw a long timeline, spanning back 200,000 years, the starting point of modern humans. Ask: Why it is that only relatively recently--roughly 5,000 years ago--humans began to record their history?

The historian Mary Beard says that most people today would find the "brutality toward other human beings" in the ancient world to be abhorrent. Throughout most of human history slavery and rigid social hierarchies were taken for granted. Ask: Why do modern western societies value equality and humanitarianism?

Show students some maps from the early modern era and some from the modern era. Ask: What accounts for the fundamental differences in how cartographers drew these maps? What might history tell us about the changing perceptions those in the West and those in the East had of the world?

Quote Johann Gottfried Herder: "History is geography." Ask: Is history shaped or controlled more by geography than any other force? Why or why not?

Does history have a direction? Are we heading "somewhere"? Is society getting better? Is society getting worse? How could we know one way or the other?

Needless to say . . . I'm still thinking through these.

Dispatches from the Historical Society Conference, Day 3: New Directions in the Study of Race and Slavery

Randall J.Stephens

Historians of the last two generations have been fascinated by the question of what race amounted to, or, how race was made. How was racial inferiority constructed and how did slavery take root in the early modern era? This panel, fitting with the umbrella theme of the conference, looked at some recent trends in the study of race and slavery. The three presenters skillfully spanned the centuries and ranged over several continents. (See the Youtube videos here, which record the first 10 minutes of each presentation.)

Session IVE: NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE STUDY OF RACE AND SLAVERY
Room 413-14

Chair: Mark Smith, University of South Carolina

Joyce Malcolm, George Mason University School of Law, “Slavery in 18th-Century Massachusetts and the American Revolution”

Robert Cottrol, George Washington School of Law, “Race-Based Slavery and Race-Based Citizenship: How Brazil and the United States Became Different”

Amy Long Caffee, University of South Carolina, “Hearing Africa: Early Modern Europeans’ Auditory Perceptions of the African Other”

Joyce Malcolm (George Mason University School of Law) spoke about the legacy of slavery in the North during the Revolutionary War. She began by describing the surprising number of slaves in Massachusetts. Military service and its link to freedom varied widely between the North and the South. Malcolm called on historians to closer examine what happened to black soldiers after the war. She also pointed to the need for greater scrutiny of the possibilities and limits of freedom in the emerging nation. (The last New Hampshire slaves, noted Malcolm, died in the years before the Civil War.)

Robert Cottrol (George Washington School of Law) invited historians to think of the issue of slavery and its

legacy beyond the antebellum narrative and beyond the South. He called on historians to look at Latin America, opening up a bigger, hemisphere-wide picture. Slavery in Brazil, for instance, took place for a much longer period and was much more intensely tied to the African trade. Comparisons and contrasts between national legal systems explain some basic differences between North and South America. America's egalitarian ideals were embarrassed by slavery. Slavery's justification in the US revolved around race and black inferiority. Brazil, by contrast, was not a liberal society and was not as contradicted by the institution of slavery. Cottrol also asked several larger questions that are part of a broader project, including: "What is slavery's impact in terms of race relations?" And, he wondered: "How has slavery continued to shape the Western Hemisphere up to the present?"

Early in the European-African encounter white perceptions of Africans were shaping ideas of racial difference. Amy Long Caffee (University of South

Carolina) discussed the auditory notions English traders had of Africans in the early modern period. White traders and travelers reported their views to a larger public back in England. The documents of such venturers, observed Caffee, are "rich with sensory details." These reports speak volumes about what Englishmen thought of as a "barbarous land and people."

Summarizing the panel Mark Smith (University of South Carolina) commented that slavery was not an anomaly in the 19th century. It was the norm. Smith also linked the stereotypes, sensory and otherwise, of the 19th century to similar ones in the 20th century.

During the q and a session, participants considered where the field is headed. Malcolm thinks that more connections will be made between regions and eras. She also believes that the stereotypes of the antebellum period will be challenged more. Cottrol suggested that changes in graduate education--encouraging students to ask larger questions and requiring language work--could shift the field. Smith finally pointed out that emancipation and questions of slavery and freedom will possibly become a greater part of how historians in the area work.

Jared Farmer's On Zion's Mount Wins Parkman Prize

Last week Harvard University Press announced that Jared Farmer's book has won the Francis Parkman Prize. Well deserved indeed.

Jared Farmer has been honored with the Francis Parkman Prize by The Society of American Historians for his 2008 book On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape, which details how Mormon settlers in Utah endowed their new homeland with a spiritual geography—how they made themselves "native" in a strange land—and how their effort to confer meaning on their new dwelling place came at the expense of the Utes they displaced, people whom, ironically enough, they considered their "spiritual kin." Farmer, Assistant Professor of History at The State University of New York at Stony Brook, shows how this pattern, this imbuing of the American landscape with "Indian" lore that hadn't existed until Euro-American settlers showed up, was repeated time and time again across the United States, and how the legacy of these cultural acts remains with us today.

In January 2009 Farmer's essay, "Displaced from Zion: Mormons and Indians in the 19th Century," appeared in Historically Speaking.