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Wild West Shows To Circuses

The Springfield Daily Leader quotes Cody as saying: "Springfield has always had a place in my heart" when he last appeared here in 1915 with the Sells-Floto Circus.

The intensely exciting, evolving whirligig world of the circus in nineteenth century America is the dream of the father of the American Circus, Phineas T. Barnum, (1810-1891). And how the circuses loudly proclaimed themselves!: Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus... The Highest Class Show on Earth; Bentley's 'Big' Vodvil and Dog Circus ... Positively Most Beautiful Troupe of Trained Dogs in the World; The Leviathan of Shows. Howes' Great London Circus and Grecian Hippodrome .... How, also, they blare the merits of their performers!: Miss Kate Fisher, the Great Protean Actress and Daring Equestrienne!; Pennick the Expansionist, or Human Balloon; and the Flying Concellos. Peerless, Daring Artists of the Flying Trapeze.

Out west of the Mississippi, that legendary Western frontier of song and story, was theatrically brought to life by Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. This Western version of circus entertainment popularized cowboys and Indians, stagecoaches and sharp-shooting, indelibly implanting these images onto the American consciousness and foreshadowing the movie Western. Thus the legendary West was formulated, and later sustained, celebrated, and endlessly reformatted on movie screens throughout the 20th Century. Also, gunshots and hoof beats were heard from radios across America, and, of course, during the second half of the Century, came the sights and sounds of gunfights, stagecoach chases, and saloon brawls to families gathered before their television screens.

Whether sawdust or sagebrush, ladies in tights standing on their horse's backs or cowpokes leaning from their saddles while lassoing varmints, acrobats balancing on the high wire or war-painted warriors chasing berserk stagecoaches, it's all one - The Greatest Show on Earth!

All the World's a Frontier

Although the continued creation of new attractions made good marketing sense for Wild West shows, it threatened to undermine their claim of authenticity and realism. Buffalo Bill promoted his displays as educational exhibits and not shows — in fact, it was called the Wild West, never the Wild West Show. All of the shows employed real Western figures, reenacted historical and current events, and claimed that they were reporting, not staging; edifying, not diverting. Journalist Brick Pomeroy praised this incomparable representation of Western pluck, coolness, bravery, independence and generosity" in the 1894 Buffalo Bill program, remarking, "All of this imaginary Romeo and Juliet business sinks to utter insignificance in comparison to the drama of existence as is here so well enacted."

American riding styles and frontiersmen were exotic when compared to the industrial East Coast, but familiar nonetheless. The acts - Indians attacking stagecoaches, Indians attacking villages, Indians attacking Custer, cavalries saving the day — were restagings of the real drama of American settlement. As Pawnee Bill put it, "All is real. Everything is a fact ... It is an object lesson in the story of a great people, a narrative told and illustrated by themselves."

But once Wild West shows introduced foreign acts, what was to distinguish them from the parade of eccentricities that was the circus? At first the incorporation of foreign acts presented a dilemma. Certain acts such as the African bushmen, South Sea islanders, and Australian aborigines were clearly considered exotic; but how to classify the Cossacks, these frontier settlers and irregular cavalry from the far reaches of the Russian empire? As expert horsemen, the Cossacks resembled American frontiersmen, but they wore strange hats and had long beards.

Cossacks performed an ancient style of trick riding called dzhigitovka, which probably originated in the Caucasus or Central Asia. At full gallop, they stood up, stood on their heads, jumped to the ground and back to the saddle, and fought with swords. The Daily Tribune reported that they were worthy to be compared to American horsemen: "These stalwart cowboys of the Russian steppe equal and excel the 'cowpunchers' of the West in displays of horsemanship."

The paper also cautioned readers to remember that the difference between a Wild West show and a circus was that in the circus, performers did things they learned only for the circus, while Wild West stars "perform feats which are learned for quite other purposes, and, for the most part, for some important purpose."

By 1898, Pawnee Bill was staging incidents from the Spanish-American War such as "The Fall of Luzon" with "genuine Filipino soldiers" and "actual participants in the battle." Buffalo Bill soon added a Cuban contingent to his show. The Washington Observer noted the connection between contemporary reality and performance in July 1898: "Every act on the program is suggestive of war, which is perhaps the secret of the wonderfully increased success of the 'Wild West' this season." After the war Teddy Roosevelt himself got into the act, leading Rough Rider Reunions, which appear oddly similar to Wild West shows with their titles such as "Grand Patriotic Production in Five Pictures of the Battle of San Juan" and all the riding, roping, and parading.

Beginning in 1901 Cody staged "The Allied Powers at the Battle of Tien-Tsin or the Capture of Pekin," loosely based on the rescue of diplomats who had been taken prisoner during the Boxer Rebellion in Peking the year before. In a colorful outburst of international cooperation, U.S. infantry and marines, British marines, Welsh fusiliers, East Indian Sikhs, and German, Russian, French, and Japanese forces stormed large gates representing moats and scaled the city wall to rescue the envoys. The show's program called it "China's audacious affront to the civilized world, by her barbaric attack upon the official representatives at court." Cody coaxed American Indians to play part of the Chinese.

Pawnee Bill mounted a Russo-Japanese War act in 1904, but was reluctant to take sides between "the mighty Slav race and the Yankees of the East." The Washington Post claimed that the crowd failed to applaud the Cossacks and that popular sentiment was on the side of the Japanese, despite the fact that "the plainsmen from Siberia demonstrated their equestrine superiority."

A few years later, with World War I approaching, Wild West shows changed direction again. Cody switched to a theme of preparedness and set up recruiting stands at his show to encourage volunteers to sign up. The program notes promised "life in the trenches; the perilous work of the scout and the sharpshooter; charges by cavalry and mounted infantry; artillery in action, and other spectacular incidents of an offensive and defensive army." But soon, Americans realized that life in the trenches was hardly an entertaining spectacle.

The 101 Ranch show went one step further. Anticipating a war with Mexico as a part of World War I, show owner Joseph Miller telegraphed President Wilson with an offer to raise and equip a contingent of Native Americans, Oklahoma cowboys, and Mexicans to head south. Wild West shows lost their European performers, and the Miller Brothers had their animals confiscated in Britain for the war effort. Reality finally crowded performance off the stage.

Thomas M. Barrett is a professor at St. Mary's College in St. Mary's City, Maryland. He received a $4,000 summer stipend from NEH for his research. The above is adapted from his book in progress, Wild and Crazy Guys : Russia and Eastern Europe in American Popular Culture.

With his exhibition, "Wild West," he toured America and Europe for twenty years. Thousands of people experienced the talents and traditions of legendary Wild West figures like Sitting Bull, Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane. The Wild West Show was considered a circus, by some, for a ring was set up inside a tent, and within it were demonstrations of horse-riding, cattle-roping and mock battles between cowboys and Indians. Buffalo Bill made a fortune from his show, which he invested in lands in Nebraska and what is now Cody, Wyoming.

Catlin began displaying and lecturing on his Indian paintings in the early 1830s. He soon discovered that the addition of artifacts spruced up his performances and by the late 1830s had added live Indians to the show. Emphasizing the diversity and complexity of Indian cultures, Catlin's shows raised public understanding of and empathy for Indians. Yet, as Reddin notes, he had a "two -- pronged relationship with [them]: he detested what happened but used it for personal gain" (p. 21). By the mid-1840s, Catlin's shows in Europe featured Indians on horseback, "sharpshooting and warmaking" - a full -- fledged precursor to Cody's entertainment endeavors four decades later. But by the late 1840s and early 1850s, Catlin, whose traveling shows and various book publications had failed to ensure him financial stability, began engaging in costly and unsuccessful land promotion schemes - a strange precursor to Cody's failed Bighorn Basin irrigation project a half century later. Catlin died poor and unfulfilled in 1872, the year that also marked the beginning of Cody's Wild West show career.

The early popularity of the show was astounding. During the summer 1886 season, Cody was daily filling a thirty-thousand-person arena in Staten Island, New York. At the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, the show was seen by nearly six million spectators. The show's flexibility, as it reconfigured to meet the varied tastes of audiences in different European countries, was remarkable, as was the promotional blitz that accompanied it. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, Reddin notes, "Cody ... had become an idyllic reminder of the past" (p. 139). Cody tried everything to revive the show, including a series of farewell tours starting in 1910. In 1916 he joined the competing Miller Brothers' 101 Ranch Wild West show. He died early the next year. Like Catlin's story, Cody's is one of slow decline and compromised principles.

The Miller Brothers' 101 Ranch launched their first show in 1905. By the late teens it had developed into a spectacle with heavy emphasis on the Far East as well as the Wild West. But, as Reddin notes, by the 1920s the Wild West show format was losing its distinctiveness, since most circuses featured a Wild West segment and the Miller Brothers' show included a circus. The genre's heyday had passed, and the Miller Brothers, in replacing the vague, mythic western locale of Cody's shows with a specific regional location, the Oklahoma plains, failed to revive significant interest.

Nonetheless, the Miller Brothers provided the missing link that connected a flailing Wild West show tradition with the Western movie industry. The link was Tom Mix, who learned the tricks of the trade, invented a glorious past for himself at the 101 Ranch, and performed in the Miller Brothers' shows. Mix experienced a meteoric rise to movie stardom in the 1920s, but by decade's end his career was in decline; he never effectively made the transition to talkies or to more complex plots that stretched the moral dualities of the classic Western format. By 1929 Mix was appearing in Wild West shows again, claiming that they were his first love and a more authentic experience than the movies.

Reddin effectively examines a genre that not only reflected and shaped cultural trends in the United States, and European reactions to the American West, but also reflected and shaped the nation's worldview. "During their heyday," he concludes, "Wild West Shows parlayed a nationalistic message that sanctioned America's efforts to grow, on this continent and elsewhere, and to kill those who stood in their way. Consequently, scores of Native Americans, Spaniards, Boxers, and Mexicans fell before Americans in Wild West Show arenas" (p. 221). A more extended conclusion exploring further the links between Wild West shows and rodeos, the growth of rodeo as a spectator sport and as a televised sport, and the periodic revival of the Western movie genre would have been welcome. Still, Reddin covers a good deal of ground, and the desire for extended coverage of these legacies is a testament to the book's quality and readability. Scholars and general readers interested in the West and in the broad currents of American thought and culture would do well to read this thoroughly researched and well -- written study.

Montana: The Magazine of Western History, Summer 2001 by Wrobel, David. Copyright Montana Historical Society Summer 2001. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.

The Circus From Rome To Ringling

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