Authors: John Beckman
Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings
(1880) became one of the century’s best-selling books. In the book’s opening tale, “
Uncle Remus Initiates the Little Boy,” the latter’s mother, Miss Sally, finds him leaning his head against Remus’s arms, gazing into his kindly “weather-beaten face,” and hearing about the time Brer Rabbit robbed her own garden to throw a dinner for
Brer Fox—who in turn tries to make a dinner of Rabbit. But the lesson is that Rabbit always slips away. Rabbit always outwits Fox in the end, “en Brer Fox ain’t never cotch ’im yit, en w’at’s mo’, honey, he ain’t gwine’ ter.” The story never reveals Miss Sally’s reaction to the glorification of her garden thief, but this bold “initiation,” taking place right under her nose, tells young readers that these cautionary tales aren’t intended for their mothers.
Of all the diluted “family fun” of the Gilded Age, Harris’s Brer Rabbit
tales may have been the most socially subversive. His tricksters didn’t teach you how to climb the corporate ladder. Writing under the cover of a fawning old “darky” (Harris’s word)—blacking up with the masquerade of hokey false innocence that middle-class audiences had applauded for decades—Harris celebrated the
pranks, rebellion, flirtations, risks, jokes, fiddling, dancing, mockery, and indefatigable hedonism of “
de funniest creetur er de whole gang.” While overtly racialized through Uncle Remus’s black culture and often impenetrable dialect, these naughty beast epics had a broad appeal for all of the nation’s Victorian children: even in a world of starchy manners, where the rich and powerful call all the shots, they said the smallest and smartest creatures in the forest can, at their own risk, sport the highest prestige.
Children also liked it that Uncle Remus was black. Samuel Clemens was there in the spring of 1882, at the house of
George Washington Cable, when a group of them came to hear Uncle Remus. They looked with “outraged eyes” upon the “
undersized, red-haired and somewhat freckled” Harris, who was too shy to open his mouth in public. (Harris also had a stutter.) “Why, he’s white,” they complained. Clemens said he understood their outrage. As a fellow admirer of Uncle Remus, Clemens, like thousands of other readers, had come to believe they were “personal friends,” and here was this stammering white journalist. This trickster’s humbug was shocking even to the pupils of Brother Rabbit.
“
Well, I tell you dis,” Remus cautions in
Nights with Uncle Remus
(1883), “ef dese yer tales wuz des fun, fun, fun en giggle, giggle, giggle, I let you know I’d a-done drapt um long ago.” There were serious lessons to be learned from Brother Rabbit, lessons never intended for little white boys. But even—especially—Brother Rabbit’s
fun,
the same fun that electrified antebellum slave quarters, sent readers a penetrating message. The pursuit of pleasure on one’s own terms—not P. T. Barnum’s terms, nor B. F. Keith’s—sometimes comes at a personal cost: embarrassment, hurt feelings, broken bones. But the benefits include a personal freedom that can’t be bought at any price. Brother Rabbit was no “respectable” white trickster like
Tom Sawyer, but once he had gotten into the American mainstream, he kept popping back up again—perhaps most tenaciously as
Bugs Bunny.
……………
BOLDER THAN THE
CIRCUS
, rawer than vaudeville, more “genuine” than Uncle Remus, was
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. The show opened in Omaha in 1883 with a flagrant insult to Barnum’s gimcrackery: “
No Tinsel, No Gilding, No
Humbug! No Side Shows or Freaks!” Here was
genuine American
fun
—thrills, spills, and spectacular clashes between rowdy cowboys and noble savages. The Omaha headlines responded in kind: “Eight Thousand Attend the Initial Performances, and Go Wild With Enthusiasm—the Races, Fights and Feats of the Big Amusement Hit.”
Colonel William Cody was no P. T. Barnum, no B. F. Keith. This ringmaster was himself the real, rawhide deal, at least according to his big-talking
Autobiography,
which appeared in 1873 as a realist foil to the various popular novels featuring the thirty-three-year-old legend. The story it told (and sold at the show) tintyped the West in grand escapades that appealed to middle-class American dreamers, and many of them appear to be true. When Cody was seven, in 1853, his father built a log cabin in the Kansas Territory, and the boy took an easy shine to frontier life. He aspired to the westerner’s long-haired, buckskin-clad elegance, to “
the belt full of murderous bowies and long pistols,” a look he would eventually make iconic. His daily exposure to “the rare and skillful feats of horsemanship,” he wrote, “bred in me a desire to excel the most expert,” which eventually he did. He kept constant acquaintance with Indian boys who schooled him in archery and a bit of Kickapoo, and allowed him to “[take] part in all their sports.” He told of a childhood fraught with violence, as between the “mobs of murder-loving men” who wanted Kansas open for slavery and opponents like his father, who was stabbed on a platform for making an anti-slavery speech. (This one was true.)
Then, of course, there was violence with Native Americans, but is it possible that Cody, fatherless and eleven, was overtaken by “
red devils” and had occasion to kill his “first Indian”? Biographers dispute this story. Fewer, however, have challenged his claim to have ridden, at thirteen, for the
Pony Express. This too-delicious-to-be-false episode, which stars
young Cody making the Express’s longest ride ever and working under Twain’s favorite desperado, Slade, came to signify the Express itself—its youth, its danger, its daredevil audacity. Its reenactment was the signature event of his show; histories of the Express cited it as fact; and as late as 2000 a respected biographer honored it with a fastidious chapter, only to have it debunked in 2005, when
Louis S. Warren showed with disappointing certainty that during those years Cody “
was in school.”
But even as he exaggerated his later-life exploits—tacking zeroes onto Indians’ headcounts, decorating his gruesome buffalo slaughters with impossibly acrobatic flourishes—there was no disputing the frontier butchery that paid for his reputation. Strapping and handsome with his long flowing locks, sporting decadent weapons and fringe, Cody stood for western extravagance. He strutted the frontiersman’s dangerous fun. He didn’t swear, but he drank and fought, and he loved to stage a practical joke. In September 1871, on a
buffalo hunt with General
Philip Sheridan, Cody pulled an elaborate prank reminiscent of Dan De Quille’s at Carson River. Having riled up “
Mr. McCarthy,” a New Yorker in their party, with rumors of violent Indians in the region, Cody arranged for twenty-some
Pawnees, who were in league with a captain he knew, to “throw blankets around them, and come crashing down upon us, firing and whooping in true Indian style.” The joke got out of hand, and “two companies of cavalry” were sent in pursuit, but Cody, as he told it, headed off disaster.
It was Cody’s flair for such bullish theatricality that had him less than one year later exploiting the new road-show industry and staking his claim in the emerging star system. Thanks to
Ned Buntline’s
dime novels—yes, Ned Buntline of the Astor Place riots—“Buffalo Bill” was now a household name, and easterners clamored to see the legend in the flesh. Accompanied by fellow scout
Texas Jack Omohundro, Cody played out scenes from his personal adventures in
Scouts of the Prairie,
a play Buntline himself threw together in an afternoon. They fist-fought, wrestled, fired live rounds, and hurled hackneyed obscenities like “
Death to the Indians!” But for all of the stage show’s mawkish melodrama—which early reviewers mercilessly detailed—realism was Cody’s ace in the hole. He would step out of character and mug for the audience. Between seasons, he would be back on the trail, hunting, scouting, and working
up material that blended seamlessly into his dramas. Most notably, in the summer of 1876, he wrapped his season early to join the western wars that brought Custer’s defeat at the Little Big Horn: adorned in his flashy stage clothes, he was out scouting
Cheyenne warriors when he was stood down by the young Indian chief Yellow Hair (Cody called him “Yellow Hand”), who recognized his face and wanted to fight. Cody shot the man at twenty paces, and “
jerking his war-bonnet off … scientifically scalped him in about five seconds.” He branded this achievement “The First Scalp for Custer” and worked it into the next season’s performance—“a noisy, rattling, gunpowder entertainment,” he called it, “all of which seemed to give general satisfaction.” In the years to come he expanded his cast to include fellow gunslinger
Wild Bill Hickok and hand-picked
Lakota actors from the Indian Territory.
By 1882 he had outgrown the stage. A national population, riven by the Civil War and waves of immigration, still struggling to recover from the Panic of ’73, took comfort in this dashing frontier hero who bragged of America’s manly triumphs. There was money to be made from his heroism. All he needed was an open arena and a good supply of cowboys and Indians. In recent years he had become partner in a ranch on Nebraska’s
Dismal River. Cody himself was a reckless horseman who groused about the “
hard work” of ranching (“I could not possibly find out where the fun came in”), but he was fascinated by the cowboys’ antics in their downtime: “
broncho riding, roping, racing, riding wild steers, swimming contests.” This was the genuine cowboy fun he imported for his show, along with “a bunch of outlaw cow horses.” His hired Indian actors followed a similar pattern. Having learned on the boards that Native Americans could be sold as symbols of vanishing nobility (as well as of ruthless savagery), Cody joined the Barnums and other showmen who had been sensationalizing this culture for decades. His respectful treatment of the many Indians he hired for the Wild West show—to parade in full dress, to engage in staged battles, to compete in fair-and-square foot and horse races—earned him lifelong appreciation among various western tribes. With hard-won permission from the federal government, even the outlawed
Sitting Bull joined his show for one year in 1885.
During its infamous first season, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West caused a
national thrill, though it failed to lasso the respectable audiences that Cody knew it would need to survive. As a large-scale road show it outshone Barnum. Cody borrowed some of Barnum’s best tricks, such as his techniques for moving animals in boxcars, but he traded the big-top for the wide-open sky and told a manly, white-supremacist story that, as Warren argues, soothed the anxieties of an urban middle class.
Against popular fears that boys and men were becoming “neurasthenic” milksops, Buffalo Bill and his handsome “centaurs” celebrated the virility of the American male. Against the dread of runaway immigration, his noble white cowboys staged glorious triumphs over the threat of racialized others—over the Native Americans and Mexican “vaqueros” who played his road agents and cattle rustlers. In truth, Cody’s cast of western toughs couldn’t live up to this white-hat myth. They drank like real cowboys all throughout the season, legendarily devoting one boxcar to liquor. They let their violence leak into the arena, publicly abusing their animals and their assistants. And the program itself showed little restraint, promising spectacles of killing and “torture.” Newspaper reporters noticed less-than-savory crowds swarming Cody’s bloodsport spectacle, just the thing to keep nice families away.
But Samuel Clemens, America’s first source for Wild West high jinks, attended the show two days in a row and wrote Cody a fan letter in 1884 that served as publicity for both mythmakers. “
It brought vividly back the breezy wild life of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains,” he wrote, “and stirred me like a war-song.” “The show is genuine,” he testified, “wholly free of sham and insincerity.” Most stirring for Clemens, as he reported it, were the curiosities his book
Roughing It
had made iconic, the “
pony expressmen” he had glorified with shameless hyperbole and the “bucking horses,” which he claimed, in an allusion to his own famous “Mexican Plug,” were “painfully real to me, as I rode one of those outrages once for nearly a quarter of a minute.” Most potent for Clemens was the show’s nationalist splendor, its “purely and distinctively American” entertainment. He signed the letter with his brand (“Yours Truly,
Mark Twain”), thus giving Cody tacit license to use it as a blurb.
Cody took note. He inflated the show’s patriotic image and made it worthy of this celebrity endorsement. He also enlisted showman Nate
Salsbury, who had gotten his start as a minstrel performer, to clean up the show’s act for Victorian consumption. Salsbury forbade the cast to drink. He retained many of the show’s original thrills—Bill’s Express ride, his
Buffalo Hunt, and the breathtaking Deadwood stagecoach attack that gave select audience members the rides of their lives—but he set it to the music of a cowboy orchestra, adding a dainty Virginia reel on horseback and for a “grand finale” having Cody and his cowboys save a white frontier family from Indians. Salsbury killed much of the show’s genuine danger, and also its indulgence in reckless fun, but its new patriotic tribute to pure domestic values would have won even B. F. Keith’s approval.
The show could now be sold as “
America’s National Entertainment” and boast its educational value for children. It also attracted a prized demographic that hitherto had eluded Cody: women. It wasn’t until 1885, however, when he discovered the small, young, pretty, frugal, sprightly, demure, but sharpshooting
Annie Oakley, that Cody was ultimately able, in Warren’s terms, to “
domesticate” the Western image. In Oakley’s clever hands—the same hands that embroidered her stage
costumes and served tea to reporters in her humble trailer—even the deadly, phallic rifle took its place as a household appliance. With the help of Oakley, the ruder
Calamity Jane, and a supporting cast of female performers, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show cracked the mainstream code. No longer a celebration of the masculine abandon that galloped from one firefight to the next, it repackaged the frontier as a rousing triumph of the orderly American home.