Free Louis S. Warren by Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody, the Wild West Show Page A

Bill’s Wild West show: that Buffalo Bill Cody was the savior of the settler family. The cabin rescue finale was not the only family scene in the show. White families also rode in the wagon train which trundled into the arena, and which was then attacked by Indians, who were, of course, driven off by Buffalo Bill. There was the oddly humorous and elegant scene in which Buffalo Bill, the cowboys, and the show’s cowgirls performed a Virginia reel on horseback, a tableau which suggested that settler men and women could join for courting and marriage even on the rough-and-tumble frontier. The family theme ran through acts from which Cody was absent, too. Annie Oakley spent sixteen years with the show, performing as its star shooter, and everybody knew that she was married to Frank Butler, the man who held her targets. They were a handsome, wholesome couple. The fact that she fired a gun at targets in his hands, over and over, without ever so much as grazing him, made them seem somehow weird proof of the marital covenant’s protection. Much of the time, the settler’s cabin stood in the arena from the show’s beginning, positioned slightly toward one end, so that all of the other show acts swirled around it. The audience could tell that the home was where the action would culminate. 1
    Cody cultivated the connection between Buffalo Bill and home defense for his entire public career. It was a major component of his theatrical performances, which began in 1872, and as we have seen, it was a consistent thread in the autobiography of 1879. In one of the book’s yarns about the Civil War, the spy William Cody protects the home of a Missouri secessionist from being plundered by Union soldiers, an action which left him “happy in the thought that I had done a good deed, and with no regrets that I had saved from pillage and destruction the home and property of a confederate and his family.” 2 The story was undoubtedly fictional (as we shall see), but it suggests that for Cody, family defense even trumped wartime enmity. Such a code of honor no doubt appealed to northern and southern readers alike, longing as they were for national reunion.
    Cody did not invent family defense as an entertainment attraction—he merely perfected it. The “Settler’s Cabin” finale of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show seems to have been implemented by Nate Salsbury after he became the show’s managing partner in 1884. Even then, it was hardly new. White family defense was a consistent motif in popular literature, art, and entertainment throughout the life of the republic. Myriad writers, dramatists, and artists portrayed Indian war as the necessary precursor to family salvation. In inscribing a frontier line between domestic order and savagery, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West made Cody himself into a chief bulwark of the American family. In a sense, the arc of Buffalo Bill’s life touched earth at one end with the speeding pony, at the other with the family home.
    Despite the fact that he never actually drove an Indian war party away from anybody’s home, Cody assumed the role of the white family’s defender with the natural grace that comes from experience and conviction. If he was not the first to portray frontier warfare as the fight for domestic bliss, his commitment to it reflected some belief in the essential reality of the scene. Indeed, home salvation was much on his mind as a boy.
    But the frontiersmen of myth are not domesticated. They straddle the line between civilization and savagery. In his actual life, if Cody was defender of the home, he could also be its assailant. As a teenager, he found that staving off family destruction meant earning money, a challenge which required him to leave his own home repeatedly and for extended periods. In the early 1860s, he was inspired by fellow Kansans who combined the hunt for money with the quest for revenge.
    THROUGHOUT the late 1850s, many