There’s No Business Like Show Business, Buffalo Bill–Style

His museum in Cody spotlights his larger-than-life bio, his Wild West show, and why Annie Oakley wished she’d killed the Kaiser when she had the chance.

I think I’ll give readers a few days free of the Biennale. Buffalo mozzarella might be delicious, but today Buffalo Bill beckons via the Buffalo Bill Center for the American West. I visited earlier this summer and wrote then about its top-notch collection of Western art, beautifully arranged in the center’s sprawling campus in Cody, Wyo., but the place is five museums in one, known as the Center for the West. Today I’ll look at galleries on the life, times, and immense fame of Buffalo Bill Cody (1846–1917).

Italy won’t be far. Cody is a story of world-size adventure and grit. He once established a Kansas boom town that he named Rome. It went bust. Years later, and what a wonderful American story, his name was on the marquee at the Vatican, where he and his Wild West show performed for the pope. He’d later hit Milan, Turin, Naples, Bologna, Ravenna, and Verona, where 65,000 saw him in the town’s ancient amphitheater. And Cody called his gun, a Springfield Model 1866, Lucretia Borgia, the Italian noblewoman portrayed as a vamp and murderess in a Donizetti opera he loved.

From 1872 to 1913, permutations of his Wild West show traveled 250,000 miles. “I determined to give people of the East some idea of the West and the doings here . . . cowboys and buffalo . . . a lariat cast by one who knew how to do it” and more. Buffalo Bill was probably the most famous American of his age except for a president or two. He’s been dinged and dissed by grievance pimps, and his last bit of spotlight was in Silence of the Lambs. Time for a look that puts fact and fancy and fraud in their proper places. There’s so much grievance politics and grift surrounding the history of the American West.

The Buffalo Bill center is fantastic at taking the prosaic and making it universal. That’s one reason the entire complex is so appealing. Cody’s adventure in life started on the eve of the Mexican War, in 1846, proceeded to the Bleeding Kansas conflict over slavery in the 1850s, and ended with the full flower of American show business, in the year we entered World War I. He was the child of pioneers, a boy cowpoke, a scout, a buffalo hunter, a whiskey runner, a fighter in the Indian Wars, an entertainment entrepreneur, an actor 24/7, an international superstar, and a tourism titan.

The museum starts with a gallery called Becoming Buffalo Bill. Pajama Boys, Emilies, and they/thems, be warned, keep close to your fainting couches. Cody might not have ridden for the Pony Express at age 13, but he rode hard and long, barely a teen, carrying messages for abolitionists, evading pro-slavery Missourians, called Pukes, and working as a boy teamster bullwhacking wagons from Fort Leavenworth, Kan., to Denver, Colo. He was an optimist with wild-horse spirit. The Cody family was middle class but not bourgeois, his father a farmer, speculator, and Free Soil agitator who opposed the expansion of slavery into western territories. The standards weren’t of the open-range variety — ratty — but of boomtowns with more rogues than schoolmarms. Papa Cody was once knifed at a meeting in Leavenworth when he made an abolition speech.

Cody’s niece started organizing a museum in Cody very soon after he died, so she had leads on Buffalo Bill’s material culture. On view are boots, snowshoes, bolo ties, spurs, lariats, handcuffs, poker chips, Bill’s dishes, teapot, and blankets, and even his tooth powder. Lots of people like relics but I look at history and art. What history — Buffalo Bill has a dash of Zelig in him — and he’s the work of art.

At 20, Bill married a woman with Victorian values but could never stay put. He earned cash not working nine to five but through a dozen hustles, among them buffalo hunting. He was a good shot and a fast and nimble rider. Cody killed, by his count, more than 3,000 during his year or so on the job. The meat went to feed Union Pacific Railway workers. He had a company butcher assigned to him. It was work and big-game hunting, but that’s what people did then. Destroying the American bison, which nearly happened, wasn’t part of a much-vaunted genocide. Nothing on the Western plains was ever that organized. On the ground, things were chaotic. The entire Army postwar was around 17,000 men, as ragtag as they could be.

Before long, a new name, Buffalo Bill, stuck. And he hadn’t even set foot on stage!

The museum doesn’t pick apart his 1879 autobiography, but we learn he wasn’t really in the Pony Express and wasn’t really that much of a war hero, though he did indeed shoot, kill, and scalp the Cheyenne warrior Yellow Hair at the Battle of Warbonnet Creek, a skirmish in 1876, three weeks after Little Big Horn, famously shouting “First scalp for Custer!” Later, he reenacted the fracas on stage and, with a grasp of Victorian melodrama, waved the actual scalp.

There’s a section on Cody’s time as an Army scout in the late 1860s into the early ’70s. A scout wasn’t merely a pathfinder or a guide. The best were white Indians, civilized but by second nature a Native with Native knowledge of the land and how to live and fight. Possibly the scouts were mixed-race. Bill was different in that he had few Native friends and spoke no Native languages, but he absorbed a lot and was intuitive. His eyesight was telescopic, and he had a knack for reading the land, which looked flat but was pocked by gullies, mole hills, and surface ridges. By nearly all accounts, he was a superb scout, knowledgeable, skilled, and brave, but he was never technically in the Army. His Medal of Honor for gallantry is on loan to the National Medal of Honor Museum. Congress stripped Cody and nearly a thousand others of their medals in 1916 when it changed the criteria, but his was restored in 1989.

Cody became famous because of a fluke. He’d met dime-store novelist Ned Buntline on a train in 1869. They chatted, and from the conversation Buntline wrote Buffalo Bill, King of the Border Men. It was adapted into a play that premiered at the working-class-oriented Bowery Theater in New York in 1872. Cody happened to be in New York and went to the performance. He was called onstage. A nice tingle flowed from his booted toes to his Stetsoned brow. Within months, he was onstage in his own show, opening in Chicago. Within a year he was a star.

Cody didn’t exactly invent the Wild West show. They’d been around as modest things for at least a generation. The most durable and best were based on the life and times of Davy Crockett, but Crockett himself went into politics, another kind of acting, before his heroic last stand at the Alamo. In the 1870s, Cody produced and starred in Western melodramas, touring the country and, off-season, guiding celebrities.

In 1883, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West debuted. That was Cody’s goldmine and hallmark show. It was outdoors, with Plains animals, bison included, trick performances, sharp shooting, rope games, rodeo with moose and bears in addition to horses, and reenactments. “Custer’s Last Stand,” a train robbery, and, later, the charge up San Juan Hill were favorites. The finale often was a skit called “Attack on a Settler Cabin,” an Indian assault on an innocent family cabin, with the kidnapping of women and children, and then a rescue, Cody at the helm. The shows lasted at least three hours. Billboards, licensing deals, celebrity endorsements, and spotlights on Native performers and cameo appearances by Sitting Bull made for win after win in the theater marketplace.

Cody also pioneered the concept of the celebrity brand in these early days of mass entertainment. His flowing hair, that Stetson, a face that was both rugged and pretty, his devil-may-care mustache and goatee, beaded buckskin coat, and boots were made for the stage and for mass media. He’s head of a line that includes Mark Twain, Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh, and, since she’s in the news, Dolly Parton.  He’s famous not only for being famous, or famous as an actor, but as an icon of a zeitgeist.

I didn’t know the extent of the Wild West show’s travels, so the 25-foot lithograph poster promoting its appearance before Queen Victoria on May 11, 1887, was a surprise as an event and a stunner as an object. It used multiple wood blocks for brilliant color, and what a production that show must have been. It was part of Victoria’s golden jubilee and her first public appearance since Prince Albert’s death, in 1861. She loved the Native war dances.

Annie Oakley (1860–1926), born Phoebe Moses, joined the troupe in 1885 as Cody sought to domesticate a show high on gore and what was called centaurism, a 19th-century term I didn’t know. Coming from the half-man, half-horse creatures of Greek myth, “centaurism” defined old-time, manly courage, intrepidity, and strength rooted in a prairie spirit. Oakley feminized gunplay — she was the great trick shooter of her age — and empowered women. Pretty and diminutive, she stepped on stage waving and blowing kisses, dressed with bourgeois modesty but with sass in that she wore a Stetson and carried a rifle, and within seconds, she snuffed a candle with a whizzing bullet. She shot holes through playing-card aces, shot from behind, shot while riding a horse, and, in 1887, performing at Queen Victoria’s jubilee party, shot a cigarette out of the mouth of the queen’s grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm. In 1918, with America at war with the Germans, she said she wished she’d killed him. She stayed with Cody’s show, often with equal billing with Buff himself, until 1901. Her gun and riding dress are on view.

Was Buffalo Bill a ham? Of course he was. He was a natural on stage, but his splendid buffalo-hide coat with beaver-fur trim is splendid and from 1870, when he was a mere Army scout. It’s got hand-stitched glass beadwork in red and blue patterns and a fringe of narrow leather strips. He knew what looked good and knew he had charisma. The coat, his beaded and embroidered shirts and white angora chaps, and a selection of beaded, fringed gauntlets are all on view.

Cody hired Native actors starting in 1874, a lot of them, and he stayed clear of atrocities that Natives committed, of which there were many, often directed at frontier innocents and often at other Natives. By and large, Cody’s Natives were portrayed as primitive, honest, and fair but bound to lose, fade, and disappear given modern times that couldn’t be stopped. In 1885, he agreed that the Battle of Little Big Horn had not been a massacre but a fight that Custer lost fair and square. The Indians were hounded and had no choice. He takes the side of Western civilization as inexorable and good and preferable, but he looks at the inevitable losers with empathy.

What about horse fashion, saddle-style? Buffalo Bill loved his horses, and he pined to meet at St. Peter’s Gate those who had died before him, and he was mighty partial to equine bling. Saddles were practical but also, like high-end cars, finely crafted status symbols. The finest of Buffalo Bill’s saddles on view was made around 1893 by Collins & Morrison in Omaha. It’s hand-tooled leather with a fender embossed with an image of Cody riding a horse, and with decorative angora saddle bags that bounced and flowed as he moved. There’s a rose-and-vine design and silver medallions. The bridle is braided with horsehair “brush frills.”

Two saddles made by Edward Bohlin — from Cody, Wyo., but known as Hollywood’s saddler to the stars – in the collection. One is a spectacular “Mission saddle” with handmade silver medallions, each one depicting one of the California missions. It’s from around 1930. Bohlin saddled up Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and John Wayne. A few years ago, the Center for the West got the workshop equipment — 3,000 tools and some beautiful saddles — of Victor Alexander, another artisan saddler.

As a nice touch, Thom Ross’s 1999 painting, Burial at Sea, is on view. It visualizes the at-sea funeral of Cody’s veteran showbiz horse Old Charlie, who died aboard the steamship Persian Monarch during the Wild West show’s return crossing from Europe to New York in 1888. Cody wrapped his old pard’s body in an American flag. “Your willing speed, tireless courage . . . you have never let me down,” he eulogized, and as a true cowboy admitted that he loved his horse more than anyone. He doubted claims from those who smugly pontificate that animals have no souls.

Though his Wild West show was nearly bankrupt when it ended, and he’d made lots of bad frontier investments, Cody didn’t die broke. He was well off and very much involved in causes like local irrigation and oil drilling and in promoting Yellowstone tourism starting in Cody. His legacy? Audiences left his shows believing true stories mixed with what might’ve been exaggeration, wishful thinking, or lies, but they were there to hear and see a thrilling story unfold. Cody the man and Buffalo Bill the actor and character merged into one swashbucklin’, bronco-bustin,’ gun-slingin’ savior of the fair sex and Christian civilization. It’s a story worth telling and the Center for the West presents it well. It’s asking us to look and think, as all the best museums do.