June 25, 2024: WesternStudying: Wild West Shows

[75 years ago this week, the first network TV Western, Hopalong Cassidy debuted. Few genres have been influential for longer or across more media, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy Hopalong and other Westerns—add your responses & analyses in the comments, pardner!]

On how a mega-popular medium can embody the worst and best of America at the same time (and in some of the same elements).

As part of this January post on origin points for Columbia Pictures (trust me, it makes sense in context), I noted that I’ve thought a good bit in recent years about how under-remembered Vaudeville is compared to its significant influence on 20^th century American culture. At least part of the reason for that gap, it seems to me, is that it can be difficult to remember older cultural forms that were based on live performance, and thus harder to pass down than media that were overtly captured and preserved (whether in print, recordings, video, etc.). And thus we’ve also failed to adequately remember a late 19^th century cultural medium that was just as popular and influential in that period as Vaudeville would become a couple decades later: the Wild West Show. As that hyperlinked list illustrates, there were numerous popular such shows touring the nation in the last couple decades of the 19^th century; moreover, the most successful of them, Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, was so popular that it staged performances just outside of the grounds of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition for the entirety of the six-month-long fair, offering as that article indicates a genuine competitor to that hugely prominent attraction.

In all likelihood, one of the specific pieces that was featured in many (if not all) of those 1893 Buffalo Bill Wild West Show performances was The Red Right Hand, or, The First Scalp for Custer. That excellent hyperlinked Time magazine article by Ijeoma Oluo (adapted from her 2021 book MEDIOCRE: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America) describes that particular performance of Cody’s in detail, as well as its links to his overarching self-mythologizing and the narratives of the American West which it and he embodied. It is of course no secret that the genre of the Western too often featured depictions of and roles for Native Americans that were stereotypical at best and white supremacist at worst, as exemplified by perhaps the single most famous recurring shot in film Westerns: Native Americans coming over a hill/ridge to threaten the white protagonists. So it’s pretty significant to note that those narratives were quite present in this early iteration of the genre (perhaps the earliest, although dime novels were at least contemporary with the Wild West Shows in the late 19^th century), and indeed that Buffalo Bill’s version was even more aggressively violent, focused not on threatening Native Americans so much as on white people’s righteous (in this highly constructed story) revenge.

There’s no getting around those discriminatory layers to both Bill and his Show and the genre of the Western more broadly, but it’s important to note that there were other, quite distinct and even opposed (and certainly more positive) ways that he and his Show engaged Native Americans. Exemplifying those more positive possibilities was Cody’s longstanding friendship with the Sioux Chief Sitting Bull, a relationship that included (but was not at all limited to) Sitting Bull’s many years of performances as part of Bill’s Wild West Show. As this piece on the Buffalo Bill Center of the West website puts it, Native American performers like Sitting Bull “generally were treated and paid the same as other performers. They were able to travel with their families, and they earned a living not possible to them on their reservations.” In this blog post on Native American pop culture performers I highlighted the actor Jay Silverheels, who had the chance to act in multiple mid-20^th century Western films and as a result help change the way that medium depicted Native Americans; Sitting Bull reminds us that there was a longstanding legacy of such performers, one that connected to the equally complex and multi-layered genre of the Wild West Show.

Next Western tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Westerns you’d analyze?