[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 20th
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 19th 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 19th 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 19th
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-20th
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?
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