It Was a Most Thrilling Sight!

As I have written in a previous post, my great-grandmother Dorothy (Dollie) Loud grew up on cavalry posts across the western United States and, for high school, attended boarding school in Omaha, Nebraska. While Dollie was in Omaha during the mid-1890s, a particular highlight came when she and some of her school friends attended Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, most likely in 1896, when the show toured the Western states.

Dorothy (Dollie) Loud, c1890s. Longley family photo.

As Dollie described the scene in her memoir:

My Father was a very good friend of Buffalo Bill's and I had the great pleasure of being asked to ride in the stagecoach in his show, the old Deadwood Coach, and there was a scene in the show where the Indians attacked this stagecoach and we were riding like Sam Hill in circles, expecting it to go over any minute. I was black and blue for at least three days. Some thrill! (Longley n.d.)

While most audience members did not get to ride in the stagecoach, Dollie’s enjoyment of the show was shared by many. Over the 30 years of its existence, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West toured across the United States and Europe, attracting millions of attendees, for most of whom the show was their only experience of the American West.

Unknown photographer. “Buffalo Bill and Members of the Wild West Cast with the Deadwood Stage Coach.” In Walsh, Richard J., with Milton S. Salsbury. 1928. The Making of Buffalo Bill: A Study in Heroics. Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, p. 260.

Wild West shows were popular in the late 19th century, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was the first and by far the most famous of them, providing a template for other shows to follow. Launched in 1883, the show quickly became popular in the United States and then, in 1887, went to London. There the show was performed for Queen Victoria, who enjoyed it so much that she asked to see it again a month later. From 1889 to 1892, the show toured across continental Europe, exposing Europeans to its mythic depiction of the American West. Returning to the United States, what was now called “Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World” had a triumphant run across the street from the grounds of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and then set out on annual tours of the country through the 1890s. [1] The mid-1890s, when Dollie Loud would have seen the show, were the peak of its popularity and success (Blackstone 1986; Reddin 1999).

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was quite a spectacle. For the price of 50 cents for adults and 25 cents for children, attendees could see several hours of horse racing, trick riding, and cattle roping as well as a herd of bison, which had by the 1890s nearly become extinct. An opening parade highlighted expert riders on horseback from all over the world. Sharp-shooting exhibitions were put on by Johnnie Baker and Annie Oakley, both of whom Dollie got to meet. Most importantly, the heart of the show was the set-pieces—among others, the attack on the Deadwood stagecoach that Dollie experienced, Indian attacks on a settler’s cabin or a wagon train, and a re-enactment of the Battle of Little Bighorn. These thrilling vignettes confirmed audience beliefs about the dangers of the Western frontier, despite the fact that, by the 1890s, there was little frontier left in America (Blackstone 1986; Reddin 1999).

“Advertisement of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.” September 27, 1896. Omaha, NE: World Herald, p. 10.

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West presented itself as a true depiction of the American West, and much of its legitimacy came from the fact that Buffalo Bill was himself a frontiersman. William Cody was born in Iowa in 1846, but his family moved to Kansas Territory when he was a boy. Following his father’s early death, [2] Cody went to work as a messenger for a company that hauled freight by wagon. He served in the Union Army during the Civil War and remained with the army after the war as a scout, which is likely how Dollie’s father, a cavalry officer, became acquainted with him. [3] Cody also had a contract to provide railroad workers with bison meat, and his success a hunter gave him his nickname. When Cody turned to show business, he was able to point to his experiences on the Western frontier for credibility, and his fame was only enhanced by his appearance as the hero of a series of dime novels (Blackstone 1986; Reddin 1999).

Brisbois, Alfred, and Charles D. Mosher, photographers. c1880s. William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody. Chicago, IL. Photo from Milner Library Special Collections, Illinois State University.

If the 1890s were the peak of the Wild West’s popularity, the next decade was its downfall. The cost of moving the show—with its 200 to 300 cast members, scores of horses, and enormous tents—from place to place was enormous, and Cody, now nearly 60, was finding the physical demands of the show and constant touring to be challenging. 20th century audiences also seemed less eager to attend, particularly in the Western United States, where large annual rodeos like Cheyenne’s Frontier Days had begun to offer similar entertainment featuring local heroes. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, in fact, spent much of the first decade of the 1900s touring Europe and finally went bankrupt in 1913 (Blackstone 1986; Reddin 1999).

Scholars suggest that the popularity of Buffalo Bill’s West in the 1890s was due, at least in part, to the anxiety experienced by many Americans as their nation rapidly became more urban and industrialized. It was in 1893 that historian Frederick Jackson Turner proposed his famous thesis, which links American democracy to its frontier spirit and suggests that the closing of the frontier would mean that Americans needed new challenges. Turner’s argument has been rightfully criticized as Eurocentric and overly simplistic, but it seems indisputable that mythic ideas of the Western frontier were, and continue to be, important to American identity and how America is viewed by the rest of the world (Reddin 1999).

Sadly, the Western myth as presented by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West is one in which men are depicted as violent and individualistic, women as helpless victims, and Native Americans and other minority groups as villainous savages. Buffalo Bill routinely hired Native Americans to perform in the Wild West, and the opportunity to see “real Indians” was an important draw for the show (Blackstone 1986). This policy ironically provided needed work for people whose land had been appropriated by the American thirst for Western expansion but only at the cost of portraying themselves and their cultures in caricature.

For Dollie Loud, these stereotypes would have been less jarring than they would be today, since they reflected the public attitudes of her time. For her, the Wild West show seems to have been primarily a memorable experience. Her description of the show is reminiscent of the way teenage girls in the 20th century have responded to musical stars from Elvis and the Beatles to Taylor Swift, reflecting the celebrity of Buffalo Bill himself. As Dollie said in her memoir:

Father had told Buffalo Bill that I was there and he sent me a box ticket for his show and I asked my girl friends to come to the show and we sat up there in this box. During the performance, Buffalo Bill rode up to the box and I had not told the girls that I thought this was going to happen. It had happened to Mother and Father. He came up on his beautiful white charger right in front of the box, and he swept off his large white hat and bowed to us girls, while his horse stood on its hind legs. Oh, Boy! What excitement! All for the benefit of us girls in that box. It was a most thrilling sight! We thought it was the greatest thing that ever happened (Longley n.d.).

[1] Theodore Roosevelt’s cavalry regiment, raised in 1898 for the Spanish-American War, borrowed its “Rough Riders” nickname from Buffalo Bill.

[2] I was interested to learn that Cody’s family were vehemently anti-slavery. In fact, his father’s death resulted in part from an incident when he was stabbed while making an anti-slavery speech at a local store.

[3] Cody and Dollie’s father John S. Loud were also both high-ranking Freemasons, which is another way they could have met.

Unknown artist. c1899. Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World. Image from the Library of Congress.

Works Cited

Blackstone, Sarah J. 1986. Buckskins, Bullets, and Business: A History of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. New York: Greenwood Press.

Longley, Dorothy Loud. n.d. The Life of an Army Girl in the Far West. Unpublished manuscript.

Reddin, Paul. 1999. Wild West Shows. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.