Buffalo Bill Cody and the Myth of the American West - Essay Example

?Buffalo Bill Cody and the Myth of the American West Introduction The life of Buffalo Bill Cody is an example of the weight of celebrity and myth in determining the history of a time and place. Buffalo Bill Cody lived in the Midwest of North American as a child, but eventually went West in order to support his family after his father was killed. As a result, he was in a central location to witness many of the events that occurred towards changing the nature of civilization in America. He took his experiences and translated them into a performance piece that was a show in which exhibitions of Sitting Bull and other members of the Western culture were used in perpetuating the myths. The myths are now history, thus transforming the nature of a time and place through the use of celebrity and propaganda. Modern culture is now built on the myths that are created through textual histories that are exaggerated and changed to support the needs of the immediate culture in creating heroes, villains, and a story to fill the spaces within the history of mankind. Early Life William Frederick Cody was born on February 26 1846 to Mary Ann and Isaac Cody in the county of Scott in Iowa. Mary Ann and Isaac Cody had traveled to Iowa as pioneers, part of the group of people who were expanding the territories in North America towards the West. In his autobiography, Cody (1978, p. 17) writes that he was the fourth child of eight children in the Cody family. When he was born, he and his family lived on a farm that they had given a Native American name, Napsinekee Place, but when he was around the age of seven he was moved to the small town of LeClair, Iowa where he had an idyllic childhood. Cody (1978, p. 28) describes his childhood as an adventure, one where he stole apples from the neighbors orchard with the vigilance of the guard dog always his nemesis. He swam in the Mississippi River and took boats out on the water, although the boats were also not always his to take. He reports the story of getting stuck out in the middle of the river, he and a childhood friend having lost the oars, only to be discovered from having stolen the boat from the dock. His descriptions of the events of the his early life describe him as a child who sought adventure and wanted to experience everything, all of the thrills that would come from challenging his boundaries and the elements of his natural world. After his family made a brief and failed attempt to move to California, they moved to Walnut Grove Farm where Cody learned to trap and hunt. He became good with horses, but one event stuck out in his childhood that brought him great sorrow and involved a horse accident. His older brother, Samuel, rode out with Cody into town and decided to take a mare that he had been warned not to ride. Samuel, with Cody in his company on another horse, took the mare to the school where he decided to show off, but the horse reared up and then fell upon him, giving Samuel fatal injuries that took his life the next day (Cody 1978, p. 20). Some elements of this event may have contributed to the nature within Cody that led him to his celebrity. Cody’s father was involved in politics, giving him a public persona (Cody 1978, p. 19). So Cody was not unfamiliar with the concept of being known. Samuel had been a popular young boy, his gregarious personality leading the community to give him a great deal of adoration. When he died, the community felt the pain of his passing, thus even in his grief, it is possible that William saw that the effects of celebrity was the appreciation and emotional connection of a large number of people. That Cody sought fame may be traced to this event as he recorded it in his autobiography as being transformative in his life. The second event in Cody’s life where fame and death were connected came with the stabbing and eventual death of his father. Cody’s family was moved from the farm in Iowa to Kansas, a state that was heavily involved in a debate whether to allow slavery within its borders. His father, involved in politics and particularly involved in the abolitionist movement, was giving a speech at an anti-slavery rally when he was stabbed in the back by a man who was against his values. Isaac Cody survived that attempt and several subsequent attempts on his life. In one incident, Cody was made aware that an attempt on his father was eminent and was shot at as he rode home to warn his family to get out of the house. In 1857, his father died from complications due to the original stabbing (Manning 2003, p. 200). The events in Cody’s early life were framed in such a way as to lead him on the path that he would eventually follow. His family was active in public affairs and not afraid to support what the aspects of life in which they had belief. In addition, his family as well known and through the events of Samuel’s death and his father’s death, he saw both the realities of life and the advantage of courting public favor. This is not to suggest that the tragedies gave him a taste for fame, but that they led him to understand the connections between public love and respect in association with comfort. Buffalo After his father’s death, the family was suffering from financial difficulty. At the age of eleven Cody took a job as message runner for a freight company in which he ran up and down the various caravans delivering messages. The company serviced Fort Laramie through which he met Kit Carson, a legendary man of the West who used his skills as a guide and a trapper, and found fame through his political and military interactions with Native Americans. Carson influenced Cody through tales of the West, his stories of adventure leading Cody to want to explore and become a part of it. The boy, at the age of thirteen, tried to fulfill his father’s dream of going to California in search of gold, but after that experience didn’t work out, in the same year he returned. Cody found a job as a rider in the Pony Express, the qualifications for the job listed as “young, skinny wiry fellows not over the age of eighteen” (Manning 2003, p. 201). The Pony Express did not last very long as the United states government began to build a railroad at this point. During the building of the railroad, Cody began his first steps towards legendary status as he contracted with the railway to provide food for the crews, which exceeded 4,000 people as they worked towards getting the connection between the East and the West constructed. Cody became a renowned hunter of buffalo, killing thousands of the creatures in the process of providing food. It was during this time that he gained the nickname that has lasted through history, Buffalo Bill. He set a record for deaths of the buffalo, killing 4,280 in a seventeen month period (Manning 2003, p. 201). Celebrity Production of the West Penny Novels The encouragement that was intended to get people to move to the West varied, but included a great deal of literature on the benefits of moving West. This meant that articles in newspapers and magazines were used to help motivate people to moving. Fictional claims were made in order to make the West seem like a land of magical opportunities and limitless abundance. The papers characterized Oregon as a place where it was a “pioneer’s paradise” where “the pigs are running about under the acorn trees, round and fat, and already cooked, with knives and forks sitting in them so that you can cut off a slice whenever you are hungry” (Aquila 1998, p. 6). There were also tales of immortality in which the soil of California was said to be so rejuvenating that buried men would come back to life within their graves (Aquila, p. 6). However, these stories seem more horrific than enticing, but for those in the 18th and 19th century, they seemed to be attractive. The first place where the fame of Buffalo Bill was related to the public was through penny novels, named so after the British ’penny dreadfuls’ in which the names of people who were acting in the West were used to create great and exotic adventures of the wild territories which had yet to be tamed (Lukenbill 2006, p. 155). People such as Kit Carson, Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill became stars of these novels that also featured fictional characters such as Deadwood Dick or Seth Jones (Warren 2005, p. 7). One of the earliest of these penny novels was written by Charles Averill and called Kit Carson’s Prince of the Gold Hunters (1948). As an example of how these novels affected the reputation of Western heroes, Kit Carson became known as a mighty ‘Indian’ fighter, gaining him a reputation as someone who killed Native Americans, rather than as someone who, although misguided by modern terms, was actually trying to save them through protection he thought would come on reservations (Cheney 1998, p. 38). Wild West Shows Cody’s life took a turn when he went to Chicago to become part of a group of people participating in a Wild West Show. Ned Buntline, himself a writer of penny novels, began producing shows that brought the action of the west to the more settled people of the East and the Midwest. Buffalo Bill joined his show Scouts of the Plains in 1872. He and Texas Jack became stars of this show, their real life presence a big draw to the crowds in Chicago. The first performance, according to Cody, was difficult for him, although he came through with finding himself as a performer. When he first stepped on stage, he couldn’t remember a single line, but Buntline, playing a trapper, prompted him by asking “Where have you been, Bill? What has kept you so long”. Still not remember his lines, he stated that he had been out hunting with a prominent member of the audience and after more prompting, related a humorous tale about the adventure, before uttering a single word of the script (Russell 1979, p. 192). Cody became a natural on the stage. By 1883, Buffalo Bill felt that it was time for him to put together his own show and after securing financing, he built a traveling show called Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. The events of the Pony Express experience became fodder for public entertainment, the job being shown for the skill it took to pass the bag from one carrier to the next, the horsemanship providing context for the speed with which the exchange would be made. One of the legends of his time is that he rode a 15 mile per hour route on horseback for 85 miles, only to find out that the next carrier had been killed, so he undertook the final 85 miles of the route. After he dropped off the bag, he turned around and rode back, riding 322 miles in one trip without stopping for rest, making it the longest ride in Pony Express history (Warren 2005, p. 4). These were the stories told during the show in order to enhance the performances. It was not only Buffalo Bill that exploited his history in order to provide entertainment for the rest of the country. Annie Oakley was a performer whose expert shot made her the example of the Western female, brash and bold as males and full of the same spirit. In using people who either had a history in the West or who could portray the aspects of the West, Buffalo Bill created a world that was exotic and thrilling, an example of the nature of expansion and exploration, something that every member of the American public had in common as their recent ancestors or themselves had come to the continent to find a new future. However, there had been a great cost to taking over the regions of North America and in doing so, the victors were displaying their prowess and their spoils. Sitting Bull, a man who had led his people, the Lakota Sioux, during victories against the ‘white’ threat, also joined the show as an example of Native America. After marshalling great resistance against the Caucasian oppressors, he was eventually defeated and his person became subject to being used as an ‘exhibition’, first at the location of his defeat. When sent on a traveling exhibition, his translator would take the persuasive speeches of Sitting Bull towards peace and friendship, misleading the listeners and turning them into a story of the Battle of Little Big Horn. Sitting Bull spent his time meeting and greeting, and giving autographs, thinking he was being allowed the opportunity to serve his people, when he was actually little more than a zoo exhibit. Sitting Bull had met Annie Oakley, previous to her time with the Wild West Show and when Buffalo Bill made many requests to those in control of Sitting Bull, he was eventually allowed to use him in the show because Sitting Bull saw pictures of Oakley in the publicity and stated he would like to be a part of the show. According to Bridger (2002, p. 316), “In Sitting Bull, Cody…not only had the manifestation of the magnificent adversary, they had a box office attraction to equal Buffalo Bill himself”. The ’exhibition’ allowed Cody to take his show to a whole new level of success. Truth and Fiction William or Buffalo The stories that were written by Buffalo Bill and by those around his legend created a world of humor, enchantment, and high adventure. The adventures of the man in his youth were designed around the idea that death and danger were something to be taken with a quick wit and a wink of the eye. Yet, his real life had been immersed in war since he was eight years old, the Civil War and all of the surrounding events creating a life for the young man that was filled with the horrors of families who were attacked in their own homes, even the threats on his father impacting his world view. The truth is unknown, the stories written about the period the only real history providing context from which to try and discover what was true and what is fiction. Julia, Cody’s sister, wrote her own history and did her best to honor the stories of her brother while trying to shed some light on the truth of the time period in which Cody was having his adventures. She did her best to take out some of the exaggeration and instill some context to how to relate to what had happened. However, Cody was her brother so whether or not she was revealing all of the truth or only re-shading the stories to reflect other aspects of his life is unknown (Warren 1979, 337). Sociology and the Myth of the West There was a myth about the racial origins of Buffalo Bill that provided a further exotic nature to his existence. This myth arose during the European tours of his Wild West Show, creating an ‘otherness’ to his existence which explained the exotic nature of the American West. Buffalo Bill was in question for his ancestry, thus creating a mythic controversy in which his nature was put towards the existence of the sense that he was accomplishing things beyond that which ‘white’ European culture could attempt. His exaggeration of the nature of the West participated in creating this mythology, a myth that supported the beliefs of such 19th century sociologists as Havelock Ellis who believed that there were different ‘species’ of humans that cultivated different values and abilities through physical differences in the human animal (Ellis 1890). The West provided a social division that created a way in which to both evoke and displace the primitive nature of man. According to Warren (1979, p. 338) “To social evolutionists, the frontier line was, among other things, a purported division between primitive and modern”. This provided context for Bram Stoker to write his legendary novel Dracula as he played on the fears of race issues and the underlying belief that had been created in Europe that Western Frontiersmen were actually of a different race, a different species from Caucasian British civilization. Warren states that “Popular doubts about Cody’s racial identity, combined with his physical beauty, his ‘irresistibility,’ his military prowess, and his ability to master savages and savage nature, all suggest that the novel Dracula is a fantasy of the ambivalences that made Buffalo Bill such a figure of power and fascination in late nineteenth century London, played out on the dark side”. Inventing the Wild West What Bill Cody did in creating his show was to invent the legend of the West in such a way as to create celebrity from death and destruction. The tools of his creation lay in the guns, the subjugation of the Native American tribes, and in creating a romanticized version of history that attracted those who wished to see its spectacle. His versions of entertainment “reveal the fluidity of nineteenth century American performance culture” (Kasson 2001, p. 11). His first representations to the public leaving a bad taste, their feelings about his work seeming to be an exploitation of his experiences. However, he managed to transform his reputation through “written texts, visual images, new performance practices and a resonant connection with a national sense of destiny” (Kasson 2001, p. 11). In creating this connection, Buffalo Bill Cody manifested a Western culture that had a defined sense of adventure and reinforced the rights to possess the lands that were being tamed by such national heroes. The nature of the Wild West was a creation of celebrity and textual fictions. The nature of the West was that it took great perseverance to survive, and in surviving, the stories that were told became exaggerated in order to provide emotional context to the events that had been both horrific and sometimes unlivable to the participants. Great sweeping changes were taking place in the West with entire civilizations in the form of Native American tribes being wiped out or displaced, the people of the tribes having generations and thousands of years of history changed in a few decades. The West represented a great deal of change, much of it in tragedy and a great deal of it in the form of destruction. (word count 3135) References Aquila, Richard. 1998. Wanted dead or alive: the American West in popular culture. Urbana, Ill.: Univ. of Illinois Press. Bridger, Bobby. 2002. Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull: inventing the Wild West. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press. Cheyney, Arnold B. 1998. People of purpose: 80 people who have made a difference. Glenview, IL: Good Year Books. Cody, William F. 1978. The life of Hon. William F. Cody, known as Buffalo Bill, the famous hunter, scout, and guide: an autobiography. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Ellis, Havelock. The Criminal. London: W. Scott, 1890. Print. Kasson, Joy S. 2001. Buffalo Bill's Wild West: celebrity, memory, and popular history. New York: Hill and Wang. Lukenbill, W. Bernard. 2006. Biography in the lives of youth: culture, society, and information. Westport, Conn: Libraries Unlimited. Manning, Jason. 2003. Last chance. New York: St. Martin's Paperbacks. Russell, Don. 1979. The lives and legends of Buffalo Bill. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Warren, Louis S. 2005. Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody and the Wild West Show. New York: Knopf. Read More