June 25, 2024: WesternStudying: Wild West Shows

[75 yearsago this week, the firstnetwork TV Western, Hopalong Cassidy debuted. Fewgenres have been influential for longer or across more media, so this week I’llAmericanStudy Hopalong and other Westerns—add your responses &analyses in the comments, pardner!]

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

As part ofthisJanuary post on origin points for Columbia Pictures (trust me, it makes sensein context), I noted that I’ve thought a good bit in recent years about howunder-remembered Vaudeville is compared to its significant influence on 20thcentury American culture. At least part of the reason for that gap, it seems tome, is that it can be difficult to remember older cultural forms that werebased on live performance, and thus harder to pass down than media that wereovertly captured and preserved (whether in print, recordings, video, etc.). Andthus we’ve also failed to adequately remember a late 19th century culturalmedium that was just as popular and influential in that period as Vaudeville wouldbecome a couple decades later: the Wild West Show. Asthat hyperlinked list illustrates, there were numerous popular such showstouring the nation in the last couple decades of the 19th century;moreover, the most successful of them, BuffaloBill Cody’s Wild West Show, was so popular that it staged performances justoutside of the grounds of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition for theentirety of the six-month-long fair, offering as that article indicates agenuine competitor to that hugely prominent attraction.

In alllikelihood, 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 RightHand, or, The First Scalp for Custer. That excellent hyperlinked Timemagazine article by Ijeoma Oluo (adapted from her 2021 book MEDIOCRE:The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America) describes that particular performanceof Cody’s in detail, as well as its links to his overarching self-mythologizingand the narratives of the American West which it and he embodied. It is ofcourse no secret that the genre of the Western too often featureddepictions of and roles for Native Americans that were stereotypical atbest and white supremacist at worst, as exemplified by perhaps the single most famousrecurring shot in film Westerns: Native Americans comingover a hill/ridge to threaten the white protagonists. So it’s prettysignificant to note that those narratives were quite present in this earlyiteration of the genre (perhaps the earliest, although dimenovels were at least contemporary with the Wild West Shows in the late 19thcentury), and indeed that Buffalo Bill’s version was even more aggressivelyviolent, focused not on threatening Native Americans so much as on white people’srighteous (in this highly constructed story) revenge.

There’s nogetting around those discriminatory layers to both Bill and his Show and thegenre of the Western more broadly, but it’s important to note that there wereother, quite distinct and even opposed (and certainly more positive) ways thathe and his Show engaged Native Americans. Exemplifying those more positivepossibilities was Cody’s longstanding friendshipwith the Sioux Chief Sitting Bull, a relationship that included (but was notat all limited to) Sitting Bull’s many years of performancesas part of Bill’s Wild West Show. As thispiece on the Buffalo Bill Center of the West website puts it, NativeAmerican performers like Sitting Bull “generally were treated and paid the sameas other performers. They were able to travel with their families, and theyearned a living not possible to them on their reservations.” In thisblog post on Native American pop culture performers I highlighted the actorJay Silverheels, who had the chance to act in multiple mid-20thcentury Western films and as a result help change the way that medium depictedNative Americans; Sitting Bull reminds us that there was a longstanding legacyof such performers, one that connected to the equally complex and multi-layeredgenre of the Wild West Show.

NextWestern tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Westerns you’d analyze?