Beneath the surface, the Wild West was a complicated performance. The trope of the savage threat to white homes proved quite adaptable in the Gilded Age; not only Indians but also radical workers and immigrants could be cast in the role. In the United States, however, the audience for the Wild West shows also contained immigrants, who in the 1880s and 1890s applauded the defense of the white home even as they were denounced in the popular press as dangerous savages whose own whiteness was in question.
