Buffalo Bill Research Articles

5. Technician in a Trench Coat

5. Technician in a Trench Coat Bill Broyles (bio) Trained in geology and armed with a fresh doctoral degree in geography, Ives left academia and promptly went to work as a gunnery instructor and then electronic researcher, though not entirely by his own choices. When he received his PhD he also received a draft notice from his friends at the U.S. Army. Following his stint as a civilian instructor in electronics and remote control aerial gunnery, Ives went to work at Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, or simply CAL, in Buffalo, New York. He stayed from 1951 to 1955. His title was principal physicist and later principal engineer, and his work consisted of evaluating various military ideas for practicality and then conducting research on selected ones. He also designed and built equipment in some cases, and even inspected and evaluated military installations for purposes of improving operational methods and suggesting improvements or modifications where possible. He worked on several projects including one called the Buffalo Bill Radar Project for the Tactical Air Force,206 and his official reports included "Effect of Centrifugal Force on Vertical Indices" (CAL GM-776-T)207 and "Measurement of the Earth's Electrical Field" (CAL RA-764-P-1-4). On the side, he also produced 29 publications of his own. [End Page 298] Click for larger view View full resolution College student Ronald Ives wearing a trench coat and its personality; self-portrait about 1935. (Courtesy Arizona Historical Society, Tucson, Ives Collection, MS-983, photo book 14, no. 3252.) [End Page 299] Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory (CAL) Helen Beck was a secretary for Ives in the physics department at CAL for a year and a half, and then in the same area during his tenure. She remembered him well, having been hired there in May of 1951. Most of the things that I remember best about Dr. Ives were unusual, funny, and different. He used to joke that he really approved of me because I reminded him of his best friend who was a madam in Las Cruces. He always came to work in a taxi. I don't think he ever learned to drive. But if, for some reason, a taxi wasn't available or if he didn't like that taxi driver, which sometimes happened, he walked. And it was a good three miles from where he lived to where he worked. I can still see him coming up the road with that slouch hat pulled down over one eye. And, you could always tell when he was coming down the halls because you could always hear his shoe soles flapping. They were leather. His soles had come partway off, and they flapped when he walked. And frugal? Oh my. In the months that I worked directly for him, he wore the same shirt every day. I know it was the same shirt every day because he cut himself shaving one morning, and the blood spot was still there all that time. I did see him dressed up once, sometime later. One time he came up for some speech that somebody was giving, and he was dressed up. The only thing that he ever softened up enough to talk about really was Mexico, the mission down there, or the little church. He bought a bell for them. That was near to his heart. He liked that part of the country, and he was very fascinated with it. He'd bring out the maps, and tell me where he'd been and the areas he was interested in. He'd talk about what a nice area that was. And then he was really quite friendly, quite likable. I always got along fine with him. He struck me like the kind of a person that maybe had always been a brilliant person who has never really known how to interact with people. He didn't act like a man who had received a great deal of affection. He was pretty good about keeping regular hours, but sometimes we wouldn't see him for a week, or he might spend days in a library or sleep at the office overnight. Our engineers were a very strange [End...

Plains Indian Buffalo Cultures: Art from the Paul Dyck Collection by Emma I. Hansen

Reviewed by: Plains Indian Buffalo Cultures: Art from the Paul Dyck Collection by Emma I. Hansen Emily C. Burns Plains Indian Buffalo Cultures: Art from the Paul Dyck Collection. By Emma I. Hansen. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. ix + 178 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95, paper. Joining an array of beautifully illustrated books that chart expansive private collections of American Indian art objects is Emma I. Hansen’s analysis of the Paul Dyck collection of about 2,000 objects, acquired in 2007 by the Plains Indian Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. In the footsteps of his father, Dyck avidly pursued acquiring objects for his “Buffalo Culture Collection” over his lifetime, and also used his collection as inspiration for his own art-making. Hanson’s accessibly written and well researched volume presents a broad selection from this collection which largely comprises prereservation-era objects made by citizens of the Crow, Pawnee, Lakota, Arapaho, Cheyenne, [End Page 386] Shoshone, Hidatsa, Mandan, Arikara, Dakota, Kiowa Comanche, Blackfoot, Otoe, Nez Perce, and other indigenous nations in the Great Plains. Hanson’s analysis simultaneously considers points of cultural overlap and shared artistic interests across these communities while flexibly allowing for occasional divergences and cultural specificity as appropriate, such as for beading techniques. She interweaves discussion of the lineage of Plains Indian art traditions with the adaptability of art production during the beginning of the reservation era. After a foreword by Oglala Lakota artist Arthur Amiotte, thematic chapters cover (1) the context of “Buffalo Culture” societies; (2) the material culture of warrior and hunting societies; (3) an analysis of a muslin painting of warrior life by Apsáalooke (Crow) painter Mee-nah-t-see-us (White Swan); (4) the role of women in Plains Indian art production; (5) the function of visual culture to bestow leadership and respect, both for men and women; (6) the relationship of art to horse culture in the Plains; and (7) the legacies of the Dyck collection, as well as a discussion of its occasional reservation-era artifacts, like ration cards and passports. The volume might do more to show the reciprocity between the details of the aesthetics of the objects and their histories, contexts, and uses, as well as framing the Dyck collection objects in a larger trajectory of Plains Indian art production. For example, how does Meenah-t-see-us’s depiction of himself as a warrior scout working with the Seventh Calvary in 1876 overlap with and distinguish itself from Lakota painter Mató Nájin’s (Standing Bear’s) depiction of the Battle of Little Bighorn (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017.718.2)? Yet the volume is at its best in Hanson’s investments in indigenous voices in the textual as well as the visual by drawing a large percentage of its primary and secondary source material from indigenous accounts. Her project also draws welcome attention to the role of women in Plains Indian society, in a deep reading of their labor of producing art objects, in participating in ceremonies, and in developing societies for art production. For scholars of Native American art, spiritualities, and history as well as for the lay reader, this book blurs the boundaries between traditional and adapted art practices, in the process revealing the cultural layers of Plains Indian nations as well as their resilience. Emily C. Burns Department of Art and Art History Auburn University Copyright © 2019 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Up the Trail: How Texas Cowboys Herded Longhorns and Became an American Icon by Tim Lehman

Reviewed by: Up the Trail: How Texas Cowboys Herded Longhorns and Became an American Icon by Tim Lehman Richard W. Slatta Up the Trail: How Texas Cowboys Herded Longhorns and Became an American Icon. By Tim Lehman. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Pp. 172. Illustrations, notes, index.) This concise synthesis of life on the nineteenth-century trail drives north from Texas is ideal for the general reader as well as students in Texas or western American history classes. Tim Lehman, professor of history [End Page 468] at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana, deftly brings the long drives to life, thanks to copious primary source quotations from nineteenth-century reminiscences, diaries, publications, and newspaper accounts. The readable and highly interpretive text emphasizes social realities of trail driving over the romanticism that colors much of the extant cowboy literature. However, it also clearly explains how and why the mythical cowboy arose after the great drives ended. As part of the “How Things Worked” series from Johns Hopkins University Press, the book puts a premium on clarity, concision, and engaging detail. While meant for the general reader, Up the Trail includes incidents and interpretive commentary that will interest specialists as well: we get a cameo of Gail Borden Jr., who adapted his process for dehydrating a beef-flour mixture (a market failure) to condensing milk in a can; learn about Englishman Tom Candy Ponting’s 1853 cattle drive from Texas to Chicago, and also about Joseph W. McCoy, who gets ample coverage, appropriately enough, for making Abilene, Kansas, an inviting destination for Texas cattle. This study is especially noteworthy for the raw social history that Lehman brings to life. He illustrates the prevalence of mavericking and outright cattle theft in building herds. Frontier “swindlers and confidence men” (34) cheated cattlemen out of money. It was also commonplace for drovers to kill newborn calves on the trail because they could not keep up with the herd. As Kansas farmers began protecting their crops with barbed wire, conflict arose between proponents of the cow and the plow. Ticks on Longhorns carried “Texas fever,” deadly to cattle on the trail routes. Dangerous river crossings, billowing clouds of dust, meager, monotonous rations, and danger of illness or injury meant that many drovers only made the great trek north from Texas once. Kansas cow towns excelled at creating ways to separate cowboys from their cash, notably through gambling and prostitution, meanwhile trying to cover such activities with a veneer of respectability. Lehman also debunks the myth of widespread gun-toting in the West. Recognizing that guns and liquor did not mix, most cow towns confiscated cowboy firearms at the city limits. Fearing shooting accidents, stampedes, or gratuitous violence, many trail bosses kept cowboy firearms in a wagon. Coincidentally, pressures to disarm cowboys arose at the same time that dime novelists and other mythmakers projected the image of wild cowboys armed to the teeth. This short but authoritative study concludes with ample notes, an index, and several pages of excellent suggestions for further reading. Lehman makes effective use of the ample sources on Texas history and the cattle drives. While the era of great drives lasted only a few years, it permanently established the cowboy as an American cultural icon. Those who created [End Page 469] the cowboy myths get their due—Buffalo Bill, Buck Taylor, Owen Wister, Theodore Roosevelt, and others—because “[i]t turned out that there was more profit in cowboy stories than in cowboy labor” (122). Up the Trail does an admirable job of taking readers behind the tall tales to see the real lives of real cowboys on the great cattle drives as well as showing their transition from history to mythology. Richard W. Slatta North Carolina State University Copyright © 2019 The Texas State Historical Association

Buffalo Bill Goes to France

AbstractIn 1889 and 1905 William F. Cody, commonly known as Buffalo Bill, took his Wild West show on a tour of Europe, playing to sellout crowds on both trips. Although at first glance Buffalo Bill may appear to be a symbol of the vanishing American West, he also represented the power of the new American colossus, embodied by the conquest of the frontier through the technology of the rifle. Buffalo Bill's Wild West was a symbol of American invention and ingenuity, employing electric lights and mass publicity techniques. The show, however, was not simply a demonstration of modern American enterprise and technology; its very message of the westward march of civilization was modern. Examining the reception of Buffalo Bill in France on two visits offers us a unique opportunity to explore the evolution of the relationship of the “sister republics” at a key moment in French and American history.

The Popular Frontier: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Transnational Mass Culture. The William F. Cody Series on the History and Culture of the American West. Edited by Frank Christianson. Foreword by Jeremy Johnston, Frank Christianson, and Douglas Seefeldt

The Popular Frontier: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Transnational Mass Culture. The William F. Cody Series on the History and Culture of the American West. Edited by Frank Christianson. Foreword by Jeremy Johnston, Frank Christianson, and Douglas Seefeldt

Visualizing Winchester: a brand history through iconic Western images

PurposeThis paper aims to present a visually documented brand history of Winchester Repeating Arms through a cultural analysis of iconic Western images featuring its lever action rifles.Design/methodology/approachThe study applies visual culture perspectives and methods to the research and writing of brand history. Iconic Western images featuring Winchester rifles have been selected, examined, and used as points of departure for gathering and interpreting additional data about the brand. The primary sources consist chiefly of photographs from the nineteenth century and films and television shows from the twentieth century. Most visual source materials were obtained from the US Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West and the Internet Movie Firearms Database. These have been augmented by written sources.FindingsWithin a few years of the launch of the Winchester brand in 1866, visual images outside company control associated its repeating rifles with the settlement of the American West and with the colorful people involved. Some of these images were reproduced in books and others sold to consumers in the form of cartes de visite, cabinet cards and stereographs made from albumen prints. Starting in the 1880s, the live Wild West shows of William F. Cody and his stars entertained audiences with a heroic narrative of the period that included numerous Winchesters. During the twentieth century and into the present, Winchesters have been featured in motion pictures and television series with Western themes.Research limitations/implicationsHistorical research is an ongoing process. The discovery of new primary data, both written and visual, may lead to a revised interpretation of the selected images.Originality/valueBased largely on images as primary data sources, this study approaches brand history from the perspective of visual culture theory and data. The research shows how brands acquire meaning not just from the companies that own them but also from consumers, the media and other producers of popular culture.

Louis S. Warren. God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America.

The Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 is one of the best-known events in American history. It is an internationally recognized symbol of the violence of settler colonialism and of indigenous resistance to oppression. The massacre has long been a staple in textbooks and in classroom lectures as the last gasp of Native American military resistance to the United States. Historians and anthropologists have spilled more ink on the massacre than on nearly any other event in the history of the North American West. Although each of the works on the massacre includes a discussion of the Ghost Dance, the indigenous religion that precipitated the massacre, rarely has that movement in and of itself been taken as an object of scholarly inquiry. Louis S. Warren’s new book, God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America, demonstrates that the Ghost Dance readily rewards close scrutiny, and that when properly understood, it has implications that illuminate not only western but also American and global histories. Warren has previously shown how to take a well-worn western subject—William “Buffalo Bill” Cody—and transform it into a lens through which to understand a broader American story. Warren’s Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (2005) won the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Award in American History and the Western History Association’s Caughey Prize for the Best Book in Western History.

Talking Machine West: A History and Catalogue of Tin Pan Alley’s Western Recordings, 1902–1918. American Popular Music Series. By Michael A. Amundson

Music historians generally agree that the first recording of a western or “cowboy” song was “Jesse James” by concert singer Bentley Ball in 1919, while Carl Sprague, who waxed “When the Work’s All Done this Fall” in 1925, was the first authentic cowboy to record. In this new book, Michael A. Amundson explores the phonograph industry’s earlier recordings of western-themed material. This material sprang from the pens of professional songwriters based in New York and the performances were by vaudeville performers such as Billy Murray, Ada Jones, and Len Spencer, none of whom had experience in the West beyond singing in regional theaters. Talking Machine West is divided into three sections. The first discusses the author’s engagement with popular music history, exploring early recording equipment and processes with a focus on cylinder recordings. Next, Amundson provides an overview of the early recording industry, the idea of the West in popular culture, and places western themed recordings within that context. Important factors in emergence of popular images of the West are Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, western tourism, and influence of Theodore Roosevelt and Frederick Jackson Turner. Equally important in the writing of popular music was the rise of blackface minstrel and ethnic imagery. These factors merge into an examination of the songs and recordings themselves. Amundson is particularly adept at outlining the types of songs represented in the catalogue “including cowboy poetry, western skits, cowboy songs, love songs, Indian songs, Wild West show songs, cowgirl songs, and both cowboy and Indian ragtime dance songs” (p. 45). Racial and ethnic attitudes, common on the early twentieth-century American stage, find discussion and show that Western compositions were not immune to those trends.

Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary by Joe Jackson

Reviewed by: Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary by Joe Jackson Lori Burlingame Joe Jackson, Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016. 599 pp. Cloth, $30. Jackson's biography is an epic, comprehensively researched historical and sociopolitical account of the life of Black Elk (1863–1950), revered and iconic Oglala Lakota visionary and healer. Born on the cusp of the most turbulent period of change in Native North American history, Black Elk bore witness to his people's unimaginable losses and to their incredible story of strength and "survivance." Black Elk's 1872 vision of the sacred hoop and the restoration of balance haunted him; he strove to understand it and felt a sacred responsibility to honor and preserve it, which is why he shared his story with poet John Neihardt. Jackson's narrative begins with the first encounter between Black Elk and Neihardt and then moves chronologically through the events of Black Elk's life as they converge with pivotal moments in Native history. Black Elk killed a soldier at the 1876 Battle of Little Big Horn, where Custer and the Seventh Cavalry were defeated. He bore witness to escalating tensions between the Lakotas and Whites, the theft of his people's sacred lands, the killing of his second cousin Crazy Horse in 1877, and the near extinction of the buffalo. Because of his powerful vision, Black Elk became a healer and performed traditional ceremonies. He and his people suffered the hardships of reservation life at Pine Ridge, where increasingly the US government and the Catholic Church worked to outlaw Lakota traditions and ceremonies, like the Sun Dance. From 1886 to 1888 Black Elk performed with Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show in England. Jackson explores Black Elk's missing of the ship home, his injury while working in Joe Shelley's Western Wilds of America Show, and his relationship with a Parisian woman. He returned home in 1889, just prior to the Sioux Ghost Dance. [End Page 459] Jackson narrates in inspiring detail Black Elk's courage in charging at soldiers while under intense fire, thus enabling some fellow Lakotas who were captive to escape during the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. In 1904 Black Elk was baptized in the Catholic Church, after having previously clashed with Jesuit priests over his work as a traditional Lakota healer. Jackson delineates Black Elk's conflicted relationship with Christianity; he worked as a catechist for over twenty years but as early as 1923 began to practice traditional ways again and from 1936 to 1945 managed the Duhamel Indian Pageant at the Sitting Bull Crystal Caverns. Black Elk's son, Ben, was a student at the Carlisle Boarding School, and both Ben and Neihardt passed away in 1973, the year of the Siege of Wounded Knee. Jackson documents the close relationship between the Black Elk and Neihardt families, as well as Black Elk's connection with Joseph Epes Brown, recorder and editor of The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk's Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux (1953). Particularly poignant is Jackson's account of Black Elk's 1931 climbing of Harney Peak, the last mountain in his vision; while he was praying for his people there, it began to rain—perhaps a sign to Black Elk, a thunder dreamer, that his prayers had been heard. Jackson's biography is colorful and thoroughly engaging; readers will have a hard time putting it down. Every topic raised, from Black Elk's heyoka ceremony to the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, is exhaustively addressed, and while some topics examined, like the Whitechapel murders, might be viewed as tangents, they are all connected to a deeper understanding of the historical circumstances that shaped Black Elk's life. Featuring a user-friendly organizational structure, Jackson's text includes a listing and description of key historical figures and maps of places discussed, photographs, English names of Lakota months, and a timeline of events. A premise of Jackson's biography is that Neihardt endeavored to the extent possible to be true to Black Elk's voice, even as he employed poetic license in writing Black Elk...

Gauguin, Buffalo Bill, and the Cowboy Hat

In this paper, I show how the French post-impressionist artist Paul Gauguin absorbed Buffalo Bill’s dual cowboy and Indian mythologies from his visits to the Wild West show, which ran alongside the 1889 Paris international exposition. Gauguin brought to the Wild West in Neuilly his own recently-constructed identity as an American Indian (albeit Peruvian) and, in the years following—while in Brittany, Tahiti, and Paris—performed various aspects of the French interpretation of “Buffalo Bill” as applied to a pioneering modern artist. Gauguin’s New World context was extensive, and included his Peruvian and other South American relatives, his art world audience of American artists and collectors, and, finally, his expatriation to the Pacific islands of Tahiti and the Marquesas. His adoption of the long hair and cowboy hat, made internationally famous by Buffalo Bill, gives us a key to understanding how he wove together the French and American cultural notions of primitivism, sexuality, leadership, and the avant-garde. And in turn it sheds new light on Buffalo Bill himself as we see him through the lens of the French avant-garde art community. In Gauguin’s interpretation of both Buffalo Bill’s gender performativity and of the avant-garde scout, we gain a new appreciation of Cody’s daring embrace of androgyny and rejection of the narrowness of western civilization, all of which makes him more “modernist” than the twentieth-century cowboy mythology has previously led us to believe.

Authentische Fiktionen. Selbst-Darstellung und Identitätskonstruktion bei William F. Cody und Karl May

Abstract This article deals with the cultural-historical change of public self-presentation and construction of identity at the end of the 19th century with the examples of William F. Cody (“Buffalo Bill”) and Karl May. The impact of the various public, both real and virtual, stages, the change of selfrepresentation as response to public reaction, and the interaction of public and private self-perception will be examined in particular with regard to the question how authenticity and illusion are negotiated individually and socially (within the media and publicly). The importance of physical presentation (as a sign of authenticity) and the increasing necessity to claim and proof (and thus to simulate) “reality” are particular objects of study. Both sample cases, within the specific cultural-historical context of their time, demonstrate change and diversification of public self-presentations which already display in their increasing virtuosity and plurality important aspects of modern mass mediality.

Picturing Indian Territory: Portraits of the Land that Became Oklahomaed. by B. Byron Price

Reviewed by: Picturing Indian Territory: Portraits of the Land that Became Oklahomaed. by B. Byron Price Sam Ratcliffe Picturing Indian Territory: Portraits of the Land that Became Oklahoma. Edited by B. Byron Price. ( Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. Pp. 160. Illustrations, bibliography, index.) This engaging book provides a valuable visual overview of life in Indian Territory, while also chronicling the activities of well- and lesser-known painters there. In the first of the book's three essays, "Indian Territory, 1819–1861: Romanticism and the Spirit of Discovery," James Peck demonstrates how artists reflected the interplay of Romanticism and scientific inquiry that characterized American military expeditions in the West, though occasionally over-interpreting a few of their works. The vanguard of these, Thomas Nuttall, Samuel Seymour, and Titian R. Peale, focused on geographical features and wildlife. Fifteen years later, George Catlin arrived to gather material for much of his career's artistic output. Another well-known painters of American Indian life, John Mix Stanley, in three years of intermittent visits, not only executed Indian portraits but also produced International Indian Council (Held at Tallequah [sic], Indian Territory, in 1843), a companion to his Tehuacana Creek Indian Council of the same year in Texas. Heinrich Baldwin Moellhausen, a draftsman and topographer and the last significant artist to work in the territory before the Civil War, concentrated on architectural and natural features. In the second essay, "Indian Territory, 1861–1907: Turmoil and Transition," B. Byron Price notes that while the area was of relatively little strategic value in the Civil War, it soon saw conflict between the U.S. Army and various tribes. Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer's surprise attack on an Indian village on the Washita River in November 1868 was illustrated by Harper's Weekly correspondent Theodore Davis as well as by other publications. Four months later, artist Vincent Colyer arrived as a member of the U.S. Board of Indian Commissioners. In addition to several Indian portraits, his pencil sketches and watercolors depicted distinctive landforms and at least one military installation. Railroads soon facilitated reporting from the region, as exemplified by James W. Champney's illustrations in Scribner's Monthly (1873) and others by Paul Frenzeny and Jules Tavernier in Harper's Weekly (1874). In what would become western Oklahoma, CarlJ. A. Hunnius, a German artist, sketched forts and settlements while on an 1876 surveying trip. American magazines sent a trio of artist-reporters in 1888: Frederic Remington (Century Magazine), Rufus Zogbaum (who worked for Harper's Weekly and was considered Remington's equal), and [End Page 335] the somewhat lesser-known George Foster (Leslie's). Price notes the symbiotic relationship between army and artist, exemplified by artist Henry Farny's joining General Nelson Miles on an inspection tour of the territory in 1894. Centering his activity at Fort Sill, Farny produced several portraits, including one of Geronimo, autographed by the sitter. Three years later, the president of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History sent his nephew, E. A. Burbank, to execute a portrait of Geronimo. Finally, Price discusses the earliest efforts of homegrown Oklahoma artists and of New Jersey artist Charles Schreyvogel's paintings depicting Custer's "Battle of the Washita," which Remington criticized as inaccurate. The third essay, Mark Andrew White's "On to Oklahoma: Reportage, Spectacle, and Statehood," focuses on "land runs" in the 1880s and 1890s that opened the territory to settlement by non-Indians. Using newspaper and magazine illustrations, White details the frequent efforts by "boom-ers" to settle there illegally and on their confrontations with the U.S. military. "Reportage" bled into "spectacle" when Buffalo Bill included the colorful boomer David Payne in advertising for his Wild West show. Such spectacle reached its zenith in 1888 when the Wichita (Kansas) Board of Trade enlisted one of Buffalo Bill's most popular performers, Major Gordon William Lillie ("Pawnee Bill"), to renew efforts to open Oklahoma to settlement. However, Congress acted first, authorizing the first of five land runs in April 1889. White uses promotional literature, city views, and photographs effectively to convey the speed and skill with which settlers built new towns like Guthrie and Oklahoma City. Depictions of western Oklahoma...

Nelson Waldron, Master Stage Machinist of the Nineteenth-Century Theatre

Always on the margin of the nineteenth-century theatre is the stagehand. Nameless to history, they follow orders of influential producers like Lester Wallack; they follow theatre dreams of artists like Steele MacKaye. Yet researching this last artist, one stagehand name repeatedly appears. Doing so he takes on a personality and a history. The man was Nelson Waldron (1839–1917). At times he was noted as stage machinist, later on a master machinist, then a recipient of a theatrical benefit night – something reserved for actors who had achieved peer recognition. This peer of the New York theatre community during the last quarter of the nineteenth century begins to take shape. He was savvy enough to hold the patent for the Madison Square Theatre’s double stage in the heady days of feuding between the Mallory Brothers and Steele MacKaye. In the days that first brought Buffalo Bill’s rodeo inside to become an actual horse drama, there was Nelson Waldron again, building visual sensations that filled the Madison Square Gardens, literally. Waldron’s life in the theatre was evidently full and rewarding. His was a life not chronicled, but certainly one deserving. The paper brings forward an initial accounting of Nelson Waldron’s theatre.

The story of Comanche: horsepower, heroism and the conquest of the American West

Marked by the Census Bureau’s closure of the frontier; the symbolic end of American Indian resistance at Wounded Knee and powerful articulations on the ‘winning of the West’ from Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill Cody, the early 1890s was a critical moment in the history of the American West. It also saw the death of one of the region’s most famous cavalry horses, Comanche, who succumbed to colic in 1891 aged twenty-nine. Famously billed as ‘the only living thing to survive the Battle of the Little Bighorn’, this article uses Comanche as a locus around which to examine the history of warhorses in the military culture of the American West, and, more broadly, to point towards a growing scholarship on war and the environment that emphasises the usefulness of such themes as spatiality and inter-species exchange in embellishing our understanding of the experience, impact and cultural memory of war. Not only does Comanche’s lifespan (c.1862–1891) usefully coincide with the federal government’s final conquest of the West but his equine biography serves as valuable testament to the use of horses in the US military as both practical and symbolic agents of American expansionism.

Rough riders in the cradle of civilization: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in Italy and the challenge of American cultural scarcity at the fin-de-siècle

Abstract Comparisons with European culture have often generated feelings of discomfort and anxiety in the United States. Since the age of the Enlightenment, American culture has been associated with a desert or wasteland. This conceptual inclination persisted well into the 19th century − when several American writers picked up on the perceived dearth of culture that the American intellectual landscape offered − until the Gilded Age, when the United States powerfully asserted itself as an economic and industrial power. Cultural affirmation remained, therefore, the last frontier for America to conquer. In this context, the soft power operated by Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show in Europe proved to be a tremendous tool for the assertion of American cultural vitality on a worldwide scale. America’s ultimate validation, I argue, was established when Cody’s show landed in Italy, ‘the cradle of western civilization’, a stage which exuded a powerful significance in the sphere of culture, and which Cody orchestrated as a symbolic translatio imperii, by picturing himself as a Novel Columbus and America as the vessel of human progress. The resonance of Cody’s Italian tours had a regenerating effect on America; witnessing Italian culture in a moment of profound decadence fostered America’s collective confidence in its cultural superiority and confirmed its newfangled ‘exceptionalism’.

Roy De Forest Papers

Previous articleNext article FreeAcquisitionsRoy De Forest PapersLiza KirwinLiza Kirwin Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe papers of Roy De Forest (1930–2007), donated by Gloria Marchant, the artist’s wife of thirty-two years, include a family tree compiled in the late 1970s. A three-by-nineteen-foot blueprint, it is perhaps the largest document in the Archives. The chart begins in France and England, with the De Forests settling in Nebraska in the late nineteenth century. An individual of pioneer spirit, Roy was born in North Platte, Nebraska, once home to William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Under Roy’s name, the family genealogist proudly recorded his occupation as “one of the top 10 best artists of the US.” Spanning the late 1940s to 2007, the collection of letters, writings, photographs, video recordings, sketches, inventories, and financial records that form Marchant’s gift to the Archives gives weight to this claim.While critics across the US praised De Forest’s unique vision, they often struggled to define his eccentric world of cowboys and Indians, anthropomorphic animals, and sly art-historical references. Not quite adhering to California Funk, De Forest preferred the term “Nut” art for his work. His papers include his 1972 “Nut Art Manifesto” and an outline of his famous dog lecture, which used dog tails to represent art movements through the ages (fig. 1). The latter document speaks to the fact that dogs were ever-present in the artist’s life. Snapshots in his papers reveal a canine chronology, from King in the 1960s (see Table of Contents) to Cato, De Forest’s last dog (fig. 2). These beloved animals are shown lounging in the studio, napping with the artist, and leading him on outdoor adventures. They also figure in his work, often as wide-eyed spirit guides to imaginary worlds.fig. 1. Page from Roy De Forest “Dog Lecture.” Roy De Forest Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.fig. 2. Roy De Forest working on A Country Life (2005) in his Port Costa, California, studio with his dog Cato, 2005. Roy De Forest Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.The papers will be useful to anyone investigating the social and aesthetic circle around the University of California, Davis, where De Forest taught from 1965 to 1992, and particularly his close friendships with students John Buck and Deborah Butterfield, colleagues Robert Arneson and William T. Wiley, and artist neighbors Betty and Clayton Bailey. De Forest taught a recurring course on art materials, and his financial records document his love of art supplies and invention. Studio receipts chronicle purchases of airbrushes and assorted nozzles, luster pigment, impasto gel, oil pastels, metallic crayons, linen, and lumber for frames. From taxidermy suppliers he ordered modeling compound and glass eyes in yellow, red, hazel, light brown, straw, and blue. He favored Golden and Rembrandt acrylics, but would also mix his own water-based paints, adding polyvinyl acetate for extra stickiness. As De Forest noted in his 2004 interview for the Archives, “It’s a wonderful adhesive, so you can stick all kinds of junk in there: gravel, fillers of various kinds, and create all kinds of textures.”Hundreds of condolence letters sent to Marchant after De Forest’s death in 2007 show a groundswell of regard for the artist. Wiley wrote: “A good father, husband, teacher, artist, friend, who will be greatly missed and remembered … Roy doggedly pursued his vision and never sent a Cocker Spaniel if a Terrier was called for, and near as I can tell never barked up the wrong tree.” His papers will allow a new generation of visitors to the Archives to experience his legacy as a top dog in American art. Notes Liza Kirwin is the deputy director of the Archives of American Art. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Archives of American Art Journal Volume 56, Number 1Spring 2017 Sponsored by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/692639 Views: 272Total views on this site © 2017 by The Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

ATVB Named Lecture Review-Insight Into Author.

ATVB Named Lecture Review-Insight Into Author.

Walleye Introduction Eliminates Predation Refuge for Adfluvial Cutthroat Trout and Rainbow Trout

AbstractA predation refuge allowed Yellowstone Cutthroat Trout Oncorhynchus clarkii bouvieri and Rainbow Trout O. mykiss to coexist with Lake Trout Salvelinus namaycush in Buffalo Bill Reservoir, Wyoming. Recently, Walleye Sander vitreus appeared prompting concern about the persistence of Oncorhynchus populations. Study objectives were to (1) understand how environmental conditions have contributed to the coexistence of Lake Trout and Oncorhynchus populations, and (2) determine habitat use, diet, and per capita consumptive demand of Walleyes. While Walleye population expansion is difficult to predict, we compared consumptive demand of Lake Trout to biomass and production of Oncorhynchus populations to evaluate if additional predation demand by Walleyes could be sustained by prey populations. We measured limnological variables and sampled fishes monthly during April–October in 2012 and 2013 to determine habitat use and collect growth and diet samples. Low Secchi depth (1.6 m) and warm (19°C) epilimnetic temperatures in summer appear to have inhibited Lake Trout predation and provided Oncorhynchus spp. with a thermal refuge from predation, but this refuge was eliminated with the introduction of Walleyes. Prior to thermal stratification, Lake Trout and Oncorhynchus spp. co‐occurred at depths less than 18 m, but during summer, Oncorhynchus spp. remained in shallow water and Lake Trout retreated to the hypolimnion. Unlike Lake Trout, Walleyes always co‐occurred with Oncorhynchus spp. Only large (≥600 mm TL) Lake Trout consumed Oncorhynchus spp. and only during the unstratified period; in contrast, 64% of Walleye diet was Oncorhynchus spp., regardless of season. Per capita consumption of Oncorhynchus spp. by Walleyes (13.43 kg) was similar to that by Lake Trout (17.46 kg), despite the longer Lake Trout life span. Thus, although Lake Trout consumed only about 18% (462 kg) of the August biomass (2,624 kg) and 9% of annual production (5,049 kg) of young Oncorhynchus spp., expansion of the Walleye population could threaten Oncorhynchus populations in the future.Received July 13, 2016; accepted October 19, 2016 Published online January 31, 2017

“I’ve Got a Story You Haven’t Heard”: Conversation about the Art and Craft of Nonfiction with Candace Fleming

“I’ve Got a Story You Haven’t Heard”Conversation about the Art and Craft of Nonfiction with Candace Fleming Teri Suico Click for larger view View full resolution Candace Fleming Author Candace Fleming’s books for young readers include novels and picture books, but she is best known for her nonfiction young adult books. These include The Lincolns: A Scrapbook Look at Abraham and Mary (2008), which won the 2009 ALA Notable Books, and The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (2014), which won numerous honors and awards, including the NCTE Orbis Pictus Award and the Cybils Award in Nonfiction for Young Adults. Her works are characterized not just by their historic accuracy but also by the vivid detail and narrative Fleming skillfully weaves into her texts. From behind the scenes of the Civil War to the contrasting worlds of opulence and penury found in Russia just before the revolution, Fleming brings the past to life for her readers. Her latest publications—Presenting Buffalo Bill: The Man Who Invented the Wild West (2016), a nonfiction YA book on the life of Buffalo Bill Cody, and Giant Squid, a nonfiction science picturebook that was named a Robert F. Siebert Informational Honor Book—continue this tradition of presenting facts and making them as riveting to readers as fiction. In this [End Page 31] conversation, Fleming discusses what attracts her to writing nonfiction, how she goes about finding the right balance of accuracy and suspense, and what she hopes her readers get from her books. Terri Suico: You’ve written a wide range of books for children and young adults, but you seem to have an affinity and a real talent for nonfiction for this audience. What drew you to writing nonfiction for adolescents, and what compels you to keep coming back to it? Candace Fleming: I come to nonfiction kicking and screaming, which is why I don’t have as many of those as I have of my other types of works. With nonfiction, I always say I’m not going to do it, and then invariably I end up writing about a nonfiction topic simply because it nags at me. I’ll read something that links to it or something that has completely had nothing to do with the topic, but in my head, suddenly the two are connected, and now it’s a bigger idea. It’s almost like you’re doing the research before you even get started. Eventually, I get to that place where I say, “If I actually want this book in the world, it’ll have to be me who does it.” I will fight it, but I love it, which is interesting. I just know how work-intensive writing a nonfiction book will actually be, and that’s what my life will become, at least at the second-year mark of the research. But I have this master’s degree in American history, so every once in a while, I feel the need to pull out all those wonderful skills that I actually learned in school. TS: How do you go about choosing your topic or subject? CF: I’m not sure why subjects bite me, but they do. And the ones that I choose are always the ones that hang on. Even after I push the idea away, they come back. I’ll go to the Art Institute, seriously, and all of a sudden all I see is the American West and Buffalo Bill. He kept popping up everywhere, and I was like, “No, I’m not going to write about this. Nobody wants to read about the West anymore.” But I live in Chicago, and you would not think that he would be a guy that turns up in this area, but he was here a long time. So I just had to write about him. TS: You’ve written books about a number of figures from American history, including Presenting Buffalo Bill and The Lincolns: A Scrapbook Look at Abraham and Mary. And you also have The Family Romanov, which is a departure from your usual topics. How did you end up writing a book on the...

Shattering Hamlet's Mirror: Theatre And Reality by Marvin Carlson

Reviewed by: Shattering Hamlet's Mirror: Theatre And Reality by Marvin Carlson Ryan Claycomb SHATTERING HAMLET'S MIRROR: THEATRE AND REALITY. By Marvin Carlson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016; pp. 160. At one level, one always knows to expect a high degree of excellence in a new Marvin Carlson book—volume after volume has taught us that. At another level, the range of those volumes has taught us to keep on our toes, as we never know precisely whether we are being introduced to a body of work heretofore unknown to most scholars in the West (as in his recent work with Khalid Amine), being presented a new and invigorating argumentative frame to reimagine work we already know well (as in 2001's The Haunted Stage), or being offered a comprehensive set of lessons by the most distinguished of professors (as in 1993's Theories of Theatre or 1996's Performance: A Critical Introduction). In this last category Carlson's books do not so much make a pointed argument, as they let an argument emerge from the wealth of examples the author has at his fingertips. Such is this most recent book, which only fully articulates its argument in the closing pages, by which point the reader is already convinced of what Carlson will claim: that theatre has always been about the real, but that in this contemporary moment, the mimetic binary between what is real and what is theatre has essentially collapsed, leaving us with a dizzying though nonetheless artistically [End Page 281] productive moment in our theatrical and cultural history. Although the book is brief, it covers a wide range of historical territory, from Aristotle to Rimini Protokoll. Along the way, his five chapters address the real as it is expressed in spoken text, in character, in space and place, in objects, and in audience immersion. In each case Carlson begins with a prototype example that demonstrates the unsettled binary between the real and the theatrical, and then moves forward through theatre history, pausing on significant examples and theories that trace the development of an argument he borrows from theatre phenomenologist Bert States: that theatre amounts to "a progressing colonization of the real world" (14). Although his examples are diverse and typically well-known (the canon of documentary theatre, famous conflations of character and actor, landmark set designs, storied props, and so on), Carlson typically spends no more than three or four paragraphs (and sometimes only a few sentences) on each example, relying less upon close reading or thick description than the sheer proliferation of artifacts to draw out this progressing colonization. This tactic is balanced by two performances that he returns to throughout the book: William Shakespeare's Hamlet and the life and performances of "Buffalo" Bill Cody. The former play's overt consideration of the mirror-held boundary between theatre and the real also hosts the book's most famous prop—Yorick's skull, often enough performed unsettlingly by a real human skull. Buffalo Bill, on the other hand, represents the thoroughgoing blurring of the real and the theatre, from the repurposing of Cody's own stagecoach to the theatricalized frontier persona of Buffalo Bill himself. By juxtaposing two deeper case studies, referenced in both deeper analyses and brief asides, alongside a panoply of other less fully treated examples, Carlson suggests the degree to which his artifacts pervade the whole of theatre history. This wide-angle, transhistorical approach is also reflected in Carlson's theoretical lexicon, which is as likely to cite Denis Diderot on stage objects as to cite Andrew Sofer. If there is a critique of the book to be made, it is that the argument is perhaps less deeply referential to the protracted scholarly conversations about these concerns than might be useful to the scholar working in this particular field. Carol Martin's work in Theatre of the Real is not mentioned at all, and major scholarly entries by Mike Pearson, Liz Tomlin, and several others are mentioned briefly, only in passing. Certainly, one cannot claim that the book is not thoroughly theorized—Carlson does not need to cite Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, Bruno Latour, or Judith Butler more than once...