Buffalo Bill Research Articles

Wild West Children: Performing the Frontier

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was a milestone in the development of American popular culture, a late Nineteenth century phenomenon that enshrined the frontier as an enduring symbol of national progress and prosperity. Existing scholarship ably assesses the show’s contributions to emergent mass culture and its ideological framing of frontier mythology. However, current scholarship largely ignores the importance of childhood and child performers to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. This paper examines how Buffalo Bill and his partners drew on ideations of childhood in crafting their show and analyzes the complex ways child performers responded to the Wild West’s dominant narratives.

“They Met Force with Force”: African American Protests and Social Status in Louisville’s 1877 Strike

“They Met Force with Force”:African American Protests and Social Status in Louisville’s 1877 Strike Shannon M. Smith (bio) On Tuesday, July 24, 1877, African American laborers employed to dig Louisville’s sewer system left their jobs in protest. That morning, “some idle negroes, including a strange one from Cincinnati” known as Buffalo Bill, reportedly urged the workers to demand a wage increase. When the supervisor refused their demands, the contracted workers—“mostly colored men”—left the work site and paraded through town. With this action, the black workers joined thousands of striking laborers across the country in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. The marching strikers gathered workers from other construction sites until the group numbered approximately four hundred black laborers. After traversing the city and commanding the attention of startled white townspeople, the group eventually dispersed in the late afternoon without incident.1 The actions of Louisville’s black workers were significant for several reasons. Four years into a national depression, and more than a week into the railroad strike, it was not surprising for laborers to protest low wages. Undoubtedly inspired by the working-class solidarity [End Page 1] that prompted a near-nationwide general strike, Louisville’s African American workers made public demands for fair pay consistent with that of white railroad workers engaged in unskilled labor. In Louisville, as in other southern cities, black workers demanded wage equality as vigorously as they sought civil rights. Over the next several days, black strikers were joined by hundreds of white men and women from the city’s tobacco factories, foundries, paper and woolen mills, furniture and plow factories, saddleries, and breweries, culminating in a general strike across the city.2 But unlike the railroad workers who led the strikes in cities across the country, Louisville’s white railmen adamantly refused to join the strike. Instead, they sided with the city’s white business and political leaders by joining the militia that helped to protect railroad property. In an industrializing border city, white railroad employees established their most important identities as protectors of “law and order” rather than joining in working-class action with other laborers. The perceived threat of black militancy led to the creation of an all-white militia that further disrupted possible class collaboration between black and white workers. White men used militia service to reinforce their own economic power and to ensure that black workers did not challenge long-standing class and racial boundaries. Through their actions, the men of Louisville contested who had the right to organize, by what means they could assert themselves publicly, and who was denied those rights—in short, who could lay public claim to being a citizen and a man.3 It is difficult to piece together the story of a strike, even more so [End Page 2] when it is accompanied by violence. Few eyewitness accounts remain from most riots, and police and military records are often scarce. No sources are more valuable than newspapers, yet they present their own challenges. News reporters did not interview the striking black workers to ask about their demands, so African American voices are limited. Nineteenth-century newspapers typically framed class conflicts as wars in which strikers threatened the forces of law and order. Such framing made “violence itself the story” and distracted readers from criticism of the system that created the conflict. Editors and reporters offered politicized viewpoints to their target audience and engaged in heated exchanges with competitors. Through interviews and relaying of selected events, news editors shaped citizens’ attitudes toward each other and a city’s vision of how best to preserve law and order. But newspapers were also beholden to advertisers and readers, and could not risk alienating either. Out of the challenges and confusion of strike coverage, newspapers became participants in molding the perceived reality of an event. Competing Democratic and Republican news reports of the Louisville strike must be interpreted carefully, but they still provide insights into the aims of striking black workmen, white workers who joined their ranks, and the employers who sought to re-establish control.4 The railroad strike in July 1877, the first nationwide industrial strike, began with railroad workers...

Stages of Engagement: US Theatre and Performance 1898–1949

Stages of Engagement: US Theatre and Performance 1898–1949

Buffalo Bill on the Silver Screen: The Films of William F. CodySandra K.Sagala. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013.

The Journal of American CultureVolume 39, Issue 3 p. 355-356 Book Review Buffalo Bill on the Silver Screen: The Films of William F. Cody , Sandra K. Sagala. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. Martin J. Manning, Martin J. Manning US Department of StateSearch for more papers by this author Martin J. Manning, Martin J. Manning US Department of StateSearch for more papers by this author First published: 04 September 2016 https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.12581Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume39, Issue3September 2016Pages 355-356 RelatedInformation

Linda Scarangella McNenly, Native Performers in Wild West Shows: from Buffalo Bill to Euro Disney

Review of Linda Scarangella McNenly, Native Performers in Wild West Shows: from Buffalo Bill to Euro Disney

The Pan American Imagination: Contested Visions of the Hemisphere in Twentieth-Century LiteratureThe Geopoetics of ModernismThe Black Pacific Narrative: Geographic Imaginings of Race and Empire between the World Wars

The Pan American Imagination: Contested Visions of the Hemisphere in Twentieth-Century LiteratureThe Geopoetics of ModernismThe Black Pacific Narrative: Geographic Imaginings of Race and Empire between the World Wars

Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century by Sadiah Qureshi

Reviewed by: Andrew Cobbing, The University of NottinghamPeoples on Parade , a magisterial work that takes the reader on a guided tour through Victorian exhibitions, brings a sensitive approach to the emotive theme of humans on display. Often viewed with horror now, even at the time such exhibitions were trivialized as freak or dismissed as pseudoscience, notably by early anthropologists guarding their own field. Qureshi offers a more nuanced reading, exploring how some shows also contributed to scientific enquiry. The displayed people here are not typecast as passive victims, but present a range of experience--professional performers among them--with voices and agency of their own. In this beautifully crafted and elegantly written volume, headings appear in bold period fonts, evoking the promotional culture of the Victorian age. A host of colour plates allows respectful interrogation of how the shows were portrayed, not, as Qureshi stresses, to resurrect them as subjects of voyeurism today (10).Victorian audiences did not pay to see these people just for their rarity. Instead, the ethnically diverse population in metropolitan London created a consumer market of urban spectators fascinated by difference. Navigating the streets, pedestrians used the latest theories in phrenology and physiognomy to read the crowd and decode life histories of passers-by. Critiques of exploration and colonization also reminded people of social divides at home as terms like Street Arabs' (coined in 1847) gained currency to describe the urban poor. Similarly, promotional material for human displays drew heavily on a growing canon of travel literature, piquing the interest of a public already attuned to current affairs in foreign policy, society, and science.Chapters move thematically through the steps involved in staging this show. Actors are introduced in turn, starting with the showmen who presented humans for profit. Some were also driven by social, religious, or political motives, for example, George Catlin, who publicized the plight of Native (103). Aware of their customers' fixation with authenticity, they spun dramatic backstories to explain how the people on display were plucked from their own environment. Costumes and props were used to differentiate them from the ethnic minority residents in London. Feathered headdresses became obligatory after Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in the 1880s, to meet their patrons' expectations of how real Indians dressed (121). Choreographed performances of song, dance, and ritual would emphasize their savagery, at some stage of development below the civilized Christian West.The focus then turns to exhibits themselves, from their provenance to the degree of agency they exercised in the final package. A select group of case studies reappear at each stage of their journey. From southern Africa arrive the Hottentot Venus (Sarah Baartman), the San bushmen, and the Zulus. From the Americas come the Aztec Lilliputians and members of the Anishinaabe tribe. Using consent theory Qureshi demonstrates that free choice was rare, although later in the nineteenth century some professional performers chose to go on show. Their control over their working lives also varied: Baartman was clearly unhappy with her humiliating treatment on stage, Native Americans resisted missionaries' attempts to convert them, and Zulu chiefs successfully appealed to English courts over contractual disputes. …

Of Globetrotters and Globalization

Of Globetrotters and Globalization Andrew R. Graybill (bio) Lynn Hunt. Writing History in the Global Era. New York: Norton, 2014. x + 196 pp. Notes and index. $25.95. David M. Wrobel. Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013. xv + 312 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $39.95. In the 1870 account of his journey through the United States, the British traveler John White made a stop in Nebraska, which he found underwhelming. But he did come away with a story sure to delight his readers back home: the case of the “scalped man of Omaha.” As White learned, the man—a fellow Briton, as it turned out—had been crossing the Plains when Indians derailed the goods train on which he was traveling. He dashed for safety while the Natives dispatched the other passengers, and yet the Indians soon tracked him down, clubbed him with an axe, and— figuring that he was dead—claimed his scalp as a prize. The intrepid Englishman had in fact survived, and once the Natives scattered, he followed the railroad tracks, soon discovering his own scalp, which had been lost in the Indians’ hasty retreat. As White explained, the man “kept his scalp in a little box [and] showed it to visitors with pride” (Wrobel, p. 2). David Wrobel opens his book on travel writing about the West (and beyond) with this vignette, which nicely illustrates what we think we know about such accounts: namely, that they confirmed—often with more than a hint of condescension—that the trans-Mississippi was exotic and unpredictable, home to legendary figures such as Buffalo Bill Cody, and therefore unlike anywhere else on earth. But as Wrobel argues, John White was only one type of visitor to the West; during the period between 1850 and 1940, many other such sojourners (both Europeans and Americans) drew astute comparisons between the region and the wider world. It was only later, in the early decades of the twentieth century, that travelers venturing beyond the 100th meridian focused more intently on U.S. frontier exceptionalism, largely because of their anxieties about the creeping uniformity that followed in the wake of modernization. [End Page 132] Wrobel’s argument thus speaks meaningfully to a very different book: Lynn Hunt’s assessment of the “global turn” in the professional writing of history. On the one hand, Wrobel’s travelers—especially those nineteenth-century wanderers who placed their Western experiences in a broader context—confirm Hunt’s contention that the history of globalization reaches back much farther than the early 1990s, when it became a buzzword. On the other, just as the accounts of later visitors to the West are colored by their authors’ determination to find traces of authenticity there, Hunt reminds us that scholars bring their own concerns and orthodoxies to investigations of the past. This essay explores both books on their own terms before considering Global West, American Frontier through the lens of Writing History in the Global Era. Wrobel’s new book builds quite naturally on themes that he has explored in his two previous monographs: angst about the supposed closing of the U.S. frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, and the role of two forms of maligned and overlooked writing (booster literature and pioneer reminiscences) in shaping past as well as present understandings of the West. In the introduction to his latest book, Wrobel explains that he wants to use another set of dismissed or understudied texts—travel narratives—to chart the surprising trajectory of exceptionalist thinking about the region during the age of American empire (roughly the period between the U.S.–Mexican War and the Great Depression). In chapter one, he introduces us to the sorts of travelers who have caught his attention: Americans and Europeans, men and women, the famous and especially the forgotten. Indeed, while the artist George Catlin makes an extended appearance in this first section, Wrobel’s coverage, as he explains, “emphasizes works that warrant resurrection, or at least a closer look” (p. 8). Take, for example, Friedrich Gerstäcker (1816–72), a German writer who traveled...

Epiphany in the Wilderness: Hunting, Nature, and Performance in the Nineteenth-Century American West by Karen R. Jones

Reviewed by: Epiphany in the Wilderness: Hunting, Nature, and Performance in the Nineteenth-Century American West by Karen R. Jones Lydia R. Cooper Karen R. Jones, Epiphany in the Wilderness: Hunting, Nature, and Performance in the Nineteenth-Century American West. Boulder: UP of Colorado, 2015. 360pp. Cloth, $55; e-book, $44. In Epiphany in the Wilderness, Karen R. Jones illuminates the act of hunting in the late nineteenth-century American West as a ritualized performance of individual and national identity. Positing the hunt as an act “saturated with the language of performance, recital and enactment” (12), Jones examines the structural semiotics of the hunt through the lens of performance theory. This analysis is offered through a chronological “three act” study that examines, first, the creators of the “hunter mythology” of the West; second, the “afterlife of the hunt,” a meticulous examination of hunting artifacts, artwork, and taxidermy (23); and third, the demise of the hunt as a cultural utopic performance of masculinity and the rise of conservationists and concern for the hunt’s ecological ramifications. In the first “act,” Jones explores the “sporting hunter hero”—the signifier of the masculine ideal of national identity and power (34). From the masculine hunter hero, Jones broadens her scope to include landscape and animals, the stage and props of the hunt, and the hunting rituals that articulated certain males as dominant while denoting others as oppositional or supplemental to the white male center of the action. Yet Jones draws attention as well to narrative moments in hunters’ memoirs in which actors placed in the subaltern role pushed back through subversive acts like pranks on the hunter hero, a “gesture politics” of resistance (69). In a similar fashion, Jones extends her analysis beyond the most common images of the hunt to those points where images blur or refract. For example, in her chapter on that most central of props, the rifle, she notes that on military campaigns, hunting was generally reserved for officers as a “gentleman’s leisure sport”—a sport [End Page 363] that blurred the line between hunting and warfare. The Winchester rifle, she contends, thus becomes a “colorful tool of empire” (103). In the final chapter of the first act, Jones explores narratives by and about women hunters—a vivacious challenge to the narrative of the masculine hunter hero that dominated Western discourses. In the next act Jones analyzes artifacts of the hunt, beginning with an analysis of the constructed landscape of the West through the autobiographies of the hunters, and then proceeds to visual reproductions of the landscape of the hunt, the hunt itself, and hunting kills. The power of her analysis lies again in her attention to the darker edges of familiar objects. In this case, Jones underscores for readers the resonance between photographs in which hunters pose with strung-up carcasses and photographs of lynchings. The visual assertion of white masculine mastery over the “other” was asserted through the photographic afterlife of the hunt, an assertion preserved and consecrated through viewers’ participation in that gaze of mastery over the dead. Jones also analyzes the staging of the hunt, from James “Grizzly” Adams’s traveling menagerie of live and dead animals to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, concluding her chapters on the hunt’s afterlife with a detailed analysis of the popularity of taxidermy, in which the trophy, preserved and capable of traveling great distances, becomes the visual claim of mastery over the natural world as a transnational colonial enterprise. Her final “act” traces the shift in rhetoric about the hunt from the mid-nineteenth-century’s emphasis on the West as a place of “cornucopian bounty” (274) to the late nineteenth-century’s elegiac rhetoric about loss—with the decimation of American bison as the emblem of that loss. Performances of hunting prowess as the essence of the West, such as Buffalo Bill’s extravaganzas, thus frame for audiences the rhetorical case for preservation and conservation. Perhaps the book’s weakest segment appears in this final section as Jones contextualizes the Ghost Dance movement within the late nineteenth-century’s performances of resistance to the narrative of bounty and celebration of the hunt. While providing a helpful elucidation...

Acting Out Assimilation: Playing Indian and Becoming American in the Federal Indian Boarding Schools

Acting Out AssimilationPlaying Indian and Becoming American in the Federal Indian Boarding Schools John R. Gram (bio) During the summer of 1886 the students of Albuquerque Indian School (ais) marked the passing of Decoration Day (predecessor of Memorial Day) with a day-long picnic. The following Monday the students took part in the Decoration Day parade in Albuquerque at the invitation of the local gar (Grand Army of the Republic) post. The boys wore their school uniforms and marched “in precision of movement and soldierly bearing,” while the girls, dressed in white aprons, rode on a float decorated with patriotic bunting. Each side of the float bore a banner with a different motto: “Anglo-Saxon civilization rules the world, we submit.” “Wise statesmanship demands a homogenous population.” “Patriotism precludes allegiance to civil powers, independent of the United States.” “We are free born; education confers knowledge and power to assert and maintain our freedom.”1 Scholars have long noted the assimilative importance of activities beyond classroom and industrial training at Indian boarding schools.2 What has received little focus in the existing literature, however, is the use of public performances, such as the Decoration Day parade described above—moments intended for consumption by both the student body and local citizens—as agents of assimilation. This study hopes to demonstrate the importance of public performance to the assimilative mission of the federal Indian boarding schools by examining how they were used at Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools from roughly 1880 to 1930. It also hopes to demonstrate that studying such performances at the boarding schools can place Indian education within the larger project of assimilation that preoccupied the country during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the [End Page 251] larger struggle over how the American public was to understand Indians and themselves. Though likely with varying levels of awareness, the Indian students participating in this parade, the Albuquerque Indian School personnel who arranged their participation, the gar post that invited them, and the Albuquerque citizens who watched the child soldiers and float pass by were all engaged in several national conversations as they took part in their local parade that day. These conversations remained important ones in American society during the era stretching from roughly 1880 to 1930. The first conversation revolved around how late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Americans would think about Native Americans now that the conquest of the West was drawing to a close. The Wounded Knee Massacre, often thought of as the last battle of these wars, would happen a mere four years after this parade. One popular image of Native Americans was championed by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and other similar Wild West shows that enjoyed immense popularity during this time period. The appeal of these shows was the opportunity to witness an “authentic” display of a quickly closing chapter in the nation’s history. As historian L. G. Moses explains, “It appeared to many Americans . . . that the West and its native inhabitants, however wild they once may have been, were passing from existence.”3 In the words of another historian, Paul Reddin, the shows “tantaliz[ed] people with the proposition that they had missed something special because a particular phase of Plains history was nearing its end or had already passed.”4 These shows were about selling the past, not the future. And the Indians who worked in these shows were carefully crafted inhabitants of that past. They wore traditional costumes and performed traditional activities for audiences, which could include anything from building a teepee, to dancing, to “traditional” attacks on wagon trains. The message was clear: the era of such Indians was over. Fear and anxiety had been replaced by curiosity and nostalgia.5 The federal government during this same period, however, was firmly committed to the idea that Indians not only were part of the nation’s past but also must be made part of its future. One consequence of this competing “image” of Indians was government-operated boarding schools, which sprang up in significant numbers in the trans-Mississippi West in the late nineteenth century, representing the next step in a nearly four...

Presenting Buffalo Bill: The Man Who Invented the Wild West by Candace Fleming

Presenting Buffalo Bill: The Man Who Invented the Wild West by Candace Fleming

The William F. Cody Archive. http://codyarchive.org/ . Created and maintained by The William F. Cody Archive, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln . Reviewed January 2015.

<b>The William F. Cody Archive</b>. http://codyarchive.org/ . Created and maintained by The William F. Cody Archive, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln . Reviewed January 2015.

Book Review: Sagala, Buffalo Bill on the Silver Screen: The Films of William F. Cody, by Richard W. Etulain

Book Review: Sagala, Buffalo Bill on the Silver Screen: The Films of William F. Cody, by Richard W. Etulain

Ride, Boldly Ride: The Evolution of the American Western by Mary Lea Bandy and Kevin Stoehr (review)

Reviewed by: Ride, Boldly Ride: The Evolution of the American Western by Mary Lea Bandy and Kevin Stoehr Christine Bold Ride, Boldly Ride: The Evolution of the American Western. By Mary Lea Bandy and Kevin Stoehr. Foreword by Clint Eastwood. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. vii + 330pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95 cloth. This volume’s originality lies in its detours from a well-worn path. A study of Westerns from Edison’s filming of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in 1894 to Cowboys and Aliens in 2011, it moves through familiar chronological stages (silent, sound, classic, revisionist, and postmodern Westerns), discussing a plethora of significant directors, actors, and films along the way (John Ford’s work features as a constant, Clint Eastwood’s as a culmination). The result is a valuable survey, well informed by previous film scholarship, if a little predictable when it connects Westerns and American nationalism and a little uneasy when it wavers between criticizing and apologizing for the Western’s justification of violent expansionism, with the “good bad man” at its moral center. The sparkle comes when the authors linger over what they variously term “underappreciated,” “underrated,” and “oft-forgotten” films. The scholars have a distinct talent for combining technical and aesthetic analysis to probe the “cinematic artistry” of these works while also gesturing to unexpected lineages and influences. They do a beautifully nuanced reading of Ford’s handling of rhythm and space in his first feature-length silent Western, Straight Shooting (1917), and draw a straight line to the effects he achieves in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance forty-five years later. They read The Wind (1928) as “the last great Western of the silent era” and precursor to later “psychological Westerns” such as Ford’s The Searchers (1956). Lillian Gish performs Letty Mason as a “classic westerner”—survivor, killer, self-contradictory in her innocence and passion; Victor Sjöström directs “the ultimate landscape Western” in his handling of nature as character; and the combination discloses “the dark underbelly of the American West’s progress.” They position Ruggles of Red Gap (1935) with Charles Laughton, directed by Leo McCarey, at the height of the comic Western genre, with its dissection of class and other prejudices echoing Wild and Woolly (1917) with Douglas Fairbanks and anticipating Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles (1974). The love triangle in Delmer Daves’s Jubal (1956)—which they reevaluate as “a clear model of the mid-century psychological Western”—sits on a spectrum from D. W Griffith’s “Indian romance,” The Mended Lute (1909), to Liberty Valance and beyond. Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) is linked to Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), the noir Western to German expressionism via Fritz Lang. In this accumulation of the unexpected, the authors acknowledge that some films fit the genre only by broadening its definition, but they do not commit to full-out reorientation of the Western’s history. Instead, they offer intriguing [End Page 215] legacies, lineages, and clusters that may well lay the groundwork for such a project. Christine Bold School of English and Theatre Studies University of Guelph Copyright © 2015 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Native Performers in Wild West Shows: From Buffalo Bill to Euro Disney by Linda Scarangella McNenly (review)

Native Performers in Wild West Shows: From Buffalo Bill to Euro Disney by Linda Scarangella McNenly (review)

Surround, Background, and the Overlooked

This piece invites attention to the background of photographs, or, as James Elkins would call it, the surround. He argues that the characteristics of the surround mean that this feature can be used to distinguish the genre of photography from that of painting. This essay maintains that there is much more of an overlap between photography and painting in this respect than he allows, since photographic surrounds were frequently artificial, or depended on aesthetic effects. It considers two different types of Victorian and early Edwardian photographs to support this claim: studio portraits, especially those featuring members of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show posed against non-Native scenes; and those in which atmospheric darkness was created through flash.

Buffalo Bill on the Silver Screen: The Films of William F. Cody. William F. Cody Series on the History and Culture of the American West. By Sandra K. Sagala . ( Norman : University of Oklahoma Press , 2013 . xvi + 218 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95 .)

<b><i>Buffalo Bill on the Silver Screen: The Films of William F. Cody</i></b>. William F. Cody Series on the History and Culture of the American West. By Sandra K. Sagala . ( Norman : University of Oklahoma Press , 2013 . xvi + 218 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95 .)

The Most Interesting Men in the World

The Most Interesting Men in the World Jon Coleman (bio) Monica Rico. Nature’s Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1213. ix + 287 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $40.00. A trapper and guide memorable for the scars given him by a perturbed grizzly bear, James Nugent lived a wild but circumscribed life. He routinely wandered in search of game and of mountains to scale, yet he stayed close to his home in Estes Park, Colorado. So intensely local that his identity fused with the landscape, “Rocky Mountain Jim” nevertheless stepped on the world stage when he consumed too much whiskey, threatened Griff Evans with a pistol, and got blasted with a shotgun. He died from his wounds three months later, while Evans pleaded self-defense and was absolved of any wrongdoing. Neither Evans nor Nugent were “foreign,” and no consulates or ambassadors intervened in the legal proceedings. The incident, however, was international because Estes Park was not completely national. The place and its residents belonged both to the United States and to a global network of circulating elite metropolitan men. In Nature’s Noblemen, Monica Rico reconstructs a transnational conspiracy of identity creation through a series of cold case studies. Her roster of dead white people will be familiar to specialists in nineteenth-century Western American history as well as to heritage-inclined television viewers zapping between the History Channel and PBS. “Buffalo Bill” Cody and Theodore Roosevelt could support their own boutique cable networks; lesser known, William Drummond Stewart, Moreton Frewen, Isabella Bird, and the Earl of Dunraven still have long track records as historical subjects. The connection between the British elite and the American West is old news too. As Rico explains in her introduction, Ray Allen Billington, Robert Athearn, and Earl Pomeroy rifled through these sources decades ago. Rico’s training in the history of gender and race gives her a fresh pair of eyes to see new clues in this worked-over material. Previous investigators were so busy looking for outside confirmation of America’s exceptionalism that they missed the obvious transnational significance of the foreign correspondence. Western American historians wanted British expatriates to explain [End Page 651] Rocky Mountain Jim to them. They wanted disinterested third parties to report that the American frontier was truly a breeding ground for a unique national character. Face and torso mauled into a novel arrangement, Jim embodied the genesis of American freedom, democracy, and toughness. He had tangled with an agent of the primitive wilderness and clawed back to serve as a wrangler of tourists. His fight with Evans—an American settler known to be friendly with the Englishmen who dawdled “around in those parts on the pretence of hunting”—was a strike for national independence and egalitarianism (p. 83). He would not be deprived of his liberty in a “deep-laid scheme” motivated by “English gold” (p. 125). For Rocky Mountain Jim, and Western historians, Estes Park—and by extension all of the West—belonged to Americans because they paid an elemental price for it. Reverse the perspective, however, and the landscape looks different. Instead of asking what the West or the frontier meant to Americans, Rico ponders why wealthy Brits invested their time, their money, and their identities in places like Estes Park. Why was the spectacle of American colonization intriguing to them? British aristocrats were not suffering for colonial outposts where they could enact their great-white-hunter fantasies. Why go west for elk and bighorns when Africa and India offered lions, rhinos, elephants, and tigers? Then again, why not visit them all and bag the lot? By downplaying Western uniqueness, Rico highlights the linkages that radiated out of the region. Wealthy seekers of masculine trophies—big game, ranches, paintings, resorts, or autobiographies—didn’t let national borders limit their collections. They fanned out across the globe and, in the process, knit together colonial regions through race, gender, and violence. They portrayed the American West as an episode in the planetary saga of Anglo-Saxon expansion. Race linked them to American colonization in a delightfully theoretical fashion. They possessed a grandparent’s stake in the proceedings...

Disneyland Indians: circa Paris, 2014

A four-act historical ethnodrama critiques the Paris Disneyland, Buffalo Bill Wild West Show and its use of Native Americans as re-enactors of a wild west that never was. The play asks if new stories of the West can be performed and if so how. I contest the transnational narrative that uses Native Americans as vehicles for telling stories about the global Wild West. I situate the critique in Paris Disneyland, but it could as easily be located in Disneyland Parks in Tokyo, London, or Rust, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. These global Wild West shows, with audience participation, enact recurring fantasies of colonial domination over Native Americans. By performing its own reflexive critique, this play is intended to mimic the Paris Wild West Show and expose this ideology.

Fan substitution between North American professional sports leagues

We use Canada-to-US border crossing data to estimate market penetration and fan substitution across sports leagues. We find that passenger car crossings into the US increase by more than 2000 when the National Football League’s Buffalo Bills are playing a home game just across the border. This accounts for as much as 5% to 8% of Bills home attendance. Additionally, we find evidence of price competition, but not quality competition, between the Bills and Toronto-based teams in the three other major North American pro sports leagues. Given the exclusive market rights and antitrust privilege extended to professional sport in North America, these findings have important implications with respect to competition policies as they apply to major sports leagues.