AtD and the Wild West #2

[Paul Nightingale]

More from Slotkin's "Buffalo Bill's 'Wild West' and the Mythologization of
the American Empire" ...

The essay gives it away in the title: the Wild West stands in for, and helps
justify, the American Empire.

"The Wild West's conflation of the frontier myth and the new ideology of
imperialism was fully achieved in 1899 when 'Custer's Last Fight' was
replaced by the 'Battle of San Juan Hill,' celebrating the heroism of
Theodore Roosevelt -- whose First Volunteer Cavalry regiment was best known
by its nickname of 'The Rough Riders.'" (175-176)

'The Rough Riders' was the name given to performers in BBWW; Roosevelt
denied stealing it for his own regiment:

"The 1899 Wild West Program reprints an exchange of letters between Cody and
Roosevelt, in which the latter denies having borrowed the name from Cody's
Congress, asserts that it was spontaneously bestowed by local citizens, and
that Roosevelt himself was unaware of its reference. This (as Cody rather
modestly points out) was hardly credible, given the fame of the Wild West
(which Roosevelt had certainly attended) and the presence of some of the
show's cowboys and Indians among Roosevelt's recruits. Roosevelt offered a
mollifying compliment to the effect that, however it had come about, he was
proud to share the name with those "free fearless equestrians, now
marshalled under the leadership of the greatest horseman of all." (176)

[...]

"In 1901 San Juan Hill was replaced by a more recent imperial adventure,
'The Battle of Tien-Tsin,' reenacting the capture of that city by the Allied
army that suppressed China's Boxer Rebellion and rescued the 'captives' in
the Peking Legation Quarter. In this performance, the Indians assumed the
role of the Boxers, and the Wild West's soldiers and cowboys represented all
of white civilization, storming the citadel from which flew 'the Royal
Standard of Paganism ... proudly defiant of the Christian world,' to place
there 'the Banners of civilization.' After running 'Tien-Tsin' in 1901-2,
Cody reprised 'San Juan Hill' in 1903-4 taking advantage of (and perhaps
assisting) Roosevelt's run for reelection." (178-179)