ATDTDA (1): Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show (part 1)

[Tim Strzechowski]

from Eric Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America.  New York:  Vintage, 2003.

A train with a more lighthearted cargo also headed for Chicago, this one leased by Buffalo Bill for his Wild West show.  It carried a small army: one hundred former U.S. Cavalry soldiers, ninety-seven Cheyanne, Kiowa, Pawnee, and Siousx Indians, another fifty Cossacks and Hussars, 180 horses, eighteen buffalo, ten elk, ten mules, and a dozen other animals.  It also carried Phoebe Anne Moses of Tiffin, Ohio, a young woman with a penchant for guns and an excellent sense of distance.  Bill called her Annie, the press called her Miss Oakley.

At night the Indians and soldiers played cards (p. 207).

[...]

There was disarray in the fairgrounds, but not next door on the fifteen acres of ground leased by buffalo Bill for his show, which now bore the official title "Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World."  He was able to open his show on April 3 and immediately filled his eighteen-thousand-seat arena.  Visitors entered through a gate that featured Columbus on one side, under the banner "Pilot of the Ocean, the First Pioneer," and Buffalo Bill on the other, identified as "Pilot of the Prairie, the Last Pioneer."

His show and camp covered fifteen acres.   Its hundreds of Indians, soldiers, and workers slept in tents.  Annie Oakley always made hers very homey, with a garden outside of primrose, geranium, and hollyhock.  Inside she placed her couch, cougar skins, an Axminister carpet, rocking chairs, and assorted other artifacts of domestic life.  And of course a diverse collection of guns.

Buffalo Bill always began his show with his Cowboy Band playing "The Star-Spangled Banner."  Next came the "Grand Review," during which soldiers from America, England, France, Germany, and Russia paraded on horseback around his arena.  Annie Oakley came next, blasting away at an array of impossible targets.  She hit them.  Another of the show's staples was an Indian attack on an old stagecoach, the Deadwood Mail Coach, with Buffalo Bill and his men coming to the rescue.  (During the show's earlier engagement in London, the Indians attacked the coach as it raced across the grounds of Windsor Castle carrying four kings and the prince of Wales.  Buffalo Bill drove). [...] (pp. 222 - 23)
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