Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [23]
The show was immensely popular. In 1885, Cody took his “Wild West” to forty U.S. cities. In 1886, the show reached New York. Staged in Madison Square Garden, the set included a reproduction of the town of Deadwood doomed to be destroyed in each performance by a mock cyclone. In a single week, the show drew two hundred thousand people. The following year, Cody took the show to London, accompanied by ninety-seven Cheyenne, Kiowa, Pawnee, and Sioux Indians (including the Sioux chief Red Shirt), one hundred eighty horses, eighteen buffalo, ten elk, ten mules, and a dozen or so other animals. He also brought Phoebe Anne Moses, a twenty-seven-year-old woman from Tiffin, Ohio, who had begun shooting when only eight years old to help feed her family. She performed as Annie Oakley. At one point during the “Wild West” ’s London engagement, Cody’s Deadwood stage careened about the exhibition stadium carrying three crown princes and five kings, including the Prince of Wales. When the Indians attacked the stage, Buffalo Bill himself came riding to its rescue, as always.
Richard Slotkin, author of the 1992 book Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, contends that from 1885 to 1905, Cody’s “Wild West” “was the most important commercial vehicle for the fabrication and transmission of the Myth of the Frontier. It reached large audiences in every major city and innumerable smaller ones throughout the United States. The period of its European triumph coincided with the period of massive immigration to America. As many immigrants testified, the ‘Wild West’ was the source of some of their most vivid images and expectations of the new land.”
Undoubtedly, the show also persuaded many Americans and immigrants that the gun was central to the building of America. The proliferation of guns on and among the actors would alone have made the point, but Cody’s showbill addressed the matter directly in a discussion titled “The Rifle as an Aid to Civilization.” “The bullet,” the program declared, “is the pioneer of civilization, for it has gone hand in hand with the axe that cleared the forest, and with the family Bible and school book. Deadly as has been its mission in one sense, it has been merciful in another; for without the rifle ball we of America would not be to-day in the possession of a free and united country, and mighty is our strength.”
Buffalo Bill and his contemporaries the dime novelists, pulp writers, and overly enthusiastic reporters also assisted in myth manufacturing in a more indirect, but possibly more significant way. They provided the plots that Hollywood would soon use to relay and reinforce the distortions of myth, among them the notion that when all else fails, a gun can save us. From the earliest days of the film industry, movie directors recognized the lasting appeal of the frontier. In 1903, Edwin S. Porter made The Great Train Robbery, considered the first western and an important precursor of modern narrative cinema. It was an immediate success, imitations quickly followed, and within five years the western became an established genre. The real frontier, however, was left further and further behind.
By 1925, William Hart had vividly established the good badman as a film archetype. Next came Tom Mix, who perhaps did the true West the gravest injustice by inventing the fancy cowboy with his tailored clothes, silver-inlaid boots, diamond-studded spurs, and pearl-handled Colt six-guns. No one ever walked into Tombstone, Arizona, in the late nineteenth century wearing such clothes, yet after Mix’s death in a car crash in 1940 a plaque was installed at the crash site that read: “In Memory of Tom Mix, Whose Spirit Left His Body on This Spot and Whose Characterizations and Portrayals