The Real, and Fake, Wild West

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July 7th 2011

Published: March 31st 2012

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Buffalo Bill's stagecoach

The stagecoach Buffalo Bill used to travel with his Wild West Show

I spent most of my time today in the museum many call the Smithsonian of the West, the Buffalo Bill Historic Center.

It is a complex of five museums, all related to the west in one form or another.

The museums cover Buffalo Bill, the natural history of Yellowstone, plains Indians, western art, and firearms.

All of them are through and engaging.

Buffalo Bill Cody

The complex was originally founded to honor Buffalo Bill Cody, with a museum on his life.

He was born in Iowa in 1846 and grew up in Kansas.

As a teenager, he may have ridden for the Pony Express (see Frontier Legends).

During the Civil War, he joined the Union Army as a scout.

Afterward, he worked for several railroads, hunting and supplying buffalo meat.

He was very good at this job, and earned his nickname accordingly.

When the war against the Sioux broke out (see Tourists in a Sacred Land), he rejoined the Army.

He earned a medal of honor in 1872 for defending his unit during an ambush.

After the war was over, in 1883, he formed a travelling show that amounted to a western themed circus.

Late in life, he helped

Medal of Honor

The Medal of Honor Buffalo Bill won during the Great Sioux War

found Cody.

Buffalo Bill lived the real west, and he helped create the mythic west through his show.

The museum contrasts the two through exhibits and artifacts.

The romantic myth of the west started during the Sioux war, and eastern writers loved to romanticize Buffalo Bill’s exploits.

He exploited this fame thoroughly during the thirty years the show ran.

It always featured a segment on the Pony Express, a real buffalo herd, shooting demonstrations, and the Indian Wars.

A surprising number of plains Indians, including Sitting Bull agreed to play themselves in the show for at least a few years.

The predictable result is that the Sioux came to represent ALL Native American tribes in the popular imagination, regardless of region.

People expected all Native Americans to live in tipis and wear feathered bonnets.

Many other western stereotypes can be traced directly to Buffalo Bill.

The final section is on Buffalo Bill’s home life in Cody.

He was always travelling with the show, so his wife kept the household running.

The museum has the contents of their living room.

She also kept the

Anne Oakley

Items used by Anne Oakley in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show

books.

Sadly, interest in western subjects disappeared early in the new century and the show went bankrupt.

Buffalo Bill died in Denver soon afterward in 1917 while visiting his sister.

Like all museums of this type, this one is filled with artifacts.

Buffalo Bill’s Union Army uniform is on display, along with several of his buckskin coats.

The museum has his medal of honor.

They also have Buffalo Bill’s personal stagecoach he used while running the show.

The list goes on and on.

Unlike some famous people, Buffalo Bill did not keep many mementoes of his career, so the museum has had to track down items from hundreds of collectors.

The museum has a section on the most famous show member after Wild Bill himself, Anne Oakley.

She was a sharpshooter in the show nearly as long as it ran.

Unlike Buffalo Bill, she never worked on the frontier, but she was a good show woman and crowds loved her.

Ultimately, she became part of the western legend with a long list of books and souvenirs about her life.

The

Forest Diorama

Diorama of a temperate forest in Yellowstone

museum has a sample of them.

Yellowstone Natural History

The newest of the museums covers the natural history of the Yellowstone region.

It focuses on animals and plants.

All of them are displayed in highly realistic dioramas that put most museums of this type to shame.

Stuffed animals prowl and slither through fake rocks and trees.

The displays are divided into areas based on elevation, which in the Rocky Mountains determines the climate.

Every animal has a display panel talking about its life and how it survives.

The central point of the museum is that the famous park is just one piece of a much larger ecosystem.

What happens outside the park has a direct impact on what happens inside it.

The largest of the panels discusses the grey wolf.

The wolf was eliminated from Yellowstone in 1926, and its reintroduction in 1997 caused considerable controversy.

The panel discusses the essential role that this predator plays in the Yellowstone ecosystem, culling old and sick animals so they do not use up the park’s food supply.

It also discusses why so many people fear them, ranging from livestock losses to childhood

Lakota on the Move

Diorama of a Lakota woman between campsites, from the Plains Indians Museum.

fables.

My one disappointment with this museum was how little it has on geology.

Yellowstone is a geologic wonder, and most people visit for that reason.

The biggest geology display was on the area’s most famous feature, the geysers.

A geyser is a hot pool with a restricted passage from underground.

Water heats up and expands faster than it can get to the surface.

The trapped water then turns to steam.

Eventually, the steam pressure builds so high that it overwhelms the weight of the water in the passage, and up it goes.

After the eruption finishes, the steam needs to rebuild, which is why nearly all geysers have a time period between eruptions.

The next museum covers the plains Indians.

Most of the information duplicated that from the Nebraska Historical Society (see Interesting Things in a Dull Landscape) and the Journey Museum (see Tourists in a Sacred Land), but the displays make it worthwhile.

For example, it has a full diorama of a Lakota woman on the move, her baby strapped to her back and pulling the family belongings on a sledge.

The most interesting part for me was

Lakota vs. US Army

The Lakota view of their dealings with the US Army during the Great Sioix War

a series of panels where modern tribe members discuss historic events (including the Great Sioux War), called “Voices”.

The selection of artifacts and artwork is larger than what I saw elsewhere.

It has a rare collection of ghost dance shirts (see This Hard Land) and a buffalo hide illustrating the Battle of Greasy Grass.

The Center had a chuck wagon set up in the front lawn.

Unlike the show version, this one was authentic to the time period.

Real cowboy food had a close resemblance to the meals of the Oregon Trail (see Pioneer Trails), things that would not spoil after months outside, combined with lots of meat.

A staff member demonstrated the normal cooking technique, a bunch of cast iron pots over the fire.

The pots contained beef and vegetable stew, which visitors could sample.

Firearms Museum

Next up was the firearms museum.

The Center owns one of the largest private collections in the world.

The display’s justification, in part, is that guns formed (and still form) and important part of western history and culture.

Guns on the frontier were another tool that people used to survive.

Enthusiasts could spend all

Chuckwagon

Authentic chuckwagon outside the Buffalo Bill Center

day here, but I found it rather numbing after a while.

The guns are divided based on purpose.

There are guns made by governments expressly for war.

There are guns used for hunting, which are surprisingly specialized (duck guns are different to deer guns, for example).

Finally, there are guns used for everyday survival.

Most were used to shoot dinner instead of outlaws.

Other than the obvious design advances (the Gatling machine gun, for example) I found it hard to appreciate all the nuances.

The museum has entire walls of guns made by different manufacturers.

Pride of place goes to two groups, Winchester and Colt.

These guns were favored on the frontier.

As one sheriff allegedly put it: “God made all men, but it was Colonel Colt that made them all equal”.

Oddly enough, both types were made in the same place, Hartford Connecticut.

The museum has an odd display of famous guns.

Virtually all of them were used in western movies!

These guns are more famous for appearing in filmed versions of the west than those used in real life.

Gatling gun

A Civil War Gatling gun, the world's first practical machine gun.

One was a tiny gun kept in the boot of the owner of a house of ill repute in Cody in real life.

Western Art Museum

The final section, and the one where I spent the most time, is a museum of western art.

All of the big names are represented, including Russell, Remington, and Bierstadt.

Much of the work is landscapes of one form or another, with and without human participants.

One entire section is on Yellowstone, with pictures of geysers, hot pools, and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.

It includes a number of paintings by Thomas Moran, the official painter of the Hayden expedition to the area that later became the park in 1871.

The style for most work is either realism or Hudson River School romanticism.

Paintings like these helped create the western myth.

They also built support for preserving landscapes in national parks.

One section covers the depiction of animals in western art, especially horses.

Horses were symbolic of survival and self-reliance on the frontier.

The museum owns a version of Last Drop by Charles Schreyvogel, a famous sculpture of a cowboy sacrificing himself to give

Shootout!

The final battle during the Cody gunfight

his last available water to his horse.

A highly stylized painting, Out to Lunch by Anne Coe, shows a group of bears destroying a picnic.

This is a literal problem in Yellowstone, but also a symbolic one: humans intruding into a natural world.

The museum owns two paintings of the Battle of Greasy Grass (see The Highway in the Sky) that illustrate very different approaches to western mythmaking.

On one side of the room is “Custer’s Last Stand” by Edgar Samuel Paxson, painted in 1899.

It depicts Custer and his troops as western heroes, valiantly fighting to the last man against an Indian horde.

Custer himself is the centerpiece, standing in the exact middle of the huge canvas.

On the other side is “Battle of Greasy Grass” by Allan Mardon. Finished in 1996, it depicts things more evenly.

The painting is a thoroughly researched history painting showing the battle throughout the day.

Custer is just a small figure in a corner, surrounded by the Native Americans that will ultimately kill him.

The layout has remarkable similarity to the buffalo hide showing the battle in the Plains Indians exhibit.

The museum owns

Calf Roping

A competitor ropes a calf during the Cody Night Rodeo

a collection of poignant work I have never seen before.

During World War II, the US government sent all Japanese and Japanese Americans on the west coast to internment camps.

One of them was located near Cody.

The residents needed some way to pass the time, so the guards encouraged them to learn crafts.

They produced a striking array of painting and sculpture, most on traditional Japanese motifs.

Prepare for a gut punch viewing it.

Cody Gunfight

After the museums, I saw the cheesy side of the western myth.

Cody has a staged gunfight every day during the summer.

The performance group sets up a western style set on a closed street, and then does the show.

The story will be familiar from any western movie.

A group of outlaws comes to town to cause trouble.

They end up in the local saloon where one gets arrested.

The rest break him out of jail while the sheriff is away, and a gun battle commences with the townspeople.

All seems lost until the drunken deputy shows himself to be the ultimate sharpshooter.

The only unique thing about the show is the Buffalo Bill reinactor

Calf Chase!

Kids (the blurs on the left) chase after calves (the dark shapes on the far right) during the Cody Night Rodeo.

who shows up at the start to introduce the whole thing.

I found it entertaining for a half hour; the secret is to not think too much and go with the absurdity.

A taste:

Cody Nite Rodeo

My final item for the night was yet another western tradition in Cody, the night rodeo.

Cody likes to call itself the rodeo capitol of the world, and throws this show every night the weather is descent.

The events and their order are broadly similar to the Black Hills Roundup (see The Western Tradition).

The difference is that this is amateur rodeo; anyone who pays the entry fee can compete.

Most of the cowboys were descent, the rest failed in often amusing ways.

One event that will never appear on the professional circuit is the calf chase.

The organizers invited every child under the age of 12 to enter the arena floor.

They then released three calves with ribbons on their tails.

The first child to grab a ribbon and bring it to the announcer’s stand got a prize.

The hordes went after

Rodeo Clown vs. Bull

The Cody rodeo clown stares down a bull. This scene rarely appears on the professional circuit :)

the calves, which proceeded to run for their lives.

The chase looked like a demolition derby in slow motion, and it was real fun to watch.

Well edited video from Cody: