The Popular Frontier
(University of Oklahoma Press, 2017)
When William F. Cody introduced his Wild West exhibition to European audiences in 1887, the show soared to new heights of popularity and success. With its colorful portrayal of cowboys, Indians, and the taming of the North American frontier, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West popularized a myth of American national identity and shaped European perceptions of the United States. The Popular Frontier is the first collection of essays to explore the transnational impact and mass-cultural appeal of Cody’s Wild West. As editor Frank Christianson explains in his introduction, for the first four years after Cody conceived it, the Wild West exhibition toured the United States, honing the operation into a financially solvent enterprise. When the troupe ventured to England for its first overseas booking, its success exceeded all expectations. Between 1887 and 1906 the Wild West performed in fourteen countries, traveled more than 200,000 miles, and attracted a collective audience in the tens of millions. How did Europeans respond to Cody’s vision of the American frontier? And how did European countries appropriate what they saw on display? Addressing these questions and others, the contributors to this volume consider how the Wild West functioned within social and cultural contexts far grander in scope than even the vast American West. Among the topics addressed are the pairing of William F. Cody and Theodore Roosevelt as embodiments of frontier masculinity, and the significance of the show’s most enduring persona, Annie Oakley. An informative and thought-provoking examination of the Wild West’s foreign tours, The Popular Frontier offers new insight into late-nineteenth-century gender politics and ethnicity, the development of American nationalism, and the simultaneous rise of a global mass culture.
Review by Phillip A. Snyder presented at Faculty Book Lunch
In 2003 I was standing in the large dining hall of the castle on Cornwall’s St. Michael’s Mount when I caught a glimpse of something in a small adjoining room that was completely familiar yet totally foreign to that environment—a vintage 19th-century slick fork, half-seat, high-cantled buckaroo saddle. Above the saddle hung a framed newspaper article describing it as a gift to the Baron St. Levan from his friend William F. Cody. “Wow,” I thought, “Buffalo Bill sure got around.” As this fine essay collection illustrates, in transporting their versions of the American frontier throughout the British Isles and Europe, Cody and his Wild West Show (especially with the addition of the Congress of Rough Riders of the World) did much more than get around: they transformed an initially national enterprise into a quintessentially international one, and, in Frank Christianson’s words, “ritualized multiple strains of nationalist discourse that were, in turn, part of a broader shift in transatlantic culture of the late nineteenth century” (21). Robert W. Rydell argues for Cody’s influence on European peace talks; Jamie Horrocks brilliantly parallels Cody with Oscar Wilde in their posed sartorial splendor as international celebrities; Jeremy M. Johnston links Cody with Teddy Roosevelt and notions of American exceptionalism; Monica Rico and Jennifer R. Henneman write on Annie Oakley, respectively, as an embodiment of the transnational “New Girl” and of English ideas regarding “natural” womanhood; Emily C. Burns explores the implications of Cody’s masculine “colonization” of Paris as an extension of the western frontier; Julia S. Stetler interrogates German fascination with the indigenous members of Cody’s troop; Chris Dixon connects the Wild West’s five-week run in Barcelona with historical Spanish-American relations; Renee M. Laegreid investigates Italian and fascist appropriations of the Buffalo Bill myth; and, finally, Christianson adds a fitting note of Anglo-American epilogue and then calls for further transnational studies of Cody’s influence abroad. We can be reassured, then, that Buffalo Bill will continue to get around.