As a commercial and cultural center, New York was the nerve center for shaping American ideas about its indigenous inhabitants, though not through some top down directive. It was market-driven. It was what people wanted to hear. For the defeated Northeastern tribes there was sentimentalization. So it is that we arrive at the concept of the Noble Savage. The phrase “noble savage” was coined by restoration playwright John Dryden, England’s first poet laureate and as it happens my 2nd cousin, 13 times removed. Dryden was a Puritan, so not a huge stretch that he’s a relation. Dryden’s phrase became attached to a concept that crept into political science, philosophy, and literature, an idea of aboriginal man as something like an angel, uncorrupted by the moral corkscrew of modern civilization. According to this idea, the Noble Savage is like an innocent child, or a very loyal dog. Robinson Crusoe’s Friday, for example. This is an outgrowth of romanticism.
The great actor Edwin Forrest, today most
famous for his unintentional part in the anti-English Astor Place Theatre Riot
of 1849, starred as King Philip in a melodrama for the stage called Metacom.James Fenimore Cooper wrote his Leatherstocking Tales and Longfellow, The
Song of Hiawatha. Herman Melville’s allegory Moby Dick describes a
ship called The Pequod driven to destruction by a bloodthirsty,
hate-filled, monomaniacal captain, and casts as its harpooners the "primitives" Queequeg, Tashtego and Daggoo. There is sadness and regret in that stuff,
but also a convenient lack of acknowledgment that folks from all of those
tribes were still alive, still had needs and wishes and thoughts and dreams. It
consigned the heart of the issue to the past as though it were a dead letter,
rather than one that was ongoing.
This is a testament to the fact that native Americans had become novelties in the Northeast by this stage. In fact, James Fenimore Cooper’s landmark novel The Last of the Mohicans is set during the French and Indian War, nearly a century earlier, and it’s all about what’s advertised, a member of a New York tribe so endangered he’s the last man standing. There’s your sentimentalizing right? After it’s too late. Uncas and Chingatchgook are types of the Noble Savage: loyal, brave, dutiful.
As
for the still troublesome western tribes, those were painted as a threat, one
that was generally much exaggerated by newspapers and dime novels and
theatrical spectacles of one kind of another. Around 1860, there occurred a
revolution of sorts in the realm of popular literature with the release of a
paper-bound publication called Maleaska,
The Indian Wife of a White Hunter. Sold for a dime, it was a runaway
success selling 65,000 copies in a few months. It established a winning recipe
that sold books for four decades: lurid, cheaply and hastily made. Pot-boilers,
bodice rippers. There were all sorts of romances and melodramas with all sorts
of settings, pirate ships and the castles of cavaliers, but the ones that were
most popular were set in the west. I was about to call it the Old West, but
back then it was just the west.
The
best remembered of these tales of the great plains concerned the adventures of
a character whose name you may be familiar with , a gentleman by the name of Buffalo Bill Cody. Cody was one of the
greatest showmen of all time, second perhaps only to Barnum. Yet it might
surprise you to know that in many ways as a frontiersman he was the genuine
article. He had been an Indian scout, buffalo skinner, Pony express rider,
Union soldier, a gold prospector, and more. It wasn’t until a gentleman named Ned Buntline starred him in a series of
dime novels that Cody’s legend began to grow…into a legend. Amusingly,
Buntline’s real life story is nearly as picaresque as Cody’s was. His real name
was Edward Judson. He took Buntline as his nom
de plume because he had been a sailor, much as Samuel Clemens had taken“Mark Twain” from the riverboat lexicon. Buntline was a rough character; he was
always starting newspapers and magazines, they would fail and then he would
skip town to avoid his debts. He spent plenty of time in jail and yet he funded
one of his magazines by single-handedly catching a pair of wanted men for the
bounty. But then he would do things like the diddle some guy’s teenage daughter
and then kill him in a duel when he got mad about it. Buntline was hung by a
lynch mob on that occasion and was only saved when the awning he was hanging
from fell down. He liked to stir up trouble. Politically, he was to the right
of the cavemen. He was a leader in the Nativist “Know Nothing Party and was
convicted for inciting TWO riots. One of them was the famous 1849 Astor Place
Theatre Riot in New York. and there was another one in St Louis 3 years later.
Now
you’d think a guy like that wouldn’t need to make up stories. But he did. he
wrote ripping yarns to pay his bills, tales with titles like The Black Avenger of
the Spanish Main: or, The Fiend of Blood, or The
Red Revenger; Or, The Pirate King of the Floridas. Now, it might not surprise you to know that
Ned Buntline was a heavy drinker. And if you know anything about the world at
all, it won’t surprise you to know that Ned Buntline was also an outspoken temperance crusader. So while he was on this
lecture tour in Fort McPherson, Nebraska
in 1869, preaching about the evils of drinking, he heard that Wild Bill Hickok
was over at the saloon. he went in there to interview to get material for a
book or an article or something but Bill wasn’t having it, and shooed him away
at gunpoint. So he went and saw the other long haied Bill, Bill Cody, who had
fought alongside Hickok in a recent actions against the Sioux and Cheyenne. And
that’s how Buffalo Bill: King of the
Bordermen was born. This dime novel penned by Ned Buntline was a publishing
sensation and made a household word out of Cody, who had never been called
Buffalo Bill in his life.
And
then, a transformation: from the actual to the legendary. In those days, there
were no firm lines between a) fiction, b) journalism, c) biography, d)
advertising, and e) public relations. And so Ned Buntline went from
interviewing Cody about his real adventures, to making up fake adventures as
though he were a mythical figure, to being his manager, i.e. managing his real
life as well as his fictional one. In
1872 Buffalo Bill, King of the Bordermen was adapted into a stage play that was
presented at the Bowery Theatre in New York City. Cody liked it so much that Buntline
wrote him a new play, Scouts of the
Prairie, in which Buffalo Bill played himself, accompanied by Texas Jack
Omohundro, who did rope tricks, Italian ballerina Giuseppina Morlacchi, and 6
year old Carlos Montezuma, who played “Atseka, the Apache Child of
Cochise.” On at least one occasion Wild
Bill Hickok relented and appeared in these shows. But Cody was bit by the bug.
They toured the whole country with this show which was still essentially a
melodrama stage play. A decade later (1883) Cody debuted Buffalo Bill’s Wild
West, a large scale spectacle that possessed elements of circus, rodeo,
sideshow, a parade, a carnival, and a stage spectacular, and paved the way for
Hollywood westerns.
The show reenacted real events like Custer’s Last Stand, and one
of the most famous acts they booked was the genuine Sioux Chieftain Sitting Bill. Buffalo Bill toured his Wild West all over the US and Europe and kept it going until 1908. He had many
imitators in the wild west show line yet was the only one that lived on in
popular memory
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