August 16, 2010 • 25 mins
It didn't take long for America to romanticize cowboys. Even after most cowboys gave up their spurs, Wild West shows captivated audiences across the country. Tune in and learn more about the stars of Wild West shows, from Buffalo Bill to Annie Oakley.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And you remember
a little while ago we talked about famous battle horses
(00:21):
like Incatatas, like Incatatas, and remember how at least half
of them seemed like they had been stuffed. So if
you're the kind of person who keeps up with the
latest in stuffed horse news, I am you've probably heard this.
Roy Rogers Trusty Steed trigger just sold for two hundred
and sixty six thousand dollars in New York City, and
(00:43):
his dog bullet sold for about thirty five thousand dollars.
I think this would make a difficult decorative scheme in
one's house, but I'm not very good at interior decorating.
Bullet on one side of the door, trigger on the other, maybe.
But the cool thing is before the sale, we received
this note in photos from people at Christie's Interiors, their
fans of the podcast, and they also auctioned off the memorabilia,
(01:06):
and they told us that trigger, bullet, buttermilk, and quote
too many cowboy boots to count had all been stored
in their warehouse for about five months, and understandably they
were kind of sad to see the stuff go. They
had gotten a little attached to it. So they sent
a request for an episode on famous cowboys in honor
of their sale, and we're responding with, of course, but
(01:28):
how do we decide on who to talk about? And
Sarah was saying, the first cowboys that she thought of
weren't really cowboys at all, their outlaws and hustlers and
lawman when we've talked about a lot of them before,
White Earp that kind of that kind of fellow. And
the next one's we thought of were like Roy Rogers,
their TV stars, film cowboys, stuntman, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood,
(01:52):
that type. So we wanted something that's a little bit
between those two eras, something that's not yet so far
in from the real open range, real cowboys. And our
answer was the Traveling wild West Show, which is a
little bit vaudeville for our vaudeville hungry listeners, a medley
of horse tricks, gun tricks, and humor. But first, how
(02:16):
did we get from the actual wild West to the
Wild West Show? And just a little more than a decade,
if the cowboy is not the outlawed gun slinger we
know from movies. What does he really do? To give
you a definition before we start, Real cowboys are horsemen
who handle and drive cattle. Pretty obvious. They also do
other tasks like branding and castrating the animals, or they
(02:39):
break horses, and they obviously still exist today. But they're real.
Heyday was pretty short. It's eighteen sixty seven to eighteen
eighty seven, so only twenty years of hardcore cowboy times.
Their techniques using horses and lariats to herd cattle were
picked up as early as eighteen twenty by pioneers of
(03:00):
serving Mexican vaccaros, and by the end of the Civil
War we've got a pretty big cattle industry in Texas,
which is centered around the Texas Longhorn steer, a hybrid
of Spanish and English cattle. But we have a problem,
and that's getting the beef out of Texas into the
railroad where it can be shipped to northern cities where
(03:20):
there are a lot of hungry people. And that's where
the cowboys come in. And their job was two in
the fall, round up the herd, brand the ones that
are unmarked, or collect any unowned cows, and then they'd
watch over them through the winter, make sure nothing terrible happened.
In the spring, they would drive the cattle on trails
out of Texas to the railheads in Missouri and Wyoming
(03:42):
and Kansas. And I didn't know what a railhead was,
if you want to explain, because I thought it was
just an insult. It does sound like an insult. It's
just a rail terminus or at the end of a line,
a place where you go and ship your cattle off
to the off to the cities. So within about a deck,
this cattle ranching spreads across the Great Plains all the
(04:03):
way to Canada, as far west as the Rockies and
Soda Cowboys. But by about eight or so, fenced ranches
replaced open grazing. Railroad stops are often closer to the cattle,
and ranching becomes a big business. So cowboys aren't aren't
needed as much. You don't need as many of them.
They're not covering these huge, long distances. But by this
(04:26):
point the cowboy has already entered American mythology. It doesn't
matter that we don't need tons of cowboys anymore. But
public can't get enough of this mythological, sort of glamorized idea,
a ragged young man of cowboys. Yeah, the stagecoach robbers,
the railhead brawls. So we end up making up more
(04:47):
news and that's dime. Novels about the wild West. They
become really popular and you can just imagine kids in
big Eastern cities reading about their famous um Western counterparts.
But what's better than reading about cowboys is seeing a
real live one plus Indians plus buffalo. So enter the
(05:10):
first wild West Show and our first wild West cowboy,
Buffalo Bill. So. One thing that makes the performers a
Wild West shows so interesting why we decided to go
with this genre in particular, is that a lot of
the performers actually come out of the real wild West.
Most really worked as cowboys, some even split their time
(05:31):
between the stage and the ranch that they were still
being authentic even when they were performers. And William Frederick
Cody born in eighty six in Iowa is definitely one
of these. He is the real deal. He starts work
as a messenger boy in Kansas at age eleven when
his father dies, and interestingly, the firm that he works
for is Russell Majors and Waddell. That sounds familiar. Yeah,
(05:54):
that's because these are the guys who financially backed the
Pony Express. So there's Yeah, as we mentioned, there are
some people who think that Buffalo Bill was part of
the Pony Express, some people who don't. He was definitely
involved with the financial backers. Photo pony expert. There you go.
So he's also doing some horse wrangling and some hunting,
(06:15):
which will prove to be valuable entertainment skills in his future.
He joins the service for the Civil War and then
he continues to work for the U. S. Army after
the war. He is a messenger and at times a
dispatch bearer and scout for troops out of Kansas. His
side job was hunting buffalo to feed the men building
(06:36):
the Union Pacific Railroad, and he earned his nickname Buffalo
Bill by killing four thousand, two hundred eighty buffalo, something
that sounds kind of terrible today. Yeah, not quite as
impressive of a stat these days. Also terrible sixteen Indian attacks.
So those are just some basic numbers for Buffalo Bill.
(06:57):
His real reputation comes from scouting, and he's got this
near perfect spatial memory which is something to be MPEd,
I'd say, uh. And he's employed by the Fifth Cavalry
as a guy because he goes somewhere and he can
remember exactly where everything is how to get their trails.
It's pretty amazing, exact opposite of all of my skills.
(07:19):
His work earns him a Medal of Honor in eighteen
seventy two, which is later revoked since he was a civilian,
and then given back to him posthumously. To make up
your mind, guy. So newspapers love Buffalo Bill and eat
him up, and dime novels do too, which is weird
to think of a real life guy being a character
(07:40):
fan fiction. It is. That's another proto thing, isn't it.
So When author ned Buntline, whose real name is easy C. Judson,
I don't know why picture picture periods between capital letters,
not like easy see easy c uh So Buntline Flush
(08:00):
Judgson asks him to start in this drama called The
Scouts of the Prairie that he's written, and Cody signs on.
He's realizing that this is going to be a possibly
good way to cash in on his dime novel theme.
And he's not the greatest actor in the world. But
he's really fun to watch. His stage tricks are good
(08:20):
and he's a success. When he's not acting, he's pulling
a city slickers and taking rich guys and noblemen out west.
So he's got the best of both worlds going on here.
And it's not long before he decides to stage his
own show, a variety act. He'd have cowboys rough riding, roping, shooting,
and bronco busting. There would be staged fights with Indians
(08:43):
and recreations of friendier life, and it would all be
going down at your local campus tent so act Worth, Georgia.
I'm like, yeah, it sounds like a good idea, and
it's not entirely a new idea, though Barnum had included
a wild West act in his show way back in
eighteen seventy six, which is the heyday of cowboys. But
Buffalo Bill and his partner w F Doc Carver show
(09:07):
is definitely beyond what anyone else has done. And they
call it the Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders
of the World, and their first show is in eighteen
eighty three. And these shows are are nothing to laugh about.
They are four hours long, which people must have had
longer attention spans than they do today. I can't imagine
(09:28):
a four hour show now, and what you get in
your four hours are a buffalo hunt. Of course, you
get to see other wild animals like elk, bear, moose,
and deer. There's a pony express ride, a stagecoach capture,
and eventually two big name stars taking part sitting Bowl
as in the Sitting Bowl and Annie Oakley, who is
(09:52):
the next star on our list. So Annie Oakley, she's
really born Phoebe and Mosey and a fun early story
about her that she paid the mortgage on the family
farm at age fifteen with her hunted game. So she's
obviously a sharp shooter, but she has a pretty traumatic childhood.
Her father dies early and her mother, who's left with
(10:14):
too many kids to take care of, lets out Annie
as a servant, and she suffers from abuse, but finally
manages to work her way home and become the family breadwinner.
You can imagine she's not willing to let anything happen
to her again, and soon her shooting skills are worth
more than the game she can hunt. She enters a
shooting contest against Frank E. Butler, a vaudeville performer, and
(10:38):
he said to have laughed when he saw that his
opponent was this title five foot girl. But she wins,
which must have impressed him, because in eighteen seventy six
the two get married and tore the circuits as Butler
and Oakley, a stage name she took from a Cincinnati suburb,
and in eighty five they ditched their own outfit. Butler
(10:59):
switches to manage then and Oakley signs with Buffalo Bill,
going by Miss Annie Oakley, the peerless Lady wing Shot,
and it's Sitting Bull who gives her the more famous
nickname Little sure Shot. So what can Annie do? Here's
a list. She can hit a dime tossed into the air.
She can shoot cigarettes from her husband's lips, or shoot
(11:21):
cigarettes from the future Kaiser Wilhelm the second slips which
whatever lips are available. I can't imagine whose people would
let him do that, But apparently she could shoot a
playing card tossed in the air full of bullets. And
she could split a playing card held on end at
thirty paces. These are just a few of Annie's amazing
(11:41):
tricks for you to contemplate, and they take her around
the world. She even meets Queen Victoria in seven, who
saw the show three times in a row. And she
works with Buffalo Bill for sixteen years starring in the
show except for one brief period when she left him
for his arrival. The next star on our list, and
(12:02):
that is Pawny Bill, and just still warning. I don't
know how this happened, but every man on this list
is either named Bill or Will so good luck keeping
them swats. It's better, possibly than his real name, which
is Gordon William Lily. Gordon doesn't work well for a cowboy,
I feel, or calling him Lily his last name doesn't
(12:23):
sound particularly great either, but that's not to insult any
cowboys named Gordon, so Lily slush. Pawny Bill born Valentine's Day,
eighteen sixty. His family moves to Kansas after their flour
mill burns down, and it's there where he makes the
acquaintance of the Pawny people who were wintering near Wellington's
and they had just been removed from their lands in Pawnty, Oklahoma,
(12:46):
and he works as a trapper in Indian Territory for
a while with trapper Tom McClain, not to be confused
with the Mad Trapper and supplements his income with waiting tables,
working as a cowboy, picking up work where you can
get it. He continues his relationship with a Pawny by
teaching and interpreting for the U S Indian Agent, and
in eighteen eighty three, Buffalo Bill brings him on for
(13:09):
his inaugural show to coordinate the Pawnee Troope of entertainers.
And it's while touring with Buffalo Bill that Pawny Bill
meets a teenage Quaker girl named May Manning watching these
shows parade, and he marries her two years later. And
then it's just mentioned in our source that she turns
into a sharpshooter, So I guess the marriage was going
to magical school that could be acquired. So her family
(13:32):
suggests that Pawny Bill break out from Buffalo Bill and
start up his own show, and he does that in
surprisingly you think with his sharpshooting wife and his own
skills it would do all right. It's a financial failure,
but he has other stuff going on, namely opening up
Oklahoma's unassigned lands. On April eighty nine, he leads a
(13:56):
land run of four thousand men to claim the territory
with the plan is basically, line up on horseback, stake
your claim, and there are tens of thousands of participants
and his prominence with the Oklahoma Boomers makes him nationally famous,
which means it's the perfect time to start another wild
West show. Yeah, this time it's Pawny Bills Historical wild West,
(14:18):
Indian Museum and Encampment, and this one is a big success.
May Lily does are sharp shooting on horseback and by
nineteen o eight he's able to merge his show with
Buffalo Bill, so back to the original and they bill
it as Buffalo Bills Wild West and Pawnee Bill's Great
Far East Show. But a note on Pawny Bill, Buffalo
(14:42):
Bill was not that great at managing his fortune. You'd
think you'd be a very wealthy man with this original
wild West show. Doesn't turn out like that. Pawny Bill,
on the other hand, is a very successful businessman, and
he gets into oil and real estate and motion pictures
in banking, and I kind of think of him as
the modern Western man, you know. On the one hand,
(15:04):
he's very into preserving the Old West. Uh. He gets
into lobbying for Buffalo protection. He helps establish the Witch
Tom Mountains National Wildlife Refuge. But he's also the modern man.
He wants to bring business into the West. He advocates
for building highways. I think he even has a highway
(15:24):
named after him at one point. But Bill and Bill
have another competitor, the Miller Brothers One oh one Ranch
and wild West Show, and their star is the next
cowboy on our list, Bill Pickett. So Bill Pickett is
Bill Bill, and versus Bill, we'll we'll have a will
coming up to So Bill Pickett isn't just your average cowboy.
(15:47):
He's a pulldogger. And in case you don't know what
that means, this is what you do. You grab the
steer by its horns and twist its neck and then
you bite its nose or upper lip before flipping it
to the ground, which is insane founding. And then seriously,
how dogs wrestle steer which I didn't even know dogs
(16:08):
were used to wrestle. And I'm going to bring this
up with my next Georgia Bulldogs football game. By the way,
it would be a different kind of bulldogger for sure. So, uh,
there's a modified version of this that still happens in
rodeos today. If you're a rodeo fan, you should feel
free to write us and tell us about it. William
Pickett was born in eighteen seventy near Austin. He was
(16:29):
one of thirteen kids, which quite a lot of children,
said me, who's one of six, and he was the
descendant of American Indians and black slaves. After finishing the
fifth grade, he started ranch work and did some tricks
on the weekends in town, and by eighteen eighty eight
he and his four brothers start a horse breaking business.
(16:50):
He entered his first rodeo in Taylor, Texas, and in
nineteen hundred he got sponsored by the rodeo entrepreneur at
Lee Moore. Soon he's working with the Miller brothers on
the one A one Ranch and Wild West Show build
as the Dusky Demon, and he's really good at handling
domestic animals, wild animals and doing those amazing bulldogging stunts.
(17:11):
And his quintessential performance comes in Mexico City in nineteen
o eight. This is a great story. He wrestles a
Mexican fighting ball for a full seven minutes, but finally
the outraged audience just freaks out that he's doing it wrong,
because you don't wrestle a Mexican fighting bowl. You wave
(17:32):
the red flag and you get out your sword, and
so they're thinking he's doing it completely wrong. It's not
bull fighting. Nice tribe. They'll pick it up. Still, it
must have been a pretty cool show. When he's not performing,
he's working as a cowboy or appearing in rodeo as
It kind of reminded me of those early baseball players
we talked about in the Facial Page episode. Yeah, it's
(17:53):
it's not a part time job, not a seasonal job.
You've got to work year round if you're in this business.
To appear in those rodeos, he's identified as Indian instead
of black, so he can compete against white people. Since
the era of the wild West Show dovetails into film,
Bill Pickett does some work out of Jacksonville, starring in
(18:14):
films like The Crimson Skull and The Bulldogger and After Horse.
But he dies from a ranch injury in nineteen thirty two.
I think was he kicked in the head by a horse.
And finally, our most successful crossover star from wild West
to wild West Show to film is Will Rogers, a
(18:35):
Will instead of a Bill at last, So William Penna
Dare Rodgers was born in eighteen seventy nine in Cherokee
Territory it's Oklahoma today. He was part Cherokee on both sides,
and he grows up on his father's ranch and at
boarding schools. But because his father has some money, he's
able to travel a bit, which is important for considering
(18:55):
his later life. He gets a wanderlust bug pretty early,
and he even gets to see the World Exposition in
Chicago in eighteen nine, which I have to imagine influenced
his desire to become a performer. But he's into the range,
not into the classroom or settling down into the family business.
So at eighteen, he leaves his Missouri military school to
(19:20):
move to the Texas Panhandle and work on ranches. He
may even have applied to be one of Roosevelt's rough
rider's side note, but by about eight he goes home
to manage the family ranches cattle while his father works
in banking and tribal politics. He was hoping his son
would sort of take over the farm business and he
(19:40):
could go off to the city and do his work,
but that doesn't work out because Will cannot stay away
from the action for long and in nineteen hundred, he
and his friend Dick Paris go to South America. Their
boat goes from Galveston to New York to London to
Buenos Aires, and when he can't find work there, he
gets a job on a cattle boat bound for South Africa.
(20:02):
And so he ends up in South Africa and he
gets another job driving a herd through the country. This
is he's a really great example of good luck with
your jobs. I guess, just going out on a limb
and something coming along. So while he's driving this herd
through South Africa, he runs into a Wild West show
(20:23):
of course led by Texas Jack and gets a job
as a trick roper and he's billed as the Cherokee
Kid and works there for a while. He gets a
glowing recommendation from Texas Jack when he finally leaves the show.
I have the very great pleasure and recommending Mr W. P.
Rogers the Cherokee Kid to Circus proprietors. He has performed
(20:44):
with me during my present South African tour, and I
consider him to be the champion trick rough rider and
lasso thrower of the world. He is sober, industrious, hard
working at all times and is always to be relied upon.
I shall be very pleased to give him an engage
Jiminta at any time should he wish to return, Just
the kind of recommendation you'd like from a former professor
(21:05):
or boss. Definitely. So will travels the world a little
bit more. It finally makes it back to Oklahoma in
nineteen o four, which conveniently is just in time for
the St. Louis World's Fair, where he does rope tricks,
and soon he's on the stage in Chicago. At one show,
he lassos a dog that runs up on stage in
verse bulldogging. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um, he's performing in New York.
(21:29):
His big break comes in nineteen thirteen when he gets
a job at the Midnight Frolic. But that doesn't sound
very sketchy, but it's a show at a theater owned
by Florence Siegfield Jr. Which is obviously a big stepping
stone to a career in entertainment. He joins the Follies
in nineteen sixteen, and this is very steady work for him,
(21:51):
something he's able to come back to, and he's also
able to hone his jokes while he's there. So what
was once his routine of rope tricks is now interspersed
with occasional commentary and becomes a comedy show. He builds
himself as the Oklahoma Cowboy, great Lasso Expert, or the
Lasso King, and he begins starring in movies, moving his
(22:13):
family out to l A and returning to work on
the follies when when business isn't so great. Yeah, And
of course the early movies are silent movies, which isn't
exactly suited to his style. He so much of his
routine was based on his spoken, common natty pattern. Yeah,
but he is able to write some of the uh
the cards that they show in silent movies, And obviously
(22:36):
it's a good transition for him to go into talkies.
But it's not just movies and Zigfield Follies performances that
he's doing. He gets into speaking engagements, books, he writes
syndicated newspaper columns, so he's your your everyman for comedy.
He's really folksy. He is able to make fun of
(22:57):
everyone in a way that doesn't hurt at anyone's feelings.
And he has a motto, we liked lead your life,
so you wouldn't be ashamed to sell the family parent
to the town gossip. Yeah, he's full of little witty
remarks like that, and he travels the world some more,
probably in a different style than he did when he
was a young man. But he befriends Calvin Coolidge, he
(23:20):
mingles with Edison and Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. But unfortunately,
at the height of his fame, he dies in an
Alaskan plane crash in nineteen thirty five. And it's not
long after that that the age of the wild West
show is definitely over. It was certainly dying down long
before it. But the last of the big shows ends
(23:42):
in nineteen thirty eight with Colonel Tim McCoy's wild West.
And when it ended in nineteen thirty eight, that made
me a little bit sad, because these wild West shows
sound really cool. To be perfectly honest, they found great
and I think we mentioned this on our Vaudeville episodes
about how people didn't know what they were. They trade
vaudeville for television. They don't know what they're missing. Video
(24:05):
killed the radio Star. But seriously, like, as far as
big spectacles go, I'm trying to think of I know,
the rodeo does come to Georgia and you know we
have monster truck rallies, but we have nothing. We have
nothing like a Wild West show now because anyone else no,
it sounds great. But I guess if you know of
any little While West show, County fair kind of things,
(24:25):
let us know. We'd love to hear about your own
local variety if it exists. You can also follow us
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(24:46):
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missed in History Class blog on the how stuff works
dot com home page. M
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And you remember
a little while ago we talked about famous battle horses
(00:21):
like Incatatas, like Incatatas, and remember how at least half
of them seemed like they had been stuffed. So if
you're the kind of person who keeps up with the
latest in stuffed horse news, I am you've probably heard this.
Roy Rogers Trusty Steed trigger just sold for two hundred
and sixty six thousand dollars in New York City, and
(00:43):
his dog bullet sold for about thirty five thousand dollars.
I think this would make a difficult decorative scheme in
one's house, but I'm not very good at interior decorating.
Bullet on one side of the door, trigger on the other, maybe.
But the cool thing is before the sale, we received
this note in photos from people at Christie's Interiors, their
fans of the podcast, and they also auctioned off the memorabilia,
(01:06):
and they told us that trigger, bullet, buttermilk, and quote
too many cowboy boots to count had all been stored
in their warehouse for about five months, and understandably they
were kind of sad to see the stuff go. They
had gotten a little attached to it. So they sent
a request for an episode on famous cowboys in honor
of their sale, and we're responding with, of course, but
(01:28):
how do we decide on who to talk about? And
Sarah was saying, the first cowboys that she thought of
weren't really cowboys at all, their outlaws and hustlers and
lawman when we've talked about a lot of them before,
White Earp that kind of that kind of fellow. And
the next one's we thought of were like Roy Rogers,
their TV stars, film cowboys, stuntman, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood,
(01:52):
that type. So we wanted something that's a little bit
between those two eras, something that's not yet so far
in from the real open range, real cowboys. And our
answer was the Traveling wild West Show, which is a
little bit vaudeville for our vaudeville hungry listeners, a medley
of horse tricks, gun tricks, and humor. But first, how
(02:16):
did we get from the actual wild West to the
Wild West Show? And just a little more than a decade,
if the cowboy is not the outlawed gun slinger we
know from movies. What does he really do? To give
you a definition before we start, Real cowboys are horsemen
who handle and drive cattle. Pretty obvious. They also do
other tasks like branding and castrating the animals, or they
(02:39):
break horses, and they obviously still exist today. But they're real.
Heyday was pretty short. It's eighteen sixty seven to eighteen
eighty seven, so only twenty years of hardcore cowboy times.
Their techniques using horses and lariats to herd cattle were
picked up as early as eighteen twenty by pioneers of
(03:00):
serving Mexican vaccaros, and by the end of the Civil
War we've got a pretty big cattle industry in Texas,
which is centered around the Texas Longhorn steer, a hybrid
of Spanish and English cattle. But we have a problem,
and that's getting the beef out of Texas into the
railroad where it can be shipped to northern cities where
(03:20):
there are a lot of hungry people. And that's where
the cowboys come in. And their job was two in
the fall, round up the herd, brand the ones that
are unmarked, or collect any unowned cows, and then they'd
watch over them through the winter, make sure nothing terrible happened.
In the spring, they would drive the cattle on trails
out of Texas to the railheads in Missouri and Wyoming
(03:42):
and Kansas. And I didn't know what a railhead was,
if you want to explain, because I thought it was
just an insult. It does sound like an insult. It's
just a rail terminus or at the end of a line,
a place where you go and ship your cattle off
to the off to the cities. So within about a deck,
this cattle ranching spreads across the Great Plains all the
(04:03):
way to Canada, as far west as the Rockies and
Soda Cowboys. But by about eight or so, fenced ranches
replaced open grazing. Railroad stops are often closer to the cattle,
and ranching becomes a big business. So cowboys aren't aren't
needed as much. You don't need as many of them.
They're not covering these huge, long distances. But by this
(04:26):
point the cowboy has already entered American mythology. It doesn't
matter that we don't need tons of cowboys anymore. But
public can't get enough of this mythological, sort of glamorized idea,
a ragged young man of cowboys. Yeah, the stagecoach robbers,
the railhead brawls. So we end up making up more
(04:47):
news and that's dime. Novels about the wild West. They
become really popular and you can just imagine kids in
big Eastern cities reading about their famous um Western counterparts.
But what's better than reading about cowboys is seeing a
real live one plus Indians plus buffalo. So enter the
(05:10):
first wild West Show and our first wild West cowboy,
Buffalo Bill. So. One thing that makes the performers a
Wild West shows so interesting why we decided to go
with this genre in particular, is that a lot of
the performers actually come out of the real wild West.
Most really worked as cowboys, some even split their time
(05:31):
between the stage and the ranch that they were still
being authentic even when they were performers. And William Frederick
Cody born in eighty six in Iowa is definitely one
of these. He is the real deal. He starts work
as a messenger boy in Kansas at age eleven when
his father dies, and interestingly, the firm that he works
for is Russell Majors and Waddell. That sounds familiar. Yeah,
(05:54):
that's because these are the guys who financially backed the
Pony Express. So there's Yeah, as we mentioned, there are
some people who think that Buffalo Bill was part of
the Pony Express, some people who don't. He was definitely
involved with the financial backers. Photo pony expert. There you go.
So he's also doing some horse wrangling and some hunting,
(06:15):
which will prove to be valuable entertainment skills in his future.
He joins the service for the Civil War and then
he continues to work for the U. S. Army after
the war. He is a messenger and at times a
dispatch bearer and scout for troops out of Kansas. His
side job was hunting buffalo to feed the men building
(06:36):
the Union Pacific Railroad, and he earned his nickname Buffalo
Bill by killing four thousand, two hundred eighty buffalo, something
that sounds kind of terrible today. Yeah, not quite as
impressive of a stat these days. Also terrible sixteen Indian attacks.
So those are just some basic numbers for Buffalo Bill.
(06:57):
His real reputation comes from scouting, and he's got this
near perfect spatial memory which is something to be MPEd,
I'd say, uh. And he's employed by the Fifth Cavalry
as a guy because he goes somewhere and he can
remember exactly where everything is how to get their trails.
It's pretty amazing, exact opposite of all of my skills.
(07:19):
His work earns him a Medal of Honor in eighteen
seventy two, which is later revoked since he was a civilian,
and then given back to him posthumously. To make up
your mind, guy. So newspapers love Buffalo Bill and eat
him up, and dime novels do too, which is weird
to think of a real life guy being a character
(07:40):
fan fiction. It is. That's another proto thing, isn't it.
So When author ned Buntline, whose real name is easy C. Judson,
I don't know why picture picture periods between capital letters,
not like easy see easy c uh So Buntline Flush
(08:00):
Judgson asks him to start in this drama called The
Scouts of the Prairie that he's written, and Cody signs on.
He's realizing that this is going to be a possibly
good way to cash in on his dime novel theme.
And he's not the greatest actor in the world. But
he's really fun to watch. His stage tricks are good
(08:20):
and he's a success. When he's not acting, he's pulling
a city slickers and taking rich guys and noblemen out west.
So he's got the best of both worlds going on here.
And it's not long before he decides to stage his
own show, a variety act. He'd have cowboys rough riding, roping, shooting,
and bronco busting. There would be staged fights with Indians
(08:43):
and recreations of friendier life, and it would all be
going down at your local campus tent so act Worth, Georgia.
I'm like, yeah, it sounds like a good idea, and
it's not entirely a new idea, though Barnum had included
a wild West act in his show way back in
eighteen seventy six, which is the heyday of cowboys. But
Buffalo Bill and his partner w F Doc Carver show
(09:07):
is definitely beyond what anyone else has done. And they
call it the Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders
of the World, and their first show is in eighteen
eighty three. And these shows are are nothing to laugh about.
They are four hours long, which people must have had
longer attention spans than they do today. I can't imagine
(09:28):
a four hour show now, and what you get in
your four hours are a buffalo hunt. Of course, you
get to see other wild animals like elk, bear, moose,
and deer. There's a pony express ride, a stagecoach capture,
and eventually two big name stars taking part sitting Bowl
as in the Sitting Bowl and Annie Oakley, who is
(09:52):
the next star on our list. So Annie Oakley, she's
really born Phoebe and Mosey and a fun early story
about her that she paid the mortgage on the family
farm at age fifteen with her hunted game. So she's
obviously a sharp shooter, but she has a pretty traumatic childhood.
Her father dies early and her mother, who's left with
(10:14):
too many kids to take care of, lets out Annie
as a servant, and she suffers from abuse, but finally
manages to work her way home and become the family breadwinner.
You can imagine she's not willing to let anything happen
to her again, and soon her shooting skills are worth
more than the game she can hunt. She enters a
shooting contest against Frank E. Butler, a vaudeville performer, and
(10:38):
he said to have laughed when he saw that his
opponent was this title five foot girl. But she wins,
which must have impressed him, because in eighteen seventy six
the two get married and tore the circuits as Butler
and Oakley, a stage name she took from a Cincinnati suburb,
and in eighty five they ditched their own outfit. Butler
(10:59):
switches to manage then and Oakley signs with Buffalo Bill,
going by Miss Annie Oakley, the peerless Lady wing Shot,
and it's Sitting Bull who gives her the more famous
nickname Little sure Shot. So what can Annie do? Here's
a list. She can hit a dime tossed into the air.
She can shoot cigarettes from her husband's lips, or shoot
(11:21):
cigarettes from the future Kaiser Wilhelm the second slips which
whatever lips are available. I can't imagine whose people would
let him do that, But apparently she could shoot a
playing card tossed in the air full of bullets. And
she could split a playing card held on end at
thirty paces. These are just a few of Annie's amazing
(11:41):
tricks for you to contemplate, and they take her around
the world. She even meets Queen Victoria in seven, who
saw the show three times in a row. And she
works with Buffalo Bill for sixteen years starring in the
show except for one brief period when she left him
for his arrival. The next star on our list, and
(12:02):
that is Pawny Bill, and just still warning. I don't
know how this happened, but every man on this list
is either named Bill or Will so good luck keeping
them swats. It's better, possibly than his real name, which
is Gordon William Lily. Gordon doesn't work well for a cowboy,
I feel, or calling him Lily his last name doesn't
(12:23):
sound particularly great either, but that's not to insult any
cowboys named Gordon, so Lily slush. Pawny Bill born Valentine's Day,
eighteen sixty. His family moves to Kansas after their flour
mill burns down, and it's there where he makes the
acquaintance of the Pawny people who were wintering near Wellington's
and they had just been removed from their lands in Pawnty, Oklahoma,
(12:46):
and he works as a trapper in Indian Territory for
a while with trapper Tom McClain, not to be confused
with the Mad Trapper and supplements his income with waiting tables,
working as a cowboy, picking up work where you can
get it. He continues his relationship with a Pawny by
teaching and interpreting for the U S Indian Agent, and
in eighteen eighty three, Buffalo Bill brings him on for
(13:09):
his inaugural show to coordinate the Pawnee Troope of entertainers.
And it's while touring with Buffalo Bill that Pawny Bill
meets a teenage Quaker girl named May Manning watching these
shows parade, and he marries her two years later. And
then it's just mentioned in our source that she turns
into a sharpshooter, So I guess the marriage was going
to magical school that could be acquired. So her family
(13:32):
suggests that Pawny Bill break out from Buffalo Bill and
start up his own show, and he does that in
surprisingly you think with his sharpshooting wife and his own
skills it would do all right. It's a financial failure,
but he has other stuff going on, namely opening up
Oklahoma's unassigned lands. On April eighty nine, he leads a
(13:56):
land run of four thousand men to claim the territory
with the plan is basically, line up on horseback, stake
your claim, and there are tens of thousands of participants
and his prominence with the Oklahoma Boomers makes him nationally famous,
which means it's the perfect time to start another wild
West show. Yeah, this time it's Pawny Bills Historical wild West,
(14:18):
Indian Museum and Encampment, and this one is a big success.
May Lily does are sharp shooting on horseback and by
nineteen o eight he's able to merge his show with
Buffalo Bill, so back to the original and they bill
it as Buffalo Bills Wild West and Pawnee Bill's Great
Far East Show. But a note on Pawny Bill, Buffalo
(14:42):
Bill was not that great at managing his fortune. You'd
think you'd be a very wealthy man with this original
wild West show. Doesn't turn out like that. Pawny Bill,
on the other hand, is a very successful businessman, and
he gets into oil and real estate and motion pictures
in banking, and I kind of think of him as
the modern Western man, you know. On the one hand,
(15:04):
he's very into preserving the Old West. Uh. He gets
into lobbying for Buffalo protection. He helps establish the Witch
Tom Mountains National Wildlife Refuge. But he's also the modern man.
He wants to bring business into the West. He advocates
for building highways. I think he even has a highway
(15:24):
named after him at one point. But Bill and Bill
have another competitor, the Miller Brothers One oh one Ranch
and wild West Show, and their star is the next
cowboy on our list, Bill Pickett. So Bill Pickett is
Bill Bill, and versus Bill, we'll we'll have a will
coming up to So Bill Pickett isn't just your average cowboy.
(15:47):
He's a pulldogger. And in case you don't know what
that means, this is what you do. You grab the
steer by its horns and twist its neck and then
you bite its nose or upper lip before flipping it
to the ground, which is insane founding. And then seriously,
how dogs wrestle steer which I didn't even know dogs
(16:08):
were used to wrestle. And I'm going to bring this
up with my next Georgia Bulldogs football game. By the way,
it would be a different kind of bulldogger for sure. So, uh,
there's a modified version of this that still happens in
rodeos today. If you're a rodeo fan, you should feel
free to write us and tell us about it. William
Pickett was born in eighteen seventy near Austin. He was
(16:29):
one of thirteen kids, which quite a lot of children,
said me, who's one of six, and he was the
descendant of American Indians and black slaves. After finishing the
fifth grade, he started ranch work and did some tricks
on the weekends in town, and by eighteen eighty eight
he and his four brothers start a horse breaking business.
(16:50):
He entered his first rodeo in Taylor, Texas, and in
nineteen hundred he got sponsored by the rodeo entrepreneur at
Lee Moore. Soon he's working with the Miller brothers on
the one A one Ranch and Wild West Show build
as the Dusky Demon, and he's really good at handling
domestic animals, wild animals and doing those amazing bulldogging stunts.
(17:11):
And his quintessential performance comes in Mexico City in nineteen
o eight. This is a great story. He wrestles a
Mexican fighting ball for a full seven minutes, but finally
the outraged audience just freaks out that he's doing it wrong,
because you don't wrestle a Mexican fighting bowl. You wave
(17:32):
the red flag and you get out your sword, and
so they're thinking he's doing it completely wrong. It's not
bull fighting. Nice tribe. They'll pick it up. Still, it
must have been a pretty cool show. When he's not performing,
he's working as a cowboy or appearing in rodeo as
It kind of reminded me of those early baseball players
we talked about in the Facial Page episode. Yeah, it's
(17:53):
it's not a part time job, not a seasonal job.
You've got to work year round if you're in this business.
To appear in those rodeos, he's identified as Indian instead
of black, so he can compete against white people. Since
the era of the wild West Show dovetails into film,
Bill Pickett does some work out of Jacksonville, starring in
(18:14):
films like The Crimson Skull and The Bulldogger and After Horse.
But he dies from a ranch injury in nineteen thirty two.
I think was he kicked in the head by a horse.
And finally, our most successful crossover star from wild West
to wild West Show to film is Will Rogers, a
(18:35):
Will instead of a Bill at last, So William Penna
Dare Rodgers was born in eighteen seventy nine in Cherokee
Territory it's Oklahoma today. He was part Cherokee on both sides,
and he grows up on his father's ranch and at
boarding schools. But because his father has some money, he's
able to travel a bit, which is important for considering
(18:55):
his later life. He gets a wanderlust bug pretty early,
and he even gets to see the World Exposition in
Chicago in eighteen nine, which I have to imagine influenced
his desire to become a performer. But he's into the range,
not into the classroom or settling down into the family business.
So at eighteen, he leaves his Missouri military school to
(19:20):
move to the Texas Panhandle and work on ranches. He
may even have applied to be one of Roosevelt's rough
rider's side note, but by about eight he goes home
to manage the family ranches cattle while his father works
in banking and tribal politics. He was hoping his son
would sort of take over the farm business and he
(19:40):
could go off to the city and do his work,
but that doesn't work out because Will cannot stay away
from the action for long and in nineteen hundred, he
and his friend Dick Paris go to South America. Their
boat goes from Galveston to New York to London to
Buenos Aires, and when he can't find work there, he
gets a job on a cattle boat bound for South Africa.
(20:02):
And so he ends up in South Africa and he
gets another job driving a herd through the country. This
is he's a really great example of good luck with
your jobs. I guess, just going out on a limb
and something coming along. So while he's driving this herd
through South Africa, he runs into a Wild West show
(20:23):
of course led by Texas Jack and gets a job
as a trick roper and he's billed as the Cherokee
Kid and works there for a while. He gets a
glowing recommendation from Texas Jack when he finally leaves the show.
I have the very great pleasure and recommending Mr W. P.
Rogers the Cherokee Kid to Circus proprietors. He has performed
(20:44):
with me during my present South African tour, and I
consider him to be the champion trick rough rider and
lasso thrower of the world. He is sober, industrious, hard
working at all times and is always to be relied upon.
I shall be very pleased to give him an engage
Jiminta at any time should he wish to return, Just
the kind of recommendation you'd like from a former professor
(21:05):
or boss. Definitely. So will travels the world a little
bit more. It finally makes it back to Oklahoma in
nineteen o four, which conveniently is just in time for
the St. Louis World's Fair, where he does rope tricks,
and soon he's on the stage in Chicago. At one show,
he lassos a dog that runs up on stage in
verse bulldogging. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um, he's performing in New York.
(21:29):
His big break comes in nineteen thirteen when he gets
a job at the Midnight Frolic. But that doesn't sound
very sketchy, but it's a show at a theater owned
by Florence Siegfield Jr. Which is obviously a big stepping
stone to a career in entertainment. He joins the Follies
in nineteen sixteen, and this is very steady work for him,
(21:51):
something he's able to come back to, and he's also
able to hone his jokes while he's there. So what
was once his routine of rope tricks is now interspersed
with occasional commentary and becomes a comedy show. He builds
himself as the Oklahoma Cowboy, great Lasso Expert, or the
Lasso King, and he begins starring in movies, moving his
(22:13):
family out to l A and returning to work on
the follies when when business isn't so great. Yeah, And
of course the early movies are silent movies, which isn't
exactly suited to his style. He so much of his
routine was based on his spoken, common natty pattern. Yeah,
but he is able to write some of the uh
the cards that they show in silent movies, And obviously
(22:36):
it's a good transition for him to go into talkies.
But it's not just movies and Zigfield Follies performances that
he's doing. He gets into speaking engagements, books, he writes
syndicated newspaper columns, so he's your your everyman for comedy.
He's really folksy. He is able to make fun of
(22:57):
everyone in a way that doesn't hurt at anyone's feelings.
And he has a motto, we liked lead your life,
so you wouldn't be ashamed to sell the family parent
to the town gossip. Yeah, he's full of little witty
remarks like that, and he travels the world some more,
probably in a different style than he did when he
was a young man. But he befriends Calvin Coolidge, he
(23:20):
mingles with Edison and Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. But unfortunately,
at the height of his fame, he dies in an
Alaskan plane crash in nineteen thirty five. And it's not
long after that that the age of the wild West
show is definitely over. It was certainly dying down long
before it. But the last of the big shows ends
(23:42):
in nineteen thirty eight with Colonel Tim McCoy's wild West.
And when it ended in nineteen thirty eight, that made
me a little bit sad, because these wild West shows
sound really cool. To be perfectly honest, they found great
and I think we mentioned this on our Vaudeville episodes
about how people didn't know what they were. They trade
vaudeville for television. They don't know what they're missing. Video
(24:05):
killed the radio Star. But seriously, like, as far as
big spectacles go, I'm trying to think of I know,
the rodeo does come to Georgia and you know we
have monster truck rallies, but we have nothing. We have
nothing like a Wild West show now because anyone else no,
it sounds great. But I guess if you know of
any little While West show, County fair kind of things,
(24:25):
let us know. We'd love to hear about your own
local variety if it exists. You can also follow us
on Twitter at misst in History and keep up with
what we're doing on a daily basis, or join our
Facebook fan page when we post a lot of links
tool history news that's coming out. And if you're interested
in other kinds of entertainment, we've got some great articles
(24:46):
on sword swallowing and walking through fire midway type exactly
if you'd like to search on our homepage at www
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