Among the highlights of his troupe’s performances were scenes in which real-life Indians, many of them recent survivors of violent encounters with the US Army, reenacted attacks on stagecoaches and log cabins only to be dispatched at the last minute through the heroics of Buffalo Bill and his “Cowboys.” This trigger for this violence, however, was not US expansion but rather Native American aggression toward peaceful settlers. Cody, by contrast, made warfare with American Indians the preeminent feature of his Wild West Show. Turner managed the neat trick of making “free land” the key factor in the rise of American democracy without ever once mentioning the dispossession of the continent’s indigenous peoples that made it possible. At the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, attendees could step into one of the White City’s hastily constructed pavilions to listen to the professor Frederick Jackson Turner unveil his “frontier thesis.” Or they could cross the street to catch a performance by William “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his “Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World,” the most popular show business act of its time.Įach figure offered a synoptic history of the West, but otherwise they diverged starkly from one another. FOR A PEOPLE OBSESSED with expansion, Americans have spent more than a century confused about how best to tell the history of their spread into the West.
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