The Epitome of the American West

The real West and the West of the imagination have been tangled up in people’s minds since the first non-Indian artist went into the wilderness and drew the first portrait of a Native American.

Modern media accelerated the blurring of the boundary between the two. Even after you’ve seen Monument Valley, you tend to think of it in terms dictated by the western epics of John Ford. Examining the boundary between what is strictly true about the West and what has been imaginatively interpreted is the forte of the Autry Museum of Western Heritage. And what institution is better qualified than a western museum founded by a singing cowboy--a museum located in both the geographical West and the entertainment capital of the world.

Starting Saturday, visitors to the Autry will be able to study a particularly notable example of the merging of the authentic West and its show-biz incarnation.

That’s when “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” opens--an exhibit on legendary William “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his immensely popular Wild West shows.

Interestingly, the show originated not in the United States, but in England. It was produced by the Royal Armouries of Great Britain, situated in Leeds.

That is not as unlikely as it sounds. Weapons were among the most dramatic props used in Buffalo Bill’s extravaganzas, and the Royal Armouries know from weapons. Moreover, Buffalo Bill was wildly popular in Great Britain. As the exhibit makes clear, the British loved Cody and his cowboy and Indian performers, who made successful tours of both Great Britain and the Continent.

As Kevin Mulroy, the English-born head of the Autry’s research center explains: “Buffalo Bill was the first real worldwide western personality. He was the one who took the West on the road--in the 1880s.”

Vividly depicted on big, bright posters in his elaborately beaded buckskins, the handsome Cody was also responsible for “that whole showman aura” that continues to color our view of the West, Mulroy says.

At the Autry, the Buffalo Bill show has been mounted with the kind of pizazz that characterized Cody’s own. Visitors will enter the exhibit as if entering an enormous tent. And inside the galleries, they’ll find the true story of a visionary entrepreneur who turned the rapidly disappearing West into a worldwide commodity.

“So many of the stereotypes and traditional images of the West come directly out of the Wild West shows,” says Michael D. Fox, the Autry’s curator of material culture and local curator of the exhibit.

But Buffalo Bill’s intention was always to create something that was faithful to his memories of the West. As the gallery guide to the show explains, at least one fan--Mark Twain--felt that Cody succeeded admirably. Cody’s show, Twain wrote in 1886, “is wholly free from sham and insincerity, and the effects it produced upon me . . . were identical to those wrought upon me a long time ago by the same spectacles on the frontier.”

Born in Iowa in 1846, Cody was a “crossover figure,” Fox says--one who both experienced the frontier and changed it into something more theatrical and marketable. As a young man, Cody had been a buffalo hunter, a scout for the Army and a gold miner, and he may have been a rider for the Pony Express. In 1869, he became the friend of Ned Buntline, who immortalized Cody in one of his Western dime novels, “Buffalo Bill, King of the Border Men.”

Cody was suddenly sought after for stage appearances and began dressing the part in fancy costumes that were a far cry from the grubby clothes most frontiersmen wore. During the Indian Wars of the 1870s, Fox points out, “Bill was actually wearing his theatrical costumes out on the Plains when he acted as a scout for the Army.”

One of the biggest draws of Cody’s Wild West shows was the presence of real Indians, including such famous Plains warriors as Sitting Bull. Shortly after Custer’s defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Cody killed and scalped a Cheyenne under-chief named Yellow Hand. He probably killed the Sioux chief Tall Bull as well. But as a showman and a lover of the vanishing West, Cody was eagerly recruiting prominent Native Americans only 10 years later, and he respectfully paid them as much as his non-Indian performers. (The face of one of Cody’s Native American stars, Iron Tail, was immortalized on the Indian Head nickel.)

In regard to Native Americans, Fox says, “Bill’s philosophy was enemies in war, friends in peace.”

The show includes such riveting artifacts as the flashy saddle, decorated with silver dollars that Doc Carver had shot through as part of his act. Annie Oakley’s gold-plated rifle is there, as are the gifts Cody received from Queen Victoria and other royals.

“By the turn of the century, his was the most well-known face in the world,” Fox says of Cody. “He was the first international superstar. There were people in the world who didn’t know who the president of the United States was, but they definitely knew who Buffalo Bill was.”

The appetite for Wild West shows persisted into the second decade of the 20th century, Fox says. What replaced it? A new craze called motion pictures. Since Buffalo Bill was all about the merger of the West and its depiction, it is fitting that the show includes movie footage of Cody and one of his shows, made in 1903. You can even hear his voice, captured by an early recording device.

One fascinating historical footnote: Cody’s touring shows were triumphs of logistics. He needed 52 boxcars to transport the show in the United States and could set it up and dismantle it in a day. So impressive was this aspect of Cody’s operation that Kaiser Wilhelm sent military advisors to check the show out when it toured Germany in the early 1900s.

“Apparently the German Army picked up some tips,” Fox says.

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The Autry Museum is at 4700 Western Heritage Way in Griffith Park. For more information on the show, which continues through July 9, call (323) 667-5721.

Spotlight appears every Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at valley.news@latimes.com.