William Cody better known as Buffalo Bill perhaps more than any other person helped to create the popular image of the Wild West. The “Wild West” with the stories of Indian attack and cowboy heroism was something that fascinated late Victorian society and Cody was in a good position to exploit that interest. Born in 1846 he had worked as a trapper, soldier, scout, and gold miner and Pony Express rider.
He also knew the leading characters of the West such as Wild Bill Hickcock, Sitting Bull and General George Armstrong. Cody used this experience to good effect and he began his Wild West Show in Omaha Nebraska in 1883.
Buffalo Bill bought his Wild West Show top the Potteries in August 1891 returning to the UK after initially touring the country as part of the American contribution to Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee celebrations four years earlier. The show was certainly an impressive undertaking and required 3 trains with a total of 76 carriages to bring the company and their equipment from its previous engagement in Sheffield. The show comprised of 250 performers, a few hundred horses and a score or so of bison. They also bought enough scaffolding and canvas to build a pavilion to seat 15,000 spectators. Local workers built the set in three days. An Indian village was also built to house the native Americans and their families.
Cody was keen to let people see the human side of the ferocious tribesman. Among the Indians who came to Stoke was Short Bull who was involved in the Ghost Dance Movement a religious movement amongst the natives which was bloodily suppressed at the “Battle” of Wounded Knee- in effect a massacre carried out the previous December. Short Bull had been released from prison in Illinois only a few months earlier so that he could go on the British tour.
A Sentinel reporter had the enviable job of speaking to the performers who had set up camp on the County Cricket Ground a site now occupied by Staffordshire Universities in College Road. He met with the manager of the tour Nate Salisbury who kept a photographic record of the tour and George C Crager a Lakotan interpreter who showed the reporter several “ghost shirts” that had been worn during the uprising. The shirts were tragically believed by the supporters of the movement to protect them from the bullets of the American soldiers.
As a footnote one of the shirts was left to the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow later in the tour and was the subject of some controversy in the 1990s when the Lakota tribe asked for the shirt back which the Museum dutifully returned.
But returning to the Potteries, Short Bull placed his war bonnet on the reporter’s head. The bonnet was made of eagle tail feathers and valued at £100- a large amount of money a century ago. The reporter offered one of the principal members of the Ghost Dance Movement and a friend of Sitting Bull a packet of cigarettes, which was accepted with great glee.
The show opened on Monday 17th August for 6 days with two shows during the day at 3 and 6pm. It was promoted as a show “unequalled in amusement annals”. I’m sure that the people of Stoke felt a thrill of anticipation at the prospect of having a little bit of the Wild West on their doorstep.
INDIANS-MEXICANS-COWBOYS-SCOUTS-BUCK RIDERS-SHOOTISTS
In animated tableaux and vivid scenes.
Truthful! Natural! Startlingly! Realistic!
Visit the picturesque Indian Village and Frontier Camp.
All performances daily at 3pm and 6pm.
Prices 1s, 2s, 3s and 4s.
Saturday 22nd August! Positively the last day!
The Sentinel reported on the first show. It rained although the weather improved as the week progressed ” the audience assembled in numbers large enough to crowd the popular parts of the stadia although with more favourable weather a better display might have been expected, the full programme was given and all seemed intensely delighted.
One of the stars of the show was the slight figure of Annie Oakley who achieved a certain immortality as the subject of the musical “Annie get your gun” many years later. Her shooting mightily impressed the crowds as did the antics of the cowboys and their “bucking broncos” There followed an Indian attack on the Deadwood Stage Coach. The show ended concluded with an attack on a Pioneer cabin. Earlier in the day the Indian village was visited by thousands of spectators. Buffalo Bill was wildly cheered at the end of the performance as he made his parting bow.
Buffalo Bill was unusual as he was away ahead of his time. He believed passionately in Native American rights and made sure that the Indians as well as the female performers were paid equally with the white male performers. He believed in the native culture when in the aftermath of the “ghost dance movement” many wished to see destroyed. He was not an arrogant, bloodthirsty Indian killer.
The 1890s were an age in which there was no television, no cgi and even film was in its infancy. Always alive to any opportunity to self promote Cody appeared in a picture towards the end of his life in 1912. The spectators in Stoke would have seen sights, sounds and smells of genuine Americana.
I had ancestors who lived in Stoke and Shelton (My great grand father was living in Ashford St). I feel that if they had attended the show they would have been awe-struck at the exotic vision before their eyes and they would have gone away satisfied and thrilled at this never to be repeated spectacle