58 results for “Wild west shows”

A photograph of Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill as they appeared in the Wild West Show while in Montreal, Canada. In the 1870s, Sitting Bull led Sioux resistance to Euro-American settlement on the northern Great Plains, most notably defeating the U.S. Army at the Battle of Little Big Horn. After the defeat of the Sioux, Sitting Bull was confined to his reservation home except for his brief tour with William Cody's Wild West Shows in which he played himself.

Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show highlighted the horse-riding traditions of many countries, while always depicting white Americans as the most advanced. The three-way division of races between “savage” (Indians), “barbarous” (non-Christian), and “civilized” (white Europeans) was a common feature of racialist thinking at the turn of the 20th century.

A program from Cody's Wild West Show at the World's Columbian Exposition. These dramatic open air performances highlighted the horse riding and shooting skills of Euro-American and American Indian performers, and claimed to recreate historical events such as the Battle of Little Big Horn.

When the United States declared war on Spain in 1898 it was in part to support the independence movement in Cuba. For William Cody, the good-versus-evil struggle in Cuba mirrored the dramas of western combat he regularly presented in his Wild West Shows.

One of many posters advertising William Cody's Wild West Show as a re-enactment of Euro-American conflict with American Indians.

As William F. Cody had adopted the persona of Buffalo Bill, in the 1890s Gordon William Lillie adopted the name Pawnee Bill and started his own wild west show.

Buffalo Bill Cody put himself in company with older iconic frontier figures in offering tales of the “Pioneer Quartette:” Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Kit Carson and himself. In addition to the dramatic battle scenes depicted in the frontispiece, the title page promised an account of Cody's “conquests” as a performer in England.

William Cody's Wild West Shows inspired this piece of piano music from the late 1880s.

The sharpshooter Annie Oakley (1860-1926) was born Phoebe Ann Moses to a poor Ohio farming family. To feed and support her family she learned to trap and shoot, and later performed shooting tricks on stage. She became a regular part of William Cody's Wild West Show in 1885. This portrait from 1899 suggests how Oakley stretched the conventional roles for women in the late 19th century as an expert shooter, although she always wore a skirt and rode sidesaddle in deference to audiences expectations.

Thomas McKenney accompanied Lewis Cass, the governor of the Michigan Territory, to the far west of Lake Superior during the summer of 1826 to meet with American Indian leaders and search for the source of the Mississippi River. This drawing shows the American Fur Trading Company post including a fenced garden area. In his description of the post, McKenney identified separate cemetaries for whites and American Indians behind the garden.