CODY'S LAST STAND:
MASCULINE ANXIETY, THE CUSTER MYTH,
AND THE FRONTIER OF DOMESTICITY
IN BUFFALO BILL'S WILD WEST

Louis S. Warren

Close analysis of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show suggests that frontier mythology of the late nineteenth century was more domestically oriented than most historians have assumed. In fact, the show relied on scenes of family defense more than it did on depictions of “Custer’s Last Fight.” How William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody utilized domestic imagery, and why he appears to have dropped it near the end of his career, suggests changes in his personal biographical needs and in frontier myth at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Even a cursory glance at the literature on William F. Cody will turn up the connection between the West’s greatest showman and its fallen boy general, George Armstrong Custer. Indeed, the study of Cody has become so entangled with Custer as to make the two nearly inseparable. It is a commonplace of western scholarship that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show consistently re-enacted the Battle of Little Big Horn, or “Custer’s Last Fight,” as the show called it, and that the spectacle enhanced Cody’s mythic stature. Consequently, as various historians have told us, the Custer legend was profoundly influenced by Cody’s presentation. In one of the most influential arguments, Richard Slotkin recounted that after Cody founded the Wild West show in 1883, he quickly hit on the notion of presenting American history as a series of frontier epochs. “Three years later, a reenactment of ‘Custer’s Last Fight’ was added to the Wild West’s repertoire, and it eventually became not only the most spectacular of the ‘epochs’ but the center of a reorganized program.” 1	1
Slotkin built on older interpretations. Over forty years ago, Don Russell penned what is still reckoned the most scholarly biography of Cody, in which he described “Custer’s Last Fight” as “long the crowning spectacle” of the Wild West show. 2 More recently, Richard White has concluded that “Buffalo Bill played no small part in making the image of Custer’s defeat and the slaughter of most of his command the chief icon” of a theme of Indian aggression against whites. 3 Joy Kasson speculates that the popularity of Cody’s reenactments of Custer’s defeat inspired Otto Becker’s imaginative lithograph of the battle, which was displayed in bars across America after it became an advertisement for Budweiser in 1896. 4 Not surprisingly, the link between Custer and Cody permeates popular treatments of western history. In the illustrated companion to the Ken Burns-Stephen Ives documentary series “The West,” the Custer reenactment is described as “the perennial finale of Cody’s show.” 5	2
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