Buffalo Bill and Susan B. Anthony at the Fair
When Worlds Collide
Changing the newsletter name
When I started this over a year ago, I had no idea what I would use it for. It’s now pretty clear that it’s where I can talk about things I find out while searching for other things. So, I’ve changed the name of the newsletter to describe what it is: Wandering Down the Rabbit Holes of History. The URL is still the same.
This week’s wander started with a great observation by Bruce Ervin, who read my Herald article about trolley cars and wanted to talk about exactly how the 61st Street Streetcar worked. I flagged the fact that I had a speculation about the arched passageway under the Illinois Central train tracks—if, as someone told me, it had been built in 1893. He pointed out that the passageway at 62nd Street might have just bumped into the backside of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, which was somewhere around there.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show
So, that sent me looking at the east side of the tracks for the exact layout. The first thing I found was this terrific map of the World’s Fair at the Library of Congress, which showed that one reason they might have wanted a pedestrian tunnel was to connect people to the cable car line that looped back south at 62nd Street and Stony Island Avenue. It didn’t show the Wild West Show, which was not an official part of the fair.
Googling located this map (origin unidentified) showing Buffalo Bill’s arena on the west side of Stony Island between 63rd Street and 62nd Street.
Buffalo Bill Cody wanted to cash in on what was literally going to be the biggest show on earth in Chicago. Official concessions had to give half their gross receipts to board of fair managers and take whatever space was allotted to them. Instead, Cody leased 14 undeveloped acres running along Stony Island to build an 18,000 seat arena and the sheds and staging area for horses, buffalo, and the many players for his Congress of Rough Riders of the World.
He did tie his show into the rhetoric of the fair, which was hosting “congresses” all summer long. Experts on a topic were invited from all over the world to speak in the building that is now the Art Institute. It’s at the congress of historians that Frederick Jackson Turner announced that the frontier was closed.
Cody called his show the “Congress of Rough Riders of the World.” Some of the acts included vaqueros, cossacks, dervishes, bedouins, and European cavalry among the cowboys. There were also 75 Oglala Lakota from the Pine Ridge Reservation, which had been created in 1889, just four years earlier, to incarcerate prisoners of war. Cody negotiated with the U.S. government to allow whole families to be released and to earn desperately needed income. The show exploited stereotypes of savagery and the inevitability of white “progress” into the west, but quite a few of the performers embraced the touring life and stayed with the show. Some argued that performance allowed them to preserve at least some aspects of their cultural traditions, which were under assault by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Still, there was no doubt that crowds saw the show as proof that the Indians were vanishing along with Turner’s frontier.
Cody offered a lot of respite from the fair itself: especially protected seats cooled by lake breezes. I'm not sure the ad claiming that it was in the midst of a shady forest was legit. At night, it was lit up as bright as the fair itself.
The show was wildly successful. Cody left the fair with a profit worth $30 million in 2023 dollars. One key to his success was the fact he performed on Sundays. When the fair was authorized by an act of Congress, the law said that the fair had to be closed on Sunday. A coalition of Protestant churches had organized a petition campaign to honor the Sabbath. No one realized this. People who had traveled to the fair and thousands of working people who had only one day a week off—Sunday—came to the gates along Stony Island on May 7 only to find that they were all locked. There was a riot. Gates and walls were vandalized. The board of managers quickly realized that this was going to put a big dent in their revenues, so they went to court. They got a ruling that, because it was in a public park, they could charge admission to the grounds on Sunday, but no machines could operate and most of the exhibits remained closed. The Methodists were scandalized and pushed for a total boycott of the fair, which, apparently, had an effect on attendance, though there were other reasons too, like unfinished exhibits. The Ferris Wheel itself opened a month after the fair started.
Buffalo Bill’s show was the best show available on Sundays. The two shows a day packed the arena. Since the 61st Street trolley was cheap and carrying working people from the western parts of Chicago, the passageway to 62nd Street would have been busy. And Cody apparently realized it. His first ads mention just the 63rd Street entrance near the Elevated, Stony Island cable car, 63rd Street horse trolley, and the Illinois Central railroad stop. In just a few weeks, he’s also pointing to the entrance on 62nd Street and access via electric trolley.
Susan B. Anthony
Susan B. Anthony, who had spent decades vilified in the wilderness of public opinion, was a celebrity during the World’s Fair. She was an organizer of the week-long Congress of Representative Women, which was a triumph. Record crowds filled its 81 sessions to hear women from 27 countries and 126 organizations talk about their lives and causes. An abolitionist before the Civil War, she was particularly glad to give African-American women a platform. Hallie Q. Brown, Anna J. Cooper, Fanny J. Coppin, Sarah J.W. Early, Frances E. W. Harper, and Fannie B. Williams spoke. An account of their speeches can be found here: https://www.natcom.org/communication-currents/black-womens-historical-speeches-asserting-self-determination
One of her supporters wrote a memoir and recalled what Anthony was like at the fair:
Her very presence on the fair grounds, advertised her cause, for in the mind of the public she personified woman suffrage. This tall dignified woman with smooth gray hair, abundant in energy and spontaneous friendliness, was the center of attraction at the World's Congress of Representative Women. In her new black dress of Chinese silk, brightened with blue, and her small black bonnet, trimmed with lace and blue forget-me-nots, she was the perfect picture of everyone's grandmother, and the people took her to their hearts. She was the one woman all wanted to see. Curious crowds jammed the hall and corridors when she was scheduled to speak, and often a policeman had to clear the way for her. At whatever meeting she appeared, the audience at once burst into applause and started calling for her, interrupting the speakers, and were not satisfied until she had mounted the platform so that all could see her and she had said a few words.
Eric Larsson made an anecdote of an encounter between Buffalo Bill and Susan B. Anthony famous in Devil and the White City, milking the incongruity. In the process of tracking the origin of the story to Anna Howard Shaw’s memoir, I found the encounter was maybe not so incongruous after all.
As the Board of Lady Managers debated about their response to the issue of Sundays at the fair, Anthony, who was not a manager, was cornered by an angry clergyman, who demanded to know where she stood. According to Shaw, this was the result:
"If I had charge of a young man in Chicago at this time," she told the clergyman, "I would much rather have him locked inside the Fair grounds on Sunday or any other day than have him going about on the outside."
The clergyman was horrified. "Would you like to have a son of yours go to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show on Sunday?" he demanded.
"Of course I would," admitted Miss Anthony. "In fact, I think he would learn more there than from the sermons preached in some churches."
When William Cody heard about the encounter, he wrote her a note and invited her to the Wild West Show. When she showed up with her squad, they got box seats. When Buffalo Bill rode into the arena on his gleaming white horse with the spotlight shining on him, he rode to the box seats, rose in his stirrups, swept off his hat, and made a sweeping box. Anthony in turn, rose to her feet, bowed, and waved her handkerchief to the roar of the crowd.
Larsson makes this the symbol of the violent past of the frontier yielding to the gentler future of women’s rights. But it might not have been that simple. On Cody’s side, he was about to use his fair profits to create the town of Cody in Wyoming, a state that had granted women the right to vote in 1870. When Cody was asked about women’s work, he replied, “If a woman can do the same work that a man can do and do it just as well, she should have the same pay.” He demonstrated that by paying his stars like Annie Oakley and female stunt riders at the same rates as the men.
On her part, Anthony, a Quaker and sometime Unitarian, may not have agreed with the clergyman that Buffalo Bill was scandalously beyond the pale. She may, in fact, have known Cody and his family and certainly knew about them for decades. In the 1870s, he’d rented a house in Rochester as a home base for his wife and children and performed there when the show wasn’t on tour. The Cody house was one street over from Susan B. Anthony’s house. Cody’s children attended the school where Anthony’s sister was the principal. Sadly, three of his children are buried in Rochester, in the same cemetery as Anthony and Frederick Douglass.
The World’s Columbian Exposition wasn’t the only small world.
I’m reading Larson’s book now and was stopped in my tracks by the charming encounter between Anthony and Cody. Anthony was still a woman after all and I loved her demure acceptance of Cody’s chivalrous gesture by countering with a bow herself. If Larson’s fantastic book is finally made into a movie I will be sorely disappointed if this encounter between two American icons is not included, roaring crowds and all. Now, a quest to find a photo of that episode!
My great-uncle saw the rodeo at the fair as a little boy. He still remembered it into his 80s. I really enjoyed this episode.