CHAPTER XII

WILD WEST AND SPORT

THE spirit of the open frontier passed out of American life forever in the decade of the eighties, leaving behind it Frontier survivals that lasted for another generation, and spirit inducing the development of substitutes to take its place. The frontier while it lasted was a social safetyvalve that prevented the rise of social pressure or class antagonism to the danger point. Not only upon the western margin of the United States, but in every State farm land was either free or cheap, and invited each generation to enlarge the area of settlement and erect new homes. There was no chance for the socially discontented to become numerous or ominous. No oppressed lower class could be created in a community in which any young man with reasonable nerve and luck might hope to be an independent farmer before he was thirty. All American society was close to its frontier origin, and the man of affairs, wherever he found himself, normally looked back to his boyhood on the farm.

The influence of universal farm life with independence within easy reach of all gave its peculiar aspect to the American character. The more picturesque life upon the actual frontier provided the theme that men of letters grasped in the second quarter of the century. James Fenimore Cooper with his romances of the frontier made himself a lasting place in American letters. His Deerslayer and Chingachgook were unreal portraits, but they coincided with what his Eastern readers thought the West to be, and perpetuated the spirit of the frontier life.

In one form or another this spirit permeated American society, and when the creative force was stopped, its survivals carried on the legend. In December, 1887, a group of the young men who had hunted on the buffalo range

and had followed the rear guard of American big game into the mountains organized the Boone and Crockett Club, through which they cherished a memory of the past and a love of outdoor life. A few years later they exhibited at the Chicago World's Fair a frontiersman's log cabin set on an island in its typical surroundings. "The club felt very strongly," wrote Theodore Roosevelt, one of its members, "that the life of the pioneer settler, the life of the man who struck out into the wilderness as part of the vanguard of civilization, and made his living largely in warfare with the wild game, represented a phase of our history so characteristic and yet so evanescent that it would be a mistake not to have it represented. . . . There is nothing in the history of any other nation which quite corresponds to it.” Roosevelt set to work to write the history of the frontier in his Winning of the West (1889-96), and a more genuine plainsman than he dramatized it.

Bill"

Colonel William F. Cody, known through a generation in Europe and America as "Buffalo Bill," grew to boyhood on the margin of the plains. At the age of four- "Buffalo teen he was rider on the pony express which carried the mails in less than eight days across the plains from St. Joseph on the Missouri to Sacramento. He later became a professional hunter providing fresh buffalo meat by contract to the construction camps of the Union Pacific Railroad while it was building across Nebraska, and when the road was done, he was in demand as guide and friend for Eastern sportsmen and distinguished foreigners, who wished to hunt big game and see the West.

About 1872 Cody went upon the stage, acting in cheap Western melodramas whose Indians were all painted white men. In 1883 he prepared a larger venture, gathering at his ranch on the North Platte cowboys and mustangs as well as real Indians borrowed from the reservation. Here he organized his Wild West Show with its open-air presentation of cowboy life. His performance leaped into immediate popularity. In 1887 he took it to London to exhibit at the American Exposition there in the Jubilee year of Queen

Victoria, and earned even greater popularity than at home. The novel life aroused the interest of the youthful royalties gathered in London that summer. Command performances were frequent and Cody returned their hospitalities with Western barbecues in the big arena. Alexandra, then Princess of Wales, came repeatedly with her children, and like the rest of royalty insisted upon riding around the arena in the Deadwood coach during the Indian attack. So long as it was possible to obtain real Indians and cowboys, the popularity of the Wild West Show continued, and when Cody died in 1917 his rivals were still imitating his performance and moving-picture actors without number had seized upon his theme.

The Wild West Show preserved a part of the disappearing life with the technique derived from an even greater spectacle, then at its height - P. T. Barnum's

"Greatest Show on Earth"

'Greatest Show on Earth." It was the mission of Barnum, who turned his Yankee ingenuity to the trade of showman in 1835, to make amusement and recreation respectable. The Puritan ideals and the frontier simplicity of American life had restricted the development of public amusements. The theater was unimportant outside the cities and in bad repute within them, but there existed in most of the population sufficient means to patronize whatever entertainments might arouse their interest. Barnum, with genius for both entertainment and advertising, became a great figure in New York with his American Museum. His exploitation of the dwarf Tom Thumb and his later importation of the Swedish singer Jenny Lind in 1850 were typical successes in his career. Out of his museum and menagerie there developed a traveling circus that he put upon the road in 1871, and that ten years later was famous under its boasting name, with three rings under the main top and its gigantic side-shows. His importation of Jumbo in 1882 failed to produce an international clash as Punch feared, but led to violent and profitable publicity. His royal Burmese white elephant, imported a little later, was white enough to be unusual, but not white enough to

be profitable, and added the phrase "white elephant" to the rich American vernacular.

In the fifty years during which Barnum was prominent before the public, American life lost its rural simplicity and city populations came into existence, living a narrower and less satisfying life than that of the farm, and craving new outlets to restore their spiritual balance. Farm life had given opportunities for a rounded development that was denied not only to the inhabitant of the city tenements, but even to the city well-to-do. The latter now organized their country clubs, yacht clubs, and athletic clubs, while the former became willing supporters of public recreation and organized sport.

The rise of sport in America between the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876 and the World's Fair at Chicago in 1893 is due in part to a readjustment Rise of of American life from rural to urban conditions, sport and provides the outlets that replaced the frontier as it was closed. Before the Civil War there was little sport in America. The Turnverein members had imported group gymnastics from Germany. There was some racing of both horses and boats, and there was much hunting on a small scale, but sport was generally only an afterthought and a by-product. The breed of race-horses that Diomed, winner of the English Derby of 1780, started in Virginia in his old age, contributed to the development of the American thoroughbred and the permanent interest in racing stock. In 1866 the American Jockey Club was opened on the outskirts of New York, and was followed by similar race-tracks that made racing a spectators' sport, entertaining the city population and discredited by the gamblers who infested it. Robert Bonner, who owned Maud S. when her records beat the world, found the burden of proof still against him, as the public asked why a man of known respectability should devote so much of his attention to sport.

The America's cup was brought to the United States from the royal yacht races held at Cowes in 1851, and induced

a long series of English sportsmen to undertake to take it back. During the eighties the Atalanta (1881), Yachting the Genesta (1885), the Galatea (1886), and the Thistle (1887) made the attempt in vain, and a generation later the famous cup was still in the hands of the New York Yacht Club, and the hope of its recovery was still alive in Britain.

Promoters of sport as a spectacle found that it could be made to pay, with city audiences anxious for a chance to contribute to its support. In 1878 an English Walking sportsman, Sir John Astley, offered a purse of £500 and a championship belt worth £100 more to establish a championship for a six days' go-as-you-please race. Walking races among professional pedestrians had been popular for some years, but had been marred by the inability of referees to maintain any effective definition of walking. The Astley belt was competed for in London and was won by a Chicago Irishman named O'Leary, who covered 520 miles in six days. The trophy was defended four times before the end of 1879, and other similar races had ample patronage.

The interest in walking races was surpassed by the reviving interest in prize-fighting, and the personality of pugilists who followed the profession. The fight Boxing of John C. Heenan against the English champion, Sayers, in 1860 was the last of the great fights of the old school before promoters built arenas and commercialized the pastime. About 1880 a Boston Irishman, John L. Sullivan, began to attract interest by his engaging personality and his genius for slugging. In February, 1882, he won the championship of America from one Paddy Ryan, and thereafter repeatedly crowded the arena at Madison Square Garden. Like Buffalo Bill he went to England for the Jubilee in 1887, where his conduct when he met the Prince of Wales and treated him as an equal was widely noticed. Sullivan differed from many of the professional fighters in his willingness to take punishment as well as to give it. In 1889 a bout was arranged between him and Jake