Buffalo Bill

European fascination for the American West was never more in evidence than in the late 1800s. Colonel William Frederick Cody—"Buffalo Bill"—after a lifetime of hunting, scouting and soldiering, took his enormously successful "Wild West" show on two tours of Europe. In 1887 he and his troupe went to Britain where they played to enthusiastic crowds —indeed, to an enthusiastic Queen Victoria, herself, who liked the show so much that she went back to see it a second time. Everyone was eager to see the fabled buffalo hunter and Indian fighter, the sharp–shooting Annie Oakley and bands of real Sioux warriors and, maybe—as did the Prince of Wales—even ride on the fabled Deadwood Stage! 

Two years later, they returned to Europe and went to Italy where they were invited to the Vatican to attend the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the coronation of Pope Leo XIII. Also, in Verona, Cody fulfilled his ambition of exhibiting his "Wild West" (he disliked the term "show") in an ancient Roman amphitheater. (In Rome he was unable to fulfill his dream of playing in the Coliseum, itself, as there was too much rubble and stone cluttering the arena; he settled for having himself and his troupe photographed in front of it.) 

A high point of the visit to Rome was a bronco-busting challenge "grudge match" between Buffalo Bill's cowboys and true working cowhands from the Maremma region in central Italy, men who spent much of their time working with the Cajetan breed of horse, the wildest and most unmanageable in Italy. The Prince of Teano challenged Cody's men to break the Cajetans. Twenty thousand spectators saw the contest. The Rome correspondent of the New York Herald wrote:

The brutes made springs into the air, darted hither and thither in all directions, and bent themselves into all sorts of shapes, but all in vain. In five minutes the cowboys had caught the wild horses with the lasso, saddled, subdued and bestrode them. Then the cowboys rode them around the arena while the dense crowds applauded with delight. 

Depending on who is telling the story, the Maremma cowboys were then only marginally to moderately successful at trying to duplicate that feat on Cody's horses. 

Buffalo Bill opened in Naples on January 26, 1890. (An imaginative local had counterfeited more than two-thousand tickets—and why am I not surprised at that?!—producing great confusion at the opening.) An ad in the Neapolitan newspaper, il Paese, that day announced: 

Buffalo Bill's Wild West! 
100 Indians! 
100 Marksmen! 
Hunters & Cowboys! 
200 animals, including wild buffaloes! 
2 Week Engagement—Daily, 2,30 p.m. 
Corso Meridionale, at the Rione Vasta.
Tickets: 1, 2, 3, 5 lire.

And so Buffalo Bill let the West run wild in Naples for a while. Bear in mind that no one—not Cody, not his company, and certainly not the people who watched them perform throughout Europe—viewed this as a circus. It was more of a replay, if you will, of current events. In 1890 the Indian Wars that had raged along the American frontier had not even totally subsided. The West may have been won, but the combatants were still very much alive. The Native Americans in Cody's troupe were not stage 'Indians'—they were the real thing, many of the very same Sioux braves who had fought Custer at the battle of the Little Big Horn. Indeed, they were in Cody's troupe only because he got them released into his custody for his tour after they were imprisoned in the wake of the last great Sioux uprising. Back in America, Chief Sitting Bull was still alive and still their leader, (although he would be "shot while trying to escape" from internment later that same year of 1890). (Cody would live until 1917.) 

The Neapolitan papers praised Cody and his band:

That which may seem to the everyday Neapolitan to be a kind of game, an idle display of skill, is nothing less than a common necessity of everyday life in a country where acrobatic agility, boundless audacity and prowess are conditions for survival.

Today, those raised on the "authenticity" of films and television can scarcely comprehend what a live display of this kind must have meant to Europeans of the late 19th century. Speaking of a simulated Sioux attack on an immigrant wagon train, part of the daily show in Naples, the reporter for il Paese continued:

No description can convey the effect of an authentic mounted charge by Indians, this folk who here show us a few meager scenes from a life that until a few years ago was theirs to lead untrammeled.

Buffalo Bill Cody had brought a kind of time machine with him. He had opened a window and given a privileged few a chance to look out and glimpse something very rare: an authentic reproduction of a way of life played for them by the very people who had led it. The window would soon close and the players would become anachronisms and caricatures of themselves. Then, generations of imitators and made–up distortions of "cowboys and Indians" would follow. For a fleeting moment, however, the citizens of Naples and other European cities got a chance to see the real thing.

A curious sidelight

Tales of Buffalo Bill were present in much popular adventure fiction in many countries in the early 20th century, including Italy. In the 1920s, the Nerbini publishing house in Florence started publishing, in illustrated (I hesitate to say “comic book”) format, the adventures of Buffalo Bill, l’eroe del [the hero of the] Wild West. Then WWII rolled around, and the US and Italy were at war with each other. Italian scholar and author, Umberto Eco, reports in his recent book, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna, that in 1942 some anonymous Fascist party hack at Nerbini decided that real heroes had to be Italian, not American! Thus, the publisher concocted the story that William Cody was really an Italian named Domenico Tombini who had emigrated from Romagna, Mussolini’s native province (imagine that!), to America and become the famous hero. Thus, for a while you had the “Italian hero of the Wild West.” That story is, of course, bunk. If Cody had been an Italian and returned to Italy and Naples in 1890, that would have been the real headline, not the buffaloes.

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