Mossback’s Northwest: Seattle loved Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show

You associate the buffalo — the American bison — with the Great Plains, where they lived by the millions. But they also lived and grazed in the Pacific Northwest, proliferating after the glaciers melted and the megafauna vanished. They were in eastern Oregon and Washington, and many tribes here had access to them — for the Yakama, the Nez Perce, the Cayuse, the Spokane and others, they were part of their diet and culture.

Buffalo Bill made his name as a scout for the U.S. Army and as a buffalo hunter — a deadly shot who led wealthy tourists from back East on buffalo hunts at a time when one way of fighting Indigenous people of the plains was to wipe out their source of life support, the buffalo. Interest in life on the plains eventually drew Bill to New York City, where he played himself in stage and in touring dramas.

Bill decided to take his show on the road. He recruited cowboys and sharpshooters like Annie Oakley, native chiefs like Sitting Bull, Sioux dancers and white soldiers to recreate, night after night in city after city, a traveling pageant of the West. His selling point was “authenticity” — a performance that merged real frontier figures and fiction into a narrative of colonial conquest. His show was multicultural: mixed-race scouts, stunt horse men and women and rough riders from all over the world — Mexican vaqueros, Cossacks, gauchos, Arab Bedouins. Native people, often whole families, were hired to show off Indigenous ways. Yet the big white man on his white horse with his white hat presided over the mythmaking.

Buffalo Bill’s show first reached Seattle in 1908. The show set up on grounds at 29th and Jefferson — an open-air arena of tents and grandstands. It promised “a diorama of Indian warfare, a reproduction of Western life … ” There was a great train holdup; riders playing football on horseback; the Battle of Summit Springs was recreated with Bill himself playing himself killing Cheyenne Chief Tall Bull, a disputed claim. The Seattle Star reported “It was all a whirl of galloping horses, shouts in all languages from Piute to Tartar, whips crackling, lariats whirling and a big roar of applause.” It sold out.

From our perspective now, every Western cliché was showcased or invented in Wild West shows like Buffalo Bill’s, and they had a direct impact on the new medium of silent films. A good example is a Wild West show that came to town the following year, setting up on the county fairgrounds at Madison Park, across Union Bay from the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, Seattle’s first world’s fair.