Scraps of the West: why Buffalo Bill’s Wild West tour captivated English audiences
As part of the University’s History and American Studies degree, second year students are trained to make use of the rich archival collections held around the city relating to the history of the United States. Students work with collections held at John Rylands Research Institute and Library (which includes records held at the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre at Manchester Central Library), and are shown how to request, use, and interpret such sources in the context of the programme’s revamped module, AMER2002: US History Long Essay. This past year students examined documents relating to Manchester’s Civil-War era Union & Emancipation Society, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West tours in the 1890s-1900s, and their research was the basis of an extended study of these subjects. Their main findings are shared in blog posts.
Below you will find work by Georgina Mullins
Beginning my undergraduate project with little prior experience of working with archival materials, it soon became clear how valuable a scrapbook, held by the John Rylands Library since 1937, would be to my study. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Scrapbook (ref. English MS 1393) became the foundational reference for my investigation of why Buffalo Bill’s Wild West tour captivated English audiences in the late nineteenth century. Reading this scrapbook, alongside studies of British imperial culture and popular entertainment in the late Victorian era, captured how the American Wild West was made into entertainment for ordinary English people, and seen largely through the lens of Britain’s own empire.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West scrapbook was compiled by the middle-class Hipkins family, of West London, and it focuses on the Wild West exhibition established by William Frederick Cody in Nebraska in 1883. The exhibition was characterised as an authentic reflection of Cody’s experiences growing up on the frontier, and featured re-enactments of Indian attacks, white heroism, rifle-shooting cowboys, Annie Oakley and Lillian Smith, horseback racing, and a genuine buffalo hunt. First travelling the eastern and midwestern states of the US, the 1887 American Exhibition in London (the same year as the Queen’s Jubilee) brought the show to Britain, and it returned in 1891–2 and 1902–4, visiting Manchester, Sheffield, and Glasgow and charting its course for Europe.
An opening letter written by Edith Hipkins describes the scrapbook as “a ‘momento mori’ of an exhibition of real-life held in London…collected by her brother and carried out by their father for their mother’s amusement”. Bound in a burgundy cover, the scrapbook’s spine is embellished with the words “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 1887. 1892. 1903”. It is chronological in sequence, containing material up to 1919, and is paginated in each top right-hand corner, from 1 to 80. The scrapbook encompasses an extensive body of material: newspaper clippings, predominantly from the journals Black & White and Illustrated London News; photographs, some signed by Cody, many of which are cartes de visites taken in studios in London, Paris, and America; assorted images of Native Americans; as well as authentic programmes, handwritten notes, and symbols to highlight sections of articles, images, and places.
Seldom used by previous scholars, the Hipkins scrapbook offers an insight into English reactions to broader understandings of imperialism through its inclusion of material concentrated on Native Americans (their objectification and commercialisation); the patronage of English royalty, the connections between America and Britain and especially a shared fascination with Anglo-Saxon “West-ward” expansion.
Scholarship relating to this period — including past studies by Joy Kasson, and John Mackenzie — has revealed how imperialism threaded through all aspects of British life, with popular literature, magazines, and exhibitions all fostering racial ideologies around Britain’s position in a new global world. Feverishly awaiting the arrival of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was an English society with long-held assumptions about the Western frontier, shaped by the society’s absorption of modern American novels, travel accounts, and even jokes that were reprinted in British periodicals.[i]
In a climate of increasing trade, growth, and immigration, Britain and America were becoming both imperial rivals and partners, joined by a common aspiration of creating a civilised world. Inspirited by their shared language and supposed “Anglo-Saxon” heritage, Britons interpreted Americans through Buffalo Bill’s Wild West as embodying the same imperial goals, civilising their own primitive frontiers, and defending against their own savages. Buffalo Bill’s scrapbook, therefore, was engaged within this wider conversation and becomes a template and reflection of this English desire to help Americans narrate the story of Buffalo Bill and the phenomenon of the ‘Wild West’ guided by their own history and experiences of the British empire.
[i] David Howe, ‘American Victorianism as a Culture’, American Quarterly 27 (1975); Bob Nicholson, ‘Looming Large: America and the Late-Victorian Press, 1865–1902’ (PhD, University of Manchester, 2012).
Additional Resources
Small amounts of the Buffalo Bill Scrap Book (Ref. English MS 1393) and other related material has been digitised and can be accessed here
By Georgina Mullins
