Gregory Hinton: "Out West with Buffalo Bill"

"Colonel William F. Cody, 1889," by French painter Rosa Bonheur. Courtesy of the BBHC.

From Gregory Hinton:

On Dec. 16, 2011, I gave an informal talk on my preliminary findings at the monthly "Wellness of Mind" BBHC lunch meeting. The entire staff of museum attended. The audience included Senator and Mrs. Alan Simpson and BBHC President Bruce Eldredge and his wife Jan.

The following is an excerpt from my talk:  

By studying the collection, interviewing your wonderfully knowledgeable curators and reading the Papers of Buffalo Bill, I feel that I have met my objectives: which as stated in my abstract were to analyze the assets of the BBHC for evidence of LGBT art and culture in the American West.

I take home with me tomorrow something much more substantive: a greater understanding of the generous charisma of William F. Cody, and why people love him so. Stand back Louisa. Yes, I admit it, I too, must now confess to having a slight crush on Buffalo Bill.

Three months before the Wild West came to Paris, the celebrated 19^th Century French painter Rosa Bonheur was grieving the death of Nathalie Micas, her companion of fifty years. Bonheur’s reputation as an internationally acclaimed animalier was well known, primarily as the result of her mammoth painting, Horse Fair, depicting an auction of Percheron horses, which Cornelius Vanderbilt eventually purchased in 1887 for $55,000 and donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  It was reproduced in lithographs all over the world, and certainly Colonel Cody must had known and admired her for it.

Rosa Bonheur came from simple roots.  Her father was a painter and her mother was a musician, which informed the artistic abilities of Rosa and her siblings. Her mother died early on and her father remarried. Rosa’s talent blossomed quickly and her reputation as an ‘eccentric’ who dressed in men’s clothing was also well-known.  She excused her need for masculine attire as necessary in order to work in slaughter houses and stock yards. She applied and received an official permit from the French government to dress like a man, renewable every six months, as long as she didn’t appear that way in public. 

She and Natalie were inseparable since Rosa was fourteen. They were so close that on his death bed, Nathalie’s father begged them to never part. Natalie ran the house, managed her business affairs and served as her studio assistant, laying on under-paintings, or tracing sketches onto canvas.  She was ‘naturally tragic’ and gave off airs which amused the dowdy and humble Bonheur. They traveled together, and when she died, Bonheur grieved for months and reportedly found life unendurable.  She wrote to a friend:

“You can very well understand how hard it is to be separated from a friend like my Nathalie, whom I loved more and more as we advanced in life; for she had borne with me the mortifications and stupidities inflicted on us by the silly, ignorant, low-minded people. She alone knew me, and I, her only friend, knew what she was worth.”

Three months after Nathalie’s death, Rosa Bonheur’s art dealer arranged for her to visit Buffalo Bill’s Wild West at the Paris Exposition Universelle. In addition to finding a great new friend in Cody, she also found herself as artist-in-residence behind the scenes of the Wild West. 

I was curious to see if she commented about the death of Nathalie in those circumstances.  She freely roamed the premises, and said, especially interested in the Indians: “Observing them at close range really refreshed my sad old mind. I was free to work among the redskins, drawing and painting them with their horses, weapons, camps, and animals… Buffalo Bill was extremely good to me.” 

And to pay him back, she invited him to her castle at By at the edge of Fontainebleau, and offered to paint his portrait for free – unheard of because she never did Equestrian paintings, and at the time her paintings sold for 300,000 francs.  When it was finished, Cody sent it to North Platte, where a year later, his house caught fire. He wired his sister Julia and told her to save the Bonheur, and let the house go to blazes. 

Over the years this image was incorporated into countless posters and programs, including the famous one where Bonheur is seated between her paintings of Cody and Napoleon, which served to elevate Cody to the status of great general.  Lithographs were made, and copies were made after her death by artist Robert Lindneux. In 1896, he put two hundred Percheron and Norman horses into his arena as a living “tableau” of Horse Fair. 

Three days after she invited Cody to lunch at By, a businessman named John Arbuckle paid a visit accompanied by Anna Klumpke, an American artist who offered to act as translator.  Several years before, Arbuckle, a devoted fan of her work, had sent two wild mustangs to France for Bonheur to paint.  She was forced to admit that they were too wild to stand still long enough, and only days before had given them to Buffalo Bill. Cowboys from his Wild West had broken them and they were now in his show.

Arbuckle had lunch and departed, but Klumpke, whose work Bonheur admired, quickly found herself ensconced at By. When Bonheur died ten years later, her entire fortune was left to Klumpke, to the exclusion of her family who had long resented her relationship with Nathalie Micas.  Klumpke generously split her inheritance in half, and went on to a great career of her own.

If Rosa Bonheur’s fame saved her love-life from outside forces, the same cannot be said of Oscar Wilde, who was also a fan and friend of Buffalo’s Bill.  Five years before QueenVictoria’s Golden Jubilee, Oscar Wilde came to America to lecture on Aestheticism and the Decorative Arts.  His fame as the Oxford-articulated effete intellectual allowed him to book nearly 150 engagements from New York to Leadville, a highpoint of his tour, where H.A.W. Tabor named a mine shaft- The Oscar - in his honor, and dropped him by bucket deep into the mine. Wilde said he hoped they might include shares in the mine with the honor, but to their great surprise and delight, he lit a cigar and drank all their whisky and was pronounced a “bully-boy with no glass eye.”

It is speculated that Wilde’s success in America may have prompted Buffalo Bill’s Wild West to return the favor in England. 

Of his impending visit, Wilde wrote of “The American Invasion” and that “English people were far more interested in American Barbarism than they are in American Civilization… The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious… Better the far west with its grizzly bears and its untamed cowboys, its free open-air and its free open-air manners; its boundless prairie and its boundless mendacity! This is what Buffalo Bill is going to bring to London; and we have no doubt that London will fully appreciate the show!

In 1887, when the Wild West hit London, Oscar Wilde had been married for three years, and quickly had two sons in a row. His wife Constance was attractive, intelligent, and unprepared for life as Mrs. Oscar Wilde.  He spared no expense with his friends, many single, attractive young men, and left her to child care while he socialized in London. His friends were Henry James and James Whistler, and while in America he had paid a call to Walt Whitman, who according to biographer Richard Ellmann, openly discussed his homosexuality. 

Constance was not his first choice as a wife – his first proposal went to Frances Balcombe, who married Bram Stoker – at the time the manager of the Lyceum Theatre instead. Frances didn’t have it much better than Constance Wilde.  Stoker, who ultimately wrote Dracula, was deeply obsessed with his boss, the eminent Victorian actor, Henry Irving, who befriended William F. Cody before he came to London.  In was on Irving’s arm that Buffalo Bill came to know the British Royals, and if Cody enhanced the underwhelming physicality of Irving, Irving raised Cody’s credibility mightily above the stature of circus-master. It is suggested that Stoker was actually jealous of Cody, though it was clear that they had direct dealings. Invitations for Cody by British nobility and upper echelons of the art and theatre world avalanched onto Cody, so much that this personal note from Constance implies that Wilde, too, had to compete for an audience.

Even Lady Wilde, Oscar’s fantastically flamboyant mother sent Cody a standing invitation to her salon.  At the time she was struggling financially, and could not afford help, so she kept her drapes drawn during the daylight and lit her rooms in red candlelight so no one could see the dust. I hope to connect with the British Library, for a more personal account of Cody’s encounters with Oscar Wilde, which has Constance Wilde’s visitor book on Tite Street, where she always insisted on inscriptions from her famous guests.  Over the next several years, Wilde’s star rose as did Cody’s. 

Wilde was yet to write his plays, Lady Windemere’s Fan, and The Importance of Being Ernest, and his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.  As Cody was aware of Rosa Bonheur’s reputation, he certainly would have known about Wilde’s predilection for young men. Wilde’s downfall would start to occur in 1892, when he became seriously involved with Lord Alfred Douglas, the son of the Marquess of Queensbury (of "The Queensbury Rules"). When Queensbury publicly accused Wilde of sodomy, Wilde foolishly sued for libel and lost. 

It would be fascinating to know of Cody’s reaction to Wilde’s notorious sodomy trial and his subsequent conviction in 1895. Cody had yet to face his own trial of public opinion with his attempt to divorce his wife Louisa. Wilde was sentenced to two years hard labor in prison, all the while assuming his fame would exonerate him. Friends turned their backs, his wife changed her name and by 1900, Oscar Wilde, Constance, his brother Willie and his mother Lady Jane Wilde were all dead in obscurity. 

Wilde made homosexuality infamous.  And at the time of his death, the word ‘homosexual’ had only recently been written about in scientific journals and was not in the public vernacular until the early 1900s.