BACKSTAGE AT THE BUFFALO BILL CENTER
One of my on-going threads is the concept of “Western” which began in the 19th century in the US and expanded to fans around the world. It’s a major preoccupation that gives potency to old rich white men who raided national resources, even makes them seem legitimate by forming institutions like museums, historical societies, art galleries, writing genre guilds, TV series, and reputations. This thought comes in part from lived experience in the Sixties.
The paper I note here was sent to me by Academia.com. “Memory and Myth at the Buffalo Bill Museum” by Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, & Eric Aoki. Western Journal of Communication Vol. 69, №2, April 2005, pp. 85–108
Having been present in the very early development of this complex, backstage in a way these writers weren’t, I don’t find the article particularly revelatory, although I’m very pleased with the word “carnivalizing” when considering the bloody prairie clearances of the indigenous people. But I see no need to use a word like “suasory” when one could simply say persuasion — it helps pass off clap-trap as thought.
“Based on its rhetorical invitations to collective memory and national identity, we argue that the Buffalo Bill Museum privileges images of Whiteness and masculinity, while using the props, films, and posters of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West to carnivalize the violent conflicts between Anglo Americans and Native Americans.
. . . The perceived truthfulness of history museums, as well as their size, scope and complexity, pose unique challenges for rhetorical critics (Armada, 1998, p. 235). However, such critics, who have increasingly turned their attention to the material spaces of memory (Blair & Michael, 1999; Blair, Jeppeson, & Pucci, 1991; Dickinson, 1997; Gallagher, 1999, 1995; Hasian, 2004; Katriel, 1994), are well positioned to understand the suasory force of history museums.” The noting of references signals academic prestige.
Currently people are attacking the related idea of “manifest destiny” “which claimed that westward expansion was not simply necessary for political or economic reasons, but was, instead, a moral or even religious duty of the nation”. Thus, as is conventional, religion is thrown up as a justification for taking as much as one can, particularly when the cost is to “lesser” people. Christianity has many convenient arguments for this, but unfortunately they’re mostly in the Old Testament which Jesus came to replace. People who spoke of “manifest destiny” were crypto-Christians justifying the same old bloody means to empire.
And these were the dynamics of our relationship with the Buffalo Bill empire. The little emperor of the empire was Harold McCracken, a short bossy man who managed to invent a persona from a few adventures and a lot of books. He pushed in on our lives through Bob’s conviction that he was a key to fame and fortune. Alas, only for himself at the expense of others: literal expense, first with money from Gertrude Whitney, then from Cornelius Whitney Vanderbilt and after that the Coe family. This relentlessness of McCracken’s was very useful to the development of the Buffalo Bill Center.
At the point he made contact with us, his task was to deal with a transitional building between two structures. The problem was that it was mostly glass walls. He wanted to fill it with art but there was no place to hang paintings, so art would have to be sculpture, so he demanded that Bob supply him with 100 bronzes in a year. This effort was nearly impossible and pushed Bob into a heart attack that made it necessary for me to make my famous solo life-threatening journey driving a faulty old van in a mega-snowstorm to deliver the last ones by May 1. (See “Bronze Inside and Out” by Mary Scriver) There was never any question about changing the deadline.
I never understood McCracken’s hold on Bob except that he seemed to have occupied Bob’s hunger for a father, since his own father never really approved of him. The expression of devotion came through grizzly bears: Bob sent McCracken a big standing bronze of a grizzly and bronze grizzly footprints — without charging him, which was unheard of. He even let McCracken attend the transfer to us of the Thunder Pipe Bundle. The by-then old man wrote about it as though he were the star, but got most things wrong. He didn’t include his desperate need for Noxema on his bald head in the prairie sun. To him “Indians” were a conquered people worth money. He didn’t really know any. His earliest adventure was an expedition to prove that the Bering Straits had been a land bridge for people to cross.
Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney and his wife were very rich by inheritance and Cornelius’ mother, Gertrude, was the real instigator of the celebration of Buffalo Bill, contributing land, money and the key monumental statue of BB himself. (The standing figure in front of the museum — if it’s still there — is by Bob Scriver.) Whitney was considered a good businessman and made a lot of money from a zinc mine in Canada, which is an interesting echo of today’s Russian oligarch who is a zinc mine entrepreneur.
Cornelius and his fourth wife, MaryLou, were involved in the BBHC and liked to create muddy paintings of the land, which they insisted be shown in the new Whitney Art Gallery. McCracken, who was as obsequious to them as everyone else was to him, knew they were bad art but hit upon the solution of showing their work on a mezzanine which was designated as a very special gallery for excellence. This worked.
Behind the scenes was a corrida about artists. The Coes were charmed by Harry Jackson so part of McCracken’s fondness of Bob Scriver was pitting him against Harry to show the Coes didn’t own him. Too bad for the fans of violence — Harry and Bob were almost instant friends. We spent a couple of hours in the high-backed booths at the Irma whooping it up and telling stories.
Harry came to visit us in Browning, flying in to the “landing strip” by Heart Butte. His pilot called ahead so we could clear the cows out of the way. This was not at all political, but a very real celebration of art, land, history, and two dynamic men. At its heart, this was the kernel of the “Western” — not the exploitation that it came to be for the rich white male exponents of mythology that could cover their butts. Luckily, despite being land-based, Western American mythology escaped its bounds and stands for much more when talented people get their hands on it.
