Wild West Shows

Wild West shows were traveling vaudeville performances in the United States and Europe. The first and prototypical Wild West show was Buffalo Bill's, formed in 1883 and lasting until 1913. The shows introduced many western performers and personalities, and a romanticized version of the American frontier, to a wide audience with many different members. Will Rogers also toured a Wild West show.

The mythology and legends of the American West evoke images of adventure filled with cowboys, Indians, wild animals, wild parties with outlaws, and stagecoaches. The real American West of the 19th century was not nearly as glamorous as often depicted. Cowboys, Native American Indians, army scouts, outlaws, and wild animals did truly exist in the West. However, gunfights, stagecoach attacks, and train holdups were not an everyday ordeal. The dramatic myth of the Wild West as we see it today is really a “puffed-up exaggeration” of the real western frontier. The shaping of this myth of western life was aided into creation by films, dime novels, live performances, paintings, pulp magazines, sculptures, and television. More than anyone or anything else, William Frederick Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill, can be credited with helping to create and preserve a lasting legend of the West. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show took the reality of western life and glamorized it into an appealing show for Eastern audiences and helped to permanently preserve the legend of the Wild West.

“Cowboys driving cattle over open range. Outlaws and lawmen facing one another on a dusty main street. Indian hunters racing through buffalo herds on horseback. These images, so familiar from books and movies, are what come to mind when many people think of the American West.” Although these images are not entirely fictionalized, the real American West was home to European settlers and pioneers. The show helped develop dramatic images of the "wild west" and the west was a place open for imagination and new starts.

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