@ 2015 Martin Woodside ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

@ 2015 Martin Woodside ALL RIGHTS RESERVED GROWING WEST: AMERICAN BOYHOOD AND THE FRONTIER NARRATIVE by MARTIN WOODSIDE A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-Camden Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Childhood Studies Written under the direction of Lynne Vallone And approved by ________________________________________ Lynne Vallone ________________________________________ Robin Bernstein ________________________________________ Holly Blackford ________________________________________ Daniel Thomas Cook ________________________________________ Susan Miller Camden, New Jersey May, 2015 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Growing West: American Boyhood and the Frontier Narrative by Martin Woodside Dissertation Director: Lynne Vallone This dissertation examines how frontier narratives interacted with discourses of American boyhood to establish and inform notions of race, gender, and national identity in the second half of the nineteenth century. A rich academic conversation exists exploring connections between the mythic power of the American frontier and nineteenth century constructions of hegemonic masculinity; this project adds to that conversation by considering the dynamic relationship between frontier narratives and boyhood. This is a cultural history, assessing prominent nineteenth century cultural forms, such as the dime novel and the Wild West show, through the vivid interplay of frontier mythos and boyhood. Through this interplay, these cultural forms brought together late nineteenth century notions of child development, history, and frontier mythology to tell powerful stories about America’s past and create hopeful visions of its future. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A number of people were indispensable to the completion of this project. I want to thank my friends and family for all of their support, especially my wife Lois, whose patience and encouragement during the writing process has been inestimable. I’m very thankful for the helpful staff at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, the Denver Public Library, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, who helped guide my research. I’m especially thankful to John Rumm, my mentor as a Buffalo Bill Center of the West Fellow, and Mary Robinson, who did much to make my time at the McCracken Research Library successful. This dissertation would never have been completed without the careful attention of my committee members, Holly Blackford, Robin Bernstein, Dan Cook, Susan Miller, and I’m very grateful for their help. I owe a special debt to Lynne Vallone, who chaired my committee and has provided invaluable assistance every step of the way. Finally, I owe great thanks to my father, John Woodside, to whom this book is dedicated. The writing here, like all of my writing, and most of my self, bears his mark—and proudly so. iii List of Illustrations Illustration One: “The Last Exit,” Gar Williams Cartoon. Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Illustration Two: “Buffalo Bill’s Duel with Yellow Hand,” True Williams. The Autobiography of Buffalo Bill. Illustration Three: The Scalping of Yellow Hand, from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West 1891 Program. Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Illustration Four: Cody and Carver’s Wild West, 1883 Program Cover. Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Illustration Five: 1884 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Program cover. Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Illustration Six: “Attack on the Burning Cabin,” Buffalo Bill’s Wild West 1885 Program. Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave. Illustration Seven: Johnny Baker, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West publicity photo. Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave. Illustration Eight: Annie Oakley, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Publicity Photo, 1892. Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Illustration Nine: Lillian Smith, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West publicity photo. Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave. Illustration Ten: Rose Nelson Cabinet Card. Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Illustration Eleven:. White Fawn and Papoose, Cabinet Card. Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Illustration Twelve: Children backstage, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Illustration Thirteen: Bennie Irving, “The World’s Smallest Cowboy.” Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Illustration Fourteen: Daisy Rifle Ad, 1913. Saturday Evening Post. iv 1 Introduction “Go West young man, and grow up with the country.” On July 13, 1865, Horace Greeley published these famous words in a New York Tribune editorial. Like much in the history of the West, the authorship of the credo remains in dispute, and, like much of the history of the West, that dispute hardly seems to matter.1 As reporter Maxwell Scott says at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a film that offers as persuasive an analysis as any of the relationship between myth and history in American frontier culture; “This is the West, sir. When legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Greeley’s legendary utterance is now fact, and since the publication of that Tribune editorial, the motto has served as the title for three feature films, a Bing Crosby album, and countless newspaper headlines. The quotation also serves as a useful frame for this project. In the second half of the nineteenth century, America completed the final stages of westward migration, fulfilling the promise of manifest destiny and beginning to come to terms with the idea that the frontier was closed, and with it a defining chapter in American history.2 As Greeley’s quote suggests, the frontier has become synonymous with a distinctive type of frontier masculinity, a type of masculinity that, in fact, has come to represent much of the national character. The iconography of frontier manhood is pervasive and longstanding, bridging the centuries and including larger than life figures such as John Wayne, the Marlboro Man, and a series of cowboy presidents like Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. Wedding strong character to feisty individualism, these men represent a powerful, and persuasive, vision of American ethos, formed, like the nation itself, through exposure to the open—and wild—West. 2 Ideas of youth play a prominent role in this mythologizing of the West, a role current scholarship has largely failed to account for. Greeley’s quote exhorts “young men” to head west, and, importantly, it frames that journey in the language of development. In the space of the frontier, boys will grow into men, just as the fledgling nation will grow to fulfill its promise. Imagining the West as a literal and metaphorical space for development and progress, nineteenth century writers and thinkers, like Greeley, drew on distinctive ideologies of race and gender. Spreading civilization westward intensified the influence of white, masculine hegemony through occupation of the “open” frontier. Greeley’s quote tells a story about that process, one that became increasingly influential in the second half of the nineteenth century. This project revisits that story, examining how discourses of American boyhood and frontier mythology worked through and against each other in literature and performance to shape late nineteenth century ideas of national character, identity, and progress. American history is steeped in a long-standing national fascination with the landscape, both real and imagined, of the frontier. Prominent New World intellectuals, from St. John de Crèvecoeur and Benjamin Franklin before the American Revolution to Thomas Jefferson after it, used the potent signifier of “unspoiled land” in the West to imagine and mediate a number of disparate visions for America’s future. These visions were predicated on the acquisition and development of the land. For Jefferson, this project took shape most prominently in the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis & Clark Expedition. John Jacob Astor sought to establish trade routes from Oregon to Asia alongside the contemporaneous drive to establish the Oregon Trail in the first decades of the nineteenth century. And, of course, the promise of the untapped West formed the 3 impetus for the shared dream of a North American transcontinental railway, finally realized by the establishment of the Pacific Railroad in 1869. In each of these instances, visions of the West drew on the idea of unspoiled land to weave complex, often contradictory, narratives of America’s past and future. As Henry Nash Smith smartly concludes, the importance of the Lewis and Clark expedition “lay on the level of the imagination: it was drama. It was the enactment of a myth that embodied the future” (18). It’s been over 200 years since Lewis and Clark headed west, and the myth of the frontier continues to dominate the American imagination. In those two hundred years, this myth has often been articulated through a set of powerful and durable themes. As Richard Slotkin describes it, America has developed a dominant "myth-historiography,” one in which “the conquest of the wilderness and the subjugation or displacement of the Native Americans who originally inhabited it have been the means to our achievement of a national identity, a democratic polity, an ever-expanding economy, and a phenomenally dynamic and 'progressive' civilization" (10). As Annette Kolodny points out, this mythology has long been clearly gendered. The idea of open land, she argues, is “America’s oldest and most cherished fantasy,” specifically, a male fantasy. In theorizing the virgin land, writers like Jefferson, and explorers like Lewis and Clark, created “a daily reality of the

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