- [Narrator] Warning: viewer discretion advised.

(bright music) (excited music) - Back before Taylor Swift filled stadiums on multiple nights, there was a touring show that drew huge crowds.

It was pure spectacle.

Parts circus, rodeo, melodrama, and pageant.

It was the Wild West show.

The mold was set by William F. Cody, the frontier Barnum known as Buffalo Bill.

A scout, buffalo hunter, and soldier, his resume was more inflated than the belly of Diamond Jim Brady, the notorious Gilded Age gourmand.

Bill never rode for the Pony Express, nor scouted for Custer as he claimed, but his message and spectacle sold a fantasy of the American West that shaped the world's sense of American history and spawned dozens of Wild West copycats.

And when the buffalo were gone, Buffalo Bill rode on.

He toured the country and Europe.

As the railroads stretched across North American continent, he went further west, eventually to Seattle.

And in Seattle he had an idea that helped his celebrity live on even further.

(mellow music) You associate the buffalo, the American bison, with the great plains where they lived by the millions.

(rustic music) They also lived in grace in the Pacific Northwest and proliferated after the glaciers melted and the megafauna vanished.

They were in Eastern Oregon and Washington and many tribes here had access to them.

For the Yakama, the Nez Perce, the Quileutes, the Spokane, and others, they were part of their diet and culture.

Buffalo Bill made his name as a scout for the U.S. Army, and as a buffalo hunter who was a deadly shot and who led wealthy tourists on buffalo hunts, where one way of fighting Indigenous people of the plains is to wipe out their source of life support: the buffalo.

Interesting life on the plains eventually drew Bill to New York City where he played himself on stage in a touring dramas.

Bill decided to take his show on the road.

(serious music) (crowd cheering) He recruited cowboys and sharpshooters like Annie Oakley, Native chiefs like Sitting Bull, Sioux dancers and white soldiers to recreate night after night in city after city, a traveling pageant of the West.

His selling point was authenticity, a performance that merged real frontier figures and fiction into a narrative of colonial conquest.

The show was multicultural.

Mexicans, mixed-race scouts, stunt horsemen and women, and rough riders from all over the world.

Mexican vaqueros, Cossacks, gauchos, Arab Bedouins.

Yet the big white man on the white horse with his white hat presided over the mythmaking.

Buffalo Bill's show reached Seattle for the first time in 1908.

(driven music) The show set up on grounds at 29th and Jefferson, an open-air arena of tents and grand stands.

It promised a diorama of Indian warfare, a reproduction of Western life.

There was a great train holdup, riders playing football on horseback.

The Battle of Summit Springs was recreated with Bill himself playing himself, killing Cheyenne chief, Tall Bull, a disputed claim.

(lively music) "The Seattle Star" reported, quote, "It was all a whirl of galloping horses, shouts in all languages from Paiute to Tatar, whips cracking, lariats whirling, and a big roar of applause."

It sold out.

From our perspective now, every Western cliche was showcased or invented in the Wild West shows like Buffalo Bill's, and they had a direct impact on the new medium of silent films.

A good example is a Wild West show that came to town the following year and set up on the county fairgrounds at Madison Park across Union Bay from the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, Seattle's first world's fair.

A cowboy from Bill's show who called himself Cheyenne Bill, his real name was William J. Gabriel, put on a very similar show.

It featured a young up-and-coming rodeo rider, Tom Mix, who went on to stardom in the first movie Westerns that would turn the Wild West show into cinematic entertainment.

Some of the realism portrayed in Cheyenne Bill's show might shock modern sensibilities.

(rustic music) The closing act showcased a performer named Reindeer Ike, who played a cattle rustler.

He is lassoed, dragged across the arena behind a horse, and lynched in the grand finale in two performances a day.

"So realistic is his part in the event illustrating quick justice in old cattle country that many of the spectators refused to believe the apparently-lifeless form hanging from the tree is really that of the man who crept up on the sleeping cowboy and stole his horse," reported one newspaper.

While most of the northwest was no longer the frontier, lynchings were not unknown here into the early 20th century.

(subdued music) And in 1882, 3 white men, accused killers, were brutally lynched by a Seattle mob downtown intent on committing its own murders, a mob that got off scot-free.

Cheyenne Bill's show included fake history too.

It showcased a recreation of the infamous Mountain Meadow Massacre where an immigrant train crossing Utah had been slaughtered.

In the show, Sioux Warriors were responsible, but in reality, the slaughter was committed by a Mormon militia in white-on-white violence.

Cheyenne Bill did know something about massacres.

He'd been a dispatch writer for General Nelson Miles during the Wounded Knee campaign.

Today, myths of the West persist, so do the buffalo, largely thanks to indigenous people who sought to save them from extermination.

Some tribes are still allowed to hunt wild buffalo by treaty rights.

The Yakama Nation, for example, are building a large bison herd and have made sanctioned trips to hunt buffalo in Yellowstone to keep their cultural traditions alive and feed their community.

(warm music) Bill himself last performed in Seattle in 1915, and while staying at a Seattle home, his niece said that he knew the end of his touring was near.

The idea of a museum was hatched because Bill wanted his legacy to live on.

For better and worse, it has.

- [Narrator] For more on this episode, listen to the "Mossback Podcast."

Just search for "Mossback" wherever you listen.