Storming the Gates of Paradise Read Online Free PDF Page B

fictions published in the East, and they collaborated with the mythmaking by lying extensively about their own lives afterward—or perhaps they had become true inhabitants of that murky borderland. They began in 1872 to reenact their adventures for audiences, helping to create a pageantlike docudrama that drew equally from circus, theater, and rodeo. This hybrid reached its apotheosis with the Wild West Show that Cody founded in 1882 with the pseudononymous Ned Buntline, who wrote more than a hundrednovels about his partner. The circus, formerly a blend of the fabulous and the exotic, became a vehicle for presenting the celebrated characters, skills (shooting, roping, riding), and events of the West as entertainment. The West had already ceased to be a place and become a genre: it had become the Western.
    In his autobiography, Cody wrote about fashion and fiction:
    At the last minute I decided to take along my buckskin suit. Something told me that some of the people I had met in New York might want to know just how a scout looked in his business clothes. . . . I was still wearing the wonderful overcoat that had been given me by the Grand Duke Alexis, and it was a source of continuous admiration among the officers, who pronounced it the most magnificent garment of its kind in America. . . . In the papers the next morning I found that I had had adventures that up to that time I had never heard of. The next evening I had my first adventure in high society.
    Cody was born in 1846, the year the United States began its war with Mexico for what is now the American Southwest, and died during the First World War; he began his career as a buffalo hunter and army scout and ended as a silent-movie producer. He is the crowning achievement of this proto-shape shifting, a prefigurative mix of Andy Warhol and Steven Seagal and Michael Eisner. There is now a Buffalo Bill Museum in Colorado, and, like the Gene Autry Museum in Los Angeles, it presents Western history and theater as though they were one—and in crucial respects they were. To comprehend the Wild West Show, imagine that Colin Powell toured the country in a theatrical production simulating the bombing of Baghdad, and that Saddam Hussein joined him occasionally for a command performance. The stars played themselves, and actors played the smaller parts. Enemies on the battlefield became co-stars of the circus, and Cody harbored an outlaw for a while who played himself—Gabriel Dumont of Canada’s Riel Rebellion. For many of the most prominent characters of the West, crime, law enforcement, and entertainment were not distinct categories: Las Vegas already existed in spirit.
    In the 1880s in Montana, some young outlaws were apprehended with saddlebagsfull of dime novels—they must have been copycat criminals, egged on by their reading. In his book
Spaghetti Westerns
, Christopher Frayling recounts, “Emmett Dalton, the last surviving member of the Dalton Gang specializing in great train robberies, actually collaborated on a book in 1937 (subsequently filmed) entitled
When the Daltons Rode
. This book told the story of how Emmett Dalton had died a romantic death at Coffeyville, Kansas, forty-five years previously.” Wyatt Earp’s sister-in-law Allie, married to Virgil Earp, tells of an occasion when Kate Holliday, the common-law wife of Doc Holliday, accidentally stumbled upon Earp’s other identities, in the presence of Mattie, Wyatt Earp’s wife:
    Kate had been leanin’ against the closet door, her hand on the doorknob. As she flipped around, the door flew open. There was a bang and a clatter. Out of the closet tumbled a big suitcase, spewin’ out on the floor some things that made my eyes pop out. Wigs and beards made of unravelled rope and sewn on black cloth masks, some false mustaches, a church deacon’s frock coat, a checkered suit like drummers wear, a little bamboo cane—lots of things like that! Mattie gave a scairt little cry and fell on her knees in a