Pioneers of Promotion: How Press Agents for Buffalo Bill, P. T. Barnum, and the World's Columbian Exposition Created Modern Marketing
408
Pioneers of Promotion: How Press Agents for Buffalo Bill, P. T. Barnum, and the World's Columbian Exposition Created Modern Marketing
408Hardcover
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806160108 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 06/14/2018 |
| Series: | William F. Cody Series on the History and Culture of the American West , #5 |
| Pages: | 408 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
BURYING A LEGEND
John Burke's body lies a'mouldering in the grave
For a small town, Golden, Colorado, is certainly a place of large contrasts.
Neatly tucked in a valley between North Table Mountain and South Table Mountain, about twelve miles west of Denver, Golden sits where the high plains abruptly end their eight hundred-mile run at the foot of the soaring Rockies. Home to only twenty thousand people, it is nevertheless known by millions because of its recurring cameo in the ad campaigns of its largest employer, the Adolph Coors Brewing Company. And although Golden was founded during the Pike's Peak gold rush of 1859 and is still home to the Colorado School of Mines, it actually derives its euphonious name not from a metal but from a man — Thomas L. Golden, a Georgian who came west in search of treasure and then left. (What's more, the most important metal in town is not gold, but aluminum, courtesy of the Rocky Mountain Metal Container facility, the largest aluminum can production center in the world.)
And then there is Golden's best-known resident: William Frederick Cody (Buffalo Bill), probably the most famous American of his era, who helped settle the rugged frontier, entertained more than 50 million people with his Wild West show, and was the subject of more than 550 dime novels ... but who is buried there in relative obscurity high atop Lookout Mountain.
To reach the Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave from the center of Golden, you turn onto 19th Street just south of where Clear Creek crosses under Highway 6 on its long amble to the South Platte River. From there it is a short though rugged drive up Lookout Mountain Road, through some forty-two turns, many of them hairpins, up, up, up, climbing 1,700 feet in less than five miles, squeezing past the inevitable thrill-seeking cyclists. (For a major attraction, the museum is in a relatively inaccessible location: annual attendance averages seventy thousand, but on days of inclement weather, it sometimes attracts only twenty visitors, maybe fewer.) Each turn reveals a new and more magnificent vista: the snowcapped peaks to the west, the skyline of Denver floating ethereally in the distant clouds to the east, and the evergreens standing tall and proud against the backdrop of tawny rocks and hayfields below.
Why Lookout Mountain became Cody's final resting place is a matter of considerable controversy. Born in Iowa and raised in Kansas, Cody would later call many places home, including Rochester, New York; North Platte, Nebraska; and the town he founded, Cody, Wyoming. All of them could lay claim to a more important role in his life than could Denver (or Golden), which happened to be where his sister May lived, where he died, and where Harry Tammen, the owner of the Denver Post and a persistent creditor late in Cody's life, wielded great influence — perhaps, some people at the time said, including a payment to Cody's widow, Louisa, to keep the body there. Indeed, Cody himself had at one time selected a burial spot on Cedar Mountain in Wyoming, overlooking the town of Cody, and had marked it with some rocks; he even drew up a will in New York in 1906 specifying Cedar Mountain for his grave and allocating ten thousand dollars to his executors to erect a monument there. Yet anecdotes also describe Cody's love for the majestic views from Lookout Mountain, his desire to be buried there, and a later will, dated February 19, 1913, ceding control over such decisions to Louisa as executor of the estate.
Regardless, here he has lain ever since the day in June 1917 when some twenty thousand people wended their way up the mountain to pay final respects, just one manifestation of an outpouring of grief and respect that had not been experienced in America since the death of Abraham Lincoln.
Today, the colorful and well-thought-out displays at the small museum offer some wonderful insights into Cody's amazing life. A few steps away is a rustic-looking wood-and-stone structure, the original museum building from 1921, called the Pahaska Tepee, which now houses a café and a gift shop densely packed with Buffalo Bill–themed key chains, magnets, t-shirts, mugs, postcards, books, posters, license plate frames, Stetsons, souvenir rugs, and one of those machines that stamps an image on a penny. Sitting atop spinning racks of postcards are signs created on a printer that was low in ink: "Buffalo Bill Says Half Off On Fudge." On the outside of the building is a wooden sign plugging Duffy's Rowdy Root Beer.
From the Pahaska Tepee you can walk along a pathway, to which patches of snow and ice cling persistently into springtime, past the inevitable silver triangular coin-operated binoculars, up to the grave.
It is a solemn and modest place — a small stone column with an inset plaque, surrounded by a wrought-iron picket fence — but the views are impressive. From here, on a good day, you can see beyond eastern Colorado all the way to Kansas, Nebraska, and Wyoming. If you look hard enough, perhaps you can also see back in time, with the jagged mountains, open plains, smokestack plumes, and seemingly Lilliputian metropolis all suggesting important passages in western history that brought us to this point, this place, this very moment.
But the reverie does not last long, for looming above it all is the enormous red-and-white Lake Cedar Group television antenna, part of a cluster of towers, antennae, and microwave-relay dishes that punctuate the view like asterisks as you stand by Cody's grave. The antenna, erected in 2009 to replace the even larger KCNC-TV tower and predecessor radio and TV towers on Lookout Mountain dating all the way back to 1952, is today shared by Denver television stations 4, 7, 9, and 20, beaming high-definition news and episodes of The Big Bang Theory and Grey's Anatomy to the good people of greater Denver. At 730 feet, it is large, but all the more so because it is built on the side of a steep mountain that itself sits on top of a mile-high plain. "Nothing special in the United States," said Don Perez, a veteran television engineer who worked on the project, of the tower's size. "We just happened to have a big rock to park our antenna on."
Thus, controversy aside, it is hard to imagine a more fitting resting place than this big rock for a man whose dashing career of scouting, fighting Indians, and hunting buffalo helped win the West, and whose re-creation of all those events on stage and in arenas helped fixate the western myth and transform the world of marketing and communications. In his life Cody was a bridge between Old World and New, and so he is in his death. The vastness, the fresh air, the endless prairie, the vistas, the heretical challenge to Mother Nature's dominion, the encroach of industry, the tourist tchotchkes, the towering communications beacons — all are as they should be.
And yet there is something wrong, something important, something out of balance in this world. There is a spirit missing. Because Cody's story, Cody's legend, would never have come to pass without the trailblazing promotional efforts of John M. Burke — for forty-five years Cody's press agent, publicist, advance man, general manager, mythmaker, impresario, apologist, storyteller, and friend.
As early as 1869, Major Burke, as he was widely known, recognized Cody's heroic nature and the powerful symbolism of the fading West, and he gradually fused them together. Looking back at that first encounter with Cody, Burke wrote (with his typical hyperbole and tortured syntax) that the scout "seemed surcharged with youth, life, blood, graceful, dignified poise, while the fact of his daily duty being to defy savage death surrounded him with a tragic atmosphere investing him with a halo of glory, in the actual, equaling that with which sacred history adorns its martyrs and militant heroes, since the days of Charlemagne and the Crusaders. Oh, for the photo color film then!"
Burke befriended newspaper editors everywhere, regaled them with western stories both apocryphal and apothegmatic, exaggerated or invented tales of Cody's (and his own) legendary career, mastered the use of photography and lithography with iconic images he plucked from the West, aggrandized Cody's heroic deeds, kept them in front of the public, and in so doing generated a blizzard of advance publicity for the Wild West everywhere it traveled, year after year. "Even when editors doubted his embellished tales of Cody's heroism, they printed them," wrote historian Scott Cutlip. As a result, Burke kept the crowds coming and made what he called the "mimic arena" into one of the most popular attractions of the era, one that toured small towns and large cities for more than three decades and played in front of most of the crowned heads of Europe and military and entertainment heroes of the day.
Thus, Burke may not have invented Buffalo Bill, the Wild West, or the modern concept of celebrity; he just buffed them to a blinding sheen. And he did all of this in an era when the functions of "promotion" and "marketing" were so new, so undeveloped, that they hadn't even entered the lexicon, let alone the public consciousness. There truly was no marketing industry yet and wouldn't be for another two or three decades. Yet without broadcast technology, without mass media, without any obvious means for large-scale promotion, Burke somehow built William F. Cody into the nation's first great marketing pitchman.
Burke was an easterner who adopted the look and outlook of a pioneer, complete with flowing locks, sombrero, and boots. He had followed Cody all over the world (or more properly, Cody had followed him, since Burke was the advance agent for the Wild West, traveling ahead of the show by a week or two) — even to Wyoming's Big Horn Basin, where, close to Cody's once-chosen burial place of Cedar Mountain, Burke found one of his own. In an article in the New York Times in May 1902, Burke described a giant spur of McCullough Peak, officially designated on maps as Burke's Bluff, Wyoming, fifteen thousand feet up. "I will have it all to myself," Burke told the reporter. "My solitary tomb up among the clouds will dominate the finest valley on God's footstool. I will be lonelier but safer there than in any cemetery, and I will have only the stars and the eagles for companions." Burke informed another reporter that he had even changed his life insurance policy to ensure that his wishes to be buried in the Big Horn Basin were carried out.
Burke died on April 12, 1917, just ninety-two days after Cody — of, as some historians later speculated, a broken heart.
But for all his grandiose plans, Burke did not end up in a tomb among the clouds, or anywhere near Cody or the stars or the eagles, for that matter. He was buried 2,001 miles away from McCullough Peak, Wyoming, and 1,684 miles away from Lookout Mountain, Colorado, in an unmarked grave in Mount Olivet Cemetery, on the somewhat gritty northeast side of Washington, D.C. Burke's plot is in section 53, home to 1,400 gravesites (and as many as 2,800 graves, since interment often happened in double-decker fashion) in an eighty-six-acre cemetery, which is shoehorned into a neighborhood now surrounded by auto body shops, cab dispatchers, public storage units, craft breweries, Gallaudet University, and the city's Department of Public Works Fleet Management yards. It was an unfitting end to a man who idolized Cody, shadowed and protected Cody, loved the West, lived the West, and more than almost any other person of his era, understood the marketing power of symbols and images.
* * *
Like many red-blooded American boys growing up in the second half of the twentieth century, Jim Fuqua had a certain fascination with the Old West.
Born in 1948 and raised in Delaware, he was far removed from the substance of the actual West. But this was literally prime time for the mythic West, with television shows such as Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Have Gun — Will Travel, The Lone Ranger, Death Valley Days, Sky King, Wagon Train, Maverick, Rawhide, and The Rifleman. They were accompanied by a flood of Hollywood westerns (on average, one was released every single week of the 1950s), various other productions of Broadway (Annie Get Your Gun, Oklahoma!) and Madison Avenue (the Marlboro Man), and a boom in what historian Robert Athearn called the "hardiest weed that ever grew on the literary landscape" — western paperbacks, with some 35 million copies sold each year. Fuqua, with his cowboy hat and Mattel Fanner 50 cap pistol (complete with real leather junior holster!), would often go off to play a sort of faux western ring-a-levio in the woods near his home in the new tract housing suburb of Elsmere, south of Wilmington.
Indeed, inculcated with a heavy dose of gunslingers and pioneers, many boys of Fuqua's generation routinely invoked the legends of Daniel Boone, Wyatt Earp, George Armstrong Custer, Sitting Bull, and Billy the Kid. They also had some awareness of the name Buffalo Bill, a man connected with a vague notion of western heroism but whose actual achievements were lesser known.
"Yeah, I knew who Buffalo Bill was," recalls Fuqua with a laugh. "He was the famous Western guy. He did a lot of stuff."
An image was there — a long-haired, rifle-toting, white-hatted "good guy" Indian fighter — though specifics were badly lacking. Was he a figure from history or a character from a book? Was he the same as Wild Bill? Buffalo Bill Cody had simply become part of an inherited body of knowledge, the stories, myths, and legends that had seeped into the consciousness of children, especially boys, for many generations — and that was sufficient to elevate him into the tabernacle of Jim Fuqua's childhood heroes. The real Buffalo Bill had died when Jim's father was just a small boy himself, but the mythical one lived on, in the collective consciousness as well as in literature and celluloid.
Yet unlike his cowboys-and-Indians playmates, who on any given Saturday in 1959 might have headed to the bijou theater in Wilmington to see the double feature of Good Day for a Hanging and Rio Bravo, Jim Fuqua had a special interest in Buffalo Bill. That's because on Sundays, when his aunts and uncles would often come over for dinner, he listened intently to their stories about their mother, Katie Burke, who had died in 1918 at the age of forty-eight, and about her father, Thomas A. Burke, brother of John M. Burke, the man the newspapers had called "Buffalo Bill's Bosom Friend." Someone in the family had clipped a 1946 article from the Reader's Digest about Burke and Cody ("How the power of publicity turned a simple prairie scout into an immortal symbol of our western frontier"), and other scattered pieces of Burke memorabilia in the Fuqua household tied them back to the days of the Wild West — an old photograph, a baptismal certificate, a piece of embroidery dated 1914. It wasn't much, but when you are a boy, any connection to a legend like Buffalo Bill Cody, however tenuous, is to be treasured.
What Fuqua did not know was that his great-granduncle had already been measured by several historians and for the most part found wanting — an oversight that has continued to the present day. Some of Cody's biographers have dismissed Burke as a Barnumesque charlatan, a master snake oil salesman and self-promoter who never saw a sentence he couldn't butcher. Others saw him as a somewhat more important figure, a shaper of Cody's legacy and one of the pillars of the Wild West's long and successful run. Either way, to the extent that Burke appeared at all, it was usually just a historical footnote to Cody, and never in any serious studies of the history of marketing. He was depicted in the 1976 Robert Altman movie Buffalo Bill and the Indians, starring Paul Newman as Cody, but Kevin McCarthy's Burke came off as a fat blowhard in a fur coat. Introducing a singer to Cody, McCarthy/Burke proclaims, "Bill, Buffalo Bill, Monarch of the West, it delights me to present this compellingly cornucopious canary, this curvaceous cadenza in the compendium of classical soupçon. This collagen of champagne and columbine. This cultivated coloratura of Colorado. Words fail me. Lucille DuCharme." That was McCarthy/Burke's only major line in the film.
But what the historians heretofore have missed is the profound role Burke played not just in establishing the legend of Buffalo Bill and promoting the Wild West, but in laying the very cornerstones of the marketing industry itself. He had an innate talent for communications and a remarkably sophisticated grasp of how imagery and celebrity could (and would) be used for persuasion, especially when linked to the allegorical American West. He understood what kinds of messages resonated emotionally with consumers, and how to use the press to convey them. He also had an almost preternatural sense of history — predicting, among other things, that the volatile Alsace-Lorraine region of Europe would become the seat of world war, and even anticipating that the day would come when the United States would elect a member of the minority as president. Little wonder, then, that he was so far ahead of everyone else in anticipating the power of marketing.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Series Editors' Preface ix
Author's Note xi
1 Burying a Legend 3
2 The Big Tent of P. T. Barnum and Tody Hamilton 11
3 Boom or Boost: Promoting the West 47
4 The Hero Cody and the Mythmaker Burke 66
5 The Newsmaker, Moses P. Handy 96
6 Birth and Growth of the Wild West 139
7 Evolution of a Marketing Virtuoso 172
8 The Battle for the World's Fair 198
9 The Department of Publicity and Promotion 216
10 1893 252
11 Denouement 283
12 Legacies 329
Epilogue 341
Notes 343
Bibliography 373
Acknowledgments 381
Index 383