Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill
Richard White
Americans have never had much use for history, but we do like anniversaries. In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner,
who would become the most eminent historian of his generation, was in Chicago to deliver an academic paper at the
historical congress convened in conjunction with the Columbian Exposition. The occasion for the exposition was a
slightly belated celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Western Hemisphere.
The paper Turner presented was "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." 1
Although public anniversaries often have educational pretensions, they are primarily popular entertainments; it is
the combination of the popular and the educational that makes the figurative meeting of Buffalo Bill and Turner at
the Columbian Exposition so suggestive. Chicago celebrated its own progress from frontier beginnings. While
Turner gave his academic talk on the frontier, Buffalo Bill played, twice a day, "every day, rain or shine," at "63rd
St—Opposite the World's Fair," before a covered grandstand that could hold eighteen thousand people.2 Turner was
an educator, an academic, but he had also achieved great popular success because of his mastery of popular frontier
iconography. Buffalo Bill was a showman (though he never referred to his Wild West as a show) with educational
pretensions. Characteristically, his program in 1893 bore the title Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough
Riders of the World (Figure 1).3 In one of the numerous endorsements reproduced in the program, a well-known
midwestern journalist, Brick Pomeroy, proclaimed the exhibition a ''Wild West Reality . . . a correct representation
of life on the plains . . . brought to the East for the inspection and education of the public.''4
Although Turner, along with the other historians, was invited, he did not attend the Wild West; nor was Buffalo Bill
in the audience for Turner's...