The Foreign Service Journal, June 2018

84 JUNE 2018 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL explore Cody’s impact. With more than 100 pages of color photographs, Lakota Performers in Europe tells the story of how 157 Lakota (Sioux) artifacts found a home in a private Belgian col- lection, most of them purchases or gifts from 15 Lakotas who performed at the 1935 Brussels International Exposition. The original collector meticulously annotated the provenance of each arti- fact, and the present owner, co-author François Chladiuk, spent years finding photos and ephemera from the exposi- tion, and from earlier Lakota European tours, to link the artifacts to the families who wore them. Two generations of Lakotas, like many other Americans before and since, found in Europe popular acclaim, economic opportunity and a new perspective on the United States by seeing their country through European eyes. Their Brussels appearance came 18 years after Cody’s death and was not associated with his original Wild West exhibition, but many of the Lakota performers had been. “Men like Stab- ber, Lone Bear and Black Horn, at one time the youngest to have lived that [performance] life, were now old. Their departure from Europe at the end of 1935 marked the end of the Wild West as a living reality for the people of Europe,” Friesen and Chladiuk write. “Lone Bear, with his understanding of European ways and his facility with lan- Telling America’s Story: Before USIA, There Was Buffalo Bill Lakota Performers in Europe: Their Culture and the Artifacts They Left Behind Steve Friesen with François Chladiuk, University of Oklahoma Press, 2017, $39.95/hardcover; $34.95/Kindle, 276 pages. The Popular Frontier: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Transnational Mass Culture Frank Christianson, editor, University of Oklahoma Press, 2017, $32.95/hardcover; $26.95/Kindle, 264 pages. Reviewed By Edwina S. Campbell For 46 years, the U.S. Information Agen- cy’s mission was to “tell America’s story to the world,” and American diplomats in Europe were doing that long before USIA was established in 1953. Still, it was not from diplomats, but from a variety of Americans who crossed their path that many Europeans formed their expecta- tions of the United States. The American with the most endur- ing impact on those expectations was perhaps William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, whose Wild West show visited Europe on three extensive tours in 1887-1888, 1889- 1892 and 1902-1906. Over nearly two decades, Cody made a lasting impression on his audiences, from Britain (Queen Victoria’s 1887 Golden Jubilee) to France (the 1889 centennial of the French Revolution) and Spain, Italy and the eastern reaches of the Hapsburg empire. Two new books in the Buffalo Bill Center of the West’s series on the “His- tory and Culture of the American West” BOOKS guages like French and German, was a part of that change. The 1935 Indian village with its dances and feats of skill heralded the rise of rodeos and powwows as new presentations of culture rather than of conflict. This shift would be final- ized by the advent of World War II, which brought sweeping changes to both the United States and Europe.” In Cody’s heyday a half-century earlier, there had been equally sweeping economic, political and cultural changes. The Popular Frontier, edited by Frank Christianson, explores the ways in which the content and logistics of the Wild West evolved in response to the shifting global political order. This included the United States’ conquest of overseas territories and the revolution in connectivity and mobility led by telegraphy, steam power, newspapers and spreading literacy. The American story Cody told in his final European tour, during which Japan defeated Russia in the Far East and the United States brokered the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth, was both similar to and a radical departure from the one recounted in 1887, when Britain’s flirtation with the Confederacy was recent history. If the Wild West show had never left the United States, “the Buffalo Bill phe- nomenon” would still have “exemplified a culture of mass spectacle ... dramatiz- ing an image of the Western frontier just as Americans experienced a growing nostalgia for this mythic place and time.” But after “the first visit to England, the exhibition would be forever defined, in large measure, by its internationalism.” Two generations of Lakotas, like many other Americans before and since, found in Europe popular acclaim, economic opportunity and a new perspective on the United States.