Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
Featured in More Treasures from American Film Archives, 1894-1931.

Annie Oakley (1894)
Production Co.: Edison Mfg. Co. Director: W.K.L. Dickson. Photographer: William Heise. Cast: Annie Oakley. Transfer Note: Copied at 30 frames per second from a 35mm print preserved by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. New Music: Martin Marks, score and piano. Running Time: 20 seconds.

Buffalo Dance (1894)
Production Co.: Edison Mfg. Co. Director: W.K.L. Dickson. Photographer: William Heise. Cast: Hair Coat, Last Horse, Parts His Hair. Transfer Note: Copied at 18 frames per second from a 35mm print preserved by the Library of Congress (Gordon Hendricks Collection). New Music: Martin Marks, score and piano. Running Time: 15 seconds.

Bucking Broncho (1894)
Production Co.: Edison Mfg. Co. Director: W.K.L. Dickson. Photographer: William Heise. Cast: Lee Martin, Frank Hammitt. Transfer Note: Copied at 30 frames per second from a 35mm print preserved by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. New Music: Martin Marks, score and piano. Running Time: 20 seconds.

Before the invention of movie projection in 1895, films were viewed exclusively through single-person peep-show machines. The Edison Manufacturing Company dominated the field with its electrical- or battery-powered “kinetoscopes,” which initially held a loop of about fifty feet of 35mm film. By the end of 1894, the machines could be found in phonograph parlors, amusement parks, bars, and a handful of new kinetoscope parlors. Customers typically paid for access to a series of machines started up by attendants—initially at the relatively expensive price of twenty-five cents for five machines—on each of which the approximately twenty-second loops could be repeated several times.

To provide films for the new device, W.K.L Dickson added to his duties at Edison a role we would call producer-director. With his cameraman-assistant William Heise, he made around eighty short films in 1894—of female dancers, male boxers, and vaudeville acts especially—almost all of them shot in the company’s single-room studio, known as the “Black Maria,” which could be rotated with the sun to illuminate the acts against its black walls.

Seen here are Wild West show performers, who made several visits that year to the New Jersey studio. All were employed by William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody (1846–1917), the Western scout and hero of dime novels, who had originated a decade earlier the touring cowboy-and-Indian exhibition he titled “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.” Always refusing to add the word “show,” Cody claimed to offer a glimpse of the real West, contained safely within arenas and authenticated by his own presence and those of guest stars, such as the Teton Sioux leader Sitting Bull for a season in 1885. For the 1894 season in Brooklyn, Cody had arranged with Edison to install electric lighting in his arena, and the contact may have led to these films.

Up first—as she usually was in the show itself—is Buffalo Bill’s most famous performer for seventeen years, the markswoman Annie Oakley (born Phoebe Ann Moses), age thirty-four here. After the death of her father, she had learned to shoot in rural Ohio and helped support the family by hunting wild game that she sold to Cincinnati restaurants. She was soon regularly winning contests over celebrated riflemen and at sixteen married one of her defeated opponents, Frank Butler, with whom she performed for the rest of her life. Edison’s studio made for a cramped shooting range and left no space for her famous routine of leaping over a table, grabbing her rifle, and dispatching airborne clay targets. In the confines of the studio, she is not quite the “Little Sure Shot” that Sitting Bull had dubbed her.

As part of its appeal to authenticity, “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” included Native American performers, who by 1894 were participating in the show’s reenactments of the Little Bighorn battle against Custer’s cavalry—a revised history in which Buffalo Bill himself played a hero who takes “the first scalp for Custer.” Buffalo Dance is one of several kinetoscope films featuring Oglala and Brulé Sioux whom Cody brought over from Brooklyn on the Monday morning of September 24, 1894. The next day’s New York Herald reported archly on the scene under the headline RED MEN AGAIN CONQUERED: “A party of Indians in full war paint invaded the Edison laboratory at West Orange yesterday and faced unflinchingly the unerring rapid fire of the kinetograph. It was indeed a memorable engagement, no less so than the battle at Wounded Knee, still fresh in the minds of the warriors. It was probably more effective in demonstrating to the red men the power and supremacy of the white man, for savagery and the most advanced science stood face to face, and there was an absolute triumph for one without the spilling of a single drop of blood.”

To photograph Buffalo Bill’s horsemen the next month, Dickson fenced a portion of the laboratory’s backyard. “The interior of the ‘Maria’ was not large enough to allow any broncho busting,” as the Orange Journal noted with understatement. The paper reported that Colorado cowboy Frank Hammitt was to have been filmed on his horse El Dorado, but “he deemed it not advisable to attempt the act as the place was not large enough, the animal being an extraordinarily dangerous one.” Instead Hammitt can be seen standing on the fence shooting a revolver as Wyoming cowboy Lee Martin rides his horse Sunfish.—Scott Simmon

About the Music
For such short films as these, one does best to play a medley of traditional songs and dances evocative of the old West. So for Annie Oakley I chose “Shoot the Buffalo,” a mid-nineteenth-century song often played at parties to spark playful courting rituals, and for Bucking Broncho I used the well-known cowboy song “The Chisholm Trail.” But for the middle film I adapted an “Indian War Dance” by Walter Cleveland Simon (published in 1923 in Gordon’s Loose Leaf Motion Picture Collection). It is not authentic Native American music, of course, but a popularized version—the sort of thing played throughout the silent period for Indian scenes, just as had been done in the Wild West shows themselves.—Martin Marks

About the Preservation
Annie Oakley and Bucking Broncho came to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences through the generosity of Ray Phillips, who has rebuilt kinetoscopes for museums around the world and is the author of Edison’s Kinetoscope and Its Films (Greenwood Press, 1997). Annie Oakley was copied from a print saved by the Archives du film in Bois d’Arcy, France. Buffalo Dance was preserved by the Library of Congress from among more than 100 early Edison films donated by Gordon Hendricks.

Further Reading and Viewing
Charles Musser provides a full history of early U.S. filmmaking in The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (University of California Press, 1990). On Buffalo Bill’s shows, see Joy Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (Hill and Wang, 2000). More than 340 early Edison films are available for streaming and downloading through the Library of Congress’s American Memory Web site.

About the Archives
Over the years the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has developed an important moving image collection relating to the history of the Hollywood industry and the documentary film. Its 70,000 items include interviews with industry leaders, technical tests and visual effects demonstrations, trailers, outtakes, the International Documentary Association archive, films winning or nominated for Oscars, and the Academy Award shows themselves. The archive has an active preservation program and has restored eight Academy Award–winning Best Pictures, numerous other Academy Award–nominated and –winning films, and a broad selection of avant-garde and documentary films. To accommodate its growing collection, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences renovated a historic building in downtown Hollywood. The storage, exhibition, and research facility opened in 2002. The archive generously contributes technical leadership to special preservation and public access projects, including the NFPF’s Treasures DVD anthologies.

The Library of Congress, the world’s largest library, is the research arm of the United States Congress. Founded in 1800, the Library mapped its course as a premier research institution with the purchase of Thomas Jefferson’s personal library. The collections include more than 29 million books and countless manuscripts, photographs, films, videos, sound recordings, and other materials. The Library is open to the public and welcomes researchers. The Library’s motion picture holdings began in 1893 when Thomas Edison deposited paper copies of his early kinetoscope loops for copyright protection. Today the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division is home to a vast collection of films and television programs. The Library also runs its own film, video, and sound preservation laboratories at the Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Virginia.