The French president and his wife were among the audience of thousands at the debut performance of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair.

Cody’s raucous tribute to the golden age of the American West has already caused a sensation in the United States. By 1887, the show had taken the UK by storm. But the French weren’t quite sure what to make of the Lakota Sioux warriors and lanky cowboys who came screaming into the open-air arena, spurring their horses to fire lightning bolts. Even one of the show’s most popular acts, the rescue of a stagecoach ambushed by Native Americans, left them cold.

Annie Oakley then jumped into the arena and launched into her act, her weapons breaking a flock of glass balls thrown into the air. When he ran out of bullets, he threw down his pistols like hot irons and grabbed another. The audience came to life with a roar.

Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show was “a great success in every way,” declared the newspaper’s front page. Herald of Paris the next day. Within weeks, the French capital had been infected by “Wild West Fever.”

Annie Oakley 1894 filmed by Thomas Edison

In 1894, Thomas Edison filmed Annie Oakley showing off her shooting skills. Video: Annie Oakley 1894 Filmed by Thomas Edison, silent film

The “wild Indian” turned into a French celebrity

By the late 1880s, a deep nostalgia for an American West full of “savage Indians” and “noble pioneers”—a place that, by then, existed only in memory because of the U.S. federal government’s brutal policies against Native Americans—had settled into the American consciousness.

Europeans were also intrigued by the idea of ​​the vast plains and their “primitive Indians.” Indigenous peoples had been displayed in Paris for decades, sometimes as performers on stage, other times as temporary residents of “living habitats” in the city’s zoological gardens. That same year, about 400 indigenous people from the French colonies lived in the main fairgrounds. Early anthropologists, supporters of social Darwinism, the ideology that all human groups occupied a rung on the evolutionary ladder between savagery and enlightened civilization, studied them as specimens in the science of race.

Parisians “had heard of the [American] Indians, but the Wild West show was his first exposure,” says Steve Friesen, former director of the Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave in Golden, Colorado, and author of Gourmet on the gallop: eat and drink with Buffalo Bill. “They saw the reality and were impressed.”

In fact, it wasn’t long before young Parisian women began flocking to the Wild West Show’s “Indian Camp” (the area where the artists lived and which was open to the public). Dozens of people waited, ready to push aside each other to offer cigarettes and shy smiles to the handsome young Sioux warriors. Men were also hanging around the place, intrigued by the expert horsemen and snipers. American and Mexican-style cowboy hats and saddles flew off the shelves of merchants capitalizing on the trend.

The popcorn sold at the fair, unknown to the French, became so popular that it could soon be found in other entertainment venues in the city. In October, five months after Cody’s company debuted, “it was said that the people of Paris seem to go to the [any] theater just to eat popcorn,” laughs Friesen.

Buffalo Bill Cody (Guillaume Buffalo to the French) was the ideal ambassador of the legend of the American West. Back in his own country, he was already a huge celebrity: a true cavalryman, explorer, who claimed to have traveled on the Pony Express, as well as a stage actor known for his charisma and good looks.

He soon “became one of the darlings of Paris,” says Friesen. “Everyone wanted to meet him.” He, along with several of the Native American artists and cowboys, were often seen around the city, in theaters and on the grounds of the World’s Fair, even climbing the Eiffel Tower, which was built for the event.

Buffalo Bills Wild West Show 1908 Original Images

This 1908 footage shows Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show that took Paris by storm in the late 19th century. Video: Original images of the Buffalo Bills Wild West Show 1908, Movies

For six months, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show played twice a day to a packed stadium of 30,000 people that, despite being some distance from the center of the World’s Fair grounds, sometimes overshadowed the main event. No one in the city could get enough, including some of Europe’s most famous artists.

“Paul Gauguin went to the show once,” Friesen says. “He liked it so much that he went a second time and then went out and bought a Stetson hat. In the Orsay Museum, in a self-portrait he made in Tahiti, he wears a very similar hat.”

Edvard Munch visited; French painter Rosa Bonheur was a regular presence at Indian Camp and captured the artists on canvas. It was also in Paris that Cody met Thomas Edison, who was at the fair to demonstrate new electrical technologies. A few years later, he put the showman and his Lakota performers in one of the world’s first films.

The Wild West is still alive in Paris

“Buffalo Bill was basically the first emissary of the American West to France, and he told people what the West was like,” Friesen says. The call was anything but fleeting. When the company returned for a six-month tour of the country in 1905, it reignited the “Wild West fever” that had swept Paris 16 years earlier.

Today, the impact of that “fascination with the American West is certainly still felt in a broader sense,” he continues.

According to Friesen, the trend of women wearing cowboy hats with skirts, Annie Oakley’s signature style, probably began with the Wild West Show. The type of “western” stores that cashed in on this trend back in 1889 are still found in the city and beyond. There’s even a French steakhouse chain called Buffalo Grill that features a portrait of Buffalo Bill in its logo.

While the French were skeptical when Disneyland Paris opened in the early 1990s, one thing at Disney Village was “making very good profits,” Friesen says: its imitation of the Wild West Show.

“It had room for 2,000 people, twice a day, who would come in and eat American food: cornbread, steak, things like that. Everyone got a straw cowboy hat and watched a Buffalo Bill-type performance,” Friesen says.

“The popularity and name recognition of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show had enough of an impact that it continued into the 2000s.”

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