277
Facsimile
Transcription
BILL NYE AND THE COWBOYS.
Why He Apprehends an Incursion of Old World Amateurs.
The Effect of the Buffalo Bill Show on the European Youth--What We May Except When B.B. Reopens the Roman Coliseum--The Real and the Ideal Cowby Contrasted--Last of the Red Man.
The cable news from London would seem to indicate that the coming year will witness a large hegira of armed goslings from England who intend to prosecute the cow gentleman and Deadwood stage-robbing business on our frontier. It is perhaps unnecessary to state that Buffalo William, the graceful and courteous hirsute wonder from Nebraska, is largely responsible for this. Wherevery he has gone with his eccentric, dark-red, self-made Indians and his speckled broncos he has sown the seeds of discontent in the grammar schools and bred open rebellion and mutiny in the primary department.
Look along the red-hot trail of B. William and you find the American and foreign youth turning with undisguised loathing from his education pursuits to immerse his legs in a pair of chaperajos, to wield the brief but stinging quert, to whoop up the red-eyed, haughty and high-tailed Texan Maverick, or shoot large, irregular holes into the otherwise poorly ventilated savage.
And what is to be the result of all this? I do not ask it in a light or [fl.ppant?] manner, but in a tone of deepest solicitude.
Buffalo Bill is encircling the earth with his Wild West show. Everywhere the fever follows his performances. Wherever he goes high-heeled boots, lar.ats, tarantula juice and hair rise to a ficticious value. Boys leave the farm to follow the show away. Picnics lose their flavor and seem flat. Climbing a shag-bark tree to fasten a swing does not seem so daring a feat as it used to. The custard pie vainly beckous to the young man who is near-sighted and who wears lavender pantaloons to come and sit on it. In the rural districts the watermelon ripens and goes to decay, and pretty larceny everywhere seems tame, dull and flabby. No one wants to steal wealth unless it has gore and hair on it. Dollars or watermelons that can be taken without walking over a coruroy road of dead bodies seem hardly worth taking.
Already the tide of young and fuzzy cowboys has set in from the mother country and an extra detective and police force haunt the wharf at Liverpool to prevent the exodus to leggy and pimply young patriots who desire to roll up their trousers and wade in the hot, fresh blood of our rapidly disapearing red men. Already every steamer that ploughs the wide waste of booming moisture which separates us from the home of the patients yacht builder, brings from one to several aspiring young gentlement in flannel shirts who pany to imbrue their hands in the blood of Old Git-Up-and-Sit-Down.
And so it is likely to continue while Mr. Bill is on his wild, whooping, shrieking and Coliseum storming career. After a while it will not be the British Isles alone that will contribute to our languishing frontier cemeteries, but, saturated with a wild desire to snort across the American plains and provide themselves with Indian Pocahontases, the youth of all lands and all [cl mes?] will buy wide, white, soft hats, fur pantaloons, with lambrequins down the sides; the lwow, gruff-voiced American revolver, with the dry, backing cough; the noisy and voluminous Mexican sprut and the foundered mustang, with one white eye and the gift of appearing to go like a cyclone, while really making mighty poor time. Then they will invade our Western borders and there will not be an Indian apiece for them by next spring.
Already there are not stages enough to rob unless the mall service should be expedited this winter, and unless we can work in the Tantivy or have an occasional attack on our fox-hunters by the Anglo and Clyde built cowboys, any one can see that we are going to run short of out-door sports.
I do not wish to be considered an alarmist, but unless we bring in our Indians at night the cowboys of Great Britian and of Frnace will sweep our great West, and together with the road agent from Rome, the pilgrim from Palestine and the tenderfoot from Turkey, they will wipe out our pigeon-toed [Putes?], our cute little Crows, our low-browed Digger Indians before snow flies next year.
Gentle reader, we stand upon the crumbling brink of a great cowboy eruption from England, Ireland, Scotland, the Continent and the great Orient itself. I do not think that Buffalo Bill had any idea when he started in to rehearse his great society drama and horse play that it would so soon
Notes and Questions
Nobody has written a note for this page yet
Please sign in to write a note for this page
