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The Chicago Times July 9"

BUFFALO BILL'S CAMP.

Behind the Rockey Mountains at the Wild
West Show.

Nobody can say that he has seen the Wild
West properly and fully who has not spent
an hour or two in the camp, where Indians,
cowboys, Cossacks, Germans, French, Mexicans,
and English eat, drink, and sleep together
harmoniously cheek by jowl. The
grove of trees in which the camp is pitched
makes the place quite picturesque. Every
nationality has sometbing distinctive
about its quarters. The tepees of the
Indians are ornamented with rude native
paintings of animals put men;
around the tents of the Frenchmen are green
wooden trellises, forming an arbor-like porch
to the neat canvas home; an attempt at a
garden here and there marks the instinctive
love for flowers in some cavalier from the
Rhineland or trooper from the country lanes
of Devon or Surrey, and everywhere
throughout the streets of the camp order
and tidiness reign; there is no litter of waste
paper or fringe of tomato cans near the
tents; the stables are clean and airy and the
horses look as contented and well fed as the
men, and that's saying a good deal.

It has always been a strong point with Col.
Cody to give his men lots of grub, and the
silliest lie that was ever told about the Wild
West was that the Indians were not properly
fed. One has but to look at the big blanketed
braves striding about the camp to know
that they get good food and lots of it. It
will put an edge upon your appetite to see
the four, or five cooks preparing dinner,
slapping huge steaks into the pan, as they
come fro the butcher who wields his
cleaver inside a fly-tight wire cage just outside
the kitchen. When you've seen the
show you'll understand what an appetite a
cowboy has a right to have after his work.
The bill of fare changes every day, but Sundays
chickens are always the crowning dish
at dinner. Over 400 fowls lose their heads
to make a rough riders' feast once a week.
In fact the commissariat department big
feature of the show, though few see much of
it. It is practically a full regiment of cavalry
that has to be cared for.

Maj. Burke says that the different races in
bis big family never quarrel. The Indians
and the cowboys are studiously polite to each
other; Frenchman salutes German as a
brother in arms, and the Britisher never
thinks of singing "We don't want to fight,
but, by Jingo, if we do!" when his hereditary
foe, the Cossack, is passing by. It might be
said of the encampment that the lion and the
lamb lie down there together, if to any member
of the Wild West aggregation could be
ascribed the mild attributes of a juvenile
sheep. It is the more remarkable that so
many men, ail feræ nature, but of different
races, get along so well together.

All the fighting that is done is among men
of the same nationality. Of course there
are quarrels, but rarely serious ones: The
Indians have their own police officers, elected
by themselves, and they, backed up invariably
by the best and also strongest element
among the Sioux, have no difficulty in
squelching any warrior who comes home
with a superfluity of firewater aboard.
When an Indian leaves the camp for an excursion
of any sort he deposits with the Indian
policeman at the gate a leather check,
and he has to pass inspection by this official
when he returns before he can obtain again
the check, which entitles him to his place in
the Wild West's ranks. In this way an Indian
who gets tanked up down town and
comes back to camp looking for trouble can
be side-tracked into the caboose till his amiability
is fully restored.

The Wild West has some of the appointments
of a good-sized town. Its electric
lighting apparatus is quite large enough to
illuminate the average town of 10,000 inhabitants.
The engines are of 250-horse
power, and a double equipment of dynamos
insures perfect service. The other night, for
instance, the belt connecting one of the
dynamos slipped and the lights went out.
There was darkness for a minute or two in
the immense arena, relieved by the prompt
playing of "Where Was Moses When the
Light Went Out?" and then the other dynamo
set a new current in motion, and the
200-odd lights, representing something like
50,000-candle power, blazed out again.

No one in the camp allowed to drink
lake water, a supply of Waukesha being had
from mains specially laid. All these things
cost money, and one need not be much of an
arithmetician to figure out that 400 men and
as many horses, camped on ground which,
from its location between the 1llinois Central
and the fair itself, is the most expensive
site of its size near Chicago, must cost a big

(DRAWINGS)
RIDING A "BUCKER", A COSSACK RIDER, THE ORIGINAL SKIRT DANCER

pile of money to keep going, to say nothing
of the original cost of building a stand seating
16,000 people without crowding and
the vast sums spent on advertising, as the
Wild West management believes in doing.
For all that the Wild West is making more
money than any other out-of-door show ever
made in this country, and Maj. Burke takes
particular delight in pointing out a brand-
new steel safe which they had to put in the
other day to accommodate the stream of currency
which kept flowing into portly Jule
Keen's treasury tent.

"Do Indians really wear clothes like
those?" asked a Tady at Buffalo Bill's Wild
West the other day. The gentleman of
whom she asked the question was somewhat
at a loss bow to answer, for he had just
made out to his own satisfaction that the
nearest Indian in the arena bad on a complete
coat of blue paint and nothing else to
speak of. But he answered like a hero:
"Yes. dear, more or less."

Half the people who see the Wild West get
the impression that the Indians are clad in
skin-fitting tights. Perhaps it is unkind to