Pawnee Bill brought Wild West to Bangor

Maine’s young men and women didn’t need Horace Greeley to tell them to go West. The state’s brain drain had begun long before the Civil War as thousands headed for Kansas, Texas, California and other destinations to seek their fortunes.

By the beginning of the 20th century, newspaper stories about Maine men who had struck it rich in the West’s feverish economy were common. Most families had an uncle or a cousin who had joined this gold rush or that land boom.

More than a few Mainers making a threadbare living from the land or the sea felt like they had been left behind. A temporary antidote for this condition was to attend one of the Wild West shows that occasionally found their way to Bangor. A sure bet on July 1, 1904, was the arrival of Pawnee Bill’s Historic Wild West and Great Far East Ethnological Congress, the largest show of its type then operating in America “now that Buffalo Bill is in Europe,” according to the Bangor Daily News. Maybe you missed out on going West, but Pawnee Bill would bring his dime-novel version to you on 23 railroad cars.

Gordon William Lillie, alias Pawnee Bill, in many ways embodied the dreams of those disappointed thousands of young men and boys who had stayed home. Born in Illinois, he moved to Kansas with his family as a teenager, and then struck out on his own at age 15 aiming to become a cowboy. He later claimed to have killed a man in a gunfight in Wichita and to have helped lynch a cattle thief, and at 18 he was declared “White Chief of the Pawnees,” and so on.

“What seems more certain is that young Lillie lived on the Pawnee reservation in Indian Territory, became fluent in the Pawnee language, and worked as an interpreter and teacher at the Pawnee Agency Indian school,” according to the Encyclopedia of American History.

In 1883, he was hired by Buffalo Bill as an interpreter for the Pawnee performers in his Wild West show. Five years later, Lillie started his own show, and along with the other Bill, was instrumental in helping invent the romantic myth of the Wild West.

Part circus and part traveling theme park, anthropological museum and zoo, Pawnee Bill’s show began with a mile-long parade featuring four bands and a huge steam calliope. It moved toward downtown on Summer Street through Haymarket Square to West Market Square, and then up Main Street to the Bangor House and on to Maplewood Park (now Bass Park) where canopies that could shelter 10,000 people from the rain had been erected.

The first part of the parade, the Wild West component, was led by Bill and his wife, May Manning Lillie, a Smith College graduate and Philadelphia socialite whose sharpshooting on horseback were almost as legendary as Annie Oakley’s. Close behind them was Lillian Smith, alias “Princess Winona, the Indian Girl Shot,” another famous female marksman.

Besides the celebrities, the parade included delegations of “Indian squaws and papooses,” Mexicans, cowgirls and cowboys, Cheyenne and Sioux Indians, Jubilee singers on tableaux wagons, prairie schooners, U. S. Cavalry and artillery detachments and a host of other attractions. The wagons were up to their shiny hubs in the mud thanks to the rain that day, the reporter pointed out.

The Far East or second section of the parade included an Arabian band, Arab horsemen, Russian Cossacks, South Sea Islanders, Singhalese with camels, Japanese and Chinese cavalry contingents, boomerang throwers, Filipinos and others. America’s recent engagement in the Philippines and the Russo-Japanese war, which also involved China, doubtlessly influenced many of the choices and fascinated onlookers who had only read of such people in the newspapers.

Wild West shows predictably featured stagecoach attacks, Pony Express escapes, Indian battles and other stereotyped events with the Indians taking the role of the dime-novel villains they so abhor today. Assuming the readers were already familiar with such antics, the reviewer for the Bangor Daily News tried to sum up what Pawnee Bill had to offer that was different.

“In addition there was an abundance of novelty, together with a military spectacle so up-to-date that it included an entire scene from the Russo-Japanese war. Artillery evolutions by the ex-United States soldiers … balancing and juggling acts by Japanese and Arabian athletes, and the daredevil riding of the Cossack cavalry, were doubtless the most artistic, as well as the most entertaining features of the long and varied program. The military spectacles were both impressive and spectacular, and the rifle shooting of Winona, a full-blooded Indian girl, was a marvel of nerve and power and well-nigh perfect skill,” he wrote.

The two Bills – Pawnee and Buffalo – teamed up in 1909, but the show went broke four years later and Pawnee Bill retired to his ranch in Oklahoma, where he worked to save the buffalo from extinction. Both Bills appeared as characters in dime novels and in the movies that were contributing to the demise of the Wild West shows.

As a final note, it is interesting to speculate to what extent Maine’s Native Americans worked in such shows. I found a story from April 4, 1904, in the Bangor Daily News announcing an eight-member Passamaquoddy band from Pleasant Point had left to play for six months at the St. Louis World’s Fair. The members were Peter Mitchell, cornet; Soctoma Sabattis, trombone; Stephen Noel, baritone; Joe Mitchell and Joe W. Dana, altos; Peter Frances, tenor drum; Peter Neptune, bass drum; and Alexis Sopiel, cymbals.

It said, “Nearly all the players have been about the country at different times with shows and circuses and were engaged at the World’s Fair, the Buffalo Exposition, also at Coney Island.”

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.