Buffalo Bill Lithographs

I promised some posts about my trip to Denver, so here goes.

One of the first places my hosts took us was up the winding road on Lookout Mountain, which is west of Golden (which is west of Denver). It's home to the grave of Buffalo Bill. 

I learned in the small museum there that William Cody (Buffalo Bill's name) had very little role in wiping out the North American buffalo, despite his nickname, though he did hunt the animals for a brief time in his early work life. He was a showman who took advantage of that part of his reputation.

"Buffalo Bill's Wild West" show dates from 1883 — nearly 20 years after the Civil War, when the West had been fairly settled. Its heyday was during its first 10 years, though it existed until 1913. It toured Europe eight times. Annie Oakley was part of the show for 16 of its years.

A major thing I was interested to see was how the museum represented the role of Indigenous people in the show. Sitting Bull, contrary to my recollection, was only involved for a brief period and rode out only in a dignified way during the procession part of the show. Many other members of Indigenous tribes participated for years and were more involved in the performances of staged "reenactments." 

The museum's displays explain that the people had mixed feelings about this. The show provided some of the best jobs available to them at the time. People like Iron Tail became famous from their participation. They lived within a positive community with all the other people involved in the show. But at the same time, they knew they were being portrayed as savages to the show's audiences, rather than as people defending their land and way of life.

As with my experience in most museums, I could only tolerate so much reading, and I wasn't taking notes. Plus, I forgot my phone on this part of the trip, so I was at the mercy of my fellow visitors to take photos for me. So my analysis is lacking, but I think this gets at least part of the idea across of how the museum portrays things. There are probably books written about this subject that are more critical.

Visually, what caught my attention the most in the museum was its collection of promotional lithographic posters from Buffalo Bill's Wild West. 

Lithography is a crazy process involving drawing backwards with a grease pencil on polished stones. For multicolor printing, each color is drawn separately on a different stone, and when creating a large poster, multiple sheets of paper are needed (and multiple stones). To print the stones after drawing, the stone is treated with acid and gum arabic, which makes the ungreased areas hydrophilic (water-loving). Water is then applied, followed by greasy ink. When paper is pressed to the stone, the inked areas transfer and the watered areas do not.

Remember, the drawing was backwards or wrong-reading, so the final print is right-reading. For multiple colors, there also has to be a process of registering the stones and paper each to the other so that the overlaid colors of ink are aligned. The inks are transparent, so blue overlaid on yellow becomes green, blue on magenta becomes purple, and so on.

With all of that said… appreciate these posters! (I apologize for the glints of light off of the plexiglass covers.) As always, click on any image to see it larger.

First, this one-sheet of William Cody:

Tall, vertical posters like this adorn the entry hallway of the museum. It's probably 3 feet by 8'. There's a poster in this format portraying one of a dozen or so different people from the show. 

This giant square poster is behind the check-in desk. I think it's a three-sheet (something like 9 feet wide by 8 or 9 feet tall).

This close-up of the bottom right of the huge square poster shows the level of detail, as well as who printed the poster:

The Enquirer collection, from Cincinnati, is now held at the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. I don't think the collection includes lithographic stones like these; that would be a lot of weight.

In the hall heading toward the restrooms is this gigantic horizontal poster for a combined Ringling Brothers circus and Wild West Show. It's probably 20 feet long by 8 or 9 feet tall. The hall wasn't wide enough to back up enough to get the whole poster in:

A couple of details, including an Indigenous woman shooting: 

The texture in the background is so interesting to me. Because my knowledge of lithography is second-hand, I don't know how it is accomplished:

 

This poster was created by Erie Lithographing & Printing Company in Erie, Pennsylvania:

The rest of the museum is full of large one-sheets of various characters from the show and posters used to promote it. 

There are probably at least 50 of them, maybe more.