At the turn of the twentieth century, America was experiencing something of a national mid-life crisis, and like a suburban dad buying a convertible to make up for a lost sense of cool, coped by investing in something flashy. The 1890 census had declared the American frontier officially closed, and as cities teemed with the country’s largest waves of immigration to date, many Americans worried they could no longer send these unruly others to assimilate out West. Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis popularized the fear that an essential adventurous, democratic, and self-reliant aspect of national character might be lost—not to mention new markets for goods and sources of raw materials.
But Americans disconsolate at the loss of the frontier experience could indulge themselves with romanticized simulacra. The 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, themed for the Louisiana Purchase, provided a particularly potent setting for Wild West shows full of action-packed entertainment and heaping doses of nationalistic fantasy. Americans flocked to staged battles between cowboys and Indians as well as the event’s runaway hit—the first version of the Boer War Spectacle.
Alfred W. Lewis, a Canadian scout who had served on the British in South Africa, grasped both the nation’s fascination with the Boer conflict and the rising popularity of shows featuring idealized violence. He pitched a group of wealthy St. Louis businessmen on organizing some of the conflict’s veterans to play back their most daring exploits, eventually bringing over two hundred Boers, two hundred Brits, and about fifty black Africans. After a summer of smashing success, the show took to the road, touring the South with daily performances through the fall and winter. But interest proved fleeting there, perhaps due to the relative lack of urban immigration or the prevalence of its own Lost Cause mythology. With lackluster audiences, it quickly ran out of money. Its backers were forced to flip the show to a duo who conspired to bring it north: William Brady, a famous New York showman, and Orlando Harriman, the brother of the president of the Union Pacific railroad.
The pair acted quickly, purchasing a swampy stretch next to Coney Island. In just six weeks, they transformed the previously undeveloped expanse into what called itself the largest amusement development in the nation. More than eight hundred laborers constructed a mile-long boardwalk, laid the nation’s longest scenic railroad, refurbished a bathhouse, built 150 concessions plus a racetrack, and of course, created a fourteen-acre battlefield with grandstands seating twenty-eight thousand—almost ten thousand more seats than Madison Square Garden currently holds—complete with a rushing river. The project, including acquiring the land and shipping hundreds more soldiers, weaponry, and “natives” from Africa” cost a reported $2,225,000—around eighty million in today’s dollars.