In his memoirs, my father, Terence Gallacher, recalled an unexpected story about his father, Patrick Joseph Gallacher:
“Much to the surprise of his family, Patrick said that he had seen Buffalo Bill and his great show. This would have been during 1891 or 1892 when the show visited Glasgow. The show had come to London first in 1887 as part of the celebration of the Jubilee of Queen Victoria.”
Patrick Joseph Gallacher was born in Parkhead in 1881. If his memory was correct, he would have been around ten years old when Buffalo Bill’s Wild West came to Glasgow.
The exhibition was held at the East End Exhibition Buildings in Duke Street, Dennistoun, from 16 November 1891 until 27 February 1892. The Gallacher family home in Westmuir Street was only around a mile and a half away, making it entirely possible that the young Patrick was among the hundreds of thousands who attended.
The scale of the production was remarkable. The exhibition buildings had to be adapted to accommodate the show and could seat more than 7,000 spectators. During its three-month run, over half a million people are said to have passed through its doors.
Newspaper advertisements promised an extraordinary spectacle:
“250 Indians, cowboys, scouts, hunters, marksmen and women, frontier girls, Mexicans; 175 animals, horses, Indian ponies, wild bucking bronchos, mustangs, a herd of buffalo, wild steers and deer.”
For many Glaswegians, it would have been their first glimpse of the American West, albeit one carefully staged for public entertainment.
The star attraction was, of course, William F. Cody, better known throughout the world as Buffalo Bill. However, he was far from the only celebrity performer. Among those appearing was Annie Oakley, the famous sharpshooter known as “Little Sure Shot”, described in the programme as:
“Miss Annie Oakley, famous shot, in feats of skill with rifle and shot gun.”
Oakley’s performances had become legendary. Contemporary reports claimed she could shoot ten glass balls in ten seconds while changing rifles between shots.
Also travelling with the show were a number of Native American performers, including Kicking Bear, Short Bull, One Bull and Charging Thunder. The latter would later settle permanently in Britain.
Buffalo Bill himself proved to be as skilled at publicity as he was at showmanship. Shortly before the Glasgow engagement, on 7 November 1891, he made an unexpected appearance at Ibrox to watch Rangers play Queen’s Park. Arriving in full western costume, he was enthusiastically received by spectators and generated exactly the sort of publicity that accompanied the Wild West show wherever it travelled.
Whether Patrick’s visit to the exhibition kindled a lifelong fascination is impossible to know. Yet my father believed there may have been a connection. He wrote:
“It is possible that his experience gave him a life-long preference for reading ‘Western’ novels in general and those written by Zane Grey in particular.
In Tottenham, in his later years, he would ask Alice to go to the small book library in the Tottenham High Road, to find him a western to read. He had read so many of them that he would make a pencil mark on the first page to let Alice know that he had read that one. Eventually, every western in the library had been read and he was obliged to read some of them for the second time.”
Decades after the Wild West show visited Glasgow, Patrick was still borrowing Western novels from the library in Tottenham High Road and reading them in his spare time, just as my father remembered.
