Buffalo Bill in the Carmargue

Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show was a big hit in Europe. And in the Carmargue region on the south coast of France, it had a special impact on an eccentric aristocrat.

I've spent much of this summer in Europe, but I didn't escape the Southwest. To my surprise, in the south of France I came across that larger-than-life Western figure, Buffalo Bill.

Allegedly it was the author Mark Twain who persuaded Buffalo Bill, whose real name was William F. Cody, to take his famous Wild West Show across the Atlantic to "show them something truly American." They went to England for Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in 1887 and stayed until spring of the following year.

Audiences were enthralled with this spectacle of the western frontier. The cast of characters included Annie Oakley, Sitting Bull, Native Americans, cowboys, outlaws, horses, cattle and even buffaloes. Buffalo Bill and his entourage went back to Europe in 1889, playing in Paris for seven months, as well as Lyon, Marseille, Barcelona and several cities in Italy. In 1905 they returned for a tour of 120 French cities.

Imagine the scene! It took 16 boats to get the troupe, which included 800 people and 500 horses, and all its equipment across the ocean. They traveled around the country on three special trains with American cars, which together stretched a kilometer in length. At each showground, along with their arena and stage props, they set up their own little city with hundreds of tents and teepees for the cast and crew, topped by the flags of every nation and powered by three dynamos for electricity.

In the Paris audience in 1905 was the Marquis Folco Baroncelli, an eccentric aristocrat from Avignon who had gone to live in the Carmargue. This vast delta on the southern coast of Provence is famous for its lagoons, white horses, black bulls and gardians, the French equivalent of cowboys.

Baroncelli invited Buffalo Bill and members of his troupe to visit him in the Carmargue. They set up camp around his house, and during their stay the cowboys and gardians held a lassoing contest. Baroncelli formed a friendship with Jacob White Eyes, a Dakota Sioux, and took to wearing a Sioux headdress on occasion. They continued a correspondence long after the troupe had moved on.

Baroncelli saw many similarities between the American Indians and the natives of the Carmargue. He believed that Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show was an example of how they might preserve their own traditions.

Today much of the Carmargue is preserved in a national park, and tourism is an important part of the economy of this unique region. At the Baroncelli Museum in les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, you can see some of the gifts given to the Marquis by his Native American visitors.

To read more about Buffalo Bill, click here.