Water Buffalo Bill

In honor of this week’s Western History Association meeting in Tucson, Arizona, I am sharing what I consider to be my greatest find thus far in Norway: a Tarzan comic book featuring Wild West show performer Buffalo Bill…in Norwegian!

What was Buffalo Bill doing in the jungles of Africa hanging with the Apenes Konge?  Well, since I don’t speak Norwegian, at first it appeared to me that he had arrived to wrestle a triceratops and battle a tank.  But, no – turns out the tank is in a separate story.

I confess that I wasn’t entirely surprised to see Buffalo Bill sharing the page with another iconic figure of nineteenth-century primitivism.  As the historian Louis Warren well explains, Buffalo Bill (William Cody) was both a malleable cultural symbol and a man who knew his own symbolic power.  He even served as inspiration for parts of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  Who’s to say Cody didn’t have something to do with Tarzan too? 

In presentations to high school students here in Norway, Tarzan has even come up and allowed me to mention my fabulous flea market find.  In a presentation on Native Americans, I describe the stereotypes of the “savage savage” and the “noble savage” and how such stereotypes affect contemporary native people. 

English is a part of the core curriculum in Norway, and students are quite proficient in the language.  The term “savage,” however is new to most of them, and I have struggled to describe it.  Teachers are reluctant to allow Norwegian in their English classrooms, so I have cast about for synonyms in English with which teenagers might be familiar: “Um…primitive….simple….” I pause and gesture to the phrases on the screen while I stall for time. “It can be both an adjective and a noun….and…um…It means uncivilized.”  In one class, somewhat to the teacher’s consternation, the students began to chatter in Norwegian. “Villmann?” They asked.  “Yes!” I said.  We moved on, but one student frowned and squirmed for the remainder of our time.  Finally, at the end, she asked, “Villmann?  Like Tarzan?”  “Yes!” I said again, thrilled to babble on about my new comic book.  I thought the student had great historical insight.  Indeed, as my colleague Rachel St. John pointed out when I mentioned the comic to her: “How very nineteenth century!”

 

Except that the comic book is from 1977.

How can this be? Well, let’s contextualize, shall we?

A little B+ research (that’s Googling for those of you who have just joined the blog) revealed that there was a major oil blowout in the North Sea in 1977.  In fact, it was the worst in Norwegian history.  I was initially elated to discover this.  Not, you know, because I’m happy about oil spills, but because that would explain the environmental anxiety of the story.  Tarzan frets over the water buffalo, worried that it will be taken to the United States for Buffalo Bill’s show.  Later, when the triceratops shows up, Tarzan is more successful than Buffalo Bill in subduing it.  And he is utterly scornful when Buffalo Bill starts dropping the names of his fellow celebrities.  

No doubt there was a fair amount of anxiety about humans’ mastery of nature following the 1977 blowout.  Such wrangling over who gets top billing as Chief Wrangler makes sense.  Does nature require a gentle touch or a firm hand?

All this was great.  Except that the blowout occurred in April of 1977, and the comic book must be from late February or March, thus its injunction to “Kjøp nytt Tarzan 19. Mars!”

So, what was going on in 1977 before April?  Some more B+ research revealed that concern over African wildlife hunting – particularly elephant hunting for ivory – was acute in 1977.  Kenya banned the hunting of all wildlife that year, and 1977 remains the cutoff for import of wild ivory to the United States.  My guess is that the triceratops and the water buffalo were stand-ins for elephants. (But I’d have to do A-level research to be sure.) 

Could the beauty of primitive Africa have arrived on U.S. shores?  Not if Tarzan had anything to do with it.  At the close of the issue, Buffalo Bill offers Tarzan a job as an animal trainer and a role as the “Savage of Borneo.”  

Tarzan gives him a scornful look before taking the triceratops back to its homeland.  In the final frame, Buffalo Bill announces that he’ll never understand foreigners.  It would appear that 1977 Tarzan had a few more economic options than did 1877 Native American performers. 

And Native Americans, of course, aren’t foreigners.  Students here still watch the Simpsons and are delighted to review the episode “Much Apu about Nothing,” in which an Indian American becomes a citizen like his friend, Homer, a self-proclaimed “native American” whose daughter reminds him not to forget the first American Indians.  Regardless of their English ability, most students here seem to catch on that the plot of Dances with Wolves is familiar…they’ve seen this story before…of course…Avatar! 

But whether they’re in the pages of a comic book or on the rodeo stage or in outer space, we ask a lot of our villmenn.  They must achieve, nay, embody an understanding of nature that their observers do not have.  I teach the meaning of the word, but ultimately my students here know better before they walk into my class.  Whether noble or brutal, there’s no such thing as a savage.