The William F. Cody Archive: Documenting the life and times of Buffalo Bill

Some of the spectators who applaud Buffalo Bill's Cossack horsemen in the Wild West arena may chance to inquire how these wanderers from the Caucasus have been brought to London, and who found them in their native wilds and lured them to become part of a show for the entertainment of Londoners. No one fancies that they were manufactured in the Wild West "property-room," and only a very few believe that Major Burke has magic enough in his composition to fetch a dozen Cossacks across sea and Continent by merely rubbing his biggest diamond ring. The fact is that the Cossacks were discovered and imported by Mr. C. M. Ercole, one of the biggest and most enterprising entertainment-agents in the world. Mr. Ercole, who has offices in London, Paris, and New York, and is European agent for Barnum's show and for Carl Hagenbeck, the great Hamburg dealer in wild beasts, apparently supplies anything and everything in the way of natural curiosity or artistic spectacle at the shortest notice. He was the organiser and manager of the "Wild East" show given in the West Kensington arena during the French Exhibition, and himself took a principal part in its most dramatic episode. When he undertook to bring Colonel Cody a troop of Cossacks from the Caucasus he entered upon a task that would open the eyes of our armchair entertainment agents very wide indeed. Starting from Batoum, he went right across the Caucasus to Astrakan, and with infinite difficulty secured his recruits and got them out of the country—after a delicate negotiation with the Russian Government, which looks with keen suspicion on any tendency to foreign travel amongst Caucassian chiefs. Such an achievement deserves more notice than it has yet received.