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

The Argonaut, published in San Francisco, in its edition of the 7th of May, has some observations evoked by the account given in American newspapers of Mr. GLADSTONE'S visit to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. It regards the "capture" of three such eminent persons as an ex-Premier of England, leader of the Irish rebellion, his wife, and the husband of one of Her Majesty's daughters as a proof that Buffalo Bill is as successful a showman as is Gladstone a Parliamentary hand. "Nothing could be more neat than the introduction of 'Red Shirt' as a 'type of the American citizen.'" After reminding Mr. GLADSTONE of his former sympathy with the slave-owners' rebellion, when the Confederate States were engaged in war for the preservation of human slavery, the same paper remarks that it is "no thanks to Mr. GLADSTONE for the magnitude of America's destiny; no thanks to him that our Union was not divided, and that the earth today is not cursed with an institution holding in bondage 10,000,000 of souls as white as his own. Mr. GLADSTONE is charged sometimes with political inconsistency. His course to-day in aiding the treasonable Irish to divide the British Empire is in moral harmony with his endeavour to aid a treasonable South to divide and destroy our Republican Union. We hope he fully explained this to Buffalo Bill, and that, through his interpreter, he made plain to 'Red Shirt' his patriotism to England and his devotion to the human family in these the two most important efforts of his life. The article concludes:—;

"Perhaps, however, we have no right of reasonable complaint, for if the English people are willing to take Buffalo Bill and a dilapidated old Indian wrapped in a red woollen blanket as representatives of American citizenship, we shall be compelled to accept this Pecksniffian hen-talk as a specimen of parliamentary eloquence, and Mr. GLADSTONE himself as a fair sample of the strong-minded, robust, patriotic John Bull."