Museum Minute: The female bandit in the poster for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West

A new exhibit opening later this month at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West features posters used to advertise the spectacle of the Wild West in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

One of the posters, titled “The Great Train Robbery and the Union Pacific Bandit Hunters,” depicts a train robbery, where a gang of outlaws blow up a safe using dynamite to get money.

Jeremy Johnston, curator of the Buffalo Bill Museum, says that in this version of the poster, a woman is seen participating in the robbery.

“The controversy surrounding the female bandit is interesting. Some viewers didn’t want to see women become outlaws, even though there is this history in the American West of women taking on more masculine roles – characters like Calamity Jane or Pearl Buck, who took on roles as freighters, stagecoach divers or outlaws,” he said.

Johnston said train robberies, like the scene depicted on the poster, had been re-enacted with real locomotives in the arena for several years in the Wild West Show. The show featured historical scenes and myths from the American West.