Edward Achorn

(A daily diary of the greatest season a major-league pitcher ever had.)

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — It’s Sunday, and the National League is taking the day off. A day to pause and consider that there is plenty of competition for the entertainment dollar in 1884.

That week, a big, rugged-looking man has arrived in a thick night fog at Providence’s Union Depot. He comes in on a train from Woonsocket, where his Wild West Show has performed before a whooping audience of over six thousand people.

While the rest of his entourage is switched to a local train bound for the Narragansett Park racetrack nearby, which they will soon transform into a city of tents, Bill Cody leaves the station on foot for Rhode Island’s most sumptuous hotel.

“The conspicuous slouch hat was not necessary to attract the attention of passers-by on Westminster street to a tall, broad-shouldered man who was making his way to the Narragansett Hotel, and the familiar face of Buffalo Bill was readily recognized,” the Providence Journal reports.

At the hotel, “Buffalo Bill” Cody shows the reporter a telegram he has just received from the filthy rich James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the New York Herald and the owner of a stunning mansion on Belleview Avenue in Newport. Bennett plans to visit the show, bringing with him several English noblemen who want to see what the American West is really like.

Another famous visitor to the 1884 show asserts that Cody has got it exactly right. “Down to its smallest details, the show is genuine — cowboys, vaqueros, Indians, stage coach, costumes and all; it is wholly free from sham and insincerity, and the effects produced upon me by its spectacles were identical with those wrought upon me long ago by the same spectacles on the frontier,” the old Western prospector Samuel Clemens — better known as Mark Twain — writes in a letter to Cody in September. “Your pony expressman was as tremendous an interest to me yesterday as he was twenty-three years ago, when he used to come whizzing by from over the desert with the war news: and your bucking horses even painfully real to me, as I rode one of those outrages once for nearly a quarter of a minute.”

The show features the original Deadwood stagecoach, used on the Cheyenne and Black Hills line. “Everyone rides in that coach. I’ve had noblemen and lords and mayors of cities and a lot of big personages in that coach,” Cody boasts to the Journal.

But a bigger show is the battle taking place this week for the National League pennant between the first-place Providence Grays and the second-place Boston Beaneaters – a fierce regional rivalry that brings out thousands of red-hot fanatics. These two teams will not meet for the rest of the season, so the next few days will be immensely important.

RADBOURN’S RECORD: 30-9.

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