In 1908, Vernon Seaver, the same man who opened the Al Fresco amusement park on the Illinois River in Peoria, opened his own Wild West show.
Reliving the colorful days of cowboys and Indians, of sharpshooters on horseback, of bucking broncos and buffalo had become a popular attraction across the United States ever since Buffalo Bill Cody put a show together in the 1880s.
Cody’s success around the country and in Europe encouraged others to pay homage to the old West that went about circus-style, attracting audiences eager to relive the country’s fabled past. Seaver’s show was called the Young Buffalo Wild West. In 1910 the show, which performed regularly at Al Fresco Park, went on the road, leaving Peoria by train in specially marked red-and-yellow cars, noted Steve Gossard, the Bloomington historian who served as the former curator of Special Collections at Illinois State University's Milner Library.
In 1910 the Young Buffalo troupe staged not one but two parades in Peoria to mark the start of a string of performances. A torchlight street parade was followed by a parade the following morning.
The parade featured three bands, a calliope, cowboys, cowgirls, Mexicans, Cossacks, soldiers, six tribes of American Indians, wagons, a stagecoach, oxen, and buffalo, stated Gossard. The parade route ran from south Adams Street to Cedar to First, to Franklin, to Jefferson, to Hamilton, to Adams, and onto showgrounds at South Adams and Garden streets, he said.
The show’s central theme was crossing the plains in the days of 1849—before the encroachment of Western civilization, said Gossard. In a show held in New York later in 1910, attractions were listed by the New York newspaper as “Montana Jack, trick riding, and fancy roping.” Also cited were Dynamo, “the celebrated educated horse,” and Annie Oakley, the legendary sharpshooter, who had consented to come out of retirement to appear.
Taking the Wild West show on the road was no easy matter, Gossard said. The show included 200 performers and stagehands with 150 animals, a menagerie that included horses, burros, Indian ponies, oxen, draught horses, and wild steers.
Tom Mix, one of the cowboys who often performed with Seaver's show, reportedly left in 1913 to make the movies that would later make him a household name. That was the same year that Seaver built the Hippodrome Theater in Peoria, a vaudeville house later to become known as the Rialto Theater.
Audiences eventually tired of reliving the Wild West exhibitions, preferring to follow their heroes on movie screens, said Gossard. By 1914, Seaver’s show ran out of money and was forced to close, bringing the curtain down on the era when Peoria had its own Wild West Show.
