These trick riders performed with Buffalo Bill under the misnomer Cossacks—but by any name they were worth watching.
Alongside the North American cowboys and Indians, exotic riders from foreign shores flaunted their skills in William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West and similar shows around the turn of the 20th century. “I don’t know anything about Cossack riding, because I never saw any of it,” Cody said in an 1888 interview, five years after he started his Wild West in Omaha, Nebraska. “But I will guarantee that our men can do anything that Cossacks can do and more, too.” Cody must have changed his tune. In 1892 Cossacks joined the Wild West in London, and at a command performance at Windsor Castle, Queen Victoria took a shine to the group. In 1893 Cody changed the name of his international extravaganza to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World. Joining the Russian Cossacks in the ring were other horseculture heroes in their colorful national costumes, including Argentine gauchos, Turks and Arabs.
The Cossack riders certainly had talent, straddling the backs of galloping horses while swinging their frightful swords or standing on their heads in the saddle. But the truth is these Russian warriors were not actually Cossacks. They came from the Russian province Georgia, specifically from the western part known as Guria. Gurians are ethnic Georgians who speak a local dialect of the Georgian language. For more than two decades I— a native of Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia—have researched my countrymen to reveal the story behind their trick riding, how they came to be associated with Cody and what life was like for them while on tour in Europe and in the United States.
When the Wild West performed in London and at Windsor in 1892, the original 10 Georgian riders ranged in age from 18 to 25. Their leader was Prince Ivane Makharadze. Group leaders often styled themselves as “princes,” largely as a publicity ploy to draw larger audiences. While some riders were of noble origin, most were peasants.
In 1893 the Gurians ventured to the States, where they won widespread recognition and even influenced American cowboys. “Trick riding came to rodeo by way of a troupe of Cossack daredevils imported by the 101 Ranch,” noted the late Western historian Dee Brown. “Intrigued by the Cossacks’ stunts on their galloping horses, Western cowboys soon introduced variations to American rodeo.” Brown traced another link between early rodeo performers and the Georgian trick riders: “Colorful costumes seem to be a necessary part of trick riding,” he wrote, “and it is quite possible that the outlandish Western garb which has invaded rodeo arenas can be blamed directly on Cossacks and trick riders.”
Promoters referred to the Gurian riders as Cossacks for various reasons. Georgia was part of the Russian empire at the time, having been annexed by Czar Alexander I in 1801, thus the Georgians were technically Russians. Their American employers wanted to sell tickets, of course, and the best way to do that was make these Russians popular heroes. The respective show promoters told reporters the skilled riders hailed from the southern part of the Russian Caucasus, origin of the Cossack family in Lord Byron’s narrative poem Mazeppa. The riders played along, boasting of medals they had been awarded for bravery back home. “The Cossacks were the real thing, right from the Czar’s army,” claimed the July 24, 1908, edition of the Hutchinson (Kan.) Leader. “Splendid horsemen and brave fighters, they are also fierce and cruel. They were members of the same regiment that charged upon a throng of men, women and children in the streets of St. Petersburg two years ago and shot and sabered, murdered, a thousand.” It was all a con, of course. There is no doubt these so-called Cossacks were Georgians, as almost in every case the riders’ surnames end with the suffixes -dze, -shvili, -ia and –ian, fixing that region as their place of origin.
On June 25, 1892, when Makharadze and his fellow Georgians performed at Windsor before Queen Victoria, the royal family and other members of the aristocracy, their act lasted just 12 minutes. Wild West manager Nate Salsbury stood by the queen to explain the act. “At a point in the performance when the Cossacks were doing their horseback work,” Salsbury later recalled, “Prince Henry of Battenberg, who was standing in the rear of the pavilion, said to the queen in German, ‘Mamma, do you think they are really Cossack?’ Before the queen had time to reply to him, I said, ‘I beg to assure you, sir, that everything and everybody you see in the entertainment are exactly what we represent it or them to be.’” Actually, in the showbiz world of Buffalo Bill Cody and Salsbury, Georgian peasants were Cossacks, Indian men were chiefs, Indian women were princesses, and military men were colonels.
The Georgians’ performance usually began with the riders—all bearing weapons and dressed in the national costume (a short coat known as a chokha in Georgian)— entering the arena in full song. After marching once around, they dismounted, broke into a new song and performed a native Georgian dance to the accompaniment of handclaps, sometimes atop a wooden platform. They followed with stunt riding that represented the perfection of man and horse, performing the most unbelievable stunts at full gallop. The riders executed a series of maneuvers— doing headstands in the saddle, standing bolt upright atop the saddle, riding three horses simultaneously, jumping to the ground and then back, diving beside their horses’ to pick up small objects from the ground. In one popular trick the rider stood on horseback at a gallop while shooting. This trick-riding style is called dzhigitovka (a Turkic word taken to mean a skillful and courageous rider) or jiriti in Georgian. “They stood in the saddle, on their feet and on their hands, and kicked their legs as the horses flew madly around,” reported the April 9, 1893, edition of The Philadelphia Inquirer. “They rode standing in their saddles with their faces facing their horses’ tails and chased each other to capture a handkerchief carried in their mouth.” On July 28, 1906, an American observer wrote, “Our cowboys are universally the best exponents of expert horsemanship, but the famous Cossacks are their close rival.”
It was not uncommon for princes, kings and other royals to attend Wild West performances, as well as such prominent Americans as future Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. The latter— a statesman, Spanish-American War hero, Rough Rider and outdoorsman who loved the West—attended a show in Chicago and was so fascinated by rider Giorgi Chkhaidze’s performance that he presented him a gold ring and a tray as a token of his esteem. “[The ring] was so big that it nearly covered my finger,” recalled Chkhaidze. According to Chkhaidze’s daughter Ekaterine, her father later traded the ring for his freedom after the Bolsheviks imprisoned him in Georgia.
Financial hardship often prompted the Georgian riders’ decision to travel to distant lands. Touring meant income, and their American employers paid relatively good money, some $40 to $50 per month, or 100 rubles (the price of a cow in Georgia in those days was 3 to 5 rubles). Not all of the riders went to America for noble reasons. Gurian riders Vaso Tsuladze and Sam Sergie (his real name is not known) fled to the States following a train robbery. Sergie used to show off a gold cigarette holder imprinted with a double-headed eagle, boasting he took it from a Russian army officer. He went on to own a café named Sam’s Club in Fort Worth, Texas, where he died in 1965 at age 81. Tsuladze died in Chicago in the mid-1960s.
Some riders were not as lucky or long-lived. They were skilled performers, but the dangers of their business were real. On July 2, 1901, an unknown Gurian rider died during a performance of Pawnee Bill’s Historic Wild West in the city of Iron River, Wis. In 1914 Khalampri Pataraia was killed while trick riding in Louisa, Ken. In May 1912 the Cumberland (Md.) Evening Times ran a story about Cossack Steve Graceley’s death in the arena. Sometime earlier Graceley’s friend George Henney had demonstrated a challenging trick during a break and was injured, though not seriously. Graceley, who had been in the riding business 12 years, tried the same trick that day in Maryland, fell from his horse and was admitted to a nearby hospital, where he died on May 26. His real name was Irakli Tsintsadze, and he was 52. He had no relatives in America and was reportedly in deep financial trouble. After his death his friends took up a collection and managed to scrape together $84, of which $40 went toward Tsintsadze’s burial. His friends sent the remainder to his widow and six children in Georgia.
The Georgians took on nicknames often because their real names were unpronounceable to promoters and the public alike. Buffalo Bill’s financial manager went so far as to call them by number on payday. All Wild West participants— whether cowboys, Indians, Arabs, Mexicans or Gurians— shared spectacular personal tales full of blood and gore with reporters. Luka Chkhartishvili told several newspapers how he had killed actual Cossacks from Russia’s Don River region, the number of Cossacks varying between one and 20.
Before joining the show, most of the Gurian riders hadn’t even been as far as Tbilisi, and the United States particularly impressed them. Nikoloz Chkonia favored California. “The climate, fruit and hospitality remind us of our home country,” he wrote to his family back home. “I’ll just tell you that we have toilets made of marble stones. They look very expensive.” Kirile Khoperia noted that American city dwellers lived in multistoried buildings and used “moving rooms” to get to their floors. “There are so many wires in the streets that birds often fly into them and fall down dead,” Giorgi Chkhaidze noted in a letter home.
These exotic horsemen also made an impression on the fairer sex in America. “We are much respected here, especially by ladies,” recalled one Gurian rider. “One wealthy American woman even offered a friend of ours to marry her, but the poor bastard chose to tie the knot with a Georgian lady, and now he relishes all the inconveniences of life in Guria.” Some Georgians did marry Americans and settle down in the States. One rider tied the knot with an American even though he already had a family in his native Guria. When he went to Georgia for a visit, Bolshevik officials would not allow him to return to the States, so the man killed himself. Other Georgians, stuck Stateside by World War I and the Bolsheviks’ rise to power, continued touring with various circuses. Some returned home when the war ended, only to be rounded up as American spies by the Bolshevik government. Others settled down and eventually lost ties with their homeland.
Not all of the Georgian riders who performed in the United States were male. At least four Georgian women —Frida Mgaloblishvili, Kristine Tsintsadze, and Maro and Barbale Zakareishvili— participated in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, Barbale and husband Christephore Imnadze remained in the States and continued to perform. Barbale’s signature trick was to hold the American flag aloft while standing on the shoulders of two riders, their horses at a gallop. She died in 1988 in Chicago. Just three years later the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic became the independent nation of Georgia.
The Georgian riders, so long misnamed, were not out to become famous or make history. They were doing what they did best to make a living and support their loved ones. In Western Europe and the United States they faced unknown languages and alien cultures. But they adapted to the new world quite well, making friends and sometimes families. These trick riders who performed for Buffalo Bill and other American showmen might be viewed as the first Georgian ambassadors to the United States.
Filmmaker and researcher Irakli Makharadze divides his time between his native Georgia (the nation not the state) and New York City. For further reading see his book Georgians in America and visit the website www.georgians.ge.
Originally published in the April 2013 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.