ABSTRACT
Maintaining the illusion that American Indians dwelled in regions far removed from eastern urban centers, extravaganzas like "The Wild West: Buffalo Bill's and Doc Carver's Mountain and Prairie Exhibition" constructed "the image of the Plains Sioux as the quintessential American Indian." Forcibly removed from any contexts that would threaten the imaginative security of consumers, American Indians were being turned into fetishized images that satisfied the hunger for entertainment and disposable commodities. Just as the eroticized image of an American Indian woman was made available for white-male erotic fantasy, Indians were reduced to images that could be made to play allotted roles in nineteenth-century fantasies of cultural imperialism. As "the volume of American advertising increased by more than tenfold" from 1870 to 1900, advertising trade cards became the most important form of mass-market advertising.
