By Phil Roberts
In these times of ever more curiosity with the antics of the British royals (and former royals), writers have remarked on the unusual interest these events seem to hold for Americans. They say it seems paradoxical that citizens of a country that declared its independence from a hereditary monarch more than two centuries ago would have such interest in a personal milestone of faraway royals.
Such observations are nothing new. In 1876, as the nation was celebrating the centennial of the Declaration of Independence, America hosted the first-ever visit by a royal head of state to the United States. The visiting monarch wasn’t from Britain. He was Dom Pedro, the emperor of Brazil.
To many Americans, bewildered by rapid industrialization and social upheavals resulting from immigration and the recent end of the institution of slavery, the visit by a royal personage may have brought some yearnings for the apparent stability of hereditary rule. Some simply viewed the visit as a mere curiosity. To others, it was an awkward intrusion of an anti-egalitarian symbol at the very time when the country was celebrating the anniversary of independence from another empire.
Before going to the festivities in Philadelphia for the Fourth of July, the emperor of Brazil traveled throughout the United States to every region of the country. Huge crowds greeted his train in Chicago as he set out for a trip to the West. Newspaper coverage was extensive with every reporter seeking an interview. Some got an audience with the emperor; others had to settle for somewhat less.
It was the middle of the night when Dom Pedro’s train passed through Cheyenne. A reporter for the Cheyenne Daily Leader, unable to land an interview, nonetheless had to come up with an eyewitness story for his readers. So he paid a visit to the sleeping monarch. “He arrived here at 4:30 this morning,” the reporter wrote. “He didn’t climb down out of his royal car and saunter about the city in search of sights, because he was still dreaming of his far-off palaces when the train reached the Magic City.”
He continued: “This reporter was permitted to gaze upon his sleeping majesty and listen to the imperial snore which may be described—the snore we mean—as a cross between the sonorous nose-buster of a bullwhacker and the quivering wail which issues from the proboscis of a lovely woman when her bronchial tubes are affected by a bad cold.”
The reporter had his brief look, got off the train, and left the depot platform. The train continued on. Nonetheless, the reporter had his story. Not much of a story, perhaps, but Wyoming readers wanted to know every tiny detail of the emperor’s visit to their town. Even in the wild west of Cheyenne in 1876, royalty held some fascination. The 21st century Wyomingite watching the coming royal wedding likely follows in that unusual tradition.
A lengthy version of this brief story appears as “All Americans Are Hero-Worshippers: American Observations on the First U. S. Visit by a Monarch, 1876,”Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 7 (October 2008), pp. 453-477).