Louis S. Warren (32 page)

Much as critics denounced Cody's stage plays for plotless violence, they had a coherent political message in that they propagated the army's position in the struggle for control of Indian affairs.
Scouts of the Plains,
Cody's 1873–74 drama, was highly critical of the Peace Policy, under which churches administered reservations while the army patrolled outside their boundaries. As one critic noted, “All through the play there is a Quaker Peace Commissioner dropping in everywhere most inopportunely, and who gets scalped—as he deserves—before the close.”
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The Peace Policy had collapsed by 1875. But until the twentieth century, army officers continued a drumbeat of criticism of federal bureaucrats and religious reformers for malfeasance, naiveté, or general misconduct in Indian affairs. Throughout the period, Cody underscored his support for the army position in his public statements. Thus, his lament that “the Indian” had been “ill-used and trampled on by those whose duty it was to protect him,” a sentiment he repeated in various forms throughout his life, was a thinly veiled criticism of the civilians who ran the Office of Indian Affairs, and who were responsible for administering reservations.
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Less pointedly, and in some ways more surprising, his ambivalence toward Indian conquest and his sympathy toward defeated Indians were also products of his long exposure to army officers. To be sure, America's leading Indian fighters were and are rightly notorious for some of their pronouncements about Indians. General Philip Sheridan was said to have remarked that “the only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” Paraphrased as “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” Sheridan's remark has been a banner of Indian hating for more than a century.
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Whether or not Sheridan ever uttered the remark, others said similar things. Upon hearing of the destruction of Captain Fetterman's command at Fort Phil Kearny in 1866, General William T. Sherman had wired the White House: “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.”
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But calls for extermination were rare among army commanders. Indeed, officers' views of the Plains Indian wars can best be summarized as ambivalent, and highly contingent upon conditions of war or peace. General George Crook, for whom Cody scouted in the summer of 1876, frequently blamed white settlers for pushing Indians “beyond endurance” until they took up arms, waging wars which the army “had to fight,” even though “our sympathies were with the Indians.” Treated fairly, he thought, “the American Indian would make a better citizen than many who neglect the duties and abuse the privilege of this proud title.”

Crook had as many critics as any other officer in the army, but on the subject of Indians, his views were widely shared. General Oliver Otis Howard, who pursued Chief Joseph in the Nez Perce War of 1877, was of the opinion that Indians, at least, stole only only from enemies. They kept promises, too. When asked if he thought Indians were especially treacherous, he replied, “No, not so much as the Anglo-Saxon.” General Nelson Miles, a personal friend of Cody's who commanded troops against the Sioux, Cheyenne, Apache, and Nez Perce, wrote that Indian warriors showed “courage, skill, sagacity, endurance, fortitude, and self-sacrifice of a high order,” and they followed distinctive “rules of civility.” These magnificent people, he thought, ill deserved America's “haughty contempt.” Even Philip Sheridan was not above sympathizing with them. “We took away their country and their means of support, broke up their mode of living, their habits of life, introduced disease and decay among them, and it was for this and against this they made war. Could any one expect less?” To Sheridan's mind, reservation poverty was the major cause of Indian warfare, and entirely the fault of the Office of Indian Affairs and the ignorant reformers who posed as “Friends of the Indian.”
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Coming from commanders who routinely defended soldiers for killing Indian women and children, such sentiments might seem contradictory. But the ambivalence was genuine, deeply rooted, and widespread. Preparing to kill Indians in combat, soldiers (and their families) denounced Indians as bloodthirsty savages who merited destruction. Removed from imminent battle, soldiers valorized their opponents as noble, stalwart defenders of home and family, more primitive but still honorable versions of themselves.
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Of course, such sentiments said more about soldiers than Indians. Only a valiant soldier could defeat a valiant enemy. Venerating their opponents as noble savages allowed officers to claim the status of alienated men of honor in a dishonorable age. To their way of thinking, the Plains Indian wars were mostly the result of greedy frontier settlers, merchants, and their cronies, who manipulated a distant, disengaged Washington bureaucracy into declaring war on victimized, misunderstood Indians, all in an effort to grab Indian land and army supply contracts.
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Cody's complaint about white thieves who supplied the “regular market” for stolen Indian horses thus echoed the complaints of many army officers who saw Americans, particularly of the lower-class variety, as the real savages of the frontier. Consistently, his stage plays borrowed from dime novel conventions and military rhetoric that placed Indians at the mercy of evil whites. “General, it is not the Indians who are the first cause of difficulties,” Buffalo Bill asserts in
Life on the Border.
“It is the white men who disguise themselves as Indians and commit these depredations, then the Indians are to blame for it. Then away goes the military for them and that brings on an Indian war.”
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There was truth to the contention. American criminals who disguised murders and thefts by planting Indian clues—moccasin prints, arrows, unshod horse tracks—were common on the frontier. But white settlers who stole from Indians were even more widespread, and officers castigated them. Captain John Bourke, a veteran of the U.S. Army's Apache campaigns, denounced reckless, idle, and “dissolute” settlers for starting Indian wars. In Texas, officer James Parker wrote his mother, “I would like to go on a scouting expedition after renegade Texans and hang up every scoundrel I caught,” for the horse thieving, rapine, and murder they visited upon Indians. Major Alfred Lacey Hough denounced Colorado's “wholly unscrupulous” frontier settlers for being “ambitious men who care only for their own interests” and who stirred up trouble with Indians to bring on a federal Indian war and an infusion of federal dollars into the local economy.
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As enlightened as such views seem, they were also self-serving. Where the army's war on Indians verged on atrocity, officers (and scouts like Cody) held themselves blameless, and pointed at settlers, bureaucrats, or Indians for starting the conflagration into which duty thrust them.
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Thus, in the minds of officers, at least, the army did the nation's dirty work. When they were not in combat, the army stood between frontier settlers and Indians, and they understood their role as protectors of each from the other.

If the Indian wars were bereft of honor, why did Cody and so many officers fight them? Why not resign? Simply put, resisting duty would not have improved matters. Popular Darwinian and Anglo-Saxonist ideologies found numerous exponents among the educated and comparatively well-read officer corps. To them, the march of the white race and its higher civilization made the destruction of Indian culture—the Indian “race”—inevitable. For Indians to surrender to the farms and industry of the higher American civilization was the only possible outcome of the race confrontation described by the frontier line. Lieutenant Colonel George Forsyth, in a typical statement of this widespread philosophy, acknowledged that “the Indian has been wronged, and deeply wronged, by bad white men.” Nonetheless, “it must always be borne in mind that, cruel as the aphorism is, ‘the survival of the fittest' is a truism that cannot be ignored or gainsaid and barbarism must necessarily give way before advancing civilization.”
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If warfare and skullduggery were the means through which civilization triumphed, as far as the army was concerned, that was the fault of distant bureaucrats or greedy settlers. Officers usually saw themselves as honorable mediators between civilization and savagery, even when they had to fight Indians who had been wrongly provoked. By vanquishing their Indian opponents as quickly as possible, and moving them expeditiously to reservations, they were giving the Indians a peaceful home—in which they could pass quietly into oblivion.

In reality, of course, Indians were not about to vanish. Their survival strategies included performing dances and other cultural practices for cash, something Cody's stage shows and his Wild West show facilitated. But the belief that they were about to disappear, in a development that was as inevitable as it was unfortunate, remained a dominant stream of American thought well into the twentieth century.

Indians, indeed, were only the most prominent of the “vanishing” peoples, landscapes, tools, trades, occupations, and customs that preoccupied nineteenth-century Americans. The rhetoric of vanishment described categories of beings or things that disappeared to make way for more highly developed successors. It was central to the ideology of progress, and woven through contemporary notions of biology, industrial development, and politics. Naturalists, like officers, influenced Cody's views on retreating Indians, buffalo, and the frontier. In the late 1860s Cody hunted buffalo “specimens” for America's leading taxidermist, Professor Henry A. Ward of Rochester (with whom he frequently socialized afterward, as a resident of that city), and in 1871 he guided Professor Othniel C. Marsh, of Yale University (whose continuing search for dinosaur bones was later assisted by another guide, George Sword). Ward, Marsh, and others related the region's ancient past in stories of brutal competition, violent extinction, and the ineluctable ascendance of higher orders. According to Cody, Marsh “entertained me with several scientific yarns, some of which seemed too complicated and too mysterious to be believed by an ordinary man like myself; but it was all clear to him.”
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Whether or not his self-effacing shrug at Marsh's science was false modesty, Cody understood evolutionary thought at least as well as most Americans did. Darwinian evolution, after all, could be read as a variation on the larger narrative of progress and upward development that had preoccupied American thinking since the beginning of the United States.

Buffalo Bill's Wild West show stands in popular memory as a symbol of Gilded Age confidence. But the centrality of Indians to it, as noble savages doomed to vanish, in truth reflected the conflicted views of most Americans on the subject of the frontier, which they loved and destroyed through their own progress. Cody's exposure to Darwinism, the theory of civilization, and the army command provided him with a ready rhetoric of Indian vanishment, a development so preordained and inevitable that it rendered Indian hating not only distasteful, but excessive. In time, he adapted this language to his Wild West show as a whole. The show, like the Indians, was predicted to disappear as time swept away the “originals” who represented life in the show's Far West. In adapting the sentiments of officers and scientists for his own needs, Cody borrowed a language that combined scientific prediction with certainty about the political advent of the United States in the Far West, but which was also shot through with profound uncertainty about the
moral
quality of that succession. Even as Americans swept out across the Plains to force the ineluctable conclusion of progress, Cody remained less convinced of its righteousness than of its inevitability.

Ambivalence: this was the defining characteristic of American sentiment on westward expansion. And ambivalence was where Cody arrived after searching for the right language to tell stories to the public about real Indians, initially Sword and Two Bears, ultimately all the others who followed in the decades after his stage season of 1877.

As Indians became essential to the spectacle of Buffalo Bill, the need to expand the performance space from stage to arena became increasingly evident. For if Indianness were to be put on display, Indians would have to be on horses.

On horseback, Plains Indians were both enemies and inspirations. Cavalrymen, who venerated great horsemanship, were astounded at Cheyenne, Lakota, and other Indians who galloped bareback amid stampeding buffalo, firing continuous streams of arrows without putting hand to reins. In warfare, their horsecraft was awesome. Hooking one heel over a horse's back, they clung to the sides of their mounts and used the animals' bodies as shields from enemy fire, and the showier men even returned fire from under their horse's necks. They could retrieve fallen comrades from teeming battlefields, at top speed and without dismounting. (Alternatively, one shocked officer reported that a Cheyenne brave scooped up a soldier's corpse at full gallop, stripped him naked, dashed out his brains, and discarded the body— without even slowing down.)
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“Having never seen the riding of Arabs, Turcomans, Cossacks” or other “world renowned riders,” wrote one officer, “I cannot say how the Indian compares with them, but I am satisfied that he is too nearly a Centaur to be surpassed by any.”
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The appellation “centaur” was a popular compliment in the nineteenth century, often used to reflect the manly bearing of a gentleman on horseback. Indian centaurism simultaneously invited and compelled soldiers to master horses in new ways. After fighting a Cheyenne war party in 1868, one troop of soldiers “were seen to mount from the right-hand side, Indian fashion; others to get on their horses' backs by catching hold of the animals' tails and giving a spring—also an Indian fashion. There was not a trooper in camp who had not made an effort to ride beneath his horse instead of above him.”
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