Louis S. Warren (60 page)

German fascination with Plains Indians as romantic symbols of a preindustrial age, bound together through the blood of a united race, spurred a range of other German developments and practices. Most prominent among these was the work of Karl May, a prolific German novelist whose most famous literary characters were a heroic German, Old Shatterhand, and his Indian sidekick, an Apache chief named Winnetou. Winnetou debuted in May's fiction in 1875, and his most popular novel was the three-volume
Winnetou,
which he published in 1893, capitalizing on the western enthusiasms stirred by the Wild West show's 1890 German tour. May wrote eighty novels, about a third of them westerns, which resembled American dime novels but with a twist. Throughout, Old Shatterhand and his “good Indian” friend, Winnetou, battle “bad Indians,” including many Oglala Sioux. As in the United States, the “bad Indians” of the plot are driven to their evil deeds by bad white people. But in May's West, the bad whites are, of course, Americans. In the course of the novel, they are made to suffer the wrath of the righteous German avenger, Old Shatterhand.

Like other Europeans, including Baroncelli, Karl May routinely denounced American treatment of Indians. “The Indian is also a human being and possesses human rights; it is a heavy sin to deny his right to exist and, bit by bit, remove his means of existence.”
³⁶

But to read May's fiction is to realize that he desired less the autonomy of Indians than the hegemony of Germans, who in May's fictional world master the frontier far better than Americans, and subjugate its Indians in proper German fashion. The popularity of his German hero who brought justice and removed savagery from the dark frontier in part expressed German longings for empire, for the exclusive right to usher primitives into modernity. May's imagined world would differ from his own modern world in that its Germany would be far more influential than her corrupt and decadent rival, the United States. May's covert nationalism, cloaked in Romantic idealism and fronted by the noble savage Winnetou, helps to explain the broad appeal of his novels. In an era of growing nationalist fervor, May's westerns were gigantic best sellers among Romantics, expansionists, imperialists, and pacifists alike.

May's lurking German chauvinism also explains why he was not friendly toward Buffalo Bill or his Indians, whom he accused of betraying their race.
³⁷
Although he posed for photographs in western gear that looked much like Cody's, his name is absent from the list of people who visited Cody during his years in Europe. May never met Cody, and he never saw the real West. Perhaps there was no need. His fictionalized landscapes met the desires of his reading audience. Indians came to Germany with Buffalo Bill's Wild West and other shows. When necessary, May posed as their protector from the Americans, a real-life Shatterhand.
³⁸

Not long after May died, his widow opened the “Villa Bärenfett,” or Villa Bear's Grease, to house the combined artifact collections of May and a friend, Patty Frank, who had been inspired to collect Indian handcrafts after serving as a stable hand for Buffalo Bill's Wild West in Frankfurt am Main in 1890. The Villa Bear's Grease became a center for the burgeoning crowds of German enthusiasts, or “hobbyists,” who, beginning around 1900, dressed up as Indians, cowboys, and trappers. Eventually, hobbyists dressed in “authentic” Indian and cowboy clothing, learned Indian languages, and hosted real Indians and cowboys from visiting Wild West shows to teach Plains Indian lore and history, and even to hold memorial talks on Karl May's grave. The first known “Cowboy Club” in Germany was founded in Munich in 1913. (It was preceded by the first French hobbyist organization, the Club Blue Star, founded by Joe Hamman in Paris in 1908.) As in France, some of the first films produced in Germany were westerns, featuring cowboys and Indians.
³⁹

Hobbyists had counterparts in America. The Boy Scouts and a predecessor organization, the naturalist (and Boy Scout cofounder) Ernest Thompson Seton's “Woodcraft Indians,” encouraged children to learn Indian lore as a means of connecting with nature, and later enthusiasts elevated the practice to a full-fledged avocation. American hobbyists saw Indian lore as the pathway to native identity and an authentic bond with American wilderness. German hobbyists had some of the same motives. They saw themselves as “like Indians” in their racial unity and their reverence for nature.
⁴⁰

But the similarity between Indian hobbyists in the two countries masked distinctive nationalist impulses underlying their respective devotions. On the one hand, Americans seized on Indian lore to become white Indians, empowering them in cultural and military struggles with decadent Europeans. On the other hand, German enthusiasm for Indian play implied their potential “hostility” to the Americans who so oppressed their “Indian brothers.”

THE COLLISION of primitive and progress was the ineluctable truth of world history, and Europeans saw it happening not only in the United States, but around the globe. Anglo-Saxonism and Aryanism, with their histories of races advancing from east to west, provided a narrative history of race advancement for Europeans like Bram Stoker and Folco de Baroncelli. For its believers, to look across geographical space into alien country was to look backward in time. As we have seen, remote regions of profound ethnic conflict provided a tableau of the march of social evolution, which could be read in the racial “types” that represented each of its stages.
⁴¹
Thus, in Buffalo Bill's Wild West, the progress of civilization went from savage Indian through Mexican and “half-civilized” cowboy to the “representative man” William Cody, who had been through “every stage” of frontier development.

British travel writers, among others, saw eastern Europe's Gypsies, Saxons, and Magyars in a roughly similar sequence. Savage Gypsies eternally pursued stagecoaches (although on foot, not on horseback), and Saxon herders were either indolent and vicious, or stalwart and brave, or some combination of all these (like cowboys), as the needs of the writer dictated.

For this reason, the “Attack on the Deadwood Coach” resonated with European notions of progress as much as with American. In depictions of remote regions of Europe, as in America, wheels were the exclusive technology of civilized people, who alone harnessed the driving energies of the universe. Savages—Indians, Gypsies, and Asiatic bandits—attacked stages and other wheeled vehicles almost as a genetic trait, as if they were unable to resist the moving target of the higher races whom they could not destroy.
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On both sides of the Atlantic, stagecoach attacks represented obstacles on the road to civilization, the savagery of the assailants both fearsome and doomed before the wheels of progress turning rapidly beneath the coach. Baroncelli was not only a patron of Indians, but of Gypsies, too. To him, they were mystical descendants of Europe's original peoples. He honored them as “the Indians of Europe.”
⁴³
(Of course, such ideas were not Baroncelli's alone, and Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World obliquely incorporated them with the addition of the mysterious “Magyar Gypsy Czikos” in 1897.) When Marquis Folco de Baroncelli entertained Indians and some cowboys from the Wild West show, his beloved
gardians
rode alongside them in a street parade, the better to situate the mythic horse-men of the Camargue in their proper moment in the march of civilization.
⁴⁴

Frontiers, then, were not just an American place or process. They were Eurasian, too. And the presence of Americans allowed Europeans to reimagine their relation to the march of progress in new terms, to see themselves as Indians or cowboys, or both.

The notion of global racial frontiers partly inspired Cody and his staff to reformulate the Wild West show as an exhibition of worldwide combat between primitive and civilized. Of course, they took only the most “manly” racial types they could find, which meant that they took only those “primitive” or “semi-civilized” men who rode horses into war. The Congress of Rough Riders of the World reinscribed America's frontier history not just as racial conflict, but as the
last
of the many conflicts in the east-to-west march of white civilization. Eurasian borders became clearly racial boundaries, “frontiers” of combat in which progressive races extinguished savage races, and Progress marched on.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Ghost Dance

THE VERY FEATURE of Cody's entertainment which drew millions over its long life—the enthusiastic participation of Indians—has done the most to discomfit many Americans who remember it. Were the Indian performers extorted, duped, or both? Robert Altman's 1976 film
Buffalo Bill
and the Indians
presented Buffalo Bill's Wild West as the fulfillment of America's darkest expectations about the frontiersman. Paul Newman's Cody appears as a self-promoting drunk who exploits Indians, especially Sitting Bull, to enhance his own reputation and make money. Altman, like many others, presumes that Indians were simple, naive victims of Cody's chicanery.

So, when the Brooklyn Museum opened a large exhibit on Buffalo Bill's Wild West in 1984, many were surprised to see an essay in the exhibit catalogue by Vine Deloria, Jr. The famed Lakota scholar, activist, and author might have been expected to denounce the Wild West show. (Among his many books is a scathing and best-selling indictment of federal Indian policy called
Custer Died for Your Sins.
) But Deloria painted Wild West performers like Sitting Bull, Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses, and Gall as nobody's fools, men who joined the show for very good reasons. As he pointed out, Buffalo Bill's Wild West show offered them a chance to escape reservation travel restrictions, see the larger world, and make decent money. If the show presented Indians as primitives, they were nevertheless noble equals of their “civilized” opponents, such as cowboys, the U.S. Army, and later on, the many contingents from European armies. Furthermore, in working for Cody, Indians learned a great deal they could not have learned otherwise. “As a transitional educational device wherein Indians were able to observe American society and draw their own conclusions, the Wild West was worth more than every school built by the government on any of the reservations.” The knowledge Indians gained from their tenure with the show offered them at least some hope of protecting themselves from the worst excesses of the government. And if they acted out highly fictionalized battles, well, that was “preferable to a complete surrender to the homogenization that was overtaking American society.”
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Surprising as the essay was for many readers, Deloria echoed teachings of Lakota elders passed down since the earliest days of Buffalo Bill's Wild West. Indians discovered a realm of opportunity in the Wild West show that they had almost nowhere else. In a time of crushing poverty and fierce cultural suppression, the show in some cases made possible the survival of family and culture.

For the Lakota, then, the stakes in Wild West show performance were huge, as they were for Cody, too. William Cody was well aware that without Indians, there would be no unblemished primitives, no noble savages, for civilization to overcome in his entertainment. Without the Lakota, there was no show.

Indians flocked to the Wild West show because they were innovative, courageous men and women searching for a means of economic and cultural survival, and the show offered better hope for that than just about any other paying job. But their enthusiasm for it would be sorely tested, as a new ordeal descended on the Lakota in 1890. That year saw a crisis that nearly flared into civil war across the Great Sioux Reserve and that culminated in an army massacre of the poorest, most defenseless Indians. In the process, it nearly destroyed Buffalo Bill's Wild West. Cody persisted, to reemerge the following year with a newly invigorated show. The 1890s would be his most successful decade of all. Over three million people would see Buffalo Bill's Wild West in 1893 alone.

Among the many factors that allowed it to emerge from this period unscathed, Cody's own sagacity for show business cannot be discounted. But by far the greatest factors in the show's survival were its Indian performers, men such as Black Heart, No Neck, and others who had come to rely on popular entertainment for their survival. Americans today are rightly suspicious of show business and self-promoters, and their skepticism about Cody's employment of Indians is understandable. But the fact remains that Sioux men who fought at the Little Big Horn and never quailed before an enemy, and who energetically volunteered to work and travel in the show industry, were on a fearsome road. They were desperate to save their people from the calamity of 1890, and their efforts to do so likely preserved at least some Lakota lives. In so doing, they saved Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, and Cody's career, too.

OVER THE ENTIRE thirty-three years of Cody's Wild West performances, more than a thousand Indians chose to perform with his company. Why?

Black Elk, who fought at the Little Big Horn as a young teenager, and who went on to become a holy man (his autobiography is a classic of American Indian literature and theology), recalled his reasons for joining the Wild West show in 1886: “I wanted to see the great water, the great world and the ways of the white men; this is why I wanted to go. . . . I made up my mind I was going away . . . to see the white man's ways. If the white man's ways were better, why I would like to see my people live that way.”
²

Black Elk was disappointed in the ways of white people, but he stayed with the show through its English tour the following year. He was pleased to dance for Queen Victoria, and to see her pass in a parade some days later. “As the Queen passed us, she stopped and stood up back to where the Indians were sitting. All her people bowed to her, but she bowed to us Indians.” Like the popular memory of Victoria's (fictional) bow to the flag, Black Elk recalled her homage to the Lakota with exhilaration. “We sent out the women's and men's tremolo then. . . . Then we all sang her a song. This was the most happy time!”
³

Subsequently, Black Elk and several others were accidentally left behind when the Wild West show left for the United States (the occasion of their interview by London police looking for the Ripper). He spent the rest of 1888 and part of 1889 traveling through France, Italy, and Germany with Mexican Joe's Wild West show, trying to earn enough money to buy a ticket home. For a time, he lived with an English “girl friend” and her family, becoming so ill at one point that he nearly died. But finally, he learned that Buffalo Bill's Wild West had returned to Europe and was showing in Paris. Black Elk took the next steamer across the English Channel. “When I got there Buffalo Bill had gathered all the people together there and they gave me four big cheers. Buffalo Bill asked me if I was going to stay or go home. I told him that I was going home. He bought me a ticket and gave me ninety dollars. We then had a big dinner on my account.”
⁴

Cody's good humor, kindness, and generosity with money and time became legends among the Sioux and Cheyenne who worked with him. George Dull Knife, a northern Cheyenne who lived at Pine Ridge, rode with Buffalo Bill's Wild West for most of the 1890s. He told stories of Cody abandoning his hotel room to sleep in Sioux tipis in the Wild West camp. Late in life, his son, Guy Dull Knife, recalled a day when his father returned to the reservation with Buffalo Bill. There was a party that night, and the next day Cody introduced the Dull Knife children to a trick pony he had brought with him. “Whenever there was a loud noise, the horse fell down and played like he was dead. Pretty soon, all of the kids started standing next to the horse and clapping their hands as loud as they could. The horse would fall down and then everyone would really laugh and so we did this for a long time. It was about the best time we ever had.”
⁵

In part, these happy memories suggest how the Wild West show provided Lakota with space in which to explore ways of transforming Indianness rather than seeing it destroyed. By the 1880s, the Plains Indian wars were over. Attention now turned to “civilizing” the reservations, a process that entailed the complete destruction of Indian cultures and the assimilation of Indians into white society, “to kill the Indian and save the man,” in the words of educator Richard Henry Pratt.

Assimilation was the cause of self-styled “friends of the Indian,” mostly eastern reformers who saw it as the logical culmination to the march of progress. If Indians were defeated, what happened next? Since civilization was carried by race, and races were distinguished partly by their peculiar practices—language, religion, clothing, methods of child rearing—then to eliminate savage culture would secure civilization. The two basic assumptions of assimilationists, then, were that only one standard of civilization existed, and Indians should be forced to conform to it. Fixity had to trump mobility. Each Indian should be compelled to stay in one place, in a house (a settler's cabin), outside which they cultivated farms and built schools and churches, and inside which they created domestic order through monogamous marriage. By forcing Indians to assimilate the values of middle-class Protestant culture, reformers hoped to make a first step toward unifying the diverse, even polyglot country, whose immigrants and freed blacks needed as much “Americanizing” as Indians did.
⁶

Reservations became laboratories for assimilation in the 1880s, but much earlier, authorities had conceived them as educational zones where Indians would learn farming and Christianity. By 1883, the year the Wild West show debuted, reservation superintendents, or Indian agents, justified expenditures by documenting the number of acres plowed, schools built, and wages dispensed for “honest labor.” Bureaucrats like these had little interest in seeing their charges leave the reservation with private employers, unless the work was in “civilized” pursuits.

Indians were not allowed to leave the reservation without a pass from the agent. Hunting for deer, picking chokecherries, or visiting relatives on another reservation required a personal appeal at agency headquarters, which was often miles from the homesite, and in the opposite direction of the intended trip. The agent, for his part, could be counted on to exploit every angle to see that “his” Indians stayed put. Along the passage between savagery and civilization, conditions of itinerancy or even migrant labor were trapdoors to barbarism. For civilization to triumph once and for all, the fixity which Americans idealized (and which the Wild West show portrayed at its climactic settler's cabin defense) must be imposed on Indians.

So it was that Buffalo Bill's Wild West, the entertainment which climaxed with a show of settlers securing their stationary cabin against mounted, mobile Indians, paradoxically offered Indians an otherwise unthinkable mobility. In practically no other way than with a Wild West show could Lakota hope to travel overseas, or through eastern cities, especially with dozens of other Lakota for company. Although Cody claimed that the Indians were carefully supervised, in day-to-day show life they frequently ventured out from the camp on walking tours or even jaunts of several days' duration. As the years wore on, such outings were less and less supervised, and Indian freedom within the bounds of the show increased.
⁷

Travel away from the reservation allowed Lakotas to better retain proscribed spiritual and cultural traditions. By 1883, U.S. authorities had banned all Lakota religious ceremonies, except for overtly Christian ones. But Lakotas in the Wild West show, charged with reenacting Sioux defeat in the arena, found ample means of resisting spiritual alienation in the show camp. Wherever Buffalo Bill's Wild West made an appearance, a cluster of Sioux tipis soon rose on the horizon. Although most of the performers were men, women and children also accompanied the show. There were lots of experiments with new technologies and amusements. Accordions appeared in the show camp in Germany, and Lakota men could be found shouting and betting over games of dominoes. But all this innovation came amid a little Sioux village that provided a comforting simulacrum of a real village for the performers, with meals cooking over camp fires and the familiar rhythms of Lakota language on every side.
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Cody made no effort to constrain religion in the camp. Show Indians had learned to be circumspect about their religion where whites were concerned, but on the road, they disguised some of their rituals, like Poe's purloined letter, in plain sight. Visitors to the show camp often commented on “Indian steam baths.” These small, canvas-covered domes were actually sweat lodges, sacred structures, in which Lakotas made offerings and prayers before any new endeavor.
⁹
They popped up wherever the show went in Europe, from London to Hamburg, so that Wild West Lakotas engaged the many challenges before them with the help of all the spirits they could implore—and without a prying agent around to order their sweat lodge dismantled.

The help of spirits was welcome, because traveling great distances, sometimes across the Atlantic, was terrifying and often dangerous. North Atlantic storms and European illness took a heavy toll, and there were injuries and even deaths in the show. All circus-style entertainments were physically perilous workplaces, and the Wild West show was no exception. Cody himself was hurt on occasion. “There is hardly a day that some on[e] isn't hurt,” wrote Ed Goodman, Cody's nephew, who took a job selling programs in 1886. “The day Uncle Will got hurt there were 3 Indians, 2 mexicans, 1 cowboy, 1 hostler, and 1 canvas man got hurt. It was a general day for to get hurt. . . . Dick Johnson got two ribs broken this morning.”
¹⁰
The peril that performers faced made the show all the more relevant to their audiences, many of whose members endured almost incomprehensibly hostile workplaces. Between 1890 and 1917, some 72,000 railroad workers died in workplace accidents; two million were injured.
¹¹
Dangerous amusements were fitting for people with dangerous jobs.

Camp injuries were endured with few complaints, but every death was doubly unfortunate for Indians, whose numbers had been declining for decades in the face of starvation, epidemic disease, and American expansion. The prospect of dying far from home, with no hope of burial there, was a lonely one indeed. The term
oskate wicasa,
“show man,” was a badge of honor, and Lakotas honored their courage with songs, such as this one composed for Sam Stabber, otherwise known as White Buffalo Man.