Louis S. Warren (62 page)

Still, the show's rising profile meant that any misstep with Indians might easily play into the hands of assimilationists. Indeed, this soon happened. In January of 1887, as critics raved about Buffalo Bill's Wild West and
The
Drama of Civilization
at Madison Square Garden, a New York congressman called for an investigation of this entertainment which, in his mind, had de facto government sponsorship to exploit Indians.

In response, George Bates, who was responsible for Indian supervision within the show, indignantly referred authorities to the Reverend C. H. Maul, pastor of the Baptist church at Mariner's Harbor on Staten Island, “whose church was attended [by Indians] twice each Sabbath for three months”; the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, Plymouth Church, Brooklyn; the Reverend T. DeWitt Talmadge, of Brooklyn Tabernacle, “where our Indians attended [a] divine service and where they are to attend again next Sunday”; and the Reverend Mr. Hughes, of Trinity Baptist Church in New York, “where they attend Service every Sunday evening.”

If a schedule of religious observance befitting the most zealous Christian was not enough to convince the doubters, Bates supervised an ongoing Indian tour of the institutions of civilization, including New York's City Hall, “where the Indians were taken, introduced, and instructed in the working of the city government”; the offices of the
New York World,
where they were “instructed in newspaper making”; as well as Central Park, Bellevue Hospital, Blackwell's Island, the post office, and a public school.
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Despite these assurances, and despite the complaints of Cody and his managers that Indians had long been part of medicine shows and other unsavory entertainments without federal authorities paying the least attention, the Indian office put the Wild West under intense scrutiny. Other shows may have hired Indians, but by 1886, the Wild West show hired by far the most. To the Indian office, the Wild West show was most of all a new genre of Indian performance, wherein dozens of Indians, some of them renowned war leaders, simulated life before conquest. Officials needed a new policy to go with it. So authorities sent letters of inquiry to every reservation agent, requesting their report on which Indians had been out with Wild West shows or other entertainments, what impact the experience had on them, and what influence such figures retained among their tribe after their return.

Although no evidence emerged to support critics' charges of moral debasement in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, the case against it developed as Indian agents performed a two-part harmony of antitheatricalism and assimilation. Their reports condemned shows for encouraging “idleness and dissipation,” and making Indians reluctant to wear Euroamerican clothing, farm, and attend church or school. They encouraged disregard of “proper authority.”
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Like reenacting train wrecks and robberies for young boys, letting Indians perform in Wild West shows did not “encourage the Indians in legitimate or honorable habits of industry,” wrote one agent.
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“The only show that an Indian should be connected with or take an interest in,” wrote another, “is the State or County Fair where he can exhibit his farm produce and well kept stock on the same footing as the white man, where the showing would be creditable to the Indian and to the Department.”
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No agent spoke in favor of Wild West shows, and the litany of evil attributed to them—syphilis, drunkenness, debauchery, rebelliousness, laziness, and just plain sin—suggests how much the convergence of Indians and show business brought America's latent antitheatricalism to the surface. “I do not think the Government should permit Indians to connect themselves with shows,” wrote a Kansas agent. The Indian having been educated to the “romantic barbarism” of “stage robbery, daring feats of horsemanship, and fantastic dressing” for centuries, “he should now be taught useful practical lessons of real life; such as will secure him a sound body, comfortable clothing, a permanent home, and the knowledge, that by honest toil alone, men become happy, successful, and even great.” Show business could only be a “material and moral injury to the Indian who engages in it.”
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The powerful hold of antitheatrical prejudices on the Indian office only echoed broader middle-class sentiment. The vehemence of these opinions meant that Cody could never allow his show to be presented merely as a show, a series of acts in an arena, if it was to survive. To succeed, Cody—and the show's Indians—had to convince detractors that under the frontiersman's guiding hand, Indians were not just playing in a drama of civilization; they were passing from savagery into civilization. The public had to be persuaded that Indian performers—who appealed to white, middle-class audiences because of their racial distinctiveness—were becoming more like middle-class white people in the audience (a sequence which could only result, ultimately, in the “vanishing” of Indians, and of the show itself). Buffalo Bill's Wild West became not just a show, but a community balanced on a razor's edge between the savagery of entertainment and the enlightenment of civilization.

Cody intended his imposture as a great scout to be the opposite of the frontier confidence man on the Plains, but here the rhetoric of Cody's opponents situated him as a confidence man. (The charge has proved durable: it is, in essence, the same complaint that director Robert Altman made about Cody in 1976, in
Buffalo Bill and the Indians.
) Many believed Cody was corrupting the innocence of his charges, the naive and honest Indians, by shepherding them into an industry of decadence, a realm of savagery that compounded the flaws and lapses of civilized man. The “moral and spiritual degradation” of show Indians was “fearful to say the least,” wrote an agent. “A bright young man goes to one of these shows for a few months and when he returns he has lost all the bright manly looks indicative of purity and all respect for himself and for the white man's instruction.” Indeed he had become one of “a worthless and criminal class bringing back all the vices” of those he had associated with, including gambling, venereal disease, and addiction to “intoxicants.”
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Cody continued to fend off these complaints as they poured into the offices of Indian Service bureaucrats in Washingon, but in the end their sheer persistence finally provoked a crisis in 1890, after a particularly hard year for Indians in Buffalo Bill's Wild West. Injuries were common enough, but it was illness that carried away at least four of the Lakotas with the show during the European tour that year. Two of these, Featherman and Swift Hawk, became ill and were left in the care of doctors in a Marseilles hospital. Show managers arranged a private room and personal care for them, and left money for them to return to the show when they were well. But they died soon after. Another man, Goes Flying, died of smallpox in Naples. Still another, Little Ring, died in his sleep from heart disease.
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Coming on the heels of the investigation into the effect of show business on Indians, these Indian deaths seemed to validate antitheatrical prejudices, and assimilationists were not long in saying so. Their opportunity came when five Indians departed the show early and arrived in New York, bound for home. Cody's managers had paid their passage through to the reservation. They were accompanied by Fred Mathews, stage driver for the Wild West show and a former officer in the Pawnee scouts. But one of the Indians in this group, Kills Plenty, was taken ill and had to be hospitalized in New York. His companions—Eagle Horn, White Horse, Bear Pipe, and Kills White Weasel—waited for him to recuperate. He, too, soon died.

With few exceptions, Indians were not citizens in 1890, nor would they be until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. They could not vote, and when they returned from overseas, these indigenous Americans had to pass through immigration control. On their way through the port of New York, Kills Plenty and his companions met retired General James O'Beirne, the assistant superintendent of immigration in New York. According to O'Beirne, the men complained that they received poor treatment and poor food in Buffalo Bill's show, and that they had secured permission to return home only after great suffering on their part. Later, after Kills Plenty died, newspapers reported that they fell to weeping when O'Beirne showed them a photograph of their dead comrade. Such open displays of sorrow conflicted with ideals of white manliness and noble savagery alike. “The fact that these Indians were able to cry is an evidence that they have been weakened by contact with civilization and the show business,” reported a columnist.
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O'Beirne's allegations may have been imaginary, and his paternalism, while typical of officials who dealt with Indians, was certainly misplaced. “The Indians with Eagle Horn,” he wrote, “came here without an interpreter, or anyone to conduct them, or to supply their wants, excepting a boy from an immigrant boarding house who fortunately came to me.”
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In fact, Fred Mathews had accompanied them. Besides, Indians routinely set out on excursions of a day or longer while in Europe. Some of the Indians in this party could speak English. The idea of Indians traveling alone shocked Americans, but being able to do so was one of the reasons why Indians worked with Buffalo Bill in the first place.

Whether or not the Indians had actually made any complaint, O'Beirne forwarded his version of the encounter to authorities and the press. Suddenly, the Wild West show was at the center of a major scandal over the treatment of Indians. Charges of mistreatment, all of them relayed by O'Beirne or other officials, splashed across the front pages of major dailies, along with cartoons of Uncle Sam taking disaffected Indians under his wing after they fled Europe and the Wild West show.
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By the time the 1890 season ended, then, the assimilationists were on the verge of victory. Cody and Salsbury faced the very real prospect that they would not be allowed to hire Indians again. Caught by surprise, Cody dispatched John Burke to rebut the allegations. But by this time, even Cody's sympathizers in the government had to agree to an investigation of those Indians still with the show. When they returned to the United States in the early fall, No Neck, Black Heart, and others testified before an inquiry in the Office of Indian Affairs, which weighed the morality of show business as much as Indian employment in it. “You are engaged in the exhibition or show business,” observed the acting commissioner of Indian Affairs, A. C. Belt. “It is not considered among white people a very helpful or elevating business. I believe that that which is not good for the white people is not good for the Indians, and what is bad for the white people is bad for the Indians.”

The Indians, however, defended their work as adamantly as any white performer, and they turned the inquiry into a pointed denunciation of Indian policy by comparing conditions in the show with those at Pine Ridge. The contrast reflected poorly on the Indian Service. Rocky Bear began by pointing out that he had long served the interests of the federal government, or “the Great Father,” by encouraging the development of reservation agencies. He worked in a show that fed him well, “that is why I am getting so fat,” he said, stroking his cheeks. It was only in returning to the reservation that “I am getting poor.” If the Great Father wanted him to stop appearing in the show, he would stop. But until then, “that is the way I get money.” When he showed his inquisitors a purse filled with $300 in gold coins—“I saved this money for to buy some clothes for my children”—they were silenced.

Black Heart, too, denounced the allegations of mistreatment. “We were raised on horseback; that is the way we had to work.” Cody and Salsbury “furnished us the same work we were raised to; that is the reason we want to work for these kind of men.”
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The inquiry concluded in Cody's favor. But if the charges were overblown, there is a possibility that frictions within the Indian contingent contributed to them. According to press correspondents, the five Indians who passed through immigration and triggered the investigation had complained not only that food and clothing in the show were scarce (charges which proved incorrect), but that “Rocky Bear, the chief, and Broncho Bill, the interpreter, are cruel in their treatment of the Indians.” Allegedly, when White Horse reached home he planned to tell his cousin Red Cloud about the matter, “and the probable result will be that Buffalo Bill will be compelled to hire a new lot of Indians.”
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At the inquiry, the other Oglalas vigorously denied the shortage of food and clothing. But curiously, none of them denied that there had been disputes over Rocky Bear's leadership.

Indeed, it would have been unusual had there not been some tension over it. Oglalas were not a modern state, but a decentralized people, a network of kin with chiefs who led by persuasion and example. Their transformation to wage-earning employees required considerable adjustments on their part, most of which remain hidden from us. Within the show, Indians vied with one another for the privileges Cody dispensed, particularly the office of “chief” of the Indian contingent, since it paid $125 per month, considerably more than standard performance roles. Jealousies and rivalries among Indians sometimes affected their performance. Rocky Bear would quit the show and go home after being refused the position of contingent chief in 1892, and Luther Standing Bear would blame his lackluster early performance as chief of show Indians in 1903 on subversive advice he received from a jealous Oglala underling, Sam Lone Bear.
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These rivalries help explain why some of the most vehement critics of Indian employment in Wild West shows were actually other Indians. On the reservations, questions of who went to the show, and how they were paid, inspired some controversy, and rivals of the Indians who were fortunate enough to be selected sometimes attempted to influence the show—or terminate it—by importuning each other and the government. Red Cloud's interference kept some Oglalas from joining in 1887, making it necessary for Cody to request that fifteen more men be sent to him just before the show left for Europe. Two years later, the aging chief sought payment of twenty-five cents per month from each Indian who went with Buffalo Bill's Wild West.
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In 1897, he and several other Lakota demanded that the government force Cody and Salsbury to break off their agreement with James F. Asay, a trader in Rushville, Nebraska, who allowed Indians to swap a month's wages for store merchandise in advance of their show contracts, but who levied “the most outrageous charges” for his goods.
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