Louis S. Warren (65 page)

Perhaps because of his refusal to reenact it, Cody's impact on public perceptions of Wounded Knee has been all but ignored. His aversion to staging a Wounded Knee simulacrum probably came from several sources. In all probability, his Indian performers would not have tolerated it. But also, the American public and press were split on the causes and meaning of the event. Many of the same newspapers that had bayed for blood in the weeks leading up to the massacre now turned around and denounced it. Others hailed the heroism of troops under savage fire. The army, too, was riven. No fewer than eighteen veterans of Wounded Knee received Congressional Medals of Honor. But General Miles himself called it “a general melee and massacre,” and ordered a court of inquiry into the conduct of the Seventh Cavalry's commanding officer, James Forsyth. (When the court of inquiry exonerated him, Miles ordered another, with the same result.) Until the end of his days, the general would lobby in vain for congressional compensation for Wounded Knee survivors, victims of an event he considered “most unjustifiable and worthy of the severest condemnation.”
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This was the cultural divide that Cody's entertainment followed, like a watershed on the Plains, allowing audiences to stake out their own opinions on the recent bloodshed without detracting from the spectacle of Ghost Dancers in the arena. Insofar as his position influenced popular memory of Wounded Knee, it was to establish the killings as a “massacre” of Indians rather than a “battle” of heroes. The show gained new authenticity by featuring Ghost Dance evangelists, but Cody, Burke, and others worked hard to create a middle ground where audiences could enjoy watching the Ghost Dance prisoners without necessarily embracing the violence perpetrated against them at Wounded Knee. Cody had, in fact, been careful to stake out an ambiguous space on the conflict since before his attempt to bring in Sitting Bull, as he warned about the “serious threat” of a Sioux uprising, but refused to commit to fighting the Indians himself.

Cody maintained his ambiguity throughout the conflict. When he returned to the reservation at Governor Thayer's request in early 1891, the massacre at Wounded Knee had already happened. In articles that went out under Cody's name to the
New York Sun
and the
New York Herald,
and which subsequently reappeared in Wild West show programs, Cody and Burke celebrated the army command, but they also broke with the most egregious, bloodthirsty propaganda. Cody's articles provided both grist for popular fantasies about dangerous Indians and an oddly politic suggestion that further violence was unlikely, so long as the government abided by its agreements with the Indians.
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According to Cody, there were 3,000 well-armed Indians in the vicinity—but 2,500 of them were friendly to the government. “It is like cooling and calming a volcano. Ordinary warfare knows no parallel.” The army had handled the situation masterfully. “The situation to-day,
so far as military strategy goes,
is one of the best-marked triumphs known in the history of Indian campaigns.” Indian raids on settlers had been prevented. The “dangerous game” had been caught in a “trap,” the Ghost Dancers held inside a “military wall” so that they could be calmed by the assurances of “progressive Indians” among them. He lauded all the officers in the conflict, who not only endured “much privation” themselves but “have expressed great sympathy for their unhappy foe and regrets for his impoverished and desperate condition.” Warning that “the Government and nation are confronted by a problem of great importance” in “remedying the existing evils,” Cody concluded that “intelligence and quick legislation can now do more than the bullet.” The articles, in other words, claimed no heroics for Cody, but continued Buffalo Bill's career-long endorsement of army strategy over regrettable Indian Service policy and the fickle, ration-slashing Congress.
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At the same time, Cody refused to endorse the violence of Wounded Knee. In the midst of praising the “presiding genius” of General Miles, Cody qualified his remarks: “I speak, of course, of the campaign as originally intended to overawe and pacify the disaffected portion” of the Indians. After all, “the Big Foot affair at Wounded Knee Creek was an unlooked for accident.”
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Accident or not, back on the road, Wild West show programs incorporated Cody and Burke's articles in a Barnumesque presentation of history, which allowed audiences to debate the meaning of the Ghost Dance and make up their own minds. Just as Barnum had presented his most curious exhibits, his FeeJee Mermaid and the What Is It?, alongside rival expert opinions so the audience could feel safe believing in the exhibits or in criticizing them, Buffalo Bill's Wild West programs offered different perspectives on the Ghost Dance and its climax at Wounded Knee, from which the audience could take their pick. Cody's newspaper articles from Pine Ridge were reprinted, along with a January 1891 telegram from General Miles to Cody in which the officer announced the situation was well in hand and that Nebraska state troops could withdraw. Readers who skimmed the programs might focus on Cody's warnings about the “savage foe,” overlook his imprecations against the failure to attend to the needs of the Sioux, and decide the Wounded Knee outrage was justified, or unavoidable.

But for spectators sympathetic to the Ghost Dancers, the programs included alternative viewpoints. Cody's careful distancing of himself from Wounded Knee—the “unlooked for accident”—was complemented by a lengthy, anonymous essay on “Ghost Dances in the West,” reprinted from the magazine
Illustrated America.
The piece concluded that the Ghost Dance was an honest expression of Christian faith by a people who had been cheated of their land. “As they brooded over their wrongs, the scarcity of rations, and miserable treatment, imagine with what joy they hailed the coming of Him who was to save and rescue them.” But it was not to be. “Even this last boon and comfort was refused by their conquerors,” who suppressed “the worship of any Indian who should dare to pray to his God after the dictates of his own conscience.”

Recognizing the contentiousness of the issue, Burke inserted a parenthesis after the essay, advising of its source, commending it for being “in many respects very accurate,” but warning that “the compiler gives it without comment, as the whole matter has yet to be investigated to get at bottom facts.” (In fact, the essay to some degree anticipated Dr. James Mooney's federally commissioned inquiry, in which the Ghost Dance was described as the millennial dream of an oppressed people, in 1896.)
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Bridging these conflicting viewpoints, and offering a middle ground for any who were uncomfortable choosing one or the other, was an essay on the Ghost Dance by Burke himself. The press agent suggested the tragedy was coda to a conquest that was less than moral, but certainly inevitable. The Indians' “grand and once happy empire” had now been “brought thoroughly and efficiently under the control of our civilization, or (possibly more candidly confessed) under the Anglo-Saxon's commercial necessities.” After all, Burke reminded his readers, if “civilization” was the fate of the world, its progress was suspiciously fast where profit margins were greatest. The savagery of Indian warfare, he mused, was of course the fault of Indians. But their fading resistance, “in another cause,” might represent “courage and tenacity as bright as that recorded in the pages dedicated to the heroes of Thermo[p]ylae.”

The essay appeared with a drawing titled “After the Battle—Field of Wounded Knee—Campaign 1890–91.” Drawn from photographs taken right after the massacre, it depicted dozens of dead Indians and empty, sagging tipis beneath a background of brooding hills. In the distance two soldiers and a scout with a wide hat survey the carnage. Snow lies thick on the fallen.

Whatever position one took on the event, Burke concluded, “the inevitable law of
the survival of the fittest,
must ‘bring the flattering unction to the soul' ” of the Indians who were conquered, and who would eventually “march cheerily to the tune of honest toil, industrious peace, and fireside prosperity.”
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In the end, civilization would embrace Indians, too. However it came, come it must. The show program's presentation of Wounded Knee reflected all the humanity—and all the self-acquittal—of America's traditional ambivalence toward Indian conquest. Buffalo Bill was many things, but by the time of Wounded Knee, he scouted mostly the terrain of ambiguity and ambivalence, the only place where mass entertainment could engage the injustice of massacre.

For Cody himself, the Wounded Knee imbroglio and the haste with which the Indian Service backed away from responsibility for the massacre allowed him to regain official trust in his treatment of Indians. This was a remarkable turnaround from the events of only two months before, when his show was held hostage to Indian Service inquiry. Authorities did not forget about the controversy, however, and they continued to keep close tabs on Indian education in the Wild West show.

For its part, the army did not manage to wrest authority over Indians away from the Department of the Interior. But they did succeed in placing a military officer in charge of Pine Ridge for at least the next few years. During that time, Cody had no trouble acquiring permission for Indians to leave the reservation with Buffalo Bill's Wild West. The acting Indian agent, Captain George LeRoy Brown of the U.S. Eleventh Infantry, was a friend of Cody's, with views on Indian performers that were close to the showman's:

Of course you understand that I share the feelings of all Army Officers in [regard] to your show and am very thoroughly convinced of its advantages as an educator for the Indians. It is conceded on all hands that traveling is a good civiliser and educator for white men. After a good many years of experience I fail to see any difference in the fundamental traits of character between an Indian and a white man, and the same causes, seem to me, to produce the same results, without regard to color, and differ only in degree.

Brown facilitated Cody's requests and made suggestions about how to circumvent antitheatrical Indian reformers and bureaucrats.
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Although he did no scouting in 1890, Buffalo Bill provided a symbol of Indian expertise and frontier savvy for an army hoping to recover Indian governance for themselves as the twentieth century approached. In the aftermath of Wounded Knee, the army continued these efforts. Troops marched through the reservations in a show of force, then returned to their posts, armed and waiting. Regular combat forces were stationed at Fort Robinson, on the southern edge of the Pine Ridge reservation, until 1919.
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They had put down the revolt that happened on the Interior Department's watch, a fact that gave them much credibility on Indian affairs. Cody's status as their most eminent civilian ally, and as employer of the Ghost Dance evangelists the Indian Service could not contain, would make it extremely difficult for the Indian office to challenge him, for a few years at least.

Cody owed his comeback to various people and influences: to his connections to the military and his friendship with General Miles, to his ability to maintain his pose as frontier scout without actually shooting at anybody, and to his extremely able publicist, John Burke. But his success in turning the dispute to his favor must be attributed above all to choices that Oglala performers made during the Ghost Dance troubles. The Wild West show's Indian performers would have suffered most from an official ban on Indian travel with Cody's show. In this sense, the victory over the Indian Service was at least as much theirs as it was Cody's. Although they remained silent on their motivations, it is not hard to see how they reinforced their image as “progressive” Indians. Back in Washington, in late 1890, as they rose to leave the inquiry into their treatment in the Wild West show, acting commissioner Belt warned the show Indians that “some little excitement” was “growing out of the religion of your people, who believe in the coming of a new Messiah.” He implored them to “use your influence and your exertions on the side of the Government.”
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Rocky Bear, Black Heart, and the others may have taken Belt's request as an order. If they feared that joining the Ghost Dance might impede future work with the Wild West show, they were probably correct.

Back at Pine Ridge, they certainly behaved as if such matters were on their minds. The Lakotas in the Wild West show refused to endorse allotment while they were traveling in 1889, but upon their return in 1890, they overwhelmingly supported the government in its fight against the Ghost Dance. U.S. agents hired dozens of Oglalas to scout for the army and serve as tribal policemen. So many of the show's Indians were among these that agent Royer, who had been a strong critic of the Wild West show before the troubles, now commended it. The Indians who returned from Buffalo Bill's Wild West show “stood by the government to a man,” wrote Royer. “The great number of them belong to the police and scout force.” John Burke telegraphed news of the alliance between the show's Indians and government forces during the troubles. Show publicity later extolled it.
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In fact, not all the men who had been with the Wild West show became government supporters, and at least one fought the army. But even his story suggests how the men and women who survived that killing winter decided to turn away from the Ghost Dance promise and toward the the limited cultural continuity and economic opportunity of the Wild West show.

Black Elk, who had caught up with Buffalo Bill in Paris after his two-year odyssey in Europe, returned home in 1889 to find his people starving. He became a leading Ghost Dancer. This was a decision he came to regret. When Big Foot and his people fell at Wounded Knee, Black Elk heard the shooting and rode to help the survivors. He had no gun, but charged the scattered troops again and again, driving them before him. He wore his Ghost Dance shirt. No bullets harmed him. With other refugees, he gathered at the stronghold between Manderson and Oglala, until he heard there was peace. Returning to his home at Pine Ridge, he found the people had fled in terror after the massacre, and were now in a fierce skirmish with more U.S. soldiers at nearby Drexel Mission. Black Elk rode into this battle, too, and was shot in the side. An older warrior, Protector, ran up to him and steadied him on his horse. “Let me go, I'll go over there,” said Black Elk, gesturing toward the troops. “It is a good day to die so I'll go over there.”