Louis S. Warren (68 page)

There were real Mexican nationals in the show, about whom very little information survives. The vaquero contingent included Vincente Oropeza, a legendary roper whose performance inspired the young Will Rogers. Oropeza worked bullfights in Mexico when he was not with the Wild West show, and we may assume that other Mexicans also worked internationally, appearing in bullfights or other entertainments in Mexico, and in Wild West shows and circuses north of the border at different times of year.
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Cody left no clues to his reasons for simultaneously casting the Esquivels as Mexicans, white cowboys, and gauchos, but we can guess that their facility with animals and men was a factor. They could perform the rope tricks and horseback feats required of both cowboys and vaqueros, and if Joe Esquivel played a gaucho in the arena, then he likely learned their signature skill of throwing the
bola,
a leather thong with iron balls at each end, from the genuine gauchos who were with the show in 1893.

But at least as important as the Esquivels' arena talent must have been their powers of persuasion over people, especially the show's cowboys. Cy Compton, Ed Richards, and other cowboys included renowned rodeo performers and horse breakers. Generally, the contingent was hardworking and well behaved. But like cowboys on the Plains, they gambled and drank in the off-hours. As Harry Webb suggests, fists were as legitimate a means of resolving disputes as practical jokes—and almost as entertaining.

As we have seen, the show's viability as a respectable family entertainment required sublimation of cowboy aggression. In this connection, motivating cowboys and keeping them in line required formidable diplomatic and managerial talents. Clues suggest the Esquivel brothers had these in abundance. Recall that Pedro Esquivel was fluent enough in French to correspond with the Marquis Folco de Baroncelli. Tony Esquivel's daughter recalled that her father grew up speaking Spanish, English, and Polish (having learned the last language from his mother, a Polish immigrant to Texas). After several years in the Wild West show, he had mastered Lakota, perhaps the better to defuse the tensions that sometimes arose between show Indians and cowboys.
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Tony Esquivel commanded respect simply through his horsemanship. “The best rider in the show got thrown yesterday,” wrote cowboy George Johnson from London in 1892. “He is a Mexican and he has been with the Show for eight years.”
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Recalling his confrontation with the show's chief of cowboys, Luther Standing Bear credited Cody with intervening on behalf of the young Indian who had been given one of the cowboys' sour mounts. But smoothing over such disputes was part of the cowboy chief's job. That year the cowboy chief was Joe Esquivel, who may have acted without Cody's direction.
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Similarly, cowboys and Indians played antagonists, but behind the scenes relations were more complex because at least some of the white cowboys had Sioux families. By the early 1880s, William “Bronco Bill” Irving, a white cowboy, had earned a reputation as a top hand and a superb bronc rider in South Dakota's Black Hills. He also spoke fluent Lakota, a considerable asset in his marriage to Ella Bissonett, a Lakota woman. He joined the Wild West show at its beginning, and remained with Cody and Salsbury for many years. Cabinet photos of the Irving family, with Ella in traditional Lakota finery, her husband in cowboy hat, chaps, and moccasins, and their fiveyear-old son, Bennie, wearing a similar Indian-cowboy costume, were popular in London and elsewhere.
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Similarly, William “Billy” Bullock joined the show's cowboys in 1883. His father, William G. Bullock, had been a merchant in the Lakota country since the early 1860s, when he took a Lakota wife. His marriage cemented a political alliance with the Oglalas, whose leaders, particularly Red Cloud, regarded him as a trusted ally and a go-between in negotiations with the U.S. government. By the late 1870s, William G. Bullock was ranching in the Black Hills. Billy, his mixed-blood son, became a skilled roper and bronc rider, and hired on as a Wild West show cowboy for the first five years of the show.
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In 1883, Irving and Bullock traveled together from Pine Ridge to Colville, Nebraska, for the show's first dress rehearsal, the occasion of Pap Clothier's ordeal. On that journey, they were accompanied by John Y. Nelson, the white man whose marriage into Red Cloud's family had been an asset to Cody ever since 1877, when Nelson traveled with Cody's stage troupe as a translator for Sword and Two Bears. In the Wild West show, Nelson sometimes drove the Deadwood stage. On other occasions, he was the hunter who was just returning to the settler's cabin as it was attacked. On still other occasions, he appeared as a cowboy. But always, his skills as an interpreter, and as a venerated senior member of a Lakota family who was also a white man, made him an essential go-between for Cody and his Indian performers.
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Cody shifted from Pawnees to Lakotas in 1886, and the move was eased by the show's prior acquisition of Irving, Bullock, and Nelson, three show cowboys who were fluent in Lakota, and married to or descended from Lakota women. Irving and Bullock in particular were widely noticed for their cowboy skills, while Irving's son Bennie often could be found among the Indian contingent. In cabinet photographs, he wears beaded moccasins and a cowboy hat, and is billed as “The Smallest Cowboy in the World.”
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According to legend, in 1885 John Y. Nelson's children—who venerated Red Cloud as an ancestor—appeared in the “Attack on the Settler's Cabin,” as white children facing imminent abduction by Indians.
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To understand how the show community cohered, then, we must see its peoples as possessing not only cultural differences but also conjoined histories which had long required at least some of them to innovate in living arrangements and to mediate deep differences. Mixed-blood familial relations were no interracial utopia. John Y. Nelson claimed that whenever his wife's people went to war against the American army, he left his tipi to scout for the troops, while his wife, and presumably his children, stayed with the Sioux.
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During the late 1870s, a Sioux horse raid swept up a number of horses from William G. Bullock's ranch in the Black Hills. His partner, Jim Hunton, took Billy Bullock and other cowboys to retrieve the horses. They succeeded, but during a gunfight with the Sioux raiders, Hunton was killed. “Some of the Indians we have in this show were in that horse-stealing expedition,” Billy Bullock explained to a London correspondent in 1887. The chief of the show's Indians in 1887 was Red Shirt, “and I won't swear that Mr. Red Shirt didn't have a hand in it,” remarked the cowboy. “They are all very close, however, as to which of them shot Jim.”

But Billy Bullock did not carry grudges. He might have warred against some of the Indian contingent in the past, but some of them were kin. “Mr. Red Shirt is my uncle,” he explained, perhaps with some exaggeration (or perhaps not). “He is a very good sort of fellow. . . . He and I are very excellent friends. You see I speak his language, and whenever he wants anything fixed up he usually comes to me. I also do his correspondence, especially the private part of it.”
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So, too, with “Bronco Bill” Irving. Rocky Bear, head of the show's Indian contingent in the late 1880s and at various times in the 1890s, was Bronco Bill's father-in-law. (The close ties between them may have aggravated complaints about Rocky Bear and Irving among those Indians on whose behalf O'Beirne complained in 1890.)
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How do we reconcile the show's displays of mixed-blood men and their Indian families with its message of white racial triumph? Cody's publicists struggled with this very question, and they came up with some powerful answers. One strategy was to raise the class status of mixed-blood men. John Y. Nelson became one of “the most honored and reliable” men who “by general honesty of character and energy, has gained fame and respect among whites and Indians.” Billy Bullock was identified in show programs as “a half-breed Sioux, and a good combination of the best blood of that justly-famed fighting nation, allied, through Indian rites and ceremonies, with the blue blood of the East.”
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Elevating the class status of Nelson, and of Bullock's white ancestors, made their interracial unions seem less socially subversive, because upper-class status made them remote from the middle-class audiences who flocked to the show.

In other ways, mixed-blood families were less frightening than we might suppose, not unlike Annie Oakley's display of feminine sharpshooting. In this sense, the families of Nelson and Irving were more like freaks in the circus, their weirdness underscoring the “normality” of whiteness among the cowboy contingent. They were miscegenated exceptions that proved the rule of white racial purity. For the most part, cowboys looked white. Indians were convincingly “Indian.” The presence of a few mixed-blood families suggested the possibility of race mixing, and the temptation of interracial sex. But in doing so, it simultaneously underscored the virtues of the majority of white cowboys, and of Cody himself—and, by extension, of American white men—in resisting frontier temptations, especially Indian and Mexican women.

But for us, performers' transgression of the show's race lines suggests the illusory nature of race itself. Show publicity notwithstanding, skills like bronco busting and rope throwing were not biologically transmitted. They were cultural attributes which were learned and practiced. Just as the first U.S. cowboys acquired their skills because they were willing to mimic Mexican vaqueros, Cody's Wild West show could not have existed without the crossing of racial boundaries that gave rise to cowboys who spoke Spanish, French, and Lakota.

Racial identities are cultural artifacts which masquerade as “natural” categories. In this sense, they are an ongoing deception which the public practices every day. The ability of some people to “pass,” to deceive the public into believing they are of one race when their ancestry supposedly consigns them to another, subverted the supposedly “natural” boundaries that defined America's racial hierarchies. The slipperiness of racial characteristics in this regard, and the confusion that ensued as Americans tried to sort individuals into ever more complicated “racial” groups on the basis of supposedly self-evident features—skin color, head shape, nose size, and so forth—combined with their centrality to social order, made them a fit subject for popular amusement. They were at the heart of artful deceptions like Barnum's What Is It? and the minstrel show, in which white performers so convincingly donned blackface and assumed “Negro” song and dance traditions that many audiences ceased to see them as white men. Conversely, when African Americans began performing minstrel shows after the Civil War, they were often suspected of being white men in disguise.
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The Wild West show, and its Congress of Rough Riders, was a kind of reverse minstrel show, with its nonwhite members occasionally masquerading as white men to better persuade a largely white audience of their own superiority. Buffalo Bill cast racially Mexican wranglers and mixed-blood men as cowboys, appropriating their skills as white. Sustaining a narrative of white racial destiny paradoxically required racially subversive casting of nonwhite performers in white roles.

AS STANDING BEAR and Louise Rieneck have shown us, Wild Westerners crossed racial frontiers not only semisecretly within the show but also in day-to-day life. Newspapers had a field day when a Pawnee man they called “Push-a-Luck” eloped with a white woman from Newark in 1886, and reports of other Indians in romantic relations with whites occupied press columns, too.
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John Shangrau, Lakota interpreter for the show and a mixed-blood of French and Sioux ancestry, married a Liverpool woman in 1892.
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During the Wild West show's second tour of Europe, Nate Salsbury hired a governess for his children, an Englishwoman named Clara Richards. In 1893, she married Tony Esquivel—he who embodied “the stock of the Mexican or the half-breed.” They had five daughters before his death in 1914.
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Collectively, the cast of the Wild West show was like one of the era's popular magicians, their racial imposture a giant sleight of hand; with one hand they encouraged audiences to believe in immutable barriers and interminable competition between races as historical fact while with the other, in private, they befuddled, contradicted, and dissolved those same racial lines.

Indeed, Indian men were practically overwhelmed with offers of white women's companionship. Billy Bullock translated Red Shirt's correspondence in London. “You would be surprised at the number of letters he receives, and from ladies, too. I guess your English ladies are original,” said the bemused Bullock to a reporter.
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Jacob White Eyes, who toured with the Wild West show through southern France in 1905–6, carried on a relationship with a Frenchwoman.
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After he returned to Pine Ridge, White Eyes fondly recalled the comparative sexual openness of Europe. “I would like to have some Bull-fight postal card and some Ladies photograph without clothing,” he wrote to Marquis Folco de Baroncelli. “[I]t is pretty scarce in America.”
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For all the transgression of racial frontiers by the Wild West cast, and for all the shifting back and forth between white, Mexican, and gaucho identities in the show, Indians were one touchstone of authenticity which remained constant in the arena. Buffalo Bill's theatrical melodramas had presented dozens of non-Indian “supers” as Indians, and competing circuses and Wild West shows passed off peoples of all races as Indians at one time or another. But non-Indian performers were not allowed to pose as Indians in Buffalo Bill's Wild West. Just as Cody did not allow others to pass themselves off as him (although many claimed he did), he protected the authenticity of the show's Indians, recognizing them and himself as essential to the umbrella of authenticity which allowed the show's larger fictions to remain credible.
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