Louis S. Warren (70 page)

The sentimentalism of press accounts obscures the significance of such meetings. Throughout the eighteenth and for most of the nineteenth century, Lakota leaders cultivated alliances with European monarchs in hopes of restraining or influencing American policy. In the aftermath of the Plains Indian wars, the development of a new peacetime strategy for building relationships with foreign leaders—a kind of Sioux foreign policy—was now under way. As recently as 1881, Sitting Bull and his followers had been living in Canada, where they fled after the battle of the Little Big Horn to secure the protection of “the Grandmother Country” and of Queen Victoria from the vengeful Americans.
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Red Cloud requested that Nate Salsbury bring him an English flag in 1887, and Black Elk recalled that the queen bowed to them that year. In a sense, Red Shirt and his successors in the show were trying to open diplomatic channels.
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For William Brown, the chance to meet officials face-to-face no doubt had a special resonance. The new century was not kind to the Lakota, and as their complaints in 1908 suggested, it was especially frustrating for those who were educated. They had completed compulsory education at government boarding schools. Their skills and training should have qualified them for clerkship or even managerial positions. But they usually met with the same racial prejudice which stymied the ambitions of black, immigrant, and other nonwhite men and women: white employers would not hire them except in the most menial jobs.

Meanwhile, government agents tried to compel self-sufficiency. In 1902, Brown was dropped from ration rolls after authorities decided he was capable of fending for himself. When he tried to acquire work on road-building crews, he was turned away, because government-funded labor was reserved for those “unable to exist without assistance.” In the eyes of officials, Brown's herd of three or four dozen cattle and his ownership of an allotment disqualified him.
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Reductions in agency rations compelled families, including William Brown's, to combine scarce wages with the few traditional resources remaining, including wild foods. The challenges of gathering were greater than ever, because many of the best root and berry grounds were now beyond the bounds of the reservation. In October and November many Indians ventured off the reservation to unclaimed public lands where they hunted deer and small game and gathered chokecherries, other fruit, roots, and herbs to stock their larders for the winter. In the fall of 1903, Brown led his wife, children, and two other families into the Black Hills in northeast Wyoming. It was late summer, and the weather was good. The agent had given them a pass to be off the reservation. Berries were plentiful. The party traded moccasins to local ranchers for mutton. By all accounts, their tour of the backcountry was peaceful.

Like white men traveling in turn-of-the-century (or present-day) Wyoming, some of Brown's party had guns. But they hunted no large game. On their return, Brown's group joined up with Charlie Smith, also known as Runs-to-It, another Carlisle-educated Lakota who was on a similar expedition with his own extended family. The two groups joined for the trip back to the reservation. Together, they made up a train of fifteen wagons, full of Indian men, women, and children, making their way deliberately back to Pine Ridge.

On the evening of October 30, Sheriff Bill Miller, of Newcastle, Wyoming, arrived at the Indians' campsite with a posse. After Brown's wife fed them dinner, the posse attempted to arrest the Indians for hunting deer without licenses. Smith refused to submit to arrest, contesting the right of a sheriff from neighboring Weston County to make an arrest in Converse County, where the meeting took place. Brown struck a more diplomatic pose. At first, he offered to accompany the sheriff to Newcastle. But, as the other Indians were intent on leaving with Smith, he decided to remain with them. The lawmen left without making any arrests.

The Indians hastened to the reservation. They traveled all night, covering fifty miles in the next twelve hours. Sheriff Miller, meanwhile, deputized more locals. With his reinforced posse, he lay in wait for the Indians where the road crossed Lightning Creek. Consisting of mostly “cow-boys and bar-tenders,” the posse was, in the words of the official who investigated what happened next, “no Sunday-school class.”
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Afterward, surviving members of the posse claimed that they had ordered the Indian wagon train to halt, and the Indians had opened fire. Surviving Lakota said they never saw the lawmen until they stood up from hiding and began shooting, without so much as announcing who they were. The Indians turned their wagons and tried to escape, but almost immediately twelve-year-old Peter White Elk was killed when a bullet took the top of his head off. Charlie Smith, who flew to the boy's aid, was soon mortally wounded. Loudly singing his death song, he kept up a vigorous return fire, accompanied by William Brown and several other men, who took up positions around him. The shooting lasted only a few minutes. The posse killed four Indians that day, including Charlie Smith and his wife. Two white men, including Sheriff Miller, also lay dead.

Outside their hometown of Newcastle, the sheriff and his posse were roundly condemned. The event was a regional scandal. But none of the surviving white men was ever tried or punished.

Surviving Indians, on the other hand, were tried for murder, and their acquittal came about because, as one local white man put it, “the worst of the party are dead.”
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A series of hearings, trials, and investigations of Indian behavior followed. The homicidal white hostility toward poor people on a berry-picking expedition grieved and rankled the Lakotas. “We think the sheriff and his posse are guilty of murder,” explained Oglala council members George Sword and Jack Red Cloud in an open letter to the public, “but because they are white men we believe they will not be tried.” If any Indian had done such a thing, on the other hand, “he would undoubtedly get the full extent of the law.” Back at Pine Ridge, Lakotas preserved Charlie Smith's death song. Across the reservation, in painting, song, and story, they memorialized the savage white attack on a peaceful wagon train of Indian families.
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Brown's participation in the Wild West show was motivated by many of the same desires and responsibilities that took him on gathering expeditions into the Black Hills: the need for food and medicine, the chance to sell crafts, the freedom of travel, the requirements of his family. Five years later, authorities still regarded William Brown with suspicion, because of Sheriff Miller's attempt on his life. They dismissed his 1908 appearance in the Office of Indian Affairs as the agitations of one “chroni[c] fault-finder and trouble breeded,” who was, after all, “in that unfortunate row in Wyoming between the state officers and a party of Pine Ridge Indians.”
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Combined with his show business career, this history gave Brown a dire reputation, indeed.

The many ironies of his predicament suggest the complexity of Wild West show performance for Indians in general at the turn of the twentieth century. William Brown was a man of skill and economic savvy, as the size of his cattle herd suggested. In 1889, not long after he returned from Carlisle, he was married and had a daughter, and the Indian agent described him as “a good young man.” Yet he had almost no prospects for employment despite having followed the “the white man's road” to Carlisle and beyond.
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Like many others, his growing frustration with the lack of opportunities for educated Indians made him more contentious in the years after his return from Carlisle. As Brown was all too aware, depictions of Indian savagery in the Wild West show informed the continuing prejudices of white Americans against Indians. In 1903, Wild West show audiences watched Indians leave their tipis and raid the settler's cabin, and it was possible to believe that they had not changed in the many years since the Plains Indian wars.

And yet Brown's opportunities for countering the brutality of bigots who attacked an Indian wagon train extended to performance of this “historical” reenactment in which Indians attacked a white wagon train. From that curious platform, he retained a limited mobility, earned a livelihood, and even challenged Indian office bureaucrats and their racist policies. By being in the Wild West show and conforming to an old stereotype of Indian savagery, he became in some small way a partisan of Lakota progress.

Brown and other Lakota saw how education, the ability to read and write and argue the law, and mobility beyond the reservation allowed them at least to demand justice (without necessarily getting it) in the most egregious insults like the killings at Lightning Creek. These tools helped in the fight against the downward revision of rations and against the continuing racism of Great Plains society. In this sense, Buffalo Bill's Wild West was not just an economic portal, or a vessel for cultural and racial mixing; it was an arena for pushing the limits of Indianness itself.

This may indeed be its greatest contribution, and Buffalo Bill's most enduring legacy. In the grand scheme of progress, Indians were to disappear into history, followed shortly after by the cowboys who succeeded them, who would in turn vanish before farmers and commerce. The Wild West show drew vast crowds on the strength of its principals as vanishing attractions.

But paradoxically, the performance wonders in the Wild West show made audiences and performers alike wonder if they would ever vanish, or even if they should. In 1890, cowboy Warren G. Vincent, from Wyoming, wrote to his father from the show camp in Rome. He had been unable to see his father before he left the United States, and he wanted the older man to know why his son, a hardworking cowboy who loved the range, had done something so odd as to join a traveling show. The first time he saw the show, explained Vincent, he was drawn to its realistic combat, the high drama of horsemen unhorsed, then rising to fight again. “It was the best thing I ever saw in my life to see horses, men, and Indians falling.”

But it was the show's suggestion of a potential for change and transformation that captivated Vincent. In the Wild West show's potent mythology, the frontier turned men into horse-men, and lowly country folk like Cody himself into rich showmen. It was a heady vision for a young cowboy, who scraped, scrambled, hustled, and prayed to get enough money for horses, cattle, and some land of his own. And although he had no obvious love for Indians, he well understood how much they sought a new West through this show of the Old West. His reasons for joining the show were in this sense the same as theirs. “I cannot explain the diferant acts,” he told his father, “but if you could see this show it would make you think that cowboys and indians amounted to something.”
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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Buffalo Bill's America

AFTER WOUNDED KNEE, Cody did not learn he would be allowed to hire Indians again until March of 1891. Salsbury sought out new contingents of racial primitives—other Others—who could replace Indians. By the time the show regrouped in Strasbourg, in the spring of 1891, Salsbury and Cody had incorporated twelve Cossacks and six Argentine gauchos, as well as two detachments of regular European cavalry—twenty Germans, and twenty English—to join twenty Mexican vaqueros, two dozen cowboys, six cowgirls, a hundred Sioux Indians, and a cowboy band of thirty-seven.
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The additions were the culmination of Salsbury's earlier ideas for a show of world horsemen, paralleling developments in European circuses, which were employing Cossacks, Arabs, and other exotic trick riders and horsemen in Europe in the 1890s.
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This new Wild West show now toured parts of Western Europe. In Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II was a fan. Annie Oakley recalled “at least forty officers of the Prussian Guard standing all about with notebooks” to record the show's rapid deployment of railroad, horses, and ranks of men in arms. German military interest was echoed across the Atlantic, where the American army was studying circuses for similar reasons.
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After Germany came Belgium and the Netherlands, then a tour of the British provinces. Late in the fall, there was a reprise of
The Drama of Civi
lization at the East End Exhibition Hall in Glasgow.
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Despite the size and military presence of the new Wild West show, Cody found himself ever more besieged behind the lines. Louisa insisted that the newly married Arta and her husband, Horton Boal, assume management of Scout's Rest Ranch. Cody resisted, for it would mean evicting his sister Julia and her husband, Al Goodman. “I want you to live there just as long as you are contented there,” Cody wrote his brother-in-law. Louisa made life difficult for the Goodmans, and Cody lamented it. “I often feel sorry for her. She is a strange woman but don't mind her—remember she is my wife—and let it go at that. If she gets cranky just laugh at it, she can't help it.”
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But after a bitter squabble the Goodmans abandoned the fight and moved back to Kansas. Louisa, whose relations with Julia had always been cool, now had an ally at Scout's Rest in her daughter Arta. Her victory was short-lived. Arta and Horton abandoned the job within three years. Al Goodman returned to manage the ranch again. But this time, mindful of Louisa's hostility, Julia stayed away.
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In the spring of 1892, the Wild West show returned to Earl's Court, London. There was another command performance at Windsor Castle for Queen Victoria, who was enamored of the Cossacks.
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The tour was a success, but the novelty of the Wild West had faded considerably since 1887. To repeat the great fanfare of their London debut five years before, Cody and the company had to wait till the following spring, when the newly christened “Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World” opened outside the gates of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Extensive newspaper coverage of Cody's European successes heightened popular interest in the show, which had not toured the United States since 1888. In Chicago the new format recharged the show's authenticity and its frontier myth. Cody's connection to Sitting Bull and the Ghost Dance troubles, and the continuing presence of Ghost Dancers like Kicking Bear and Short Bull, provided a red-hot connection to the Far West and the American frontier, which in turn facilitated a depiction of the new acts—Cossacks, gauchos, and European cavalrymen—as relics of ancient racial frontiers.

To a degree, the circus roots of the new racial segments suggested the continuing dance of the Wild West show with the big top. Railroad circuses proliferated in the 1890s, until over a hundred of the giant amusements toured the United States after 1900. As modern corporations that displayed exotic peoples for popular amusement, the Wild West show and its circus competitors constituted “a powerful cultural icon of a new, modern nation-state,” in the words of historian Janet Davis.
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But the Congress of Rough Riders also hints at how the show's extended European sojourns had taught Cody and his publicists to speak of Eurasian and American frontiers in the same breath. When the Wild West cast visited the field of Waterloo in 1891, Cody told a journalist about the “striking resemblance” of this battlefield to the Little Big Horn. (Of course, the comparison allowed readers to make up their own minds about whether Custer was “the Napoleon or the Wellington of the conflict. He looked out for the arrival of Major Reno, who was destined either to be the Blucher or the Grouchy of the close of the fight.”)
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Back in Chicago, the opening at the world's fair reflected the development of the show's marketing strategy. By this time, Buffalo Bill's Wild West practically orbited the world's fairs and exhibitions which proliferated in the United States and Europe, from the New Orleans Cotton Exposition of 1885 to the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889. As popular celebrations of progress which explored the meaning of national expansion and newfound prosperity, world's fairs were ideal places for traveling entertainments to pitch their tents, especially a show of the “progress of civilization” like the Wild West show.
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The center of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 was the White City, a group of huge, neoclassical buildings, constructed of wood and plaster on reclaimed marshland along Lake Michigan, symbolizing the glories of America and containing exhibit space for every state and many nations, too. The architectural heart of the fair was the Court of Honor, a grand plaza with a huge pond and a fountain in the middle. Soaring over the watery mirror of the pond was the Statue of the Republic, a sixty-five-foot-tall, gold-plated Lady Liberty. The statue, the gleaming white buildings, the arcing fountains could move visitors to tears with their “inexhaustible dream of beauty,” in the words of poet Edgar Lee Masters. They could also be subjects of ridicule: the statue was widely known as “Big Mary.”
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The Wild West show was not in the White City, but outside the fair proper, along the route to the entrance, on what became known as the Midway Plaisance. Fair organizers reserved this space for exhibits that were too commercial, or too similar to circus or carnival attractions, for inclusion in the edifying White City. But Cody's success in this location was a finger in the eye of fair officials, who came to regret their decision to exclude him. Because of the joint attractions of the White City, the Wild West show, and the Midway, Cody and Salsbury sold well over three million tickets in 1893, making profits of over a million dollars. It is said that spectators sometimes mistook the Wild West show for the World's Fair, and went home satisfied.
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In recent years, scholars have followed the crowds to Buffalo Bill's 1893 season, taking imagined walks up the Midway for lessons in the rise of mass culture and Gilded Age notions of race, conquest, and progress. The kaleidoscopic attractions of the World's Columbian Exposition in many ways reflected or amplified aspects of Wild West teachings. Exhibits and displays on the Midway were situated so that those featuring the most “primitive” peoples—South Sea islanders and mock Ethiopian villages—were farthest from the White City. As one approached the gates of the exhibition proper, one encountered ever whiter, more “advanced” peoples. The Wild West show was right outside the White City gates. The social evolution of the Midway and the world's fair echoed the social evolution of Cody's arena (while inside the fair, one hot July night, historian Frederick Jackson Turner expounded on the role of “free land” in stimulating social evolution along the American frontier). Tickets to the Wild West show announced it as the “Key to All,” as if its story of relentless progress organized the fair's mysteries and unlocked the narrative which explained them all.
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But for modern readers who want to know how Gilded Age Americans thought about Buffalo Bill's Wild West, the 1893 season is at best a slippery key to a hall of mirrors. The world's fair, the Midway, and the Wild West show were infused with so much exhibitionism, outlandish display, performance, exotica, hoax, fraud, artful deception, and amusement as to turn an imaginary trip to Cody's show into a fun-house tour. The swirling cultural disjunctures of the world's fair left many observers disoriented even at the time. There were swimming races and boat races in the newly dredged lagoon in Lake Michigan, between Zulus and Turks. Visitors floated by in mock Venetian gondolas, poled by real gondoliers (imported from Venice) in ancient costume. Fair exhibits included a chocolate Venus de Milo, a giant horse and rider made of prunes, and, over in the Wisconsin Pavilion, a 22,000-pound cheese.
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In August, there was a Midway ball—one paper called it the “Ball of the Midway Freaks”—at which a white-clad, fez-wearing George Francis Train (said to have been the inspiration for Phileas Fogg, hero of Jules Verne's
Around the World in Eighty Days
) led a procession of exotic women onto the dance floor at the fair's natatorium. In short skirts made of tiny American flags, they waltzed and quadrilled with eminent Chicago gentlemen in black dress suits until four-thirty in the morning.
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The image of Cody's show as a bastion of Americanism and originality in a world of effete culture was already traditional. In 1893, Chicago critics welcomed Buffalo Bill's Wild West as a natural, American counterpart to all the mock Greek and Roman statues, bone-white neoclassicism, and flat-out weirdness of the White City. “There,” wrote Amy Leslie, pointing to the Wild West, “is the American Exposition.” At Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World, visitors could “find Americans, real Americans . . . if not in the audience in the performance.”
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The bizarre distractions of the world's fair context make it harder to deduce what visitors saw in the Wild West itself, and besides, the show's whopping 3.8 million admissions were perhaps less significant than they seem. Unknown numbers of those millions were return customers. The show sold 2 million tickets during the 1886–87 appearances at Erastina and Madison Square Garden, when the number of return visitors (who had no Midway Ball, gondolas, or giant cheese to attract them) was probably much lower.
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In the end, most Americans who saw the show saw it not in Chicago but much closer to home, and the constant cross-references between White City and Wild West in 1893 tell us more about the meaning of the world's fair than they do about how most Americans understood the Wild West show in its most successful decade.

The Chicago season of 1893, where the Rough Rider spectacle unfolded amidst a global extravaganza, underlies the common historical argument that Cody's new format infused America's newfound overseas ambitions with frontier mythology and expressed public sentiment for empire. To be sure, Cody's show did resonate with U.S. foreign affairs, in complex ways, as we shall see in the next chapter. But public commentary about the show suggests the Rough Rider drama engaged the public on more familiar ground: the challenges of urban living, industrialization, and immigration, all of which touched and shaped daily life for the millions who attended the show in 1893 and after.

In this regard a more revealing season than that of 1893 is the following year's six-month stand in Brooklyn, which was in many ways the apogee of its long stands. The show's open-air ambience was in keeping with the way most spectators saw it, whether it was appearing in Elkhart, Indiana, or Stockton, California. Moreover, the venue was an independent, fully industrialized city, allowing us to see how the nostalgic spectacle of the vanishing (or vanished) frontier appealed to the increasingly urban populace. The completion of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883 had initiated a furious expansion. By 1894, Brooklyn's overall population approached 900,000, and was growing by 25,000 people per year. It was already half the size of New York, which was the nation's largest city and the destination of most Brooklyn commuters who, six days a week, crossed the new bridge to work. Most of Brooklyn's buildings were homes, but it was also America's fourth-largest industrial metropolis. Half the sugar in the United States was refined there. The city's giant grain elevators had four times the capacity of New York City's, and its piers unloaded the cargo of four thousand ships a year.
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For our task, the city provides a better indication than a world's fair of how the show was received. In contrast to the phantasmagoria of the World's Fair, there were no competing attractions for the Wild West in 1894. Construction of Brooklyn's legendary amusement parks at Coney Island would not begin for another year.
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The Wild West show's Brooklyn summer was the culmination of over a decade of show appearances, and it was also the last of the show's long stands in the United States. Beginning in 1895, a new partnership with James A. Bailey, of Barnum & Bailey, would put the show on the road for one- and two-night stands.
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Historians have often summarized the show's new format—Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World—as merely an expanded version of the original entertainment. But it was more than that. Judging by the growth in clippings pasted into surviving scrapbooks, the appeal of the Congress of Rough Riders was deeper and broader than the original Wild West show. The crowds who came to see it were distinct from the crowds of the mid-1880s, and they saw it in different ways. Although nostalgia for the frontier was as great as ever, the show was now much more than a spectacle of a vanished world. In surprising ways, audiences drew lessons in the challenges of urban life, and their possible solutions, from this show of frontier drama.