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In Canada, the American colonies, and Mexico, governments paid a handsome sum for the scalps of Native men, women, and children.3 In eighteenth-century New Hampshire, you could earn one hundred pounds for every male Native scalp you turned in, fifty pounds for each scalp of a Native woman, and twenty-five pounds for the scalp of each Native child.4 These were not individually named Native people who were wanted for particular crimes—the reward was for any Native scalp, for no other reason than the act left the world with one less Native person.
While both Natives and Europeans used scalping as a weapon in battle, the European use of scalping as one of their many tools of genocide would be largely erased from textbooks. In place of this gruesome history, Americans are widely taught half truths glorifying the supposed suffering and heroism of European colonizers.
The story of Buffalo Bill’s scalping of Yellow Hand would become a part of that mythology—a story that he largely invented, just as he had invented his own legend. Before William F. Cody was Buffalo Bill, he was a lot of other things. Cody had worked as a farmer, a teamster, a trapper, a driver, and a soldier. But throughout much of it, Cody maintained dreams of taking the stage as a successful actor.
Cody was given the name Buffalo Bill for his talent in slaughtering buffalo (now known as American bison). Buffalo were plentiful around the country, and hunting them was a popular sport, but Cody was obscenely prolific in killing—claiming to have shot dead 4,280 buffalo in just eighteen months.5 At first, Cody hunted buffalo for food. He got a job with the railroad companies to kill buffalo in order to feed railroad workers. But quickly, the work became about more than killing buffalo; it became a part of killing Indians.
As American colonizers looked to expand their territory westward with the building of railroads in the mid- to late nineteenth century, they came into direct conflict with the Native people who had lived on those lands for centuries. Prime railroad territory was often prime grazing territory, and valuable resources like gold were found in places where the Sioux hunted. The US government had declared de facto total war against Native people wherever they stood between the United States and its expansion west. The United States attacked Native people in every way it could—fighting combatants on the battlefield, killing women and children in their homes, spreading disease, forcing relocation—nothing was off limits. But still, Native communities fought to maintain their lands, and fought well.
“Cheyenne people, Lakota people, and Arapahoe people at that time were basically freedom fighters trying to defend themselves, their homelands, and their way of life,” Russell Brooks, a Cheyenne filmmaker, scholar, and educator explained to me.6
In 1869, facing a protracted battle with Native tribes like the Sioux, President Ulysses S. Grant appointed Phillip Sheridan as commanding general of the army and asked him to help solve the “Indian Problem” once and for all. Sheridan reached out to William Tecumseh Sherman, who had distinguished himself with his scorched-earth battle tactics during the Civil War, for advice. Sherman observed that wherever buffalo existed, there would be Native people, and they would continue to fight for land wherever the buffalo roamed. Sherman’s advice to Sheridan was simple: remove the buffalo in order to remove the Indian. “I think it would be wise to invite all the sportsmen of England and America there this fall for a Grand Buffalo hunt, and make one grand sweep of them all,” Sherman wrote to Sheridan.7 No more buffalo, no more Indians.
As Cody gained a reputation as a skilled hunter, he went to work for Sheridan, killing as many buffalo as he could. Buffalo hunting became a wildly popular sport for white people in the West—well, “sport” is far too generous a term, because there was little sportsmanship involved. Men from all over the country boarded trains headed west in order to shoot buffalo with .50-caliber rifles from train windows. They killed thousands of buffalo a day, leaving the animals’ lifeless bodies where they fell on the plains to rot.
Wealthy and powerful men from the East Coast and even Europe rode west to join in on the fun, guided by William Cody, by this point known as Buffalo Bill. As journalists traveled with the wealthy men to document the hunts for newspapers across the country, Cody saw his first real opportunity for fame. As Buffalo Bill started featuring in major newspaper stories as a symbol of the adventures to be had in the Wild West, Cody capitalized on the attention. He began partnering with the authors of dime-store novels and started commissioning plays about his exploits. Soon, Cody was regularly traveling back and forth—east to star in stage shows, and then back west to continue the wholesale slaughter of buffalo.8
As famous hunters like Cody popularized buffalo hunting and countless men joined in the killing, they found that they had to travel farther west in search of buffalo as numbers dwindled. The excitement following the widespread slaughter of buffalo began to wane. Cody, now having tasted celebrity, went in search of greater fame and found it in battle. An experienced scout with the US Army, he signed on to join in the Plains Wars in 1876, announcing from the stage of one of his shows that he was leaving “play acting” in search of the “real thing.” He packed his costume and went off to war.
Opportunity struck a little over a month after Cody joined the 5th Cavalry in southern Wyoming. A small band of Cheyenne warriors had been spotted heading west in pursuit of two US military couriers. Cody gained permission from his superiors to take a small group of fighters to engage the warriors. Before leaving, Cody changed out of the typical sturdy, rough clothing that the rest of the cavalry wore and into his costume. Dressed in black velvet pants and a red silk shirt trimmed with silver buttons, Cody rode out to meet fame and fortune.
The fight itself was unextraordinary. Cody’s men exchanged shots with the Cheyenne warriors. Cody and one Cheyenne warrior fired at each other, the warrior just missing Cody, and Cody shooting the warrior in the leg and felling his horse. Then Cody’s horse tripped in a hole and went down too. Cody and the warrior both took aim again, and Cody once again proved the better shot, killing Hay-o-wei, his adversary. The name Hay-o-wei translates to “Yellow Hair,” which the young warrior was named due to his blonde hair. Yellow Hair was not a war chief; he was just a warrior of no particular rank. The entire confrontation was over in a few minutes.9
The rest of the Cheyenne warriors fled the scene, and as Cody’s men left in pursuit, Cody walked over to Yellow Hair’s body, scalped the dead warrior, and took his warbonnet and weapons as trophies. According to Cody, he thrust the scalp in the air and shouted, “The first scalp for Custer!” Nobody else at the skirmish remembered him doing that. None of the warriors that the men fought had been at the battle of Little Big Horn or had likely ever encountered Custer.
Within a week of his killing Yellow Hair, stories of Cody’s bravery under fire began to reach the newspapers. The first to write about Cody’s heroism was his friend Charles King for the New York Herald. The quick fight became much more dramatic in the retelling. Other papers picked up the exciting tale of Cody’s first scalp for Custer. The cavalrymen who were with Cody when they engaged the small group of Cheyenne warriors were surprised to see what had been such an inconsequential fight suddenly spun into an epic battle.
Cody made the tales even taller in a letter to his wife, Louisa, which was meant to precede a package of his war trophies. In the letter he wrote, “We have had a fight. I killed Yellow Hand, a Cheyenne chief, in a single-handed fight. [I am going to] send the war bonnet, shield, bridle, whip, arms, and his scalp.… The cheers that went up when he fell was deafening.” The package reached Louisa before the letter; when Louisa opened it, expecting a gift from her husband and instead finding a human scalp, she fainted.10
A few months after killing Yellow Hair, Cody left the cavalry to return to the stage. The Red Right Hand: or The First Scalp for Custer scandalized and excited audiences. Each night, Cody took the stage in the very outfit that he wore in battle to reenact a wildly dramatized version of the killing of Yellow Hair, now renamed by Cody as Yellow Hand and promoted to the position
of chief, instead of simple warrior. Sometimes Yellow Hand would go down due to a gunshot wound; sometimes he would die in hand-to-hand combat with Cody. While papers denounced the blatant glorification of violence, audiences packed the theater to see Cody wave the scalp of Yellow Hand in the air in victory.
This was not the first time that Cody had tried to claim fame from violent confrontation with the Cheyenne people. “He was no friend to the Cheyenne,” Russell Brooks told me. Cody had long been involved in US Army campaigns to forcibly remove Cheyenne and Lakota people from their lands. Cody was involved in what is known to Americans as the Battle of Summit Springs but is known to Brooks and other Cheyenne as the Battle of White Buttes. In that battle, in which the US Army ambushed a band of Cheyenne who were resting on their way north to join up with Lakota people, twenty warriors, seven women, and four children were killed. Cody shot and killed a Cheyenne warrior and claimed that he had shot Cheyenne chief Tall Bull. Others at the scene testified that Tall Bull had been killed at the beginning of the battle by another soldier, and Cody had instead killed somebody else who was riding Tall Bull’s horse.11
Cody would go on to develop more stage productions showcasing the violent masculinity of the West to great success, leading to the 1883 debut of his most famous show, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World. The timing of Cody’s show was perfect. In the mid-nineteenth century, white men in England and the United States began to worry about their young men. These young men had it too easy; their wealth and comfort had made them soft. In the United States, a country still fighting to retain the land it had stolen from Native people, this softness could threaten the expansion of America across the continent. The call for white men of America to maintain physical power was not just political; it was a spiritual calling. The rise in popularity of Muscular Christianity in the United States and Europe during this time gave white male elites a religious mandate to conquer both rugby fields and battlefields. According to practitioners of Muscular Christianity, physical softness in men had undermined traditional masculinity and had led to intellectual and moral softness.
As the wives and daughters of these wealthy white men began to make strides in social and political life, men felt an even greater threat to their masculine identity. This fear of the “feminizing” of young American elite men led to calls for stories of “strong, brutal men with red-hot blood in ’em, with unleashed passions rampant in ’em, blood and bones and viscera in ’em.”12 “Masculine” theater, dime novels, and adult male fiction steeped in grit and violence known as “red-blooded realism” became increasingly popular, in large part due to the threat of the widespread success of women writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Susan Warner (whom author Nathaniel Hawthorne dismissed as a “damn’d mob of scribbling women”),13 and of plays geared toward women audiences. Young white men popularized dime novels that told wild tales of danger and exploration, hunting and gunfights, first with stories of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, and later with fictionalized accounts of the exploits of heroes and outlaws like Kit Carson and Billy the Kid. Buffalo Bill’s own stories of adventure would make it into dozens of wildly popular dime novels. Men in search of manhood began to look west.
Cody’s Wild West show offered everything that white men in search of power and glory were looking for. In Cody’s show, white men were noble and brave. They fearlessly tamed animals and fought savages. “Indians,” even when Cody allowed them to be something less than mindless killing machines, were seen as great relics of the past, conquered by the superiority of white men. Once-great Native warriors were paraded in front of white crowds like tigers in a zoo to show how great white men must be to have physically bested people built for little more than violence.
The lure of Western adventure did not dissipate as these boys became men. Instead, they set out to star in their own stories of physical dominance. One man who was heavily influenced by cowboy mythology, and in turn shaped an entire generation in its image, was President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was a poster boy for the manly renewal that Western-themed violence promised. Once known as a scrawny, squeaky-voiced dandy, Roosevelt moved to the Dakota badlands in the late 1880s to remake himself. When Roosevelt returned to the East Coast, tanned, muscular, and brimming with tales of taming wildlife and battles against cattle thieves, he became the American man that every American man wanted to be.
Roosevelt was not just a strong proponent of cowboy mythology and Muscular Christianity; he was also directly inspired by William Cody’s image. When Roosevelt fought in the Spanish-American War in 1898, the name given to his regiment, the Rough Riders, was taken from Cody’s Wild West show. In return, Cody dramatized the Rough Riders’ celebrated Battle of San Juan Hill in his stage show.14 Roosevelt also seemed to believe the same violent, racist stereotypes of Native people that were displayed in the early Wild West shows, infamously saying in 1886, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”15
As president of the United States, Roosevelt’s obsession with the physical supremacy of white manhood would influence his policy decisions. Roosevelt saw the West as a place to be won, and in his view white Americans had already won it—by conquering both the terrain and the Native people. To Roosevelt, it was white Americans’ honored duty to preserve and protect the beauty of Western lands for future generations of white Americans to enjoy. Roosevelt claimed for the United States tens of millions of acres previously promised to Native people, land that had been stewarded by Native people for countless generations. They became our national forests and parks.
In an article published in the American Indian Law Journal, Native scholar and law professor Angelique Townsend EagleWoman noted that while Roosevelt is celebrated today as a great conservationist for his creation of national parks and forests, his actions were actually “an illegal, unconsented-to land grab from the Tribal Nations, and then a reappropriating of those lands owned by tribal peoples to the ownership of the United States on a might makes right basis.”16 Roosevelt made this decision not just callously, but calculatingly. Professor of American history Gary Gerstle described Roosevelt as a man who “expected that they [Native people] would be eliminated, exterminated from America in contest with the white men who were settling the continent, to the people who he hailed as backwoodsmen. And he required the Indians to be there to be the strenuous opponent through which Americans could prove their valor. But he was very clear that in a modern America that he was building, he expected they would be exterminated either through battle or through simply the inability to adjust to modern life.”17
The white culture of the West was steeped in the expectation of triumph over land and peoples. In fact, Roosevelt shared this belief with Cody, whose stories of white victory over both the West and the people who had previously inhabited it carried a sense of inevitability and paternal racism. “This continent had to be won,” Cody wrote. “We need not waste our time in dealing with any sentimentalist who believes that, on account of any abstract principle, it would have been right to leave this continent to the domain, the hunting ground of squalid savages. It had to be taken by the white race.”18 Manly men were quick to sing the praises of a stage show that opened with the scalping of an Indian and then moved through gunfights, horseback riding, cattle roping, and more fantastic feats of masculinity. One reviewer commented that compared with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, “all the operas in the world appear like pretty playthings for emasculated children.”19 Cody himself encouraged this celebration of hypermasculinity. A poster for Wild West from 1902 loudly declares that the show is “Standing like an obelisk above and beyond all others. A perfect phalanx of all that is GREAT, GRAND, and HEROIC.” It touts “A gathering of extraordinary consequence to fittingly illustrate all that VIRILE, MUSCULAR, HEROIC MANHOOD has and can endure.”20
Cody expanded his show from a sm
all stage to an extravaganza the size of a small town. He hired real Native warriors to play Native warriors. Gunslingers and cowboys would join the show. Eventually he would add “Zulu warriors,” Mexican “vaqueros,” Turks, and dozens of other “exotic” performances. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West became the most popular show in America, and he became one of the wealthiest and most famous entertainers in the world.
Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, and many other dime-store-novel heroes would inspire an entire generation of young white men to head west in search of their own Manifest Destiny. With the Wild West show gaining in popularity, Cody also strove to increase its respectability. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was not a “show”—it was, according to Cody, an educational event. It was a living history. People would come to Wild West to learn as much as to be entertained. Few questioned the supposed educational value or legitimacy of his project. And the racist, exaggerated stories of white male American bravery, leadership, and righteous victory became a part of our collective understanding of American history; these misleading legends persist to this day.
After decades of success, Wild West was eventually done in by financial mismanagement, Cody’s drinking habits, and the rising popularity of movie theaters. Cody died on January 10, 1917, at age seventy. Cody is still remembered as an icon of the American West: a soldier, a showman, a wildlife conservationist, and a friend of the Indian. He deliberately cultivated that reputation. As Cody interacted with the Native people who worked in his show, he became less comfortable with the scalping act that had launched his career. The scalp and warbonnet of Yellow Hair were removed from their stage-side case, never to be displayed again. Cody would eventually speak against the scalping of Native people. In his dramas of the Wild West, Native people were no longer portrayed as bloodthirsty savages and instead became “noble savages”: moral, trustworthy innocents who were tricked by evil Mormons into attacking innocent white people—at least until Cody and his friends could show up and save the day.21