Bill O'Reilly's Legends and Lies

by David Fisher

  Chief Sitting Bull toured with the Wild West Show for four months in 1875. During that time, he befriended Annie Oakley, calling her Watanya Cicilia, which translated to Little Sure Shot.

  While giving an exhibition a year earlier, she had met Sitting Bull, who noted that she was about the same age his own daughter would have been if she had survived the Indian wars and gave her the name Watanya Cicilia, which in Lakota means Little Sure Shot. During the time they spent together traveling with Buffalo Bill’s show, they became close, and he adopted her into the Hunkpapa Lakota tribe, an honor that she took seriously.

  In 1886, the show set down for the entire summer on New York’s Staten Island, drawing almost 336,000 spectators to that season’s production, “The Drama of Civilization.” Many patrons traveled by ferry from Manhattan, passing the newly installed Statue of Liberty, then taking a four-mile ride on the new rail line. When the weather turned cold, the show moved inside, to Madison Square Garden. Bringing the Wild West to sophisticated New York caused a sensation, resulting in a great deal of national publicity for Annie Oakley. Her ability to drill bullet holes in falling cards was the inspiration for a common slang term for a free or complimentary ticket to an event—an “Annie Oakley”—because holes had already been punched in it.

  That same season, Buffalo Bill added to his cast fifteen-year-old sharpshooter Lillian Smith, “the Champion Girl Shot,” who quickly developed a rivalry with Annie Oakley.

  The popularity of the show led Mark Twain to encourage Cody to take it to Europe, to bring the epic story of the settlement of the West to the celebration of Queen Victoria’s fiftieth year on the throne: “It is often said on the other side of the water that none of the exhibitions which we send to England are purely and distinctly American. If you will take the Wild West show over there you can remove that reproach.” Cody packed 300 performers, including 97 Indians, 18 buffalo, 181 horses, 10 elk, 4 donkeys, 5 Texas longhorns, 2 deer, 10 mules, and the Deadwood stage on several ships and sailed to England. The troupe toured for six months, often drawing crowds of more than thirty thousand people. This glamorized version of the American West became the accepted European version of life on the frontier. Although the image of the cowboy became symbolic of the brave-if-not-so-sophisticated nation, Cody’s Indians also created a fervor, and Europeans rushed to touch them when a rumor spread in France that brief contact with an Indian assured fertility.

  The show gave two command performances for Queen Victoria, one of them causing a sensation. As Cody wrote, “When the standard bearer passed the royal box with Old Glory her Majesty arose, bowed deeply and impressively to the banner, and the entire court party came up standing … and all, saluted.” This marked the first time in history that a British monarch had saluted the American flag.

  As soon as the show returned from its triumphant tour, Annie Oakley resigned. Various reasons were given but they all centered on the same issue: She just didn’t like Lillian Smith. She resumed touring as a solo act, briefly joined a competing Wild West show, and even appeared onstage in a trifle called Deadwood Dick. Smith eventually fell in love with a cowboy and left the show as well, darkening her skin and touring in Mexican Joe’s Wild West show as Princess Winona, the Indian Girl Shot. Her departure allowed Annie Oakley to rejoin Cody’s show in time for another long tour of Europe.

  The show became part of the Paris Exposition, staged to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. Oakley became the sensation of Europe: She reportedly took part in the lighting ceremony of the newly built Eiffel Tower; the president of France offered her a commission in the French army; the king of Senegal wanted to buy her so she might kill the tigers then terrorizing his country; and she nearly created a scandal when she ignored protocol and shook hands with the Princess of Wales.

  When Buffalo Bill’s Wild West set up in Italy, Cody and Sitting Bull visited Rome on a tour personally conducted by Pope Leo XIII. To promote the show, an Indian village was built inside the Colosseum, and a mock shoot-out between cowboys and Indians was staged in St. Peter’s Square—followed by a sharpshooting demonstration from Annie Oakley. And the show’s concessionaires introduced another American creation to Italian audiences—popcorn!

  Buffalo Bill’s shows were wildly successful throughout Europe, creating the romanticized impression of the American West that has become accepted as reality.

  While the show was wowing Europe, at home the United States Census Bureau officially declared the frontier settled. The dream of a nation stretching from ocean to ocean had come true. The Indian wars were over and most tribes were settled on reservations; the majority of the land had been explored and opened for settlement; the great buffalo herds were mostly gone; railroads crisscrossed the continent; and people were even talking to one another on the telephone. When Cody had first opened his show, it reflected current events, but within a decade, it was presenting a sometimes nostalgic look at a rapidly vanishing era of our history. The reality had been transformed into myth. And crowds loved it. In 1890, the show drew six million people and reported a million-dollar profit. Buffalo Bill Cody and Annie Oakley had become among the best-known Americans in the world. Bill Cody was consulted by presidents on just about all matters concerning the West, and among his friends were the most celebrated writers, painters, and inventors of the time.

  Producing a show of that size was an enormous undertaking and required ingenuity to set up and move quickly from place to place at minimal cost. In 1899, for example, the show gave 341 performances in 200 days across 11,000 miles. To accomplish that, the troupe had to carry its own bleacher seating and canopies, electrical generators, and kitchens, and under the direction of James Bailey of the Barnum & Bailey Circus, they revolutionized methods of rapidly and safely loading and unloading railway flatcars.

  Among the people who delighted in the performance was the inventor of the electric light, Thomas Edison, who in fact did light the show brightly, enabling it to become one of the first entertainments to be staged in the relative coolness of the night. Oakley and Edison had met in Paris at the 1889 exposition, where he was demonstrating his phonograph. In 1894, he invited her to the Black Maria, which is what he called his photo studio, where he used his kinetograph, the earliest movie camera, to capture the smoke as she fired her guns—as well as visually recording glass balls shattering when she hit them. The “moving pictures” he shot eventually were shown in Kinetoscope parlors and cost five cents to view, causing these halls to become known as nickelodeons—and turning Annie Oakley into one of the world’s first “movie” stars. After proving he could capture rising smoke on film, Edison also brought Buffalo Bill and several Indians to his West Orange, New Jersey, studio and recorded them.

  The success of the Wild West Show found Cody in the odd position of being the employer and, at times, the guardian of the same Indians whose tribes he had been at war with only years earlier. It is possible he had even fought some of these specific individuals in battle. But Buffalo Bill proved to be an enlightened employer, paying his cast equal wages and treating all of them—including Indians, black cowboys, and women—with great respect. Indians, in particular, earned a much better wage than would have been possible on a reservation and were able to make their case for fair treatment in show programs and when speaking to newspapers. Cody’s abolitionist upbringing transformed easily into common decency, and he was said to be respected by all the people he dealt with. He was known to be an advocate for women’s suffrage and at every opportunity fought for fair treatment of Native Americans.

  Annie Oakley and Frank Butler had left the show at the beginning of the new century, and Oakley once again took to the stage, starring as The Western Girl, a play written for her that involved her using a pistol, rifle, and rope to vanquish the bad guys. A story published in William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers in 1904 accused her of being addicted to cocaine and claimed she had been arrested. Outraged by that attack, she sued fifty-six newspapers for libel—winni
ng fifty-five of those cases and restoring her reputation.

  The Butlers never quite mastered the art of settling down: building then selling houses in several places, preferring to stay at resorts or in a New York City apartment. Annie Oakley was quoted as admitting, “I went all to pieces under the care of a home.” She retired from touring in 1913.

  Toward the end of his life, Cody explained, “[T]he west of the old times, with its strong characters, its stern battles and its tremendous stretches of loneliness, can never be blotted from my mind.”

  By then, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West had lost its luster. Through the years, several others had attempted to launch competitive Wild West shows, although none of them had been able to survive more than a few seasons. But in 1903, The Great Train Robbery, the first Western motion picture, had been released. It was a huge success and further established the Western as a popular cultural form—and cut deeply into the audiences for live shows.

  Buffalo Bill had earned a fortune bringing the Wild West to the East Coast and Europe. He’d invested those profits in everything from Arizona mines to filmmaking, publishing, and even a crazy idea about selling fresh spring water all over the country, but in the end, he had little money to show for it. In ’08, he’d sold a substantial interest in the show to Pawnee Bill’s Wild West and Great Far East Show but continued starring in it. In 1910, he began a three-year farewell tour, and the show finally closed forever in 1913.

  Buffalo Bill immediately secured backing to produce a five-reel Western picture, The Indian Wars. He toured with other shows for another two years, until his health failed. When his death was reported, quite prematurely, he remarked, “I have yet a great life work to complete before I pass over the river. I have been supervising the taking of motion pictures. These start with the opening of the west …”

  In 1915, Frank and Annie Butler drove their car to visit him while he was appearing in a show entitled Sells Floto Circus & Buffalo Bill Himself. That was the last time they were together. When he died at home in 1917, the nation mourned. As the respected western historian and writer William Lightfoot Visscher wrote, “Prominent men and women from many states and civilized nations journeyed to Denver to attend his funeral. Cities did him honor and legislatures adjourned for the obsequies …”

  From Pine Ridge, the Oglala Sioux sent a telegram, part of which read, “Know that the Oglalas found in Buffalo Bill a warm and lasting friend; that our hearts are heavy from the burden of his passing …” It was signed Chief Jack Red Cloud.

  And Annie Oakley said simply, “He was the kindest hearted, broadest minded, simpliest [sic] most loyal man I ever knew. He was in very fact the personification of those sturdy and lovable qualities that really made the West …”

  Annie Oakley continued to give occasional performances for charity and was especially active raising money to aid the war effort throughout World War I. A strong supporter of women’s suffrage, she offered to raise an entire regiment of women capable of fighting in that war. She was sixty-six years old when she died in November 1926, and only three weeks later, Frank Butler, her husband of fifty years, also died.

  But both Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley have lived on in the legends they helped create. Annie Oakley would be remembered in numerous movies, beginning with the 1935 film Annie Oakley, and most successfully in Irving Berlin’s Broadway musical and subsequent hit film Annie Get Your Gun; while the story of Buffalo Bill has been told in numerous entertainment formats, and he has been played by numerous actors, from Roy Rogers to Paul Newman.

  Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley created the passion for western entertainment that remains so firmly embedded in American culture. Annie Oakley, for all her talent with a gun, never set foot in the Old West. William Cody, on the other hand, played an important role not only in settling the West but also in creating the myths that would end up at least partially obscuring what really happened in this exciting but dangerous time. It was his vision that laid the foundation for all the wonderful storytellers who would follow him, who would turn the hardest days in the Old West into one of the world’s most popular entertainment subjects.

  While honoring Bill Cody, the state legislature of California properly noted, “[I]n his death that romantic and stirring chapter in our national history that began with Daniel Boone is forever closed.”

  THE AMERICAN INDIAN: WITH NO RESERVATIONS

  Lonesome Dove author Larry McMurtry wrote, “Most of the traditions which we associate with the American West were invented by pulp writers, poster artists, impresarios and advertising men.” And without question, at the heart of that invention is the American Indian.

  The Indians played an essential role in the actual settling of the West and then played an even larger role in all the glorified stories told about it. The actual relationship between the white settlers and the several hundred different tribes that had lived on the land for thousands of years is extraordinarily complex, but in the legends it generally has been described as an almost continuous battle between mostly innocent settlers wanting to live in peace and the warlike Indians who slaughtered them.

  Actually, the many millions of Indians living on the North American continent when Europeans arrived generally left the newcomers alone. In fact, an early problem faced by settlers was that too many of them wanted to leave the settlements and live among the tribes. Ben Franklin said, “No European who has tasted Savage life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.”

  Most of the tribes didn’t care very much about the settlers; they were too busy fighting other tribes. In some ways, theirs was a relatively sophisticated society: Hundreds of years before the American Constitution was written, the Iroquois Great Law of Peace apparently included the freedoms of speech and religion, a separation of powers in government, and the right of women to participate in government. Prior to the American Revolution, the relationship between the largest tribes and the British was good; the Indians even adopted some elements of the British lifestyle and farming techniques. And when that war erupted, they fought alongside the British to maintain that relationship.

  This 1776 illustration depicts a British Loyalist and American colonist fighting over a banner, while a Native American watches what he believed to be a battle over Indian lands. The Indians sided with the British, anticipating that a British victory would end westward expansion.

  Following the Revolution, the question that was to shape this new nation—Who owned the land on which the Indians lived?—was strongly debated. George Washington’s secretary of war, Henry Knox, believed that “the Indians being the prior occupants, possess the right of the soil.”

  Responding to President Monroe’s attempts to buy their land, a Choctaw chief laid out the Indians’ desire: “We wish to remain here, where we have grown up as the herbs of the woods; and do not wish to be transplanted into another soil.”

  The Indian wars that would spring up like brush fires across the continent for most of the nineteenth century began in the Southeast after the British surrender at Yorktown. But by 1830, all the tribes east of the Mississippi had been pacified, and those tribes were “removed” into the Indian Territory. Andrew Jackson had promised the Indians that the land would be theirs “as long as grass will grow green and the river waters will flow.” In actuality, within a decade, more than four million white settlers had crossed the Appalachians into the vast Mississippi valley.

  The government negotiated several treaties with the Indians, then proceeded to break those pacts when the land became valuable. The terrifying—then, years later, thrilling—fighting began with the discovery of gold in the Dakotas in 1849 and the decision to build a transcontinental railroad. Great Plains tribes such as the Lakota Sioux, Navajos, Cheyennes, Comanches, Apaches, Kiowas, and Arapahos lived and hunted on those lands and fought to protect their way of life. But mostly they fought soldiers, not settlers. Although attacks on wagon trains were common in dime novels, Wild West shows, and movies, they were uncommon in real life. It’s estim
ated that fewer than four hundred settlers were killed in Indian attacks, and the settlers probably killed an equal number of Indians. Settlers were much more likely to hire Indians as guides or trade with them than fight them.

  As the tribes settled on reservations, government Indian agents and traders arrived, both to provide assistance and to exploit them whenever it was possible.

  The Dawes Act of 1887 and ensuing legislation allowed the federal government to sell lands to white settlers that had already been granted by treaty to the tribes. This 1911 poster offers settlers “fine lands in the West” for easy payments.

  But the fighting between the army and the Plains Indians was brutal. General Sherman gave his troops orders to kill all Indians—and even their dogs—and burn their villages to the ground. When that failed, the cavalry killed the buffalo to starve the Indians into submission. In 1890, the Census Bureau estimated that in the forty different Indian wars, nineteen thousand white men, women, and children had been killed, along with at least thirty thousand Indians. But the real number of Indian dead is likely in the hundreds of thousands, as countless more tens of thousands died of disease and other factors during long forced marches to designated lands.

  Although it is understood that the victors get to write the history, in recent years, Americans have reassessed the country’s victory in the Indian wars. Many people have gained a greater understanding of the Indian point of view, perhaps best explained by Chief Black Hawk, who said, upon his surrender in 1832, “We told them to leave us alone, and keep away from us; they followed on, and beset our paths, and they coiled themselves among us, like the snake. They poisoned us by their touch.”

  JESSE JAMES