Blood Brothers

by Deanne Stillman

  These are riddles without answer, yet of this we are certain:

  The Lakota had delivered a shattering message, and it could not have arrived at a more significant moment. A week after the battle, the country was about to celebrate its centennial. The brash and young country, which had broken free of the Old World in a bloody and prolonged revolt, had just seen its most adored military figure destroyed on the battlefield. It was an unexpected event, especially on the eve of the nation’s 100th anniversary. As it happened, there was one survivor of Custer’s unit—the war horse Comanche. This time, he had been found bleeding from seven or eight bullet wounds, lying in the greasy grass amid the carnage. He was roused with some bourbon from a soldier’s hat, helped off the field, taken to a nearby steamer and then up the Yellowstone River to Fort Randall, where he was retired with full honors. Over time, he was nursed back to health, though he had developed a taste for booze. He was billed as “the lone survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn” (although others had made it through, including many Native Americans), just in time for centennial celebrations; as such, he joined the parade of frontier superstars on the national stage. Years later, he was an eyewitness to Wounded Knee, serving in the army pack train in spite of retirement.

  While Comanche’s survival conveyed hope as news of the Custer massacre reverberated, the national mood had darkened. The campaign against the Lakota had failed and the cavalry was humiliated. Recall that Buffalo Bill was scouting for the Fifth Cavalry in Wyoming, trying to escape the grief caused by his son’s death. He did not get word of the Little Bighorn and Custer’s demise until July 6, while staging from Sage Creek with the army as they pursued Indians who were dispersing after their victory. Early the next morning, he rushed into camp with the shocking news. Four days later, the Fifth was told to head for Fort Laramie, but early on the morning of July 14, they learned that a thousand Cheyenne were planning to flee the Red Cloud Agency in Nebraska so they could join Sitting Bull, who was en route to Canada. The Fifth headed in that direction, with Cody and two other scouts leading the way. At daybreak on July 17, at Hat Creek, they engaged the Indians. It would be Cody’s fourteenth fight against the enemy since he had become the official scout for the Fifth in 1868. And it would be his most glorious, involving a duel that sent his reputation into the stratosphere.

  According to war correspondents from various newspapers on the scene (including the New York Herald and Chicago Times), as well as eyewitnesses to the skirmish, and Buffalo Bill himself, Cody and Colonel Wesley Merritt were lying on an outpost behind a hill. They sighted Cheyenne war parties on a ridge above. Three miles to the south, a wagon train carrying infantry was on its way, led by two couriers who did not see the Indians. A small party of Cheyenne galloped up the ravine to attack the two riders. Cody rushed back to camp, rounded up fifteen men, returned and started a running fight. The soldiers were quickly swarmed by many Indians.

  “I know you, Pahaska,” said a young chief known as Yellow Hand or Yellow Hair, breaking out of his line and riding up and down before his men. “If you want to fight, come ahead and fight me!”

  It wasn’t unusual that this Indian had singled out Buffalo Bill. His luxuriant hair had given him the nickname invoked by Yellow Hand, which many natives used. Plus he was all dressed up that day, in a stage costume no less—a black velvet vaquero outfit, bedecked with lace, silver buttons, and scarlet ribbon. Ever the showman, he had been wearing it for the past eighty miles, en route to either his death or one more near-miss. But he was not dressed this way just to impress reporters or to display his version of war paint for the Indians. His choice of regalia that day had all to do with a little-known mania for truth; he later said that he wore it so that in future reenactments of this battle he could wear the suit and honestly say that it was what he was wearing at Hat Creek.

  Cody accepted Yellow Hand’s challenge. “I galloped towards him for fifty yards,” he later wrote,

  and he advanced towards me about the same distance, both of us riding at full speed, and then, when we were only thirty yards apart, I raised my rifle and fired; his horse fell to the ground, having been killed by my bullet. Almost at the same instant my horse went down, he having stepped into a gopher hole. I instantly sprang to my feet. The Indian had also recovered and we were now both on foot, not more than twenty paces apart. We fired at each other simultaneously. My usual luck did not desert me on this occasion, for his bullet missed me, while mine struck him in the breast. He reeled and fell but before he had fairly touched the ground, I was upon him, knife in hand, and had driven the keen-edged weapon to its hilt in his heart. Jerking his war bonnet off, I scientifically scalped him in about five seconds.

  Cody was immediately swarmed by Indians, while Company K hurried to his rescue. As the soldiers converged, Cody held the “top-knot and bonnet” aloft, shouting, “The first scalp for Custer.” Blood splattered across his face as he waved the scalp, and the beautiful war bonnet to which it was attached. Within hours, telegraph wires were ablaze with the story and the moment was trumpeted in newspapers across the country. Custer had been avenged.

  For a while, Cody carried Yellow Hand’s arms, shield, and scalp on scouting expeditions. It was war loot. Those who rode with him begged him to discard the scalp, for it had a stench which was unbearable. On the day after the taking, a cavalry scout is said to have observed Cody with the scalp over his belt as he played pool at the Red Cloud Agency, where members of Yellow Hand’s Cheyenne tribe lived. It was at Red Cloud that Cody learned the name of the man he had killed and that his father was a leading chief named Cut Nose. Some time later, Cut Nose sent a white interpreter to Cody at his camp in the Bighorn Mountains, offering to trade four mules for his son’s scalp, war bonnet, ornaments, gun, pistols, and knife, all of which Cody had taken. No deal was struck and from then on, whenever he could, he brandished the very scalp and war bonnet, arms, and decorative items he had seized at Hat Creek. While touring with his theater troupe, he arranged for the display of the items in a prominent window. He had joined a long line of ancient warriors, from the Scythians in 700 BC to his contemporaries, the Apache and Comanche and Mohawk and other tribes for whom the taking of a decorated whorl of hair woven with feathers and beads was not just war booty but the capture of a soul. By the time he got to New England, his victory war dance would come to a halt. He was met by reporters and clergymen who railed against “the blood-stained trophies of his murderous and cowardly deeds.” He did not exhibit them anymore, finally putting the scalp in a box and mailing it to his wife in Rochester. But first he sent a telegraph that said to expect a surprise. The scalp arrived before his message and according to some accounts, when she opened the package, she fainted. “Will Cody,” she said upon his return, “don’t you ever send me another Indian scalp as long as you live.” After Cody died, Yellow Hair’s scalp passed down through the generations to his grandchildren. It is said that the scalp was intact, still tied with two leather strips, just as Yellow Hand wore his hair. In 1957, the family sold it to the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, where it is maintained in a “sacred vault” to which only certain Native Americans and museum staff members have access.

  Soon after the duel at Hat Creek, the New York Weekly published “The Crimson Trail, or, Custer’s Last Warpath, A Romance Founded Upon the Present Border Warfare, as Witnessed by Hon. W. F. Cody.” By then, Sitting Bull had escaped to Canada and Crazy Horse was hiding in the Black Hills. “The Indians are tired,” Cody declared. “There is little prospect of any more fighting. I determined to go east as soon as possible to organize a new dramatic combination, and have a new drama written for me based on the Sioux War. This I knew would be a paying investment as the Sioux campaign had excited considerable interest.”

  There were still some skirmishes on the frontier, even in the height of winter when the thermometer had frozen at more than fifty degrees below zero. A year later, General Sheridan reported that the war against the Sioux was over; the Indians had ceded al
l titles to the Black Hills. Meanwhile, Cody was appearing on stage in a playlet about the duel with Yellow Hand. It was billed as follows:

  * * *

  * * *

  First appearance since his return

  from the Indian Wars

  Buffalo Bill Combination

  (Hon. W. F. Cody)

  Supported by Capt. Jack,

  The Poet Scout of the Black Hills

  In the new drama founded on inci-

  Dents in the late Indian War

  Entitled

  The Red Right Hand

  Buffalo Bill’s First Scalp for Custer.

  * * *

  * * *

  He did not scalp another Indian. In a few years, he would be hiring them. They would play themselves in the reenactment of the duel with Yellow Hand and other incidents, including the Battle of the Little Bighorn. But it was not until Cody hired Sitting Bull that the Wild West would have its most successful year. When Sitting Bull entered the circus ring on tour, he was often, though not always, booed, for Americans believed that it was he who had killed the golden boy, George Armstrong Custer. What really happened was this: Tatanka Iyotake, according to his own account, had engaged briefly with one of the units which was not Custer’s and not near it, and then departed to protect his village, watching the battle with noncombatants from a vantage point nearby. Among those who watched with Sitting Bull was One Bull; according to him, Sitting Bull was dressed in a characteristic unassuming manner—not at all like the warrior who would ride into the arena as part of the Wild West. He wore buckskin clothes, said One Bull, and not a war bonnet, but a feather. Human hair hung from his sleeves and his face was not painted. On the day before the battle, the two men had visited the field. As they smoked a ceremonial pipe, they laid down a bison robe and placed small bundles of tobacco tethered to sticks of cherrywood nearby.

  “Pity me,” Sitting Bull had called out to the Great Mystery, in one of his famous lamentations. “Wherever the sun, the moon, the earth, the four points of the wind, there you are always. Father, save the tribe, I beg you . . . Guard us against all misfortunes or calamities. Pity me.” The men were praying on the spot that became known as Last Stand Hill. Someone else had killed Custer, but Tatanka Iyotake’s medicine was all over the place.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In Which Sitting Bull Is Hired and Heads East for the Wild West

  Everyone wanted a piece of the Plains Indians, especially the Lakota and Cheyenne, the holdouts, the rebels, the “last ones to come in.” Even as they were being purged from the lands, the white man was preserving their clothing, their dwellings, their art, their spoons, their hair; their very heads were shipped to far-flung repositories where they were studied and calipered and gazed at in wonderment, scientists gathering in a torqued-out version of Hamlet contemplating his own mortality, but in this case, it was someone else’s because the wasichu could not grasp that he too would meet the end some day, and that the other was in fact himself.

  Buffalo Bill well knew the desire for communion with Native Americans; he had led dukes and financiers on treks to meet them and he had led soldiers on missions to find and kill them and he had learned their ways. Later, when the frontier began shutting down and he took Indians across America and around the world, the spectacles were transformative, a magic act, and to further partake, people would visit the villages where the traveling Indians lived in order to touch them. It was a scenario that hinted at the power of ritual and dance and music to set people free, and a hundred years later, girls would faint at the sight of handsome crooners who hit certain notes and gyrating dancers who moved just so and there would be attempts to shut the whole thing down because sometimes it involved other races and could lead to a general breakdown in the scheme of things.

  It was only fitting that John M. Burke was dispatched by Buffalo Bill to make an offer to Sitting Bull to join his show, the last and most famous of the “last holdouts.” Larger than life and a man whose actions mostly matched his words, Burke had been part of Cody’s circle since the early theater days in the Midwest and on the East Coast. A character actor himself, he appeared in many repertory productions around the country, and was well known in the acting community. Experiencing the eternal fate of performers, he took on other jobs in theater when he couldn’t find work as an actor. When he couldn’t find jobs in theater, he worked on newspapers, where he met the important reporters of the day and acquired skills that would make him a publicity man par excellence. In 1873, while Cody was appearing in The Scouts of the Prairie, Burke developed a serious crush on one Mademoiselle Morlacchi, a beautiful Italian actress who was playing Dove Eye, the Indian Maiden of this play. According to the Chicago Tribune, she had “an Italian accent and a weakness for scouts.” To Burke’s dismay, she was in love with Texas Jack Omohundro, a long-haired frontier scout who was handsome, six feet tall, and carried Indian scalps on his belt. The pair soon married, and the portly and not especially suave “Arizona John,” as Burke was known (though he had no connection with Arizona), threw himself back into his own career, which included managing celebrities as well as a troupe of acrobats. He also committed himself to Buffalo Bill. When Cody starred in The Red Right Hand, or the First Scalp for Custer after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Burke helped publicize the sensational show, which featured Yellow Hand’s scalp, and from then on he was an indispensable part of Cody’s enterprises, soon to include the Wild West.

  Over the years, Burke came to idolize Buffalo Bill, and in some ways resembled him. In stature, he too was large. He had a bushy mustache, and he was flashy, often wearing a big Stetson and a diamond in his lapel. Like Cody, he had shoulder-length hair. He also told a lot of stories about himself (in his case, often untrue), and in addition to invoking the Southwest with the name “Arizona John,” he allied with the army, calling himself “Major Burke” (sonorous it was, but he had never served; it was one more element of the glittering vapors around Cody and his show).

  By 1884, he had become the primary advance man for the Wild West. “Was there a notice to be published in the Podunk Gazette?” wrote Shirl Kasper in Annie Oakley. “Was there an entertainer or a government endorsement to be had? Burke secured it.” His stock-in-trade was “wind and brass,” according to friends, and not surprisingly he was beloved by reporters around the country. Like Burke, they were enamored of Cody, and Burke took pride in the fact that he was a major port of entry to the international idol. But the alliance between Burke and Cody went beyond acolyte and adored. They were making history, mainly because they were simpatico on the mechanics of show business. While certainly the Wild West could not exist without Buffalo Bill, Cody knew that he could not be the only figure to carry the show over time. Plus, there was clearly a fortune to be had, if certain arrangements were in place and all of the right elements converged. The frontier was not just a jackpot of gold and animals with thick coats and birds with pretty feathers, but it was yielding great characters who had been formed by their lives on it—and they themselves were now proffering their stories and experiences in the endless wilderness bonanza.

  For instance, Wild Bill Hickok—a friend of Bill’s—had experimented with a Wild West show long before Cody’s, and it was probably on Cody’s mind when he cooked up his own. “Securing co-operative Indians was not too difficult,” Sell and Weybright wrote in their book about Cody, “but capturing wild buffalo was a much more perplexing problem.” In 1870, the notorious gambler and gunfighter Hickok rounded up a herd and shipped them to Niagara Falls. But it was not possible to get the animals into the arena in Buffalo, and mayhem erupted. The buffalo escaped, and the Indians chased them through the streets while dogs and children followed. A grizzly bear that had been caged in a railcar also broke loose, rushing for a vendor’s hotdogs. Soon, the buffalo were herded into a dead-end street, and Hickok sold them to raise train fare for the return to the plains. The audience had seen an accidental buffalo hunt for free—and loved it. As for the buffalo, one can onl
y hope that their travails came to an end quickly. Knowing of the strange event, Cody and his associates planned their show accordingly, with logistics that would head off a buffalo stampede outside any arena—and make sure to have one that they could control. Of course, the main idea was to turn a profit.

  To that end, on June 6, 1885, John Burke boarded a train in Chicago where the Wild West was playing and headed for Mandan, Dakota Territory, site of the Standing Rock Agency, where Sitting Bull had been transferred after being a prisoner of war at Fort Randall. Signing Sitting Bull was almost a done deal. Prior entreaties from Cody had been turned down by Major James McLaughlin, the army official in charge of Standing Rock, but now he had changed his mind. McLaughlin is a controversial figure in frontier history, often viewed as a villain whose mission was to obstruct Sitting Bull in every way, and occasionally presented as a complicated man who believed that the only way to save Indians was to help them acquiesce to the ways of the white man. Weighing the many accounts, it seems clear that McLaughlin, a company man who was no doubt tormented, had a problem with Sitting Bull. He generally scorned his most well-known resident, often condescending to him, a façade that barely covered his fear of Sitting Bull’s power among his own people. But with a Native American wife, McLaughlin had his own allies among the Indians at the agency.

  When McLaughlin finally relented to Cody’s request to meet with Sitting Bull and extend an offer of employment, he was still concerned with how best to handle him. Sitting Bull had been learning to farm, as required of all the Indians at the agency, but it was simply his presence that continued to vex McLaughlin, a thing that needed to be controlled and contained. Yet, in a very palpable way, McLaughlin’s behavior toward Sitting Bull is a lesson in human contradiction, for in spite of his fear of Sitting Bull’s fame, he himself had tried to use it. In 1884, he helped Alvaren Allen organize the “Sitting Bull Combination,” which took him to St. Paul where he had the fateful meeting with Annie Oakley. McLaughlin was hoping that the tour would educate Sitting Bull in the ways of the white man—simply put, aren’t lamps better than fire?—and demonstrate the value of giving up his old life. While it did introduce Sitting Bull to the various wonders of the conquerors’ world, it also became an embarrassment for McLaughlin. When the train carrying the actors returned to the plains, it stopped in Bismarck, where a reporter came aboard and interviewed Sitting Bull. When asked what he liked about the tour, Sitting Bull replied that he liked the dancing girls in the East, and then reportedly gestured in imitation of what he had seen. That response was unexpected and, moreover, the tour had been sanctioned by a group of Catholic missions, according to assurances from McLaughlin to the federal government. Now it sounded as though the production was a party. The commissioner of Indian Affairs rebuked McLaughlin, who then replaced Sitting Bull with Gall, another prominent Lakota and Little Bighorn veteran, in the upcoming Dakota exhibits at the New Orleans Cotton Expo. It was shortly after that incident that he approved Buffalo Bill’s request for a meeting, again hoping, perhaps even more fervently, to get Sitting Bull off his hands—and trying to make things right with Interior Department secretary Henry M. Teller. More importantly, no less a figure than General Sherman had endorsed the idea. “Sitting Bull is a humbug but has a popular fame on which he has a natural right to ‘bank,’ ” Sherman said.