“Are your young braves willing to fight?” the reporter asked.
“You will see,” Sitting Bull said.
“When?” was Stillson’s reply. “I cannot say” was Sitting Bull’s. And then came another request. “I have not seen your people,” Stillson said. “Would I be welcome at your camp?”
Sitting Bull stared at the ceiling for a few moments. “I will not be pleased,” he said. “The young men would not be pleased. You came with this party [the Terry delegation] and you can go back with them. I have said enough.”
And then Sitting Bull wrapped himself with his blanket, shook hands with Stillson, and headed for the door. There, he stopped, put on his cap, and said “adieu” to the reporter. His first newspaper interview was done.
Five years later, perhaps suspecting the trouble that lay ahead, Walsh was reluctant to see his friend depart. Yet he was in a difficult spot. Sitting Bull’s Canadian exile had not been without problems. Primarily, there was an overriding one: his band was going hungry. Buffalo herds were depleted up and down the Great Plains, and the Lakota were competing for sustenance with the indigenous tribes of Canada. Sometimes they crossed back into the United States when they were hunting, and then they would cross back to Canada. The land of the Grandmother may have provided sanctuary while Sitting Bull and his followers were on the run, but it was now withholding support, acquiescing to its powerful neighbor below the Medicine Line, who wanted Sitting Bull to return. Quite simply, it was time for the Hunkpapas to go home.
Now, for a time, four months to be precise, through his association with Cody, he was free of political concerns. In the Wild West, Sitting Bull lived a version of the life he once had on the Plains. He was indeed a king, as newspapers described him, and as Cody well knew. Yet he was not always greeted with the awe and reverence with which kings are usually met. While often cheered by throngs, especially in Canada, below the Medicine Line there was also hissing and booing as he entered the arena atop a gray horse at the beginning of the gaily bedecked procession.
This was ritualized, a response to the heroes-and-villains nature of the Wild West, though in some cases brutal and not devoid of anti-Indian fervor. Yet it was a far cry from the previous year in St. Paul, which took Sitting Bull and a troupe of Lakota to the Eden Musee in New York and then on to other cities, where he would have some of his first experiences as a celebrity. In St. Paul, someone fired a shot at Sitting Bull as he and the tour manager were leaving the theater. In Philadelphia, he was lured into a strange and potentially deadly public relations trap. When his party arrived at their hotel, the editor of a local paper asked for his photograph, guaranteeing prominent coverage. The tour manager provided the photo, and sure enough, the next day, a Sunday, there was Sitting Bull, splashed across the front page. But his picture was accompanied by something much darker.
He was denounced in uppercase letters followed by exclamation points, and the newspaper enumerated his “crimes.” It restated the horrors of the Custer massacre, and accused him of disemboweling men, women, and children. Years of official presentations of Sitting Bull as a savage red man who was doing the devil’s handiwork would not be unraveled in a single tour, and the frenzied editor went on to ask the citizens of Philadelphia to boycott “the monster” and “to assemble and hang him” as well. Shortly thereafter, the venue that was featuring his show canceled it. The Indians left town and headed for Brooklyn, but by then there was bad publicity everywhere. The show was a failure. Other newspapers closed in, railing against the government for allowing Sitting Bull to leave the reservation. In the heat of a presidential election, the Indians were ordered back to Standing Rock.
Now, while on tour with Cody, he was besieged by reporters. Yes, they wanted to discuss Custer, but perhaps when Walsh had told Sitting Bull years earlier that the man from the New York Herald “talked with a thousand tongues,” he had conveyed that Sitting Bull’s very words could reach the four directions, beyond his own people across the Plains, all the way to the Grandfather possibly, and who knows where else? Now, in the Wild West, it was time to fulfill the next part of the thing he had learned in the primordial waters of his mother’s belly—that one day he would be a big man. Some said that Cody’s path had been foretold too, by a gypsy. “Your child will be a boy,” she told his mother. “You should give him the world. He will be famous. His name will be known to all—young and old, rich and poor. People will love and praise him. He may even be president of the United States.”
Behind the popularity of the Wild West was a net that had been cast wide and far, fueled by a machinery of fame and advertising that was finely tuned and carefully considered. The results were weighed and adjusted, and each tour became a kind of frontier focus group for the next one. Weeks in advance of an engagement, laborers would converge on a location, plastering it with Wild West posters, or what was referred to as “paper”—lots of it. In some years, according to Paul Reddin in Wild West Shows, “a half million sheets went into storefronts, on buildings, on fences, on specially constructed billboards, and in any number of other conspicuous places.” There were posters for every conceivable venue and space, from small window-size posters to gigantic ones that were nine feet high and nearly 150 feet long. Cody himself was closely involved with advertising, befriending the designers and producers of the posters, “and making certain that the finished product reflected his ideas,” Reddin wrote. “Some conveyed a single western scene, others an act or personage from the show, and others a variety of western images and acts,” including, as described by a publicist at the time, “Indian Massacres, wild horse bucking, dare-devil riding, and hair-raising Indian dances.”
Much of the time, there was but one solitary figure on the posters, and it was Cody himself. Buffalo Bill was the Wild West, and with every poster plastered to every wall or doorway, the idea was restated, and even this routine affixing of announcements became an event. Children would converge at the site, seemingly out of nowhere, and the men who pasted the paper to walls would spin tales of adventure on the road. Sometimes, the kids would wangle a free pass for the show in exchange for pitching in and tacking up posters. Rock stars were in town, and a pass was a big deal, not just because celebrities were involved, but because tickets were expensive. At a time when a typical working man earned between a dollar and a dollar fifty a day, and two dollars would buy a week’s groceries or a pair of shoes, the cost of entry to the Wild West was two dollars for a family of six—at fifty cents per ticket for adults and twenty-five cents for children. An outing to see Cody and his cast was not unlike a trip to the baseball park today, a significant and meaningful expense that a family saved for weeks in advance.
Once a location was primed, advance men followed, and they bought ads in newspapers. The notices had evocative headlines such as “The West at Your Doors” and “Practically a Tour of the Frontier”—the latter of which might not have been so intriguing without strategic placement of the adjective “practically.” In addition to the ads, there were stories cooked up by publicists and distributed via magazines called “couriers,” and the stories in turn were picked up by reporters who seem to have quoted them verbatim—a forerunner of the kind of modern coverage that is so prevalent today, whereby news outlets simply restate what they hear at press conferences or from certain people, no questions asked, or repeat material from press releases without citing the source. The Cody publicity enterprise was a masterwork in promotion, one that seems to have sent forth seed pods in the methodology of how to attract attention.
But one other thing factored into the success of the show and it was nothing that could be concocted by a publicist. It was something that other enterprises of a similar nature did not have, and that was magic. Much was swirling around this epic spectacle of a vanishing America; in the dust and thundering hooves and flying manes and tails there was a portal, open as long as the show was in town, and it led right to the national dream. Some of the most powerful figures ever to take the stage represen
ted the dream and were the dream, and when it was in your town, your front and backyard, it was an American prayer in action and resplendent, presenting the longings and the history, real and imagined, of a nation that loved freedom, made a fetish of it, while at the same time, it had to squelch and control it. In short, America was still forming, and it had formed, and here was its DNA for all to see, hear, and feel.
The reporter from the New York Herald may not have understood the concept of “medicine man,” but it did not matter, for there was indeed a medicine man upon us and his name was Sitting Bull. He did not have the right to vote, but he could make it rain. He was not a dictator or a man who used threat of force, but when he had called for the horse tribes to assemble in the greasy grass for the battle that sealed his fame and fate, scores of his kin and kind trekked in from the four directions, simply because the town criers had spread the word and it came from him. Those who attended the Wild West would not have had knowledge of such matters, but such were the elements of his force field, and they were in play.
Buffalo Bill, through the magnetic strength of his own personality as well as how people perceived him, could make a lot of things happen too; his show was a strange and dazzling and idiosyncratic conjure, a serious act of alchemy that spun off in a thousand trajectories, presenting screaming wildmen with tomahawks in face paint and glorious regalia and fearless cowboys who mounted crazed mustangs and stayed there until they got calm, and the whole parade fell in line behind Cody himself, a national true north regardless of location and what he was actually doing at any given time.
And of course there was Annie Oakley, Little Miss Sure Shot herself, a feminine killer, a dead-eye who skipped onto the field in a dress, blowing kisses, demurely. She wiped out no animals in the Wild West, though people knew she could, and had, and how they loved to see her send those bullets whizzing right past her dog’s head and into a bull’s-eye, and later, when she took a break from Cody’s show and joined up with another circus, she would shoot live birds released from a trap, so many that she was told to stop, and at some point she rejoined the Wild West, and of one thing, her fans were convinced: here was a woman who liked to shoot and she was as serious as any frontier bad man.
Let us also tip our hat to another star of the show, sometimes the star, pictured front and center on program covers, stampeding, emblazoned with Cody’s image, and listed as an official cast member along with the cowboys and Indians in the text of the programs, and given its historical due.
“The buffalo is the true bison of the ancients,” its official biography said. “It is distinguished by an elevated stature, measuring six to seven feet at the shoulders, and ten to twelve feet from nose to tail. Many there are under the impression that the buffalo was never an inhabitant of any country save ours. Their bones have been discovered in the superficial strata of temperate Europe; they were common in Germany in the eighth century. Primitive man in America found this animal his principal means of subsistence, while to pioneers, hunters, emigrants, settlers, and railroad builders this fast-disappearing monarch of the plains was invaluable.” The portrait concluded with a characteristically self-congratulatory but truthful statement: “Messrs. Cody & Co. have a herd of healthy specimens of this hardy bovine in connection with their instructive exhibition, ‘The Wild West.’ ”
In 1892, after a performance in the Wild West during its London tour, a cast member named Long Wolf came down with pneumonia. Not wanting to be buried at sea, he asked his wife to leave him behind. Buffalo Bill helped them locate a plot and then the show left port. Shortly thereafter, he died, and decades later, in the twentieth century, a woman in Worcestershire read a story in an old book about his life, death, and burial “in a lone corner of a crowded London cemetery, just at the end of a smoke-stained, Greco-Roman colonnade, under a poplar tree.” She visited local cemeteries and looked for a wolf emblazoned on an old tombstone. After finding it, she tracked down Long Wolf’s descendants in South Dakota. They traveled to London to bring him home. When his body was exhumed, the bones of a young girl were also found. These belonged to Star, long rumored to have been buried in England.
The three Lakota who had come to claim Long Wolf carried off his remains in a ceremonial procession, bedecked with feather headdresses and followed by a pair of black horses pulling a casket in a wagon draped with American and Lakota flags. A few weeks later, he was reburied at Wolf Creek, east of Pine Ridge, and a herd of buffalo appeared on a bluff overlooking the ritual. They had been repatriated sometime earlier. In 1999, something else from the Wild West was returned. This was a ghost shirt, the item of apparel said to repel bullets from the white man. It had been taken from a warrior at Wounded Knee, carried to Glasgow in 1891, and sold by a man who said he was in charge of relics from the Wild West, along with a baby carrier and a pair of boy’s moccasins. The shirt was bloodstained and had bullet holes. A Cherokee Indian visiting Scotland saw the shirt in a gallery at an exhibit called “Home of the Brave.” He contacted the Wounded Knee Survivors Association and negotiations for the shirt’s return began. It was finally returned to the Lakota at a ceremony at the massacre site on a summer afternoon. Once again, some buffalo appeared on a hill and witnessed the occasion, and yet one more time, they would appear on another rise several years later and watch the return of wild horses. “I have been told,” said Crow chief Plenty Coups in 1930, shortly after bounty hunters had gunned down hundreds of ponies, “that the white man, who is almost a god and yet a great fool, does not believe that the horse has a spirit. This cannot be true.” In the Wild West, it was not true, and the triumvirate was complete: man, horse, and buffalo, together again in the Dreamtime.
Yet at its core, the show was an equestrian extravaganza. This was the original concept, and as Cody’s partner, Arizona John, made a point of telling reporters in Chicago shortly before Sitting Bull joined, the show’s full name, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, was copyrighted, lest anyone try to use it without permission. But more importantly, for anyone who did reprint the name for commercial use, it must be followed by its official description, which was this: “The Wild West, or Life Among the Red Men and the Road Agents of the Plains and Prairies. An Equine Dramatic Exposition on grass or under canvas of the Advantages of Frontiersmen and Cowboys.” Often the show’s equine stars received more visitors than Cody or Sitting Bull, with fans rushing “backstage” to their corrals; in 1886, when the Wild West was presented to Queen Victoria, the English Metropolitan welcomed the frontier horses with breathless prose in an article entitled “Mustangs, Horses, Mules, Some 250 Animals, 166 Horses.” “These are not remarkable for height or the ordinary points of thoroughbreds, but they possess staying powers that an English racer does not,” the paper said. “They are suitable for riding unshod over rough country for many miles together. . . . Bronco horses, mustangs, or buck jumpers are to be seen here—animals that have never been, and never can be tamed; whose kick is death, and upon whose back no man could remain for a moment.”
In every city and town all of these elements converged to make the Wild West a thing to behold. It began with a grand procession, people flanking it on either side and swarming in between the mounted cowboys and Indians, the prancing horses, the hangers-on as it paraded down the main avenue, and there came Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill and Annie and all the rest. The show consisted of a series of scenes suggesting or depicting frontier signs of the cross: Sitting Bull making a circuit of the arena, in his war bonnet of eagle feathers, sometimes in a buggy, other times warrior-style on a war pony, looking neither right nor left, not waving or expressing any gestures, issuing no battle cries or utterances, still and quiet, responding only to the announcer Frank Richmond telling the crowd, “Here he comes! The Napoleon of the Plains! Chief Sitting Bull, ladies and gentlemen!” and he did what he had promised, making this one appearance, around the track, and then exiting without gesture or farewell—a rare moment of exposure that only added to his mystery and evoked no further verbal assaults, shoul
d they be in the works; and then there came Cody reenacting the scalping of Yellow Hand with an Indian playing him, the run-away Deadwood stage with the Grand Duke in it, a buffalo stampede and hunt or “surround,” which demonstrated how Indians would circle and circle the animal until there was nowhere for it to go and then they would close in as it became tired and frightened, or if they were in the wilderness, run the herd off a cliff on sites that were known as “jumps,” and which to this day still bear the markings.
A highlight of the show was “the girl of the Western plains,” as announcer Frank Richmond called out, “and her incredible feats with pistol, rifle, and shotgun.” Annie Oakley would run to a gun table while glass balls sailed upward, and then, hoisting a rifle, she would swing it to her shoulder and squeeze the trigger. The balls shattered in the air and the crowd made the right noises and then in galloped a cowboy, wielding targets from a leather thong, and Annie would mount a buckskin, grab a pistol from the ground, and quickly shatter the target. “And now,” the announcer said, “with the target behind her, seeing its reflection in the blade of a hunting knife, Miss Oakley will pierce a playing card held in the attendant’s hand.” She fired the rifle and the card fluttered to the ground.
The grand finale of each show was the “Attack on the Settler’s Cabin,” a scene that was an explosive stand-in for the burgeoning new America. A settler had just returned from hunting, and his wife stepped out the door to welcome him home. There was a shout in the near-distance, and then the settler would turn to confront an Indian racing toward the house in feathers and war paint. The hunter “raised his rifle,” wrote Louis Warren in Buffalo Bill’s America, “and fired,” watching as the intruder fell into the dust. Then there was “an outburst of cries and screams and suddenly the lonesome cabin became the center of a swirling mass of mounted Indian warriors, guns blazing. The settler and his wife retreated through the door, their children loading and firing guns through the windows.” But there were too many Indians, and they were getting closer to the cabin. “Their war cries were terrifying, the roar of guns and smoke filled the air.” In a moment, their home would be destroyed.
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