As for Sitting Bull’s meeting with President Grover Cleveland, a desired goal of this trip, the record varies. Some second- and third-hand accounts say that the men met and shook hands, and that warrior to warrior, the event indicated to Sitting Bull that he had the respect of the head chief of America. But in newspaper coverage of the Washington meetings, there is no mention of any contact with the president, although several years later, in 1888, Sitting Bull and Gall and John Grass traveled to the capital and did in fact meet with President Cleveland. They were there to discuss the fate of the Standing Rock Agency, where they lived. Once again, the government wanted to carve up the land. Sitting Bull opposed the plan, but lost that battle.
When the Wild West arrived in Philadelphia during the summer of ’85, the question of Indian rights became front and center, resulting in a strange confrontation with Sitting Bull and several representatives of the Indian Rights Association (IRA), who had arranged for a visit. Such matters were very much a topic of discussion in Philadelphia; the group had formed there in 1882, joining other organizations that had come on the scene earlier in New England and Brooklyn. The IRA’s mandate was to make sure that treaties were enforced—seemingly, an honorable task. Yet it wanted to advance assimilation in such a way that obliterated native culture. According to its credo, “farming is superior to hunting; alcohol is evil; idleness is the ultimate evil, and Christianity is the cure.” Upon completion of this work, the group’s founder wrote, “the Indian will cease to exist as a man, apart from other men . . . his empty pride of separate nationalism will have been destroyed.” In its place, greater blessings will arrive, primarily “an honorable absorption into the common life of the people of the United States.”
Whether Sitting Bull knew of this mandate is of no consequence, for it would soon become very clear. At their meeting with him, the members of the IRA launched into a discussion of the Little Bighorn. “Ask Sitting Bull if he ever had any regret for his share in the Custer massacre,” they said to the interpreter. For the sin of murdering the American hero, he must “flee from the wrath to come.” Sitting Bull jumped to his feet, according to Nate Salsbury, who witnessed the bizarre encounter. He then thrust his fingers into a questioner’s face. “Tell this fool that I did not murder Custer,” he shouted. “It was a fight in open day. He would have killed me if he could. I have answered to my people for the dead on my side. Let Custer’s friends answer to his people for the dead on his side.” Recalling the incident years later, Salsbury referred to the rights-minded men as “worthy cranks.”
What reserves did Sitting Bull draw on at such a time? In today’s parlance, he was not the kind of guy who would walk away from a bar fight. We know from the record that he was close to having one with the God-fearing men who told him that Custer’s last stand would be avenged. Yet brawling while on tour was obviously precluded; he was traveling with Cody for other reasons, after all, and an altercation might have sent him back to Standing Rock. Perhaps it was his animal allies who came to him in these private moments, as they had at other times in his life. They were right there in the flesh too, in the stables and corrals that were part of the Wild West, and perhaps he drew on the power of his four-legged brothers and sisters who had always advised him. Perhaps he drew on all of this medicine and more; we can imagine that he recalled a song from his youth, a song of the wolf, who had come to him for aid, and in this song he became its vector. As he sang its song, the wolf made a promise in return, and through Sitting Bull forever after ran a current of this encounter:
Whatever I want, I always get it.
Your name will be big, as mine is big. Hau! Hau!
The song echoed what he had heard in his mother’s womb—that he was destined for greatness—and such things were necessary for a man who was cast in a role that was honorable and fraught, and so, as visions and visitations had foretold, he remained on this path, and on tour he was soon back in Canada, “the medicine house,” as he had told army commissioners, on safer ground where he would be treated in a fitting manner.
In Toronto, and later elsewhere, Cody spoke on behalf of the Indians during an interview with the Globe titled “The Bill and Bull Show” following the Wild West performances on August 23, 1885. “I never shot an Indian but I regretted it afterwards,” he said. “In nine cases out of ten, when there is trouble between white men and Indians it will be found that the white man is responsible for the dispute through breaking faith with them. When an Indian gives you his word that he will do anything he is sure to keep that word, but it is different with white people. The white men were responsible for the Sitting Bull war, which was really caused by miners invading the Sioux reservation [in the Black Hills] in search of gold.”
In the same interview, Sitting Bull spoke fondly of his old friend Major Walsh, and then mentioned that on the reservation at Standing Rock his family of sixteen received rations once a week but they were usually gone in two days. A U.S. government agent who was traveling with the cast quickly intervened. This was only because Bull “invariably fed all the hungry members of his tribe,” he said, “who swarmed into his house whenever he had rations.”
“I’m too old to adopt the ways of the white man,” Sitting Bull responded, and added that his children might be taught economy and frugality but, as long as he had anything to eat he would live as he always lived, and feed anybody and everybody who came to his door hungry whether they were white men or Indians.
The interview was an unrehearsed song-and-dance in the best of ways, pure of heart and intent, a dramatic routine in which two superstars exchanged opinions and views of the other by way of a reporter—and thus each learned things that they may have been unable to say without an intermediary, or perhaps they did, in their own way, in private and therefore known only to themselves. But through this exchange, a portrait of the two men emerges, perhaps the portrait behind the photograph soon to be taken; we see them as rivals, friends, and members of different tribes. And the more they talk, the more it becomes clear that their paths were indeed foretold.
In Montreal, Sitting Bull was besieged by young fans. They would hang around his tent, follow him onto the grounds, sometimes imitating his gait, described by a reporter as “bowlegged and limping,” and he would buy them Cracker Jack and candy. But it was more than young fans who sought his attention backstage. By all accounts, he was sought out by admirers wherever he went. In posing for the famous series of photographs with Buffalo Bill at the Notman studios in Montreal, he must have been relatively confident that he would not have to face intrusive individuals inquiring about Custer or threatening him with damnation for his sins as he emerged from the session. But that is a low bar, as they say; in Canada, he knew he was in the Grandmother’s arms, and Lakota culture, after all, was a matriarchy.
The man who would take the photograph that memorialized the alliance between Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill is hardly recognized today—not outside of Canada, at any rate. But William Notman was the first Canadian photographer known internationally. He emigrated to Montreal from Scotland in 1856 and set up a commercial photography studio that became a roaring success. His first commission was photographing the construction of the Victoria Bridge across the St. Lawrence River, which Sitting Bull would cross as a celebrated guest during an orchestrated event when he returned to Canada with Buffalo Bill. Queen Victoria so appreciated Notman’s photographs of the bridge construction and opening and other iconic Canadian scenes that she made him “photographer to the Queen.” During that era, photographers such as Edward S. Curtis and D. F. Barry attained prominence for making photographic portraits of Native Americans and making sure that their images were not lost to the ages. Notman was taking pictures of everyone and everything—and earning a good living while doing so. If you were celebrating a milestone, you contracted with Notman for the portrait. If your class was graduating at Yale or Harvard, you hired Notman for the portrait (he had set up seasonal studios at various American universities). If you wanted a reco
rd of your marriage, you arranged it with Notman, and if you were the Canadian government and you wanted images of the landscape for the archives or pictures related to forestry or mining, you set it up with Notman or his surrogates.
Little is known of the preparations that were made for the visit with Notman, or, for that matter, of who exactly contacted him and what was said, and if the idea had been percolating for a while (or not). But there is intrigue surrounding the session which memorialized the two icons. Did Notman happen to be in town at the same time that the Wild West was booked for Montreal? Or was that arranged in advance? Or perhaps he had contacted Cody or his advance people with the idea of a joint portrait of Buffalo Bill and his most celebrated star; after all, Sitting Bull had been generating more coverage in Montreal than Cody and it would have been the natural thing to do for a man who made his living by making photographic portraits, sometimes of celebrated figures. Of course there had already been many photographs of Buffalo Bill, and some of Sitting Bull, but none of the pair together. The idea was sure to be a publicity bonanza, and however it was hatched, something was clearly in motion in advance of the portrait, it seems, as Sitting Bull apparently headed to Notman’s studio with two sets of clothing, each of which was used in different photographs from that session. In one photograph of Sitting Bull alone, of his head and shoulders, he is in a white shirt and vest with a bandolier across his chest and two feathers in his hair. In the other, with Buffalo Bill, he is in full dress, wearing what he wore in the show, as did Cody. The fact that Sitting Bull brought two clothing changes with him would suggest that he liked the idea of the session with Notman—and maybe even was something of a dandy or a little bit vain; certainly those are not traits out of character for a man who symbolized an empire, regardless of the fact that its time had come to a close. He knew what was at stake on the day of the photo session, and Cody too was well prepared for the moment. Dressed to the nines, with his Winchester in tow, he and Sitting Bull arrived at the Notman studio on an August afternoon. They were accompanied by several other Indians. Adirondack Murray, the “father of camping,” would join them.
Judging from the tones of light in the photographs, it was probably bright and sunny on the day that they were taken, according to the former curator of the Notman Museum, Stanley Triggs. The skylights in the studio faced north to get soft light. As an assistant helped set up the shot, the two men posed against a painted background, one that Notman had used in other portraits. “It looks eastern,” Triggs tells me in a phone conversation, examining the photos that are rarely inquired of nowadays. Yet the background’s origin is of little consequence; not much is visible, and the men are front and center in a prominent way. “Sitting Bull just stood there,” Triggs recounts, recalling museum records. “He was not posing. Apparently Notman had trouble with Sitting Bull because he wanted a more pleasant look on Sitting Bull’s face.” Buffalo Bill of course was clearly posing, assuming a well-known attitude with ease. It would have taken about one-tenth to one-twenty-fifth of a second for the photograph—the one that has entered the annals—to be taken, and while Notman was taking it, and the other images, an assistant would have been going back and forth into the darkroom, checking on them. We can imagine Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill holding their positions, both men frozen in the moment, neither betraying any thought or feeling (though perhaps Cody said something witty while waiting for the images to develop between takes). Notman would have shown the results to Cody and Sitting Bull, and clearly, some of them met their satisfaction. One in particular would become a hallmark of the Wild West, the image dramatically entitled “Foes in ’76, Friends in ’85.” The slogan instantly became part of the show, with the photo made into cabinet cards and widely sold and distributed, and even after Sitting Bull left, it continued to be used as an invocation of Cody’s ongoing alliance with Native Americans.
So there the two men stood, clutching a Winchester—“the gun that won the West”—and, in a lesser known role years later, caused Sarah Winchester, the wife of its progenitor, to go mad because this gun, the one that made her family rich, killed so many Indians that she wanted no part of it and gave her fortune away, and then tried to purge the famous mansion named after the gun and where she lived of its aboriginal ghosts.
It must now be noted that there was another photograph taken by William Notman, or credited to him, when the Wild West was in Montreal, one that is of lesser fame, to be sure, but nonetheless significant. I refer to a picture of a newborn buffalo calf in the corrals of the four-legged Wild West menagerie. The calf is with its mother and Cody is nearby. It’s not an especially well-composed photograph, does not romanticize the animals or capture them in a transfigurative moment such as mid-stampede or while they are charging or making eye contact with the photographer. The buffalo and its mother are just there, recorded casually, seemingly as an afterthought. The rest of the herd that traveled with the Wild West is nearby, out of frame, because they were kept with their kin, along with all creatures in this spectacle. To Sitting Bull and the other Indians on tour, the birth of a buffalo while touring would have been noteworthy, though not strange; life goes on, of course, but they knew the buffalo had vanished and seeing that it was procreating even as they were in captivity would probably have registered. They may have made no public mention of it, for such a manifestation was not meant for chatter. Yet some may have acknowledged it in some way, remarking on it to cowboys in the troupe, for instance, or a cook, or maybe it was the other way around; it is Cody in the picture after all (and he may have strode into the frame because Notman was recording the image), and Cody himself may have told the Indians of the birth, and maybe he even relayed the news to Sitting Bull (though if so, that’s something Cody would have mentioned in his many autobiographies). I imagine Sitting Bull getting word one way or another, for there was probably little that escaped his attention when it came to matters of tribal interest, then perhaps walking the grounds at dusk after the show, pausing at the corral fence or the gates, reminded of his Sun Dance just before Custer was felled. The ritual was now forbidden on the reservation and its underpinnings were the buffalo, and now here he was, in a show that permitted him and his kind to live the Lakota way again, and the buffalo was back, one of them was anyway, and they were prisoners together on the White Man’s Road, and people paid good money to cheer and jeer them and buy their photographs. As the sun set and fires were lit in the Wild West camp and tourists who had gone backstage to mingle with Indians and even touch them were heading home, Sitting Bull might have headed back to his tipi, his choice to travel this road affirmed by the birth of the buffalo calf, a thing that was in accord with spirit, and his alliance with Cody would bode well for all people—bittersweet though it was.
In October of that year, the Wild West headed to St. Louis, where Sitting Bull would make his final appearance. Arizona John took him on a tour of the city’s hotels and restaurants, and at one of them, they ran into General Carr, a famous fighter of Indians, perhaps the most famous of them all, the man who had pursued Sitting Bull and his people in the Badlands to their exhaustion and doom. Here was a figure who loved his work; once he had said that he would rather be a cavalry officer than czar of Russia. Now, the wheel had turned yet again for both men; as they made eye contact across a hotel lobby, Carr rushed through a crowd, happy to see his battlefield nemesis. Sitting Bull said nothing. It was time to go.
On October 11, reporters gathered in the rain outside Sitting Bull’s tent. The final show had concluded, and the cast was packing up for the winter. Everyone wondered if Sitting Bull would return to the Wild West. And what would he tell his people of his time on the road? “The wigwam is a better place for the red man,” he said at the time. “He is sick of the houses and the noises and the multitudes of men.” Then he headed to Annie Oakley’s tent. “She was putting away her costumes and guns,” Havighurst reported. Sitting Bull had brought presents—“a quiver of finest arrows, beaded moccasins, a feathered headdress. They stoo
d together for a moment, and then Annie followed him into the rain. Sitting Bull looked off into the western sky and spoke.”
“What did he say?” Annie asked the interpreter.
“He says it will be a cold winter.”
Later, they all dined in the cook tent and the band played “Auld Lang Syne.” At some point Salsbury arrived, thanking the cast on behalf of himself and Cody for such a successful season, and bidding them farewell until springtime.
Before Sitting Bull headed for the Dakota Territory, Buffalo Bill took him aside. There was something he wanted to give him. It was a horse—the one that he had ridden during the four months that Sitting Bull had been in the show. For a man who had to give up his horses when he returned to the land of his birth, this was a most symbolic gesture. The tribes had been stripped of their ponies during the wars against them; there were massacres in which thousands had been gunned down in cavalry attacks. The ponies represented freedom, and on foot the tribes were at a disadvantage—at war and on the hunt, as they well knew. Without the thundering four-leggeds, they were diminished. Somewhere during the course of his time in the Wild West, Sitting Bull had given Cody a gift as well. It was a bear claw necklace, a presentation that was also of significance. It symbolized might and strength, for the bear was an ally of the greatest warriors, the first animal to be the object of shamanic adoration. There was little if any fanfare around either of these gifts, for in the end Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill knew that they were joined in ways that could not be publicized or spoken of. They shared something that was written in their blood perhaps, in the blood of the buffalo, whose name was linked to theirs; in the Wild West, they were brothers in arms and now as the frontier was closing, had closed, they were brothers as they went their separate ways, never having disclosed, to our knowledge, resentments and points of admiration to one another, now conveying such matters to strangers. So here we find Buffalo Bill, a few months after Sitting Bull had left the Wild West, talking with a reporter in Minnesota. Sitting Bull was a great general, he told the scribe. Tatanka Iyotake had heard such praise many times in many places, from making an entrance as a performer to meetings with army opponents. But Cody also told the reporter something he may never have heard—that no white man could convince his people to follow him as they starved, which is what Sitting Bull did for months, and even years, until he and his people could no longer bear it.
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