As December of 1890 played itself out and word of Sitting Bull’s ambush spread through the camp, some of his followers and those of the Minneconjou Big Foot fled south, hoping to get to the reservation at Pine Ridge, where perhaps there was sanctuary with the Oglalas. On December 28, three days after Christmas and in the midst of a winter blizzard, they were intercepted by soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry—Custer’s outfit—at Porcupine Creek just outside their destination. There was discussion and Big Foot, weakened by pneumonia, agreed to an escort to the agency. That evening, the group of 230 men and 230 women and children arrived at a creek named Wounded Knee, just inside the reservation. There they set up an immediate village, a thing to which they were accustomed, and there, on the following morning, they were told to disarm. Surrounded by armed soldiers and faced with Hotchkiss repeating weapons on a hill overlooking the campsite, they relinquished their guns, which were stacked up on the frozen ground. Already stunned by the death of Sitting Bull, the villagers grew increasingly wary and nervous. They could not flee, this they knew, lest they risk a massacre. They could not negotiate; this latest incident, after years of others, including the assassination of Crazy Horse and the vanishing of the buffalo, suggested that things were coming to a close. The soldiers too had become more agitated.
A search for concealed weapons was ordered, and two more rifles were found. Black Coyote, later said to be deaf, balked at turning over his weapon. A scuffle ensued and hell broke loose, with the Indians grabbing their guns and the soldiers blasting them at close range and from the bluffs above. When it was over 162 Lakota had been killed, including sixty-two women and children; others may have gotten away and died of their wounds later. Big Foot was killed in this encounter, his haunting image forever preserved in a photograph of his frozen and gnarled body, found on the site on a travois several days later, along with the other bodies. The Seventh Cavalry also suffered casualties; twenty-five men had been killed and thirty-five wounded in this horrific action, which has come to be seen as a coda to the Battle of the Little Bighorn. On New Year’s Day 1891, army wagons came from Pine Ridge to retrieve the dead. Surviving children were found wrapped in shawls amid the carnage, and one soldier uncovered a baby under its mother and adopted her. The bodies were taken to a hilltop where one of the Hotchkiss guns had fired at them, and buried in a mass grave.
Sometime after Sitting Bull had been killed, Buffalo Bill ran into President Benjamin Harrison in Indianapolis. In what must have been a very sad thing to hear, the president told him that he regretted rescinding the order issued by General Miles. He explained that he had been unduly influenced by some philanthropists who made the case that a visit from Buffalo Bill would result in the killing of Sitting Bull, and a war would ensue. “So,” Cody later wrote, “it was to spare the life of this man that I was stopped!” All for a political donation, it sounded like, if that was indeed the case—one more thing that would not have surprised Sitting Bull.
There are always questions about tragic events, many of which are concerned with whether they could have been averted. In this case, could Buffalo Bill have headed off the death of Sitting Bull? The question can’t really be answered, and even Cody knew that he could have been killed in the chaos that was building prior to the arrest of Sitting Bull. Or perhaps, in the event of a fight, Sitting Bull might even have killed him. But this most horrific event should not be seen as a near-miss between the two unlikely friends. At the time of the ambush, there was an unexpected convergence of their lives in a way that brings a moment of grace, wrenching though it may be. It is said that the horse that Buffalo Bill had given to Sitting Bull upon his departure from the show was outside his cabin when the shooting began. He recognized the sound, having heard it many times in performance, and perhaps even in other battles. As Sitting Bull was being assassinated, his horse began to dance. He drew himself up and snorted, the story goes. He arched his neck and pranced in a circle. He bowed and then stood up and shook his long mane and pawed the ground, and reared up and leaped into the air. He cantered around and around in a circle, stopped and backed up, and then cantered some more. He did all of this while the battle was raging around him, and the bullets never touched him. And there the legend stops and the facts begin: Sometime amid the siege he was mounted and ridden off by a policeman seeking reinforcements. He carried the rider for several miles until they encountered troops, who headed to Sitting Bull’s cabin upon hearing that they were needed. And on galloped the horse and rider, spreading the news. The days passed and the horse was returned to Sitting Bull’s widows. Sometime later, Buffalo Bill returned to Standing Rock for an audience with them. Could he purchase the horse? he inquired. Yes, they said, and he did. According to various accounts, the horse was gray or white. If white, he was indeed a ghost horse.
The four-legged soon rejoined the Wild West. “Sitting Bull’s horse has been shipped from Mandan to New York by express,” reported the Aberdeen Daily News on June 17, 1891. “The horse was presented to Sitting Bull by Buffalo Bill. Bill is now in Germany and he just called for the animal. It will go on the first fast steamer from New York to Germany.” In 1893, the horse made another appearance, during the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He was draped with an American flag, and ridden in a parade by either Cody or someone else, the record is not clear, a silent tribute to his friend. Just inside the entrance to the midway, there were five stuffed buffalo in a grove of poplar trees. On the midway, Sitting Bull’s cabin was on display. After he was killed, it had been dismantled and shipped from the plains. A Ghost Pole was next to the cabin, around which dancers had tried to conjure their world before it fell. Under the direction of one P. B. Wickham, the exhibit employed Oglala Lakota as well as Crow Indians who were veterans of the Little Bighorn (on opposing sides), performing dances and songs and posing for pictures. Cast members included Plenty Horses, a survivor of Wounded Knee, said to still have five bullets from the incident lodged inside him. Red Cloud’s son Jack was a participant, along with Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses, who had urged his fellows not to kill the army commissioners who had come to buy the Black Hills in the famous meeting after which Sitting Bull had granted his first interview with a white man. Inside the cabin, two women said to be Sitting Bull’s widows sold baskets and moccasins. The Sitting Bull Cabin Exhibit netted the World’s Columbian Exposition Company $2,575, a hefty sum for that time. A local reporter noted that Rain-in-the-Face “kindly relapsed into barbarism” for the show. Recall that the Lakota warrior is believed to have killed Custer—as opposed to Sitting Bull, who was blamed for it. Two other exhibits on the fairgrounds claimed to have the authentic Sitting Bull cabin. It was a frontier crime scene that had become a bonanza.
Every afternoon and evening at the Expo, the Wild West presented its show, apart from the midway, its own spectacle, now grander than ever, with centaurs from all corners of the earth. “While the cowboy band played its opening medley,” wrote Walter Havighurst, “scores of riders worked into formation outside the gate. The band played the national anthem, the crowd sat down, the ringmaster’s whistle filled the air, and Buffalo Bill loped around the track on his cream-white stallion. He was forty-seven, his long hair thinning, his face lined with indulgence and dissipation, but he was still an imposing figure on a horse.” Then came the announcement that the Congress of Rough Riders was about to enter; it was an addition to the show that came after Sitting Bull’s departure, the final incarnation of the “equestrian extravaganza” that Cody and Salsbury had first imagined. With fanfare from the band, in galloped American cavalry troops with guidons, British Lancers, French Chasseurs in blue coats and scarlet britches, Russian Cossacks, Argentine gauchos in sombreros and serapes, Arab Bedouins, and cowboys from the West. Buffalo Bill “doffed his hat to the flags of all nations,” wrote Havighurst, and “the riders circled the arena, men and horsemen of all colors, a World’s Fair of horsemen.” They continued to gallop, now in concentric circles, crisscrossing lines and weaving patterns, and then raced into
the wings as the band sent up a flourish. The arena was now empty, except for one rider with a star on her hat. She stopped in the center of the ring as the announcer made his introduction: “The peerless woman marksman, the maid of the Western plains—Annie Oakley!”
That season she was thirty-three, but “she looked seventeen,” Havighurst wrote, adding that “she still had her quick lithe movements and her girlish charm.” The band quickened its tempo and she hopped off her pony and ran to her gun table. She picked up the weapons quickly, becoming a whirlwind of shooting, firing on foot, from a bicycle, from both shoulders, and behind her back, remounting her horse, shattering targets everywhere and then racing away. The rest of the cast dashed in, performing feats of horsemanship, reenacting frontier scenes as always. But now the show’s finale was the Battle of the Little Bighorn, performed very elaborately, with heightened drama when it was presented at night, under artificial lighting. “After a moment of silence and emptiness, floodlights showed an Indian village at the foot of colored buttes and ridges,” said Havighurst. “For twenty thousand spectators, it is daybreak on the Little Big Horn, with ponies picketed and fires gleaming.” A scout sneaks in through the trees and returns with Custer. They count the Indians and horses but are spotted as they ride away. The Indians prepare for battle, and head off the returning cavalry in a circle of running fire. Amid their war cries, the soldiers fall one by one, and finally Custer himself is shot out of his saddle, falling to the ground to join his soldiers. All is silent and then Buffalo Bill enters on his white horse, heading for Custer and stopping there, pausing above Custer’s body for a farewell. He removes his hat and thus concludes the Wild West.
Sometime later, after the Wild West went bankrupt, Cody began traveling with other Wild West shows. There is nothing in the rec-ord that indicates he was tired of the act, weary of the jokes that must have come—“Hey, Bill, how about a trick? Hey, Bill, will you take me hunting? Hey, Bill, you’re not gonna buffalo me, are you?” In fact, by all accounts, he seemed to maintain his happy demeanor, that quintessentially cheerful and self-effacing American facade that masked the heart of a killer. Yet according to various accounts, he was drinking more than ever, a thing that began happening shortly after the death of Sitting Bull and continued throughout the prolonged and sensational divorce hearings that erupted during the early part of the twentieth century when, it seems, he had reached a breaking point. “God did not join two persons together for both to go through life miserable,” he wrote to his sister Julia, who was managing his ranch in Wyoming. “When such a mistake was made—a law was created to undo the mistake.” Quite simply, after a life on the road and numerous affairs—some quite serious and few hidden at all—the man who made and sold mythology could no longer live a lie. If his wife, Louisa, did not grant him a legal separation, he further explained, the result would be “war and publicity.”
He hoped that his daughter Arta, then thirty-seven, might see things his way, but because of his long absences from the family, including the fact that he did not attend her wedding, along with his unfaithfulness toward her mother, she did not. “I’m going through with the divorce,” he told Julia. “I think I’m entitled to be at peace in my old age. And I surely can’t have it with Lulu.” As the proceedings unfolded, the Cody family was roiled by more turmoil. Arta’s husband died, and months later her father returned from abroad to attend her second wedding. Not long after that, Arta died; Louisa said it was from a broken heart due to Cody’s desire to seek a divorce, and she sent Arta’s new husband a telegram saying so. Cody returned from London, where he was then touring, and they traveled to Rochester to bury Arta next to her brother, Kit, who had died long ago when Cody was performing there during one of his first shows, and her sister who had passed away later.
Louisa would not accompany her husband to the gravesite, and from then on the divorce proceedings became more acrimonious, with Cody accusing his wife of poisoning his prized staghounds given to him by the czar of Russia and Louisa filing statements that Cody was a drunk and a cheat, naming two of his mistresses in her claim. According to reporting by Chris Enss in her book, various witnesses were called to testify, stating that over the years Cody had been involved with “four or five nice Indian girls and other women on different occasions.” In spite of much testimony that indicated Cody was a reprobate, when Louisa took the stand and was asked if she still loved him, she said yes, and yes to whether she wanted a reconciliation, and she added that she would welcome him home. Unbeknownst to many, she had devoted much of her life to the making of Buffalo Bill, sewing the costumes that made him so desirable, making sure he was shown off in a way that suited him, right down to the buttons and fringe. In that regard, she was part of the myth.
When it was Cody’s turn, he enumerated his many good acts as a husband, and said that he “was universally kind to Louisa.” Further, he said that he had always been in a position to give his wife and family more money than most men ever possess. To support his claim, he produced a telegram that he had sent Louisa saying, “Ranch is yours. Take it and run it to suit yourself.” This was the property at North Platte, which had been rebuilt after the fire. He had deeded it to his wife, he explained, “so as to have less nagging and a little peace,” hoping that it would pave the way for their separation. But the plan failed, and in a dramatic statement outside the courthouse, she reiterated her love for her husband.
A month after the case was filed, the lawyers made their final summations. On March 23, 1905, in a kind of Samsonesque ruling, the judge dismissed the claims and counterclaims of both parties. He ordered that the names of Cody’s mistresses be stricken from the record, unconvinced that there had actually been affairs. Nor did he believe that Louisa had once tried to poison her husband, as Cody testified, supporting her explanation that she had been trying to cure his hangover. Cody lost an appeal in another court and then told reporters that he was taking Cody v. Cody to the U.S. Supreme Court. Meanwhile, he headed to France for a prolonged tour with the Wild West. Several months later, he wrote to his sister Julia that he had found God in his old age and that he had quit drinking. “Everything is running smooth. And I hope to make a lot of money before coming home. . . . I must fix myself for my old age—and for those I love.” While he was away, his daughter Irma wrote to him and asked that he withdraw his petition for divorce. She was his only living child and he responded that he would stay married to Louisa forever.
Yet there was one woman whom Buffalo Bill may have loved more deeply than any of the others. He and she did not have a physical affair but they had a connection that no one could break and that he proclaimed to everyone. This was Annie Oakley, whose rise to prominence he shaped and urged along. His affection for her—even as a kind of sister—was apparent. They had been drawn together by similar backgrounds, and they had a deep respect and admiration for one another. She and husband Frank often visited Cody and Louisa in Nebraska, and Annie and Bill would often ride and rope and shoot together throughout the years that they traveled as colleagues and friends. In 1889, Cody gave her a horse named Black Jack, and Annie was one of the few who could ride the once wild mustang. While touring, he would confide in her about some of the women in his life, and she apparently would advise him. Clearly, they were confidants, for she did not speak of these affairs to Louisa; it was through others, including private detectives, that Cody’s wife learned of them. What else Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley spoke of, we do not know. Annie would not have betrayed Frank, but her relationship with Cody incurred Louisa’s jealousy, according to many accounts. They not only spent much time together, but their names were often linked in newspaper coverage of the Wild West, and the show’s programs and posters. For Louisa, there was no getting away from Annie Oakley—except for much later, as noted in Chris Enss’s The Many Loves of Buffalo Bill, when she omitted any mention of her husband’s costar in her own memoirs, a strange blank in a chronicle of her life and times.
“She is the single greatest asse
t the Wild West show ever had,” Cody told a press agent, and this was not hyperbole. Sitting Bull may have been the representative of an ancient kingdom, but he toured with Buffalo Bill for only four months; Annie Oakley was with Cody for a decade. “To the loveliest and truest little woman both in heart and aim, in all the world,” Cody once wrote to her. Sometime later, she expressed a similar sentiment. “There were hundreds of people in the outfit,” said the woman he had nicknamed Little Missie, “and the whole time we were one great family, loyal to one man, Buffalo Bill Cody. His words were better than most contracts.”
With the film industry beginning to flourish, sooner or later most of the surviving frontier characters converged in Hollywood. Trapped in their personas, they had nothing else to do except get paid to be some version of themselves. Like the others, Buffalo Bill turned to the new mythmaking machinery for the last phase of his life. But he was not content with his accomplishments and wanted to be more than “Buffalo Bill.” “I grow very tired of this sort of sham hero-worship sometimes,” he told a friend in 1897. He wanted to present the real story of the West, which is to say, not the myth at all. Thomas Edison had already filmed his show in 1894, and in 1910 and 1911 he himself had filmed parts of it as well. He understood the power of film and it was time to set the record straight. He decided to produce a movie called The Last Indian Battles from the War Path to the Peace Pipe. Among other things, it featured General Miles, the cavalry acting out the massacre of the Indians at Wounded Knee, and participants, including Native Americans, playing themselves. Some of the cast members had not only survived Wounded Knee, but had served on one side or the other in the Battle of the Little Bighorn as well.
The film had the blessing of the Departments of War and Interior, with Interior Secretary Franklin K. Lane asking the Pine Ridge Agency superintendent to make sure that it “included pictures of the children in school working and on the farm, and otherwise industrially engaged. The whole presenting an historical event of the progress of the Indians for the last twenty years,” according to the Rapid City Daily Journal on October 22, 1913. The military was hoping that the film would present the army in a positive light, portraying its role in paving the way for settlers and protecting them in their westward journeys.
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