Yet there was disagreement as to how to depict Wounded Knee. One military advisor asked Cody to hold back footage of the incident unless the War Department approved it. Cody agreed. General Miles did not want Wounded Knee included at all. He blamed subordinates for the massacre, stating in his autobiography that “I have never felt that the action was judicious or justifiable, and have always believed that it could have been avoided.” But Cody did go ahead and film the event; after all, re-enactments were what he was known for—and this one was to be placed in a context that was not sensational like his shows, but an accounting that pulled no punches and portrayed exactly what happened. Yet this time women and children were not part of the story; General Miles had ordered that they not be included. He himself remained at the Pine Ridge Agency away from the action while the Wounded Knee segment was filmed.
It was a complicated enterprise. To make this part of the movie, Cody reconstructed the Lakota village along the creek where Big Foot’s band had assembled. “Painted canvas teepees sheltered extended families,” reported American History magazine, “few of which did not grieve for an absent loved one.” There were wails and sobs, and hundreds of soldiers were cleaning their rifles and wheeling in Hotchkiss guns. “Some Sioux wondered if the coming morning’s battle would really be pretend. Or were they to be slaughtered like their ancestors? Painted stick markers shuddered above the sacred grave as the increasing wind filled it with snow. Younger braves thought perhaps the time had come for vengeance. Some talked of loading their rifles with live rounds instead of blanks. Soon death songs shrilled above thudding drums.” From the bluffs above, Cody was watching the action, along with Louisa, who had recently rejoined him after their estrangement. Some of the Indians who had traveled with Cody warned him of the threats; a council was quickly arranged in the mess tent and Cody assured the young men that they were indeed making a movie and no one was to be killed.
On the morning of October 13, the cameras rolled. “The air erupted with gun smoke, shrieks and howls. Rifles crackled and ponies whirled,” reported American History. “With the camp aflame, people fled down into the ravine and the artillery lobbed shells into their midst. It was a tragic, bloody business.”
In the following days, other aspects of the final days of the Lakota were filmed: the Sioux in starving conditions, Ghost Dances, Sitting Bull’s arrest and death. Even the final siege of the Lakota in the Badlands was filmed, after an arduous fifty-five-mile trek for fifty Sioux families, and a company of troops and heavy wagons loaded with hay, grain, and provisions. Finally, day-to-day life on the reservation was filmed, featuring children in school and farmers harvesting crops. On October 30, Cody hosted a grand celebration to mark the end of production. Fifty-three of the Native American actors had been stranded in Denver when his show had gone bankrupt earlier, and he had not yet paid them. “You have been my friends and I am going to be yours,” he said, and then he wrote a check for $1,313 in back salaries. Later he headed south in his new seven-passenger Ford touring car.
In February of 1914, Cody went to Washington, D.C., to screen his series of films for members of President Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet, congressmen, and reporters. “Cody was still straight as the arrows that have whizzed around his noble head,” one reporter said. The audience of one thousand was spellbound. “It has been my object and my desire,” Cody said, “to preserve history by the aid of the camera, with the living participants who took an active part in the Indian wars of America.” On March 8, he was back in Denver, introducing the films to a full house for a weekly run, twice daily, at the Tabor Grand Opera House. “Nothing like this has ever been done before,” said the Denver Post. “It is War, itself, grim, unpitying and terrible, and it holds your heart still as you watch it and leaves you in the end, amazed at the courage and the folly of mankind.”
On March 28, Cody’s publicist Major Burke announced that once again Cody had a fortune in sight and “the world by the ears.” But that did not happen. The film fared poorly, perhaps because it was too real or too intense, criticized by Indians for excluding women and children from the massacre scene, and not appreciated by whites, who were unimpressed by the anticlimactic ending in which Indians were assimilated and went to school, instead of going on the warpath.
The move was cut down into a shorter version called The Adventures of Buffalo Bill. The entire documentary was supposedly donated to archives at the War and Interior Departments, but there is no record that it was ever received. However, a two-minute segment of it was viewed nearly twenty years ago at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody by Andrea I. Paul, reporting for Nebraska History Magazine in the winter 1990 edition. While the clip does not include the incident at Wounded Knee, it does include footage of the Wounded Knee period. The rest of the film portrays scouting and cavalry maneuvers at the Battle of Warbonnet Creek, and a scene of Cody en route to Sitting Bull’s cabin, intercepted by Indian police before he can intervene for his friend. Yet to this day, remnants of the film are rumored to exist elsewhere—a disintegrating and mysterious relic, a side of Cody that may be lost to the ages.
With the failure of his film and the vanishing of the Wild West show, Buffalo Bill went back on the road, as himself, in the Sells-Floto Circus. He appeared in every show and parade. Some said that he had a fear of dying in the arena. Suffering from arthritis, he had trouble getting in and out of the saddle, and waited for a cue before shows to climb aboard—aided by a close associate. “Without hope, one is dead,” he wrote to his sister Julia. His last touring season ended in 1916, with two performances in Portsmouth, Virginia, billed as the last ones before the show went into winter quarters at Norfolk. By now, Cody was generally in a carriage, standing on the buckboard in full showman dress, as a team of horses took him through town. “WILD WEST ON PORTSMOUTH STREETS” said the headline in the women’s section of the local paper following the show. The streets were thronged. The band played “Memphis Blues” and then “Home Sweet Home” was offered on the piano. It was a memorable event, as always, and soon Cody was indeed going home.
Back in Colorado to visit his sister May, his health broke down, and then he briefly recovered. “You can’t kill an old scout,” he would say as the pattern repeated itself. But soon, doctors told him there wasn’t much more time. He prepared for his final scene, calling in his friends for a last round of poker just before he died, on January 10, 1917. Although Cody had wanted to be buried in a beloved and remote spot in Wyoming, the Denver Post paid his wife $10,000 to bury him in Colorado, so that’s where he was eventually laid to rest, on Lookout Mountain in the town of Golden, overlooking the plains. Months earlier, so many people had gathered for Cody’s funeral that the country had its first traffic jam—or so newspapers reported. His body was carried by caisson past a sea of spectators, escorted by fellow members of an Elks lodge, all wearing top hats. One of his favorite horses, McKinley, followed the caisson. When the casket was lifted and carried into the lodge, according to a witness, McKinley tried to break free from his handler. As the lodge doors closed, the horse whinnied, bolted, and ran to the caisson—like Sitting Bull’s horse, and Comanche before him, looking for his rider. Then he sniffed and whinnied again. The handler grabbed his reins and led McKinley away. But he turned his head and stared at the doors, longing for Buffalo Bill. It was all a fitting end to the equestrian age.
At his burial service sometime later, Native Americans filed past the grave, placing the recently minted buffalo head nickel atop the stone. Aptly, the Indian portrayed on that famous nickel was Iron Tail, an Oglala figure of note, friend of Buffalo Bill’s, and member of the Wild West. On the other side is the buffalo, and he has a name too. It’s Black Diamond, who lived in a small cage at the Central Park menagerie, the offspring of a pair of buffalo that were once in the P. T. Barnum circus. “Its head droops as if it had lost all hope in the world,” one observer said, “and even the sculptor was not able to raise it.”
One person conspicuously absent as Cody’s
body lay in state in Denver was Annie Oakley. She had endured her own share of travails, both during and after her years of touring. In her first season with the Wild West, Frank Butler’s poodle, George, the dog who had played Cupid in their courtship and then became part of their act, got caught in the rain, developed pneumonia, and died while the show was in Cleveland. A company carpenter built a small wooden coffin and Annie and Frank covered him with the satin and velvet table cover where they placed their weapons during their act. Indian girls chanted and made wreaths, and an old friend offered his lawn as a resting place. Two cowboys dug a grave and there George was buried.
Although this happened early in Annie’s career with Buffalo Bill, it was the end of the shooting team of Butler and Oakley. Other dogs would take George’s place and Annie was devoted to them all, especially a dog named Dave. During the First World War, Annie and Frank raised money for the Red Cross by giving shooting exhibitions at army bases around the country. Dave was part of their show, sniffing out money hidden in a red handkerchief that would be donated to the charity. They signed their Christmas cards “Annie, Frank, and Dave,” and Annie’s countless fans clamored to meet him. Time passed and Annie continued to appear in shooting exhibitions, now wearing eyeglasses, but still just as fast on the draw. One day she was traveling in Florida with friends. Their car overturned and Annie was pinned underneath—one more accident since a horrific Wild West train crash in 1901 during which she and other performers, including animals, had incurred serious injuries. Now with a fractured hip and shattered ankle, she was hospitalized for six weeks. Frank took a room across the street from the hospital, visiting daily with Dave, who posted himself at her side. Later, Frank wrote a story called “The Life of Dave, As Told by Himself,” describing Annie’s hospital stay from the dog’s point of view. “She looked very feeble and could only put out one hand to stroke my head,” Dave said. “She was always so gentle and careful in combing and brushing me.” Upon recovery, she needed a cane to walk and had a steel brace on her right leg. She wrote a public letter of thanks to the thousands of admirers who had sent get-well telegrams and notes.
Shortly after her accident, while out for a walk with Frank, Dave was hit and killed by a car. He was eulogized in the paper as “The Red Cross Dog,” and it was said that Annie and Frank never recovered from his loss. Annie continued to tour, giving shooting exhibitions in spite of her limp and sometimes from a chair. In an interview with the Philadelphia Ledger, she had some advice for “the modern girl.” “Learn to ride a horse,” she said, “not merely to hold one.” She also wanted girls to learn how to shoot and said that they should concern themselves with “other people’s troubles,” lest they spend too much time thinking about their own. Over the years, she taught thousands of women and girls to shoot, and probably some boys too. But it was as a role model for girls that she had become known; in her quiet and unassuming way, she was passing along knowledge of self-defense to part of the population that may have never had it.
Over the next few years, Annie weakened, and at some point began preparing for her death. She gave away possessions including mementos from the Wild West, such as a pipe and a newspaper clipping showing Sitting Bull with that very item. Her fondness for him was known to all; not only did she speak of him to friends, but once she had dressed as Sitting Bull for a costume ball, wearing a war bonnet of pheasant feathers on Valentine’s Day. On November 3, 1926, Annie Oakley died in her sleep. Described in newspaper reports as “the friend of monarchs and Sitting Bull,” she was sixty-six. Her doctor said the cause of her death was pernicious anemia, but some said she was simply worn out. Others attributed her death to lead poisoning caused by a lifetime of handling weapons and ammunition. If accurate, this surmise suggests that any number of other frontier characters could have been afflicted by the same condition, flowing with toxins. Not quite three weeks later, Frank passed away at the age of seventy-six. He had stopped eating upon her death and although he had not been well for some time, close friends said he died of a broken heart. They were buried together in Greenville, Ohio, Annie’s hometown.
It was said that Annie had a dislike for anything that was not of the present, an understandable characteristic for a sharpshooter who was clearly in tune with the here and now. In fact, when she learned of Buffalo Bill’s death, she was at a shooting exhibition. Her reaction indicated how much Cody had in common with his old friend and touring partner Sitting Bull. “It may seem strange,” she observed, “that after the wonderful success attained that he should have died a poor man. But it isn’t a matter of any wonder to those that knew and worked with him. The same qualities that insured success also insured his ultimate poverty. . . . He was totally unable to resist any claim for assistance that came to him, or refuse any mortal in distress.” A short time later, as Buffalo Bill’s body lay in state, Annie penned a note. “Good bye old friend,” she wrote. “The sun setting over the mountain will pay its tribute to the resting place of the last of the great builders of the West, all of which you loved, and part of which you were.”
And now, there is one more item for our tale. After Wounded Knee, Kicking Bear, the Minneconjou Indian who met Wovoka and returned to his people to speak of resurrection, joined the Wild West. There were others who had danced the Ghost Dance as well, and they too entered the American dreamtime in the parade without end led by Buffalo Bill. To this day, the show is still touring.
EPILOGUE
Let us speak once again of Wovoka, the man whose vision triggered the unfortunate cascade of events leading to the death of Sitting Bull. His fame grew after the Ghost Dance prophecies failed to materialize, with many seeking his counsel, healing, rain-making abilities, and blessings. With a partner, he established a business selling his autograph and pictures, and then one winter day in 1924 he had a visitor from Hollywood. This was the cowboy Tim McCoy, who had been working as a technical director on The Thundering Herd, which was filming in Bishop, California, with various Native American stuntmen and extras. Realizing that he was a day’s car ride from Wovoka in Yerington, Nevada, he set out to explore the place where Short Bull and Kicking Bear had journeyed over twenty-five years earlier, in search of the messiah. He too wanted to find this man, after hearing so much about him from the Indians with whom he was now working. On the outskirts of town, he found the shack to which he had been directed, and he knocked on the door. A Paiute in his twenties opened the door and McCoy asked if this was the home of Wovoka. Furtively looking around, the young man nodded and then closed the door.
McCoy headed back to his car, and then the door opened. Out came Wovoka. He was no longer the vibrant conveyor of salvation, now an old man, in a dark beaver skin hat, a rumpled suit and vest, with a flourish, perhaps, of a white shirt and boots.
“His face showed much sadness,” McCoy told his son in their book, “though neither then nor later to determine for whom that sadness had been experienced; for the hundreds who had been blasted to smithereens at Wounded Knee or for himself and a dream that had become a nightmare.” McCoy explained that he wanted to talk about the Ghost Dance, and Wovoka said he did not want to discuss it. Then he headed back to his cabin. “That’s too bad,” McCoy responded, adding that he had greetings from some of his old friends. “What friends?” Wovoka said. “Two men from Wind River,” McCoy replied. “Yellow Calf and Sage. Two Men from Pine Ridge: Short Bull and Kicking Bear.” Wovoka said that he remembered them. “What do they say?” he asked. “They say that they respect you,” McCoy answered. Wovoka relaxed a little and said that they were all good men when they knew him. “They still are,” McCoy said. “And I know some others who would like to see you. They are Arapahos and were all ghost dancers. They believed in you. I think they still do.” Wovoka replied that he would like to see them too. But they lived so far away. “I’ve never been to their country,” he said. “It’s a long way off.” That was for sure, McCoy thought to himself. By all accounts, Wovoka had not been anywhere. He remained in Nevada during the gho
st dance years, perhaps never stepping out of Mason Valley. After Wounded Knee he vanished.
McCoy told Wovoka that the Arapahoes did indeed live far away. But he explained that they came from their country to see him. Wovoka asked where they were, and McCoy said that they were just across the state line, in California. “They are too far away,” Wovoka said again. “But think of how far they have come just to see you,” McCoy replied. “They have been told so often by the white man that you are a fraud and yet they continue to believe. It would be the greatest thing in their lives if they could lay their eyes upon you just once before they die.”
Wovoka relented and asked McCoy to send a car for him on the next day. Then he turned around and headed back to his shack. “Bring some of your friends,” McCoy called after him. “There’ll be a dance.”
On the following day there was no film shoot. McCoy did not tell the Arapahoes that Wovoka was coming, lest he not show up. The car had been sent, and the Indians were dancing at an outdoor fire, eating, having a good time. “At about four-thirty that afternoon,” McCoy recalled, “the long black limousine carrying Wovoka and his grandson arrived. It was followed by a convoy of five jalopies filled with Paiutes.”
McCoy asked for the men to gather in a circle, and then he told them that the Messiah had arrived, the man who started the ghost dance. At first there was no reaction. But then the Arapahoes became excited, whispering among themselves, and Wovoka got out of the car. The Arapahoes bowed their heads, afraid to look at him. The members of his entourage also avoided his eyes. “My children! Hear me!” Wovoka said. “I wish to speak with you. But first, dance and eat some more!” And so they did, and then they made music, and then Wovoka began to speak. He explained the vision that he had on that fateful New Year’s Day in 1889 when he died along with the sun and he met with God, who told him to tell his children to tell no lies and live in peace with everyone. And that was all he did, he explained, and nothing more. “But some of them,” he continued, “particularly the Sioux, got carried away and took back this idea about ghost shirts, because they wanted to fight the white man. God was not pleased with this and the Sioux were killed and the Medicine turned bad. So God decided that the spirits of the dead Indians and the elk, antelope and buffalo, would not return. At least not now.”
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