by Andy Conway
I tramped along the Bowery, marvelling at the crowds, the mass of humanity, skirting the filthy streets of Chinatown and Little Italy, where boxes of dead meat were dumped on the sidewalks, the gutters piled with waste paper, straw litter, egg shells, orange peel, potato skins, cigar stumps.
Men in stovepipe hats sucked on cigars or spat tobacco in strips of lurid brown and no one seemed disgusted by this.
My face burning, I pushed on through the pleasant green park of Washington Square, where Italians promenaded, their children running this way and that.
I found a water fountain and drank greedily from it, aching to swallow, faint with hunger, the whole side of my head throbbing.
And I walked on, from Washington Square Park, up Fifth Avenue where bearded men swung their canes and touched their shiny silk hats as I passed. They wore ankle length greatcoats here and the women sported flamboyant hats, tied under their chins with ribbon.
The sheer number of the people overwhelmed me and I wanted to run and hide. In this place I feared my wakan had deserted me. The more steps I took northwards, the heavier was the weight on my soul, till I could almost feel the clamour ahead of me, vibrating in my chest.
I came out to the intersection where Broadway cut across Fifth Avenue and froze.
It was like the battle of the Rosebud – an obscene tangle of screaming horses – or the battle of the Greasy Grass, a week later, where it had sounded like all the dogs in the world fighting.
The noise was unbearable. Wagons, buses, coaches jostling for supremacy, and the insane ringing of hooves on cobbled stone.
My fear must have shown, because an old man with white whiskers, wearing a silk hat and a red necktie, held out the crook of his arm to me and guided me across the street. I did not see how he got through that tangle of vehicles. I had my eyes closed.
He deposited me on the other side, raised his hat and walked off into Madison Square Park.
I followed, and found myself again surrounded by children playing. Boys in lambswool caps, girls in bonnets. There were no Italian voices here. The men and women that strolled were richer, more refined. All around the square the carriages rolled, as if it were some ritual parade. Liveried men in top hats and polished boots clung to the sides of the carriages. Horses pranced, trussed up in leather girdles and blinkers. They called to me their pain. Defeated. Depressed.
I noticed now that the women wore bustles, and I did not. I wondered if this marked me out as a woman of a lower class. It would have been good to know these things. As an Indian among these people I knew exactly where I stood. But as a white woman in a dress that might not be the correct fashion, it was far more difficult.
I leaned on a fountain and pulled my senses together. I had come here to chant down the walls, to bring it all tumbling down, to destroy their city.
But here I was – a blade of grass before a plague of locusts.
Tired, my legs shouting their pain, my belly groaning, I pushed on through the park, and emerged through ornate gates to find what I had come for.
Along a whole block, the white walls of a fort, with a bell tower at one corner. The sign proclaimed Madison Square Garden, and giant colourful posters all along the white walls proclaimed the day’s attraction.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.
Show Indians
THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE streamed through the various gates along the side of the building, below the circular portholes that dotted the side of the fort. I half expected to see blueshirts at each hole, with rifles, looking to shoot Indians like me.
But I was an Indian no more. I was a wasichu like every other, and I stumbled through one of the gates with the rest of them, paying my 25 cents.
Inside was a giant arena, with bleacher seats rapidly filling with ten thousand or more bodies. A sea of white faces and the warm, ripe smell of roast sunflower seeds. People all around me were munching on them from little paper bags, spitting the seed husks to the floor.
Dizzy, I found a seat and closed my eyes, trying to shut out the overwhelming crush of so many bodies, but I could not, so I looked ahead, to the giant arena where a cluster of tipis were erected, and a few lone horsemen wandered here and there, watching the crowd assemble, grinning. One rider smoking a cigar.
If I concentrated on them, I could fool my mind into thinking I was back on the plains. The crowd disappeared and I felt nearly home.
A cowboy band gave out a brass fanfare and launched into a jaunty march that caused a giant roar to erupt from the crowd. I gripped the edge of my wooden seat and felt panic flutter in my soul. I could run from that place, run and hide. So hot, so thirsty, so faint. My fingers gripped the seat and I almost left the imprint of my nails in the hard wood.
As the band played on, a long line of riders sauntered into the arena and paraded round the giant space. A hundred or more cowboys and blueshirts, and then my heart leapt at the sight of Lakota braves in war shirts and headdresses.
Tiyata! my heart cried. Home!
There were almost a hundred braves, warriors I had known: some of them I had fought beside at Little Bighorn. They rode, stony faced, gazing out at the crowds, some of whom jeered. Others gasped, and a few cheered. The whites seemed more fascinated to see them. Children patted their mouths and whooped war cries that I had never heard any Indian make. Young women turned their faces away and curled closer to their laughing boyfriends, but peered through their fingers at the savages, and smiled, curious, secretly delighted.
A man in a top hat called out the names of each group as they paraded around the ring, yelling through a giant megaphone that was almost as big as himself.
Once the two hundred or more riders assembled, the cowboy band stood and blew out a fanfare with their full might and the man with the giant megaphone announced the arrival of the great chief of the entire Wild West show... Colonel Buffalo Bill Cody!
He rode in on a white horse, waving a white gloved hand, like royalty, and the entire crowd rose to their feet, applauding and screaming.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the great city of New York! We welcome you all to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West!’’ he cried, and at his signal, every rider burst into life.
The horses bolted this way and that in a kaleidoscope of activity that sent up oohs and aahs from the crowd. One by one, the riders left the arena and the exhibitions began.
I forgot the crowd, and the sickness that throbbed in my head, as I became engrossed in the story that Buffalo Bill was writing. And it was a story. It was a fiction.
Yes, there were tricks and skills to show off – cowgirls creating shapes in the air with their lassos, Indian braves riding bareback, cowboys riding bucking broncos, and a host of sharpshooters. A young girl called Lilian Smith smashed clay pellets as they were thrown into the air; Annie Oakley pretty much hit a fly off a horse’s head at a hundred yards, and Buffalo Bill himself demonstrated what a crack shot he was by hitting targets from a galloping horse.
But the rest of the show told a story; a carefully created narrative of a wild west that I had never seen.
There was the Pony Express demonstration, where riders swapped horses mid-ride to show how letters and telegrams were delivered across half of America before they built the trans-continental railroad and the telegraph lines.
Then they ran a turn called The Horse Thief, which was a little play that showed the crowd how justice was dispensed in the early days of the frontier. They dragged the horse thief around the arena tied to a horse while the cowboys shot him with their six shooters. It looked dangerous and all, but the ‘thief’ got up at the end of it with a big smile and waved to everyone.
Then it all slowed down while they presented another little play about a frontier camp and how they entertained themselves with a dance and even a quadrille on horseback. It was a sweet scene of frontier life, with sentimental music from the band, and there were women in the crowd dabbing at their eyes with their handkerchiefs.
And this was the moment when the savage Indian
s attacked. We knew they were savage Indians because the man in the top hat with the giant megaphone told us they were savage Indians.
They rode into the arena to circle the poor, peaceful white folks, whooping and shrieking and shooting blanks, until the brave settlers forced them back out, to wild applause from the crowd.
Much later, there was almost a similar scene showing an Indian camp with fake tipis. The braves did a war dance and then scouts rushed in to announce the approach of the cavalry headed by the dreaded General Custer. All of the Indians went out to meet the 7th Cavalry and the fight began.
But it was nothing like the real Battle of the Little Bighorn.
Custer and his men had to retreat to the far end of the arena where a little sand hill was made for Custer to stand on so his buckskin jacket and blonde hair could be seen by everyone.
None of his men ran in panic, to be hunted down like buffalo. None of his men cried out for their mothers in blind terror. None of his men shook so much with fear that they couldn’t shoot straight.
They fought with determination and true grit, falling one by one, till only Custer was left alive, still firing at the Indians who, for some strange reason just circled around him, round and round in a way that didn’t make any sense, unless you wanted to get shot.
Eventually, the Indians stopped riding round in circles, and one of the Indians – the top-hatted man told us he was Sitting Bull, but it wasn’t him at all, even though the posters said he was part of the show. This brave who pretended to be Sitting Bull, got off his horse and walked up to Custer standing on his sand hill and raised his tomahawk and struck him down so he died, the top hatted man told us, like a great hero.
I laughed at that, but the cries of the Indians hid my laughter. They staged a victory dance around campfires before departing the arena.
Only then did Buffalo Bill himself ride in to Custer’s rescue, tragically too late. But, standing over the fallen hero’s dead body, he vowed to take his revenge, in a speech that unleashed applause like thunder.
There were a few more tricks and performances, and then the man in the top hat announced the appearance of a very special guest. The historic war chief, leader and medicine man of the Sioux Indians, in person:
Sitting Bull.
God made me an Indian
THE BAND FELL SILENT and so did the crowd and I swear I heard a child at the far end of the stadium ask its mother if the show was over.
A lone rider came out, on a chestnut horse, clopping silently in the sand; a short man with a walnut brown face, wearing a brightly coloured quill shirt and a great crown of eagle feathers.
He stared the entire crowd down as he strode round the arena, and they gaped back, their mouths open, and not a one of them said a word.
This was the man who had killed Custer, this was the military genius who had defeated the 7th Cavalry, this was the savage who had spoiled their centenary celebrations and given America the greatest shock of its life.
It was as if they couldn’t quite connect any of that to this little man who rode around Madison Square Garden on his horse. It was as if they could not reconcile history and myth with this... with this mere man.
He had become all their demons and bogeymen wrapped up into one chilling name – Sitting Bull – and now here he was right in front of their eyes: just a man.
He walked slowly right round the arena and as he circled it, the band struck up a fanfare that took Sitting Bull to the centre.
Many people could not help themselves and cast glances back to the sand hill at the far end of the performance space, where they had watched Custer killed by this man only moments before.
Another man rode out and the top-hatted man announced him as Bronco Bill Irving, who would translate for Sitting Bull.
Bronco Bill seemed little different from all the other cowboys who rode in Buffalo Bill’s show, but I noticed something that I think many there did not see. He wore moccasins instead of cowboy boots, he had an eagle feather in his Stetson hat, and a medicine bundle around his neck. Here was a genuine squawman, whose dress subtly pointed to his divided allegiance.
Sitting Bull raised his hand and the chatter that had sprung up was hushed. He spoke in Lakotan, and no one there but Bronco Bill and I understood a word of it. Which was good, because if the audience had known what he said, they would have torn him to pieces.
“I hate all white people,” said Sitting Bull.
“Greetings to all Americans!” cried Bronco Bill.
“You are thieves and liars. You have taken away our land and made us outcasts.”
“I come here to pay my respects to the people of the Great White Father.”
White men like to dig in the ground for their food. My people prefer to hunt the buffalo...”
“There are many things that have divided us in the past...”
“White men like to stay in one place. My people want to move their tipis here and there to different hunting grounds.”
“We have lived very different lives here in this place called America...”
“The life of white men is slavery. They are prisoners in their towns or farms. The life my people want is freedom.”
“But we are all now Americans together.”
A round of applause crackled and caught fire and spread round the entire arena.
“What white man can say he never stole my land or a penny of my money? Yet they say that I am the thief.”
“You know me as the killer of General Custer...”
“We want no white person or persons here. The Black Hills belong to us.”
“But know that I met Custer as a warrior, as a soldier, and though we fought on opposite sides, we met as brothers in arms.”
“I am a red man. If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the first place.”
“We red men have made our peace now with you. We have laid down our weapons and will fight no more.”
“We are poor... but we are free. No white man controls our footsteps. If we must die... we die defending our rights.”
“We have much to learn from the white man and we shall go forward together in peace.”
“Is it wrong for me to love my own?” cried Sitting Bull. “Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am Lakota? Because I was born where my father lived? Because I would die for my people and my country?”
“It is right that we become brothers now,” cried Bronco Bill. “Our skins are red. Yours are white. I am Sioux, but also American. We were all born here and we all love our country!”
“God made me an Indian!” said Sitting Bull.
“God bless you all,” said Bronco Bill.
They clapped their hands till their palms were sore. They whooped and hollered. And when he rode out of there, every man, woman and child loved the savage who killed Custer.
They rose to their feet, and none of them noticed that Bronco Bill’s face was redder than any Indian’s.
Akicita
THE CROWD FILED OUT of the stadium, but it was not the end of the show. I made my way out of the arena and found a fair of stalls and caravans, along the sides of the arena but within the walls of Madison Square Garden. It was an entire village of tents and tipis for the performers, who it seemed all lived on site. Surely I would find Sitting Bull in one of these?
There was a stable tent for the hundreds of horses, and pens for the other animals that starred in the show: a small herd of about twenty sad buffalo, half that number of elk, a handful of Texan steers and donkeys, and a couple of deer.
The nut-chomping crowd gawked at the animal exhibits and the Indians alike. Women bought bead necklaces, quillwork and star blankets from the winyanpi. Their husbands posed to have their photograph taken with the cowboys and some of the Indians.
There he was.
Sitting Bull sat in a chair at a desk and signed photographs of himself for a dollar at a time.
Dizzy, my face burning, I pushed to the fro
nt of the queue. I had to see him, to tell him my vision of how he would be murdered.
“You wait your turn like all of us!” a woman shouted.
She swung me round and I nearly fell, and she shouted something more but it came from underwater.
“I’m not queuing for a photograph!” I cried.
“You can queue just like us!” a man yelled.
“I don’t want a stupid photograph!”
His fat paw jabbed me between my breasts and I fell, floating on air for an age before I was swallowed by dark water.
A beautiful face rippled through the surface and I called out Monahsetah’s name, but the words came as if my mouth were full of sand.
“Is she awake?”
I tried to turn to the man’s voice but my head was made of stone.
The beautiful woman nodded, stroking my face. Coolness. The man’s face bobbed into view over her shoulder. A white man with a drooping moustache, kind eyes, a Stetson hat with an eagle feather.
Bronco Bill.
And the woman was not Monahsetah, I could see now, though she was just as beautiful.
She lifted my head and placed a cup to my lips and I felt cool mountain water seep into my soul.
I was in a tipi, and from the hubbub of voices outside, I was still in Madison Square Garden.
“You,” I croaked, in English. “Why do you mistranslate Sitting Bull’s words?”
His face reddened and he looked to his wife.
“I speak Lakotan,” I said.
“I know. You’ve been speaking it in your sleep.”
I kept to English. I sensed his wife did not speak it and I did not want to embarrass him in front of her.
“Does Sitting Bull know that you dress his words in false clothing?”
“I think he does,” said Bronco Bill, looking at me honestly, shrugging his shoulders. “But he enjoys saying what he needs to say, even though he knows I will tell them what they want to hear.”