by Andy Conway
The Wounded Knee Massacre. This account of the massacre of Chief Spotted Elk (AKA Big Foot) and his Miniconjou band, who had surrendered peacefully at Wounded Knee, is largely sourced from Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, who in turn references Utley’s The Last Days of the Sioux Nation (Yale University Press, 1963), James McGregor’s The Wounded Knee Massacre from the Viewpoint of the Survivors (Wirth Brothers, 1940) and the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology report, 14th, 1892-93, Part 2.
Running Water. Fascinating information on this once thriving place, now a ghost town, was provided by USGenWeb Project. Their FTP archive contains a wealth of information, and the only account of this town’s history I could find.
http://files.usgwarchives.net/sd/bonhomme/history/spghost.txt
Theodore Roosevelt. While he did not publish these comments until 1889 in his famous book, The Winning of the West, Theodore Roosevelt did make these racist remarks at a speech in January, 1886 in New York, so it is quite possible that they might have been circulated in pamphlet form in 1887. Roosevelt became President of the United States five years after making these remarks.
Corn palaces. The corn palace craze began in Sioux City in October 1887, ten months after Katherine hears this conversation.
Rail journey east. The route for this journey from Pine Ridge to New York was suggested by a map in the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection titled Erie Railway and connections. Map of New York City & vicinity issued by N.Y.L.E. & W. R.R. Author: New York, Lake Erie, and Western Railroad Company. Date: 1887. This historical cartographic image is part of the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, www.davidrumsey.com, a large collection of online antique, rare, old, and historical maps, atlases, globes, charts, and other cartographic items.
Show Indians. The Buffalo Bill Museum has compiled a comprehensive Country/State listing of William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s tour destinations, and it puts Buffalo Bill’s show in New York City between Nov. 22, 1886 — Feb. 22, 1887 (It should be noted, though, that the comprehensive listing is not 100% reliable, seeing as it omits Birmingham, England for 1887).
Louis S. Warren’s book Buffalo Bill’s America also cites the show as occurring during Madison Square Garden’s 1886-87 season.
The show must have travelled directly from there to England, as they set sail on March 31st, 1887.
While Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show did perform in New York’s Madison Square Garden at this time, Sitting Bull was not present. The Hunkpapa chief had toured with Buffalo Bill for only four months during 1885, but I have included him on this date because it is tantalizingly close to the departure of the show for Britain.
Staging of Custer’s Last Stand. Buffalo Bill did not, in fact stage Custer’s Last Stand on this date, nor was he the first performer to stage it. Paul Fees, former curator of the Buffalo Bill Museum, tells us, “One of the biggest names in American circus, Adam Forepaugh... may have been first to stage a re-enactment of Custer’s Last Fight as a regular act (in 1887). The Battle of the Little Bighorn had been featured in many stage melodramas and was an obvious event for the Wild West both for its audience appeal and its narrative power. Buffalo Bill did not re-enact Custer’s Last Stand until a year later, apparently in deference to the feelings of General Custer’s widow, Elizabeth. She saw it performed in Cody’s show in 1888 and wrote him appreciatively, describing her emotional reaction to its ‘terrible’ realism. The Last Stand became a regular feature in Cody’s and other shows, sometimes even employing actual battle participants from both sides.”
God made me an Indian. Sitting Bull’s famous speech is quoted all over the internet but finding a source for it has been difficult.
A more reliable account of Sitting Bull’s words being misinterpreted for the benefit of a white audience comes from Kills Plenty, AKA Luther Standing Bear, who gives an account of going to see Sitting Bull presented in a stage performance in Philadelphia. His speech, in which he promised to meet the President and make peace, and in which he did not mention Custer at all, was delivered by the interpreter as an account of killing Custer at Little Bighorn. Kind of the opposite of what I do here. (See Luther Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, (1928), pp.184-186.)
Akicita. The camp marshals or police could demand the obedience of any man, including a chief. Lakota Society, paper prepared by George Sword (AKA Hunts the Enemy) and Clarence Three Stars. Shirt, D. R..George Sword’s Warrior Narratives: Compositional Processes in Lakota Oral Tradition. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. Project MUSE.
William ‘Bronco Bill’ Irving joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West from the start in 1883, and had a reputation as a superb bronco rider. He married into Red Cloud’s family (see next note) and was fluent in Lakota. Louis S Warren’s Buffalo Bill’s America - William Cody and the Wild West Show (Vintage Books USA, 2006). There is no historical record of Bronco Bill ever translating Sitting Bull’s speeches, nor even mistranslating them, but I have conflated the rumours of such a mistranslation and attempted to give a reasonable justification for it in this fictional version.
Ella Irving. Ella, sometimes referred to as ‘Ellie’ in contemporary photographs, was the wife of Bronco Bill Irving, and accompanied him on the first Wild West show tour. She was billed as a ‘Sioux Princess’ in the popular press. It is highly likely that Bronco Bill and Ella were responsible for recruiting Red Shirt to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West once Sitting Bull had departed the show, but this is the only Native American deed I have given to my main character Katherine in this book purely because the narrative at this stage needed her direct intervention.
Buffalo Bill. “Colonel’ Buffalo Bill Cody was a scout and showman, perhaps entirely responsible for the romanticisation of the ‘Wild West’. He founded Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in 1883, taking his company on tours in the United States and in 1887 to Great Britain and Europe.
Nate Salsbury. Impressario, producer and manager of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.
Buffalo Bull Who Sits Down. This is the literal translation of Sitting Bull’s name, from the Lakota Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotȟake.
I am standing on the hill over the Greasy Grass watching our braves destroy Long Hair and all his soldiers. This account of Sitting Bull’s actions during the Battle of the Little Bighorn are from Philbrick: Two miles away, on the flats beside the low hills to the west of the river, Sitting Bull watched with the women and children. One Bull remembered that his uncle was dressed in buckskin, with a shirt decorated with green quillwork. Instead of a war bonnet, he wore a single feather and was without war paint. (Nathaniel Philbrick. The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Big Horn.)
I am being welcomed to Canada by a man in a red tunic who represents Grandmother England. On May 7, 1877, North-West Mounted Police Major James M. Walsh welcomed Sitting Bull and the fleeing Hunkpapa band to Canada to impress upon him the laws of ‘Grandmother England’. See the fascinating History.net article Sitting Bull and the Mounties, by Ian Anderson, originally published in the February 1998 issue of Wild West.
I am being forced back over the border into the hands of my enemies. While Major James M. Walsh befriended and supported Sitting Bull, his efforts to secure the chief’s sanctuary met with disapproval from Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald. In 1881 the Canadian government forced Sitting Bull over the border.
I am a boy counting coup in my first ever battle. At the age of fourteen Sitting Bull accompanied a group of Lakota warriors in a raiding party to take horses from a camp of Crow warriors. He displayed bravery by counting coup on one of the surprised Crow. LaPointe, Ernie (2009). Sitting Bull: His Life and Legacy. Gibbs Smith. pp. 26, 28–29.
I am an old man giving my young son my rifle to surrender to a white general. Sitting Bull surrendered to the United States on July 19, 1881. His son, Crow Foot, gave up his Winchester lever-action carbine to Major David H. Brotherton, commanding officer of Fort Buford.
Thiánakitaŋ. [New Lakota Dictionary Online.] To run for home.
BUFFALO
BILL AND THE PEAKY BLINDERS
“WE’D LIKE YOU TO MEET Buffalo Bill on New Street.”
This was how I began my search for Katherine Bright: sitting in the Moseley apartment above Mrs Hudson’s costume hire shop.
It was 1976 for me, but Mrs Hudson and Mitch were visiting from 2017. We would occupy this same two-storey flat above the shop at various times. Having a physical location that remained a constant between us somehow made the travelling through time thing easier.
But you never knew when someone was going to drop in.
I stared at the photograph Mrs Hudson had put in my hands.
Native Americans riding down New Street. It was quite a sight. I knew the story. I’d seen the photograph before. The paper had run an 80-year anniversary special on it a while back. Buffalo Bill bringing his Wild West show to Birmingham for the first time, with a hundred Native Americans in full regalia riding painted horses down New Street, watched by a sea of startled locals.
The locals were almost as fascinating as the Indians. A huddle of Victorians gazing up at the warrior braves riding by. A man with a grey beard carrying a Gladstone bag, a young gent in a straw boater, a woman in a black dress and bonnet, a gaggle of young boys in shabby suits and flat cloth caps. Little Peaky Blinders.
“November third, 1887, to be exact,” she said.
“It should be easy,” said Mitch.
I looked up from the photo to meet Mitch’s eyes, but found myself staring at his waxed moustache. Was this a look he’d adopted to travel back to Victorian Britain with me or was it the fashion in 2017, forty years from now?
“I’ve never gone that far before,” I said. “You know that.”
I’d been their mid-century man for almost ten years now, after stumbling across their time travel activities in ’66. The sixties and seventies were easy to me, even the fifties were a doddle. I’d gone as far back as ’46, the year I was born, but no matter how exciting it was, I wanted to stay right here, with my wife and my daughter.
“You need to get over this block you have,” said Mitch. “It’s perfectly easy to travel outside your own lifetime. We’ve all done it. I’m doing it now.”
“You’re not born yet?” I tried not to sound surprised; it was just he looked and dressed like my great granddad.
“I’m born next year,” he said. “But I’ve gone back to the thirties, and even further.”
“So why me? Why don’t you go and get her?”
They exchanged an awkward glance.
“We think she might recognize us,” Mrs Hudson said.
“She’ll recognize me too,” I said. “She broke my bloody camera.”
“We think she’ll probably not remember most of what happened. Amnesia is a feature of the, er, process she’s been through. But she’s more likely to remember us than you.”
“And why’s that?” There was something they weren’t telling me. “What did you do to her?”
That look between them again.
Mitch leaned forward. “Do you love your wife, Pete?”
“Course I do. What’s that got to do with anything?”
“And your child?”
“Are you taking the Mick? ’Course I love my daughter.”
“That’s why you’re the best for this. Newly married, a lovely daughter. You’ve got a lot to hang onto.”
“Good reasons for not travelling to a place I don’t know. A place that’s risky.”
“The thing about Katherine,” Mrs Hudson said, soothingly. “Is that she can have an adverse effect on the minds of men who come into contact with her.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s a succubus,” said Mitch. “She will seduce you, use you for her own ends and devour you.”
“We don’t know that,” laughed Mrs Hudson. “Mitch has some rather extreme theories on the matter, but she has led at least one man astray, and her own poor self, I might add. But we have no idea if that’s still a part of her, or if she presents any danger whatsoever. That’s what we’d like you to find out.”
“So you need a happy family man? Someone who won’t be tempted.”
“Plus she smashed your camera,” said Mitch. “So you probably hate her.”
I remembered the girl. Flowing red hair, bright green eyes. She was staying in this same flat in ’66, on a mission they’d given her. I’d never seen her since then, even though she was part of their time travelling cabal.
“You need to tell me what happened to her,” I said.
Mitch opened his leather satchel and pulled out a file. “Everything is here.”
Inside was a sheaf of dense type, a wad of Victorian banknotes, a letter, and a few printed calling cards bearing my name: Peter Wethers, Esq.
“All you have to do,” said Mrs Hudson, “is use the letters of introduction to get yourself attached to Buffalo Bill’s tour as a reporter, and then talk to her. Make an assessment of her psychological profile.”
“Her what?”
“Find out if she’s still crazy,” said Mitch.
“But really, it’s very simple. Get yourself into Buffalo Bill’s circle and it’s mission accomplished.”
The door sounded downstairs and Sandra called up, back from the shops with the baby, the cold air on their cheeks. I felt a flush of love and a desire to go down and hug them, soak up that feeling.
Mitch was right. I hadn’t thought about another woman in two years. I’d stopped noticing them. I’d be ideal.
Damn.
“We’ll go,” said Mrs Hudson. “Good luck.”
I walked out, leaving them in the upstairs back room that was my studio and darkroom, knowing they’d be back in their own time before I’d got downstairs and kissed my little girl.
I HUNG ON FOR A FEW days. It didn’t matter when I chose to go – 1887 would always be there – but I realized I was putting it off. The idea scared me. I wanted to hang onto now, this perfect life I had. It didn’t matter that I could go and spend a month in 1887 if I liked and come back to the exact same minute I’d left. My wife and my daughter might not miss me. But I’d miss them.
So, I read through the file, counted the money, readied my Victorian clothes and studied a map of the city centre from about the same time.
I’ve always liked a good western, I was brought up on them at the Saturday cinema club, but the films that came out recently knocked me sideways. I watched Little Big Man and I never heard General Custer’s Garryowen tune again without thinking of massacred Indians. I watched Soldier Blue and puked up. I could never again watch a western without feeling sorry for the Indians and what was done to them. And it didn’t surprise me when they protested all over again a few years ago at Wounded Knee. If I were one of them, I’d be raging my whole life.
And I was going to see some real Natives. And Buffalo Bill too. The man himself.
I left Sandra sleeping one night, kissed the baby in her cot, sneaked across the landing to my studio – the one room in the house that was off limits to my wife and child – and put on my Victorian clothes, pocketed the money, the letters, the calling cards. I sat in the comfy chair and tried to relax and remember exactly how I’d felt all the other times.
My eye roamed the photo again. The photographer had stationed himself on New Street, at about where they would later build The Ramp, to catch the procession as it passed. But what he’d captured – and this was what really fascinated me, as a photographer myself – was a culture clash. The Indians of the Plains, only eleven years after the Battle of the Little Big Horn, and still two years before the Wounded Knee massacre and the death of Sitting Bull, riding down a street of English Victorians.
I realized the photographer could have achieved a more interesting shot if he’d placed himself higher up and pointed his camera straight up the street, to capture how long the parade was. With over two hundred performers, half of them Indians, it would have stretched the entire length of New Street and he might have caught it, snaking right up to the vanishing point of
the Town Hall building.
But he’d chosen to point his camera at an angle, to get that corner and its pavement, with its cluster of startled locals.
It was these choices a photographer made that interested me. And back then the photographer was surely working with plates, having to replace them one by one. Each would take a minute to load and unload as that procession sped past. This was why there was just a single shot of Buffalo Bill riding by in an open carriage, and two shots of the Indians.
None of the Indian women.
And this was a problem. Because it was one of those women I had to find.
It wasn’t working. I was still sitting in my flat in 1976, eyes burning, head pounding, and all I could do was fall asleep.
I woke up angry. It was hopeless. 1887 was too far away to imagine. There was too much of a gulf between me now and that time for me to believe I could do it.
Maybe it was that I didn’t want to do it anyway.
I wrote down my failure on an index card, noting the exact time and date, lifted the framed photograph of Moseley village in 1879 from the wall and opened the safe behind it. Inside was the old cigar box. Twenty or more small envelopes, musty and yellowing, each labelled with a single name: Abshire, Bailey, Collier, DeTamble, Eakins, Foster...
I had no idea what the names meant, but I knew that each envelope represented a mission. I ignored the rest, as instructed, put my message in Morley and placed it back in the safe.
Half an hour later, Mitch appeared in the room. He looked dead beat, frayed at the edges, his eyes red-rimmed. Whatever was happening in 2017, it wasn’t good. But then, I remembered, Mitch was an empath. It was emotions that he soaked up. Maybe he was feeling my hopelessness. Feeling it more than I felt it. I tried to imagine him in this same room, forty years in the future, opening the safe every day, opening the Morley envelope to see what was written inside. Thinking himself back to this time. Feeling himself back to this time. All time was happening at the same moment. Once you realized that, it made travelling through time so much easier. But it was a terrifying thought.