So it was in the remainder of Cody’s stage melodramas that Indians, if they figure in the action at all, are routinely divided between noble savages (played by real Indians) and savage savages (played by supers), all of whom are vanishing. The drama reprised a classic depiction of Indians that allowed Europeans and Americans to utilize Indians as symbols without understanding them as complex people.20 This division was integral to the plays even in the early 1870s, but the arrival of real Indians in the roles marked a new departure. Where non-Indians like Morlacchi had represented “good Indians” such as Dove Eye in Scouts of the Prairie, now “good Indians” played themselves, just as the white scouts represented their own characters. The imposture suggested that nobility was, after all, the most reliable—“real”— Indian trait.
Cody’s intuitive sense of the public longing for noble savages as true, uncorrupted, honest primitives fading before the onslaught of modern, industrial commerce was the source of much of his success in the later years of his stage career and, of course, in the Wild West show. Scholars and Buffalo Bill enthusiasts rightly marvel at his sympathy for Indians, which he began to articulate in the late 1870s, at the very moment he brought real Indians to the stage. “In nine times out of ten,” he was fond of saying, “where there is trouble between white men and Indians, it will be found that the white man is responsible.” Often, he buttressed this political commentary with references to Indian nobility. “Indians expect a man to keep his word. They can’t understand how a man can lie. Most of them would as soon cut off a leg as tell a lie.”21 He routinely criticized the failure of Americans to abide by their treaties, warning that “there is just one thing to be considered” where “the management of Indians” was concerned: “That is, that when you promise him anything you must keep your word; break it, and the trouble commences at once.” Urging his compatriots to “take an Indian by the hand and make him a friend,” he also defended federal purview over Indian affairs from detractors who thought each state should administer its own Indian policy. 22
As he developed his contingent of Indian performers, increasingly he made his own violence against Indians look like a last resort. “I never sighted down my rifle or drew my knife on an Indian but I felt almost sorry for it, and I never did it when I could help it,” he said in one interview.23 He blamed the Indian wars on white aggression. Thus, in 1879, he told a local newspaperman, “There are a number of men who make it a profession to steal horses from the Indians… . In fact, there is a regular market for them. Although I have had many a tough fight with the red man my sympathy is with him entirely, because he has been illused and trampled on by those whose duty it was to protect him.”24
Cody’s sympathy for Indians might be dismissed as a show business fiction, were it not so consistent in later years. His Wild West show hired so many Indian performers, paying such good wages for enjoyable work, that it earned a lasting place of respect and even admiration among the Lakota. To this day, tales of Cody’s friendships with his Indian performers circulate at Pine Ridge.25 Lakota scholar and activist Vine Deloria, Jr., author of the famed Custer Died for Your Sins, concludes that for its time, “Buffalo Bill’s relationship with the Indians, absent the aura of show business, seems above average in the positive human qualities of justice and fair play.”26
That Cody’s understanding of Indian peoples developed to the point where it could earn such praise from Indians themselves speaks volumes about how much the performance needs of his entertainment changed his views. For in the beginning, Cody’s stance toward Indians was complex and not consistently benign. Until he began hiring Lakota performers in 1877, his sympathy for Indians was sometimes absent from his pronouncements, and even after he hired them, he continued to glory in his role—onstage and off—as the scalper of Yellow Hair. More bloodthirsty still, during California’s Modoc War of 1873 he told a reporter for a St. Louis newspaper that when it came to Indians, “I have shot and stabbed’em, cut their bowels out with my knife, harpooned’em, clubbed’em to death, and in fact killed’em in every way you can think of, except talking’em to death.” Vowing to “take a run out to the lava beds” and take enough scalps “to stuff a rocking-chair for the old woman,” Cody promised that he and Texas Jack “won’t leave a pappoose [sic] a week old.”27
Fortunately, Cody did not make good on his offer. Indeed, such Indian-killer rhetoric was confined to the earlier period of Cody’s career. As he tailored his persona for middle-class audiences, a more benign Buffalo Bill emerged and the talk of clubs, harpoons, and baby-killing soon vanished.
It may be that his move to distance himself from the Indian-hater image reflected his increasing adherence to his dime novel persona. In the fiction of the 1870s, the character of Buffalo Bill was more benign than vengeful. Indian-hating, bloodthirsty scouts featured in American fiction of an earlier period, such as Robert Bird’s 1837 novel Nick of the Woods, and in the many cheap novels and stories that circulated about “Old Dan Rackback,” the “Great Extarminator,” and about Lew Wetzel, the famous Kentucky scout, who “to his dying day, carried out the very letter of the vow he had made” never to let anything “screen an Indian from his vengeance.”28
But, as one scholar has observed, these virulent Indian haters were “too choleric, too unrestrained and bloodthirsty” to be romantic heroes. By the 1870s, the best-selling dime novels downplayed Indian hating in favor of Indian civilizing, and their romantic protagonist, the noble white scout, reclaimed Eden from the wilderness and ensured the propagation of settler homes and families.29 Like other fictional heroes in this period, the Buffalo Bill who appears in dime novels is drawn to the West because it is a natural setting. As a natural man, he evokes a Romantic appreciation of wilderness, as paradise waiting to be reclaimed, with himself as the scout who blazes a path for civilization to follow. He may fight Indians, but if so, it is because they represent a direct and immediate threat to white civilization. He is a skillful warrior, but not a vengeful one.
The power of the cultural imperative toward restraint of the bloody passions, even in dime novels, is evident in the literary career of the notoriously choleric and all-too-often unrestrained Ned Buntline. In the writer’s first Buffalo Bill novel, the action begins with the shattering of the Cody family and ends with its restoration. Buffalo Bill dispenses violence and claims retribution on the way to the story’s end, but they are means to his end: the establishment of settler domestic bliss. The most dangerous enemies are not Indians at all, but evil white men who have turned renegade. Nowhere does Buntline’s Buffalo Bill excoriate Indians for being Indians. Nowhere does he vow to obliterate them.
That so much tolerance flowed from the pen of an immigrant-bashing firebrand like Buntline suggests how far middle-class, reformist ideologies of manly moderation had penetrated even dime novels. By the 1870s, American manliness was thoroughly infused with ideals of spiritual and bodily temperance. 30 White men might fight and kill Indians if provoked, but hatred—of Indians or anybody else—was anathema to most Americans, because it was a savage, degenerative condition. It flew in the face of dominant middle-class virtues of self-control and restraint. Monomania for revenge precluded love, procreation, or the advancement of civilization. Like addiction to drink, it could become a monstrous obsession. If Americans became vengeful killers like Indians, then savagery would have won the day. Thus, Henry Morton Stanley would write from the 1867 Hancock expedition against the Cheyenne, “Extermination is a long word, but a longer task, and civilization cannot sanction it.” 31 Thus, Buffalo Bill’s stage character, like his dime novel character, was a romantic man, whose violence was controlled enough to be regenerative. He was a race hero, not a race avenger; an Indian fighter, even an Indian killer, but not an Indian hater.
Of course, even after the early 1870s, the exigencies of war made Cody’s development of his persona as Indian apologist and sympathizer difficult and uneven. Immediately upon hearing of Custer’s demise in 1876, he set out to scalp an Indian. He wa
s reenacting the “duel” with Yellow Hair early in 1877, just before he hired Sword and Two Bears—and he performed The Red Right Hand, with the Yellow Hair scalping in it, during the season that Sword and Two Bears were with him. Afterward, in the Wild West show, the scalping of Yellow Hair was a central spectacle for decades. In Cody’s day-to-day life, the actual scalp took on great personal importance. He traveled with it, keeping it in a safe in his private railway car during his Wild West show days.32
And, at the same time he denounced the breaking of treaties, Cody continued to seek profits from the practice. In 1875, he and Kit Carson, Jr., served as figureheads for the Boston Black Hills Expedition, a group of speculators trying to mount a gold-mining expedition to the Black Hills of Dakota Territory. In the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, the U.S. government guaranteed Sioux title to those hills. As reports of gold in the region began to circulate, the Indians made clear they had no intention of relinquishing their claim. Agitation from the Boston Black Hills Association and similar groups convinced federal authorities that the treaty of 1868 was unenforceable, and thereby began the sequence of events which led to the Sioux War of 1876–77, the dispossession of the Lakota from their promised home, and their further impoverishment.33 In later years, Cody told newspaper interviewers that the Lakota had only been defending what was rightfully theirs. In 1885, when Sitting Bull toured with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, Cody gave one interviewer a thumbnail history of the Sioux War, in which he attributed Sitting Bull’s onetime hostility to the United States as a defense of his home. “Their lands were invaded by the gold seekers,” he explained, “and when the U.S. Government failed to protect them they thought it was time to do it themselves.” In this case, mindful of needing government permission to have Sitting Bull with him, Cody softened his antipathy toward government bureaucrats, who “did all they thought they could do,” but to no avail, since “the white men wouldn’t be held back.”34 That he had encouraged American seizure of the Black Hills at the time did not trouble him.
Similarly, in the early 1880s, Buffalo Bill supported efforts to “open”— Indians would say “steal”—Indian reservations for white settlers. Indian Territory, today’s Oklahoma, had been guaranteed to Indians, including not only Cherokees and others removed from the East, but also the southern Cheyenne and some Arapaho, whom Cody fought in Kansas. By the 1870s, many Indians were leasing parts of their reservations to Texas cattlemen for pasture. Speculators and political opportunists began to excoriate Indian treaties as the tool of rich cattle barons. Foremost among these “boomers” was David “Oklahoma” Payne, who kicked off a populist campaign promising new opportunities for aspiring farmers if they could defeat the “corrupt” politicians who protected the “special interests” of Indians.
In 1882, Cody bought forty shares in Payne’s prospective colony, representatives of which soon marched into Indian Territory. U.S. authorities did what the law required. They removed Payne and his followers, and gave Payne a court date. With the would-be settlers perched on the border, Payne was out of money. Cody found him a place in the Wild West show to tide him over, but the “intrepid leader” who defied military orders to stay out of Indian Territory and “defended his cabin” there “against scores of his wily foes … until his name has become a terror to the Indians of that region,” died suddenly in 1884.35 His efforts reached fruition posthumously, in 1885, when Congress began “buying” Indian land—whether or not the Indians wanted to sell—and the land rushes of the late 1880s and early 1890s made Oklohoma synonymous with agrarian opportunity—for non-Indians.36 Cody never made any money on his Oklahoma investment, but nonetheless his support for the abandonment of treaties and the dispossession of Indians contradicted his many public statements about the dishonor of the practice. In deed, if not in word, he kept company with the broad swath of Americans who denounced the breaking of Indian treaties but consciously profited from it.
The real question thus becomes less how Cody derived his sympathies for Indians than how he fashioned a persona of Buffalo Bill that could denounce Indian conquest at one moment and become its most visible advocate in the next. Of all Cody’s characteristics, it is this profound ambivalence about Indians that seems most impenetrable.
But in this respect, perhaps more than in any other, Cody’s perspective on the Indian question borrowed directly from the politicking of army officers. Buffalo Bill may have turned his back on political office, but in his theatrical depiction of Indians he held a political brief for the army command, something that further encouraged their support of his theatrical and stage career. For the army that fought Indians on the Plains, the administration of Indian affairs was a large prize in an ongoing political fight in the nation’s capital. Traditionally, the War Department was responsible for Indian affairs, and for this reason the army secured a great deal of authority and a large budget well before the Civil War. But in the reforms of 1849, the Office of Indian Affairs was moved from the War Department to the Department of the Interior (where it survives to this day, as the Bureau of Indian Affairs).37
The change did not sit well with the army, who now saw themselves as enforcing an Indian policy cooked up mostly by distant politicians and Washington bureaucrats. For the rest of the century they angled to regain control of Indian relations. Thus, in the 1860s and ’70s, army officers often blamed the federal government—by which they meant the Department of the Interior—for failing in its duties to Indians. Beginning in 1869, President Grant’s Peace Policy placed Indian reservations under the supervision of Quakers and other Christian missionaries. The army’s responsibilities were restricted to pursuing Indians off the reservations. The Peace Policy was a favorite target of criticism among army commanders, who felt that they understood Indians better than any missionaries. 38
Much as critics denounced Cody’s stage plays for plotless violence, they had a coherent political message in that they propagated the army’s position in the struggle for control of Indian affairs. Scouts of the Plains, Cody’s 1873–74 drama, was highly critical of the Peace Policy, under which churches administered reservations while the army patrolled outside their boundaries. As one critic noted, “All through the play there is a Quaker Peace Commissioner dropping in everywhere most inopportunely, and who gets scalped—as he deserves—before the close.” 39 The Peace Policy had collapsed by 1875. But until the twentieth century, army officers continued a drumbeat of criticism of federal bureaucrats and religious reformers for malfeasance, naiveté, or general misconduct in Indian affairs. Throughout the period, Cody underscored his support for the army position in his public statements. Thus, his lament that “the Indian” had been “illused and trampled on by those whose duty it was to protect him,” a sentiment he repeated in various forms throughout his life, was a thinly veiled criticism of the civilians who ran the Office of Indian Affairs, and who were responsible for administering reservations. 40
Less pointedly, and in some ways more surprising, his ambivalence toward Indian conquest and his sympathy toward defeated Indians were also products of his long exposure to army officers. To be sure, America’s leading Indian fighters were and are rightly notorious for some of their pronouncements about Indians. General Philip Sheridan was said to have remarked that “the only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” Paraphrased as “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” Sheridan’s remark has been a banner of Indian hating for more than a century.41 Whether or not Sheridan ever uttered the remark, others said similar things. Upon hearing of the destruction of Captain Fetterman’s command at Fort Phil Kearny in 1866, General William T. Sherman had wired the White House: “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.”42
But calls for extermination were rare among army commanders. Indeed, officers’ views of the Plains Indian wars can best be summarized as ambivalent, and highly contingent upon conditions of war or peace. General George Crook, for whom Cody scouted in the summer of 1876, fr
equently blamed white settlers for pushing Indians “beyond endurance” until they took up arms, waging wars which the army “had to fight,” even though “our sympathies were with the Indians.” Treated fairly, he thought, “the American Indian would make a better citizen than many who neglect the duties and abuse the privilege of this proud title.”
Crook had as many critics as any other officer in the army, but on the subject of Indians, his views were widely shared. General Oliver Otis Howard, who pursued Chief Joseph in the Nez Perce War of 1877, was of the opinion that Indians, at least, stole only only from enemies. They kept promises, too. When asked if he thought Indians were especially treacherous, he replied, “No, not so much as the Anglo-Saxon.” General Nelson Miles, a personal friend of Cody’s who commanded troops against the Sioux, Cheyenne, Apache, and Nez Perce, wrote that Indian warriors showed “courage, skill, sagacity, endurance, fortitude, and self-sacrifice of a high order,” and they followed distinctive “rules of civility.” These magnificent people, he thought, ill deserved America’s “haughty contempt.” Even Philip Sheridan was not above sympathizing with them. “We took away their country and their means of support, broke up their mode of living, their habits of life, introduced disease and decay among them, and it was for this and against this they made war. Could any one expect less?” To Sheridan’s mind, reservation poverty was the major cause of Indian warfare, and entirely the fault of the Office of Indian Affairs and the ignorant reformers who posed as “Friends of the Indian.”43
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