As we have seen, Cody crafted Buffalo Bill’s Wild West to be “true to nature,” or realistic, by reworking real elements into an organic simulacrum which evoked the emotional experience of the authentic. In this, he kept company with Bonheur, and differed mightily with Gauguin and Munch, who exaggerated or manipulated the human form to make larger poetic and philosophical statements. But the interest and enthusiasm the Wild West show evoked even from the youthful avant garde imply that its themes and symbols resonated with the most profound cultural questions of the day. Just as Edward Aveling saw in the show a display of social evolution, in Europe its vivid portrayal of primitivism and progress colliding in mythic combat was a living, breathing reprise of the dialectic that created, in Freud’s words, “civilization and its discontents.” Buffalo Bill’s Wild West simultaneously affirmed the rise of the modern world and entertained some of its most potent critics. 23
The political resonances of the show’s primitive valor were more far-reaching even than its uses as parody. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West returned to Europe early in the twentieth century. In the south of France, in 1905, the show became a fascination for the Marquis Folco de Baroncelli-Javon, who for years afterward corresponded with Lakota performers Jacob White Eyes and Sam Lone Bear, and the vaquero Pedro Esquivel (who answered all Baroncelli’s letters in flawless French).24 Baroncelli was a personal friend of the great Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral, with whom he shared a belief that the south of France, and especially his home region of the marshy, sun-splashed Camargue, was a realm of ancient myth and folk traditions which had been all but obliterated by an occupying French government and the Catholic Church. He called the people of the region his “race,” and conjured for them an ancestry that extended to ancient times. Baroncelli referred often to the Albigensian Crusade of the thirteenth century, when the pope unleashed a crusade against the Cathars, a primitivist sect denounced as heretics. The center of the Cathar movement was in the south of France, which became the site of terrible bloodletting and persecution. Baroncelli saw this both as exemplary of his homeland’s colonization by Paris, and as a precursor to Sioux experience in the United States. Locating his “noble brothers” among the show’s Indians, he took a number of them out for lunch in Marseilles. Subsequently, he dressed in Sioux headdresses and moccasins (which he bought from Indians in the Wild West camp), wrote letters to “my Indian brothers” (sending along an “English translation of the work, in Provençal, of our great national poet, Mistral, to whom we all sent from Marseilles a card which we all signed if you remember”), and pined for an imagined—and lost—regional autonomy (which we may presume in part expressed his aristocratic alienation from democratic Paris).25
Baroncelli and Frédéric Mistral together met Cody, who was described in the local press as having “the build of d’Artagnan and the hat of Mistral,” in 1905, when the show wintered for five months near Marseilles, and Baroncelli continued to visit Indians and cowboys in the camp for months afterward.26 The show’s devotion to the mythic centaur found an acolyte in Baroncelli. The marquis was an advocate for the mounted, trident-bearing cattle drovers of the Camargue, the so-called gardians, who were celebrated by Mistral and Baroncelli himself as symbols of racial purity and throwbacks to rustic, premodern regionalism, much like the cowboys of Wyoming and Texas. Baroncelli also wrote poems, one of them to the native bull of the Camargue, which he believed was descended—like Aryan people—from forebears who swept westward out of Asia, and which he presented as the source of Europe’s ancient bull-monsters, the Minotaur and the god Mithra. (The heroic bull spirit of his poem “Le Taureau” explains his past, “I have known the centaurs.”) 27
In fact, under Baroncelli’s guidance and the patronage of Mistral, the code of the stalwart, masculine, mounted gardian developed contemporaneously with that of the taciturn Anglo cowboy, who was enshrined as America’s hero with Owen Wister’s The Virginian in 1902. As inspiration for the valorizing of a “folk” type, Mistral’s poetry was like Wister’s work. Just as the American novel helped lure Thomas Edison and others to capture the romance of the Wild West’s “vanishing cowboy” on film, so a Paris crew arrived at Baroncelli’s estate only shortly after the Wild West company left Marseilles on its 1906 tour. The marquis wrote to his Sioux friends that the firm sought “to cinematograph all the scenes described in this poem and it is I, my guardians, my oxen, and my horses who represented those scenes.”28
The uses of film in extolling revamped folk myths of this sort expanded to western movies, and some of the first films created in France were westerns. One of these was directed by Jean Hamman, who claimed inspiration from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, which he saw in Paris as a child, in 1889. Hamman, also a friend of Baroncelli, began calling himself “Joe” in deference to his cowboy fantasies, and in furtherance of which, in 1904, he went to Montana, where he worked as a cowboy on the Ranch 44. There he met a Cody nephew, Henry Goodman. He returned to France by 1905, where he reunited with Goodman and met Cody when the Wild West show’s French tour of that year got under way. Hamman was a painter and a poet, and he soon became a filmmaker, directing one of the first westerns in any country, Cowboy, in 1907, in which he featured real gardians and which he set in the Camargue. He also produced one of the earliest Buffalo Bill movies, in 1909—while Cody was still performing in the Wild West show—called Les Aventures de Buffalo Bill.29
Baroncelli and others denied that Cody shaped the development of gardian traditions, and even suggested that Cody borrowed ideas from them. 30 But the question of who influenced whom only distracts from the larger truth: the Wild West’s “living pictures” of heroic primitives, fighting a losing battle against the higher civilization and the advent of the modern, exemplified a much larger, transnational search for premodern traditions on which modern national identities paradoxically depended. In this sense, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was one of a large number of thoroughly modern enterprises engaged in what Eric Hobsbawm calls the “mass production of traditions.” By reshaping folk and regional traditions into national myths, Cody joined historians, filmmakers, dramatists, novelists, and poets in providing identities for the citizens of the new constitutional monarchies and nation-states that were so quickly replacing the monarchies and empires of the past.31 But, while his picturesque evocation of the frontier myth provided a unifying story and identity for Americans, its central narrative of beleaguered primitives provided grist, however unintentionally, for a diverse range of people across Europe whose relationships to the modern state ranged from chauvinism to alienation.
In this connection, the show’s lasting influence in Germany, as in France, was most directly through its Indians. The nation of Germany was only twenty years old when Buffalo Bill’s Wild West debuted there in 1890, and mythic images of the American frontier and its noble savages—and savage savages—had been standards of German art and fiction for most of the nineteenth century.32 George Catlin’s Indian Gallery had been popular in Germany four decades before, as were the Missouri River watercolors of the German Swiss artist Karl Bodmer. Long before Cody arrived, a string of German novelists and adventurers produced lurid western tales through which their readers fantasized about America’s economic opportunity and freedom from lingering feudalism, and the mythic racial unity of her primitive tribesmen. Of course, large numbers of Germans had emigrated to the United States, and their accounts of the country and its frontier fueled enthusiasm for things western.
Not surprisingly, Indians had become a feature of German amusements well before Cody arrived in 1890. Zoos often incorporated ethnological exhibits, and there was an Indian village at the Dresden Zoo by 1879.33 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West so enhanced enthusiasm for the primitive spectacle in Germany that by 1906, when Cody’s show made its second tour of Germany, cowboy and Indian performance was a standard offering in circuses. Beginning in 1912, the famed Circus Sarrasani of Dresden began a permanent cowboy-and-Indian feature, “Sarrasanis-Wild-West-Schau.” American Indians f
ound steady employment in Germany, moving through Buffalo Bill’s Wild West on a round that took them from show, to circus, to ethnological exhibit, and back again, often selling “authentic” crafts to make extra pay. Edward Two-Two, a Lakota from Pine Ridge, worked this circuit for many years. When he died, in 1914, he was buried in Dresden at his own request (and where his grave is reportedly still tended by hobbyists and descendants of his German friends).34 In 1929, Marquis de Baroncelli received a postcard from his old friend Sam Lone Bear, who was again in Dresden, working for the Circus Sarrasani.35
German fascination with Plains Indians as romantic symbols of a preindustrial age, bound together through the blood of a united race, spurred a range of other German developments and practices. Most prominent among these was the work of Karl May, a prolific German novelist whose most famous literary characters were a heroic German, Old Shatterhand, and his Indian sidekick, an Apache chief named Winnetou. Winnetou debuted in May’s fiction in 1875, and his most popular novel was the three-volume Winnetou, which he published in 1893, capitalizing on the western enthusiasms stirred by the Wild West show’s 1890 German tour. May wrote eighty novels, about a third of them westerns, which resembled American dime novels but with a twist. Throughout, Old Shatterhand and his “good Indian” friend, Winnetou, battle “bad Indians,” including many Oglala Sioux. As in the United States, the “bad Indians” of the plot are driven to their evil deeds by bad white people. But in May’s West, the bad whites are, of course, Americans. In the course of the novel, they are made to suffer the wrath of the righteous German avenger, Old Shatterhand.
Like other Europeans, including Baroncelli, Karl May routinely denounced American treatment of Indians. “The Indian is also a human being and possesses human rights; it is a heavy sin to deny his right to exist and, bit by bit, remove his means of existence.”36
But to read May’s fiction is to realize that he desired less the autonomy of Indians than the hegemony of Germans, who in May’s fictional world master the frontier far better than Americans, and subjugate its Indians in proper German fashion. The popularity of his German hero who brought justice and removed savagery from the dark frontier in part expressed German longings for empire, for the exclusive right to usher primitives into modernity. May’s imagined world would differ from his own modern world in that its Germany would be far more influential than her corrupt and decadent rival, the United States. May’s covert nationalism, cloaked in Romantic idealism and fronted by the noble savage Winnetou, helps to explain the broad appeal of his novels. In an era of growing nationalist fervor, May’s westerns were gigantic best sellers among Romantics, expansionists, imperialists, and pacifists alike.
May’s lurking German chauvinism also explains why he was not friendly toward Buffalo Bill or his Indians, whom he accused of betraying their race. 37 Although he posed for photographs in western gear that looked much like Cody’s, his name is absent from the list of people who visited Cody during his years in Europe. May never met Cody, and he never saw the real West. Perhaps there was no need. His fictionalized landscapes met the desires of his reading audience. Indians came to Germany with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and other shows. When necessary, May posed as their protector from the Americans, a real-life Shatterhand.38
Not long after May died, his widow opened the “Villa Bärenfett,” or Villa Bear’s Grease, to house the combined artifact collections of May and a friend, Patty Frank, who had been inspired to collect Indian handcrafts after serving as a stable hand for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in Frankfurt am Main in 1890. The Villa Bear’s Grease became a center for the burgeoning crowds of German enthusiasts, or “hobbyists,” who, beginning around 1900, dressed up as Indians, cowboys, and trappers. Eventually, hobbyists dressed in “authentic” Indian and cowboy clothing, learned Indian languages, and hosted real Indians and cowboys from visiting Wild West shows to teach Plains Indian lore and history, and even to hold memorial talks on Karl May’s grave. The first known “Cowboy Club” in Germany was founded in Munich in 1913. (It was preceded by the first French hobbyist organization, the Club Blue Star, founded by Joe Hamman in Paris in 1908.) As in France, some of the first films produced in Germany were westerns, featuring cowboys and Indians.39
Hobbyists had counterparts in America. The Boy Scouts and a predecessor organization, the naturalist (and Boy Scout cofounder) Ernest Thompson Seton’s “Woodcraft Indians,” encouraged children to learn Indian lore as a means of connecting with nature, and later enthusiasts elevated the practice to a full-fledged avocation. American hobbyists saw Indian lore as the pathway to native identity and an authentic bond with American wilderness. German hobbyists had some of the same motives. They saw themselves as “like Indians” in their racial unity and their reverence for nature.40
But the similarity between Indian hobbyists in the two countries masked distinctive nationalist impulses underlying their respective devotions. On the one hand, Americans seized on Indian lore to become white Indians, empowering them in cultural and military struggles with decadent Europeans. On the other hand, German enthusiasm for Indian play implied their potential “hostility” to the Americans who so oppressed their “Indian brothers.”
THE COLLISION of primitive and progress was the ineluctable truth of world history, and Europeans saw it happening not only in the United States, but around the globe. Anglo-Saxonism and Aryanism, with their histories of races advancing from east to west, provided a narrative history of race advancement for Europeans like Bram Stoker and Folco de Baroncelli. For its believers, to look across geographical space into alien country was to look backward in time. As we have seen, remote regions of profound ethnic conflict provided a tableau of the march of social evolution, which could be read in the racial “types” that represented each of its stages.41 Thus, in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, the progress of civilization went from savage Indian through Mexican and “half-civilized” cowboy to the “representative man” William Cody, who had been through “every stage” of frontier development.
British travel writers, among others, saw eastern Europe’s Gypsies, Saxons, and Magyars in a roughly similar sequence. Savage Gypsies eternally pursued stagecoaches (although on foot, not on horseback), and Saxon herders were either indolent and vicious, or stalwart and brave, or some combination of all these (like cowboys), as the needs of the writer dictated.
For this reason, the “Attack on the Deadwood Coach” resonated with European notions of progress as much as with American. In depictions of remote regions of Europe, as in America, wheels were the exclusive technology of civilized people, who alone harnessed the driving energies of the universe. Savages—Indians, Gypsies, and Asiatic bandits—attacked stages and other wheeled vehicles almost as a genetic trait, as if they were unable to resist the moving target of the higher races whom they could not destroy.42 On both sides of the Atlantic, stagecoach attacks represented obstacles on the road to civilization, the savagery of the assailants both fearsome and doomed before the wheels of progress turning rapidly beneath the coach. Baroncelli was not only a patron of Indians, but of Gypsies, too. To him, they were mystical descendants of Europe’s original peoples. He honored them as “the Indians of Europe.”43 (Of course, such ideas were not Baroncelli’s alone, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World obliquely incorporated them with the addition of the mysterious “Magyar Gypsy Czikos” in 1897.) When Marquis Folco de Baroncelli entertained Indians and some cowboys from the Wild West show, his beloved gardians rode alongside them in a street parade, the better to situate the mythic horsemen of the Camargue in their proper moment in the march of civilization.44
Frontiers, then, were not just an American place or process. They were Eurasian, too. And the presence of Americans allowed Europeans to reimagine their relation to the march of progress in new terms, to see themselves as Indians or cowboys, or both.
The notion of global racial frontiers partly inspired Cody and his staff to reformulate the Wild West show as an
exhibition of worldwide combat between primitive and civilized. Of course, they took only the most “manly” racial types they could find, which meant that they took only those “primitive” or “semi-civilized” men who rode horses into war. The Congress of Rough Riders of the World reinscribed America’s frontier history not just as racial conflict, but as the last of the many conflicts in the east-to-west march of white civilization. Eurasian borders became clearly racial boundaries, “frontiers” of combat in which progressive races extinguished savage races, and Progress marched on.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Ghost Dance
THE VERY FEATURE of Cody’s entertainment which drew millions over its long life—the enthusiastic participation of Indians—has done the most to discomfit many Americans who remember it. Were the Indian performers extorted, duped, or both? Robert Altman’s 1976 film Buffalo Bill and the Indians presented Buffalo Bill’s Wild West as the fulfillment of America’s darkest expectations about the frontiersman. Paul Newman’s Cody appears as a self-promoting drunk who exploits Indians, especially Sitting Bull, to enhance his own reputation and make money. Altman, like many others, presumes that Indians were simple, naive victims of Cody’s chicanery.
So, when the Brooklyn Museum opened a large exhibit on Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in 1984, many were surprised to see an essay in the exhibit catalogue by Vine Deloria, Jr. The famed Lakota scholar, activist, and author might have been expected to denounce the Wild West show. (Among his many books is a scathing and best-selling indictment of federal Indian policy called Custer Died for Your Sins.) But Deloria painted Wild West performers like Sitting Bull, Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses, and Gall as nobody’s fools, men who joined the show for very good reasons. As he pointed out, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show offered them a chance to escape reservation travel restrictions, see the larger world, and make decent money. If the show presented Indians as primitives, they were nevertheless noble equals of their “civilized” opponents, such as cowboys, the U.S. Army, and later on, the many contingents from European armies. Furthermore, in working for Cody, Indians learned a great deal they could not have learned otherwise. “As a transitional educational device wherein Indians were able to observe American society and draw their own conclusions, the Wild West was worth more than every school built by the government on any of the reservations.” The knowledge Indians gained from their tenure with the show offered them at least some hope of protecting themselves from the worst excesses of the government. And if they acted out highly fictionalized battles, well, that was “preferable to a complete surrender to the homogenization that was overtaking American society.”1
Louis S. Warren Page 51