Surprising as the essay was for many readers, Deloria echoed teachings of Lakota elders passed down since the earliest days of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Indians discovered a realm of opportunity in the Wild West show that they had almost nowhere else. In a time of crushing poverty and fierce cultural suppression, the show in some cases made possible the survival of family and culture.
For the Lakota, then, the stakes in Wild West show performance were huge, as they were for Cody, too. William Cody was well aware that without Indians, there would be no unblemished primitives, no noble savages, for civilization to overcome in his entertainment. Without the Lakota, there was no show.
Indians flocked to the Wild West show because they were innovative, courageous men and women searching for a means of economic and cultural survival, and the show offered better hope for that than just about any other paying job. But their enthusiasm for it would be sorely tested, as a new ordeal descended on the Lakota in 1890. That year saw a crisis that nearly flared into civil war across the Great Sioux Reserve and that culminated in an army massacre of the poorest, most defenseless Indians. In the process, it nearly destroyed Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Cody persisted, to reemerge the following year with a newly invigorated show. The 1890s would be his most successful decade of all. Over three million people would see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in 1893 alone.
Among the many factors that allowed it to emerge from this period unscathed, Cody’s own sagacity for show business cannot be discounted. But by far the greatest factors in the show’s survival were its Indian performers, men such as Black Heart, No Neck, and others who had come to rely on popular entertainment for their survival. Americans today are rightly suspicious of show business and self-promoters, and their skepticism about Cody’s employment of Indians is understandable. But the fact remains that Sioux men who fought at the Little Big Horn and never quailed before an enemy, and who energetically volunteered to work and travel in the show industry, were on a fearsome road. They were desperate to save their people from the calamity of 1890, and their efforts to do so likely preserved at least some Lakota lives. In so doing, they saved Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, and Cody’s career, too.
OVER THE ENTIRE thirty-three years of Cody’s Wild West performances, more than a thousand Indians chose to perform with his company. Why?
Black Elk, who fought at the Little Big Horn as a young teenager, and who went on to become a holy man (his autobiography is a classic of American Indian literature and theology), recalled his reasons for joining the Wild West show in 1886: “I wanted to see the great water, the great world and the ways of the white men; this is why I wanted to go… . I made up my mind I was going away … to see the white man’s ways. If the white man’s ways were better, why I would like to see my people live that way.”2
Black Elk was disappointed in the ways of white people, but he stayed with the show through its English tour the following year. He was pleased to dance for Queen Victoria, and to see her pass in a parade some days later. “As the Queen passed us, she stopped and stood up back to where the Indians were sitting. All her people bowed to her, but she bowed to us Indians.” Like the popular memory of Victoria’s (fictional) bow to the flag, Black Elk recalled her homage to the Lakota with exhilaration. “We sent out the women’s and men’s tremolo then… . Then we all sang her a song. This was the most happy time!”3
Subsequently, Black Elk and several others were accidentally left behind when the Wild West show left for the United States (the occasion of their interview by London police looking for the Ripper). He spent the rest of 1888 and part of 1889 traveling through France, Italy, and Germany with Mexican Joe’s Wild West show, trying to earn enough money to buy a ticket home. For a time, he lived with an English “girl friend” and her family, becoming so ill at one point that he nearly died. But finally, he learned that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West had returned to Europe and was showing in Paris. Black Elk took the next steamer across the English Channel. “When I got there Buffalo Bill had gathered all the people together there and they gave me four big cheers. Buffalo Bill asked me if I was going to stay or go home. I told him that I was going home. He bought me a ticket and gave me ninety dollars. We then had a big dinner on my account.”4
Cody’s good humor, kindness, and generosity with money and time became legends among the Sioux and Cheyenne who worked with him. George Dull Knife, a northern Cheyenne who lived at Pine Ridge, rode with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West for most of the 1890s. He told stories of Cody abandoning his hotel room to sleep in Sioux tipis in the Wild West camp. Late in life, his son, Guy Dull Knife, recalled a day when his father returned to the reservation with Buffalo Bill. There was a party that night, and the next day Cody introduced the Dull Knife children to a trick pony he had brought with him. “Whenever there was a loud noise, the horse fell down and played like he was dead. Pretty soon, all of the kids started standing next to the horse and clapping their hands as loud as they could. The horse would fall down and then everyone would really laugh and so we did this for a long time. It was about the best time we ever had.”5
In part, these happy memories suggest how the Wild West show provided Lakota with space in which to explore ways of transforming Indianness rather than seeing it destroyed. By the 1880s, the Plains Indian wars were over. Attention now turned to “civilizing” the reservations, a process that entailed the complete destruction of Indian cultures and the assimilation of Indians into white society, “to kill the Indian and save the man,” in the words of educator Richard Henry Pratt.
Assimilation was the cause of self-styled “friends of the Indian,” mostly eastern reformers who saw it as the logical culmination to the march of progress. If Indians were defeated, what happened next? Since civilization was carried by race, and races were distinguished partly by their peculiar practices—language, religion, clothing, methods of child rearing—then to eliminate savage culture would secure civilization. The two basic assumptions of assimilationists, then, were that only one standard of civilization existed, and Indians should be forced to conform to it. Fixity had to trump mobility. Each Indian should be compelled to stay in one place, in a house (a settler’s cabin), outside which they cultivated farms and built schools and churches, and inside which they created domestic order through monogamous marriage. By forcing Indians to assimilate the values of middle-class Protestant culture, reformers hoped to make a first step toward unifying the diverse, even polyglot country, whose immigrants and freed blacks needed as much “Americanizing” as Indians did.6
Reservations became laboratories for assimilation in the 1880s, but much earlier, authorities had conceived them as educational zones where Indians would learn farming and Christianity. By 1883, the year the Wild West show debuted, reservation superintendents, or Indian agents, justified expenditures by documenting the number of acres plowed, schools built, and wages dispensed for “honest labor.” Bureaucrats like these had little interest in seeing their charges leave the reservation with private employers, unless the work was in “civilized” pursuits.
Indians were not allowed to leave the reservation without a pass from the agent. Hunting for deer, picking chokecherries, or visiting relatives on another reservation required a personal appeal at agency headquarters, which was often miles from the homesite, and in the opposite direction of the intended trip. The agent, for his part, could be counted on to exploit every angle to see that “his” Indians stayed put. Along the passage between savagery and civilization, conditions of itinerancy or even migrant labor were trapdoors to barbarism. For civilization to triumph once and for all, the fixity which Americans idealized (and which the Wild West show portrayed at its climactic settler’s cabin defense) must be imposed on Indians.
So it was that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, the entertainment which climaxed with a show of settlers securing their stationary cabin against mounted, mobile Indians, paradoxically offered Indians an otherwise unthinkable mobility. In practically no other way than with a Wild
West show could Lakota hope to travel overseas, or through eastern cities, especially with dozens of other Lakota for company. Although Cody claimed that the Indians were carefully supervised, in day-to-day show life they frequently ventured out from the camp on walking tours or even jaunts of several days’ duration. As the years wore on, such outings were less and less supervised, and Indian freedom within the bounds of the show increased.7
Travel away from the reservation allowed Lakotas to better retain proscribed spiritual and cultural traditions. By 1883, U.S. authorities had banned all Lakota religious ceremonies, except for overtly Christian ones. But Lakotas in the Wild West show, charged with reenacting Sioux defeat in the arena, found ample means of resisting spiritual alienation in the show camp. Wherever Buffalo Bill’s Wild West made an appearance, a cluster of Sioux tipis soon rose on the horizon. Although most of the performers were men, women and children also accompanied the show. There were lots of experiments with new technologies and amusements. Accordions appeared in the show camp in Germany, and Lakota men could be found shouting and betting over games of dominoes. But all this innovation came amid a little Sioux village that provided a comforting simulacrum of a real village for the performers, with meals cooking over camp fires and the familiar rhythms of Lakota language on every side.8
Cody made no effort to constrain religion in the camp. Show Indians had learned to be circumspect about their religion where whites were concerned, but on the road, they disguised some of their rituals, like Poe’s purloined letter, in plain sight. Visitors to the show camp often commented on “Indian steam baths.” These small, canvas-covered domes were actually sweat lodges, sacred structures, in which Lakotas made offerings and prayers before any new endeavor.9 They popped up wherever the show went in Europe, from London to Hamburg, so that Wild West Lakotas engaged the many challenges before them with the help of all the spirits they could implore—and without a prying agent around to order their sweat lodge dismantled.
The help of spirits was welcome, because traveling great distances, sometimes across the Atlantic, was terrifying and often dangerous. North Atlantic storms and European illness took a heavy toll, and there were injuries and even deaths in the show. All circus-style entertainments were physically perilous workplaces, and the Wild West show was no exception. Cody himself was hurt on occasion. “There is hardly a day that some on[e] isn’t hurt,” wrote Ed Goodman, Cody’s nephew, who took a job selling programs in 1886. “The day Uncle Will got hurt there were 3 Indians, 2 mexicans, 1 cowboy, 1 hostler, and 1 canvas man got hurt. It was a general day for to get hurt… . Dick Johnson got two ribs broken this morning.” 10 The peril that performers faced made the show all the more relevant to their audiences, many of whose members endured almost incomprehensibly hostile workplaces. Between 1890 and 1917, some 72,000 railroad workers died in workplace accidents; two million were injured.11 Dangerous amusements were fitting for people with dangerous jobs.
Camp injuries were endured with few complaints, but every death was doubly unfortunate for Indians, whose numbers had been declining for decades in the face of starvation, epidemic disease, and American expansion. The prospect of dying far from home, with no hope of burial there, was a lonely one indeed. The term oskate wicasa, “show man,” was a badge of honor, and Lakotas honored their courage with songs, such as this one composed for Sam Stabber, otherwise known as White Buffalo Man.
There’s going to be a Wild West show
Someone asks you to go
White Buffalo Man
Be of courage
Whenever that steamboat whistle toots
Your heart will begin to pound. 12
By moving away from the reservation, Lakotas not only learned of the world; they were able to represent at least some familiar aspects of Sioux culture to the larger world, and to preserve and develop those aspects for themselves. The 1883 ban on Lakota religious ceremonies extended to dances. But, beginning that same year, and continuing for the rest of the Wild West show’s life, some of the forbidden dances appeared in the show arena. A banned dance is more imperiled than a forbidden book, because if it is not performed, it will quickly fade from collective memory. Although Wild West Indians did not perform the most sacred dances for crowds, it is not too much to say that social dances like the Omaha Dance and the Grass Dance were preserved partly through the Wild West show.
In fact, down to the present day, Lakota dancers credit Wild West show performers with taking dangerous journeys to protect vital traditions of music and dance that had been driven underground on the reservation. Through Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, Indian performers blazed a path out of the Indian agent’s domain for their forbidden dances and songs, carrying them into the show arena and ultimately into the performing arts such as Indian dance theater (which remains a popular spectacle in the United States and especially in Europe), and high-stakes Indian dance competitions such as those at the Frontier Days celebrations in Cheyenne, Wyoming. In the twentieth century, Indian powwows became central to song and dance traditions for many Indian peoples. The modern powwow, with its dances, craft exhibitions, and Indian food, open to all, in a sense began with the Wild West show. This legacy helps to explain why the late Calvin Jumping Bull, a descendant of Sitting Bull and Black Elk whose prowess as dancer and singer earned him a place in the Cheyenne Frontier Days Hall of Fame in 2004, credits Buffalo Bill with helping to preserve freedom of expression for Lakota people. 13
Lakota women and children were central to arena scenes of village life, and even more important as the center of Lakota community behind the scenes. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.
In addition to its cultural rewards, the most immediate attraction for Lakota joining the Wild West show was money. Even small amounts of cash were a boon to Lakota families struggling in the harsh new world of federal wardship. In 1883, the primary source of subsistence on the Sioux Reserve was rations, payments of food from the government in return for land ceded by the Lakota in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. The treaty stipulated the government could reduce rations when Indians became self-supporting. By the 1880s, agents labeled individual Indians “self-supporting” and slashed their rations, in an effort to force them into wage labor and farming. Famine crept across the reservation.14
Lakota in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West were thus driven to perform in order to keep their kin and themselves from desperation. As attractive as the money was the work itself. On the reservation, employment at digging ditches or grading roads was poorly paid, stultifying, and scarce. Riding a horse and performing dances and mock attacks in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was scarce work, too, but for Indians raised to Plains war, it had the virtues of being familiar and relatively lucrative. On the reservation, a man who secured one of the scarce positions as agency policeman could expect $8 per month, a figure which inched up to $10 by 1890. Other work, such driving a freight wagon, chopping wood, or making butter, was sporadic and paid even less.15
In contrast, the standard wage for Indians in the Wild West show was $25 per month, with translators and prestigious men designated as “chief” of the show contingent earning monthly salaries of $75 or even $125. With the show’s abundant food and the suit of clothes given to all departing Indian men (always useful for formal occasions, and for appearing before authorities back home), show Indianship paid well. Cody committed himself to hiring whole families (to retain the camp’s “moral” atmosphere), and in time wives earned $10 per month, with extra cash allowances for children. 16
To secure Indian women’s participation, Cody and Salsbury paid them their salaries directly; the usual amount was $10 per month.17 Some earned more, depending on who their husbands were. Ella Bissonett, who was married to the translator, Bronco Bill Irving, made $25 a month.18 The presence of children sometimes resulted in an increase in wages by another $5 or $10 per month for child support.19
Indians committed their funds to farming and livestock raising. But those who did soon discovered that vigilance and
continuing contact with home were required to keep property from being stolen, a cause in which they secured the assistance of William Cody. In 1891, writing from Germany, the showman requested that the agent at Pine Ridge investigate the complaints of his Indian contingent, who told him “that the lands formerly occupied by some of them were taken up by other Indians” while the show was out of the country.20 That same year, Indian women prevailed on Cody to take their part in other disputes over property back home. Relatives at Pine Ridge wrote letters to Calls the Name, a Lakota woman traveling with the show. Letters informed her that the reservation’s model farmer, a white man named Davidson, had absconded with a horse and colt belonging to her. Davidson told her family that since Calls the Name was off the reservation, she had sacrificed her property. At the request of Calls the Name, Cody wrote to the agent repeatedly, reminding him that the woman was “absent with consent of the Government” and therefore “entitled to all benefits same as if present.”21 He wrote also to General Nelson Miles, imploring him to intervene and give Calls the Name “her rights and justice.”22 Whatever the outcome of these petitions, Indians made Buffalo Bill—the champion of white expansion which had cost Indians almost all their property—into an important ally for Indian entrepreneurs.
Louis S. Warren Page 52