Louis S. Warren
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Black Heart, too, denounced the allegations of mistreatment. “We were raised on horseback; that is the way we had to work.” Cody and Salsbury “furnished us the same work we were raised to; that is the reason we want to work for these kind of men.”44
The inquiry concluded in Cody’s favor. But if the charges were overblown, there is a possibility that frictions within the Indian contingent contributed to them. According to press correspondents, the five Indians who passed through immigration and triggered the investigation had complained not only that food and clothing in the show were scarce (charges which proved incorrect), but that “Rocky Bear, the chief, and Broncho Bill, the interpreter, are cruel in their treatment of the Indians.” Allegedly, when White Horse reached home he planned to tell his cousin Red Cloud about the matter, “and the probable result will be that Buffalo Bill will be compelled to hire a new lot of Indians.”45 At the inquiry, the other Oglalas vigorously denied the shortage of food and clothing. But curiously, none of them denied that there had been disputes over Rocky Bear’s leadership.
Indeed, it would have been unusual had there not been some tension over it. Oglalas were not a modern state, but a decentralized people, a network of kin with chiefs who led by persuasion and example. Their transformation to wage-earning employees required considerable adjustments on their part, most of which remain hidden from us. Within the show, Indians vied with one another for the privileges Cody dispensed, particularly the office of “chief” of the Indian contingent, since it paid $125 per month, considerably more than standard performance roles. Jealousies and rivalries among Indians sometimes affected their performance. Rocky Bear would quit the show and go home after being refused the position of contingent chief in 1892, and Luther Standing Bear would blame his lackluster early performance as chief of show Indians in 1903 on subversive advice he received from a jealous Oglala underling, Sam Lone Bear.46
These rivalries help explain why some of the most vehement critics of Indian employment in Wild West shows were actually other Indians. On the reservations, questions of who went to the show, and how they were paid, inspired some controversy, and rivals of the Indians who were fortunate enough to be selected sometimes attempted to influence the show—or terminate it—by importuning each other and the government. Red Cloud’s interference kept some Oglalas from joining in 1887, making it necessary for Cody to request that fifteen more men be sent to him just before the show left for Europe. Two years later, the aging chief sought payment of twentyfive cents per month from each Indian who went with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.47 In 1897, he and several other Lakota demanded that the government force Cody and Salsbury to break off their agreement with James F. Asay, a trader in Rushville, Nebraska, who allowed Indians to swap a month’s wages for store merchandise in advance of their show contracts, but who levied “the most outrageous charges” for his goods.48
In later years, on the reservation, Indians sometimes borrowed the rhetoric of white critics to combat the influence of show Indians. In 1901, the Oglala Tribal Council petitioned the government to “grant no more permits or contracts to any white man to take out any Indians for exhibition purposes” because “it is a well known fact that these Indians have visited houses of ill fame while with the show and have brought home disease,” and they “neglected their cattle and property and are worthless after they have returned.”49 Chauncey Yellow Robe, a graduate of Carlisle Indian school who translated for Rocky Bear and Black Heart at the inquiry of 1890, would call for the termination of Wild West shows in 1914. “The Indians should be protected from the curse of the wild-west show schemes, where the Indians have been led to the white man’s poison cup and have become drunkards.”50
Perhaps some of the Indians in the returning party sought to utilize the press against Rocky Bear and Bronco Bill Irving as a way of forcing Cody to remove them from their show positions. When Rocky Bear left the show early in the 1892 season, Cody related how “all save one Indian were unanimous in saying they were glad,” an anecdote which reflects less on Rocky Bear’s leadership qualities (he was contingent chief again in future years) than on the continuing rivalry over leadership positions within the show.51
Such disputes may have come to the surface in conversations with O’Beirne, who did not speak Lakota well enough to do without a translator, and who appears to have relied on George Crager, a plainsman of dubious talents and even more dubious motivations. Crager, in fact, exploited the controversy to wangle a position as translator for the next season in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, and his own relations with Indians were stormy, as we shall see in another chapter. The entire 1890 controversy may have erupted out of a potent mixture of minor Indian allegations of poor leadership, the grasping ambitions of George Crager, and the overweening piety of James O’Beirne.52
The most unusual aspect—perhaps the only unusual aspect—about the dispute within the Lakota contingent in 1890 was its elevation to a public spectacle. When one weighs the care that show Indians took to defend their jobs year after year against intra-Lakota rivalries and white critics, one cannot escape a nagging sense that a special bitterness or, perhaps, a higher degree of anxiety aggravated the show’s Indian camp that year.
This was, indeed, quite likely. For, just as the Wild West show’s Indians were experiencing new levels of dissension, the community of the Great Sioux Reservation was roiled by a gathering storm. Rocky Bear, Black Heart, White Horse, and other show Indians could hear thunder over the horizon as early as 1889, while they were traveling in Europe. On March 4, 1890, Rocky Bear bowed low and made the sign of the cross before Pope Leo XIII. We cannot know what he was thinking, but whatever prayers he offered were fervent. The struggle at Pine Ridge to survive a capricious government and a dolorous conquest threatened to unhinge the fragile social order. Before another year was out, many Lakota lives would be lost, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, too, would nearly find a grave in the prairie. The story of the Ghost Dance troubles, how the show became part of them, and they part of the show, tells us a great deal about how much Lakota men and women valued the Wild West show. Buffalo Bill Cody was a legend for saving white women and families from Indian attack. Now, the Indians of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West sallied home, desperate to save their families and friends from a final catastrophe. They were not always successful. But in the process, they rescued Buffalo Bill from the clutches of sentimental reformers and saved for themselves some small opportunity in the atrocious world of U.S. Indian policy.
JUST AS THEY SOUGHT to end the Wild West show as a pornography of savagery, Indian reformers sought to eradicate what made Indians distinctive from whites by breaking up Indian reservations and forcing the narrative of progress to its agrarian conclusion. As early as the Treaty of 1868, the Sioux had been encouraged to take up individual parcels for farming. 53 In the 1880s, Congress began the process of “allotment,” or tearing Indian reservations to pieces, assigning individual parcels of 160 acres to Indian heads of household, and handing over the remainder to white and immigrant settlers.54
In the Treaty of 1868, Americans promised the Sioux all of the future state of South Dakota that lay west of the Missouri River. None of this land could be ceded without signatures from three-quarters of all Lakota men— or so the treaty guaranteed. In the subsequent agreement of 1876, the Lakota were forced to give up the Black Hills in a cession of lands along their westernmost boundary. In the Dawes General Act of 1887, the government attempted to force allotment on the Lakota, but the men refused to sign. So, under the terms of a special allotment bill in 1889, Congress mandated that they split their reservation into six separate reservations, with each Indian head of household now taking 320 acres, surrendering the better land between them to white settlers for $1.25 per acre.55
Allotment, the pet project of idealists who genuinely believed themselves to be pursuing the Indians’ own best interests, did much to make Indians the poorest minority group in America, costing them about a hundred million acres by 1928.56
Allotment was one prong of a multipronged assimilation effort, and on top of forced education, suppressed religion, and the circling monster of starvation, it brought bitter divisions as Indians grappled with the question of how to respond. Lakota anxiety over the new land cession soon spread to the Wild West show. In an attempt to secure the support of leading Sioux men, in late 1889 federal negotiators approached Indians in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in Europe, asking them to sign the 1889 agreement. To a man, they refused.57
But on the reservation, a heavy-handed campaign to force the Lakota to sign the agreement finally achieved success after General Crook took charge of negotiations. By early 1890, the twenty-two-million-acre Great Sioux Reserve had been broken into six reservations totaling just under thirteen million acres. Oglalas and some northern Cheyenne now lived on the much-reduced Pine Ridge Reservation. Brulés lived at Rosebud; Hunkpapas at Standing Rock. The government then opened the ceded land to settlement by non-Indians, with none of the safeguards for Indian property that Crook had promised. 58
This treachery was followed by a severe reduction in rations, after Congress, searching for ways to cut the budget, ordered a 10 percent reduction in funds for Sioux “subsistence and civilization.” Beef rations plummeted by one million pounds at Pine Ridge, two million at Rosebud. On top of these miseries, epidemics of measles, influenza, and whooping cough ravaged the reservations. There were only 5,500 people at Pine Ridge, and by early 1890, 45 of them were dying every month. 59 Forced education of Indian children in government schools split families apart at this time of trouble, and even seeking comfort or assistance in the spirit world was forbidden.
Then came the Ghost Dance. Originating in the vision of a Paiute man in Nevada named Wovoka, the Ghost Dance was a mixture of traditional and Christian belief which took different forms on different reservations. Its most remarkable and uniform characteristic was its announcement of an Indian messiah. To investigate rumors of this savior, several Lakota men, including Kicking Bear, Short Bull, and others, ventured to Nevada by train in 1889. They met with other Indians during their travels, and returned home to spread Ghost Dance teachings at Pine Ridge. In Lakota hands, particularly those of Kicking Bear, the dance became considerably more militant than it had originally been. In Wovoka’s revelations, Ghost Dancing was supposed to bring on a new world in which all of the dead Indians would rise and the natural world would be restored. White people would return to Europe. 60 At Pine Ridge, Kicking Bear taught that whites would be eradicated beneath a layer of earth, from which would spring grass, buffalo, and resurrected Indians, too. Variations on the Ghost Dance appeared at reservations across the United States, but only in Kicking Bear’s teachings did it include the preparation of so-called “Ghost Shirts,” which he claimed would repel bullets.61
For all the militant trappings, the Ghost Dance expressed Lakota fear, not aggression. Having endured relentless persecution for dancing and prayer throughout the 1880s, Ghost Dancers knew they courted censure and worse. Oglalas followed the dictates of conscience. Some danced. Most refused. 62 Increasingly, doubters feared that the Ghost Dance would bring no new millennium, only more unwelcome attention from authorities. At times, shooting nearly erupted between Ghost Dancers and their Lakota opponents. 63
But even the most ardent Ghost Dancers knew that there was little likelihood they could mount any kind of armed resistance to the U.S. Army. As fears of a “Sioux outbreak” grew among area whites, authorities debated how to respond. When Indian agents asked Ghost Dancers to stop dancing and report to agency headquarters in the fall of 1890, the vast majority of dancers stopped, and began their trek to the agency.64
The many broken promises of the 1880s perhaps made some confrontation likely, but one last factor made it all but inevitable at Pine Ridge: the arrival of a new and tremendously incompetent Indian agent, Daniel F. Royer. An ignorant and contemptible bureaucrat who achieved his office through a return of political favors by the new administration, he was so fearful that he rarely ventured out of sight of his headquarters. “Young-Man -Afraid-of-His-Lakotas,” as the Sioux called him, wrote breathless warnings that half of the reservation was under the spell of the Ghost Dance and refused to obey orders by Indian police to stop.65 In the months ahead, he repeatedly requested army occupation, triggering not only a confrontation between Ghost Dancers and soldiers, but a showdown between officials in the Indian Service and the War Department, whose traditional enmity over the administration of Indian reservations and Indian policy flared anew over who was to blame for the Ghost Dance troubles.
In keeping with the stance of most army officers, General Nelson Miles saw the Ghost Dance tensions as the fault of civilians in the Indian office and in Congress who insisted on cutting rations to the Sioux until they starved. In his estimation, the trouble would likely disappear if it could only be contained while the Indians were properly provisioned. When the Department of the Interior finally requested the help of the army late in 1890, Miles’s response was to surround areas where the Ghost Dance had a large following, and request that all Indians come into the agencies, where they would receive all of the rations promised them under the agreement of 1876.
The strategy was not without risks. Miles knew that the Lakota could not win a military conflict, but bloodshed was a serious possibility. In the fourteen years since the battle of the Little Big Horn, Lakotas had acquired an unknown number of twelve-shot Remingtons for hunting. Any serious conflict would destroy the Indians in the end, but they could kill more than a few settlers in the meantime, and probably some soldiers, too. Miles believed that if they were given food to take the edge off their desperation, and confronted with strong troop presence to dissuade potential warriors, the Indians would stop the Ghost Dance soon enough.66
His sense of urgency may have been partly humanitarian, but this crisis also presented him with a grand opportunity to achieve a major goal of army commanders for the previous forty years. If he moved forcefully, he might be able to establish the dominance of the War Department over the Department of the Interior and their underlings in the Indian Service. The Sioux and other “large powerful warlike tribes, that have been for years a terror to the northwest States and Territories,” he wrote, should be placed “entirely under military control, and at once.” 67 His first step toward this goal became to arrest Sitting Bull, who was showing signs of joining the Ghost Dance.
At this point, he requested the assistance of the West’s most famous scout, Buffalo Bill Cody. In fact, Cody had been unable to attend the inquiry into his treatment of Indians in Washington, because he had gone to Chicago for a banquet. There he met General Nelson Miles, who gave him orders to “secure the person of Sitting Bull and and [sic] deliver him to the nearest com’g officer of U.S. troops, taking a receipt and reporting your action.”68
For almost twenty years, Buffalo Bill had burnished the army’s public image. He had consistently taken its side in fights with the Indian Service, whose functionaries were targets of his barbs in the press and, earlier, of Indian retribution in his stage plays. Officers had returned the favor by providing him with a litany of testimonials and endorsements. Miles’s decision to send Cody after Sitting Bull thus served two functions. First, it was a continuing gesture in the army’s reciprocal relationship with the showman, an effort to lend celebrity stature to the army as they grasped for control over Indian affairs. Second, it was an attempt to bring in Sitting Bull without killing him.
The tale of Cody’s attempt to arrest Sitting Bull is shrouded in legend and the mists of antitheatricalism. Cody’s aims remain unclear, but his choice of companions has not raised the opinion of most historians. Still in Chicago, not yet bound for the reservation, he teamed up with two old friends. One of these was Frank “White Beaver” Powell, who had known Cody since the late 1860s, when Powell, then an army contract surgeon at Fort McPherson, ushered Cody into the Platte Valley Masonic Lodge. Powell was a Gilded Age pitch man, hawking everything from Mexican colonizat
ion schemes to “White Beaver’s Cough Cream—the Great Lung Healer.” He was several times elected mayor of La Crosse, Wisconsin, and he sometimes toured with the Wild West show as an exhibition shooter. Patients who climbed the stairs to his medical office passed shelves lined with the organs he had removed in his surgery, preserved in bottles of alcohol.69 Cody’s other companion was Robert “Pony Bob” Haslam, a former Pony Express rider who was occasionally a booking agent for the Wild West show, and who would end his days as a down-and-out celebrity steward at the Hotel Auditorium in Chicago.70
While in Chicago, at meals with this dubious cohort and an audience of a journalist or two, Cody began to play up the threat of the Ghost Dance, or the “Messiah Craze,” simultaneously hiding his own thoughts in his now-customary ambivalence about Indian fighting. According to one correspondent, he warned that “of all the bad Indians, Sitting Bull is the worst… . He can always be found with the disturbing element, and if there is no disturbance he will foment one. He is a dangerous Indian and his conduct now portends trouble.” But not to worry. Cody’s own show troupe, especially Rocky Bear and Bloody Shirt, had returned to the reservation and “will do what is necessary to defeat Sitting Bull.”71
To another, he reportedly mused about the Sioux: “I don’t know yet whether I shall fight them or not. It might not look exactly right for me to do so, for I have made a fortune out of them, but if they get to shedding innocent blood I may, if I can be of any service, go up there.” Most of all, he wanted Americans to know the seriousness of the threat. “A religious Indian is the most disastrous kind,” he explained to a newspaper correspondent. “This is very likely to be the most gigantic uprising of Indians ever known,” with 10,000 warriors facing off against only 4,000 soldiers. Frank Powell reinforced the message: “It may be the greatest uprising the Indians have ever undertaken.” 72