Louis S. Warren

by Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody;the Wild West Show

  Without ever promising to fight the Indians or even announcing that he was out to arrest Sitting Bull, he headed west with Powell and Haslam. When he arrived in Bismarck, North Dakota, a newspaper correspondent wrote that he was on the way to Sitting Bull’s camp with a commission “the details of which cannot be made public at this present.”

  At this point, the story grows murky. Reportedly, Cody filled two wagons with gifts for Sitting Bull, “a hundred dollars’ worth for every pound the Old Bull weighs,” and set out from Fort Yates dressed in his showman’s best: patent leather shoes, silk stockings, and a dress suit. 73

  Cody’s plan to apprehend Sitting Bull, if that is what it was, was foiled by the Indian Service, specifically by Indian agent James McLaughlin, who wanted to arrest Sitting Bull himself. Popular accounts have it that McLaughlin conspired with Lieutenant Colonel William F. Drum, the commander of neighboring Fort Yates, to waylay Cody with a drinking fest while he telegraphed Washington with a request that Miles’s order to Cody be withdrawn, on the grounds that the arrest of Sitting Bull would inflame the reservation. According to lore, Drum did his duty but Cody’s capacity for drink surpassed that of the most hardened veterans. Officers took the assignment in shifts, and most of them had passed out by morning. Not Cody. By 11 a.m., he had left Fort Yates and was on his way.74

  But McLaughlin had one last card to play. He instructed two scouts to lie in wait for Cody up the road. When they met up with him, they told him that they had just come from Sitting Bull’s camp, and that the old chief had left it by another route. He was now on his way to the agency. The ruse worked. Cody turned back.

  By that time, McLaughlin’s telegram had reached Washington. President Benjamin Harrison wired to rescind Cody’s order to arrest Sitting Bull. Cody left the reservation, and Sitting Bull, to the authorities.75

  The more colorful aspects of this story are the most suspicious. If it matters, Cody vigorously denied that he was wearing his fine street clothing on this expedition, and he published these denials in the press and in show programs.76 As for the whiskey ambush at Fort Yates, evidence suggests that Cody drank the afternoon he arrived, but not that evening. The only accounts of the all-night bacchanal are from officers who claimed to have heard about it, not to have participated, and whose memories were published long after the events in question. “Bill was induced by the hospitality of the officers to stay at Fort Yates all that day; but great was everybody’s surprise to see him emerge from his host’s quarters next morning smiling and happy, asking for his transportation, all ready for the start to Sitting Bull’s camp.” The best surmise is that Cody spent the night sleeping, not drinking.77

  Other aspects of the story, whether they are true or not, do not reflect so badly on Cody. If indeed he brought wagons laden with gifts, this would have appealed to Sitting Bull, who saw himself as the leading chief of the Lakotas (although most Lakotas disagreed). Gifts were a gesture of respect, and just as important, they helped maintain his own prestige as he redistributed them to his circle. Whatever Cody had in mind, whether it was an actual arrest or some scheme which would result in Sitting Bull returning to the Wild West show, gifts would have smoothed the way for the conversation that followed. Cody and Sitting Bull had parted friends in 1885, and Cody had given the chief a favorite gray horse and a western-style hat. Reportedly, a relative jokingly tried the hat on one day, angering the chief. “My friend Long Hair gave me this hat. I value it very highly, for the hand that placed it upon my head had a friendly feeling for me.”78

  Hints that he still felt warmly to Cody emerged even in 1890. John Carignan, a teacher on the reservation near Sitting Bull’s camp, was approached by Sitting Bull several days after Cody’s failed mission. The chief “wanted to know if it was true that Buffalo Bill was at the agency.” Carignan told him that Cody was there, “and that he wanted to see him.” The teacher hoped Sitting Bull would go to the agency, “but he said he could not get away just then, as he had to instruct his young people in their new Religion.”79

  McLaughlin sent the Indian police to arrest Sitting Bull two weeks later, with predictable, tragic results. Because they answered solely to the white Indian agent, not tribal elders or the people, the very existence of the Indian police violated the democratic norms of Lakota society. This particular detachment of Indian police consisted of young men who despised Sitting Bull for old insults and because he represented an old order which threatened the advancement of the new. Allowing these internecine rivalries to find expression by sending young Lakotas to apprehend a venerated chief in his own camp broke the code of peace that governed relations between Lakotas. Shooting erupted, and Sitting Bull was killed instantly. Soon the Indian police were trapped in Sitting Bull’s cabin, exchanging gunfire with warriors from among Sitting Bull’s 150 followers. Sitting Bull’s son and six other Hunkpapas died, as did six policemen. It is said the horse Sitting Bull received from Buffalo Bill in 1885 danced to the sound of gunfire, sitting on his haunches, raising his front hooves to the sky. Some said it was just an act. Some said it was a prayer.80

  The shoot-out at Sitting Bull’s camp was followed by two weeks of occasionally tense negotiations, as Ghost Dancers increasingly gave up dancing to come to the agencies for the food the army was delivering. But on December 30, disaster struck, when shooting erupted at Wounded Knee Creek between the band of Minneconjou Lakota chief Big Foot, who was now allied to a remnant band of Sitting Bull’s followers, and the Seventh Cavalry, which had been sent to apprehend them. Big Foot and his people had agreed to go to the agency, and army commanders on the scene appear not to have anticipated trouble. But violence broke out during attempts to disarm the Indians, whose weapons included an unknown number of the twelve-shot repeaters Miles had been so concerned about. As two soldiers grappled with a young man who refused to hand over his gun, a gun went off, followed by a general eruption of gunfire from the army. Lakota men scrambled for their weapons, but the melee quickly turned into a massacre. The Seventh, Custer’s old regiment, opened up on crowds of fleeing women and children with rapid-fire Hotchkiss guns that delivered exploding shells. There were only 120 Sioux men on the scene, facing more than 450 well-armed soldiers. Somewhere between 170 and 190 Indians were killed, few of them men, and even fewer with guns. Big Foot, too, was killed. The Seventh did not escape unscathed, either. Twentyfive soldiers were dead and 37 wounded.81

  By this time, Cody was back at North Platte. In early January, he received a message from Nebraska’s governor, John Thayer, and subsequently met with him. Back in 1889, at Cody’s request, Thayer had appointed him a brigadier general as aide-de-camp in the Nebraska militia, just prior to Buffalo Bill’s second European tour. The rank was supposed to be a show business prop, but now Thayer gave him a real mission. Like General Miles and most observers, Thayer appreciated that panicky settlers threatened to unleash more bloodshed. After talking the matter over with Cody, the governor commissioned him to “proceed to the scene of the Indian troubles and communicate with General Miles,” and also to travel the border between Nebraska and the reservation, where he should “use your influence to quiet excitement and remove apprehensions upon the part of the people.” Finally, he should “call upon General Colby,” the commander of Nebraska’s National Guard, and apprise him of his own “views as to the probability of the Indians breaking through the cordon of regular troops.” 82

  For all the excitement over this “Sioux war,” Cody’s mission was symbolic, and pacific, and his real challenge was not to face down the Indians but to calm the fears of Nebraskans. Before the Ghost Dance began to trouble them, a fierce drought reduced many farmers to desperation. They pleaded for food and support. Then, in November of 1890, as rumors of the Ghost Dance proliferated, they began to imagine an Indian uprising, and demanded bayonets and bullets to put a stop to the Sioux. Nobody was more aware of the edgy, homicidal fears gripping western Nebraska than Governor Thayer, whose office was swamped by the settlers’ demands, and who knew tha
t if there were any further violence, it was likely to come from the zealous and ill-disciplined Nebraska militia.83

  Thayer also knew that the likelihood of any Indians breaking through a cordon of thousands of troops to reach the militia was practically nil. We may speculate that what he feared most was that with tensions so high, nervous Nebraska guardsmen might slaughter any Indians they came upon. The publicity would do no good for Nebraska. Cody knew this, too, and by telling it to General Colby, it was hoped that he could begin to persuade Colby and his National Guard troops, who were positioned along the border of the reservation, to lower their guns and prepare to leave.

  This was a real challenge. The public was not yet convinced that hostilities were over, primarily because over two dozen journalists from local and national papers, more than in any other Indian conflict, had congregated at the agency trading post at Pine Ridge and at the store of James F. Asay, an old Cody friend, in Rushville, Nebraska. From the back offices, they churned out phony accounts of impending Indian violence. Many of the stories were completely fabricated, anticipating the “yellow journalism” which fomented the war with Spain eight years later.84 The volume of press scrutiny made it a media event, perfect for the symbolic appearance of Buffalo Bill. John Burke went to Rushville and Pine Ridge, where he hobnobbed with newspapermen throughout the trouble, assiduously promoting the importance of Cody’s mission, and telegraphing newspaper reports under Cody’s name. Buffalo Bill, whose very presence had been generating news stories for more than two decades, was a great attraction among journalists who needed sensational stories for their readers. His appointment as aide to the governor of Nebraska and his army endorsement not only as a scout but as a potential diplomat to hostile Indians made him into the living embodiment of the fantasy frontiersman at a moment of maximum media exposure.

  In the aftermath of the dreadful winter’s events, which killed Sitting Bull and hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children, the army imprisoned the primary evangelists of the “Messiah Craze” at Fort Sheridan (the post had been erected near Chicago after the Haymarket bombing, at the request of city industrialists, to ensure a quick army response to any future labor uprising).85 General Miles suggested to Cody that he take the Fort Sheridan prisoners to Europe with him, on the grounds that removing them from the country would allow the situation to cool, and that the exposure to Europe would impress them with “the extent, power and numbers of the white race.” The commissioner of Indian affairs had already announced that no more Indians would be allowed to participate in show business, but Cody recruited the Nebraska congressional delegation—and the influence of General Miles—to overwhelm his opposition. For their part, many of the imprisoned Lakota were only too happy to join the Wild West show. According to one correspondent, Kicking Bear greeted Cody after a month and a half in the stockade with “For six weeks I have been a dead man. Now that I see you, I am alive again.” Kicking Bear and twenty-two of the prisoners joined seventy-five other Sioux in the Wild West show camp, sailing for Antwerp on April 1, 1891.86

  Controversy over Cody’s profits from exhibiting these prisoners of war dogged him only briefly.87 In the years since, his willingness to publicize his own involvement in putting down the Ghost Dance has come to seem distasteful, especially since the complicated series of events that the Ghost Dance represented has been reduced in popular memory to the killing of Sitting Bull and the massacre at Wounded Knee.

  But on close inspection, Cody’s conduct at the time of Wounded Knee is difficult to condemn. Historians have paid much attention to the ways Buffalo Bill crafted the battle of the Little Big Horn into a popular attraction. In Europe the captive Ghost Dancers joined the reenactment of Lakota victory over Custer. But Cody staged no “Battle of Wounded Knee.”

  Perhaps because of his refusal to reenact it, Cody’s impact on public perceptions of Wounded Knee has been all but ignored. His aversion to staging a Wounded Knee simulacrum probably came from several sources. In all probability, his Indian performers would not have tolerated it. But also, the American public and press were split on the causes and meaning of the event. Many of the same newspapers that had bayed for blood in the weeks leading up to the massacre now turned around and denounced it. Others hailed the heroism of troops under savage fire. The army, too, was riven. No fewer than eighteen veterans of Wounded Knee received Congressional Medals of Honor. But General Miles himself called it “a general melee and massacre,” and ordered a court of inquiry into the conduct of the Seventh Cavalry’s commanding officer, James Forsyth. (When the court of inquiry exonerated him, Miles ordered another, with the same result.) Until the end of his days, the general would lobby in vain for congressional compensation for Wounded Knee survivors, victims of an event he considered “most unjustifiable and worthy of the severest condemnation.”88

  This was the cultural divide that Cody’s entertainment followed, like a watershed on the Plains, allowing audiences to stake out their own opinions on the recent bloodshed without detracting from the spectacle of Ghost Dancers in the arena. Insofar as his position influenced popular memory of Wounded Knee, it was to establish the killings as a “massacre” of Indians rather than a “battle” of heroes. The show gained new authenticity by featuring Ghost Dance evangelists, but Cody, Burke, and others worked hard to create a middle ground where audiences could enjoy watching the Ghost Dance prisoners without necessarily embracing the violence perpetrated against them at Wounded Knee. Cody had, in fact, been careful to stake out an ambiguous space on the conflict since before his attempt to bring in Sitting Bull, as he warned about the “serious threat” of a Sioux uprising, but refused to commit to fighting the Indians himself.

  Cody maintained his ambiguity throughout the conflict. When he returned to the reservation at Governor Thayer’s request in early 1891, the massacre at Wounded Knee had already happened. In articles that went out under Cody’s name to the New York Sun and the New York Herald, and which subsequently reappeared in Wild West show programs, Cody and Burke celebrated the army command, but they also broke with the most egregious, bloodthirsty propaganda. Cody’s articles provided both grist for popular fantasies about dangerous Indians and an oddly politic suggestion that further violence was unlikely, so long as the government abided by its agreements with the Indians.89 According to Cody, there were 3,000 well-armed Indians in the vicinity—but 2,500 of them were friendly to the government. “It is like cooling and calming a volcano. Ordinary warfare knows no parallel.” The army had handled the situation masterfully. “The situation to-day, so far as military strategy goes, is one of the best-marked triumphs known in the history of Indian campaigns.” Indian raids on settlers had been prevented. The “dangerous game” had been caught in a “trap,” the Ghost Dancers held inside a “military wall” so that they could be calmed by the assurances of “progressive Indians” among them. He lauded all the officers in the conflict, who not only endured “much privation” themselves but “have expressed great sympathy for their unhappy foe and regrets for his impoverished and desperate condition.” Warning that “the Government and nation are confronted by a problem of great importance” in “remedying the existing evils,” Cody concluded that “intelligence and quick legislation can now do more than the bullet.” The articles, in other words, claimed no heroics for Cody, but continued Buffalo Bill’s career-long endorsement of army strategy over regrettable Indian Service policy and the fickle, ration-slashing Congress.90

  At the same time, Cody refused to endorse the violence of Wounded Knee. In the midst of praising the “presiding genius” of General Miles, Cody qualified his remarks: “I speak, of course, of the campaign as originally intended to overawe and pacify the disaffected portion” of the Indians. After all, “the Big Foot affair at Wounded Knee Creek was an unlooked for accident.”91

  Accident or not, back on the road, Wild West show programs incorporated Cody and Burke’s articles in a Barnumesque presentation of history, which allowed audiences to debate the meaning o
f the Ghost Dance and make up their own minds. Just as Barnum had presented his most curious exhibits, his FeeJee Mermaid and the What Is It?, alongside rival expert opinions so the audience could feel safe believing in the exhibits or in criticizing them, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West programs offered different perspectives on the Ghost Dance and its climax at Wounded Knee, from which the audience could take their pick. Cody’s newspaper articles from Pine Ridge were reprinted, along with a January 1891 telegram from General Miles to Cody in which the officer announced the situation was well in hand and that Nebraska state troops could withdraw. Readers who skimmed the programs might focus on Cody’s warnings about the “savage foe,” overlook his imprecations against the failure to attend to the needs of the Sioux, and decide the Wounded Knee outrage was justified, or unavoidable.

  But for spectators sympathetic to the Ghost Dancers, the programs included alternative viewpoints. Cody’s careful distancing of himself from Wounded Knee—the “unlooked for accident”—was complemented by a lengthy, anonymous essay on “Ghost Dances in the West,” reprinted from the magazine Illustrated America. The piece concluded that the Ghost Dance was an honest expression of Christian faith by a people who had been cheated of their land. “As they brooded over their wrongs, the scarcity of rations, and miserable treatment, imagine with what joy they hailed the coming of Him who was to save and rescue them.” But it was not to be. “Even this last boon and comfort was refused by their conquerors,” who suppressed “the worship of any Indian who should dare to pray to his God after the dictates of his own conscience.”

  Recognizing the contentiousness of the issue, Burke inserted a parenthesis after the essay, advising of its source, commending it for being “in many respects very accurate,” but warning that “the compiler gives it without comment, as the whole matter has yet to be investigated to get at bottom facts.” (In fact, the essay to some degree anticipated Dr. James Mooney’s federally commissioned inquiry, in which the Ghost Dance was described as the millennial dream of an oppressed people, in 1896.) 92