Thus, Indians appropriated the racial symbolism of the Wild West show for their own purposes, and—in ways that remind us again of Vine Deloria, Jr.’s contention about the show as educational space for Indians—Buffalo Bill provided a kind of undercover arena in which Indians could acquire and demonstrate cowboy skills, even “out-cowboying” the show’s cowboys by dressing in cowboy clothes and performing their stunts as well as they did.
At Pine Ridge, the reservation livestock industry finally fell victim to government hostility, the leasing of Indian lands to non-Indian cattlemen, and allotment, which broke up many of the finest range lands. Lakota cattlemen sold their last large herd in 1917.45 As a major employer at Pine Ridge from 1886 until 1916, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show overlapped almost perfectly with the reservation’s cattle industry. Until its very end, cattle raising seemed one of the best hopes for a prosperous Lakota future. The Wild West show offered a means of integrating cowboy culture and Lakota culture.
Back at the reservation, show wages paid for cattle and horses, as well as wagons, farm tools, and other necessities. As early as 1892, agents at Pine Ridge were complaining about small amounts of money from Buffalo Bill’s Indians—$5 and $10 sums in greenbacks—which arrived at the Indian office with letters “in Indian” informing the agency which friends or relatives should receive the money, and in what denominations. Fast Thunder, one of the Wild West show’s Indian contingent, was said to have acquired four thousand cattle by 1896, and a comfortable cabin with “splendid” farm fields.46 Less wealthy Indians in the show routinely sent money home, too.47
Indians in the show augmented their wages by selling Indian crafts, especially “ ‘bead work’ made into moccasins, purses, etc.,” for which they received “very large prices,” according to Nate Salsbury. There was a market for Indian crafts on the reservation, but it appears to have flourished in the Indian camp at the Wild West show, because of the connections Indians built with non-Indian suppliers and customers. Cody and Salsbury bought materials such as brass beads at wholesale prices, and sold them at cost to show Indians, who made them into souvenirs for sale to tourists and kept the profits for themselves.48
Men profited handsomely from this trade.49 But beadwork and moccasin manufacture were traditionally women’s occupations, and it appears that Indian women in the show exploited the market for Sioux crafts assiduously. This might explain why Calls the Name, the sister of No Neck (chief of the show contingent in the 1891–92 season), had $260 in cash and goods during that year, after receiving only $112 in salary from Cody and Salsbury. 50
If Calls the Name’s experience is any guide, Indians manufactured and sold Indian crafts to museums and collectors across Europe. Calls the Name sold some of her goods to the show’s translator, George Crager, and perhaps used him as an intermediary with outside purchasers. Early in 1892, Crager approached the Kelvin Grove Museum in Glasgow about selling his “collection of Indian Relics.” Among the goods he sold were a pair of buckskin leggings embroidered with beads, which he claimed had been worn by Calls the Name in 1876, the year of the Little Big Horn fight. In reality, they were probably of recent vintage. Some of the other materials Crager peddled, including a pair of moccasins embroidered with brass beads and a shield that is of minimal craftsmanship, are on display today in the Kelvin Grove Museum, and they appear to have been products of the show’s Indian craft industry. 51
In all likelihood, Indians commissioned Crager as their sales agent, to sell the goods to the museum and return at least some of the cash to their Indian manufacturers. But Crager was a publicity hound. (He finagled his way into the show by translating for the show’s detractors, including James O’Beirne, in the controversy that engulfed the show in 1890.) When he discovered that his name would not be preserved as a museum “donor” unless he gave at least some of the goods away, he quickly did so.
Wild West Indians/cowboys, 1909. Indians sometimes disguised themselves as white cowboys in the show, allowing white spectatorsto claim Indian riding skills as a white racial characteristic, and giving Indian performers a chance to display cowboy techniquesthey used to tend growing cattle herds at home. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.
Such maneuvering likely helped Crager earn a poor reputation among the Lakota. In late December 1892, Charging Thunder, a Lakota man in the show’s Indian contingent, clubbed George Crager over the head backstage, knocking the translator out cold. Charging Thunder apologized, blaming the fight on whiskey which some publican allegedly slipped into the lemonade he ordered. But given the variety of goods Crager hawked to the museum, and his dubious reputation, it appears likely that tensions over Crager’s sale of goods contributed to Charging Thunder’s ire. In any case, Charging Thunder spent thirty days in a Scottish jail as a result.52 Crager left the show after one season, and returned to Pine Ridge, where he joined the staff of the Indian agency.53
AT THE END of each show season, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West provided a letter of recommendation for every performer. Cowboys who learned performance arts in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show frequently went into western films, other Wild West shows, and rodeo. As we have seen, here was always a wide streak of performance art in cowboys, who strove to approximate their romantic fictional counterparts even in the days of the Long Drive from Texas to Kansas. But over time cowboy skills became so oriented to entertainment that by the Wild West show’s final years, around World War I, at least some riders came to Cody’s show having learned their skills not on the range but in circuses and other entertainments. Those who wanted to remain cowboys found that the best living was to be had in performing the identity for somebody else, rather than living it on the range.
Meanwhile, show wages grew in importance for Indians, who had less room than cowboys to maneuver into other occupations. For a brief time after the disaster at Wounded Knee, the army ensured the Lakota their full rations, but discounting and punitive withholding soon began anew. By 1900, rations were only about 70 percent of their stipulated treaty levels, amounting to one pound of beef and 5.75 ounces of flour per person, per day. In 1902, the government announced a plan to eliminate rations for all “able-bodied men,” the better to force them to work for $1.25 per day, usually at hard manual labor, such as fence building, road grading, or dam construction. 54 By the end of the summer, wrote Luther Standing Bear, “The Indians were all heavily in debt to the storekeeper.”55
These conditions drove Luther Standing Bear to join the Wild West show that very year. Others who joined the show in this period were similarly motivated, and some of them used the show to advance their ongoing political battle with the Office of Indian Affairs. In 1908, three Lakota men with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West—Bad Cob, Edward Brown, and William Brown—took time between shows in New York for an angry meeting with the commissioner of Indian affairs. Bad Cob complained that the agency interpreter, a Lakota, was holding two salaried jobs which could better be given to two different men. The Browns were particularly confrontational, and their grievances reflected the frustration of educated Lakota men. William Brown was a graduate of Carlisle, and Edward, too, was a school graduate. Edward “said that he is anxious for any kind of job whereby he can earn a living, and that he believes that there are enough returned students on the Pine Ridge Reservation to do a good deal of the work which is now done for the Government by white persons, and wanted to know why the returned students are not given this chance to get ahead.” William Brown pointed out that even the lowest-paid work was unavailable to him. Why couldn’t he get road work on the reservation? Why couldn’t he be an assistant farmer? The Browns and Bad Cob, reported the commissioner, “were very insistent on these matters.” 56
Such complaints were not new, but Indian office functionaries customarily read them in letters or heard them from third parties, not from the Indians themselves, and certainly not in New York, hundreds of miles from Pine Ridge. However startling it was for the commissioner of Indian affairs in 1908, Indian use of the show as a m
eans to confront policymakers was not new. Show performers’ geographic and social mobility had been influencing Sioux politics for a generation. In 1885, Sitting Bull had used his tenure with the Wild West show to cultivate relationships with whites he would not meet otherwise. In 1887, Lakota performers discoursed late into the night on the significance of their meeting with Queen Victoria. After this all-night discussion, “every one of his young men resolved that she should be their great white mother.”
The sentimentalism of press accounts obscures the significance of such meetings. Throughout the eighteenth and for most of the nineteenth century, Lakota leaders cultivated alliances with European monarchs in hopes of restraining or influencing American policy. In the aftermath of the Plains Indian wars, the development of a new peacetime strategy for building relationships with foreign leaders—a kind of Sioux foreign policy—was now under way. As recently as 1881, Sitting Bull and his followers had been living in Canada, where they fled after the battle of the Little Big Horn to secure the protection of “the Grandmother Country” and of Queen Victoria from the vengeful Americans.57 Red Cloud requested that Nate Salsbury bring him an English flag in 1887, and Black Elk recalled that the queen bowed to them that year. In a sense, Red Shirt and his successors in the show were trying to open diplomatic channels.58
For William Brown, the chance to meet officials face-to-face no doubt had a special resonance. The new century was not kind to the Lakota, and as their complaints in 1908 suggested, it was especially frustrating for those who were educated. They had completed compulsory education at government boarding schools. Their skills and training should have qualified them for clerkship or even managerial positions. But they usually met with the same racial prejudice which stymied the ambitions of black, immigrant, and other nonwhite men and women: white employers would not hire them except in the most menial jobs.
Meanwhile, government agents tried to compel self-sufficiency. In 1902, Brown was dropped from ration rolls after authorities decided he was capable of fending for himself. When he tried to acquire work on road-building crews, he was turned away, because government-funded labor was reserved for those “unable to exist without assistance.” In the eyes of officials, Brown’s herd of three or four dozen cattle and his ownership of an allotment disqualified him.59
Reductions in agency rations compelled families, including William Brown’s, to combine scarce wages with the few traditional resources remaining, including wild foods. The challenges of gathering were greater than ever, because many of the best root and berry grounds were now beyond the bounds of the reservation. In October and November many Indians ventured off the reservation to unclaimed public lands where they hunted deer and small game and gathered chokecherries, other fruit, roots, and herbs to stock their larders for the winter. In the fall of 1903, Brown led his wife, children, and two other families into the Black Hills in northeast Wyoming. It was late summer, and the weather was good. The agent had given them a pass to be off the reservation. Berries were plentiful. The party traded moccasins to local ranchers for mutton. By all accounts, their tour of the backcountry was peaceful.
Like white men traveling in turn-of-the-century (or present-day) Wyoming, some of Brown’s party had guns. But they hunted no large game. On their return, Brown’s group joined up with Charlie Smith, also known as Runs-to-It, another Carlisle-educated Lakota who was on a similar expedition with his own extended family. The two groups joined for the trip back to the reservation. Together, they made up a train of fifteen wagons, full of Indian men, women, and children, making their way deliberately back to Pine Ridge.
On the evening of October 30, Sheriff Bill Miller, of Newcastle, Wyoming, arrived at the Indians’ campsite with a posse. After Brown’s wife fed them dinner, the posse attempted to arrest the Indians for hunting deer without licenses. Smith refused to submit to arrest, contesting the right of a sheriff from neighboring Weston County to make an arrest in Converse County, where the meeting took place. Brown struck a more diplomatic pose. At first, he offered to accompany the sheriff to Newcastle. But, as the other Indians were intent on leaving with Smith, he decided to remain with them. The lawmen left without making any arrests.
The Indians hastened to the reservation. They traveled all night, covering fifty miles in the next twelve hours. Sheriff Miller, meanwhile, deputized more locals. With his reinforced posse, he lay in wait for the Indians where the road crossed Lightning Creek. Consisting of mostly “cowboys and bar-tenders,” the posse was, in the words of the official who investigated what happened next, “no Sunday-school class.”60
Afterward, surviving members of the posse claimed that they had ordered the Indian wagon train to halt, and the Indians had opened fire. Surviving Lakota said they never saw the lawmen until they stood up from hiding and began shooting, without so much as announcing who they were. The Indians turned their wagons and tried to escape, but almost immediately twelve-year-old Peter White Elk was killed when a bullet took the top of his head off. Charlie Smith, who flew to the boy’s aid, was soon mortally wounded. Loudly singing his death song, he kept up a vigorous return fire, accompanied by William Brown and several other men, who took up positions around him. The shooting lasted only a few minutes. The posse killed four Indians that day, including Charlie Smith and his wife. Two white men, including Sheriff Miller, also lay dead.
Outside their hometown of Newcastle, the sheriff and his posse were roundly condemned. The event was a regional scandal. But none of the surviving white men was ever tried or punished.
Surviving Indians, on the other hand, were tried for murder, and their acquittal came about because, as one local white man put it, “the worst of the party are dead.”61 A series of hearings, trials, and investigations of Indian behavior followed. The homicidal white hostility toward poor people on a berry-picking expedition grieved and rankled the Lakotas. “We think the sheriff and his posse are guilty of murder,” explained Oglala council members George Sword and Jack Red Cloud in an open letter to the public, “but because they are white men we believe they will not be tried.” If any Indian had done such a thing, on the other hand, “he would undoubtedly get the full extent of the law.” Back at Pine Ridge, Lakotas preserved Charlie Smith’s death song. Across the reservation, in painting, song, and story, they memorialized the savage white attack on a peaceful wagon train of Indian families.62
Brown’s participation in the Wild West show was motivated by many of the same desires and responsibilities that took him on gathering expeditions into the Black Hills: the need for food and medicine, the chance to sell crafts, the freedom of travel, the requirements of his family. Five years later, authorities still regarded William Brown with suspicion, because of Sheriff Miller’s attempt on his life. They dismissed his 1908 appearance in the Office of Indian Affairs as the agitations of one “chroni[c] fault-finder and trouble breeded,” who was, after all, “in that unfortunate row in Wyoming between the state officers and a party of Pine Ridge Indians.”63 Combined with his show business career, this history gave Brown a dire reputation, indeed.
The many ironies of his predicament suggest the complexity of Wild West show performance for Indians in general at the turn of the twentieth century. William Brown was a man of skill and economic savvy, as the size of his cattle herd suggested. In 1889, not long after he returned from Carlisle, he was married and had a daughter, and the Indian agent described him as “a good young man.” Yet he had almost no prospects for employment despite having followed the “the white man’s road” to Carlisle and beyond.64 Like many others, his growing frustration with the lack of opportunities for educated Indians made him more contentious in the years after his return from Carlisle. As Brown was all too aware, depictions of Indian savagery in the Wild West show informed the continuing prejudices of white Americans against Indians. In 1903, Wild West show audiences watched Indians leave their tipis and raid the settler’s cabin, and it was possible to believe that they had not changed in the many years since the Pla
ins Indian wars.
And yet Brown’s opportunities for countering the brutality of bigots who attacked an Indian wagon train extended to performance of this “historical” reenactment in which Indians attacked a white wagon train. From that curious platform, he retained a limited mobility, earned a livelihood, and even challenged Indian office bureaucrats and their racist policies. By being in the Wild West show and conforming to an old stereotype of Indian savagery, he became in some small way a partisan of Lakota progress.
Brown and other Lakota saw how education, the ability to read and write and argue the law, and mobility beyond the reservation allowed them at least to demand justice (without necessarily getting it) in the most egregious insults like the killings at Lightning Creek. These tools helped in the fight against the downward revision of rations and against the continuing racism of Great Plains society. In this sense, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was not just an economic portal, or a vessel for cultural and racial mixing; it was an arena for pushing the limits of Indianness itself.
This may indeed be its greatest contribution, and Buffalo Bill’s most enduring legacy. In the grand scheme of progress, Indians were to disappear into history, followed shortly after by the cowboys who succeeded them, who would in turn vanish before farmers and commerce. The Wild West show drew vast crowds on the strength of its principals as vanishing attractions.
Louis S. Warren Page 59