Louis S. Warren

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

. Boy Scout reminiscence is in L. I. “Rusty” Heale [actually Haak], “Broncho Charlie Whip-lit Match,” in “Letters to the Editor,” Cody Enterprise (Wyoming), May 26, 1997; family lore of Charlie Miller is in tape transcript of interview with Walter Miller, 1987, in “Broncho Charlie Miller,” Association Files, BBHC; also Lois Miller Ellsworth, Tales of Broncho Charlie: Youngest Rider of the Pony Express (Greenfield, MA: Hollis Books, 1999); “just like gettin’ home” is in Erskine, Broncho Charlie, 248. For a measured account of Miller’s life, see Christopher Corbett, Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express (New York: Broadway Books, 2003), 231–45. My suggestion that Miller may have inspired Berger’s Jack Crabb comes from my reading of Miller’s frequent press, which places him, much like Berger’s Crabb, at 104 years of age in 1954, seated in a wheelchair in a rest home, puffing away on cigarettes and telling tall tales. See Charlie Duprez, “Last of the Pony Express Riders,” typescript, n.d., in M206 Broncho Charlie Miller file, DPL-WHR.

  CHAPTER TWELVE: WILD WEST EUROPE

  1. “BBWW Routes, 1883–1916,” BBHC; Russell, Lives and Legends, 352–53.

  2. JCG testimony, March 11, 1905, CC.

  3. Arta Cody to WFC, Nov. 1, 1885, Plaintiff’s Exhibit 1, in CC. Arta Cody attended Brownell Hall in Omaha, an exclusive girls’ school, as well as eastern finishing schools. Yost, Buffalo Bill, 148.

  4. WFC to Mollie Moses, March 1, 1886; WFC to Mollie Moses, April 26, 1886, and other letters in file; also “Bare Buffalo Bill’s Love for Kentucky Girl,” Evansville Press (KY), n.d. [1927], all in WFC Collection, MS 6, Series I:B, Box 1/9, BBHC.

  5. Threat of divorce in Ed Goodman to Al Goodman, March 17, 1887, WFC Collection, MS 6, Series VI:H, Box 1, BBHC; lack of letters in Mary Cody Bradford testimony, March 11, 1905, in Folder 4, CC. My research has revealed no known letters between Louisa and William Cody in 1887–88. In her memoirs, Louisa Cody claimed she received a letter on the day he drove four kings in the Deadwood coach. Whether that was her story or an invention of her collaborator, Courtney Riley Cooper, the incident itself was invented, and the style of the letter is not in keeping with William Cody’s prose. See Cody and Cooper, Memories of Buffalo Bill by His Wife, 296.

  6. Arta with him at public functions is in “Mansion House Dramatic Luncheon, Wednesday, June 15, 1887, Plan of Tables,” in Papers of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, Reel 21, 52/48–49; tour of continent is in Ed Goodman to “Uncle Will,” Sept. 16, 1887, and Ed Goodman to “My dear Ma and Pa,” Aug. 27, 1887, WFC Collection, MS 6, Series VI:H, Box 1, BBHC; Cody, Story of the Wild West, 749.

  7. “Some Early Experiences of Katherine Clemmons,” unattributed clipping, 1898; “For Her Reputation This Woman Fights,” unattributed clipping, n.d. [1909], in Robert Haslam Scrapbook, Colorado Historical Society, Denver, CO.

  8. Gallop, Buffalo Bill’s British Wild West, 126–27, 179–83.

  9. WFC to Al Goodman, July 7, 1887, in Foote, Letters from Buffalo Bill, 31.

  10. Four-in-hand is in Yost, Buffalo Bill, 217–20.

  11. WFC to Al Goodman, July 12, 1888, Plaintiff’s Exhibit 2, and WFC to Al Goodman, July 17, 1888, Plaintiff’s Exhibit 3, in Folder 4, CC.

  12. Yost, Buffalo Bill, 213–16.

  13. Yost, Buffalo Bill, 213–14, 223.

  14. JCG testimony, March 11, 1905, Folder 4, p. 6 (of J. C. Goodman testimony), CC.

  15. Judy Greaves Rainger, “Buffalo Bill, Boulanger, and Bonheur: TransAtlantic Cultural Exchanges in the Fin-de-Siecle,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History: Selected Papers of the 1998 Annual Meeting (Greeley: University Press of Colorado, 2000), 243.

  16. Quoted in Dore Ashton and Denise Brown Hare, Rosa Bonheur: A Life and Legend (New York: Viking, 1981), 152–53.

  17. Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: The Hundred-Year History of Modern Art (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 127–32.

  18. Hughes, Shock of the New, 276.

  19. Hughes, Shock of the New, 277.

  20. WFC to Charles Stobie, March 12, 1903, CHS.

  21. “ ‘Horse Fair’ Takes at the Wild West,” Chicago Evening Post, June 9, 1896, in NSS 1896, WH 72, DPL-WHR.

  22. For Bonheur, see Ashton and Hare, Rosa Bonheur, 144–57.

  23. See Deloria, Playing Indian, 100.

  24. A file of letters from Esquivel to Baroncelli is in the Palais du Roure, Avignon.

  25. The most thorough and intriguing treatment of Baroncelli’s regionalism and the influence of Cody’s show upon him is Rob Zaretsky, Cock and Bull Stories: Folco de Baroncelli and the Invention of the Camargue (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), esp. 61–84. Quotes from Baroncelli to Jacob White Eyes, June 6, 1906, Palais du Roure, Avignon.

  26. “BuffaloBill en Avignon,” La Femaille, July 19, 1905, clipping in Palais du Roure, Avignon.

  27. Quoted in Tudor Edwards, The Lion of Arles: A Portrait of Mistral and His Circle (New York: Fordham University Press, 1964), 161. Baroncelli once sought to sacrifice a bull in the crypt of the church of Les Saintes at his hometown of Les-Saintes-Marie-de-la-Mer, and was crushed when the curate refused. Edwards, Lion of Arles, p. 160.

  28. Translation of letter, Baroncelli to White Eyes, June 6, 1906, Palais du Roure, Avignon.

  29. Jacques Nissou, “Autour de Joe Hamman: Les Amerindiens, la Camargue, et le Western francais,” in Les Indiens de Buffalo Bill et la Camargue, ed. Thierry Lefrancois (Paris: Editions de Lat Martinière, 1994), 104–5, 123–25; Rainger, “Buffalo Bill, Boulanger, and Bonheur,” 250.

  30. Rainger, “Buffalo Bill, Boulanger, and Bonheur,” 249–50.

  31. Eric Hobsbawm, “Mass Producing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Hobsbawm and Ranger, 263–308.

  32. My discussion of western mythology in Germany is drawn from Peter Bolz, “Indians and Germans: A Relationship Riddled with Clichés,” in Native American Art: The Collections of the Ethnological Museum Berlin, ed. Peter Bolz and Hans-Ulrich Sanner (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 9–21.

  33. Karl Markus Kreis, “Indians Playing, Indians Praying: Native Americans in Wild West Shows and Catholic Missions,” in Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections, ed. Colin G. Calloway, Gerd Germunden, and Susanne Zantop (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 200.

  34. Kreis, “Indians Playing, Indians Praying,” 195; Bolz, “Indians and Germans,” 15–16.

  35. Sam Lone Bear to Marquis Baroncelli, Aug. 22, 1929, Palais du Roure, Avignon.

  36. Bolz, “Indians and Germans,” 12.

  37. Kreis, “Indians Playing, Indians Praying,” 202–3.

  38. Jeffrey Sammons, “Nineteenth-Century German Representation of Indians from Experience,” in Germans and Indians, 190–92; Bolz, “Indians and Germans,” 13; also Richard H. Cracroft, “The American West of Karl May,” American Quarterly 19, no. 2, pt. 1 (Summer 1967): 249–58.

  39. Kreis, “Indians Playing, Indians Praying,” 201.

  40. Deloria, Playing Indian, 95–153.

  41. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 169–79; Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis is perhaps the clearest example. Turner, “Significance of the Frontier in American History.”

  42. In remote regions of Europe, British and other writers recounted stagecoaches pursued by Gypsies. “They were completely naked, of dark copper colour, with shaggy black hair, and pearly white teeth, and ran after the carriage, yelling and throwing up their arms.” Johnson, On the Track of the Crescent, 148–49. American magazines that covered the Indian wars also featured accounts in which outlaws “worse than Bedouins or Indians” waylaid stagecoaches on the “Uralian steppes,” and their victims were either killed or “borne away into a captivity worse than death.” “Uralian Steppe Robbers,” Harper’s Weekly, Nov. 7, 1874, p. 921.

  43. Folco de Baroncelli-Javon, La Camargue de Baroncelli du Marquis Folco de Baroncelli-Javon (Nîmes, France: Editions Camarguo, 1984 [privately printed]), 159–66.

  44. Edwards, Lion of Arles, 160–63
; Remi Venture, “La defense d’une identité, fondement de l’amitie baroncello-amerindienne,” in Les Indiens de Buffalo Bill at la Camargue, ed. Lefrancois, 35–36.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: GHOST DANCE

  1. V. Deloria, “The Indians,” in Hassrick et al., Buffalo Bill and the Wild West, 54, 56.

  2. DeMallie, Sixth Grandfather, 245.

  3. DeMallie, Sixth Grandfather, 251.

  4. DeMallie, Sixth Grandfather, 254.

  5. Guy Dull Knife, Sr., quoted in Starita, Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge, 173.

  6. For Pratt, see White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own,” 113. For assimilation, see Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 1–39.

  7. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 69.

  8. Starita, Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge, 150–51.

  9. For ban on dances, see Robert M. Utley, Last Days of the Sioux Nation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 49; for sweat lodges among show Indians, see Parker, Odd People I Have Met, 54; “The Mild West,” The Million, Sept. 3, 1892, p. 245. For religiosity of the sweat lodge, see William K. Powers, Oglala Religion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), 89–91, 134–36; Raymond A. Bucko, The Lakota Ritual of the Sweat Lodge: History and Contemporary Practice (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).

  10. Ed Goodman to Parents, May 29, 1886, in WFC Collection, MS 6 Series VI:B.

  11. Davis, Circus Age, 52, 187–88; Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 91.

  12. The song comes from Calvin Jumping Bull. Juti Winchester, “Buffalo Bill and the Indians: Pine Ridge Remembers William F. Cody,” paper delivered at the Western History Association Meeting, Oct. 12, 2000, San Antonio, TX; also Severt Young Bear and R. D. Theisz, Standing in the Light: A Lakota Way of Seeing (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 97.

  13. Calvin Jumping Bull, presentation to Consulting Committee for Buffalo Bill Museum, July 8, 2004, and July 9, 2004, BBHC; see also Moses, Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 272; Young Bear and Theisz, Standing in the Light, 97–98.

  14. Thomas Biolsi, Organizing the Lakota, 18–20, 24.

  15. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Report of the Commissioner of Indian A fairs, 1886 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1886), 77; Report of the Commissioner of Indian A fairs, 1887 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1887), xxxvii; Report of the Commissioner of Indian A fairs, 1890 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1890), xc, 469.

  16. See contracts for 1888 in Bonds and Contracts 1888, no. 22362, Box 480, LR 1881–1907, RG 75, NARA; 1889 in “Contract and Bond to Take Certain Indians into Their Show,” no. 9526, Box 513, Letters Received 1881–1907, RG 75, NARA; and 1906 contracts in RG 75, Box 162, 047 Fairs and Expositions, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 1906 Contracts, NARA-CPR.

  17. See the extensive archive of show contracts in RG 75, Box 162, 047 Fairs and Expositions, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 1906 Contracts, NARA-CPR: also “1906–11 Contracts” folder, in Box 162, RG 75, NARA-CPR; and “BBWW Show Contracts 1912–13,” RG 75, Pine Ridge Box 162, 047 Fairs and Expositions, NARA-CPR.

  18. Ella Bissonett’s salary is in A. C. Belt to Sec. of Interior, Nov. 18, 1890, Correspondence Land Division, Letters Sent, vol. 104, Letter Book 207, pp. 191–201, NARA.

  19. See Samuel D. Oliphant to Major John R. Brennan, Jan. 13, 1916, in 047 Fairs and Expositions, Box 162, BBWW Bankruptcy, Folder 2 of 2, RG 75, NARA-CPR.

  20. WFC to Captain C. Penney, May 2, 1891, RG 75, Pine Ridge, Misc. Css. Received, 1891–95, A–C, Folder Jan. 26, 1891–Dec. 25, 1891, NARA-CPR.

  21. WFC to Captain C. Penney, Sept. 30, 1891, RG 75, Pine Ridge, Misc. Css. Received, 1891–95, A–C, Folder Jan. 26, 1891–Dec. 25, 1891, NARA-CPR. See also, in the same file: WFC to Capt. C. G. Penney, Dec. 18, 1891.

  22. WFC to Nelson Miles, Nov. 12, 1891, RG 75, Pine Ridge, Misc. Css. Received, 1891–95, A–C, Folder Jan. 26, 1891–Dec. 25, 1891, NARA-CPR.

  23. For show calculations, see Jule Keen to Anonymous, June 6, 1891, in 047 Fairs and Expositions, Box 162, BBWW, 1891–95, RG 75, NARA-CPR. Freighting figures from Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian A fairs, 1889, 151–58. Even in 1905, per capita payments disbursed to the Oglala by the Pine Ridge Agency amounted only to $30,767; per diem labor ($73,213) and purchase of beef cattle ($34,686) paid more. Biolsi, Organizing the Lakota, 28.

  24. Cowboy wages: Ed Goodman to Parents, May 29, 1886, MS 6 Series VI:B, BBHC; Blackstone, Buckskin, Bullets, and Business, 97; for Indian wages see contracts for various dates, and list of names, April 12, 1895, in 047 Fairs and Expositions, Box 162, BBWW, 1891–95, RG 75, NARA-CPR.

  25. Nasaw, Going Out, 43.

  26. Davis, Circus Age, 30.

  27. See Moses, Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 101–3; Clyde Ellis, A Dancing People: Powwow Culture on the Southern Plains (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), 79–101.

  28. Nasaw, Going Out, 15–18.

  29. Sagala, Buffalo Bill, Actor, 163.

  30. Unattributed clipping (New Orleans?), n.d. (received in Interior/Indian office on May 19, 1885), in Cody to Bureau, no. 11212, Letters Received, 1881–1907, Box 242, RG 75, NARA.

  31. See Nasaw, Going Out, 13; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, HistoricalStatistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, part 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), 165, 168.

  32. John Burke to “The Honorable Commissioner,” n.d. (Letter Received Feb. 20, 1886), Letters Received, 1881–1907, no. 5564, Box 290, RG 75, NARA. In 1886, several New York dailies ran articles poking fun at show Indians who allegedly fell asleep during a sermon at Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church. George Bates, who was in charge of the Indians during this season, responded with a letter arguing that “there was not a white man or woman in Plymouth church on the occasion referred to, that was more reverent, more respectful or more attentive to the service than were these red men from the far West.” Perhaps the entire congregation fell asleep. John Burke was careful to send the published letter to the commissioner of Indian affairs, assuring him that “we have many instructive expeditions planned” for the Indians. G. H. Bates enclosure in WFC to Lamar, no date 1886, Letters Received, 1881–1907, no. 34611, Box 364, RG 75, NARA; Burke to Gen. Upshaw, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Dec. 13, 1886, Letters Received, 1881–1907, Box 361, no. 33319.

  33. Bonds and Contract, April 14, 1887, no. 9855, Box 388, Letters Received, 1881–1907, RG 75, Bureau of Indian Affairs, NARA.

  34. G. H. Bates to LCQ Lamar, Jan. 11, 1887, no. 1124, Box 367; also, WFC to Upshaw, Jan. 12, 1887, no. 1157, Box 368; W. R. Maul to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Jan. 28, 1887, no. 3054, Box 372; G. H. Bates to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Feb. 7, 1887, no. 3637, Box 374, all in Letters Received, 1881–1907, RG 75, NARA.

  35. Box 574, no. 34459, Rosebud Agency—J. Geo. Wright to CIA, Nov. 23, 1887, Letters Received, 1881–1907, RG 75, NARA.

  36. Box 575, no. 34973, from Company River Agency, Henry George to CIA, Nov. 25, 1889, Letters Received, 1881–1907, RG 75, NARA.

  37. Box 578, no. 35938, from Devil’s Lake Agency, John W. Cransic to CIA, Dec. 10, 1889, Letters Received, 1881–1907, RG 75, NARA.

  38. Box 579, no. 36269, John Blair to CIA, 1889, Letters Received, 1881–1907, RG 75, NARA.

  39. Rev. John F. Copley of the Omaha Mission, quoted in Robert Ashley to CIA, Jan. 9, 1890, no. 1239, Box 586, Letters Received, 1881–1907, RG 75, NARA.

  40. There were rumors, too, of several Indian deaths from smallpox or influenza in Spain. See Moses, Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 86–87, 94.

  41. “Three Hungry Indians,” unattributed clipping, n.d., in G. C. Crager Scrapbook, 1891–92, BBHC.

  42. James O’Beirne to H. D. Gallagher, July 4, 1890, Pine Ridge, Misc. Css. Received, Folder Feb. 18, 1889–Dec. 29, 1890, RG 75, NARA-CPR.

  43. G. C. Crager Scrapbook,
1891–92, BBHC, includes a smattering of the news coverage.

  44. A. C. Belt to Secretary of Interior, Nov. 18, 1890, RG 75, Correspondence Land Division, Letters Sent, vol. 104, Letterbook 207, pp. 191–201, NARA.

  45. “Three Hungry Indians,” unattributed clipping, n.d., G. C. Crager Scrapbook, 1891–92, BBHC.

  46. For Rocky Bear, see WFC to George LeRoy Brown, April 22, 1892, RG 75, Pine Ridge, Misc. Css. Received, 1891–95, A–C, Folder Jan. 4–May 10, 1892, NARA-CPR; Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 253.

  47. For twentyfive-cent fee, see Red Cloud to Nate Salsbury, July 18, 1889, NSP, YCAL 17, Box 1, Folder 6, July 18, 1889; interference, see Cody to LCQ Lamar, March 20, 1887, no. 7592, Box 383, Letters Received, 1881–1907, RG 75, NARA.

  48. “Memorial of Sioux Indians,” Senate Doc. No. 90, 55th Congress, 1st Session, May 17, 1897.

  49. Petition from the Tribal Council, May 10, 1901, “Petitions, ca. 1875–1907,” Box 780, RG 75, Pine Ridge, NARA-CPR. Thanks to Thomas Andrews for the citation.

  50. Chauncey Yellow Robe, “The Menace of the Wild West Show,” address to the Fourth Annual Conference of the Society of American Indians, Oct. 6–11, 1914, in Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians, no. 2 (1914): 223–24.

  51. WFC to George LeRoy Brown, April 22, 1892, RG 75, Pine Ridge, Misc. Css. Received, 1891–95, A–C, Folder Jan. 4, 1892–May 10, 1892, NARA-CPR.

  52. Sam Madra, Glasgow’s Ghost Shirt (Glasgow: Glasgow Museums, 1991); George Crager to H. Q. C. Lamar, June 21, 1890, no. 19021, Box 634, Letters Received, 1881–1907, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, RG 75, NARA; Nate Salsbury to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, enclosing affidavit of G. C. Crager, March 1, 1892, no. 9249, Box 834, Letters Received, 1881–1907, RG 75, NARA.

  53. Rex Alan Smith, Moon of Popping Trees: The Tragedy at Wounded Knee and the End of the Indian Wars (New York: Crowell, 1975), 48.

  54. Emily Greenwald, Reconfiguring the Reservation: The Nez Perces, Jicarilla Apaches, and the Dawes Act (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002); also Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Assault on Indian Tribalism: The General Allotment Law (Dawes Act) of 1887 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1975).