IT’S SAID THAT ARCHILOCHUS walked across a desert of bones and that he was obliged to make the journey alone. An Indian physician, Dr Charles Eastman, had come to scour the area for survivors. He’d arrived one morning, 1st January, and by midday he and the men who were with him had found ten people. They continued to search through the undergrowth, anxious, but full of love and sorrow, going everywhere a dying person might have hidden; when, all of a sudden, they thought they heard a baby’s cry. They assumed they must have dreamt it, but there was a second whimper. So the men spread into a line, moving forward slowly, stopping to cock an ear. The sky was grey, the clouds were thick. The men walked in silence. Suddenly one of them called out. The others hurried over. The crying came from a woman’s corpse. They dropped onto all fours, and scraped around the dead woman. They lifted up her body, stiff, cold and congealed in its own blood; in her dead arms, they found a little girl. They had to use force to prise apart the frozen arms.
WHILE THE REGIMENT was slaughtering the Indians at Wounded Knee, Buffalo Bill had landed in America, and then reached Nebraska. There he had learned of the death of Sitting Bull and the massacre which had just taken place. It’s claimed that to the end of his days he regretted that he hadn’t been able to intervene. That’s as may be. The key fact is that he immediately made his way to Wounded Knee. You can see him in a legendary photograph, at Pine Ridge, with General Miles. It can’t be said that this connection bodes well. Miles was a scumbag. He’d had the Apache scouts in his own army deported to Florida; and Geronimo, who had given himself up only on condition that he would be able return to his own territory after two years of captivity, never saw Arizona again. A few years later, Miles would put down the strikes in the Pullman factories in Chicago; twelve factory workers would be killed. Miles would die in 1925, from a heart attack, in Washington DC. Attending a circus performance with his grandchildren.
It was a few days after Buffalo Bill’s arrival that the young Leonard W. Colby, an admired soldier and a womanizer, found himself at Pine Ridge railway station. Later, when he had attained a fair degree of celebrity, Leonard W. Colby used repeatedly to tell the story of how Buffalo Bill had escorted him to Pine Ridge, accompanied by John Burke, his impresario, and how, as they rode along together and talked, they had eventually caught up with the reserves. After leaving their bags in the white army tents, between the stocks of gunpowder and the barrels of bacon, Leonard Colby and Buffalo Bill went on to Wounded Knee. But as soon as they climbed the hill and saw the plain littered with burnt-out wagons and a swarm of vermin, booty-hunters and scavengers, all in search of Indian goods, Leonard Colby and Buffalo Bull, both of whom had experience of war and had seen battlefields before, instantly realized that what had taken place was not a battle, but a full-scale massacre.
Afterwards they went to the Pine Ridge trading post and then to the bar where Buffalo Bill was a regular because May Asay, the queen of Pine Ridge, was his mistress. I don’t know if May Asay actually enjoyed being kissed by Buffalo Bill in the outhouse next to her shop, or if she liked feeling his big military moustache against her lips. I don’t know if she liked being fucked on the dusty table, wiping herself with a dusty dishrag, and then returning behind the counter to allow her climax to subside. What I do know is that James Asay, her husband, had distributed whisky to the soldiers the night before the massacre. He ran a business, and it needed to make money; a little present to the troops couldn’t do any harm.
However, James Asay was perhaps not entirely immune to scruples. He would start boozing in the morning, and by midday his life had liquefied into oblivion. He slept all afternoon, sweating between filthy sheets and calling to some shadowy figure in his sleep. His wife would drag him roughly out of his bed in the evening, and pack him off to mind the bar. You can see that there are many ways a man can be snared in the coils of his own existence; and Asay, who had gone and given barrels of whisky to the cavalry regiment at Wounded Knee in order to win their custom, is now crushed under the weight of his own self, right there, in the middle of the afternoon, and, with his flesh pinned fast to his own nullity, it’s impossible to hate him entirely. You can imagine his forehead sticky with sweat, his cadaverous breath, his pallor, you can imagine how horribly alone he is when he’s with other people, and even when he’s not, perpetually alone and in anguish. Maybe he’s a man to be pitied. Yes, he certainly pitied himself! He wanted to act the way they do in books, to throw himself into the abyss of his own being and end it all. But he hadn’t read any books, and he hated them. All his intelligence had turned against him in the form of alcohol, tobacco, indolence and unfortunate business deals.
General Miles came into the bar from time to time, and the queen of Pine Ridge was uneasy on these occasions. Miles would drink, become progressively mean and physically violent. He’d get completely sozzled, knock the tables over and, twisting her arm, try to drag her off to the outhouse. She was a little afraid of the old piss artist. And even though Buffalo Bill spent his nights boozing and playing cards, she preferred his ridiculous baritone voice, his goatee beard and his tasselled jackets, because he was gentler. But General Miles wasn’t at Pine Ridge that day; there was only Leonard Colby, Buffalo Bill and Major John Burke, the impresario.
When Leonard Colby talked afterwards about the Pine Ridge episode, he never—but never—talked about the night he spent in Asay’s bar in the company of Buffalo Bill and Burke. He was nonetheless capable of saying all sorts of things to impress his audience, or to con journalists and the Indians he sometimes did business with, but he never told how Burke, with his ugly great mug, had talked to him, for the first time, between two rounds of hooch, about the little Indian girl. No, that he never talked about. He never said a word about the discussion where Burke first mentioned Zintkala Nuni, a tiny baby found at Wounded Knee, a little girl, “the most interesting Indian relic of all”, a tiny infant discovered a few days after the drama, who had survived by a miracle (and you can imagine with horror how Burke managed to emphasize the word, like a puppet nodding its head). No, Leonard Colby never talked about it, not to the journalists, nor to the guests in his grand sitting room, nor to anyone else. He never said how much Burke had paid—a pretty stiff price, it’s said, but Burke didn’t want people to know this either, and he kept it secret throughout his life—because Burke had bought the child. Yes, he had doubtless bought it for the Wild West Show. Well, perhaps not. But why else would he have done it, if it wasn’t to put the baby on show and add a sensational number to his programme: The Tiny Survivor of Wounded Knee? And then Buffalo Bill and John Burke must have changed their minds and decided to resell the child. We’ll never know why.
At that moment, General Colby’s heart started to beat very fast. He’d smelled a bargain. What could be better for his trafficking with the Indians than to adopt a little squaw? And since there’s no incompatibility between business and tears—on the contrary—because hoodlums, being the world’s orphans, are violent and sentimental, he doubtless felt a mix of self-interest and sentiment. The bargaining was fierce. Sitting in Asay’s store, right next to the baby who was held close by an Indian woman, while May, the queen of Pine Ridge, poured drinks, Colby, Buffalo Bill and Colby negotiated a price for the child. No one knows how much Colby paid for Zintkala Nuni, but it doesn’t matter; we know only that he was mad, and that more than once in his life his behaviour bordered on insanity; but his greatest act of lunacy was undoubtedly to buy the child and adopt it, and in so doing to mix tears and profit to an extreme degree. Yes—as you can see on that dreadful photograph where he’s holding the child in his arms, dressed in a sort of christening robe—you could say that Leonard Colby advanced a long way into his insanity, swallowing up the life of another person in his own life, and dissolving his in a calamitous enterprise.
THEY CALLED THE LITTLE Indian girl Marguerite, Marguerite Colby. I’ve seen pictures of the child, she must be four or five years old. In one of them she’s wrapped in a lace or muslin curtain, standing by a sofa. Her face is dark. Her eyes are black. She’s very pretty. She’s wearing a dress fit for a princess, as they do in good families. She’s smiling timidly, her hand has grasped a bit of the curtain and she’s holding it between her fingers, like an enigma. The Colbys’ house was full of dubious antiques, ostrich feathers, lotus flowers and hieroglyphs. Afternoon tea was served with sandwiches, fruit tarts and jam cookies. Everyone was eager to know the details of the little Indian girl’s life, and Mrs Colby, her adoptive mother, started a column in the newspaper about the doings of her daughter. You can see that, from the very start, the mass media had a propensity for excess.
And the little girl grew bigger and unruly, and she never became the model of good Christian upbringing that people wished. When she was still very young, and still playing tag among the washing lines in the yard behind the house, she would hang around in the alleyway with the negro women chattering under the porch. Then, from the boarding school where she was eventually sent, she wrote long, incoherent letters to her mother; she was often ill, and sometimes threatened to kill herself. In the end, her mother took her to Portland where they set up home. As for her adoptive father, Leonard Colby, they never saw him. He was far away, wheeling and dealing his way through life. For a while he used the name of Zintkala Nuni as a calling card in his truck with the Indians; it was a profitable tactic.
When you make a stained-glass window, you begin by outlining shapes and agonies of colour. And then you cut out the pieces of glass and you apply the blues, the reds, the yellows, and you bake it all. Once it’s cooled, you stick a little bit of blue glass—a blueberry blue—to a bit of red; and that creates the outline of a hill, Hollywood, cinema’s colonial outpost. This was where the young Indian woman settled later on, in return for a few dollars. In those days, cameramen loaded their cameras as fast as they could, films were churned out like hot dogs, actors were yelled at to take up their damn positions, and when the emulsion was exposed to the light while the cameraman furiously cranked the handle, a latent image of cowboys and Indians with horses and stagecoaches took shape—a bit like the way in spring, before their flowers burst open, buds give magnolias a hint of colour. But audiences had had enough of Westerns filmed in New Jersey with phoney cowboys and fake Indians, and they wanted the little square of celluloid to be coated for real with dust, and its eighteen by twenty-four millimetres to be tattooed for real by sun from the West.
The young woman performed in a few films. But if genuine Indians were required, it wasn’t for the leading roles. So, within a few months of arriving, she found herself destitute. It was then that, by some strange fate, she was recruited for the opening parade of the Wild West Show. Equipped with a feather boa and flashy jewellery, she probably had to dance and show her legs. She knew none of the details of her own history.
Eventually, after chasing bit parts for a few years, and finding that life, apparently, had nothing to offer her, she abandoned herself to various sordid misadventures, and, in order to pay the rent on her room and buy herself the sandwiches she lived on, she resorted to prostitution. And then, the Spanish flu, which was rife at the time and picked on weaker creatures, carried her off.
There’s a photograph of her taken shortly before she died. She’s posing as an Indian in the San Francisco Panama–Pacific International Exhibition. And it’s strange, but in this photograph, although she’s Indian, she looks as though she’s wearing a disguise. And if Zintkala Nuni looks travestied in this wretched commercial image, it’s not only because the sad, worn look in her eye screams through her costume and the circus setting that we will all die burned by our masks. No, it’s not only because she’s been kitted out in a tasselled shirt and cheap moccasins. It’s something far more terrible. If, dressed like this, Zintkala Nuni, the child of Wounded Knee, looks as though she’s wearing a disguise—it’s because she’s no longer Indian.