Chapter 17
Displays of—and sometimes warfare between—subjugated ethnic groups were once popular draws at expositions, including the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, and the 1898 Trans-Mississippi and International Exhibition held in Omaha, Nebraska. Hailed as an “instrument of civilization,” the exposition featured the “Indian Congress,” comprising 545 Indians from 36 tribes, including delegations of Apache, Sioux, Crow, Cheyenne, Flathead, Kiowa, Arapahoe, Assiniboine, Sac and Fox, and Omaha.
Held just eight years after the Wounded Knee Massacre, the fair was already romanticizing Indians as homicidal antiques and noble savages who had succumbed to the manifest destiny of the Caucasian Christian empire rolling ever westward. When the Bureau of Indian Affairs began gathering participants for the Congress and the mock wars they would take part in, it advised its regional agents to draft only “thoroughly aboriginal” Indians who demonstrated the most “primitive traits and characteristics.”
Once they arrived at the expo, the recruits were ensconced on a 4-acre patch of land called the Indian Encampment. The gathering was perceived—because it was also marketed—as a last chance to see these aboriginal peoples as they made the inevitable transition from feral to domesticated. (This, despite research to the contrary that suggests Native American populations were rising in this period rather than depleting.)
It was a radical departure from the national sentiment that prevailed just eight years before. Then, the phenomenon called the Ghost Dance united tribes in a usually nonviolent, sometimes apocalyptic, vision of an Earth renewed, replenished with bison and antelope, and depleted of White Power and alcohol. With some officials worrying the trance-like Ghost Dances turned the Indians “wild and crazy,” the government sent U.S. 7th Cavalry troops to quell a hotbed of the feared uprising in South Dakota. There, near Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, soldiers fired upon Miniconjou and Hunkpapa Sioux, killing, by one count, 153 men, women, and children.
From the collections of the Omaha Public Library
That was in 1890. By 1898, the Ghost Dance was as far removed from the exposition’s edutainment as German POW camps were from “Hogan’s Heroes.” (Imagine popular entertainments reenacting the Vietnam War with Viet Cong just eight years after My Lai.) But while the exhibits showcased the vision of tame house-cat Indians (such as the 83-foot-high “wigwam,” whose four levels included exhibits on Native Americans, and rest areas), it was the sham battles, with a cast of hundreds, in a setting of “Deadwood”-like realism, that packed the 5,000-seat grandstand.
The plots of the counterfeit combat were fluid, but involved copious amounts of scalping, shooting, clubbing, and even immolating each other. Their story lines—such as they were—were dumb-downed versions of the already dumb-downed dime novels of the time:
A cavalry unit searching for some “lost Indians” stages a proactive raid on an Indian village. Attacking as the unsuspecting Indians ate their dinner, the whites soon realize they are outnumbered and outgunned. After the first wave of cavalry is Little Big Horned, a second wave of whites retaliates and brings the hive of scum and villainy to heel. Amid a cloud of cliché, thousands of spent blank cartridges, and the Method-acting screams and wails of mutilated victims, the Indian chief, “Wyoki Nicyople Tigurebli Acolthj,” or “Great Man Who Fights Them All,” vows to lead a sedentary life on the reservation.
The sham battles provided a panoramic, high-resolution picture of a people in decline and an empire in ascension, one so powerful it could make entertainment out of its most intractable enemies. One year later, just months after United States forces defeated Spain’s military in Cuba and the Philippines in the Spanish-American War, a sequel to the exhibition, the Greater America Exposition, opened in Omaha. Perhaps the first fair to focus solely on America as a dilating empire, with new colonies to show off, the GAE furnished attractions such as the Philippine, Puerto Rican, and Cuban villages to go along with the giant seesaw and the “Fat Man’s Beer Garden.” To provide entertainment for the Cuban exhibit, organizers brought in Valentine Ruiz to display his particular talents. Known as “the terror of the people,” Ruiz, a condemned murderer, had bootstrapped himself to become a Havana prison’s official executioner and then served the Spanish military in the same capacity. Ruiz hanged or strangled hundreds, a bloodthirsty resume that included garroting at least 57 persons. Every day in the Cuban village, Ruiz, reputedly the “strongest person ever born in Cuba,” demonstrated his craft with reenactments of his strangulations using an authentic garrote, while crowds thrilled at the synthetic brutality.
No one understood how fairs could transform a peril into a pussycat better than Geronimo. Known formerly as Goyahkla (“He Who Yawns”), his name morphed permanently after one of his victims, according to legend, shrieked for clemency in the name of Saint Jerome (in Spanish, Jeronimo).
The Bedonkohe Apache band leader (“influencer” may be more accurate a description) of the Chiricahua Apache tribe, Geronimo was a fierce marauder of Mexican territory after that country’s forces had pushed the Apaches into the mountains. But when his wife, mother, and three children were murdered by Mexican soldiers, his appetite for carnage moved to levels a Homer would nod at in appreciation. His raids and revenges were at first an abstract matter to the U.S. government when they involved Mexican land. But they became a more concrete concern when his raids ventured into the American territories of New Mexico and Arizona. As ruthless and violent as any contemporary, Geronimo’s willingness to kill the children of his enemies was trumped by his suggestion one time that band members should kill their own infants to stifle any possible attention-directing scream while they were trying to escape from an ambush. When at one point nearly 25 percent of the Army’s forces—5,000 troops—chased him across the southwest, newspapers covered his run on horseback like O.J. Simpson’s escape in a Ford Bronco. He killed many men in his youth and exulted in it as much as an Olympic sprinter does in crossing the finish line ahead of everybody else. But in this he was no different than the conquistadores, or Western “heroes” like John Wesley Hardin or Custer. Like the Hound in “Game of Thrones” told the clueless Sansa Stark: “Your father was a killer. Your brother is a killer. Your sons will be killers someday. The world is built by killers . . .” But history trashes one group, then dresses up another like a prom date.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
After his 1886 capture, Geronimo was imprisoned at Oklahoma’s Fort Sill. Eventually, the “human tiger” and “red devil” was allowed to appear in public at three world’s fairs (the Trans-Mississippi, Pan-American, and Louisiana Purchase expos) and Theodore Roosevelt’s inauguration. Geronimo wandered the fairgrounds, where people were as entranced by the legend as much as we would be by a knight of King Arthur’s Round Table. His unchaperoned appearances implied the sheer unyielding and absolute rightness of an American system that saw itself—especially through the self-congratulating prism of the Pan-American Expo—as the apex of the social and historical pyramid.
The aging, defeated Geronimo admitted that the spectacle of the Omaha exhibition impressed upon him the inescapability of American power. His very presence assured Americans that whether its enemies were here at home or in foreign lands, they could be quelled and assimilated with Borg-ian efficiency.
Displayed as a walking, talking museum piece, Geronimo appeared in the fairs’ parades and, at the Louisiana Purchase expo, in a booth making bows and arrows to sell. Between regular appearances at the sham battles, Geronimo cashed in on his superstar status, receiving $45 per month at the Buffalo, New York, Exposition of 1901, and $100 monthly in St. Louis in 1904. He pulled the buttons off his army jacket to sell to wide-eyed attendees, then re-sewed new buttons back on from a supply he kept on hand, to hawk them again the next day. He wrote his autograph in block letters for 10 cents to 25 cents (in recent years, the extant autographs have fetched as much as $10,000) apiece, sometimes adding doodles to the “G.” He peddled signed photos for 50 cents to $1 each, and even an autographed beaded quiver and bow. Despite eventually being baptized in the Dutch Reformed church, his legend fueled the fascination of seeing something so dangerous up close: During the fairs, newspapers recounted as fact the folklore of Geronimo’s coat, comprised of human scalps, which made seeing the septuagenarian as thrilling as the expo’s Hereafter ride where visitors cruised in Charon’s boat. It was as if Osama bin Laden had been captured instead of killed, reduced from a furious boogeyman to a caricature who sauntered around in Crocs, binge-watched “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” sold T-shirts and selfies, and announced on Fox News he put more faith in Adam Smith than Allah. Harmless as a leaf, Geronimo still elicited a frisson of danger like Hannibal Lector even when strapped to a dolly. When he died at age seventy-nine, thrown by his horse, the Chicago Daily Tribune lashed him with a headline like a cat o’ nine tails: “Geronimo Now a Good Indian.”