CHAPTER EIGHT

Indians, Horses

BY THE LATE 1870S, the quest for a middle-class following and the competition of the scout business drove Cody to new heights of theatrical innovation. His shows grew larger and more complex, his plays not only less violent, but more spectacular. He put horses onstage, decreased the amount of gunplay in the performances, and enhanced special effects such as electrical lighting.

Most historians trace the origins of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show to the gathering amplitude of these stage productions. But it was Cody’s cultivation of Indian performers in the late 1870s that led most directly to the Wild West arena. This, too, was tied to his search for a better class of customers. For in many ways the boldest and most innovative move he made to capture a middle-class audience was to make Indians more visible, at the same moment that a consciousness of their supposed vanishing—along with all other vestiges of the frontier—became ever more pervasive.

Although Cody claimed to know a great deal about Indians, the truth was that in the 1870s he knew few Indians, and these but superficially. Pawnees and other detachments of Indian auxiliaries had been his subordinates in scouting parties, but there are no hints of any deeper relationship between them than that of friendly acquaintances. In 1872, journalists credited Cody with convincing Spotted Tail and his warriors to join the buffalo hunt with the Grand Duke Alexis, and they assumed (in keeping with the dime novel frame in which they pictured him) that the white Indian must know Indians from personal experience. In fact, he knew only enough about the Sioux to defer to those who knew them better. Thus, he approached Todd Randall, “an old frontiersman . . . who was Spotted Tail’s agent” and who had lived among the band for years and who spoke fluent Lakota, to persuade Spotted Tail to come hunting.¹

On the Plains, then, Cody’s bonds with Indians were less significant than his ties to white men who knew Indians. In fact, most of the Indians who made Cody’s acquaintance did so after the Indian wars, and they did it through show business. Indians had been part of American entertainments for a very long time, and in Cody’s day they frequently appeared as exotic living exhibits or curiosities in circuses and museums. Many of these performers came from the ranks of eastern or midwestern tribes whose autonomy had long since vanished. Thus, a party of Iowa Indians toured with George Catlin in Europe in the 1840s, and midwestern Sac and Fox peoples provided the performers for Barnett and Hickok’s mock buffalo hunt at Niagara Falls in 1872. Battered by the loss of their lands and by waves of epidemic disease, and forced into the wage economy with the worst jobs (if they could get anybody to hire them at all), these people learned American notions of Indians through hard experience. We can only wonder how much they shaped their performances to subvert, reinforce, or otherwise influence American ideas of Indianness.²

Until 1877, practically all of Cody’s stage Indians were played by “supers,” or white extras. But from the very beginning, a few Indians found their way into Buffalo Bill stage plays, their presence a hint of future possibilities. In 1872, Carlo Gentile, an Italian photographer touring southern Arizona, ransomed—or bought—a captive Yavapai boy from a band of Pima Indians. Gentile subsequently took the boy to Chicago, gave him the name Carlos Montezuma, and hired him out to play the role of Azteka, an Indian boy who shot arrows at Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack in Scouts of the Plains, during its debut performance in Chicago and on tour afterward.³ Grown to manhood, Montezuma would become a physician, a leading Indian intellectual, and a relentless critic of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and its reservation policy.⁴ As a child onstage, Montezuma took his place amid the fake Indians represented by the supers. Thus the scout business, in its dance of real and fake, featured some mix of real Indians and imitation ones, original and copy. But the mimicry of this spectacle was so poor, the supers so obviously fake, that critics complained. Real Indians were hard to find, though, so Cody dismissed Montezuma and resorted again to supers for the first few years.⁵

Cody’s inspiration to hire Sioux performers reflected a shift in performance possibilities for Indians only recently subjugated by the U.S. Army. Where earlier Indian performers came from tribes that had been defeated many years before, Indians who came to the stage in the 1870s increasingly had careers that in some ways paralleled Cody’s, with gutsy leaps from the Far West, and the frontier of combat, to the theater and the melodrama. Their own frontier imposture, in which they combined elements of Indian life and culture with popular expectations, creating new performances that would appeal to American audiences, was something that many of them learned in the West, where Americans flocked to Indian villages and dances. Soldiers watched as Osage scouts performed hours of scalp dances after returning with Custer from the Washita in 1868. Crowds of soldiers and civilians from Fort Laramie gathered to watch the huge Plains Indian powwows during the treaty negotiations of 1867. Residents of Fort McPherson and ranks of itinerant teamsters turned out to watch the Pawnee scouts perform war dances the night before they departed on the Republican River expedition, with the Fifth Cavalry and scout William Cody, in 1869. Watching Sioux dances at Fort Robinson, in Nebraska, was a major social pastime for American soldiers and civilians well into the 1870s.⁶

Among the Lakota, dances could be social affairs or sacred rituals, depending on the dancers and the context. Social dances were jovial and festive, and often accompanied by feasts. It did not take long for some Indians to adapt steps from social dances to entertainment, and the American market for public amusement. In 1874, a group of Lakota performers charged settlers for admission to their dances at the opening of a Nebraska county. Selling their performances and images became standard. By 1877, Lakota fresh from their campaigns against the army were charging white photographers $6 each for photographs.⁷

Like Cody himself, many of the first Indian performers in frontier melodrama had also been scouts for the U.S. Army, an occupation in which they encountered American fascination for Indian performance. As we have seen, Pawnee scouts had been performing mock Indian battles and mock attacks for hunting parties and railroad executives for over a decade by the time Cody hired some of the tribe to join his theatrical combination. By the late 1870s, there was enough of an entertainment industry swirling around Indians that Indian performers moved fluidly between shows. Some of the Indians in Cody’s troupe came from other theatrical companies, including Donald McKay’s troupe of Warm Springs Indians—who had served as scouts in California’s Modoc War.⁸

Cody abandoned the practice of hiring other white scouts after the bitter falling-out with Captain Jack Crawford.⁹ Immediately thereafter, he began to search out Indian performers, recognizing that his ability to marshal them east and onto the boards heightened his reputation as a white man who “knew Indians.” Of course, the presence of Indians, particularly Lakota Sioux men, so soon after the death of Custer, also charged the rapidly aging scout business with a new bolt of authenticity. Where other combinations required supers to play Indians, real Indians enabled Cody to again assert his prominence as the besieged purveyor of the real, surrounded by faking competitors. Thus, in the fall of 1877, Cody recruited Oglala Sioux Indians from the Red Cloud Agency for his theatrical season.¹⁰ As translator, he commissioned John Y. Nelson, a buffalo hunter and fur trapper who lived near Fort McPherson and was married to a Lakota woman from Whistler’s band. The two Sioux men with Cody that year were identified as Man Who Carries the Sword—known as Sword, he was an in-law of Nelson—and Two Bears.¹¹

Identified only as “Buffalo Bill and Scouts,” this photograph depicts at least two members of the Buffalo Bill Combination of 1877–78: William Cody, center, and George Sword, Lakota warrior and scout-turned-actor, front right. The unidentified Indian man to the left of Sword might be Two Bears. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.

Sword and Two Bears hailed, respectively, from the Oglala and the Hunkpapa divisions of the larger Lakota tribe, and in that sense, their people were among the most recent enemies of the U.S. Army. But the Lakota had no tradition of central organization or state hierarchy. Even at the peak of the Sioux War in 1876, some Lakotas urged accommodation with the United States. The very reason that Sheridan had chosen Spotted Tail for the Grand Duke Alexis hunt was that Spotted Tail was a strong advocate for peace between Lakotas and Americans. Similarly, both Sword and Two Bears had been prominent peace advocates. Sword was a nephew of Red Cloud, who had encouraged cooperation with the Indian agent at Red Cloud Agency and offered to guide Professor Othniel C. Marsh on his hunt for fossils in the Sioux badlands in 1874. He later scouted for General George Crook, and in 1876 he helped Colonel Randall Mackenzie attack a Cheyenne village. That same year, he sought out Crazy Horse at the behest of the army command, in a vain attempt to persuade the great warrior to surrender.¹²

The following year, in 1878, Cody ventured to Indian Territory to hire Pawnee actors, whose acquaintance he had made during his days as hunting guide and scout with Frank North. In subsequent years, he alternated between Pawnee and Lakota actors, with Nelson as his go-between for the Lakotas and Gordon “Pawnee Bill” Lillie as his translator and agent with the Pawnees.¹³ By this time, numerous Indians who had fought in the Sioux War were performing on eastern stages. Twenty Utes were featured in Barnum’s circus in 1881, and Sioux Indians showed up at Bunnell’s Museum in Brooklyn that same year.¹⁴ Sitting Bull himself went on the stage with an “authentic” display of Indian life in 1884, playing to packed houses in New York and Philadelphia.¹⁵

Other than Sitting Bull, we know very little about these Indian performers as individuals, but it seems safe to assume that they came to the stage because it offered a way of earning good money, and making contacts with powerful people to outmaneuver the officials who stifled their autonomy on impoverished reservations. In an interview with a Baltimore newspaper, Sword and Two Bears were pleased to be traveling and seeing the East, “learning the ways of the pale faces” and presumably making a living, too. ¹⁶ Accustomed to advocating peace even at times of war, they were Lakota innovators unwilling to accept either armed resistance to the United States or American terms of Lakota defeat. In these ways, Sword and Two Bears were typical of the Indian performers who followed them into Buffalo Bill’s amusements, on the stage and in the arena years later.¹⁷

For many Americans then and now, the idea of Indians reenacting scenes of frontier conquest in these blood-and-thunder, Indian-slaughtering melodramas suggests that impresarios like Cody were exploiting and humiliating them. But Indians were not naive about American desires. Their refusal to assume humiliating roles compelled Cody to commission plots allowing his Indian performers a place of considerable honor, within the constraints of the genre. Thus, Cody pointed out to one interviewer that Sword and Two Bears were his friends in the stage drama of 1877, because “it would hardly be politic to use them” in any other way.¹⁸ In May Cody, or Lost and Won, the villains of the piece were Mormons and a band of “bad Indians,” or renegades, played by supers. As with most dime novels, Indian savagery in May Cody was the product of white villainy—the malevolent Mormons, in this case, who entice Indians to attack a wagon train. The noble savages, played by Sword and Two Bears, help Buffalo Bill to recover his sister, vanquish the evil whites, and thereby remove the impulse for any Indians to be bad any longer. A similar plot was to be found in his 1880–81 production, The Prairie Waif, in which relatively few Indians died, but “a half dozen Mormons . . . are slain whenever the play threatens to grow monotonous.” ¹⁹ Civilization marches on, crushing the threats to domestic order in the woman-stealing Mormons while treating Indians fairly—but ushering their primitive world into the abyss, too, in the end.

So it was in the remainder of Cody’s stage melodramas that Indians, if they figure in the action at all, are routinely divided between noble savages (played by real Indians) and savage savages (played by supers), all of whom are vanishing. The drama reprised a classic depiction of Indians that allowed Europeans and Americans to utilize Indians as symbols without understanding them as complex people.²⁰ This division was integral to the plays even in the early 1870s, but the arrival of real Indians in the roles marked a new departure. Where non-Indians like Morlacchi had represented “good Indians” such as Dove Eye in Scouts of the Prairie, now “good Indians” played themselves, just as the white scouts represented their own characters. The imposture suggested that nobility was, after all, the most reliable—“real”— Indian trait.

Cody’s intuitive sense of the public longing for noble savages as true, uncorrupted, honest primitives fading before the onslaught of modern, industrial commerce was the source of much of his success in the later years of his stage career and, of course, in the Wild West show. Scholars and Buffalo Bill enthusiasts rightly marvel at his sympathy for Indians, which he began to articulate in the late 1870s, at the very moment he brought real Indians to the stage. “In nine times out of ten,” he was fond of saying, “where there is trouble between white men and Indians, it will be found that the white man is responsible.” Often, he buttressed this political commentary with references to Indian nobility. “Indians expect a man to keep his word. They can’t understand how a man can lie. Most of them would as soon cut off a leg as tell a lie.”²¹ He routinely criticized the failure of Americans to abide by their treaties, warning that “there is just one thing to be considered” where “the management of Indians” was concerned: “That is, that when you promise him anything you must keep your word; break it, and the trouble commences at once.” Urging his compatriots to “take an Indian by the hand and make him a friend,” he also defended federal purview over Indian affairs from detractors who thought each state should administer its own Indian policy. ²²

As he developed his contingent of Indian performers, increasingly he made his own violence against Indians look like a last resort. “I never sighted down my rifle or drew my knife on an Indian but I felt almost sorry for it, and I never did it when I could help it,” he said in one interview.²³ He blamed the Indian wars on white aggression. Thus, in 1879, he told a local newspaperman, “There are a number of men who make it a profession to steal horses from the Indians. . . . In fact, there is a regular market for them. Although I have had many a tough fight with the red man my sympathy is with him entirely, because he has been ill-used and trampled on by those whose duty it was to protect him.”²⁴

Cody’s sympathy for Indians might be dismissed as a show business fiction, were it not so consistent in later years. His Wild West show hired so many Indian performers, paying such good wages for enjoyable work, that it earned a lasting place of respect and even admiration among the Lakota. To this day, tales of Cody’s friendships with his Indian performers circulate at Pine Ridge.²⁵ Lakota scholar and activist Vine Deloria, Jr., author of the famed Custer Died for Your Sins, concludes that for its time, “Buffalo Bill’s relationship with the Indians, absent the aura of show business, seems above average in the positive human qualities of justice and fair play.”²⁶

That Cody’s understanding of Indian peoples developed to the point where it could earn such praise from Indians themselves speaks volumes about how much the performance needs of his entertainment changed his views. For in the beginning, Cody’s stance toward Indians was complex and not consistently benign. Until he began hiring Lakota performers in 1877, his sympathy for Indians was sometimes absent from his pronouncements, and even after he hired them, he continued to glory in his role—onstage and off—as the scalper of Yellow Hair. More bloodthirsty still, during California’s Modoc War of 1873 he told a reporter for a St. Louis newspaper that when it came to Indians, “I have shot and stabbed’em, cut their bowels out with my knife, harpooned’em, clubbed’em to death, and in fact killed’em in every way you can think of, except talking’em to death.” Vowing to “take a run out to the lava beds” and take enough scalps “to stuff a rocking-chair for the old woman,” Cody promised that he and Texas Jack “won’t leave a pappoose [sic] a week old.”²⁷

Fortunately, Cody did not make good on his offer. Indeed, such Indian-killer rhetoric was confined to the earlier period of Cody’s career. As he tailored his persona for middle-class audiences, a more benign Buffalo Bill emerged and the talk of clubs, harpoons, and baby-killing soon vanished.

It may be that his move to distance himself from the Indian-hater image reflected his increasing adherence to his dime novel persona. In the fiction of the 1870s, the character of Buffalo Bill was more benign than vengeful. Indian-hating, bloodthirsty scouts featured in American fiction of an earlier period, such as Robert Bird’s 1837 novel Nick of the Woods, and in the many cheap novels and stories that circulated about “Old Dan Rackback,” the “Great Extarminator,” and about Lew Wetzel, the famous Kentucky scout, who “to his dying day, carried out the very letter of the vow he had made” never to let anything “screen an Indian from his vengeance.”²⁸

But, as one scholar has observed, these virulent Indian haters were “too choleric, too unrestrained and bloodthirsty” to be romantic heroes. By the 1870s, the best-selling dime novels downplayed Indian hating in favor of Indian civilizing, and their romantic protagonist, the noble white scout, reclaimed Eden from the wilderness and ensured the propagation of settler homes and families.²⁹ Like other fictional heroes in this period, the Buffalo Bill who appears in dime novels is drawn to the West because it is a natural setting. As a natural man, he evokes a Romantic appreciation of wilderness, as paradise waiting to be reclaimed, with himself as the scout who blazes a path for civilization to follow. He may fight Indians, but if so, it is because they represent a direct and immediate threat to white civilization. He is a skillful warrior, but not a vengeful one.

The power of the cultural imperative toward restraint of the bloody passions, even in dime novels, is evident in the literary career of the notoriously choleric and all-too-often unrestrained Ned Buntline. In the writer’s first Buffalo Bill novel, the action begins with the shattering of the Cody family and ends with its restoration. Buffalo Bill dispenses violence and claims retribution on the way to the story’s end, but they are means to his end: the establishment of settler domestic bliss. The most dangerous enemies are not Indians at all, but evil white men who have turned renegade. Nowhere does Buntline’s Buffalo Bill excoriate Indians for being Indians. Nowhere does he vow to obliterate them.

That so much tolerance flowed from the pen of an immigrant-bashing firebrand like Buntline suggests how far middle-class, reformist ideologies of manly moderation had penetrated even dime novels. By the 1870s, American manliness was thoroughly infused with ideals of spiritual and bodily temperance. ³⁰ White men might fight and kill Indians if provoked, but hatred—of Indians or anybody else—was anathema to most Americans, because it was a savage, degenerative condition. It flew in the face of dominant middle-class virtues of self-control and restraint. Monomania for revenge precluded love, procreation, or the advancement of civilization. Like addiction to drink, it could become a monstrous obsession. If Americans became vengeful killers like Indians, then savagery would have won the day. Thus, Henry Morton Stanley would write from the 1867 Hancock expedition against the Cheyenne, “Extermination is a long word, but a longer task, and civilization cannot sanction it.” ³¹ Thus, Buffalo Bill’s stage character, like his dime novel character, was a romantic man, whose violence was controlled enough to be regenerative. He was a race hero, not a race avenger; an Indian fighter, even an Indian killer, but not an Indian hater.

Of course, even after the early 1870s, the exigencies of war made Cody’s development of his persona as Indian apologist and sympathizer difficult and uneven. Immediately upon hearing of Custer’s demise in 1876, he set out to scalp an Indian. He was reenacting the “duel” with Yellow Hair early in 1877, just before he hired Sword and Two Bears—and he performed The Red Right Hand, with the Yellow Hair scalping in it, during the season that Sword and Two Bears were with him. Afterward, in the Wild West show, the scalping of Yellow Hair was a central spectacle for decades. In Cody’s day-to-day life, the actual scalp took on great personal importance. He traveled with it, keeping it in a safe in his private railway car during his Wild West show days.³²

And, at the same time he denounced the breaking of treaties, Cody continued to seek profits from the practice. In 1875, he and Kit Carson, Jr., served as figureheads for the Boston Black Hills Expedition, a group of speculators trying to mount a gold-mining expedition to the Black Hills of Dakota Territory. In the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, the U.S. government guaranteed Sioux title to those hills. As reports of gold in the region began to circulate, the Indians made clear they had no intention of relinquishing their claim. Agitation from the Boston Black Hills Association and similar groups convinced federal authorities that the treaty of 1868 was unenforceable, and thereby began the sequence of events which led to the Sioux War of 1876–77, the dispossession of the Lakota from their promised home, and their further impoverishment.³³ In later years, Cody told newspaper interviewers that the Lakota had only been defending what was rightfully theirs. In 1885, when Sitting Bull toured with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, Cody gave one interviewer a thumbnail history of the Sioux War, in which he attributed Sitting Bull’s onetime hostility to the United States as a defense of his home. “Their lands were invaded by the gold seekers,” he explained, “and when the U.S. Government failed to protect them they thought it was time to do it themselves.” In this case, mindful of needing government permission to have Sitting Bull with him, Cody softened his antipathy toward government bureaucrats, who “did all they thought they could do,” but to no avail, since “the white men wouldn’t be held back.”³⁴ That he had encouraged American seizure of the Black Hills at the time did not trouble him.

Similarly, in the early 1880s, Buffalo Bill supported efforts to “open”— Indians would say “steal”—Indian reservations for white settlers. Indian Territory, today’s Oklahoma, had been guaranteed to Indians, including not only Cherokees and others removed from the East, but also the southern Cheyenne and some Arapaho, whom Cody fought in Kansas. By the 1870s, many Indians were leasing parts of their reservations to Texas cattlemen for pasture. Speculators and political opportunists began to excoriate Indian treaties as the tool of rich cattle barons. Foremost among these “boomers” was David “Oklahoma” Payne, who kicked off a populist campaign promising new opportunities for aspiring farmers if they could defeat the “corrupt” politicians who protected the “special interests” of Indians.

In 1882, Cody bought forty shares in Payne’s prospective colony, representatives of which soon marched into Indian Territory. U.S. authorities did what the law required. They removed Payne and his followers, and gave Payne a court date. With the would-be settlers perched on the border, Payne was out of money. Cody found him a place in the Wild West show to tide him over, but the “intrepid leader” who defied military orders to stay out of Indian Territory and “defended his cabin” there “against scores of his wily foes . . . until his name has become a terror to the Indians of that region,” died suddenly in 1884.³⁵ His efforts reached fruition posthumously, in 1885, when Congress began “buying” Indian land—whether or not the Indians wanted to sell—and the land rushes of the late 1880s and early 1890s made Oklohoma synonymous with agrarian opportunity—for non-Indians.³⁶ Cody never made any money on his Oklahoma investment, but nonetheless his support for the abandonment of treaties and the dispossession of Indians contradicted his many public statements about the dishonor of the practice. In deed, if not in word, he kept company with the broad swath of Americans who denounced the breaking of Indian treaties but consciously profited from it.

The real question thus becomes less how Cody derived his sympathies for Indians than how he fashioned a persona of Buffalo Bill that could denounce Indian conquest at one moment and become its most visible advocate in the next. Of all Cody’s characteristics, it is this profound ambivalence about Indians that seems most impenetrable.

But in this respect, perhaps more than in any other, Cody’s perspective on the Indian question borrowed directly from the politicking of army officers. Buffalo Bill may have turned his back on political office, but in his theatrical depiction of Indians he held a political brief for the army command, something that further encouraged their support of his theatrical and stage career. For the army that fought Indians on the Plains, the administration of Indian affairs was a large prize in an ongoing political fight in the nation’s capital. Traditionally, the War Department was responsible for Indian affairs, and for this reason the army secured a great deal of authority and a large budget well before the Civil War. But in the reforms of 1849, the Office of Indian Affairs was moved from the War Department to the Department of the Interior (where it survives to this day, as the Bureau of Indian Affairs).³⁷

The change did not sit well with the army, who now saw themselves as enforcing an Indian policy cooked up mostly by distant politicians and Washington bureaucrats. For the rest of the century they angled to regain control of Indian relations. Thus, in the 1860s and ’70s, army officers often blamed the federal government—by which they meant the Department of the Interior—for failing in its duties to Indians. Beginning in 1869, President Grant’s Peace Policy placed Indian reservations under the supervision of Quakers and other Christian missionaries. The army’s responsibilities were restricted to pursuing Indians off the reservations. The Peace Policy was a favorite target of criticism among army commanders, who felt that they understood Indians better than any missionaries. ³⁸

Much as critics denounced Cody’s stage plays for plotless violence, they had a coherent political message in that they propagated the army’s position in the struggle for control of Indian affairs. Scouts of the Plains, Cody’s 1873–74 drama, was highly critical of the Peace Policy, under which churches administered reservations while the army patrolled outside their boundaries. As one critic noted, “All through the play there is a Quaker Peace Commissioner dropping in everywhere most inopportunely, and who gets scalped—as he deserves—before the close.” ³⁹ The Peace Policy had collapsed by 1875. But until the twentieth century, army officers continued a drumbeat of criticism of federal bureaucrats and religious reformers for malfeasance, naiveté, or general misconduct in Indian affairs. Throughout the period, Cody underscored his support for the army position in his public statements. Thus, his lament that “the Indian” had been “ill-used and trampled on by those whose duty it was to protect him,” a sentiment he repeated in various forms throughout his life, was a thinly veiled criticism of the civilians who ran the Office of Indian Affairs, and who were responsible for administering reservations. ⁴⁰

Less pointedly, and in some ways more surprising, his ambivalence toward Indian conquest and his sympathy toward defeated Indians were also products of his long exposure to army officers. To be sure, America’s leading Indian fighters were and are rightly notorious for some of their pronouncements about Indians. General Philip Sheridan was said to have remarked that “the only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” Paraphrased as “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” Sheridan’s remark has been a banner of Indian hating for more than a century.⁴¹ Whether or not Sheridan ever uttered the remark, others said similar things. Upon hearing of the destruction of Captain Fetterman’s command at Fort Phil Kearny in 1866, General William T. Sherman had wired the White House: “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.”⁴²

But calls for extermination were rare among army commanders. Indeed, officers’ views of the Plains Indian wars can best be summarized as ambivalent, and highly contingent upon conditions of war or peace. General George Crook, for whom Cody scouted in the summer of 1876, frequently blamed white settlers for pushing Indians “beyond endurance” until they took up arms, waging wars which the army “had to fight,” even though “our sympathies were with the Indians.” Treated fairly, he thought, “the American Indian would make a better citizen than many who neglect the duties and abuse the privilege of this proud title.”

Crook had as many critics as any other officer in the army, but on the subject of Indians, his views were widely shared. General Oliver Otis Howard, who pursued Chief Joseph in the Nez Perce War of 1877, was of the opinion that Indians, at least, stole only only from enemies. They kept promises, too. When asked if he thought Indians were especially treacherous, he replied, “No, not so much as the Anglo-Saxon.” General Nelson Miles, a personal friend of Cody’s who commanded troops against the Sioux, Cheyenne, Apache, and Nez Perce, wrote that Indian warriors showed “courage, skill, sagacity, endurance, fortitude, and self-sacrifice of a high order,” and they followed distinctive “rules of civility.” These magnificent people, he thought, ill deserved America’s “haughty contempt.” Even Philip Sheridan was not above sympathizing with them. “We took away their country and their means of support, broke up their mode of living, their habits of life, introduced disease and decay among them, and it was for this and against this they made war. Could any one expect less?” To Sheridan’s mind, reservation poverty was the major cause of Indian warfare, and entirely the fault of the Office of Indian Affairs and the ignorant reformers who posed as “Friends of the Indian.”⁴³

Coming from commanders who routinely defended soldiers for killing Indian women and children, such sentiments might seem contradictory. But the ambivalence was genuine, deeply rooted, and widespread. Preparing to kill Indians in combat, soldiers (and their families) denounced Indians as bloodthirsty savages who merited destruction. Removed from imminent battle, soldiers valorized their opponents as noble, stalwart defenders of home and family, more primitive but still honorable versions of themselves.⁴⁴

Of course, such sentiments said more about soldiers than Indians. Only a valiant soldier could defeat a valiant enemy. Venerating their opponents as noble savages allowed officers to claim the status of alienated men of honor in a dishonorable age. To their way of thinking, the Plains Indian wars were mostly the result of greedy frontier settlers, merchants, and their cronies, who manipulated a distant, disengaged Washington bureaucracy into declaring war on victimized, misunderstood Indians, all in an effort to grab Indian land and army supply contracts.⁴⁵

Cody’s complaint about white thieves who supplied the “regular market” for stolen Indian horses thus echoed the complaints of many army officers who saw Americans, particularly of the lower-class variety, as the real savages of the frontier. Consistently, his stage plays borrowed from dime novel conventions and military rhetoric that placed Indians at the mercy of evil whites. “General, it is not the Indians who are the first cause of difficulties,” Buffalo Bill asserts in Life on the Border. “It is the white men who disguise themselves as Indians and commit these depredations, then the Indians are to blame for it. Then away goes the military for them and that brings on an Indian war.” ⁴⁶

There was truth to the contention. American criminals who disguised murders and thefts by planting Indian clues—moccasin prints, arrows, unshod horse tracks—were common on the frontier. But white settlers who stole from Indians were even more widespread, and officers castigated them. Captain John Bourke, a veteran of the U.S. Army’s Apache campaigns, denounced reckless, idle, and “dissolute” settlers for starting Indian wars. In Texas, officer James Parker wrote his mother, “I would like to go on a scouting expedition after renegade Texans and hang up every scoundrel I caught,” for the horse thieving, rapine, and murder they visited upon Indians. Major Alfred Lacey Hough denounced Colorado’s “wholly unscrupulous” frontier settlers for being “ambitious men who care only for their own interests” and who stirred up trouble with Indians to bring on a federal Indian war and an infusion of federal dollars into the local economy.⁴⁷

As enlightened as such views seem, they were also self-serving. Where the army’s war on Indians verged on atrocity, officers (and scouts like Cody) held themselves blameless, and pointed at settlers, bureaucrats, or Indians for starting the conflagration into which duty thrust them. ⁴⁸ Thus, in the minds of officers, at least, the army did the nation’s dirty work. When they were not in combat, the army stood between frontier settlers and Indians, and they understood their role as protectors of each from the other.

If the Indian wars were bereft of honor, why did Cody and so many officers fight them? Why not resign? Simply put, resisting duty would not have improved matters. Popular Darwinian and Anglo-Saxonist ideologies found numerous exponents among the educated and comparatively well-read officer corps. To them, the march of the white race and its higher civilization made the destruction of Indian culture—the Indian “race”—inevitable. For Indians to surrender to the farms and industry of the higher American civilization was the only possible outcome of the race confrontation described by the frontier line. Lieutenant Colonel George Forsyth, in a typical statement of this widespread philosophy, acknowledged that “the Indian has been wronged, and deeply wronged, by bad white men.” Nonetheless, “it must always be borne in mind that, cruel as the aphorism is, ‘the survival of the fittest’ is a truism that cannot be ignored or gainsaid and barbarism must necessarily give way before advancing civilization.”⁴⁹

If warfare and skullduggery were the means through which civilization triumphed, as far as the army was concerned, that was the fault of distant bureaucrats or greedy settlers. Officers usually saw themselves as honorable mediators between civilization and savagery, even when they had to fight Indians who had been wrongly provoked. By vanquishing their Indian opponents as quickly as possible, and moving them expeditiously to reservations, they were giving the Indians a peaceful home—in which they could pass quietly into oblivion.

In reality, of course, Indians were not about to vanish. Their survival strategies included performing dances and other cultural practices for cash, something Cody’s stage shows and his Wild West show facilitated. But the belief that they were about to disappear, in a development that was as inevitable as it was unfortunate, remained a dominant stream of American thought well into the twentieth century.

Indians, indeed, were only the most prominent of the “vanishing” peoples, landscapes, tools, trades, occupations, and customs that preoccupied nineteenth-century Americans. The rhetoric of vanishment described categories of beings or things that disappeared to make way for more highly developed successors. It was central to the ideology of progress, and woven through contemporary notions of biology, industrial development, and politics. Naturalists, like officers, influenced Cody’s views on retreating Indians, buffalo, and the frontier. In the late 1860s Cody hunted buffalo “specimens” for America’s leading taxidermist, Professor Henry A. Ward of Rochester (with whom he frequently socialized afterward, as a resident of that city), and in 1871 he guided Professor Othniel C. Marsh, of Yale University (whose continuing search for dinosaur bones was later assisted by another guide, George Sword). Ward, Marsh, and others related the region’s ancient past in stories of brutal competition, violent extinction, and the ineluctable ascendance of higher orders. According to Cody, Marsh “entertained me with several scientific yarns, some of which seemed too complicated and too mysterious to be believed by an ordinary man like myself; but it was all clear to him.” ⁵⁰ Whether or not his self-effacing shrug at Marsh’s science was false modesty, Cody understood evolutionary thought at least as well as most Americans did. Darwinian evolution, after all, could be read as a variation on the larger narrative of progress and upward development that had preoccupied American thinking since the beginning of the United States.

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show stands in popular memory as a symbol of Gilded Age confidence. But the centrality of Indians to it, as noble savages doomed to vanish, in truth reflected the conflicted views of most Americans on the subject of the frontier, which they loved and destroyed through their own progress. Cody’s exposure to Darwinism, the theory of civilization, and the army command provided him with a ready rhetoric of Indian vanishment, a development so preordained and inevitable that it rendered Indian hating not only distasteful, but excessive. In time, he adapted this language to his Wild West show as a whole. The show, like the Indians, was predicted to disappear as time swept away the “originals” who represented life in the show’s Far West. In adapting the sentiments of officers and scientists for his own needs, Cody borrowed a language that combined scientific prediction with certainty about the political advent of the United States in the Far West, but which was also shot through with profound uncertainty about the moral quality of that succession. Even as Americans swept out across the Plains to force the ineluctable conclusion of progress, Cody remained less convinced of its righteousness than of its inevitability.

Ambivalence: this was the defining characteristic of American sentiment on westward expansion. And ambivalence was where Cody arrived after searching for the right language to tell stories to the public about real Indians, initially Sword and Two Bears, ultimately all the others who followed in the decades after his stage season of 1877.

As Indians became essential to the spectacle of Buffalo Bill, the need to expand the performance space from stage to arena became increasingly evident. For if Indianness were to be put on display, Indians would have to be on horses.

On horseback, Plains Indians were both enemies and inspirations. Cavalrymen, who venerated great horsemanship, were astounded at Cheyenne, Lakota, and other Indians who galloped bareback amid stampeding buffalo, firing continuous streams of arrows without putting hand to reins. In warfare, their horsecraft was awesome. Hooking one heel over a horse’s back, they clung to the sides of their mounts and used the animals’ bodies as shields from enemy fire, and the showier men even returned fire from under their horse’s necks. They could retrieve fallen comrades from teeming battlefields, at top speed and without dismounting. (Alternatively, one shocked officer reported that a Cheyenne brave scooped up a soldier’s corpse at full gallop, stripped him naked, dashed out his brains, and discarded the body— without even slowing down.)⁵¹ “Having never seen the riding of Arabs, Turcomans, Cossacks” or other “world renowned riders,” wrote one officer, “I cannot say how the Indian compares with them, but I am satisfied that he is too nearly a Centaur to be surpassed by any.” ⁵²

The appellation “centaur” was a popular compliment in the nineteenth century, often used to reflect the manly bearing of a gentleman on horseback. Indian centaurism simultaneously invited and compelled soldiers to master horses in new ways. After fighting a Cheyenne war party in 1868, one troop of soldiers “were seen to mount from the right-hand side, Indian fashion; others to get on their horses’ backs by catching hold of the animals’ tails and giving a spring—also an Indian fashion. There was not a trooper in camp who had not made an effort to ride beneath his horse instead of above him.”⁵³

Even before this, at least one officer who found his own green troopers no match for the “centaurs of the desert” took extraordinary measures. Lieutenant George Armes, commander of the Second Cavalry, sought to remove the lopsided Indian advantage on horseback with new training methods at Fort Sedgewick in 1866. By the time he was finished, crowds gathered to watch his men “stand up on their horse’s bare back and ride around the ring at a gallop,” and “spring on and off their horses” at full speed, while the animals leapt over hurdles.⁵⁴

Armes intended the unorthodox training to enable his men to challenge Indian warriors on open battlefields, but his techniques soon earned the censure of his superiors, who upbraided him for turning his men into “circus riders.”⁵⁵ The criticism was ironically apt. Training soldiers to victory required, after all, defeating Indians whose thunderous, circling formations resembled nothing so much as “the grand entree of a circus,” in the words of Colonel Richard Irving Dodge.⁵⁶

Comparisons of Indians and Indian-style riding to circus tricks reflected the widespread notoriety of circus entertainment in the nineteenth century, and the early devotion of the circus to horseback stunts. Generals ridiculed George Armes for creating a training regiment that looked like a circus, but the modern circus was, in fact, birthed by a cavalryman in 1768. It was the brainchild of Philip Astley, a retired English cavalry officer who hit upon the idea of charging admission to the crowds who came to observe students at his London riding school. The diameter of Astley’s performance space, forty-two feet, was an accommodation to the minimum needs of horses turning at a gallop, and it became the standard size for the circus ring. ⁵⁷

Circuses had changed considerably by the time Cheyenne and Sioux challenged Americans for control of the Plains. Over the course of the nineteenth century, European and American circuses gradually combined clowning and horseback stunts with menageries, acrobatics, and trapeze acts. In 1796, the elephant made its first appearance in an American circus, and for the next hundred years American impresarios competed to acquire ever more exotic animal attractions. ⁵⁸ P. T. Barnum would say that the elephant and the clown were the pegs on which the circus was hung.⁵⁹

But cavalry training regiments like the one Armes devised had led Philip Astley to develop the circus in the first place. Now, despite official resistance, riding stunts found a new home in the cavalry as soldiers sought to match Indian horsemen. By the 1890s, horseback acrobatics would be installed as official cavalry drill, and detachments from the trick-riding U.S. Sixth Cavalry appeared regularly in circuses and, most famously, in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World, where their “military exercises” and “exhibition of athletic sports and horsemanship” included standing up on the backs of running horses.⁶⁰

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show took the European cultural form of the circus and naturalized it on American soil, reprising it as a horseback spectacle with Indian riders, indigenous American performers whose genuine skills had begged comparison to the circus long before they ever moved into the show arena. Cody’s move from theatrical stage to a show arena crisscrossed by galloping horsemen reflected the fascination with horses that he shared with Indians. On the Plains, his buffalo-hunting prowess was reinforced by his use of Indian-trained buffalo horses, animals specially conditioned and taught to mimic the movements of running buffalo as they carried hunters alongside them. He bought his favorite mount, Brigham— “the best buffalo horse that ever made a track”—from a Ute Indian (who presumably demanded a high price for him).⁶¹ Through the 1860s, he bought and sold horses to compete in the fervid horse-racing scene at army forts. These contests were a theatrical form in their own right, with visiting Indians, settlers, and scouts challenging tourists, soldiers, and one another to paying races. Riders were known to trumpet their invincibility with mid-race stunts. After one Comanche horse beat army competitors in two races on the same day, his owner cruised to a third victory while facing backward, taunting the trailing soldier and beckoning him closer.⁶²

By the time he was a scout, Cody was not only a racer but a trick rider, too. In the winter of 1869–70, in a race against a soldier at Fort McPherson, Cody “rode the horse bareback; seized his mane with my left hand, rested my right on his withers, and while he was going at full speed, I jumped to the ground, and sprang again upon his back, eight times in succession.” He drew inspiration for this stunt, he said, from the circus, “and I had practiced considerably at it.”⁶³

In 1869, Dan Castello’s Circus and Menagerie became the first circus to cross the country on the transcontinental railroad. When it appeared in North Platte, William Cody saw it.⁶⁴ (Although Cody did not say so, he may have seen the riding stunt before he visited the circus. His opponent in the trick-riding race was from the Second Cavalry, the regiment of “circus riders” trained by George Armes, and for all we know Cody’s opponent matched his performance, leap for leap.) The convergence of the railroad circus with William Cody’s Plains career was no accident. Circuses were widespread in American life and culture throughout the nineteenth century, but railroad expansion, the rise of corporate investment, and a revolution in print advertising—especially poster production—made for a renaissance of circuses after the Civil War.⁶⁵

Cody, who rose to fame by engaging the liminal subcultures of scouting and theater, observed another twilight social space beneath the big top. The circus was a morally questionable enterprise, with a long and checkered history. It was indisputably a European cultural form, and its most famous performers were European, or claimed to be.⁶⁶ With its bizarre freaks, strange animals, and scantily clad men and women—to say nothing of its androgynes and hermaphrodites—it was a disturbing spectacle of ambiguous races and genders, with a wide reputation for criminality. Early circus impresarios frequently cut deals with gamblers, grifters, and confidence men who followed them from town to town. At times, pickpockets plied the crowds so adeptly that few customers had any money to purchase admission from the shortchange artists working the ticket window.⁶⁷ Circus graft, and circus nonconformity, inspired a great deal of anticircus violence, particularly in rural areas where local men and boys regularly battled circus workers in public brawls.⁶⁸ An itinerant community that defied conventional social categories, the circus was infused with a carnivalesque spirit, the threat (or promise) of society turned upside down. For these reasons, clergymen often denounced it as the devil’s own playhouse, and “respectable” people often avoided it.⁶⁹

But the circus was a paradox, and by the latter 1870s Cody saw in it the glimmer of an opportunity. Where the crudest stage production was inevitably in the shadow of Shakespearean drama—actors who were not great tragedians would never achieve real praise—circuses had fewer respectable conventions to live up to, leaving reviewers and newspaper editors less constrained in their range of circus writing. In general, their coverage of circuses was so “soft,” or playful, that press agents from other entertainments were often surprised at how easy the art of circus promotion could be. Small-town and big-city editors alike reprinted circus press releases as news items, without comment.⁷⁰ Although many eschewed the circus as overly European, immoral, and decadent, the railroad allowed for much larger, more dazzling circuses which continued to draw viewers from all social classes, who sat together under one canvas tent. In this sense, a glamorous big top represented a better hope of capturing a democratic audience, including the middle classes, who had had steadily deserted the theater since Ned Buntline led the mobs outside the Astor Place Theater at the middle of the century.⁷¹

In 1869, the appearance of Castello’s circus in North Platte was so novel that the many social anxieties stirred up by circuses in general remained in the background. But in the 1870s, William Cody, who discerned divisions in popular culture at least as well as he followed the divide on the Plains, witnessed a burgeoning of circus performance, the public concerns attending it, and the efforts of his contemporaries to overcome them. In 1871, the year before he began his stage career in New York, P. T. Barnum, the artful deceiver, recast the circus as middle-class entertainment. Barnum tied his reputation for “moral” entertainments to the brilliant management of W. C. Coup. Together, the two made bold advances in circus showmanship. They solved the problem of loading circuses on trains quickly (devising ramps to load all circus animals, props, and matériel from one end), and turned the traditional one-ring entertainment into a three-ring extravaganza. In New York, they leased the old New Haven railroad station at Madison Avenue and Twenty-seventh (future site of Madison Square Garden) and built upon it the Great Roman Hippodrome.⁷² There, in 1874, they debuted “The Congress of Nations,” which Cody undoubtedly saw, and in which a parade of simulated royals and lavishly costumed entourages, including the queen of England, the pope, and the emperor of China, led an American contingent of cowboys and Indians into the big top as the opening act of a huge show of elephants and chariot races.⁷³ By 1880, Barnum had merged his spectacle with that of James A. Bailey, making it one of the nation’s largest entertainment enterprises.⁷⁴

The presence of Indians in Barnum’s circus, as elsewhere, signified the passage of history. Circuses had borrowed from history before. In 1856, in Missouri, the Mabie Brothers Circus combined with Den Stone’s Menagerie and Tyler’s Indian Exhibition to present a historical pageant, with reenactments of a buffalo hunt, Indian dances, Pocahontas saving John Smith’s life, and a (thrilling?) demonstration of Indians gathering corn.⁷⁵

Cody’s enterprise would work much more directly with historical materials, as we shall see. But in envisioning an entertainment that featured Indians, horses, and himself, it required no great leap to imagine cowboys in the mix. American and Mexican cowboys alike were fond of horseback performance. Americans and Mexicans had herded cattle for centuries by 1860, but it was the post–Civil War American cowboy who became a mythic figure of renown, and the Great Plains was his birthplace. Outfits began driving cattle from Texas to Kansas soon after the Civil War. Relatively few of these cattle made it to Nebraska at first, but the famed rancher J. W. Iliff ranged cattle in the western Platte River valley by the early 1860s, and John Bratt brought Texas cattle to the region in 1869. That same year, Texas Jack Omohundro trailed a herd of cattle from Texas to North Platte, where he sold them all to ranchers, who were now dispersed across western Nebraska. Omohundro took a job tending bar for a local saloonkeeper (Lew Baker, father of Johnny Baker, later the “boy marksman” in the Wild West show) before moving down to Fort McPherson at the urging of his new friend, William Cody, where he became an occasional schoolteacher and a scout.⁷⁶ In 1874, the Western Trail, which drew cattle from Texas to its northern terminus at Dodge City, Kansas, was extended farther north, to Ogallala, Nebraska, west of North Platte, which became the major railhead for Nebraska cattle outfits. The town of North Platte now sat firmly in the middle of a thriving cattle region, and acquired a thick layer of cowboy culture atop its military and mercantile origins.⁷⁷

In the late 1870s, Cody became a rancher and saw cowboy horsemanship up close. In partnership with Cody, Frank North and his brother Luther established a large ranch on the Dismal River. The Cody-North Ranch grazed its large herds across the Sand Hills, but lost money due to stock theft and heavy winters. In 1879 Cody and the Norths sold the outfit to John Bratt for $75,000. ⁷⁸

Cody plowed his theatrical profits into ranching, but like most ranch owners, he was an absentee owner who was never a cowboy. When he appeared at annual roundups, other ranchers and roundup bosses indulged the stage star and prominent ranch owner by letting him drive a few steers and dry heifers, but they kept him away from cows and calves, because his penchant for horseback drama made him a poor drover. “When I was bossing the round-up and the bunch became excited,” wrote John Bratt, “I would call Cody out” to get him away from the cattle. This the thespian “took good naturedly, knowing well that rough handling of stock meant loss of flesh and shrinkage in value.”⁷⁹

For his part, although Cody complained that “there is nothing but hard work on these round-ups,” and that he “could not possibly find out where the fun came in,” he attended because he could make them something of a party.⁸⁰ For several years, his celebrity, his flamboyant, gregarious manner, and his alcohol—“brought along as an antidote against snake bites, and other accidents”—energized festivities at the Dismal River roundups. “The cowboys were always glad to see the Colonel and the cattle owners and foremen would vie with each other in showing him a good time,” recalled John Bratt, who routinely collected the cowboys’ guns in anticipation of the festivities.⁸¹

These affairs included spectacular competitive displays of cowboy mastery over animals. Bronco riding, roping contests, horse races, and riding wild steers were primary features of roundups across the West, and the Dismal River roundup was no exception.⁸² The ethos of competition among cowboys in the United States and Mexico reflected their ongoing effort to turn the drudgery of work into challenging play. Competitions to see who could sit untamed mounts the longest—“bronco busting”—were common wherever cowboys accumulated, and roping contests and horse races were ubiquitous, too.⁸³ A favorite cowboy pastime was “picking up,” originally a Mexican game, in which contestants on running horses picked up coins, handkerchiefs, or virtually any small object placed at a designated spot on the ground.⁸⁴ Cowboys at the Dismal River roundups played the pickup game, and not surprisingly, it found its way to the Wild West arena as a display of “cow-boys fun.”⁸⁵

He may have been bored by the work, but Cody left the Dismal River roundups impressed with their exhibition of “most magnificent horsemanship” by cowboys who possessed “the greatest dexterity and daring in the saddle.”⁸⁶ The Sand Hills roundups inspired his organization of the Old Glory Blowout, the Fourth of July celebration which he organized at North Platte in 1882. Because the spring roundup for western Nebraska was occurring at the same time, the widely advertised event drew many cowboys, who were enthusiastic contestants for its cash prizes. After a morning parade, which terminated at a private racetrack, the program went forward with songs and speeches. Once the formal events were over, cowboys took turns roping and riding several buffalo and Texas steers that Cody had procured for the event, in a raucous spectacle that delighted the crowd. There was also a full slate of horse races, including not only cowboy-style free-for-alls but elegant trotting competitions in which horses belonging to Cody and other well-to-do merchants and ranchers faced off. That night, there were fireworks. ⁸⁷

Scholars often credit the Old Glory Blowout with inspiring the Wild West show. Others credit Nate Salsbury, who was Cody’s partner in the show from 1884 to 1902. Late in life, Salsbury claimed to have envisioned a show of horsemanship as early as 1876. He recounted an 1882 meeting at a Brooklyn restaurant at which he and Cody agreed to join forces. “I invented every feature of the Wild West Show that has had any drawing power,” he wrote.⁸⁸

We shall see below what Salsbury’s influence on the Wild West show actually was. But he never claimed to have proposed more than a show of cowboys and “Mexican riders.” Not even in his defensive, self-aggrandizing memoirs did he remember himself as having brought Indians into the conversation with Cody. There were no Indians in the Old Glory Blowout, either. In reality, since the day he became a scout, Cody had been revising, recasting, and exploring the boundaries of his frontier imposture by following Indians. He posed as the white Indian by getting close to them (but not too close) on the Plains. He shored up his melodrama and his frontier authenticity by bringing Indians to the stage in the East. Now, he imagined them as the center of a new drama that would allow them to perform the horsecraft that awed him and so many of his contemporaries. The resulting entertainment would offer new opportunities to more Indians than Cody or they imagined. And before they were done, over three decades later, it would offer not just Indians and cowboys, and Cody, but many others, too, new ways to imagine themselves and America in the modern world.