CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Cowboys, Indians, and the Artful Deceptions of Race

THERE WERE MANY OTHERS in Cody’s cast alongside the Indians. In the Wild West camp, Indian and non-Indian motivations became profoundly entangled, and white cowboys, Mexicans, and others worked with Indians in a kind of integrated traveling town or community. No contingent existed on its own; all depended to some degree on the cooperation of others. In this sense, the story of the camp is less in the experience of any one contingent than in the relations among them. Unfortunately, while thousands of people worked in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, only a handful left any record of the experience. Paradoxically, we know most about the show’s most impoverished and least politically powerful performers, the Lakotas, because federal authorities took such an interest in them. For the rest, the cowboys, cowgirls, vaqueros, Cossacks, Japanese, Hawaiians, and European soldiers, we know very little. But even these fragments of evidence can be revealing. Why cast members joined the show, and how they made it function, speak volumes about the limits of its racial ideologies in day-to-day life, and it tells us much, too, about William Cody’s legacy in the larger West.

For all its devotion to “authentic” racial types and historic blood feud, to look beneath the surface of show publicity is to realize the depths of Cody’s artful deception of race. The arena performance of race distinction and white supremacy hinged on a sizable amount of race mixing, cultural borrowing, and even crossing of the color line. The dramatic presentation of white supremacy only became possible through the cast’s enthusiasm for beguiling the Wild West’s racial frontiers.

Given the real racial tensions in the American West and elsewhere, racial strife between contingents was perhaps inevitable. The center of camp social life was the dining tent. Luther Standing Bear (no relation to the Standing Bear who married Louise Rieneck) joined the show in 1903. He recalled, “The Indian village would always be located not far from the dining tent.” ¹ Other groups flocked to the tent, too, and it was a kind of social center, but contingents ate at separate tables, with Indians at one table, the cowboy band at another, Mexicans at still another. ² Segmented seating allowed for fast meals and suitable quantities of food at each table, but it reinforced social constraints on mixing. In 1890, Warren H. Vincent, a Wild West show cowboy, reassured his parents that he was in no danger from smallpox, which killed a number of Indians during that year’s European tour. “We cow punchers was exposed this much,” he wrote. “We ride among them during the performance.”³

Performers’ segmentation derived partly from their disparate origins and languages. The cowboys’ reasons for working in the show were not dissimilar to those of the Indians. Out on the range, cowboy work was dull when it was not dangerous. The hours were interminable and the pay was low, all conditions which led to the cowboy strike of 1883, which broke under pressure from ranch owners who easily exploited cowboys’ transience as well as the cowboys’ own sense that their work was a temporary occupation which would lead to better things.⁴ The Wild West show presented cowboys as upwardly mobile white men rather than exploited manual laborers, and its performance held some advantages over regular range work. The advancement of barbed wire turned the open range into a series of pastures, and autonomous long-distance riders and ropers into poorly paid “Ph.Ds”— posthole diggers—who suffered the same long hours and the same low pay the industry had always offered. Harsh weather was the norm, too. On the northern Plains, late blizzards struck even in May. As Wild West show cowboy Harry Webb put it, “Frost-bitten noses and feet and fighting cattle in blizzards and belly deep snow talked loud on the side of Buffalo Bill.”⁵

With wages as high as $120 per month, the show paid better than many ranches, in addition to offering a chance for travel, and new circles of friendship and romance. Many of the show cowboys were married, and wives often accompanied the troupe on tour. Because the Wild West show toured only during the warm months, all employees had to find other work during the winter. Many went back to ranch work, mining, or even other shows. Most cowboys appear to have anticipated moving up from the ranks of cow-punchers to other businesses, perhaps to being ranch owners, or cattlemen, whose income and social standing far exceeded those of cowboys.

Of course, the show was no refuge from hard work. “By the end of three weeks several riders decided there were easier ways of living than bronc riding and had gone home and a couple of others had been fired because they were trouble makers,” recalled Harry Webb.⁶

Trouble came in many guises, and the rough life of the show camp became rougher with personal rivalries. On the road, as on the range, the culture of cowboys was imbued with practical jokes and one-upmanship. When his close friend and fellow show cowboy George “Gaspipe” Mullison began seeing a married woman during their tour, Webb frightened her away with tall tales about Mullison’s long career in crime out west. After the fistfight that followed, Mullison and Webb did not speak for six weeks. Mullison renewed their friendship by one day secretly switching the bridle of Webb’s bronco with a shorter mule bridle. As Webb’s bronco began to buck in front of the crowd, “I was flung to right and left like a straw dummy in a cyclone.” Moments later, he picked himself up from the ground “with chaps around my ankles,” two sprained wrists, and a “mouth full of tanbark and horse manure.” Mullison helped him to the sidelines, with some advice: “Now you smart son of a bitch, I reckon you’ll think twice before you scare another girl away from me.”⁷

Circling around these encounters was Cody, who often excoriated cowboys and other performers for misbehaving or for what he perceived as uninspired performance. The showman’s temper was hot, although his language was almost always folksy and clean. “Dog-gone your pictures, cowboy, if you expect to be with this trick very long you better get the lead out of your britches! You move like a man seventy five years old!” ⁸

Aggravating relations between contingents was a pervasive sense that Cody favored the Indians. “Mr. Cody sometimes gets on a tantrum and rakes up the first person he meets whether they are to blame or not,” wrote C. L. Daily, a sharpshooter in the 1889 shows in Paris. “The reason he went for me was because in the act before some of the Indians did not do quite right and of course he couldn’t scold them as they couldn’t understand him.” Daily being “next at hand,” Cody “poured his wrath on me.”⁹

This perception that Indians benefited from favoritism was not restricted to cowboys. Indians were pleased to recount similar episodes, such as the day that Buffalo Bill stormed into the camp cookhouse and berated the staff for giving the Indians inferior food. “My Indians are the principal feature of this show, and they are the one people I will not allow to be misused or neglected,” Cody warned the cook. “After that we had no more trouble about our meals,” recalled Luther Standing Bear. ¹⁰

At first glance, the experiences of show performance might be said to approximate show community. In the arena, cowboys represented white men, people with the most political power. Indians were ostensibly noble, but as primitives they were doomed. That their pay was lower than cowboys’ was in keeping with the show’s overall racial hierarchy and ideology.

But insofar as certain conditions had to be met to retain Indian performers, Cody and his managers went out of their way to placate the least socially privileged people in the Wild West show. C. L. Daily was probably correct that Cody was reluctant to criticize his Indian performers publicly, but it was not merely because he did not speak Lakota. He dared not risk embarrassing them in front of the other performers, lest they complain to federal authorities or, even more perilous to him, refuse to return. Without the vanishing primitives, the spectacle of progress lost all meaning.

Professional pride (and fear of Cody’s wrath) motivated performers to excel in the arena, and each contingent’s efforts to polish its own appearance at the expense of others also enhanced racial tensions. Cowboys sometimes exploited their position as the most autonomous performers to secure special benefits. Thus, Luther Standing Bear recalled that the chief of the show cowboys “had general supervision over both horses and men,” giving him more authority than any other contingent chief in the show. In the 1903–4 season, “when an unbroken horse would be brought in, this cowboy chief would give it to an Indian to ride bareback.” Once the animal was “broken,” the horse “would be taken away from the Indian and given to a cowboy to ride.” After enduring this for some weeks, “it began to be just a little too much to stand.” When an Indian performer finally refused to ride the unbroken horse assigned to him, Standing Bear confronted the cowboy chief, who tried to dismiss him by suggesting, “You will have to see Buffalo Bill about the horses.”

Standing Bear retorted, “You know very well that Buffalo Bill does not know what you do with the horses,” and warned that the Indian performer in question would not ride unless his old horse was given back to him. “That was all,” Standing Bear remembered, “but the boy got his horse back in time to enter the arena with the others.” ¹¹

Such accounts suggest that racial tension backstage was as important as it was in the show’s version of history, where race was the means of knowing whether a performer stood for savagery or civilization. Since the show’s earliest days, publicists had drawn a blood line of demarcation between the cowboy, “usually American,” and the vaquero, who “represents in his blood the stock of the Mexican, or it may be of the half-breed.” Even from the cheapest seats, audiences could distinguish between these frontier rivals. In contrast to cowboys, who wore angora chaps and six-guns, Mexicans wore sombreros with huge crowns, satin jackets, and pants. As show programs explained, the degenerate vaquero was “more of a dandy” than the cowboy, so “fond of gaudy clothes” and gigantic spurs that upon seeing him ride into a frontier town “the first thought of an eastern man, is that a circus has broken loose in the neighborhood.” ¹²

But for all these distinctions, the show’s racial boundaries were not as impermeable as they looked. For one thing, cowboys were not always white. Oklahoma produced large numbers of mixed-blood cowboys, and some of these joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West as white men. Thus Tom Isbell, a veteran of the Cuban campaign’s Rough Rider regiment whom Theodore Roosevelt described as a “half-breed Cherokee,” joined the show in 1899 to reenact the attack on San Juan Hill, and returned to perform as a cowboy during the 1903 tour of Europe.¹³ Jim Cook, a cowboy in the 1888 show, was also alleged to be of mixed parentage.¹⁴

We might call these men “secret mixed-bloods,” because they passed as white. But other performers straddled several different racial lines, or frontiers, at the same time, and in ways the audience could not help but notice. In 1896, the contingent of American cowboys included Pedro Esquivel. Even if audiences did not know that he had been a “Mexican vaquero” in earlier seasons, they could not have avoided noticing his name, which would have labeled him Mexican anywhere in the West. Such blurring of racial lines often occurred, with show performers crossing first one racial divide, then another, to appear in various contingents in a single season, or even in a single show.

Gauchos were supposedly even more decadent than Mexicans, and the new gaucho contingent recruited in 1892 further emphasized the racial subversions of frontier life. “The civilization that the Spanish colonists took with them to the Llanos gradually became subdued by the savagery of the new situation,” until their gauchos, with their “fiery” Spanish temperament aggravated by an “infusion of native Indian blood,” were acknowledged to be even more degenerate than other show riders, a fact reflected in their gear. A gaucho in need of footwear simply slaughtered a young horse, stripped its leg from the knee down, then sewed up the end and put his own foot inside, shaping it “to the leg and foot while still warm” to form “a leather stocking without heel or toe.” These men literally wore the legs of their horses, as if they had become hybrid horse-men, their mixed race underscored by mixed species.¹⁵

But all this racial degeneracy was an act. Sometime vaquero and American cowboy Pedro Esquivel was also chief of the show’s gaucho contingent in 1896. One of his fellow gaucho performers that year was Ben Galindo, whose name also appears on the list of cowboys. Thus, racial degeneracy and whiteness were performed, or embodied, by the same men, on the same afternoon.

In fact, although genuine gauchos joined the show in 1893, none of them remained by 1896, and the projection of the gaucho “race” required the imposture of skilled imitators. Fortunately for Buffalo Bill, he had the Esquivels. Brothers Joe and Tony Esquivel were cowboys from San Antonio. They met Cody in the early 1880s when they arrived in North Platte with a herd of cattle from Texas, and either or both of them could be found in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West for decades thereafter.¹⁶

Pedro Esquivel may have been a cousin, or no relation at all, to Joe and Tony. But whatever his origins, in 1896, both he and Ben Galindo, the cowboy-gaucho-Mexicans, were joined among the gauchos by Joe Esquivel. Similarly, Tony Esquivel was billed as the “champion Rough Rider of Mexico” in London during the 1887 season, although he often rode with the cowboys.¹⁷ By 1898, Joe Esquivel had represented everything from savage, miscegenated gaucho in 1896 to chief of white cowboys, a status he achieved again in 1902, 1903, and 1905.¹⁸

There were real Mexican nationals in the show, about whom very little information survives. The vaquero contingent included Vincente Oropeza, a legendary roper whose performance inspired the young Will Rogers. Oropeza worked bullfights in Mexico when he was not with the Wild West show, and we may assume that other Mexicans also worked internationally, appearing in bullfights or other entertainments in Mexico, and in Wild West shows and circuses north of the border at different times of year.¹⁹

Cody left no clues to his reasons for simultaneously casting the Esquivels as Mexicans, white cowboys, and gauchos, but we can guess that their facility with animals and men was a factor. They could perform the rope tricks and horseback feats required of both cowboys and vaqueros, and if Joe Esquivel played a gaucho in the arena, then he likely learned their signature skill of throwing the bola, a leather thong with iron balls at each end, from the genuine gauchos who were with the show in 1893.

But at least as important as the Esquivels’ arena talent must have been their powers of persuasion over people, especially the show’s cowboys. Cy Compton, Ed Richards, and other cowboys included renowned rodeo performers and horse breakers. Generally, the contingent was hardworking and well behaved. But like cowboys on the Plains, they gambled and drank in the off-hours. As Harry Webb suggests, fists were as legitimate a means of resolving disputes as practical jokes—and almost as entertaining.

As we have seen, the show’s viability as a respectable family entertainment required sublimation of cowboy aggression. In this connection, motivating cowboys and keeping them in line required formidable diplomatic and managerial talents. Clues suggest the Esquivel brothers had these in abundance. Recall that Pedro Esquivel was fluent enough in French to correspond with the Marquis Folco de Baroncelli. Tony Esquivel’s daughter recalled that her father grew up speaking Spanish, English, and Polish (having learned the last language from his mother, a Polish immigrant to Texas). After several years in the Wild West show, he had mastered Lakota, perhaps the better to defuse the tensions that sometimes arose between show Indians and cowboys.²⁰ Tony Esquivel commanded respect simply through his horsemanship. “The best rider in the show got thrown yesterday,” wrote cowboy George Johnson from London in 1892. “He is a Mexican and he has been with the Show for eight years.”²¹ Recalling his confrontation with the show’s chief of cowboys, Luther Standing Bear credited Cody with intervening on behalf of the young Indian who had been given one of the cowboys’ sour mounts. But smoothing over such disputes was part of the cowboy chief’s job. That year the cowboy chief was Joe Esquivel, who may have acted without Cody’s direction.²²

Similarly, cowboys and Indians played antagonists, but behind the scenes relations were more complex because at least some of the white cowboys had Sioux families. By the early 1880s, William “Bronco Bill” Irving, a white cowboy, had earned a reputation as a top hand and a superb bronc rider in South Dakota’s Black Hills. He also spoke fluent Lakota, a considerable asset in his marriage to Ella Bissonett, a Lakota woman. He joined the Wild West show at its beginning, and remained with Cody and Salsbury for many years. Cabinet photos of the Irving family, with Ella in traditional Lakota finery, her husband in cowboy hat, chaps, and moccasins, and their fiveyear-old son, Bennie, wearing a similar Indian-cowboy costume, were popular in London and elsewhere.²³

Similarly, William “Billy” Bullock joined the show’s cowboys in 1883. His father, William G. Bullock, had been a merchant in the Lakota country since the early 1860s, when he took a Lakota wife. His marriage cemented a political alliance with the Oglalas, whose leaders, particularly Red Cloud, regarded him as a trusted ally and a go-between in negotiations with the U.S. government. By the late 1870s, William G. Bullock was ranching in the Black Hills. Billy, his mixed-blood son, became a skilled roper and bronc rider, and hired on as a Wild West show cowboy for the first five years of the show.²⁴

In 1883, Irving and Bullock traveled together from Pine Ridge to Colville, Nebraska, for the show’s first dress rehearsal, the occasion of Pap Clothier’s ordeal. On that journey, they were accompanied by John Y. Nelson, the white man whose marriage into Red Cloud’s family had been an asset to Cody ever since 1877, when Nelson traveled with Cody’s stage troupe as a translator for Sword and Two Bears. In the Wild West show, Nelson sometimes drove the Deadwood stage. On other occasions, he was the hunter who was just returning to the settler’s cabin as it was attacked. On still other occasions, he appeared as a cowboy. But always, his skills as an interpreter, and as a venerated senior member of a Lakota family who was also a white man, made him an essential go-between for Cody and his Indian performers.²⁵

Cody shifted from Pawnees to Lakotas in 1886, and the move was eased by the show’s prior acquisition of Irving, Bullock, and Nelson, three show cowboys who were fluent in Lakota, and married to or descended from Lakota women. Irving and Bullock in particular were widely noticed for their cowboy skills, while Irving’s son Bennie often could be found among the Indian contingent. In cabinet photographs, he wears beaded moccasins and a cowboy hat, and is billed as “The Smallest Cowboy in the World.”²⁶ According to legend, in 1885 John Y. Nelson’s children—who venerated Red Cloud as an ancestor—appeared in the “Attack on the Settler’s Cabin,” as white children facing imminent abduction by Indians.²⁷

To understand how the show community cohered, then, we must see its peoples as possessing not only cultural differences but also conjoined histories which had long required at least some of them to innovate in living arrangements and to mediate deep differences. Mixed-blood familial relations were no interracial utopia. John Y. Nelson claimed that whenever his wife’s people went to war against the American army, he left his tipi to scout for the troops, while his wife, and presumably his children, stayed with the Sioux.²⁸

During the late 1870s, a Sioux horse raid swept up a number of horses from William G. Bullock’s ranch in the Black Hills. His partner, Jim Hunton, took Billy Bullock and other cowboys to retrieve the horses. They succeeded, but during a gunfight with the Sioux raiders, Hunton was killed. “Some of the Indians we have in this show were in that horse-stealing expedition,” Billy Bullock explained to a London correspondent in 1887. The chief of the show’s Indians in 1887 was Red Shirt, “and I won’t swear that Mr. Red Shirt didn’t have a hand in it,” remarked the cowboy. “They are all very close, however, as to which of them shot Jim.”

But Billy Bullock did not carry grudges. He might have warred against some of the Indian contingent in the past, but some of them were kin. “Mr. Red Shirt is my uncle,” he explained, perhaps with some exaggeration (or perhaps not). “He is a very good sort of fellow. . . . He and I are very excellent friends. You see I speak his language, and whenever he wants anything fixed up he usually comes to me. I also do his correspondence, especially the private part of it.”²⁹ So, too, with “Bronco Bill” Irving. Rocky Bear, head of the show’s Indian contingent in the late 1880s and at various times in the 1890s, was Bronco Bill’s father-in-law. (The close ties between them may have aggravated complaints about Rocky Bear and Irving among those Indians on whose behalf O’Beirne complained in 1890.) ³⁰

How do we reconcile the show’s displays of mixed-blood men and their Indian families with its message of white racial triumph? Cody’s publicists struggled with this very question, and they came up with some powerful answers. One strategy was to raise the class status of mixed-blood men. John Y. Nelson became one of “the most honored and reliable” men who “by general honesty of character and energy, has gained fame and respect among whites and Indians.” Billy Bullock was identified in show programs as “a half-breed Sioux, and a good combination of the best blood of that justly-famed fighting nation, allied, through Indian rites and ceremonies, with the blue blood of the East.”³¹ Elevating the class status of Nelson, and of Bullock’s white ancestors, made their interracial unions seem less socially subversive, because upper-class status made them remote from the middle-class audiences who flocked to the show.

In other ways, mixed-blood families were less frightening than we might suppose, not unlike Annie Oakley’s display of feminine sharpshooting. In this sense, the families of Nelson and Irving were more like freaks in the circus, their weirdness underscoring the “normality” of whiteness among the cowboy contingent. They were miscegenated exceptions that proved the rule of white racial purity. For the most part, cowboys looked white. Indians were convincingly “Indian.” The presence of a few mixed-blood families suggested the possibility of race mixing, and the temptation of interracial sex. But in doing so, it simultaneously underscored the virtues of the majority of white cowboys, and of Cody himself—and, by extension, of American white men—in resisting frontier temptations, especially Indian and Mexican women.

But for us, performers’ transgression of the show’s race lines suggests the illusory nature of race itself. Show publicity notwithstanding, skills like bronco busting and rope throwing were not biologically transmitted. They were cultural attributes which were learned and practiced. Just as the first U.S. cowboys acquired their skills because they were willing to mimic Mexican vaqueros, Cody’s Wild West show could not have existed without the crossing of racial boundaries that gave rise to cowboys who spoke Spanish, French, and Lakota.

Racial identities are cultural artifacts which masquerade as “natural” categories. In this sense, they are an ongoing deception which the public practices every day. The ability of some people to “pass,” to deceive the public into believing they are of one race when their ancestry supposedly consigns them to another, subverted the supposedly “natural” boundaries that defined America’s racial hierarchies. The slipperiness of racial characteristics in this regard, and the confusion that ensued as Americans tried to sort individuals into ever more complicated “racial” groups on the basis of supposedly self-evident features—skin color, head shape, nose size, and so forth—combined with their centrality to social order, made them a fit subject for popular amusement. They were at the heart of artful deceptions like Barnum’s What Is It? and the minstrel show, in which white performers so convincingly donned blackface and assumed “Negro” song and dance traditions that many audiences ceased to see them as white men. Conversely, when African Americans began performing minstrel shows after the Civil War, they were often suspected of being white men in disguise. ³²

The Wild West show, and its Congress of Rough Riders, was a kind of reverse minstrel show, with its nonwhite members occasionally masquerading as white men to better persuade a largely white audience of their own superiority. Buffalo Bill cast racially Mexican wranglers and mixed-blood men as cowboys, appropriating their skills as white. Sustaining a narrative of white racial destiny paradoxically required racially subversive casting of nonwhite performers in white roles.

AS STANDING BEAR and Louise Rieneck have shown us, Wild Westerners crossed racial frontiers not only semisecretly within the show but also in day-to-day life. Newspapers had a field day when a Pawnee man they called “Push-a-Luck” eloped with a white woman from Newark in 1886, and reports of other Indians in romantic relations with whites occupied press columns, too.³³ John Shangrau, Lakota interpreter for the show and a mixed-blood of French and Sioux ancestry, married a Liverpool woman in 1892.³⁴ During the Wild West show’s second tour of Europe, Nate Salsbury hired a governess for his children, an Englishwoman named Clara Richards. In 1893, she married Tony Esquivel—he who embodied “the stock of the Mexican or the half-breed.” They had five daughters before his death in 1914. ³⁵ Collectively, the cast of the Wild West show was like one of the era’s popular magicians, their racial imposture a giant sleight of hand; with one hand they encouraged audiences to believe in immutable barriers and interminable competition between races as historical fact while with the other, in private, they befuddled, contradicted, and dissolved those same racial lines.

Indeed, Indian men were practically overwhelmed with offers of white women’s companionship. Billy Bullock translated Red Shirt’s correspondence in London. “You would be surprised at the number of letters he receives, and from ladies, too. I guess your English ladies are original,” said the bemused Bullock to a reporter.³⁶ Jacob White Eyes, who toured with the Wild West show through southern France in 1905–6, carried on a relationship with a Frenchwoman.³⁷ After he returned to Pine Ridge, White Eyes fondly recalled the comparative sexual openness of Europe. “I would like to have some Bull-fight postal card and some Ladies photograph without clothing,” he wrote to Marquis Folco de Baroncelli. “[I]t is pretty scarce in America.”³⁸

For all the transgression of racial frontiers by the Wild West cast, and for all the shifting back and forth between white, Mexican, and gaucho identities in the show, Indians were one touchstone of authenticity which remained constant in the arena. Buffalo Bill’s theatrical melodramas had presented dozens of non-Indian “supers” as Indians, and competing circuses and Wild West shows passed off peoples of all races as Indians at one time or another. But non-Indian performers were not allowed to pose as Indians in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Just as Cody did not allow others to pass themselves off as him (although many claimed he did), he protected the authenticity of the show’s Indians, recognizing them and himself as essential to the umbrella of authenticity which allowed the show’s larger fictions to remain credible.³⁹

But even if all the show’s Indians were “genuine Indians,” the many questions circulating about what constituted Indian identity enabled its Indian contingent, and the show’s impresarios, to play vigorously with Indian authenticity. Show programs portrayed them as—and audiences believed them to be—members of separate tribes: Arapaho, Cheyenne, Pawnee, Shoshone, Crow, and Sioux. The reality was far simpler. After early experiments with Pawnees and Wichitas, Cody turned almost exclusively to Oglalas. Thus, each of the show’s “tribes” was a group of Lakotas, mostly Oglalas, mounted on horses of a distinct color.⁴⁰

We may speculate that Indians used the show for their own ruses, jokes, and impostures. The numerous “chiefs” who appeared with the show were rarely real chiefs, and playing to audience desires for an encounter with the primitive, noble savage must have been as humorous and sometimes perhaps even as rewarding as it could be tiresome.

But in becoming a forum for the creation of Indian identities, the show not only intensified emphasis on certain cultural attributes such as tipis, warbonnets, war-painted horses, and specific dances, but also facilitated acquisition of new skills which became an essential part of modern Indian practice.

In this sense, the ethnic and racial deceptions of the Wild West show were more than an amusement. Although cowboys, Cossacks, Mexicans, and German cuirassiers were not allowed to pass over the race line and assume Indian identities in the performance, Indian performers were allowed and even encouraged to travel in the opposite direction. Luther Standing Bear recalled that his fine regalia took a beating from London fog and soot in 1903. Finally, Johnny Baker, by this time arena director for the show, told him that he should save his best gear for the days when attendance was high, and that on other days “I might take the part of a cowboy if I chose.” “This was a change for me,” recalled Standing Bear, “and I enjoyed it very much.”⁴¹

To judge from extant photographs of the “backstage” showgrounds, Indians frequently put on cowboy gear, particularly hats and the long-haired angora chaps which Buffalo Bill’s Wild West made synonymous with “cowboy” prior to 1900. Some were accustomed to these trappings before they joined the show. The advent of the livestock industry on the northern Great Plains led reservation Indians to acquire cattle, and the Oglala and Brulé Lakota owned thousands of animals beginning in the early 1880s. In tending those herds, they enthusiastically borrowed and syncretized cowboy equipment and techniques from Americans the same way Americans had appropriated them from Mexicans. In the last years of the decade, Lakota artist Amos Bad Heart Bull sketched scenes of Indian cowboys at Indian roundups, working in boots, spurs, hats, and even dusters, tending herds that numbered 10,000 in 1885 and 40,000 in 1902.⁴²

Outside of the Wild West show, Indians’ development of an indigenous cowboyhood met with resistance from the same Indian Service officials who championed allotment and railed against Wild West shows. In the popular ideology of progress, after all, cattle herding was a successor to hunting, but it was only a precursor to farming, the foundation on which civilization rested. Thus, one official in Montana warned, “herding leads to a nomadic life,” and “a nomadic life tends to barbarism.”⁴³

Nevertheless, Sioux cowboys and cattle owners helped generate an Indian cattle industry which lasted almost two generations. Many of the Indians who moved into the show arena after 1900 were experienced cowhands. Indian cowboys worked for ranches off the reservation, too, and many of them moved into rodeo. By 1920, Lakotas such as George Defender and David Blue Thunder were taking first place in competitions against white cowboys, and performing feats of horsemanship from Miles City to Madison Square Garden. As rodeo itself developed partly from Wild West show precedent, so, too, did its parallel, Indian rodeo. At the Rosebud Reservation (formerly the Spotted Tail Agency), home to most of the nation’s Brulé Sioux, the earliest Indian rodeos closely resembled Wild West shows; a six-day affair in 1897 included races, bronco riding, steer riding, and a reenactment of Custer’s Last Stand, “Mixed Bloods Against Full Bloods.” ⁴⁴

Thus, Indians appropriated the racial symbolism of the Wild West show for their own purposes, and—in ways that remind us again of Vine Deloria, Jr.’s contention about the show as educational space for Indians—Buffalo Bill provided a kind of undercover arena in which Indians could acquire and demonstrate cowboy skills, even “out-cowboying” the show’s cowboys by dressing in cowboy clothes and performing their stunts as well as they did.

At Pine Ridge, the reservation livestock industry finally fell victim to government hostility, the leasing of Indian lands to non-Indian cattlemen, and allotment, which broke up many of the finest range lands. Lakota cattlemen sold their last large herd in 1917.⁴⁵ As a major employer at Pine Ridge from 1886 until 1916, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show overlapped almost perfectly with the reservation’s cattle industry. Until its very end, cattle raising seemed one of the best hopes for a prosperous Lakota future. The Wild West show offered a means of integrating cowboy culture and Lakota culture.

Back at the reservation, show wages paid for cattle and horses, as well as wagons, farm tools, and other necessities. As early as 1892, agents at Pine Ridge were complaining about small amounts of money from Buffalo Bill’s Indians—$5 and $10 sums in greenbacks—which arrived at the Indian office with letters “in Indian” informing the agency which friends or relatives should receive the money, and in what denominations. Fast Thunder, one of the Wild West show’s Indian contingent, was said to have acquired four thousand cattle by 1896, and a comfortable cabin with “splendid” farm fields.⁴⁶ Less wealthy Indians in the show routinely sent money home, too.⁴⁷

Indians in the show augmented their wages by selling Indian crafts, especially “ ‘bead work’ made into moccasins, purses, etc.,” for which they received “very large prices,” according to Nate Salsbury. There was a market for Indian crafts on the reservation, but it appears to have flourished in the Indian camp at the Wild West show, because of the connections Indians built with non-Indian suppliers and customers. Cody and Salsbury bought materials such as brass beads at wholesale prices, and sold them at cost to show Indians, who made them into souvenirs for sale to tourists and kept the profits for themselves.⁴⁸

Men profited handsomely from this trade.⁴⁹ But beadwork and moccasin manufacture were traditionally women’s occupations, and it appears that Indian women in the show exploited the market for Sioux crafts assiduously. This might explain why Calls the Name, the sister of No Neck (chief of the show contingent in the 1891–92 season), had $260 in cash and goods during that year, after receiving only $112 in salary from Cody and Salsbury. ⁵⁰

If Calls the Name’s experience is any guide, Indians manufactured and sold Indian crafts to museums and collectors across Europe. Calls the Name sold some of her goods to the show’s translator, George Crager, and perhaps used him as an intermediary with outside purchasers. Early in 1892, Crager approached the Kelvin Grove Museum in Glasgow about selling his “collection of Indian Relics.” Among the goods he sold were a pair of buckskin leggings embroidered with beads, which he claimed had been worn by Calls the Name in 1876, the year of the Little Big Horn fight. In reality, they were probably of recent vintage. Some of the other materials Crager peddled, including a pair of moccasins embroidered with brass beads and a shield that is of minimal craftsmanship, are on display today in the Kelvin Grove Museum, and they appear to have been products of the show’s Indian craft industry. ⁵¹

In all likelihood, Indians commissioned Crager as their sales agent, to sell the goods to the museum and return at least some of the cash to their Indian manufacturers. But Crager was a publicity hound. (He finagled his way into the show by translating for the show’s detractors, including James O’Beirne, in the controversy that engulfed the show in 1890.) When he discovered that his name would not be preserved as a museum “donor” unless he gave at least some of the goods away, he quickly did so.

Wild West Indians/cowboys, 1909. Indians sometimes disguised themselves as white cowboys in the show, allowing white spectatorsto claim Indian riding skills as a white racial characteristic, and giving Indian performers a chance to display cowboy techniquesthey used to tend growing cattle herds at home. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.

Such maneuvering likely helped Crager earn a poor reputation among the Lakota. In late December 1892, Charging Thunder, a Lakota man in the show’s Indian contingent, clubbed George Crager over the head backstage, knocking the translator out cold. Charging Thunder apologized, blaming the fight on whiskey which some publican allegedly slipped into the lemonade he ordered. But given the variety of goods Crager hawked to the museum, and his dubious reputation, it appears likely that tensions over Crager’s sale of goods contributed to Charging Thunder’s ire. In any case, Charging Thunder spent thirty days in a Scottish jail as a result.⁵² Crager left the show after one season, and returned to Pine Ridge, where he joined the staff of the Indian agency.⁵³

AT THE END of each show season, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West provided a letter of recommendation for every performer. Cowboys who learned performance arts in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show frequently went into western films, other Wild West shows, and rodeo. As we have seen, here was always a wide streak of performance art in cowboys, who strove to approximate their romantic fictional counterparts even in the days of the Long Drive from Texas to Kansas. But over time cowboy skills became so oriented to entertainment that by the Wild West show’s final years, around World War I, at least some riders came to Cody’s show having learned their skills not on the range but in circuses and other entertainments. Those who wanted to remain cowboys found that the best living was to be had in performing the identity for somebody else, rather than living it on the range.

Meanwhile, show wages grew in importance for Indians, who had less room than cowboys to maneuver into other occupations. For a brief time after the disaster at Wounded Knee, the army ensured the Lakota their full rations, but discounting and punitive withholding soon began anew. By 1900, rations were only about 70 percent of their stipulated treaty levels, amounting to one pound of beef and 5.75 ounces of flour per person, per day. In 1902, the government announced a plan to eliminate rations for all “able-bodied men,” the better to force them to work for $1.25 per day, usually at hard manual labor, such as fence building, road grading, or dam construction. ⁵⁴ By the end of the summer, wrote Luther Standing Bear, “The Indians were all heavily in debt to the storekeeper.”⁵⁵

These conditions drove Luther Standing Bear to join the Wild West show that very year. Others who joined the show in this period were similarly motivated, and some of them used the show to advance their ongoing political battle with the Office of Indian Affairs. In 1908, three Lakota men with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West—Bad Cob, Edward Brown, and William Brown—took time between shows in New York for an angry meeting with the commissioner of Indian affairs. Bad Cob complained that the agency interpreter, a Lakota, was holding two salaried jobs which could better be given to two different men. The Browns were particularly confrontational, and their grievances reflected the frustration of educated Lakota men. William Brown was a graduate of Carlisle, and Edward, too, was a school graduate. Edward “said that he is anxious for any kind of job whereby he can earn a living, and that he believes that there are enough returned students on the Pine Ridge Reservation to do a good deal of the work which is now done for the Government by white persons, and wanted to know why the returned students are not given this chance to get ahead.” William Brown pointed out that even the lowest-paid work was unavailable to him. Why couldn’t he get road work on the reservation? Why couldn’t he be an assistant farmer? The Browns and Bad Cob, reported the commissioner, “were very insistent on these matters.” ⁵⁶

Such complaints were not new, but Indian office functionaries customarily read them in letters or heard them from third parties, not from the Indians themselves, and certainly not in New York, hundreds of miles from Pine Ridge. However startling it was for the commissioner of Indian affairs in 1908, Indian use of the show as a means to confront policymakers was not new. Show performers’ geographic and social mobility had been influencing Sioux politics for a generation. In 1885, Sitting Bull had used his tenure with the Wild West show to cultivate relationships with whites he would not meet otherwise. In 1887, Lakota performers discoursed late into the night on the significance of their meeting with Queen Victoria. After this all-night discussion, “every one of his young men resolved that she should be their great white mother.”

The sentimentalism of press accounts obscures the significance of such meetings. Throughout the eighteenth and for most of the nineteenth century, Lakota leaders cultivated alliances with European monarchs in hopes of restraining or influencing American policy. In the aftermath of the Plains Indian wars, the development of a new peacetime strategy for building relationships with foreign leaders—a kind of Sioux foreign policy—was now under way. As recently as 1881, Sitting Bull and his followers had been living in Canada, where they fled after the battle of the Little Big Horn to secure the protection of “the Grandmother Country” and of Queen Victoria from the vengeful Americans.⁵⁷ Red Cloud requested that Nate Salsbury bring him an English flag in 1887, and Black Elk recalled that the queen bowed to them that year. In a sense, Red Shirt and his successors in the show were trying to open diplomatic channels.⁵⁸

For William Brown, the chance to meet officials face-to-face no doubt had a special resonance. The new century was not kind to the Lakota, and as their complaints in 1908 suggested, it was especially frustrating for those who were educated. They had completed compulsory education at government boarding schools. Their skills and training should have qualified them for clerkship or even managerial positions. But they usually met with the same racial prejudice which stymied the ambitions of black, immigrant, and other nonwhite men and women: white employers would not hire them except in the most menial jobs.

Meanwhile, government agents tried to compel self-sufficiency. In 1902, Brown was dropped from ration rolls after authorities decided he was capable of fending for himself. When he tried to acquire work on road-building crews, he was turned away, because government-funded labor was reserved for those “unable to exist without assistance.” In the eyes of officials, Brown’s herd of three or four dozen cattle and his ownership of an allotment disqualified him.⁵⁹

Reductions in agency rations compelled families, including William Brown’s, to combine scarce wages with the few traditional resources remaining, including wild foods. The challenges of gathering were greater than ever, because many of the best root and berry grounds were now beyond the bounds of the reservation. In October and November many Indians ventured off the reservation to unclaimed public lands where they hunted deer and small game and gathered chokecherries, other fruit, roots, and herbs to stock their larders for the winter. In the fall of 1903, Brown led his wife, children, and two other families into the Black Hills in northeast Wyoming. It was late summer, and the weather was good. The agent had given them a pass to be off the reservation. Berries were plentiful. The party traded moccasins to local ranchers for mutton. By all accounts, their tour of the backcountry was peaceful.

Like white men traveling in turn-of-the-century (or present-day) Wyoming, some of Brown’s party had guns. But they hunted no large game. On their return, Brown’s group joined up with Charlie Smith, also known as Runs-to-It, another Carlisle-educated Lakota who was on a similar expedition with his own extended family. The two groups joined for the trip back to the reservation. Together, they made up a train of fifteen wagons, full of Indian men, women, and children, making their way deliberately back to Pine Ridge.

On the evening of October 30, Sheriff Bill Miller, of Newcastle, Wyoming, arrived at the Indians’ campsite with a posse. After Brown’s wife fed them dinner, the posse attempted to arrest the Indians for hunting deer without licenses. Smith refused to submit to arrest, contesting the right of a sheriff from neighboring Weston County to make an arrest in Converse County, where the meeting took place. Brown struck a more diplomatic pose. At first, he offered to accompany the sheriff to Newcastle. But, as the other Indians were intent on leaving with Smith, he decided to remain with them. The lawmen left without making any arrests.

The Indians hastened to the reservation. They traveled all night, covering fifty miles in the next twelve hours. Sheriff Miller, meanwhile, deputized more locals. With his reinforced posse, he lay in wait for the Indians where the road crossed Lightning Creek. Consisting of mostly “cow-boys and bar-tenders,” the posse was, in the words of the official who investigated what happened next, “no Sunday-school class.”⁶⁰

Afterward, surviving members of the posse claimed that they had ordered the Indian wagon train to halt, and the Indians had opened fire. Surviving Lakota said they never saw the lawmen until they stood up from hiding and began shooting, without so much as announcing who they were. The Indians turned their wagons and tried to escape, but almost immediately twelve-year-old Peter White Elk was killed when a bullet took the top of his head off. Charlie Smith, who flew to the boy’s aid, was soon mortally wounded. Loudly singing his death song, he kept up a vigorous return fire, accompanied by William Brown and several other men, who took up positions around him. The shooting lasted only a few minutes. The posse killed four Indians that day, including Charlie Smith and his wife. Two white men, including Sheriff Miller, also lay dead.

Outside their hometown of Newcastle, the sheriff and his posse were roundly condemned. The event was a regional scandal. But none of the surviving white men was ever tried or punished.

Surviving Indians, on the other hand, were tried for murder, and their acquittal came about because, as one local white man put it, “the worst of the party are dead.”⁶¹ A series of hearings, trials, and investigations of Indian behavior followed. The homicidal white hostility toward poor people on a berry-picking expedition grieved and rankled the Lakotas. “We think the sheriff and his posse are guilty of murder,” explained Oglala council members George Sword and Jack Red Cloud in an open letter to the public, “but because they are white men we believe they will not be tried.” If any Indian had done such a thing, on the other hand, “he would undoubtedly get the full extent of the law.” Back at Pine Ridge, Lakotas preserved Charlie Smith’s death song. Across the reservation, in painting, song, and story, they memorialized the savage white attack on a peaceful wagon train of Indian families.⁶²

Brown’s participation in the Wild West show was motivated by many of the same desires and responsibilities that took him on gathering expeditions into the Black Hills: the need for food and medicine, the chance to sell crafts, the freedom of travel, the requirements of his family. Five years later, authorities still regarded William Brown with suspicion, because of Sheriff Miller’s attempt on his life. They dismissed his 1908 appearance in the Office of Indian Affairs as the agitations of one “chroni[c] fault-finder and trouble breeded,” who was, after all, “in that unfortunate row in Wyoming between the state officers and a party of Pine Ridge Indians.”⁶³ Combined with his show business career, this history gave Brown a dire reputation, indeed.

The many ironies of his predicament suggest the complexity of Wild West show performance for Indians in general at the turn of the twentieth century. William Brown was a man of skill and economic savvy, as the size of his cattle herd suggested. In 1889, not long after he returned from Carlisle, he was married and had a daughter, and the Indian agent described him as “a good young man.” Yet he had almost no prospects for employment despite having followed the “the white man’s road” to Carlisle and beyond.⁶⁴ Like many others, his growing frustration with the lack of opportunities for educated Indians made him more contentious in the years after his return from Carlisle. As Brown was all too aware, depictions of Indian savagery in the Wild West show informed the continuing prejudices of white Americans against Indians. In 1903, Wild West show audiences watched Indians leave their tipis and raid the settler’s cabin, and it was possible to believe that they had not changed in the many years since the Plains Indian wars.

And yet Brown’s opportunities for countering the brutality of bigots who attacked an Indian wagon train extended to performance of this “historical” reenactment in which Indians attacked a white wagon train. From that curious platform, he retained a limited mobility, earned a livelihood, and even challenged Indian office bureaucrats and their racist policies. By being in the Wild West show and conforming to an old stereotype of Indian savagery, he became in some small way a partisan of Lakota progress.

Brown and other Lakota saw how education, the ability to read and write and argue the law, and mobility beyond the reservation allowed them at least to demand justice (without necessarily getting it) in the most egregious insults like the killings at Lightning Creek. These tools helped in the fight against the downward revision of rations and against the continuing racism of Great Plains society. In this sense, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was not just an economic portal, or a vessel for cultural and racial mixing; it was an arena for pushing the limits of Indianness itself.

This may indeed be its greatest contribution, and Buffalo Bill’s most enduring legacy. In the grand scheme of progress, Indians were to disappear into history, followed shortly after by the cowboys who succeeded them, who would in turn vanish before farmers and commerce. The Wild West show drew vast crowds on the strength of its principals as vanishing attractions.

But paradoxically, the performance wonders in the Wild West show made audiences and performers alike wonder if they would ever vanish, or even if they should. In 1890, cowboy Warren G. Vincent, from Wyoming, wrote to his father from the show camp in Rome. He had been unable to see his father before he left the United States, and he wanted the older man to know why his son, a hardworking cowboy who loved the range, had done something so odd as to join a traveling show. The first time he saw the show, explained Vincent, he was drawn to its realistic combat, the high drama of horsemen unhorsed, then rising to fight again. “It was the best thing I ever saw in my life to see horses, men, and Indians falling.”

But it was the show’s suggestion of a potential for change and transformation that captivated Vincent. In the Wild West show’s potent mythology, the frontier turned men into horse-men, and lowly country folk like Cody himself into rich showmen. It was a heady vision for a young cowboy, who scraped, scrambled, hustled, and prayed to get enough money for horses, cattle, and some land of his own. And although he had no obvious love for Indians, he well understood how much they sought a new West through this show of the Old West. His reasons for joining the show were in this sense the same as theirs. “I cannot explain the diferant acts,” he told his father, “but if you could see this show it would make you think that cowboys and indians amounted to something.”⁶⁵