The Colonel and Little Missie Page 16

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  THE tour of Europe which Cody and Salsbury plunged into in 1889 was as ambitious as any season they would ever mount. In Paris, where they had a seven-month run, the importance of having Annie Oakley in the troupe was quickly demonstrated. The first show came very close to being a flop, the French remaining true to their reputation of being hard to get. The crowd seemed glacially indifferent to Cody, cowboys, buffalos, broncos, Indians, ropers, and the thirty-six-piece band. It was clearly the wrong place to speak of the Drama of Civilization, since the French were civilization, at least in their eyes.

  At first they were wholly reluctant to clap for anything they were seeing.

  Sensing disaster, Salsbury rushed Annie into the arena and she immediately saved the day, riding and shooting so brilliantly that the crowd leapt to its feet and in the end called her back for six encores. Once the show got established the French quickly acquired a strong yen for Indian souvenirs: moccasins, baskets, and bows sold in great numbers.

  The Wild West eventually went on to Barcelona, Naples, Rome, Florence, Bologna, Milan, and Venice, where Indians in full warbonnets were photographed on the Grand Canal. They then played Vienna, took a little trip on the Danube, and went into winter quarters in Benfield. It was in Naples that Major Burke was briefly fired.

  For this second tour over the waters Cody and Salsbury took seventy-two Indians from Pine Ridge, five of whom died during the tour. Two men, Lone Wolf and Star, are buried in Brompton Cemetery, London.

  These deaths, which the Indians said were to be expected, were nonetheless noted by the authorities at home. In Berlin two U.S. consuls came and inspected conditions; both reported that they had never seen Indians looking so well-fed and so healthy.

  Still, there were complaints from America, both from within the government and out, a problem Cody and Salsbury took very seriously. If they were denied Indians the whole tour would be compromised. Salsbury stayed in Europe to keep things in good order, and Cody went home, taking some of the Indians with him.

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  BILL CODY’S oblique and frustrating near involvement with the Ghost Dance crisis on the Dakota reservations in December of 1890 is perhaps the oddest thing that happened to him during his long career, as first a fighter of, and then an employer of, Indians.

  For the now essentially captive Sioux, the decade of the 1880s had been one long disappointment. With the exceptions of Sitting Bull and Red Cloud their major leaders were dead. More and more white settlers poured into the northern plains, the result being that the Sioux had to watch their reservations being constantly whittled down. They were repeatedly asked to make do with less; the buffalo were gone, they were dependent on agency beef, they had no work and were in an increasingly dismal situation.

  Sitting Bull was at the Standing Rock reservation, living quietly and occasionally riding the show horse that Buffalo Bill had given him. The fine sombrero he kept mainly for ceremonial occasions.

  Sitting Bull, when possible, avoided conflict with Agent James McLaughlin, who administered the Pine Ridge agency. Throughout the reservation system complaints about the slow and puny food allotments were constant. The beeves that the Indians depended on were usually slow in arriving, and were usually too few in number.

  Indeed, the Pine Ridge and Standing Rock reservations were wretched places to be, as they still are. With the buffalo gone, an old and established life way was destroyed. The general wretchedness and drunkenness made it easy for Cody to get Indians to sign up for his shows. It was better than staying home and being depressed.

  Agent McLaughlin and other honest administrators knew that the Indians were miserable. They worried that somehow there might yet be an outbreak and they overreacted to the slightest sign of independence among the bands. Their response to the Ghost Dance was just such an overreaction. Though it must have been obvious that the Sioux lacked the arms and the leadership necessary to any sort of sustained revolt, the arrival of the Ghost Dance somehow tipped the balance. Worry became paranoia.

  Native American millenarianism was hardly a new thing—Native American prophets began to preach against the whites as early as the sixteenth century; they predicted that the whites would vanish, the dead return, and the world be restored to the condition it had been in before the whites arrived.

  Many prophets preached some version of a Return story, in which the Native American world would regain its old fullness. In the late nineteenth century these prophets mostly emerged from the desert places. In 1881 an Apache preacher named Noch-ay-del-klinne was killed, with a number of his followers, on Cibicue Creek, in Arizona. He too preached of the Return, a powerful idea that gave hope to an essentially powerless people.

  The prophet most associated with the flourishing of the Ghost Dance was a short fat Paiute named Wovoka, whose white name was Jack Wilson. He lived mostly with a white family in Nevada. When Indian leaders from far away—Kansas, Oklahoma—wanted to learn about the Ghost Dance they came to Jack Wilson for instruction. He left a few instructional texts—Messiah letters, these were called—about how to perform the dance and what to expect. There was no call to violence in the letters or in his preaching. The Ghost Dance was a long dance that brought the dancers to a state of spiritual purification. Jack Wilson goes out of his way to warn the dancers to leave the whites alone. The dancers were merely to dance for a long time, then bathe in the creek and stay with their families.

  Nonetheless, thanks to the long history of plains warfare, the white administrators were simply unable to take a calm view of sizable groups of Indians assembling for any purpose at all. The whole reservation system had been designed to separate tribe from tribe and lessen the risks that they associated with large assemblies.

  Agent McLaughlin was unhappy when the Ghost Dance arrived at Pine Ridge, but for a time at least, he tried to maintain perspective. In several dispatches he mentions that the Sioux were behaving well. Above all, he hoped to keep the army out; the army had a way of making things worse.

  McLaughlin’s relationship with Sitting Bull had been touchy, but so far not catastrophic. At one point he went to visit the old Hunkpapa to express his concern about the Ghost Dance, his fear being that the young warriors would get so stirred up by the dancing that they might go back to killing whites. Sitting Bull seems to have genuinely tried to mollify McLaughlin. It is just some people dancing, he said—it was nothing to be alarmed about. Then he made McLaughlin an unusual offer, so some authorities say. He himself didn’t put much stock in preachers or Messiahs, but if McLaughlin was so worried about this man Wovoka, perhaps the two of them ought to pay him a visit. If they found him and he was indeed a Messiah then they could determine what his disposition was. But if Wovoka failed to convince, then Sitting Bull could tell his people that the Ghost Dance was all hooey. It wasn’t going to bring the buffalo back, or cause a new earth to rise, or raise the dead, or drive the whites away.

  If this offer was made Agent McLaughlin would have done well to take it, but he didn’t. No doubt he feared to leave his agency at such a nervous time.

  Meanwhile, in New York, Buffalo Bill Cody, indignant about the charges that he had mistreated Indians, was prepared to go to Washington with a number of Indians to refute these charges. Of course, with several troupes in Europe, all of them employing Indians, some abuse may have occurred, but most of the complaints usually boiled down to seasickness. None of the Indians enjoyed crossing the great water.

  Before Cody could get his group on the train to Washington, he received a bolt from the blue, in the form of a succinct telegram from General Nelson A. Miles, whom he had known for some time. It read:

  Col. Cody,

  You are authorized to secure the person of Sitting Bull and . . . deliver him to the nearest com’g officer of US troops, taking a receipt and reporting your action.

  Nelson A. Miles

  On the back Miles had scribbled a note assuring Cody that the army would offer him all the assistance he needed.

  C
ody had just returned from a long stay in Europe. Whether he knew of the Ghost Dance excitement I’m not sure, but to receive an order from a major general asking him to proceed to the very heart of Sioux country and summarily arrest their leader in the midst of his people could only have come as a major shock.

  It was no less a shock to Agent McLaughlin, when he received a copy. For Cody or anybody else to ride into Standing Rock and arrest Sitting Bull would very likely mean bloodshed and probably provoke the revolt McLaughlin was trying so hard to prevent.

  Agent McLaughlin immediately got on the singing wires, telegraphing everyone he could think of to assure them that the situation was peaceful at Standing Rock. He insisted that there was no immediate threat—if it eventually seemed necessary to arrest Sitting Bull, then native policemen could probably handle the arrest without bloodshed.

  Buffalo Bill Cody McLaughlin distinctly did not need—but the man was already on the way. The military and the administrators had got their wires crossed. General Miles continued to insist that Cody was their best bet, but by the time Cody actually reached South Dakota various official barricades had been thrown up. Cody saw General Miles but never got close to Sitting Bull—in hindsight it’s hard not to think that McLaughlin used bad judgment here. Sitting Bull knew that Cody had friendly feelings for him—if Cody had been permitted to see his old star it is not likely that he would have tried to arrest him, but it might have defused the tense situation.

  Cody had come a long way for nothing and was more than a little annoyed. He went down to his home in North Platte, though not before he secured a few fresh Indians from Pine Ridge for his show.

  A few days before Sitting Bull’s death, legend has it, he was taking a walk and minding his own business when a cheeky meadowlark, speaking in Sioux, informed him that he would soon be killed by his own people. Sitting Bull probably wished the meadowlark, too, had minded his own business; but the prophecy soon came true. McLaughlin sent a troop of native policemen to ask Sitting Bull to come to the agency, a request he usually complied with, though with much grumbling. The native policemen arrived early, hoping to get Sitting Bull out before the camp was well awake. They were early, but not early enough. Sitting Bull started to submit, but changed his mind when he saw that quite a few Ghost Dancers had lined up to support him. A scuffle ensued: two native policemen, Bull Head and Red Tomahawk, both shot Sitting Bull, who died on the spot, along with one of his sons and several others. Had the army not thoughtfully provided a sizable backup force all the native policemen would very likely have been killed.

  Cody was out of the way well before this happened. He would have seen nothing wrong about visiting his old friend Sitting Bull; the two might have had a good powwow, but it is unlikely he would have said anything about turning him over to the army. His show depended in good measure on the goodwill of the Sioux, which he would have quickly lost if he had tried to arrest Sitting Bull. General Miles’s simple hope seems to have been that Cody could lure him away from the reservation with the promise of medals or something, after which the army could have taken over.

  It may be that, once he was in striking distance, some officer told him that Sitting Bull was already on his way to Pine Ridge, using a different road. Cody was relaxing in North Platte when he learned of Sitting Bull’s death.

  The death of their toughest chief threw all the northern Sioux into confusion. They expected big trouble to result, and big trouble did result, although not immediately. Sitting Bull was killed on the fifteenth of December 1889. Because six native policemen had died in the struggle to arrest him, the Sioux expected reprisals—many fled to the hills, while others made their way to the comparative safety of the Pine Ridge agency.

  Among the groups headed for Pine Ridge were the people led by Chief Big Foot, who was ill with pneumonia at the time. Indeed, he was so ill that the officer who took charge of this group immediately ordered him a doctor and a heated tent as well. This occurred near Wounded Knee Creek, not far east of Pine Ridge.

  The next morning, with a large contingent of the Seventh Cavalry standing by, an attempt was made to disarm the Indians in Big Foot’s camp. The attempt was hurried and rough. The exact sequence of events which led to the massacre has been debated ever since; but at some point the soldiers began to shoot the Indians and the Indians fought back with knives, hatchets, and small arms. A massacre occurred, Big Foot was immediately killed, as were a total of 146 Sioux, many of them women and children. So desperately did the Sioux fight that twenty-five soldiers also died; nearly forty more were hurt.

  Nicholas Black Elk, looking over the carnage of this battle, left the most elegant statement that we have about the tragedy of Wounded Knee:

  And so it was all over.

  I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and the children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.

  And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth, you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center anymore, and the sacred tree is dead.

  Buffalo Bill was so annoyed by the poor use the army had made of him that he billed them some $500 for expenses on his unnecessary trip.

  Though the Sioux were essentially finished, a brief revolt did flare up. It lasted about two weeks. Cody left North Platte and became a kind of roving liaison man, his main task being to persuade terrified Nebraskans that they need not flee south. Some fled anyway. By the sixteenth of January the last miscreants had given up and the last Sioux outbreak was over. Eleven thousand soldiers were there to assure the surrender.

  By this time Major Burke was in Pine Ridge himself—he was escorting some fifty of the Indians who had been in the show back to the place he was supposed to return them.

  What Cody really thought about this sad debacle is not easy to say. The film he later made about it no longer exists, of which more later. Perhaps Cody unburdened himself to Major Burke, or Salsbury, or even his wife, but he said nothing disrespectful about the military to any of the reporters who pursued him.

  From this distance in time it seems that both General Miles and Agent McLaughlin lost their heads. McLaughlin had visited Sitting Bull only two weeks earlier; the old man may have grumbled, but there was no violence, no threat. Cody was a friend; he might have helped, but the left hand ignored the right hand and the blood of another two hundred people stained the much-stained northern plains.

  There was to be one more irony: when the Sioux surrendered in January 1890, they allowed the whites to take nineteen hostages. For their part in the last Sioux revolt they were consigned, by way of punishment, to Buffalo Bill Cody, who had been cleared of all charges relating to abuse.

  A short time later the nineteen Sioux were performing in Europe.

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  THERE is debate about the origins of the term “Rough Rider.” On big ranches half-broken horses were referred to as the “rough string,” and the cowboys whose job it was to improve their behavior might have been called “rough riders.” It seems clear that Cody and Salsbury used it before Theodore Roosevelt appropriated it for his Cuban campaign. By 1893 Cody’s show was grandly called Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World—by this time Salsbury had added gauchos, Cossacks, vaqueros, and Arabs to the mix.

  Salsbury was in Europe while Cody was in the Dakotas. Though the abuse accusations were easily settled, Salsbury, looking far ahead, decided that it would be wise to slowly shift the emphasis of the show from historical skits to horsemanship. Cody could never have been weaned entirely from his beloved skits, but he was an exceptional horseman himself and would never object to more riders.

  The 1891 tour through northern Europe involved ten stop
s in Germany alone, with only occasional mishaps or alarums. One occurred while Annie Oakley was giving shooting lessons to a Bavarian prince—a horse broke loose and came charging their way, forcing Annie to wrestle the startled prince to the ground.

  Kaiser Wilhelm saw her shoot a cigarette out of her husband’s mouth and demanded that she try it with him, which she did, though she didn’t like the Kaiser and later remarked that he was just the sort of man who would start a war. After he had, she informed him that if they ever tried the trick again she could not guarantee the results.

  Needless to say, they never tried the trick again. Her appraisal of the Kaiser shows how quickly and accurately the young woman from Darke County, Ohio, could size up people—particularly the great and famous. Bismarck, she remarked, looked like a mastiff. Throughout their travels together she exhibited far less tolerance than Cody for the company of stuffed shirts—though she did give shooting lessons to a good many of them, and to their children as well.

  The 1891 tour boasted the show’s most swollen roster, with 640 “eating members”—and eating members ate three full meals a day, an arrangement that the Indians found very satisfactory.

  Grandmother England came to the Wild West again and was particularly pleased that Cody had added Cossacks to the roster. Cody was again presented to the queen. He was on the wagon that summer, under strict orders from Salsbury to indulge in no more toots. When offered drinks by the queen’s equerry Cody staunchly refused; Salsbury merely accepted a glass of wine. Cody’s abstinence drew favorable notices from the Salvation Army and the temperance societies.

  In an unusual ceremony in Manchester, the nineteen survivors of the Charge of the Light Brigade were honored. Not mentioned, but also present, were nineteen survivors of the Battle of Wounded Knee.

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