The Honorable Cody

by Richard S. Wheeler

  I thought at one point of delighting her with an impromptu visit of my own, showing up in North Platte at unexpected moments, but all I would have discovered was Louisa alone, always alone.

  Chapter 17

  Major John Burke

  In 1885, Cody and Salsbury wanted Sitting Bull and dispatched me to fetch him if I could. What a task! I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but for Cody I’d try anything. Sitting Bull had appeared briefly in a variety show run by Ehle and Alvaren Allen, and they had treated the solemn medicine man badly, parading him around as if he were a freak in a sideshow, offending his dignity.

  They had promised him a chance to talk with the Great White Father in Washington and never delivered. I heard he was pretty sullen on that tour, and frankly I wondered if things would go any better if we signed him up. Not that I blamed him for any of it. His people had been broken and humiliated, and I sometimes wondered why he trafficked at all with whites.

  So Sitting Bull had returned to his quiet life on the Standing Rock Reservation in Dakota, wanting nothing more to do with white men and show business. The Sioux revered him as the man whose vision and passion had led to the triumph over Custer, while the United States government and its Indian agents feared him as the one Sioux who might stir up that powerful tribe into yet another confrontation. So the government kept a close eye on him, did everything it could to undermine his standing among his people, and treated him as a prisoner of war.

  I didn’t know how I would rope the gent into doing a show with us. Our 1885 season was well along and doing splendidly but Cody thought that Sitting Bull would be a great attraction, and he was right. Cody was almost always right. Sitting Bull was, along with Crazy Horse, the Sioux leaders who had destroyed General Custer and five companies of the Seventh Cavalry, and the mere sight of him in an arena, decked out in his bonnet and wearing his tribal regalia, would send a chill through every white spectator there.

  I thought it was a good idea but I hadn’t much hope of getting him. Then Annie Oakley told me a story while she was embroidering a vest outside of her tent, her thimbled finger magically working the bright red floss through soft cream buckskin. When she and Frank Butler were shooting on stage in Minneapolis, she said, the Allens had treated Sitting Bull to an evening at the theater, and that’s when he first saw Annie pop those glass balls, one after another, without fail. He had never seen such a thing, and wanted to meet this amazing little woman. And so it was arranged. Sitting Bull met Annie, loved her from the moment they met, called her ‘Watanya cicilia,’ Little Sure Shot, a name that stuck to Annie the rest of her life. More than that, he adopted Annie into the Sioux tribe and made her his daughter.

  “Here,” she said, “take this.” It was a photograph of her, poised with her rifle in hand, her gaze confident, her beautiful skirts embroidered by her own hand.

  “Sure, Annie.”

  “Show it to him,” she said.

  I promised I would. I boarded the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy evening express, settled in the saloon with a double gin and bitters, and was soon rolling toward the Standing Rock Agency. Springing a Sioux warrior from captivity was no easy thing and the Indian Bureau was uneasy about it. But there were two or three good arguments on our side. One was that we paid show wages and these were a lot better than the near starvation of the agency, which bred misery and restlessness. The second, simply, was that any Indian chief plunging into white men’s world would be overawed and less inclined to cause us trouble.

  The Agency finally came around to that view, and from then on we could hire a few Sioux, as well as some Pawnees, for our show and didn’t have to rely on New Jersey bit players stained red and gotten up in stage outfits.

  At Standing Rock I collected a translator and a guide and hired a light wagon and we set off to find Sitting Bull. I was actually strung tight as we drove past those lodges, half of them filled with warriors who had butchered the Seventh Cavalry just a few years earlier. I knew one thing for sure; their view of white men who were invading their country hadn’t warmed a degree since then and probably was worse because Congress and the Indian Bureau starved and cheated them.

  So it was a prickly trip. I sat there in that wagon, dressed in black broadcloth, being hauled along by a plug horse that had seen better days. But we got there and I beheld a small frame cabin, a modest place for so great a hero of his people, and I met him there, standing before his cabin in a blanket against a chill morning. He had that diamond-shaped face, a steady gaze, dignity and wariness about him, and eyes that seemed to read me well.

  I was not invited in so I made my case there, while Robideaux translated, and Sitting Bull heard me out. Then he declined, saying his heart was not good for such a thing. I offered him fifty dollars a week plus a bonus for agreeing to the contract plus transportation to and from Standing Rock when our season ended. He listened silently. Fifty dollars each week was a lot of money. He would earn enough to help his people.

  “He says no, it is not a thing he wishes to do,” the translator said. “But we will have a smoke.”

  I realized I had reversed the order of things according to his custom. A smoke should have come first and then the negotiation. But Sitting Bull motioned me to some ancient chairs on his porch and we lit pipes, sucking the coals to life, and he sat back quietly.

  I supposed I had lost him and had come a long way for nothing. Cody wanted him badly.

  Then I remembered Annie. I dug into my portfolio and pulled out that photograph of Annie and handed it to Sitting Bull.

  “Ah!” He studied the photo, his face suddenly luminous in that soft light. He said something in Sioux which my translator didn’t convey to me.

  “Tell him he’ll be with Annie, see her every day, and enjoy her company. She sent her regards to him.”

  Sitting Bull’s expression changed as he listened and he eyed me in a way that was new, with warmth and even merriment in his seamed face.

  “Every day,” I said. “He will be with Little Sure Shot.”

  It did the trick. We made things right with the Standing Rock agent, did a simple witnessed contract that would let us employ the chief and a few others who would come with him, helped the great Sioux pack his duffel, especially his ceremonial clothing and his eagle feather bonnet which only he could touch, and at last I found myself riding the rails with Sitting Bull at my side, watching him as the high plains slid into farms and forests and hamlets, watching his rapt expression as we passed the borders of civilization and into the heartland. He watched everything, fascinated by settled country, by streets in small towns where our express paused for coal and water, by the crowds in the great railroad stations where we transferred trains, and by the people he saw; families, single men, children, mothers, white people in numbers beyond Sitting Bull’s imagining.

  The whites around us did not see the storied Sitting Bull; they saw a dignified Indian in a collarless white shirt, baggy black woolen pants, black boots, with his jet hair tied back, an Indian who had withdrawn deeply into himself. If they noticed the entourage at all, it was only to observe that these Indians were attired the way white men were.

  When at last we reached the show, I took Sitting Bull at once to Cody’s tent and introduced them. I will say this about Cody. He has a natural, almost supernatural, gift of putting people at ease and making them welcome. And Sitting Bull, after a moment, responded in kind.

  “Welcome to the show, Sitting Bull,” Cody said through the translator. “You are a man I’m proud to have with us, a man who has fought for his people, a man the world respects.”

  Sitting Bull actually smiled, something I had scarcely seen him do, and never at first contact. He had not, in days of travel, ever smiled at me.

  “You’ll represent your people here,” Cody said. “They’ll see a proud leader of your people when you walk out before them attired in your robes of honor. I’m glad of that. The people need to see the strength and courage and power of the Sioux.”

  Sitting Bu
ll nodded. “I will show them the heart of my people,” he replied.

  “If there’s anything I’ve failed to do, or anything you need, I’ll do everything I can,” Cody said. “You are a man I wish to honor.”

  “I hear mighty things about the scout, Cody.”

  “I want to hear your story, Sitting Bull. I want you to tell me in your own words how the vision came to you of the Custer attack, how you knew what would happen. How you and the other great chief, Crazy Horse, saw what must be done. This is a story I will listen to with great respect,” Cody said.

  The Hunkpapa Sioux medicine man nodded, this time warily. That story would wait for the right moment in the future.

  “Now, my friend, let us clasp hands in friendship. You and your people are my honored guests and I will make sure that your time here is as you wish it.”

  Cody offered the chief some licorice and then some ginger snaps, and these things the chief tasted tentatively, and then cheerfully devoured more. The Sioux liked sugar and Cody never forgot it. He made sure that there was a plenty of chocolates and rock candy at hand for Chief Sitting Bull.

  There it was, Cody’s almost magical ability to get along with most anyone, even someone whose roots were as alien to Cody as a Hottentot’s. I thought the interview went well and so did Cody. It was the start of a deep and true friendship that lasted to the very last of Sitting Bull’s short life.

  He and his Hunkpapas were indeed the hit of the show during its last four months on tour. I’ll never forget it. The Colonel would, in that great resonant voice of his, announce the presence of Sitting Bull, the very man who defeated the Seventh Cavalry at the Little Big Horn, and then the chief and the other Sioux, all dressed in their finest eagle-feather bonnets, beautifully quilled or beaded buckskins, moccasins, and paint, would step out from behind the great canvas curtains, and be greeted by... silence. A rapt silence always greeted Sitting Bull as he and his proud band paced quietly before the grandstands, a silence that shouted a thousand things, fear, menace, admiration, fascination, dread, and finally, respect. Sometimes someone hissed but if Sitting Bull heard these tokens of disrespect, he ignored them. I came to believe that he saw his mission as one of letting the white people see the strength of his people, his common humanity, and the mystical and potent power of his nation.

  Sitting Bull, in turn, was fascinated by the white men’s world, dismayed by the extremes of poverty and wealth he saw everywhere, and ended up handing little gifts, coins, candy, sometimes even more, to the ragamuffins who collected around him. It wasn’t just the poverty he saw at every hand that troubled him; it was the uncaring attitude he found among the more fortunate that drove him deep into himself.

  One could read the stark disapproval in his stern face. He saved little, gave nearly everything he earned to those shoeless, poor, thin boys and girls and single women he constantly encountered. He had formed an ethical judgment about the people who had conquered his own, and his silent disapproval always left me uneasy. There he was, the militant medicine man who had destroyed Custer, passing candy and coin to the very poor.

  He and Will Cody ended up friends, maybe because Cody, too, handed out thousands of gifts to people who pressed him or begged from him. I think Sitting Bull approved and between them they liked to lessen the misery they saw everywhere in America. At the end of that season of 1884, Cody personally saw to it that his friend Sitting Bull and his entourage were safely returned to their home, carrying gifts and fresh clothing.

  And in spite of Cody’s prodigal spending, the show netted a hundred thousand dollar profit that year, largely thanks to the great Hunkpapa medicine man.

  (From the memoir of Colonel William F. Cody)

  The Indians were my idea. And so was Sitting Bull. When I was running the Buffalo Bill Combination we hired supers to be Indians, stained them walnut, and fitted them out in cambric and turkey feathers. That was all right for the stage, but my Wild West was something very different, something new.

  The real and still-wild west was a place of danger and romance. There were still skirmishes with Indians. Down in Arizona the army was still wrestling with the dangerous Apaches. In 1885, the Battle of the Little Big Horn was only nine years past, and most of the surviving participants on both sides were alive. I wanted them.

  I didn’t really want theater, I wanted the an authentic tableau for the Wild West. Real Indians, real sharpshooters, real lawmen and cowboys and buffalo and broncs. I wasn’t satisfied with our white Indians, dyed brown and fitted out with miserable stage costume. Not a one of them could walk or howl like the Sioux or Cheyenne, or ride horses or swing a battle axe or shoot an arrow like the true redmen of the prairies.

  I knew what would go through the minds of those people in the arenas once they saw the true articles walk out upon the grass; when they saw the magnificent eagle-feather head-dresses, the coppery faces, the lithe, strong pace of warriors scarcely retired from real battle. I knew what they would think when they saw Sioux warriors who had killed white soldiers. And that’s what I wanted. I wanted them to experience what every plainsman had experienced whenever he saw these powerful, strong, lordly people of the plains. I wanted every person in that audience to think about his topknot.

  I brooded upon it, not really knowing how to get past the Indian Bureau, which held these people in captivity either as prisoners of war, as was the case with Sitting Bull, or people who must stay upon their reserves or suffer serious consequences.

  But once I resolved upon it, I knew I had to do it, and the person I wanted most was Sitting Bull, the medicine chief of the Sioux whose vision of the forthcoming victory over the blue-bellies had spread excitement through the great confederation of the Sioux tribes as well as their allies. No tribe of the northern plains was as powerful, as numerous, as warlike, and as aggressive. My Wild West had to have them.

  It helped that I respected them and their way of life. I had been too much among them not to. Unlike so many Europeans, I did not underestimate their martial power not did I ever disdain their way of life which was admirably suited to the high plains and the woodlands.

  I was already into the season when I resolved to perk up the Wild West with some Sioux, so I sent Major Burke. I truly didn't know whether the major could manage it, but he did.

  At any rate, we brought the medicine chief back in time for the last several months of the Wild West season, having secured the cooperation of the Indian Bureau.

  There were those who wondered whether the Sioux would come to resent portraying defeat. Of course our reenactment of the Custer fight gave them a victory, but we also had tableaux in which settlers and cowboys drove off the Sioux in the nick of time. We also wondered whether they would get along with some Pawnee that Frank North was bringing to us, since they were ancient enemies, but that proved to be groundless. They saw at once that this was theater, make-believe, and set to work to make it as authentic as possible. A warrior fights not only for his people but for personal honor, for counting coup. Not only that but the youths of those tribes play war games constantly, mock battle just like the ones we would stage.

  The result was just fine. Every one of the traditional Sioux warriors fought like a demon during our Wild West tableaux. And did it over and over, his life-training helping him give his utmost to the battle.

  The result couldn’t have been better. I can gauge the success of a Wild West act by the number of women who faint in the bleachers, and by my reckoning we had whole battalions of women keel over into their husbands’ arms when these redmen rode out to greet the audience. There, before the eyes of all those Europeans, were the fiends themselves, not actors but the savages, straight off the new reservations.

  It was one of those most fortunate things that catapulted the Wild West into the foremost road show in America. Sitting Bull stayed with us; I saw to it that every man and woman in my company gave him the honor he deserved, and I made sure too that I kept his candy bowl filled. He was fond of licorice especially, and li
corice he got from me until he could stuff no more into him.

  When the season was over, I made sure they all got back to their Standing Rock Reservation as we had stipulated in the contract. Sitting Bull didn’t join us for later seasons and soon he was murdered during the Wounded Knee period. But out of that initial effort we acquired some regulars, including the old reliable Iron Tail, a fine warrior with a splendid physique whose image now decorates our buffalo nickel. And thanks to Sitting Bull, who opened the doors for us, the Wild West had real warriors ever after, and the American people got a first-hand look at the very warriors who had defeated the Seventh Cavalry in 1876. That in itself was worth the price of a ticket.

  Chapter 18

  Black Elk

  My people lived in sorrow. Everything had changed. Even the dreams had died along with the dreamers. Were we Lakota? Did we not know the true story of the way the world was formed, and where our People came from, and who among the spirits watched over us? We were walking the black road and none of us knew how to return to the good red road.

  We starved and the wasichu, or white men, confined us to a tract of land, four lines upon the earth making a rectangle, and promised to shoot us if we left it. We would be “hostiles,” they said; enemies. But we were already enemies. It was not because we starved that we lived in sorrow. We did not know whether anything we believed was true, and that was the cause of sorrow. A great sadness filled the lodges, and old men sighed while young men’s gazes burned into the wise old men who did nothing to throw off the yoke of the white men.

  I matured to such a life, seeing only the broken hoop, the bleak ending of all that my Oglalla people had known and very little to replace it. The sacred buffalo were gone into the mysterious pit where darkness lived. When I was young I had received a great vision: I was to heal the broken hoop, make my Lakota people whole, and this vision I carried with me always. I was the son and the grandson and the great-grandson of spirit-seekers, medicine men, and I was given to know that I, too, would follow where the previous Black Elks had walked.