by Jill Jonnes
On Monday, July 28, not long after his return from his holiday, Theo was busy in the Paris gallery when Anton Hirschig appeared with a letter from Dr. Gachet urging him to come immediately. Alarmed, Theo set out for Auvers and the inn. When he mounted the stairs to Vincent’s small room and opened the door, he burst into tears: Vincent lay there swaddled in bloody bandages, deathly pale. The day before, he had hiked out into the fields to paint, taking a revolver, ostensibly to scare off crows. Instead, he had tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide by shooting himself in the chest. Dr. Gachet had patched him up, and Theo remembered how Vincent had come through the earlier ear slashing. Yet even as Theo expressed his optimism, Vincent announced his intention to try to take his life again. Theo wrote to Jo: “You could not imagine there was so much sorrow in life.” At 1:30 in the morning, Vincent, thirty-seven years old, died in the arms of his brother.
The next afternoon, a weeping Theo led the funeral procession from the inn. Gachet was present, as were numerous artists, including Émile Bernard, who described the event to Aurier: “The sun was terribly hot outside. We climbed the hill outside Auvers talking about him, about the daring impulse he had given to art, of the great projects he was always thinking about, and of the good he had done to all of us.” The cemetery was a new one. “It is on the little hill above the fields that were ripe for harvest under the wide blue sky that he would still have loved. . . . [T]he day was too much made for him for one not to imagine that he was still alive and enjoying it.”
Paul Gauguin, stuck in Le Pouldu as he sought a way to get to Tahiti, responded to another letter from Bernard: “Sad though his death may be, I am not very grieved, for I knew it was coming and I knew how this poor fellow suffered in his struggles with madness. To die at this time is a great happiness for him, for it puts an end to his sufferings and if he returns in another life he will harvest the fruit of his fine conduct in this world (according to the law of the Buddha).”
When Theo returned to Paris, he devoted a great deal of energy to finding a gallery to mount an exhibition of Vincent’s work. Turned down again and again, he decided to move his family into a larger apartment and, with Émile Bernard’s help, create a museum of sorts there by hanging Vincent’s paintings on every wall. “These canvases are not the work of a sick mind,” he wrote, “but of the ardor and humanity of a great man.”
For a few weeks Theo slept better, and his chronic cough eased up. But in October, his health collapsed, and in an eerie echo of Vincent, he began to suffer bouts of insanity. He sent Gauguin a telegram: “Departure to tropics assured, money follows—Theo, Director.” When an initially overjoyed Gauguin discovered that Theo had in fact become as mad as his dead brother, he was angry and disappointed. Soon Theo’s violent, erratic behavior was carried over to his relationship with his wife and child, which led to his confinement in a nursing home. When he briefly recovered, Jo took him home to Holland, but by mid-November, Theo was again confined, for he had become disoriented, incontinent at times, wracked by pain, and prone to furious fits of destroying furniture—and he no longer recognized Jo. Speechless and paralyzed, he died on January 25, 1891, at age thirty-three from what was later recognized as tertiary syphilis. It was left to his widow to become the keeper of his brother’s artistic flame.
With Theo, his dealer, lost to illness, Gauguin marshaled all his considerable energies toward one goal: reaching Tahiti, where he felt his art could flourish. He moved back to Paris and threw himself into cultivating cultural leaders such as Stéphane Mallarmé and author Charles Morice. Their prestige helped Gauguin secure a spot as an official government artist in Tahiti, while their admiration for his Symbolist paintings cast Gauguin as a big talent. He courted anyone who might be a patron, and a month after Theo’s death held a successful sale of his art. He could now afford to make a visit to Denmark to see his estranged wife and their five children before setting sail in April 1891 for the South Pacific.
Buffalo Bill, capitalizing on the Wild West show’s success, had departed Paris to barnstorm with his company through southern Europe, opening first in Marseilles. Then it was on to Spain and Barcelona, where an epidemic of Spanish influenza wrought havoc, laying low half the company. Just as Annie Oakley was recovering, orator Frank Richmond died. With that, Cody and Nate Salsbury secured the only steamer they could and fled in mid-January 1890 with their performers and animals to Naples. A convalescing Oakley reveled in the warm sun and the sights. “Of course I visited Vesuvius,” she wrote, “Pompeii and Herculaneum. Standing on the shaking top of Vesuvius, I had the desire to look down into the crater though the lava was falling thick about me.
“Pompeii interested me. One house had undoubtedly been the home of a sportsman, as every inch of the walls was covered with the finest paintings representing a game scene. . . . One picture . . . represented a marsh scene with rushes, out of which birds that looked like English snipe were rising.”
The poverty of these old Mediterranean ports could be startling. When Oakley’s husband ventured into Barcelona to buy a Christmas turkey, the butcher “could not believe that anybody would buy a whole turkey. Two hundred beggars followed them and the turkey and the butcher sent an armed guard along with them.” Far worse, local outbreaks of smallpox and typhoid carried off several Indians, starting with Featherman and Chief Hawick, both of whom died in Marseilles. In Naples, the company lost Goes Flying, forty-five, and then Little Ring, thirty-three, apparently from a bad heart. Despite such calamities, the show went on.
When the troupe arrived in Rome in late February, Cody rode over to survey the ancient Coliseum, where he had long dreamed of performing. Under the blue Roman sky, he climbed about the crumbling galleries of seats and stared down into the arena. The prospect of bringing the show there was enticing, but the practical showman in him had to concede that the venue was ill-suited and decrepit. His cowboys and Indians instead performed in their tented arena elsewhere in the Eternal City.
Throughout the mild Italian spring, the Wild West company wended its way north, playing in Florence, Bologna, and Milan. In picturesque Verona, Cody finally satisfied his ambition of playing in a Roman amphitheater, this one built almost two millennia earlier by Emperor Augustus. The Italian tour ended with a day of pleasure in Venice, where Buffalo Bill and all the cowboys and Indians (the chiefs in full ceremonial headdresses) boarded gondolas for a languorous trip up and down the Grand Canal past the faded splendor of the pastel palazzos. From there, they departed for Austro-Hungary and Germany.
Even as the Wild West show enjoyed sold-out houses and lavish gifts from the local aristocracy (Oakley especially treasured her diamond bracelet from the regent of Bavaria), some of the Indians had had enough. Red Shirt and his family had sailed back home after the dispiriting run in Barcelona, followed that summer by several small bands. The first were five Wild West Sioux who debarked the S.S. Saale in New York on June 14, 1890, including Kills Plenty, whose right arm had been crushed when a horse fell on him in Germany. When he died from blood poisoning within days of landing in New York, the press paid attention. Disaffected and homesick, two other small groups of returning Indians were happy to vent their discontents to the newspapers.
Cody, Burke, and Salsbury knew that the new regime at the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs was avidly following the Wild West’s Indian woes. These federal officials, who had long been eager to put an end to Indian performances promoting “savagery” and the old way of life, pointed to the five Indian deaths, various injuries, sundry complaints of ill treatment, and the persistent rumors (largely true) about Cody’s Indians carousing and tomcatting about the Continent. All, they insisted, were proof of “the evil resulting from [Indians] connecting themselves with such shows.” To counter the bad press, in late July Major Burke dispatched home to refute the bad-mouthers No Neck, a strapping charmer who carried a fancy black umbrella and whose raven locks were perfumed by the finest Paris musk.
Buffalo Bill and Indians taking a gond
ola ride in Venice, spring 1890
That autumn, when yet two more Wild West Indians died in Germany, one after falling off a horse and being trampled by a buffalo, the Bureau of Indian Affairs announced a formal investigation and issued a ban on further work permits. The Wild West higher-ups were now genuinely alarmed, for without the Sioux performers there would be no show. As soon as the company settled into its winter quarters in Benfeld, a small town near Strasbourg, Germany, Major Burke departed immediately for the United States with the remaining thirty-eight Indians in tow, to prove that all were in fine fettle, and to fight the new ruling. On November 13, 1890, Burke and the Indians steamed into Philadelphia, and they had barely docked when Major Burke, his wild muttonchop whiskers trimmed back to a respectable length, assembled the press in a forward saloon so that Rocky Bear, with Bronco Bill Irving serving as his interpreter, could testify on behalf of the Wild West, while the remaining Indians stood by to exude good health and fine spirits.
As soon as the press conference concluded, Burke and the Indians boarded a train to Washington, and by the next day the Indians were testifying at the Bureau. Nate Salsbury had also sailed home to be present at the hearing, for the Wild West’s $20,000 bond was at stake if the Bureau of Indian Affairs could prove mistreatment. Black Heart explained that Cody and Salsbury “furnished us the same work we were raised to. . . . At the end of every month we drew our salary. What we eat is just the same as the whites eat, and we sit in the camp with them just the same exactly. . . . The company have spent lots of money on us, certainly; that is what we went with them for.” Rocky Bear also spoke and displayed a purse filled with $300 in gold coins, proof that the Indians were gainfully employed. Moreover, they all indicated that they hoped to return to Europe after visiting their relatives back at the Pine Ridge Agency.
A few days later, on November 18, Colonel Cody himself could be spied on the deck of the French liner La Normandie, waiting impatiently to debark in New York after having received a reassuring telegram from Major Burke summing up the Washington testimony. A quarantine inspector’s discovery of a steerage passenger with smallpox meant an eighteen-hour delay before Cody could finally walk down the gangplank and emerge from the tumult of U.S. Customs to make his case to the horde of waiting reporters. Cody said that the Sioux all wished to return to work on the show. “The theory of the government’s management of the Indian,” Cody pointed out, “is that he should be made self-supporting.” Further, Cody wanted contrition from his critics, who should “now come out and openly and publicly admit the injustice of the charges made against us.” Yet there was no such sign from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Even as Cody was brooding about how best to get his Indian performers back, he received a telegram from Gen. Nelson Miles, the famous Indian fighter whose forces had captured Geronimo. That confidential missive summoned Buffalo Bill west, setting in motion one of the stranger episodes of his later career. Since 1884, Buffalo Bill had been making a handsome living off the Wild West show, but he had not actually worked as an Indian scout in fourteen years. The fact was, he and his Wild West Sioux had all come home at a grim moment in the Indians’ history. The treaty the Indians had declined to sign in Paris had gone into effect, opening eleven million acres of Sioux land to white miners and settlers. Three years of drought had undermined official plans for nomadic Sioux tribes to settle down as farmers. Even as crops withered, the government cut food rations at the reservations Standing Rock and Pine Ridge, which led to widespread starvation and illness. At this desperate juncture, Chief Sitting Bull had joined tribes across the Plains in embracing the new Ghost Dances, frenzied rituals to usher in the coming of an Indian messiah, a savior from white perfidy who “would bring with him all of the Indians who had died, and all of the departed horses and buffalo. As he started walking from west to east, a wave of new earth many feet deep would accompany him, covering the white man and all his works and returning to the living Indian and his departed ancestors the world as it had been before Columbus.” Ghost Dancing was seen as a prelude to war.
General Miles, for whom a far-younger Cody had once scouted, had now requested that Cody undertake a secret official mission to talk sense into and urge peace with Sitting Bull. The old chief, who had toured with the Wild West during its first season, still rode a gray horse Cody had given him. Cody opined to The New York Herald that he doubted the Indians would be fighting immediately because it was winter: “Indians dread winter warfare. If it were spring there would be a general uprising. They are discontented, and claim that the Government has not kept its agreements with them in rations or by paying for their land. These Indians know that the harder they fight the more presents they will get from the Government when peace is proclaimed.” The Herald noted that experience had taught Cody that “whites invariably break a promise.”
Buffalo Bill was soon riding the train west to the Dakotas. During a brief Chicago stopover where he met with General Miles, he confided to a New York Times reporter, “Of all the bad Indians, Sitting Bull is the worst. . . . He is a dangerous Indian and his conduct now portends trouble.” He also said that Rocky Bear and other veterans of the Wild West were going home to the Pine Ridge reservation and “will do whatever is necessary to defeat Sitting Bull.” Cody did not fail to appreciate his odd position should there be an Indian war, confessing to another journalist, “I don’t yet know whether I shall fight them or not. It might not look exactly right for me to do so, for I have made a fortune out of them, but if they get to shedding innocent blood I may, if I can be any service, go up there.”
And in fact, within days Cody could be seen stepping off the Northern Pacific Railroad in snowy Bismarck, capital of the year-old state of North Dakota, wrapped in a buffalo robe against the searing cold and accompanied by two old western pals. He rented a livery rig in the rugged frontier town and headed south through the magnificent snow-covered hills and big western sky to Fort Yates and the Indian Standing Rock Agency, a part of the world he had not been in since 1876. The Standing Rock Indian agent, James McLaughlin, was none too happy at Cody’s presence, for he had intended to deal with Sitting Bull himself.
McLaughlin telegraphed immediately to Washington for someone to countermand Miles’s orders, while the soldiers engaged the ever-convivial Cody in an epic drinking contest, hoping to derail him. The next day, Cody, not visibly worse for wear, loaded up a mule-drawn spring wagon with hundreds of dollars’ worth of gifts and candy for Sitting Bull and, with his two companions, set out in the bitter weather to visit him. Cody had not yet reached the old chief’s camp on the Grand River when he was overtaken and presented a telegram from President Benjamin Harrison rescinding his mission. An annoyed Cody dutifully turned around his laden wagon, returned to Fort Yates, and set off for Scout’s Rest, in North Platte, Nebraska, for a planned family reunion with his sisters.
Two weeks later, on December 18, 1890, McLaughlin’s Indian Police launched a predawn raid on Sitting Bull’s cabin, intending to arrest the old chief. Sitting Bull’s 150 followers leapt into combat, and during the ensuing gun battle, the Indian Police killed Sitting Bull and seven of his warriors while suffering five fatalities of their own. In a bizarre note, when the shooting broke out, Sitting Bull’s gray horse, which had been trained for the Wild West arena, reportedly took the sound of gunfire as a cue to begin a choreographed prancing number that culminated in its sitting down and raising one hoof. The Indian Police were terrified at this exhibition, for they believed the spirit of Sitting Bull was coming back to life through his favorite horse.
In the wake of Sitting Bull’s death, the Pine Ridge Agency bustled with newly arriving troops and cavalry, as well as twenty-five war correspondents who had come to cover the Ghost Dancing, the possible Indian uprising, and now the killing of Sitting Bull. Major Burke, having squired the Wild West Indians back home, remained to curry favor with the local Indian agent, who was about to launch yet another investigation of the Wild West group and how they had been treated.
The latter did their part by enlisting in the Indian Police, all hoping to persuade the government to issue new show permits in time for the Wild West’s spring European tour. Meanwhile tensions were building in the surrounding plains and valleys, where five thousand Sioux were camped out in their teepees, and three thousand American troops were slowly encircling them, presumably prepared to use their overwhelming firepower. It was the largest assemblage of army troops since the Civil War.
Eleven days after Sitting Bull’s death, on December 29, the 450 members of the Seventh Cavalry massed near the frozen banks of Wounded Knee Creek on the Nebraska border. They were to accept the surrender of a band of armed Sioux warriors and escort their families back to the nearby Pine Ridge reservation. When one Indian balked at handing over his gun, a melee broke out and soon turned into hand-to-hand combat. The soldiers trained their Hotchkiss rapid-fire guns on the camp and opened fire. When the shooting ended, the snowy winter landscape lay covered with almost two hundred dead and dying Indians, mainly women and children, mowed down as they tried to flee. Twenty-five soldiers lay dead, while thirty-seven were wounded. General Miles, appalled by this massacre, began arresting leaders of the Ghost Dancers to fend off further violence.
A week later Buffalo Bill rode his white horse into the tense atmosphere of Pine Ridge, dispatched by Nebraska governor John Thayer to calm apprehensive settlers along the state’s border and to advise Miles, as “[his] superior knowledge of Indian character and mode of warfare [might] enable [him] to make suggestions of importance.” Major Burke was delighted to welcome his world-famous boss (now promoted to Brigadier General Cody in the Nebraska Militia) to the scene. Was a great Indian war imminent, or was this the poignant finale of Native Americans reduced to penury and powerlessness by the whites? While Cody made himself useful as an aide-de-camp to General Miles, Major Burke churned out lurid dispatches under Cody’s byline for the front pages of Bennett’s New York Herald: “At the moment, as far as words go, I would say it will be peace, but the smoldering spark is visible that may precipitate a terrible conflict any time in the next few days.”
