Louis S. Warren

by Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody;the Wild West Show

  As effective as Indian scouts could be, army commanders suspected them of having their own agenda in the Plains wars. Such fears were often misplaced, but not always. Many Indian scouts were out to settle old scores against the numerous Sioux and Cheyenne who had displaced them from their Plains homes. At times, Indian scouts’ eagerness for combat upset commanders’ goals of stealth and reconnaissance, endangering military operations. Thus, Cody was chief of scouts for General Carr’s Fifth Cavalry expedition against the Cheyenne in the summer of 1869, during which Carr hoped to track detachments of Cheyenne warriors to the elusive village of Dog Man chief Tall Bull, which he proposed to attack. But the strategy was almost undone by Pawnee auxiliaries who refused to stalk small contingents of Cheyenne and instead attacked them. Tall Bull soon learned of the army’s presence. Other officers feared that Indian scouts would commit atrocities against Cheyenne and Sioux opponents, and sometimes their fears were justified. 68 One of the reasons for the hiring of white scouts like Cody was that ideally they could serve as go-betweens for commanders and their Indian scouts, whose techniques and strategies were often mysterious or threatening to the army’s own mission.

  Equally prominent among scouts were so-called “half-breeds,” mixed-blood men descended from white-Indian unions. Among these were French-speaking mixed-bloods like the legendary Baptiste “Little Bat” Garnier, Baptiste “Big Bat” Pourier, Ed Guerrier, Louis Richard, and the Shangrau brothers, Louis and John. Descendants of French traders who married into Indian families as early as the seventeenth century, these French-and Lakota-speaking families were traditionally cultural brokers and conduits between Indian tribes, Europeans, and Americans. But as they lost wealth and influence in the increasingly American nineteenth century, their declining fortunes seemed proof of frontier degeneration and the power of interracial sex to weaken a race that had once been vital. 69

  By their very existence, mixed-blood scouts hinted at uncomfortable facts, at the oft-unspoken transgressions of white Indians who rather than retaining white virtue as they crossed into savagery, became deviant and indulged in interracial sex. The idea was so loaded because popular beliefs equated race with species. Mixed-blood people were infertile hybrids, like the mule, the sterile offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. Thus the term mulatto, from the Spanish word for mule (mulato), and frequently applied to children of white-black unions, also found wide use on the Plains.70 Racial theories maintained that sex between “proximate” and “distant” races, between whites and Indians, for example, produced mulato-like, degenerate races, prone to infertility, but also possessed of excessive (white) intelligence, in the service of inescapable (dark) savagery.71 On the frontier, the children of Indian and white unions were “like the mulatto, quasi-mules,” in the words of one observer, “untrustworthy, and disposed to every villainy.”72

  Such ideas gained a special purchase after the Civil War. At a time when the South was infused with white hysteria over the supposed need to contain the lust of free black men, the westward edge of the nation was by definition a place where widely divergent races met.73 Anglo-Saxonists reassured themselves that the white race—and its civilization—were hardened by the bloodletting of frontier war, and in the 1880s and ’90s Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show reinforced such notions with its triumphalist pageantry of white victory on the Plains. But during the Plains Indian wars, mixed-blood scouts aggravated an old fear of frontier degeneracy, the destabilizing of the white race in lusty entangling of limbs with primitive peoples in the forests and prairies of the American interior. Their very presence called to mind Washington Irving’s 1832 warning that on the Plains “may spring up new and mongrel races,” the “amalgamation of the ‘debris’ and ‘abrasions’ of former races, civilized and savage.”74 In this sense, the frontier held out the possibility that if Americans were to be transformed into a new race, it would be a darker, not a lighter one.

  French-speaking mixed-bloods were not the only harbinger of this fate. Much of the West had belonged to Mexico as recently as 1848. Mexican scouts, including Charles Autubees and his sons, from Bent’s Fort, in Colorado, guided with Cody in 1868.75 Mexicans themselves were ubiquitous reminders of the frontier’s potential for “unfit amalgamation” of Europeans and Indians, a racial mixture that resulted in Mexico’s political weakness and, ultimately, conquest by the racially vigorous United States. 76

  But as much as the imagined specter of the mongrel, miscegenated, monstrous half-breed haunted the westward passage of white America, in real life, mixed-bloods proved indispensable as scouts. Mixed-blood children were potential translators, because they frequently spoke both English or French and one or more Indian languages. Raised among Indians, they often knew the whereabouts of different Indian bands at any time of year. Tutored by Indian uncles, they learned to track—and fight—like few settlers could. The long list of mixed-blood men who rode with Cody in the late 1860s grew longer as the wars continued. For the Powder River campaign of 1876, the army hired “every half-breed at Red Cloud or Spotted Tail agency who could be secured.”77

  Army men might have been able to overlook some of their prejudices against mixed-blood scouts, if only mixed-blood politics had not been so conflicted. Mixed-blood men with family on both sides of the Indian wars did not always flock to the American banner. George Bent, son of American trader William Bent and his Cheyenne wife, Owl Woman, grew up speaking Cheyenne and English. Although he was educated at a boarding school in St. Louis, he chose to live as a Cheyenne, and fought Americans at Sand Creek and in other battles. His brother, Charley Bent, attended the same boarding school as George did. He became one of the most fearsome leaders of the Dog Men, taunting and battling American troopers with startling effect, leading them against Custer’s Seventh Cavalry outside Fort Wallace in the summer of 1867. He became so menacing in American imaginations that settlers and soldiers reported seeing him at the head of war parties from Texas to Nebraska. 78 Ed Guerrier was a mixed-blood scout who joined Cody in scouting for the Fifth Cavalry in 1876. In 1867, he was planning to marry George and Charley Bent’s sister, Julia. He was therefore profoundly uncomfortable to find himself that summer guiding Custer’s Seventh in pursuit of the very village in which Julia was living. Unbeknownst to Custer, he located the village and warned them away, then steered Custer’s troops in another direction.79

  The Bent brothers and their brother-in-law Ed Guerrier were just three of many mixed-bloods who, in the minds of army officers, turned on the higher civilization. To most Americans, the frontier was the boundary line between the white and the red, and the army stood in defense of white homes from Indian raiders who carried white women away into savagery. But mixed-bloods were proof that the central institution of frontier life, the family, sometimes straddled racial lines, and that the settler’s cabin could be the hearth of race mixing. The mixed-blood scout—light-skinned, fluent in English and the enemy language, too—could as easily be a renegade spy.

  With so much suspicion to go around, it is not surprising that white scouts were often tarred with the mixed-blood brush. With a reputation as frontier confidence men, they made dubious scouts at the best of times. And if they could track Indians, were they white men at all? The best of them were suspiciously well informed about the ways of these mysterious Plains nomads. Besides, popular beliefs maintained that tracking was the province of dark-skinned people, who were closest to nature. In the words of one army captain, white men “have not the same acute perceptions” in “the art of trailing or tracking men and animals” that characterized “the Indian or the Mexican.”80

  Where the white Indian was often heroic in American literature, he was in fact a notoriously unstable figure, who could be either hero or villain. In the conquest of Kentucky, Daniel Boone, the consummate white Indian hero, faced off not only against the Shawnees, but against Simon Girty and Alexander McKee, two white men who had become Shawnee. The story of that confrontation between the virtuous white Indian and his renegade
alter egos inspired thousands of American stories and novels in the nineteenth century.81 White Indian renegades embodied a dark warning about the frontier’s potential to convey savagery to the very white people who were supposed to conquer it. Many Americans suspected that absence from white civilization would eventually overwhelm a person’s race loyalty. “Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him,” wrote Herman Melville, “i.e. what is called savagery.” 82 In Kansas, in the late 1860s, soldiers and civilians alike attributed frequent army defeats to phantom white-men-turned-red, and the Plains was rife with the rumor of renegades.83

  A reluctance to confront suspicions of being a renegade likely limited the willingness of other scouts to assume the pose of the white Indian. Certainly there were white scouts who, given a greater willingness to play the game, might have matched Cody’s rise or even surpassed it. Hickok quit scouting for the army after 1868. But even if he had not, his moodiness with journalists and officers made him unpopular with various commanders, including Carr. After Hickok, the scout best situated to capitalize on his fame as a white Indian was probably Frank North. A resident of Colville, Nebraska, North was a middle-class store owner with a wood frame house and a white wife and family. He was highly unusual, though, in that he spoke fluent Pawnee, a language he learned while working as a clerk at the nearby Pawnee reservation. Beginning in the 1860s, he helped organize and rode with three battalions of Pawnee scouts fighting the Sioux and Cheyenne alongside the army. He was the Pawnees’ putative commander, although in reality he appears to have been their translator and liaison to the army command.84

  North had adventures aplenty on the Pawnee scouts’ numerous forays against the Sioux and Cheyenne. He knew Cody well, rode with him more than once, and found his theatrics amusing. He even accompanied the Pawnee veterans in joining Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in 1883, and stayed with the show for two years, until he was injured in the arena. But something held him back. Photographs show him dressed in middle-class jacket and trousers, like a merchant. No buckskin for him. North was already so close to the Pawnees that perhaps he feared a white Indian pose would alienate him from his white neighbors, leery as they were of renegades. Perhaps he was weakened by poor health—his asthma finally killed him in 1885. In any case, he seems never to have understood Indian fighting as anything more than a distasteful, even tragic necessity. In the 1860s, he had little time for frontier imposture. In 1869, dime novelist Ned Buntline read about North in the newspapers, and sought him out at Fort Sedgewick, hoping to write a novel based on his adventures as a “white chief” of the Pawnees. Nobody knows what they said to one another, but according to one colorful (and probably apocryphal) story, North demurred. “If you want a man to fill that bill,” he is said to have told Buntline, “he’s over there sleeping under the wagon.” The man sleeping under the wagon was, of course, William Cody.85

  Other than Hickok, North, and Cody, there were only a few competent white scouts on the Plains. Among the best of these were Will Comstock, Abner “Sharp” Grover, John Y. Nelson, and Ben Clark. All of these men worked at one time or another with William Cody, or in nearby regiments. All of them came to the Plains as fur trappers and market hunters. All were superb at guiding, scouting, and fighting, and some of them were even drawn to white Indian performance (John Y. Nelson was, after all, a member of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show).

  But, significantly, all had “gone native” in ways disturbingly like predecessors on other frontiers. All of them had married, or were rumored to have married, Cheyenne, Sioux, or Comanche wives. All of them spoke English and the language of their Indian families. Their Indian wives, to say nothing of their mixed-blood children, increased the plausibility that they might be spies, making them all the more suspicious to the American public, and to army officers.

  Thus, even the best white scouts were a little too Indian to be acceptable in polite company. Although their talents were often appreciated, officers saw these so-called “squaw men” as peculiar at best and treasonous at worst. Until the post–Civil War period, mixed-race families had been common on the Plains. Many of the most successful traders had Indian wives, as we have seen, in part to better their alliances with powerful clients. But as their Indian in-laws lost power, and as middle-class America expanded onto the Plains, middle-class white women increased in number, and white men with Indian wives were shunted aside as racially degenerative vestiges of a bygone era.

  The army, in pushing the Sioux and Cheyenne from the Plains and facilitating railroad construction and middle-class settlement, thus helped to marginalize mixed-race families at the same time they exploited the talents of their white patriarchs as scouts and guides. In the process, these men became, at best, quaint relics of an older time, backward white men with Indian ways of thinking. General Carr related that Sharp Grover “was a squaw man and had imbibed some of their [Cheyenne] superstitions.” 86 Another Plains witness reported, “No Indian was ever half so superstitious” as Will Comstock. “He had his ‘medicine’ horse, ‘medicine’ field-glass, ‘medicine’ everything, in fact. Even Will’s evil-looking dog was ‘medicine,’ and had a ‘medicine’ collar. If he had bad luck his ‘medicine’ was bad, and something must be done to change the condition of things.” 87

  Socially retarded throwbacks to a vanishing frontier, “squaw men” rarely climbed into the respectable white middle class after the Civil War. They were also a political threat. Despite their pro-U.S. leanings and, in some cases, army heroics, they could not escape the stigma of renegades. 88 Colonel Richard Irving Dodge denounced them as “ruffians” whose large broods of “half-breed children” were “fed and fostered by the Government,” and whose propensity for suborning Indians against the interests of the nation made them a menace. “They are an injury to the country, a detriment to the Indian, and should be abolished.” 89

  Scouts’ intimacy with Indians and the frontier was thus a double-edged sword. It provided the army with keys to white conquest of the savage wilderness, but simultaneously, it implied the danger of race decline, in which the savagery of the frontier essentially conquered the race, turning white men against civilization. In American cultural thought, men were less subject than women to corruption from interracial sex, but they were not immune to suspicions of weakened racial loyalty. In a sense, scout forays into Indian society and Indian sex raised the same fear that Attack on the Settler’s Cabin raised for audiences of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show: the savage capture of civilization.

  ONLY THE MOST concerted effort at simplification could reduce the complex and confusing racial dynamics of the Plains conflicts to a white-on-red war. Even during the Plains wars, Cody himself provided a means to do so. He was that rarity, a competent white scout. Even rarer, he had a white wife and a white daughter, although they were far away from him at the moment. Until he could bring the family together again, he was not without prospects in his effort to become a leading army scout. On the one hand, Indian and mixed-blood scouts had skills, including bilingualism, he could not match. But, on the other, his very ignorance of Indian language protected him from the suspicions swirling around men like Grover and Comstock.

  Cody exploited these social assets through an imposture so aggressive and so skillful that it allowed, even invited, commanders to overlook his shortcomings. He obscured his limitations as a tracker by sticking close to the Indians and mixed-bloods in his scouting parties, and accepting credit for their accomplishments. This was no trivial skill. Most white men, after all, were so afraid or scornful of Indians that they kept their distance even from Indian allies. Cody was not self-conscious about riding with them, and he was even curious to watch them work. Thus, in 1869, he followed a Pawnee trailer in pursuit of a Cheyenne band for miles across a grassland where he and the other white scouts could find no trace of the enemy. When the grass gave way to sand, the tracks of the Cheyenne suddenly were visible. The Pawnee’s abilities awed Cody: “
I take off my hat to him, he is the best I ever saw.”90

  In 1876, officers with General Crook were all but certain that a plume of dust rolling into the distant sky was a huge party of approaching Sioux. Cody bolted from his coterie of Shoshone scouts and dashed toward it, seemingly unafraid. “He’s going to reconnoiter,” remarked Captain Royall. “That’s Bill’s style, you know.” At that remark, a young Shoshone approached the officers, to tell them what he had already told Cody. “No Sioux,” he said. “Heap pony soldier.” Sure enough, the men kicking up that dust cloud turned out to be General Terry’s cavalry.91

  Cody’s imposture, his artful deception that combined some degree of scout skill with some sleight of hand, allowed officers to go about the serious business of fighting Indians while believing in the superiority of white men, and as his celebrity increased, their views seemed ever more vindicated. In the 1890s, the rising militarism of American society, along with the nostalgic paintings of Frederic Remington, and Cody’s own Wild West show, which began to glorify the army as a frontier institution in 1887, would elevate the memory of the U.S. military’s western service. In no small measure, the new appreciation stemmed from the whitewash in these popular images, in which the impoverished, multilingual, multihued troopers, and their weird assemblages of Indian, mixed-blood, and bicultural white scouts, too, all became battle-hardened Anglo-Saxons. But the frontier itself was far more confusing than these later images conveyed. In the 1860s and ’70s, officers and soldiers of the Plains campaigns had no idea they would ever be so appreciated. Between the end of the Civil War in 1865, and the end of hostilities against the Sioux in 1877, the U.S. military struggled to establish dominance on the Plains, in a context of low morale, high desertion in the ranks, pervasive ethnic and racial frictions, and weak political support at home.