In Wild West show drama, Standing Bear and other Indians were powerful symbols of the theory of history embedded in the concept of race. They embodied pure, unalloyed primitivism and savagery. Through conflict with another pure race—of white, civilized people—they were subdued. Buffalo Bill’s cowboys guaranteed that the Indian race would be contained within its original borders—Indian bodies—by enforcing a perimeter around the body of the vulnerable white woman in the settler’s cabin, away from which they drove the Indians.
But through performing in the same Wild West show that expressed white supremacy, Standing Bear and a few other Lakota men found wives across the racial divide at the turn of the century. For the Lakotas, the only thing that made marrying white women a strange concept was white hostility. Race was less a factor in Lakota identity than residence and behavior. By living among Lakota and acting Lakota, one became Lakota. In some ways, Standing Bear’s marriage to Louise was traditional. Lakota culture allowed for marriage of alien women through capture in war or through friendly alliance. Any Cheyenne, Pawnee, or American woman who married a Lakota man, learned to speak Lakota, and made a home with him among Lakota, became Lakota.9 Perhaps because intermarriage was a traditional means of creating alliances with powerful families and peoples, Sioux men who won the hands of white women were often ambitious and forward-looking. In 1890, while Standing Bear was convalescing in Vienna, a Santee Sioux man named Winner—who had taken the name Charles Eastman— became the first Indian to receive a medical degree, from Boston University. In the same year that Standing Bear married Louise Rieneck, Dr. Charles Eastman married Elaine Goodale in New York. 10
For all its exclusionary racial teachings, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show was a vehicle for at least a few, and probably a great many, Indian men to meet and love white women, and in at least a few cases the lovers married. Although the vast majority of its cast did not have the experience of Standing Bear and Louise, for some, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, spectacle of race enmity, became a path to a future that reconciled blood and culture. The future lay in mixing peoples together.
Standing Bear and Louise (Across-the-Eastern-Water-Woman), at their cabin, with granddaughters Rose Two Bonnets and Lula Two Bonnets, c. 1915. Courtesy Arthur Amiotte.
This was Standing Bear’s strategy. He refused to learn English himself, but insisted that his children and grandchildren learn it. He refused baptism, too, until his daughters prevailed on him late in life. But at the same time, he and Louise grafted European and Indian business and craft techniques onto one another to make a new living, to carve out a new kind of story about the Lakotas and Europeans, which they would live. The contours of that story floated beneath the surface of frontier ideologies like Buffalo Bill’s. But still, they hearkened to a real frontier history of mixed blood, which, as we have seen, typified relations on the northern Plains for many people throughout the nineteenth century. Standing Bear and Louise simply dismissed all the stigma of “miscegenation” among Europeans and Americans, and embraced that venerable legacy of mixed marriage as the path to a bright future.
Standing Bear devoted himself to history and art. While his daughters were growing up, he spent most evenings, after his work was done, painting scenes of the Lakota past, especially of his own generation, in traditional style, on large pieces of white muslin. He consulted with neighbors, his age-mates, on details of the images, and the deeds and events they recorded. In 1930, the poet John Niehardt arrived on White Horse Creek, asking to interview Black Elk. Standing Bear joined the discussions. Two years later, when Niehardt published Black Elk Speaks, Standing Bear’s testimony appeared with Black Elk’s, and his illustrations appeared throughout the book. To this day, his art is among the most evocative, and coveted, of the period.
Louise and Standing Bear lived at White Horse Creek until 1933, when she died soon after being in a car accident. The reservation reeled from depression and drought. Standing Bear grew tired, depressed. He passed later that year.
Arthur Amiotte is one of Standing Bear’s great-grandsons, and like Standing Bear, he is an artist. Amiotte works from his studio in Custer, South Dakota, and his renowned collages explore his family history, mingling painted images of Indians—including Standing Bear—with early automobiles, frame houses, and photographs of Indians at church, on the road, and in Europe.
Much of Amiotte’s early inspiration came from stories he heard from his grandmother Christina, a daughter of Standing Bear and Louise who lived in the home her parents built until 1985, and continued their tradition of generosity all her days. As Amiotte grew up, she related stories of the many relatives who would travel to White Horse Creek, to pitch their tents outside the Standing Bear home in warm weather. There were people gardening, tanning hides, plowing, and butchering cattle, and children playing ball with inflated cow bladders. In the evenings, after they turned the lamps out, Standing Bear and Louise lay in their bed, with family and sometimes guests sleeping on the floor in bedrolls. In the darkness, they told stories. Some were ancient tales. Some told of Standing Bear and his age-mates, and their adventures in Europe. Sometimes, Standing Bear and Louise performed the dialogue of the characters in the stories, and their ability to mimic voices enthralled the children, and kept them in stitches. This tradition, too, continued after they were gone. Christina and her husband, Joseph Mesteth, a mixed-blood of Lakota and Mexican descent, told their stories to their children and grandchildren.
This was more than entertainment. In the darkness, the children drifted off, to sagas of hero-creators, warrior ancestors, and long, strange trips with Buffalo Bill all weaving the space between waking world and sleep, where the consciousness of a people resides.11
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 H
ill, 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 horsemen, 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.
Louis S. Warren Page 57
