Ripper J. American Stories: Living American History. Volume 2: From 1865

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AMERICAN STORIES

5. All quotations from Ames’s diary can be found in Mary Ames, From a New

England Woman’s Diary in Dixie in 1865 (Springﬁeld, MA: 1906), Documenting

the American South, University of North Carolina, http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/

ames/menu.html.

6. DuBois, Souls of Black Folk, 25.

W.E.B. DuBois, “The Problem of Work,” AME Church Review 19 (October

1903).

8. DuBois, Souls of Black Folk, 25.

9. DuBois, Souls of Black Folk, 40.

COWBOYS AND INDIANS

Cowboys and Indians

Annie Oakley (Keystone/Getty Images)

AMERICAN STORIES

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West

Many late–nineteenth-century Americans lived according to the rhythms of

city streets or farm ﬁelds, presidential elections, newspaper headlines, rail-

road

schedules, and children’s birthday parties. For entertainment, however,

nothing beat a good gunﬁght or buffalo hunt, preferably when viewed from

a distance. By 1883, lawmakers had outlawed gunﬁghts and buffalo hunters

had killed most of the buffalo. William F. Cody had just the cure: Buffalo

Bill’s Wild West, a swirling menagerie of real Indians, real gunslingers,

lots of dust, and lots of make-believe. Anybody with the entrance fee could

settle in for four hours of stagecoach shoot-outs, buffalo hunts, and cavalry

massacres, served up by the headliner himself—Buffalo Bill. William Cody

was a handsome showman who had really been to the places he dramatized

and who had done at least half of what he showed in the big ring. Rounding

out the lineup were such wilderness luminaries as Geronimo, Sitting Bull,

and Annie Oakley—defeated Indian chiefs and no-nonsense ladies. Buffalo

Bill’s Wild West shows ﬁrst went on tour in 1883, within seven years of the

last massacre of Indians (at Wounded Knee in 1890), within the decade that

the buffalo verged on extinction, and within the generation that the United

States absorbed the Great Plains into its dominion. Cody and his performers

gave Americans (and Europeans) what they wanted to see and in the process

established America’s enduring western myth: gun-happy men on horses

fearlessly taking the deserts, the prairies, and the buffalo away from feather-

draped Indian warriors.

illiam Cody’s audiences had other options for entertainment. A wide-

eyed consumer with no taste for the purely bawdy could see the Barnum

and Bailey Circus; high-end or low-end productions of Shakespeare’s plays;

baseball matches; and any traveling scientists, magicians, philosophers,

socialist lecturers, astrologers, mystics, or charlatans who happened to be

passing through town. Insulting by today’s standards was the popular vaude-

ville

production known as a minstrel show. Some minstrel acts featured black

performers, but others featured white performers in blackface: white men

who darkened their skin with burned cork and accentuated their lips with red.

White audiences smiled and clapped at the stereotyped, smiley-faced, “yes

suh, massa” gimmicks. The blackface minstrelsy show, a mixture of imita-

tion

and insult, reinforced biased notions about black people’s incompetence,

amusing imbecility, and lewd physicality. Consumers who liked more ﬂesh

in their fun could cheer on ﬁghters like John L. Sullivan and “Gentleman”

Jim Corbett at boxing matches or enjoy the lusty box-houses, which mixed

dancing, drinking, and women in skimpy outﬁts—on stage or off, depend-

ing

on the client’s desire. Prostitutes were a staple of American life; illegal

COWBOYS AND INDIANS

in some places, tolerated in most, and even taxed in others. Author Curtis F.

Smith regales readers with a pithy comment frequently heard on the muddy

streets of Bellingham, Washington, in the waning years of the 1800s: “You

could get a glass of gin,” the saying went, “a tattoo and a social disease, all

within one block.”

William Kittredge, the cowboy prose-poet of the West,

calls brothels “civic sacriﬁce areas,” a way of explaining how the prostitutes

were “sacriﬁced” to range riders’ lusts so that a town’s wives and daughters

could be spared.

Performers like the two “Little Egypts” became famous for

their belly-shaking “hoochie-coochie” dances. But nobody was better known,

better liked, or more watched than William F. Cody. He stole the show.

In the three decades before Bill Cody could begin to make millions of

dollars pretending to kill Indians and be killed by Indians, the ﬁnal wars for

the West had been fought. Ever since the 1840s, when white settlers began

struggling across the Great Plains on their way to Oregon and California, there

had been troubles between Indians and colonists. In 1851, at Fort Laramie, in

present-day Wyoming, U.S. representatives and thousands of Plains Indians

held a council. The Indians agreed to allow white people passage across the

plains in return for yearly gifts from the federal government and ﬁrm guar-

antees

of Native American sovereignty. The Fort Laramie Treaty speciﬁed

vast expanses as the perpetual territory of the Sioux, Cheyennes, Arapahos,

and other tribes.

here was, of course, a problem with this arrangement. People’s intentions

were not necessarily the problem. Pressure for land and all that the land held

was, as always, the problem. Immigration into the United States swelled an

already-expanding population. Most white people fundamentally believed

that Native Americans did not either need or deserve so much land. The U.S.

economy relied on creating new markets and exploiting new resources, and

there was gold throughout the northern plains, especially in the Black Hills

of the Dakotas and in Montana. Few U.S. citizens or policy makers honored

the Fort Laramie Treaty, so it became the task of the military to force Native

American peoples to accept every treaty infringement that occurred. Some of

the Indians’ staunchest advocates were the military men ordered to shove the

Indians onto ever-shrinking reservations. Oliver O. Howard (former head of

the Freedmen’s Bureau) was ordered, in 1877, to move Chief Joseph and the

Oregonian Nez Percés to scrublands in Idaho. Howard protested, but carried

out his orders, chasing Joseph, other chiefs like Looking Glass, and their

few hundred followers from Oregon eastward, much of the way along the

same route Lewis, Clark, and Sacagawea had followed seventy years before.

Joseph and Looking Glass were trying to get to Canada, where the Hunkpapa

Lakota Sitting Bull had taken hundreds of his people, also in ﬂight from the

U.S. military. But General Nelson A. Miles arrested their passage at Bear Paw

AMERICAN STORIES

Mountain, within sight of the border, staining too much snow with too much

blood. The Nez Percés and Hunkpapa Sioux were not normally friends, but

in this case, an enemy’s enemy would have done.

Buffalo Bill’s extravaganzas embellished and gloriﬁed all things martial

and wild, like the death of George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn.

But in Oglala and Brule Sioux villages, in sodbuster hovels, and across the

seas of native grass, families relied less on the gun and the sword than on the

rain, the game, the wheat, and the corn. Cody turned conquest into a play just

as the conquest was entering its ﬁnal act.

Horses: Flesh and Iron

The horse became to the Sioux what the car became to later Americans: a new

way of life; a way to get from here to there a whole lot faster, transforming

families, motion, space, and food options in the process. Spanish conquis-

tadors

brought the horse to North America in 1519. Sometime around 1700,

the peoples of the Great Plains began to ride, and the buffalo were no longer

faster than their hunters. The most numerous people on the plains—the Sioux

(really a confederacy of bands known as Brules, Oglalas, Hunkpapas, and

Miniconjous, all of whom were afﬁliates of larger groups, the Lakotas and

Dakotas)—wrapped their existence around the hunt, the horse, and the buf-

falo.

Men and boys galloped from northern Texas past the Canadian border,

from the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi, learning how to kill with few

arrows, how to skin the great beasts with sure and easy cuts, how to eat the

still-warm organs when stomachs were empty and home lay hours away.

Neither one horse nor one pony was enough. A single mount could tire too

easily. Seasoned ﬁghters and older leaders often had herds of their own, some-

times

more than 100 horses, acquired through breeding and raiding. Sioux

bands did ﬁght other tribes, but warfare usually involved taking hostages and

horses rather than slaughtering enemies. Prestige came from sneaking into

an enemy’s camp and stealing a prized stallion or from galloping up to a foe

and touching his arm with a stick (counting coup), both of which required

greater ﬁnesse and style than piercing a man’s heart with an arrow. Elite war-

rior

societies, however, attested to the importance of warfare. Other Plains

Indians had gained the horse ﬁrst and used it to thrash the Sioux, who, in turn,

had become strong and warlike by necessity. When Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa

band of Lakotas ﬁnally mastered the horse in the late 1700s, they reclaimed

lost territory and took more besides. The horse was speed, power, wealth,

and freedom, and the romance of the hunt blended into the sacredness of the

buffalo and the sun.

U.S. civilization had its own sacraments and idols, chief among them the

COWBOYS AND INDIANS

headlong plunge into change and “progress” aboard the railroad. The idea for a

transcontinental railroad stretched back at least to 1845, but sectional conﬂict had

prevented its start. Northern and southern congressmen could not agree where

the ﬁrst rails should run. Then, in 1862, President Lincoln signed the transcon-

inental railroad into law, providing federal funding and land appropriations for

two companies to do the work: the Central Paciﬁc, working from the West, and

the Union Paciﬁc, working from the East. Federal support for the railroad was

necessary to get it built, because the federal government claimed the whole of

the West. The railroad was going to stitch the continent together with all the

chugging, churning energy of the industrial age, accelerating the conquest of

distance, accelerating the conquest of the Plains Indians, who also claimed the

trans-Mississippi West. By 1860, some 300,000 Indians lived west of the Mis-

issippi. By 1868, workers had placed enough railroad tracks to separate the

immense buffalo herds into southern and northern halves. By 1883, the herds

had shrunk from as many as 13 million buffalo to no more than 1,000. The thick

hides of the shaggy lords of the plains were stripped, cut, and cured into belts,

many of which got used to run the factory machines of the East.

United States colonization of the plains did not stop during the Civil War.

In 1864 alone, 150,000 people jostled west in prairie schooners, churning

up the dust of Kansas and Nebraska. The completion of the transcontinental

railroad in 1869 meant colonists no longer had to worry about biting freezes,

six-month cholera-plagued treks, or lack of food when heading toward the

West Coast. For that matter, Congress had awarded railroad companies

checkerboard patterns of land on either side of their lines, which they happily

gave away or sold for pennies to anyone willing to settle in the grassy plains

between Sacramento and Omaha. Congress sweetened the pot in 1862 with

the Homestead Act, which offered 160-acre plots of land free—except for an

overall eighteen-dollar ﬁling fee—to any head-of-household (male or female,

white or black) who would stay and cultivate them for at least ﬁve years. The

hellish iron and steel smelting factories of Ohio and Pennsylvania produced

the hard metal tracks of conquest, which Irish immigrant laborers laid in the

East and Chinese laborers laid across the West.

Just like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, other depictions of the West were

intentionally misleading. When the Central Paciﬁc and Union Paciﬁc teams

met at Promontory Point, Utah, to drive a golden spike into the completed

tracks, the ofﬁcial photographs showed a conspicuous absence of anyone Chi-

ese. Precise numbers are not possible, but perhaps 15,000 Chinese immigrant

laborers (many intentionally recruited) had blasted, dug, and heaved over and

through the imposing mountain peaks of the Sierra Nevada of California.

There they had dangled in baskets over the edges of murderous precipices,

carefully hand-drilling small holes into the rock face where they would set

AMERICAN STORIES

blasting powder, light the fuse, tug on the rope, and hope to be hauled back

up before the explosion killed them. Many men froze in instant graves of rock

and ice when avalanches rumbled over work teams toiling in the midst of the

worst winter blizzards. These nameless “Johns”—a pejorative term used to

strip Chinese laborers of their own identity—built the tracks that took Ameri-

cans

over the Great Plains, but the Chinese faces remained invisible in media

celebrations. The “iron horse” could now run over the continent.

Railroad rider and horse rider were sure to collide. When they did, the results

would be ﬁnal and devastating. There was no question that the Great Plains

would be taken from Native Americans. The only questions involved how the

land would change hands: peacefully or violently, orderly or chaotically.

Buffalo Bill, Black Kettle, and the Wars for the West

After a civilization has destroyed or tamed its original wilderness, the civili-

zation

then goes about memorializing all that was lost. Indian shamans like

Geronimo and Sitting Bull were the prairie and desert witches of white Ameri-

can

nightmares, conjuring savage magic from a spirit world that threatened

the push of progress. In Arizona, Geronimo and his Chiracahua Apaches

evaded—and in their evasions tormented—the best U.S. military command-

ers

in the ﬁeld, Generals George Crook and Nelson Miles, until Geronimo

ﬁnally surrendered in 1886, having been chased by 5,000 soldiers while he

ﬂed with thirty-four people, women and children included. Sitting Bull and his

Hunkpapas (along with many other Sioux and Cheyenne bands) decimated the

Seventh Cavalry under the reckless, egomaniacal George Armstrong Custer

at the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn. In their guises as roaming warriors,

Geronimo and Sitting Bull were barbarians whom the U.S. Cavalry needed

to catch. By the mid-1880s, the cavalry had accomplished this goal, and with

their apprehension the last stirrings of Native American military resistance

evaporated from the West. Farmers and ranchers descended unimpeded onto

the Great Plains to go about the hard arts of farming and ranching with help

from the federal government through railroad ﬁnancing, passage of laws like

the 1887 Desert Lands Act (which provided dirt-cheap lands to those who

could irrigate arid expanses), and maintenance of the Indian reservations. All

that remained was for a master storyteller to transform the once fearsome

Indians warriors into salable showpieces. Sitting Bull and Geronimo both

starred brieﬂy in William Cody’s traveling Wild West.

William Cody, born in 1846, had a hard-knock childhood in Kansas, cru-

cible

of America’s sectional strife. In 1854, his father, Isaac, was stabbed by

a proslavery neighbor at a political rally. Isaac died three years later, leaving

eleven-year-old William the not-uncommon task of earning money for the

COWBOYS AND INDIANS

family. Overnight, boys became men, and girls became women, in an era when

epidemics of disease and violence regularly snatched fathers and mothers

from families with young children. An uncanny knack for path ﬁnding and

horse riding landed young Bill Cody his ﬁrst paying job in the saddle as a

messenger for a local freight service run by the same men who soon opened

the short-lived Pony Express. Though only fourteen when the Pony Express

started its ﬁrst runs in 1860, Cody had already impressed his bosses enough

that they gave the lad his own route. The western novelist and historian Larry

McMurtry points out that the Pony Express could not have lasted long, even

with riders like Cody, who made at least one circuit of more than 300 miles in

only a few days. “The owners [of the Express],” McMurtry writes, “knew they

were racing the telegraph and the telegraph soon beat them: The two coasts

were linked in November of 1860—the singing wires, as the Indians called

them, had come to stay.”

The metal technologies of telegraph and railroad

closed old opportunities and opened new ones. If William Cody could not

make a living delivering letters from the back of a horse, he still could make

a living riding one.

Cody

joined a Union Kansas cavalry regiment during the Civil War and

stayed on with the army as a scout after the Confederacy surrendered in

April 1865. From then on, he delivered messages from fort to fort, guided

the cavalry in its futile chases after mobile bands of Indians, killed buffalo

to feed railroad crews (earning him his nickname), roped cattle, and acted in

dreadfully written theater productions. Cody met the people with whom he

would associate and travel for the rest of his days: Louisa Frederici, a New

Orleans socialite whom he married and stayed with—in matrimony if not

always in location or harmony—until he died; the Sioux leaders Spotted Tail

and Sitting Bull; the skill-less playwright and dime novelist Ned Buntline

(who helped popularize Buffalo Bill); the shotgun deadeye Annie Oakley;

the lawman, gambler, and gunﬁghter Wild Bill Hickok; and Gordon Lillie,

better known as Pawnee Bill, who bought out Cody’s Wild West company in

the early 1900s. By 1900, Cody had also shaken hands with England’s Queen

Victoria, more than one U.S. president, a Russian prince, countless fans, and

a slew of desperadoes and dignitaries—American Indian, European, and

Arabian. Muslims rode in the Wild West beginning in 1891 when he hired

Syrian and Arabian riders. He also changed the name of the show to Buffalo

Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World, a globalized

name to match his global cast. Cody’s variety in acquaintances and friends

speaks not only to his charm and celebrity, but also to the swirling events that

grooved the channels of American life through which he traveled.

While the Civil War raged in November 1864, no less ﬁerce after three

years of bloodshed, snow coated the high plains of Colorado. A few hundred

AMERICAN STORIES

Cheyennes and Arapahos camped to the southeast of Denver along the banks

of Sand Creek, some forty miles from the nearest army base, Fort Lyon. In

the preceding months, small bands of Cheyennes known as Dog Soldiers had

attacked U.S. citizens, who were encroaching on traditional hunting grounds.

Silver, gold, and farmland had attracted colonists to Colorado, and the region’s

latest colonists were up in arms, literally, over the Indian attacks. On Novem-

ber

29, 1864, a militia force calling itself the First Colorado Cavalry, led by

Colonel John M. Chivington, a Methodist Episcopal minister from Denver,

rode down upon the camping Cheyennes and Arapahos at Sand Creek. The

people camping had wanted to avoid trouble, and, in fact, the families stretched

out along the river were there at the invitation of Colorado’s governor, John

Evans, who had offered them the protection of the garrison at Fort Lyon.

On the way to Sand Creek, Chivington had actually stopped at the fort and

recruited some last-minute volunteers from the regular army troops posted

there. Just before ordering the attack on the village, Chivington was reputed

to have said, “Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.”

The leader in camp was Black Kettle, who had recently come with his wife

to Fort Lyon at the army’s request to show his loyalty and peaceful intentions.

A white ﬂag and a U.S. ﬂag ﬂew over Black Kettle’s tent. Chivington and

his 700 troops circled the village and unleashed riﬂe and cannon ﬁre indis-

criminately

, killing scores in the initial volleys, mainly women and children.

As one soldier on the scene later described it, “[Men], women and children,

were scalped, ﬁngers cut off to get the rings on them.” The same soldier also

saw “a Lt. Col. cut off ears, of all he came across, a squaw ripped open and

a child taken from her, little children shot, while begging for their lives . . .

women shot while on their knees, with their arms around soldiers a begging

for their lives.”

In the months after the massacre, Lieutenant Captain Silas

Soule recalled more atrocities. Soule, who had refused to participate in the

killing and tried to intervene to no avail, recalled how “squaws snatches were

cut out for trophies.” He said, “you would think it impossible for white men

to butcher and mutilate human beings as they did there.”

In all, militia and army regulars killed about 160 (nearly one-fourth)

of the Cheyennes and Arapahos at Sand Creek. Soon after the massacre,

Chivington displayed “trophies”—scalps and other body parts cut from his

victims—in Denver theaters and saloons packed with enthusiastic crowds.

Although a congressional committee and President Ulysses S. Grant held

Chivington responsible, no ofﬁcial action was taken against him, and he lived

until 1892, working some of those years as a sheriff. One of Chivington’s

partisans assassinated Silas Soule on a Denver street, in part because Soule

had testiﬁed before an investigative committee against Chivington. Some-

ow, Black Kettle survived the attack at Sand Creek. After the massacre

COWBOYS AND INDIANS

he found his injured wife—shot nine times—and carried her to safety on

his back. Then the survivors began an arduous ﬁfty-mile trek to a nearby

encampment at Smoky Hill River, some “shufﬂing along as best they could,

the most severely wounded on horseback.”

In 1868, another infamous char-

acter, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, killed Black Kettle and

his wife on the banks of the Washita River. The killings at Sand Creek and

the Washita were typical of the confusion and hurt that William Cody rode

through in his years as a scout and hunter. Like a stage magician transmut-

ng tragedy into pageant, Cody befriended men he had once fought against

and recruited them for his show.

Sitting Bull (Tatanka-Iyotanka) was born more than a decade before Wil-

iam Cody somewhere in the northern plains near the Black Hills in present-day

South Dakota. By the early 1860s, when serious troubles were beginning to

ﬂare between the Sioux and the United States, Sitting Bull, then in his early

thirties, had already distinguished himself as a daring ﬁghter. Later he would

become a man of powerful visions, able, so it seemed, to see the future. He

fought for the ﬁrst time at the age of fourteen against a group of Crows. From

horseback, bare chest catching the wind, Sitting Bull bludgeoned a Crow

warrior and earned his ﬁrst feather. When gold was discovered in the Rocky

Mountains in 1862, a steady trafﬁc of miners and settlers crossed Sioux lands

that had been set aside by treaty as their sole territory. From this time until

1881, Sitting Bull resisted all U.S. attempts to displace his people and corral

him onto a reservation.

ontana became a territory in 1864. An Oglala headman in the area,

Red Cloud, agreed to let a new immigration route, the Bozeman Trail, pass

through the territory. But the U.S. Army built forts and intervened on behalf

of passers-through who harassed Red Cloud’s people and stole their land.

From 1866 to 1868, Red Cloud organized such effective offensives that the

army, for the only time in the history of the West, agreed to dismantle its

three forts in the area and leave Red Cloud’s people alone. The new arrange-

ents were made in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, in which the Black

Hills was set aside forever as Sioux territory. Three years later, Red Cloud

traveled by railroad to Washington, DC, to meet with President Grant and

tour various East Coast cities. Grant’s intention was to awe Red Cloud with

the industrial might and sheer population of the States. The plan worked, and

although Red Cloud argued passionately against future attempts to reduce

the size of his people’s reservations, he did not ﬁght again, recognizing the

futility of struggling against the United States. Sitting Bull, however, had

not yet been convinced that his cause was hopeless.

Soon after Red Cloud was feted with ﬁreworks and steak in Washington

in 1871, Sitting Bull added to his own legend by sitting down in an entirely