Captivated and Buffaloed: The fascination with Indian captivity

and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show

Elsie G. Holzwarth

Chicago Literary Club

April 11, 2011

In 1676 the Narragansett Indians attacked the Puritans in Massachusetts. Mary Rowlandson described the scene. “There were twelve killed, some shot, some stabb’d with . . . Spears, some knock’d down with . . . Hatchets. When we are in prosperity, Oh the Little that we think of such dreadful Sights, and to see our dear Friends and Relations lie bleeding out their Heart-blood upon the Ground! . . . All of them stript naked by a company of hellhounds, roaring, singing, ranting and insulting, as if they would have torn our very hearts out, yet the Lord by his Almighty power, preserved a number of us from death, for there were twenty four of us taken alive: and carried Captive.”[1] After three months she was ransomed by her husband. Her written narrative was a best seller in 1682 and went to thirty editions.

In 1758 Mary Jemison was captured by Shawnees in western Pennsylvania. She was about 15 years old. Two years later she was married to a Delaware Indian, as she notes, “according to Indian custom. Sheninjee was a noble man; large in stature; elegant in his appearance; generous in his conduct; courageous in war; a friend to peace, and a great lover of justice. He supported a degree of dignity far above his rank, and merited and received the confidence and friendship of all the tribes with whom he was acquainted. Yet, Sheninjee was an Indian. The idea of spending my days with him, at first seemed perfectly irreconcilable to my feelings: but his good nature, generosity, tenderness, and friendship towards me, soon gained my affection; and, strange as it may seem, I loved him!”[2] She had two children, one of whom survived. When her husband died she refused to be ransomed.

Jemison was then married to Hiokatoo, a Seneca. She bore six more children. “During the term of nearly fifty years that I lived with him I received, according to Indian customs, all the kindness and attention that was my due as his wife. . . (W)ar was his trade from his youth . . . (W)hen he spoke of the ambush, the combat, the spoiling of his enemies and the sacrifice of the victims . . . the warmth of the able warrior seemed to animate his frame . . . He was a man of tender feelings to his friends, ready and willing to assist them in distress, yet, as a warrior, his cruelties to his enemies perhaps were unparalleled, and will not admit a word of palliation.”[3] After the Revolutionary War she would not leave the Indians because they wanted to keep her oldest son as a warrior and counselor. But, “another [reason], more powerful, if possible, was, that I had got a large family of Indian children, that I must take with me; and that if I should be so fortunate as to find my relatives, they would despise them, if not myself; and treat us as enemies, or, at least, with a degree of cold indifference, which I thought I could not endure.”[4] Although written in the first person, Mary Jemison’s story was actually orally related by her after she had lived among the Seneca for about 70 years. Her narrative was a best seller in 1824 and was reissued throughout the nineteenth century.

The fascination with the so-called “wild Indians” and their relations with white women captives was reflected not only in the popularity of captivity narratives, but also of fiction. The five novels of James Fenimore Cooper known as the Leatherstocking Tales were published between 1823 and 1841. Immensely popular, they captured the imagination of readers who read of damsels in distress, captured by Indians but saved

by heroes from “evils worse than death.”[5] Cooper describes Indians in his novels as fully-formed characters, giving them personalities and dialogues in voices of their own. He includes the so-called “noble savage”: valiant, brave and honest, with a “loftiness of … spirit”[6] and the “wild Indian”: hostile, heartless and deceitful.

In The Prairie Cooper’s “noble savage” is a Pawnee “in every particular a warrior of fine stature and admirable proportions. . . The outlines of his lineaments were strikingly noble and nearly approaching to Roman, though the secondary features of his face were slightly marked with the well-known traces of his Asiatic origin. The peculiar tint of the skin, which in itself is so well designed to aid the effect of a martial expression, had received an additional aspect of wild ferocity from the colors of the war paint. . . His head was, as usual, shaved to the crown, where a large and gallant scalp lock seemed to challenge the grasp of his enemies. . . His body, notwithstanding the lateness of the season, was nearly naked, and the portion which was clad bore a vestment no warmer than a light robe of the finest dressed deerskin, beautifully stained with the rude design of some daring exploit, and which was carelessly worn, as if more in pride than from any unmanly regard to comfort. His leggings were of bright scarlet cloth, the only evidence about his person that he had held communion with the traders of the palefaces. But as if to furnish some offset to this solitary submission to a womanish vanity, they were fearfully fringed, from the gartered knee to the bottom of the moccasin, with the hair of human scalps. He leaned lightly with one hand on a short hickory bow, while the other rather touched than sought support from the long, delicate handle of an ashen lance. A

quiver made of the cougar skin, from which the tail of an animal [was appended] as a characteristic ornament, was slung at his back; and a shield of hides, quaintly emblazoned with another of his warlike deeds, was suspended from his neck by a thong of sinews.”[7]

But the encroachment of the palefaces onto the Great Plains is imminent. “ ‘The earth is very large,’ the chief commenced after a pause of . . . true dignity; . . . why can the children of my great white father never find room on it?’ ”[8] A motley crew of squatters is captured and they meet a “wild” savage. The lustful Sioux chief enters the wigwam where the white women are held. “Surprise kept the females silent and nearly breathless. Though accustomed to the sight of savage warriors in the horrid panoply of their terrible profession, there was something so startling in the entrance and so audacious in the inexplicable look of their conqueror that the eyes of both [women] sank to the earth under a feeling of terror and embarrassment. [A fellow captive, an old trapper, declares]

“ ‘Lady, . . . a savage is a savage, and you are not to look for the uses and formalities of the settlements on a bleak and windy prairie.’ ”[9]

The trapper tries to translate the chief’s speech to the women. “ ‘Spare your breath,’ she said; ‘all that a savage says is not to be repeated before a Christian lady.’ ‘My daughters have no need of ears to understand what a great Dakota says,’ returned the trapper, addressing himself to the expecting [chief]. ‘The look he has given and the signs he has made are enough. They understand him; they wish to think of his words, for the children of great braves, such as their father is, do nothing without much thought.’

With this explanation, so flattering to the energy of his eloquence and so promising to his

future hopes, the [chief] was [in] every way content.”[10]

In 1861 Mark Twain took a stagecoach from Missouri to Nevada encountering Goshute Indians outside Salt Lake City whom he describes as “a silent, sneaking, treacherous-looking race; taking note of everything, covertly, like all the other ‘Noble Red Men’[11] [written in quotes to show his sarcasm]. . . The disgust which the Goshutes gave me, a disciple of Cooper and a worshipper of the red man – even of the scholarly savages in [Cooper’s] The Last of the Mohicans [here he sarcastically refers to the speaking voices Cooper gives the Indians] . . . set me to examining authorities, to see if perchance I had been overestimating the red man while viewing him through the yellow moonshine of romance . . . It was curious to see how quickly the paint and tinsel fell away from him and left him treacherous, filthy, and repulsive. . .”[12]

Another critic was George Armstrong Custer who derided Cooper “to whose writings more than to those of any other author are the people speaking the English language indebted for a false and ill-judged estimate of the Indian character. . . Stripped of the beautiful romance with which we have been so long willing to envelop him, transferred from the inviting pages of the novelist to the localities where we are compelled to meet with him, in his native village, on the war path, and when raiding upon our frontier settlements and lines of travel, the Indian forfeits his claim to the appellation of the ‘noble red man.’ ”[13]

Custer relates the captivity of the Box family in Texas by the Kiowa. “No pen can describe the painful tortures of mind and body endured by the unfortunate family. They

remained as captives in the hands of the Indians for more than a year, during which time

the eldest daughter, a beautiful girl just ripening into womanhood, was exposed to a fate

infinitely more dreadful than death itself. She first fell to one of the principal chiefs, who,

after robbing her of that which was more precious than life, and forcing her to become the victim of his brutal lust, bartered her in return for two horses to another chief; he

again, after wearying of her, traded her to a chief of a neighboring band; and in that way the unfortunate girl was passed from one to another of her savage captors, undergoing a life so horribly brutal that, when meeting her upon her release from captivity, one could only wonder how a young girl, nurtured in civilization and possessed of the natural refinement and delicacy of thought which she exhibited, could have survived such degrading treatment.”[14]

In August, 1862 the Dakota Sioux, led by Chief Little Crow, waged a six week war against the settlers and the U.S. Army. Among those captured near the reservation in Minnesota, where her husband was the physician, were Sarah Wakefield and their two small children. She was saved from being shot to death by the Indian Chaska who recognized her as the doctor’s wife. She writes, six years previously “at the time of the battle between the Chippewas and Sioux . . . many Sioux were wounded, and my husband attended them, extracting bullets, etc., and they often said he saved many of their lives; and now I was with them they said they would protect me and mine.”[15] And so the old Indians did, hiding her in woods and ravines, in haystacks, and under piles of robes.

A drunken Indian tried to rape her. The noble Chaska, whose wife was dead,

intervened. “ ‘I will take her for my wife, for I have none.’ [He then tells her] ‘You must let me lie down beside you or he will kill you, he is so drunk. I am a good man, and my wife is in the “spirit world,” and can see me, and I will not harm you.’ It was constantly reported and many believed that I was his wife, and I dared not contradict it, but rather encouraged everyone to believe so, for I was in fear all the while that [the other Indian] would find out we had deceived him.”[16] She and her children were rescued by the Army.

Many Indians surrendered and were tried by a military tribunal. Wakefield testified for Chaska. “They soon . . . began to say that I was in love; that I was his wife; that I preferred living with him to my husband, and all such horrid, abominable reports.”[17] Three hundred and three Indians were condemned to death. Each case was reviewed by President Abraham Lincoln whose grandfather, also Abraham Lincoln, had been killed by an Indian in Kentucky while he was planting corn. Lincoln granted reprieves, except to murderers and rapists, and thirty-eight Indians were simultaneously hanged in the largest mass execution in American history.

It was a tragedy for Chaska. His name “was on the list that were recommended to mercy,” writes Wakefield. “The Indian named Chaskadon, that the President ordered to be hanged, killed a pregnant woman and cut out her child, and they hung Chaska who was only convicted of being present when [a white man] was killed. . . I am sure, in my own mind, it was done intentionally. . . If the President had not plainly stated what the man was convicted for, then, probably there might have been a mistake made, but as it was, it was either carelessness or . . . intentional; for every man was numbered as he was

arrested, and the President sent the number, as well as the cause of his punishment.”[18]

The captivation with Indian attacks, and Indian-white relations between the sexes,

peaked in the fiction that became “the staple diet of American popular literature,”[19] the so-called “vicious and sensational”[20] dime novel. One writer noted these slim volumes “became, quite unjustly, anathema to preachers, teachers and stern parents.”[21] “Through them cavorted courageous men, virtuous women, and ‘hostile,’ bloodthirsty,’ and ‘savage Indians.’ ”[22] Dime novel writer Ned Buntline visited William F. Cody, a scout with the 5^th U.S. Cavalry, in Nebraska. In 1869 Buntline began a series portraying Cody as “the heroic Buffalo Bill, who killed thousands of buffalo, protected women, and drove off attacking Indians to provide food and safety for settlers.”[23]

In his autobiography Buffalo Bill brags that he earned his title by killing 4,280 buffalo in less than eighteen months to feed the men constructing the Kansas Pacific

Railroad. Estimates are there were from at least 30 million to one billion buffalo at the

beginning of the nineteenth century. “The buffalo was a principal resource of the Plains

Indians, furnishing them with food, hides for robes, skins for shelter and boats, bones for

tools and utensils, and buffalo chips (dung) for fuel.”[24] In 1959 Manly S. Mumford read his paper The Skull of a Buffalo at the Chicago Literary Club. He described, as a boy in Kansas, discovering a buffalo skull and being covered by a buffalo robe. I cannot improve upon his description of the hunting and extermination of the buffalo, and so I simply refer you to his paper online at the club website. At the end of the nineteenth century there were about 1,000 buffalo left in private ranches and in zoos. In Yellowstone

Park a mere 25 to 30 remained in the wild.

Ned Buntline dramatized his Buffalo Bill dime novels. In 1872 the two men

appeared on stage at Nixon’s Amphitheatre in Chicago in Scouts of the Prairie, a play

consisting of fighting with fake Indians. “We would kill them all off in one act, but they would come up again ready for business in the next,”[25] recalled Buffalo Bill. It was the beginning of his career as a showman, interrupted in 1876 only because he “was anxious to take part in the Sioux war which was then breaking out.”[26] Buffalo Bill rejoined the

5^th Cavalry, now in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where, he wrote, they heard of “the massacre of General Custer and his band of heroes.”[27] On June 25, 1876 Custer and his men lay dead in Montana near the Little Bighorn River. He had led the 7^th Cavalry in an attack on an encampment of perhaps 6,000 to 7,000 Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho.

When the 5^th Cavalry pursued the Cheyenne, Buffalo Bill engaged in man to man combat with Chief Yellow Hand, and shot him. “He reeled and fell, but before he had fairly touched the ground I was upon him, knife in hand, and had driven the keen-edged weapon to its hilt in his heart. Jerking his war bonnet off, I scientifically scalped him in about five seconds. . . ‘The first scalp for Custer.’”[28] The Cheyenne were driven to the reservation. The army chased Lakota Sioux Chief Sitting Bull and his followers and they fled to Canada, the land of the White Mother, Queen Victoria. Crazy Horse, who led the charge at Little Big Horn, was killed in 1877 and Sitting Bull, who may have been in his tepee during the battle, became known as the “Indian Chief who had defeated Custer.”[29]

Newspaper reporters went to Canada to meet him. “Now,” one wrote, “for the first time was visible to white men since the beginning of the Indian Wars the most noted

Indian of the period, and now was made real [James Fenimore] Cooper’s often derided

vision of an Indian’s face . . . His features . . .made music to the senses. He wore a quiet ironical smile. His black hair streamed down his beardless and swarthy cheeks over clean cut ears, not burdened with ornaments.”[30]

In 1877 the Sioux on the plains were vanquished. Gold was found in the Black Hills, palefaces flooded in, the town of Deadwood flourished, and the Deadwood Dick dime novel series began. One character, young Fearless Frank, wore a buckskin outfit dyed bright red. “(H)e parted the shrubbery, and entered the thicket. It required considerable pushing and tugging to get through the dense undergrowth, but at last his efforts were rewarded, and he stood in a small break or glade. Stood there, to behold a sight that made the blood boil in his veins. Securely bound with her face toward a stake, was a young girl – a maiden of perhaps seventeen summers, who, at a single glance one might surmise was remarkably pretty. She was stripped to the waist, and upon her snow-white back were numerous welts from which trickled diminutive rivulets of crimson.

Her head was dropped against the stake to which she was bound, and she was evidently insensible. With a cry of astonishment and indignation Fearless Frank leaped forward to sever her bonds when like so many grim phantoms there filed out of the chaparral, and circled around him, a score of hideously painted savages. One glance at the portly leader satisfied Frank as to his identity. It was the fiend incarnate – Sitting Bull!

‘I am surprised to find you engaged at such work as this. I have been told that Sitting Bull made war only on warriors – not on women.’ An ugly frown darkened the savage’s face – a frown wherein was depicted a number of slumbering passions. ‘The pale-face girl is the last survivor of a [wagon] train that the warriors of Sitting Bull attacked in Red Canyon. Sitting Bull lost many warriors; yon pale squaw shot down a full half-score before she could be captured; she belongs to the warriors of Sitting Bull, not to the great chief himself.’

[But Sitting Bull agrees to give her up.] Fearless Frank then hastened to approach the insensible captive, and, with a couple sweeps of his knife, cut the bonds that held her to the torture-stake. Gently he laid her on the grass, and arranged about her half-nude form the garments Sitting Bull’s warriors had torn off, and soon he had the satisfaction of seeing her once more clothed properly. It still remained for him to restore her to consciousness, and this promised to be no easy task, for she was in a dead swoon. She was even more beautiful of face and figure than one would have imagined at first glance. Of a delicate blonde complexion, with pink-tinged cheeks, she made a very pretty picture, her face framed as it was in a wild disheveled cloud of auburn hair. A hatful of cold water from a neighboring spring dashed into her upturned face; a continued chafing of the pure white soft hands; then there was a convulsive twitching of the features, a low moan, and the eyes opened and darted a glance of affright into the face of the Scarlet Boy. ‘Fear not, miss,’ and the youth gently supported her to a sitting posture. ‘I am a friend, and your cruel captors have vamoosed. Lucky I came along just as I did, or it’s likely they’d have

killed you.’ ‘Oh, sir, how can I ever thank you for rescuing me from those merciless fiends!’ and the maiden gave him a grateful glance.”[31]

A Chicago Tribune reporter found Chief Sitting Bull and his followers in

Montana. They had slipped across the border from Canada to hunt buffalo. The entire

front page of the July 5, 1879 edition and part of the next page are devoted to the encounter: ‘The Great Spirit,’ Sitting Bull said, ‘put me on this prairie and gave us this

country. . . It is not many years ago your people said they would give us the country of the Black Hills . . . that it should be our hunting-ground. . . As soon as they found there was shining dust there, they drove us from it, and said the country did not belong to us.

. . . We went away from there peacefully, though we knew it was rich with gold, for the sake of peace to our wives and children. The Americans sent the Long-Hair [so Custer was called] to follow us. Do you know of anything we did to bring the Long-Hair upon us? No, you don’t. . . We were assembled there in a peaceable camp, hunting for meat to feed our families. . . If you were ever told that we were hostile, it is a lie. It was a hunting camp. We had attacked nothing but the buffalo. . . You must not think that the Great Spirit does not watch me as closely as he watches you.’ ”[32] But the buffalo vanished and in 1881 Sitting Bull surrendered.

Meanwhile, Buffalo Bill had resumed his theatrical career. In 1878 he appeared at Haverly’s Theatre in Chicago in Knight of the Plains, reviewed in the Chicago Tribune as a “thrilling romance of the West” with “Indians in picturesque costumes . . . No one will be surprised at the magnetic power exercised by Buffalo Bill when it is considered that he

is really playing himself. . . Buffalo Bill is a welcome figure to the youthful imagination which has been prepared for the realization of boyish visions of heroic exploits by the

perusal of that entrancing sort of fiction known as the dime novel.”[33]

In 1883 Buffalo Bill opened his show called Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in Humboldt Park, Chicago. Annie Oakley, billed as the foremost woman marksman in the world with rifle, shotgun and pistol, joined the show. In 1885 it was at the Chicago Driving Park, the race track where later the Union Stock Yards were built. “Thousands streamed over the ground and into the long grandstand . . . Buffalo Bill appeared on a prancing stallion, Annie Oakley galloped around the track shooting glass balls out of the air, cowboys roped and threw the wide-horned steers, the Pony Express came dashing to the relay station, [‘real’] Indian hunters rode bareback among stampeding buffalo. When the stagecoach rumbled over the prairie, [‘real’] Indians whooped out from their ambush in the cardboard buttes. In the nick of time Buffalo Bill and his cowboys raced to the rescue. Amid the whiz of arrows and the crack of rifle fire the stage rocked on toward Deadwood City.”[34]

Later that year Buffalo Bill added another act. When he “appeared on his famous

horse Charlie, a half naked Indian rider, daubed with war paint, galloped over the prairie.

They enacted [the] famous fight with Yellow Hand. Under the flaring lights ten thousand people pictured the Indian and the scout dueling on the Kansas plain. When they had emptied their pistols they leaped to the ground. Buffalo Bill drew a knife, Yellow Hand leveled a spear. They charged, fenced, dodged, maneuvered. At last the knife struck home

and Yellow Hand fell. Bending over the prostrate savage, Buffalo Bill took ‘the first scalp for Custer.’ ”[35]

The following year Custer’s Last Stand was introduced. “The band swung into . . .

the marching song of the Seventh Cavalry – Custer’s regiment. A screen of light showed the rolling grasslands of the Little Big Horn, with Custer’s men fighting off a ring of howling Sioux. They tightened their circle and the Sioux crept closer. Firing from behind

dead horses, rushing in with drawn blades when their guns were empty, the Indians cut

down the doomed regiment. At the end one man was left standing, George Armstrong Custer . . . He fell under a rain of bullets and the furious battleground was still. The

Indians moved from one grotesque form to another, taking their last grim trophies. When

they were gone the strewn field was silent . . . But a muffled hoofbeat sounded and a lone rider halted a foam-flecked horse. The spotlight held him on the littered field while on the backdrop mountains a light screen spelled the words TOO LATE. The greatest scout of the Old West bared his head among the fallen, and the scene went dark.”[36] (Of course, Buffalo Bill had never been near the actual battle.) A final act “showed a settler’s hut on the plains with Indians creeping through the grass. After a brave but futile defense the pioneer woman and her children . . . were captured. But over the prairie came the drumbeat of hoofs. The cowboys arrived and the Indians were routed. With a final burst of music the show was over.”[37]

These were the basic scenes of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. From time to time other

scenes and other people were added. Sitting Bull – “the fiend incarnate!” – was one of

them. He joined the show in 1885, was part of the grand entrance, and then sat in the grandstand during the performances. His photo with Buffalo Bill was sold; the slogan was: “Foes in ’76; Friends in ’85.” But it was Annie Oakley who captured Sitting

Bull’s attention. He adopted her as his daughter and gave her the name Little Sure Shot.

After four months Sitting Bull had had enough. He told the press, ‘The wigwam is a better place for the red man. He is sick of the houses and the noises and the multitudes of men.’ ”[38] Buffalo Bill gave Sitting Bull a parting gift of a horse trained to perform tricks

in the show. The chief gave Annie Oakley “a quiver of his finest arrows, beaded

moccasins, a feathered headdress.”[39] She stayed with the show for seventeen years.

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West toured the United States and Canada. In 1887 the show

went to England. It was the fiftieth jubilee of the reign of the Great White Mother Queen

Victoria, and she wanted a private performance for herself and her royal guests. “The performance would be the first attended by the Queen in a public venue and outside of a royal residence since Prince Albert’s death twenty-six years before.”[40] The queen was delighted, patted papooses on the head, smiled at Chief Red Shirt bowing before her, and told Annie Oakley, “You are a very, very clever little girl.”[41]

In Paris the Wild West show performed for the 1889 World’s Fair at the newly

constructed Eiffel Tower. The show went through Spain, Germany, Austria and Italy. At Naples “(b)etween performances Chief Rocky Bear and his braves climbed the smoking [Vesuvius volcano] and stared into the fearful crater.”[42] In Rome the Indians “stifled their instinctive ceremonial cries, standing in silence under the raised hand of

[Pope Leo XIII] the Great Medicine,”[43] so called because he was a spiritual leader. But they were not allowed to explore the Vatican. “(T)heir reaction to this was that ‘they did not think much of God’s Representative if his house was too good for anybody to go into.’ ”[44]

At the end of 1890 Sitting Bull lived at the Standing Rock reservation. Buffalo

Bill was on his way to reach him, but TOO LATE. Sitting Bull was killed. “In the burst of gunfire Sitting Bull’s horse began a strange ritual of bowing, kneeling, tossing his head. The rattle of rifles had recalled his old training in the Wild West [show]. With men

falling around him, he went through his tricks, and when the camp fell silent he was still

untouched.”[45]

The 1893 the Columbian Exposition at Jackson Park in Chicago refused to allow

the show. So Buffalo Bill leased 15 acres across the street, on Stony Island Avenue. The Wild West was a huge success. Extra express trains were added to the Illinois Central line, now the Metra electric, to speed passengers directly to the 63^rd Street station from the Loop downtown. The bullet-ridden cabin where Sitting Bull was shot was one of the attractions. Sitting Bull’s trick horse was featured in the show carrying an American flag bearer and leading the U.S. Cavalry.

The Wild West continued to perform in many cities in this country and in Europe. It was regularly in Chicago: in 1896 and 1897 at the Coliseum; in 1898 at the Base Ball Grounds at Harrison and Loomis; in 1899, 1900 and 1901 on vacant lots at Wentworth and 35thStreet, and in 1907 at Drexel and 63rd Street. But the fascination had faded.

The “wild Indians” and the buffalo were gone. In 1913 the Wild West was auctioned off and Buffalo Bill was broke. The U.S. Government issued a new coin: the Indianhead nickel, or the buffalo nickel, depending on which way you look at it. One who noticed was Carl Sandburg. He wrote:

A COIN [46]

Your western heads here cast on money,

You are the two that fade away together,

Partners in the mist.

Lunging buffalo shoulder,

Lean Indian face,

We who come after where you are gone

Salute your forms on the new nickel.

You are

To us:

The past.

Runners

On the prairie:

Good-by.