Wheels of Fortune 4

The list of Buffalo Bill’s ‘Show Indians’ read like a Who’s Who of Native history: American Horse, Geronimo, Flying Hawk, Red Shirt, Kicking Bear, Chief Blue Horse, Hollow Horn Bear, Lone Bear, Young Man Afraid of His Horses, Whirling Horse, Sitting Bull. I will remain what I am until I die, a hunter, and when there are no buffalo or other game I will send my children to hunt and live on prairie mice, for where an Indian is shut up in one place his body becomes weak.
Chief Iron Tail managed the Indian Police, and became one of Bill’s best friends, feted by European aristocracy, and shooting elk and bighorn together on annual hunting trips. His poker hand was legendary among U.S. Army officials, and his head still graces one entire side of my Buffalo nickel collection.
All of this savagery his did not go down well with the paternalistic policies of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, primed for aggressive assimilation. Thomas Jefferson Morgan, its new commissioner in 1889, publicly attacked and threatened Bill with the loss of his bonds, and aspiring Indian performers with the withholding of land allotments, annuities, and tribal status. The following year the Bureau held an inquiry, to challenge the morality of Indian employment in show business. The Indians gave a masterful presentation, turning the hearing into a pointed denunciation of Bureau policy, by comparing conditions in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West with those on the Pine Ridge agency.
Rocky Bear remarked that he worked in a show that fed him well, “That is why I am getting so fat.” He said, rubbing his cheeks. “I am getting poor.” only by returning to the reservation. If the Great Father wanted him to stop appearing in the show, he would stop.
“But until then, that is the way I get money.” He showed his inquisitors a purse filled with $300 in gold coins.
“I saved this money to buy some clothes for my children.” He said. There was silence. You can trust the government, ask any Indian.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West toured Europe eight times between 1887 and 1906, giving hundreds of shows to millions of fans. Cody gave command performances for royalty, including two for Queen Victoria, and one in an ancient Roman amphitheater for Pope Leo XIII. He brought the Old West to Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Poland, Bohemia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, the Balkans, Romania, and the Ukraine. Or at least his version.
Wild West show performances had little in common with frontier life, but the entertainment spectacle was taken for the real thing. Buffalo Bill's Wild West became America's Wild West, the ‘authentic’ national narrative of American exceptionalism. It may not have been accurate, but as an American cultural export, it was unquestionably genuine.
The finale typically portrayed an Indian attack on a settler's cabin. Cody rode in with cowboys to defend a settler and his family. The legendary frontiersman can take on anything in the world, without the need for any of the other people in it. The ‘can do’ superiority of American history and society, became the ‘can do no wrong’ unerring, unfailing, faultless, flawless Manifest Destiny, the many subsequent arrogant misadventures, and the mythical core of U.S. foreign and domestic policy. Life is a rodeo, and Buffalo Bill’s show was the original, and the template for all that followed.
It made Buffalo Bill Cody the most recognizable celebrity on earth, and a very wealthy man. In 1879 he penned his autobiography, The Life and Adventures of Buffalo Bill. Six years later, he founded his own town, the one named after him, and it eventually built the museum, that Robyn and I were running to get through.
It was an impressive effort. The Native American exhibit hall was an authentic portrayal of the Indian experience, more than anything that Bill had created in his performances. There were sun dances around sacred cottonwoods, and Pretty Shield’s sad reminiscence of her nomadic Crow childhood, before the Bureau corralled her life. Moving made me happy. There were elaborately beaded papooses, now empty, and elaborate beaded baseball caps, now empty. And there was a depiction of the trade and disease and missionaries and war and loss of buffalo that had ultimately sentenced their way of life to oblivion. When I was a boy, the Sioux owned the world. The sun rose and set on their land; they sent ten thousand men to battle. Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where are our lands? Who owns them?
Outside, and we needed some air, was a magnificent statue of Sacajawea, and a live captive golden eagle, both with the same grim countenance. Quaking aspens quivered.
In 1886 Buffalo Bill purchased a 4,000-acre ranch and an eighteen-room mansion.
He died of kidney failure in 1917, at his sister's house in Denver. Still covering his options, he had been baptized into the Catholic Church the previous day. He received a full Masonic funeral, and was buried on Lookout Mountain, in Golden. Tributes came in from King George V of Great Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Imperial Germany, and President Woodrow Wilson. The country that had formed him, the country he had formed back, would name a dam and reservoir after him, and put his face on two of its postage stamps.
But the Lone Ranger Code of Conduct would be eating at Buffalo Bill, long before its fictitious existence became real for me and the other impressionable young buckeroos, in the Paramount theatre Saturday matinees. You can wash your hands but not your conscience. Sooner or later, somewhere, somehow, we must settle with the world and make payment for what we have taken.
Cody would live long enough to see dramatic change in the real Wild West. The buffalo herds he hunted, the ones that give him his superhero name, were threatened with extinction. Barbed wire wound its tendrils through the open plains. He began to speak out against hide-hunting, and campaigned for a hunting season.
The Indians he had scouted against, the ones he had depicted in his shows attacking stagecoaches and wagon trains and being driven off by rescuing cowboys and soldiers, became increasingly impoverished, interned on their reservations. He called them ‘the former foe, present friend, the American.’ Every Indian outbreak that I have ever known has resulted from broken promises and broken treaties by the government. In the frenzied face of coal and oil and natural gas exploitation, and the irrepressible greed of big ranching and farming cabals, he began to support conservation efforts.                                
“I don’t believe that Buffalo Bill Cody could settle with the world and make payment for what he had taken.” I said to Robyn. “I don’t believe he could have received the redemption he was seeking.”
“Why not?” She asked.

     “Its a path of pilgrimage. “ I said.
     “To where?” He asked.
     “Not so much to where.” I said. “As to what.”
     “To what?” He asked.
     “Authenticity.” I said. “The American West was The Sacred Land- the
      gold rush towards truth.”
     “What’s the truth?” He asked.
     “The achievement of redemption.” I said.
     “How do you get that?” He asked.
     “By living the authentic life, by living in Nature, and by facing death
      with dignity and courage.”
     “Sounds very existential.” Said Carolyn.
     “That’s where the truth lives.” I said.

“Because.” I said “Although in one sense he lived the authentic life by living in Nature, and by facing death with dignity and courage, there was this other thing.”
“Which was?” She asked.
“Water and truth are freshest at their source.” I said. “Bill made his fortune by bottling it, and slapping on his own label.”
“So?” She asked.
“No way to redeem the bottle.” I said.
Even in death, Buffalo Bill didn’t find total peace. His final disposition remained conflicted, his once great fortune diminished. In 1948 the Cody chapter of the American Legion offered a reward for the ‘return’ of the body. In response, the Denver chapter mounted a guard over his Lookout Mountain grave, until a deeper shaft could be blasted further into the rock. The wolves.
For me the most impressive object, in the Buffalo Bill Center of the West Museum, was his Wheel of Fortune. It had a design with a diamond, a heart and a club, and a spade. Shadow lines radiated out from and beyond the perimeter posts. When you spun the wheel, you would get a date from an event in Buffalo Bill’s life. It was, like roulette, a game of chance. I have killed, robbed, and injured too many white men to believe in a good peace. They are medicine…
“It's a calendar.” Said Robyn.
“It's a calendar.” I said.
We had a wheel that would take us from here to there; he had a wheel that would take him from there to the stars.



               Buffalo Bill's
                   Defunct
                       who used to
                       ride a watersmooth-silver
                                                stallion
               and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
                                                                Jesus
               he was a handsome man
                                and what i want to know is
               how do you like your blueeyed boy
               Mister Death
                                                           ee cummings