Wheels of Fortune 3

                       ‘Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.’
                                                                            John B. L. Soule

I didn’t really like the man. Or maybe I never really liked the idea of him. Life is simpler when you plow around the stump. But there was no way of going around him, not for this book, anyway.
Welcome to the Buffalo Bill Historical Center… Please leave these items in your vehicle: Food and beverages… Large containers and backpacks… Child-carrying backpacks… Motorcycle helmets… Weapons. New this year! The Family Rate. Ask about it at the admissions desk. When they ask you to leave your weapons in the car, on the same line they’re introducing their family discount, you know you’ve arrived in the Heartland.
We met the giant behind the admissions desk.
“How long does it take to see the exhibits?” Robyn asked.
“Most people take two to three days.” He said. And then he saw the terror in our faces. “There’s a wing of Buffalo Bill memorabilia, a wing of Native American artifacts, a museum of armaments…” It looked like he could go on for a bit.
“We have about two hours.” I said. “We’re driving through Yellowstone today.” He looked at us like we were crazy.
“You’ll be busier than a stump-tailed cow in fly time.” He said. “I’d concentrate on the Buffalo Bill and Native American part. That’ll be thirty dollars.” And then he saw the terror in our faces.
“Make it twenty.” He said. We thanked him, and ran so fast by Buffalo Bill’s hologram, he turned back into mist.
It is still almost easier to decide what William Frederick ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody wasn’t, than to define what he was. Bill claimed many jobs- Civil War soldier, Indian wars U.S. Army scout chief, trapper, bullwhacker, Colorado ‘Fifty-niner,’ Pony Express rider, wagonmaster, stagecoach driver, and hotel manager, flamboyant showman, Freemason, unofficial American cultural ambassador, and elder statesman. He was also a self-serving exhibitionist, historical revisionist and, as history could well judge, at least as much a hunter of publicity as he had been of bison.
William Cody was born on a farm in Iowa in 1846, but was baptized by his Quakers parent, Isaac and Mary, in Peel, Ontario. At the age of 11, Cody took a job with a freight carrier as a ‘boy extra,’ riding up and down the wagon train, delivering messages.
Nine years later, he married Louisa Frederici. Two of their four children would die young. In 1867 he contracted to supply the Kansas Pacific Railroad workers with bison meat. Cody killed over four thousand in eighteen months. He and William Comstock had a shooting competition. Whoever killed the most number of animals, would earn the exclusive right to be called ‘Buffalo Bill.’ Cody won by a score of 68 to 48. In the same year that he received a Medal of Honor for ‘gallanty in action’ as a Third Cavalry civilian scout, Bill travelled to Chicago to debut in Ned Buntline’s original Wild West show, The Scouts of the Prairie. When his friend James ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok joined him the following season’s new performance of Scouts of the Plains, the troupe toured together for ten years.
Then, in 1883, in North Platte, Nebraska, Cody founded ‘Buffalo Bill's Wild West,’ a circus-like travelling extravaganza of main events, feats of skill, staged races, and sideshows, that eventually toured the continental United States and Europe. It came to town on a gigantic billboard.

                                                An Object Lesson
   Differing as it does from all other exhibitions, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
   and Congress of Roughriders of the World. Stands as a living
   monument of historic and educational magnificence.
   Its distinctive feature lies in its send of realism, bold dash and
   Reckless abandon which only arises from brave and noble inspiration.
   It is not a ‘show’ in any sense of the word, but it is a series of original
   Genuine And instructive object lessons in which the participants
   repeat the heroic Parts they have played in actual life upon the Plains,  
   in the Wilderness, Mountain fastness and in the dread and dangerous
   scenes of savage And cruel warfare. It is the only amusement
   enterprise of any kind Recognized, endorsed and contributed to by
   governments, armies and nations; And it lives longest in the hearts of
   those who have seen it most Often Since it always contains and
   conveys intensely inspiring ideas and motives, While its programme is
   a succession of pleasant surprises and Thrilling incidents.
                                                     
The show began with a cultural parade on horseback, with participants from all over the world in their most colourful costumes- the US military, American Indians, Turks, Gauchos, Arabs, Mongols, and Georgians.
Bill employed several historical western figures. Gabriel Dumont, Lillian Smith, and Calamity Jane toured with Cody, but one of the most fascinating company members was Annie Oakley. Like Buffalo Bill, her parents had been Quakers, and her father had died from a combination of injury and exposure. Annie spent part of her childhood in servitude with another family in Ohio, enduring physical and mental abuse, so poor she almost had to borrow water to cry with. She referred to them as ‘the wolves.’ Annie began hunting at the age of nine, sold the game, and soon became known as a crack shot.
In the spring of 1881, the Baughman and Butler shooting act came to Cincinnati. Marksman Frank Butler placed a $100 bet with hotel owner Jack Frost, that he could beat any local fancy shooter. The hotelier set up a shooting match with Annie, then 21, in Greenville, Ohio. After missing his 25th shot, after losing the match, Frank won Annie. They were happily married for the rest of their lives.
Both sharpshooters joined the Buffalo Bill's Wild West in 1885. Standing only five feet tall, using a .22 caliber rifle at 90 feet, Annie could split a playing card edge-on and put five or six more holes in it before it touched the ground. In a performance before Queen Victoria and other crowned heads of state, at his request, she knocked the ashes off a cigarette held by the Prince of Prussia, the future Kaiser Wilhelm II. Some later mused that, if Annie had shot the prince instead of his cigarette, she may have prevented the First World War. In another shooting contest in 1922, at the age of sixty-two, even after numerous spinal operations after a railway accident, and wearing a steel brace after a car crash, Annie hit a hundred consecutive clay targets straight from the 16 yard mark.
When she died of pernicious anemia four years later, her husband Frank stopped eating. He died twenty days later. When Sitting Bull had first met Annie Oakley, he was so impressed with her marksmanship that he offered a photographer sixty-five dollars for a photo of the two of them together. The admiration was mutual. Sitting Bull adopted her as a daughter, and called her Watanya Cicilla, Little Sure Shot, a name she used throughout her career. After Annie’s death, it was revealed that she had given her entire fortune to charity. Her adoptive father had taught by example. The white man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it.
The meeting of Sitting Bull and Annie Oakley would have not occurred without chance, and the chance would not have occurred without Buffalo Bill. Cody knew that his show could not claim to represent the Wild West, without representative Indians. The Native Americans knew that performing in Bill’s shows offered their best chance of preserving their heritage, resisting the assimilation the Bureau of Indian Affairs was determined to inflict on them. In the ultimate irony of mutual exploitation, Oglala Sioux veterans of the Great Plains Wars, were hired off the degrading confines of the Pine Ridge Agency in South Dakota, where they were forbidden to wear traditional tribal dress, hunt, dance, or participate in their own cultural practices, where they were continually harassed by missionaries, teachers, agents, politicians, and ‘humanitarians,’ to play themselves. Cody freed them for six months every year, providing wages, food, transportation, living space and accommodation, visitors, and exotic travel. In exchange for reenacting the popular image of native tribes dwelling in tipis, skilled in horseback riding and marksmanship and ceremonial dance, attacking settlers cabins, stagecoaches, pony-express riders, and wagon trains, and killing George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn, they got to do just that. If a man loses anything and goes back and looks carefully for it, he will find it.