"Show Indians"/Showing Indians: Buffalo Bill's Wild West, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and American Anthropology

Scholarship about William F. Cody and Buffalo Bill's Wild West has, undeniably, become an industry. As a man, a myth, a celebrity, a showman, a fraud, a frontiersman, a legend, a husband, a philanderer, a marksman, a phenomenon, a defender of Indians, an exploiter of Indians, a successful businessman, a failed businessman, a producer, and in many other aspects of life, theatre, and cultural history, more has been written about William F. ("Buffalo Bill") Cody than, perhaps, any other American of his day not elected to public office. Revisionist histories of the 1970s and 80s did much to end the celebratory view of frontier subjects, including Cody, but carried with them a strong antitheatrical prejudice, a prejudice which is, ironically, on view in theatre works like Arthur Kopit's Indians (1969) and in Robert Altman's 1976 film Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson."¹

A subsequent generation of historians in the 1990s and this century have taken up the sobering critiques of revisionist histories, but with a tempered view of the duplicity of performance, representation, and celebrity. Performance troubles oppressor/oppressed binaries, and the present article locates, in a preliminary way, antitheatrical prejudices that have colored views of Cody and his show from the late nineteenth century to our own day by beginning an exploration of the connection between the Bureau of Indian Affairs and American anthropologists. Examining B.I.A. philosophy and procedures with respect to Amerindians and those in Buffalo Bill's Wild West around the time of the Wounded Knee/Columbian Exposition events (c.1890–93) reveals the constraints of modernism in the former and the liberty of traditionalism in the latter. Both were influenced by the views of anthropologists in the nineteenth century and their connections to performance. The triumph of Buffalo Bill's cultural version of Amerindians set a course that has cast "show Indians" (Amerindian performers, in B.I.A. lingo) in dialogue with "showing Indians" (the content of the performances they executed in Buffalo Bill's and other wild west shows). This tension is under historiographical reconstruction in this paper.²

William F. Cody began to employ Indians in a wild west show format in 1883, when he took his depiction of the frontier to an arena setting. Cody was not the first to hire single Amerindians or troupes of Indians to perform in a show setting or to use a circus format. Indeed, there is an example of Indians performing an outdoor show under Indian management in the 1840s (to the consternation of Phineas T. Barnum, whose employ they had left). Neither was Cody the first showman (or performer) who had to obtain some form of official permission to exhibit Indians or to travel with them to perform.³

Cody, whose earliest Indian performers were Pawnees from the Indian Territory, began "sign-up" days in the early 1880s, in the area around then at the Pine Ridge Agency, where Lakota aspirants in the hundreds would don regalia and audition for the season's tour.⁴ The rules governing recruiting and hiring Indians during the 1880s appear to have derived from the problems encountered by Cody in employing the headliner Sitting Bull for Tatanka Iyotake's one-season tour, from June to October 1885. The terms of Sitting Bull's employment, according to L. G. Moses, "established a course for all subsequent shows" and marked "the shift of Show Indian employment to the northern plains" and to the Lakota people, who "became the most prized Show Indians."⁵

At the end of his study of wild west shows, Moses observes, "The only way to explain . . . [its] . . . inconsistency of policy would be to admit that the Bureau [of Indian Affairs] possessed no real authority" to regulate wild west shows or the hiring of Indians to perform in them, which, as one official belatedly confessed in a 1921 memo, would have been "‘inadvisable at least officially and in writing'" to admit.⁶ Undaunted, officials in the 1880s, from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to...