1 Jan 1885 Jahr - Sitting Bull tours with Buffalo Bill's Wild West

Beschreibung:

The post–Civil War frontier produced mythic figures who have played starring roles in America’s national folklore ever since: “savage” Indians, brave pioneers, rugged cowboys, and gun-slinging sheriffs. Far from being invented by Hollywood in the twentieth century, these oversimplified characters emerged in the very same era when the nation incorporated the West. Pioneers helped develop the mythic ideal. As one Montana woman claimed, they had come west “at peril of their lives” and faced down “scalp dances” and other terrors; in the end, they “conquered the wilderness and transformed it into a land of peace and plenty.” Some retired cowboys, capitalizing on the popularity of dime novel Westerns, spiced up their memoirs for sale. Eastern readers were eager for stories like The Life and Adventures of Nat Love (1907), written by a Texas cowhand who had been born in slavery in Tennessee and who, as a rodeo star in the 1870s, had won the nickname “Deadwood Dick.”

No myth-maker proved more influential than Buffalo Bill Cody. Unlike those who saw the West as free or empty, Bill understood that the United States had taken those lands by conquest. Ironically, his famous Wild West, which he insisted was not a “show” but an authentic representation of frontier experience, provided one of the few employment options for Plains Indians in the 1880s and 1890s. To escape harsh reservation conditions, Sioux and Cheyenne men signed on with Bill and demonstrated their riding skills for cheering audiences across the United States and Europe, chasing buffalo and attacking U.S. soldiers and pioneer wagons in the arena. Buffalo Bill proved to be a good employer to Native men, including Lakota Sioux leader Sitting Bull, who toured with Bill’s Wild West in 1885. Black Elk, another Lakota Sioux man who joined Cody’s operation, recalled that Bill was generous and “had a strong heart.” But Black Elk had a mixed reaction to the Wild West. “I liked the part of the show we made,” he told an interviewer, “but not the part the Wasichus [white people] made.” As he observed, the Wild West of the 1880s was at its heart a celebration of U.S. military conquest.

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