Buffalo Bill's Wild West Transcript (Scotland: A Scottish History Podcast)
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Scotland - A Scottish History Podcast
Episode 20 - Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
MICHAEL PARK: It is 1999 and you stand in the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow, looking at it for what might be the last time. It stands in the centre of eerily dark room full of relics of what people tell you are glorious wars but this one seems different.
It has a power.
It’s as if it calls out to you from the doorway and pulls you in towards it.
Hanging on a mannequin, its fabric thin and yellowing in the heavy wooden case this shirt calls out in agony from across the centuries.
The shirt of the Ghost Dance, complete with raven, owl and eagle feathers hanging from the neck, was supposed to unite the spirits of the living and the dead and protect its Native American wearer from harm.
The shirt is riddled with holes where bullets have ripped through the simple cotton fabric and brown stains where the blood of its owner has begun to pour out from his mortal wounds.
The shirt has been in the museum for more than 100 years, the last vestment of a Sioux warrior from the Lakota people, one of hundreds - mostly women and children - massacred by the army of the United States of America at Wounded Knee.
It is 1999, and the Ghost Shirt is about to be returned to its people in South Dakota, to lay the spirit of its owner to rest, more than a century after his death.
It is to be replaced by a replica, made by the great granddaughter of one of the survivors of the massacre. It will still be on display in 2020.
From Be Quiet Media, this is Scotland. A podcast about history and where we made it. I’m Michael Park.
It is 1891, and the age of outlaws and gunslingers is at an end.
The American West has become a fascination of those forced to live in the drab reality of merry old Scotland. Tales of sprawling dust-bowls, notorious stick up men, tribes of natives, horses, damsels… clichés…
The boundless frontiers of the American West are fast becoming an obsession. Britain ruled a quarter of the known world and that world had never been closer thanks to the telegraph and that new-fangled telephone. Signals were carried across the world from the colonies where money was made and horrifying crimes were committed in the name of civilisation.
America seems unknowable to you in 1891. It has gone through a war unlike anything the world has ever seen and come out the other side with a renewed sense of identity - even if it is a bit fractured.
The native people who are being displaced are little more than a bottom line in the stories and news reports which reach Scotland. Cowboys and injuns are a far more romantic prospect - the civilising imperial force against the savages.
People from your street, people you know, people you’ve worked with keep leaving on ships to try their luck in this strange world where hope seems to spring eternal. People can be whatever they want to be in America - or so it seems.
It is this thought that fills you as you read the poster in the window of Tait’s confectioner’s.
BUFFALO BILL’S WILD WEST SHOW!
MICHAEL PARK: The Wild West show was coming to town, regardless of where in Scotland you lived. It rolled into Glasgow in November 1891. At the front of the colourful troupe, Buffalo Bill himself. The master showman.
William Cody was a prodigy of the American West. He’d been a Pony Express rider at age 15, fought for the Union in the American Civil War and won the Medal of Honor during the Indian Wars.
After the Civil War he won an exclusive contract to supply Kansas City Railroad Workers with Buffalo meat and launched into the job with relish. Some estimates say he killed more than 4,000 buffalo in 18 months, but as you might have guessed, there’s a lot about Buffalo Bill that’s Buffalo Bluster.
One thing that’s for sure is that he had to win the right to use the name Buffalo Bill. He competed for eight hours with another renowned hunter, Bill Comstock, for the title of Buffalo Bill and beat him 68 to 48. How did he do it?
Who cares.
Buffalo Bill and his cadre of gunslingers, Native Americans and exotic animals cut a brightly coloured swathe through the dinginess of Victorian Glasgow.
Bill Cody immediately makes a splash in the city, appearing in front of a packed Ibrox crowd before a Rangers game in full garb, and wandering through the city making significant financial contributions to the city’s poor.
One rumour that quickly does the rounds is that he paid for shoes for a wee girl helping her grandmother sell newspapers. This flamboyant character is quickly ingratiating himself with the people of the city.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West cast are booked to play the 7,000 seat East End Exhibition buildings in Dennistoun and their mere presence is causing a serious stir.
Among the group is Annie Oakley, a sharpshooter so good that the coup de grace of her performance is to split a playing card thrown edge on with one shot and then riddle it with holes before it could touch the ground - all from a distance of 90 feet.
She’s pretty amazing.
The rest of the show is full of incredible stunts, displays of derring doo, hunting, racing, rodeo events, they even reenact a train robbery to the delight of the crowd.
There’s history in the show too, or at least the American view of it part of the show called The Drama of Civilization, presents a view of how the American frontiersmen imposed 'civilisation’ on the 'Red Indian’.
The show lasts four hours and the people of Glasgow go absolutely nuts for it.
The show speaks to the Victorian belief that the world can be civilised - Westernised to meet the expectations of the rich and powerful. The sun is yet to set on the British Empire and the sight of Native Americans participating in the shows proved to audiences that even the most savage could be brought into line.
But the truth wasn’t that simple. For many of the participants in the show they were given no choice in the matter. Buffalo Bill knew the fate that awaited many of the Lakota taken into custody by his countrymen at Wounded Knee and offered them the opportunity to follow him to Europe to be part of his show.
He believed that once the Native Americans saw the huge, sprawling cities of the Eastern United States that they would feel they had no choice but to adapt to Western society.
And some did, reluctantly. They began to dress like Westerners off stage and took the opportunity to relish in the cities that they visited. Many viewed the shows as a way to prove to audiences that their culture was valuable, that it was noble, that it was worth something beyond being the bad guys in a story told by colonisers - even if the way they had to do that was in the a story told by a coloniser.
But it wasn’t easy. One member of the Ghost Dance, Charging Thunder, finished his performance one night and took himself for a night in one of Glasgow’s fine hostelries. Upon his return to the camp - steaming - he got into an altercation with George Crager, the group’s interpreter.
THE SCOTSMAN: “‘Charging Thunder’, one of Buffalo Bill’s hostages from the American Government, was taken before Sheriff Birnie, in the Glasgow Summary Court, on a charge of having, on the 31st December last, in the Wild West Show at Glasgow, assaulted George Crager, Sioux interpreter, by striking him on the head and neck with an Indian club.
“‘Charging Thunder’ pled guilty, and it was stated on his behalf that he was only 23 years of age, and was usually one of the quietest members of the Wild West Show, but in common with other Indians, the slightest drop of drink infuriated him, and on the night in question he had obtained whisky in a public-house in mistake for lemonade, which he asked for. He entertained no malice towards the interpreter.
“The Sheriff said that the assault was of so serious a stature that had ‘Charging Thunder’ not been a stranger he would have sent him to prison for a long period, but under the circumstances he would limit the imprisonment to 30 days.
“He thought it a great shame that publicans should supply these Indians with whisky.” - The Scotsman
MICHAEL PARK: He entertained no malice, until you consider that just a week before George Crager had written to Kelvingrove museum, offering to sell them a collection of Indian Relics taken during the war, including a shirt, with raven, eagle and owl feathers hanging from the neck.
A simple cotton shirt with bullet holes in its fabric that for over a hundred years would call out to be delivered home, to be reunited with its spirit.
CREDITS
You’ve been listening to Scotland, it was written and produced by me, Michael Park and is a production of Be Quiet Media.
The music for every episode of Scotland is by the human substitution cipher, Mitch Bain, you can check out more of his work by heading over to Facebook and searching for Mitch Bain music.
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Thanks for listening, we’ll see you next time.