The Lakota people had made the Black Hills both their home and their sacred lands. The name “Black Hills” comes from the Lakota words Paha Sapa, which mean “hills that are black.” From a distance, these pine-covered hills, rising several thousand feet above the surrounding prairie, appear to be black.
Initial United States contact with the Lakota took place during the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804–1806 and was marked by a standoff. Lakota bands refused to allow the explorers to continue upstream, and the expedition prepared for a battle which never came.
Hollywood made an attempt to tell this story in the film The Far Horizons.
Fort Laramie (founded as Fort William and known for a while as Fort John) was a significant 19th-century trading post and diplomatic site located at the confluence of the Laramie and the North Platte rivers. They joined in the upper Platte River Valley in the eastern part of the U.S. state of Wyoming. The fort was founded as a private trading post in the 1830s to service the overland fur trade. It was located east of the long climb leading to the best and lowest crossing point of the Rocky Mountains at South Pass and became a popular stopping point for migrants on the Oregon Trail. Along with Bent's Fort on the Arkansas River, the trading post and its supporting industries and businesses were the most significant economic hub of commerce in the region.
However, Fort Laramie had been built without permission on Lakota land, the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 was negotiated to protect travelers on the Oregon Trail. The Cheyenne and Lakota had previously attacked emigrant parties in a competition for resources, and also because some settlers had encroached on their lands.
The Fort Laramie Treaty acknowledged Lakota sovereignty over the Great Plains in exchange for free passage on the Oregon Trail for;
"as long as the river flows and the eagle flies".
The United States acknowledged that all the land covered by the treaty was Indian territory and did not claim any part of it. The boundaries agreed to in the Fort Laramie treaty of 1851 would be used to settle a number of claims cases in the 20th century. The Native Americans guaranteed safe passage for settlers on the Oregon Trail and allowed roads and forts to be built in their territories in return for promises of an annuity in the amount of fifty thousand dollars for fifty years. The treaty should also "make an effective and lasting peace" among the eight tribes, the Cheyenne, Sioux, Arapaho, Crow, Assiniboine, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nations, each of them often at odds with a number of the others.
General William T. Sherman (third from left) and Commissioners in council with chiefs and headmen, Fort Laramie, 1868
The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, signed with the US by Lakota and Northern Cheyenne leaders following Red Cloud's War, set aside a portion of the Lakota territory as the Great Sioux Reservation. This comprised the western one-half of South Dakota, including the Black Hills region for their exclusive use. It also provided for a large "unceded territory" in Wyoming and Montana, the Powder River Country, as Cheyenne and Lakota hunting grounds. On both the reservation and the unceded territory, white men were forbidden to trespass, except for officials of the U.S. government.
The growing number of miners and settlers encroaching in the Dakota Territory, however, rapidly nullified the protections. The US government could not keep settlers out. By 1872, territorial officials were considering harvesting the rich timber resources of the Black Hills, to be floated down the Cheyenne River to the Missouri, where new plains settlements needed lumber. The geographic uplift area suggested the potential for mineral resources. When a commission approached the Red Cloud Agency about the possibility of the Lakota's signing away the Black Hills, Colonel John E. Smith noted that this was;
"the only portion [of their reservation] worth anything to them". He concluded that "nothing short of their annihilation will get it from them"In 1874, the government dispatched the Custer Expedition to examine the Black Hills. The Lakota were alarmed at his expedition. Before Custer's column had returned to Fort Abraham Lincoln, news of their discovery of gold was telegraphed nationally. The presence of valuable mineral resources was confirmed the following year by the Newton–Jenney Geological Expedition.
The first symptoms of the crisis were financial failures in the Austro-Hungarian capital, Vienna, which spread to most of Europe and North America by 1873.
Prospectors, motivated by the economic panic of 1873, began to trickle into the Black Hills in violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty. This trickle turned into a flood as thousands of miners invaded the Hills before the gold rush was over. Organized groups came from states as far away as New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
Grant and his administration began to consider alternatives to the failed diplomatic venture. In early November 1875, Major General Philip Sheridan, commander of the Division of the Missouri, and Brigadier General George Crook, commander of the Department of the Platte, were called to Washington, D.C. to meet with Grant and several members of his cabinet to discuss the Black Hills issue. They agreed that the Army should stop evicting trespassers from the reservation, thus opening the way for the Black Hills Gold Rush. In addition, they discussed initiating military action against the bands of Lakota and Northern Cheyenne who had refused to come to the Indian agencies for council. Indian Inspector Erwin C. Watkins supported this option:
"The true policy in my judgement," he wrote, "is to send troops against them in the winter, the sooner the better, and whip them into subjection."Concerned about launching a war against the Lakota without provocation, the government instructed Indian agents in the region to notify all Lakota and Sioux to return to the reservation by January 31, 1876, or face potential military action. The US agent at Standing Rock Agency expressed concern that this was insufficient time for the Lakota to respond, as deep winter restricted travel. His request to extend the deadline was denied. General Sheridan considered the notification exercise a waste of time. "The matter of notifying the Indians to come in is perhaps well to put on paper," he commented:
"but it will in all probability be regarded as a good joke by the Indians."Meanwhile, in the council lodges of the non-treaty bands, Lakota leaders seriously discussed the notification for return. Short Bull, a member of the Soreback Band of the Oglala, later recalled that many of the bands had gathered on the Tongue River:
"About one hundred men went out from the agency to coax the hostiles to come in under pretense that the trouble about the Black Hills was to be settled," he said. "...All the hostiles agreed that since it was late [in the season] and they had to shoot for tipis [i.e., hunt buffalo] they would come in to the agency the following spring."As the deadline of January 31 passed, the new Commissioner of Indian Affairs, John Q. Smith, wrote that;
"without the receipt of any news of Sitting Bull's submission, I see no reason why, in the discretion of the Hon. the Secretary of War, military operations against him should not commence at once."His superior, Secretary of the Interior Zachariah Chandler agreed, adding that;
"the said Indians are hereby turned over to the War Department for such action on the part of the Army as you may deem proper under the circumstances."
There's no business like show business, like no business . . .
In 1976, two hundred years on from the United States Declaration of Independence, Robert Altman directed the film Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson, a revisionist Western film based on the play Indians by Arthur Kopit. It stars Paul Newman as William F. Cody, alias Buffalo Bill, along with Geraldine Chaplin, Will Sampson, Joel Grey, Harvey Keitel and Burt Lancaster as Bill's biographer, Ned Buntline.
As in his earlier film MASH, Altman skewers an American historical myth of heroism, in this case the notion that noble white men fighting bloodthirsty savages won the West. However, the film was poorly received at the time of its release, as the country was celebrating its bicentennial.
Sitting Bull also refuses to portray Custer's Last Stand as a cowardly sneak attack. Instead, he asks Cody to act out the massacre of a peaceful Sioux village by marauding bluecoats. An enraged Cody fires him but is forced to relent when star attraction Annie Oakley takes Sitting Bull's side.
Annie Oakley and her husband Frank Butler joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West in 1885. At five feet tall, Oakley was given the nickname of "Watanya Cicilla" by fellow performer Sitting Bull, rendered "Little Sure Shot" in the public advertisements.
Annie Get Your Gun is a 1950 American musical Technicolor comedy film loosely based on the life of sharpshooter Annie Oakley. Calamity Jane is a 1953 American Technicolor western musical film loosely based on the life of Wild West heroine Calamity Jane, and explores an alleged romance between Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok in the American Old West. The film starred Doris Day as the title character and Howard Keel as Hickok. It was devised by Warner Brothers in response to the success of Annie Get Your Gun and is set in the Black Hills of Dakota.
That's entertainment . . .
Buntline left the show and in 1874 Cody founded the Buffalo Bill Combination, in which he performed for part of the year, while scouting on the prairies the rest of the year. This strange overlapping of a make-believe theatre and the reality of U.S. expansion and consequent displacement of the Lakota people instigated by a state sponsored process of accumulation by dispossession, is an example, perhaps, of the aestheticization of politics existing well before the idea was mooted by Walter Benjamin in 1935. In this theory, life and the affairs of living are conceived of as innately artistic, and related to as such politically. Politics are in turn viewed as artistic, and structured like an art form which reciprocates the artistic conception of life being seen as art. This has also been noted as being connected to the Italian Futurist movement and postulated as its main motivation for getting involved in the Fascist regime of Italy.
Whilst the aestheticization of politics was for Walter Benjamin a key ingredient of Fascist regimes, the cultural context of the meeting of Buntline and Cody on a train journey, and their subsequent "cultural collaborations", involves a number of contradictory forces at work. These forces resulted in contributing to a hugely influential myth-making process just as the United States was re-forging its foundation narrative in the post American Civil War era. This is the era of an emerging globalisation and the impact of technologies, part and parcel of the experience of modernity, and eventually leading to an American global hegemony.
As a frontier scout, Cody respected Native Americans and supported their civil rights. He employed many Native Americans, as he thought his show offered them good pay with a chance to improve their lives. He described them as "the former foe, present friend, the American" and once said that;
"every Indian outbreak that I have ever known has resulted from broken promises and broken treaties by the government."On the other hand, as an American publisher, journalist, writer, and publicist, Edward Zane Carroll Judson Sr. also known by his pseudonym Ned Buntline, was a notorious nativist, typically promoting the interests of native inhabitants against those of immigrants. This included involvement in the Astor Place Riot that occurred on May 10, 1849, at the now-demolished Astor Opera House in Manhattan and left between 22 and 31 rioters dead, and more than 120 people injured. It was the deadliest to that date of a number of civic disturbances in Manhattan, which generally pitted immigrants and nativists against each other, or together against the wealthy who controlled the city's police and the state militia.
The instigation of this riot had its ostensible genesis in a dispute between Edwin Forrest, one of the best-known American actors of that time, and William Charles Macready, a similarly notable English actor, which largely revolved around which of them was better than the other at acting the major roles of Shakespeare.
In the first half of the 19th century, theatre as entertainment was a mass phenomenon, and theatres were the main gathering places in most towns and cities. As a result, star actors amassed an immensely loyal following, comparable to modern celebrities or sports stars. At the same time, audiences had always treated theaters as places to make their feelings known, not just towards the actors, but towards their fellow theatergoers of different classes or political persuasions, and theatre riots were not a rare occurrence in New York.
In the early- to mid-19th century, the American theatre was dominated by British actors and managers. The rise of Edwin Forrest as the first American star and the fierce partisanship of his supporters was an early sign of a home-grown American entertainment business. The riot had been brewing for 80 or more years, since the Stamp Act riots of 1765, when an entire theatre was torn apart while British actors were performing on stage. British actors touring around America had found themselves the focus of often violent anti-British anger, because of their prominence and the lack of other visiting targets.
The fact that both Forrest and Macready were specialists in Shakespeare can be ascribed to the reputation of Shakespeare in the 19th century as the icon of Anglo-Saxon culture. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for instance, wrote in his journal that beings on other planets probably called the Earth "Shakespeare." Shakespeare's plays were not just the favorites of the educated: in gold rush California, miners whiled away the harsh winter months by sitting around campfires and acting out Shakespeare's plays from memory; his words were well known throughout every stratum of society.
A handbill, produced by Ned Buntline and the American Committee (also known as the Order of United Americans) and handed out prior to, and complicit in instigating, the Astor Place riot.
It was through his columns and his association with New York City's notorious gangs of the early 19th century, that Buntline became involved as one of the instigators of the Astor Place Riot, which left 23 people dead. He was fined $250 and sentenced to a year's imprisonment in September 1849.
After his release, he devoted himself to writing sensational stories for weekly newspapers, and his income purportedly amounted to $20,000 a year. In 1852 he was involved in a nativist riot in St. Louis, while he was a member of the Know Nothing Party.
The Know Nothing Party was the unofficial name for The Native American Party, renamed the American Party in 1855 and commonly known as the Know Nothing movement. This was an American nativist political party that operated nationally in the mid-1850s. It was primarily anti-Catholic, xenophobic, and hostile to immigration, starting originally as a secret society. The movement briefly emerged as a major political party in the form of the American Party. Adherents to the movement were to reply "I know nothing" when asked about its specifics by outsiders, thus providing the group with its common name.
Following the nativist riot in St. Louis Buntline managed to elude the authorities but was arrested in 1872 while touring and promoting his play in the city. Although a heavy drinker, he traveled around the country giving lectures about temperance.
On one of his temperance lecture tours, Buntline met William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody on a train journey . . .
The rest is, as they say, history . . .
At twelve minutes long, The Great Train Robbery film is considered a milestone in film making, expanding on Porter's previous work Life of an American Fireman. The film used a number of then-unconventional techniques, including composite editing, on-location shooting, and frequent camera movement. The film is one of the earliest to use the technique of cross cutting, in which two scenes are shown to be occurring simultaneously but in different locations. Some prints were also hand colored in certain scenes. Techniques used in The Great Train Robbery were inspired by those used in Frank Mottershaw's British film A Daring Daylight Burglary, released earlier in the year. Film historians now largely consider The Great Train Robbery to be the first American action film and the first Western film with a "recognizable form".
Buntline took a train in 1869 from California to Nebraska, where he had been lecturing on the virtues of temperance. There, he met William Cody, who was with a group of men who had recently participated in a battle against the Sioux and Cheyenne.
Traveling with the gregarious Cody, Buntline became friends with him and later claimed that he created the nickname "Buffalo Bill" for the hero of his serial novel Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men, published in the New York Weekly beginning 23 December 1869.
Originally, Buntline was going to cast Cody as a sidekick of "Wild Bill" Hickok, but he found Cody's character more interesting than Hickok's. Buntline presented Cody as a "compendium of cliches"; however, this did not stop the New York playwright Frank Meader from using Buntline's novel as the basis of a play about Cody's life in 1872. In the same year, Buntline and James Gordon Bennett Jr. invited Cody to New York City, where Cody saw the play at the Bowery Theater.
As mentioned above, in December of that year Buntline also wrote a Buffalo Bill play, Scouts of the Prairie, which was performed by Cody himself, Texas Jack Omohundro, the Italian ballerina Giuseppina Morlacchi, and Buntline.
For some time, 6-year-old Carlos Montezuma also was featured in the show as "Atzeka, the Apache-child of Cochise", being the only genuine American Indian on stage, while his adoptive father, the Italian photographer Carlo Gentile, was hired to produce and sell promotional cartes de visite of the cast members.
Until his death Wassaja fought to support the rights of his Yavapai people and other Native Americans.
Cody at first was a reluctant actor, but came to enjoy the spotlight. Scouts of the Prairie opened in Chicago in December 1872 and starred Cody. It was panned by critics, but was a success nonetheless. It was performed to packed theatres across the country for years.
It was Buntline's play that served as a form of training for Cody's later Wild West shows.
Strange as it may seem, in this land of industry, technology, fluid boundaries, frontiers and law, for Cody there could be two kinds of world, two kinds of existence, where Cody served as a scout for the Army in the summer; and when campaigning stopped for the winter, he would head to a theatre stage.
