Page 12 - Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business

shape and form. And sometimes, the stage seems to exist more than the world,

it is more present than our own lives, more moving and more persuasive than
reality, more terrifying than our nightmares.
And in order to bring in an audience, in order to get ever more people
wanting to come and see the Wild West Show, they had to be told a story, the
story that millions of Americans, and then millions of Europeans, wanted to
hear, the only story they wanted to hear, and the one that, perhaps without
knowing it, they were already hearing in the crackle of the electric light bulbs.

The inhabitants of American cities, this new breed of humans whose disquiet
is a stubborn question addressed only to them, and to no one else, who in the
depths of their angst have a sense of being set apart, designated by the spirit of
progress to seize the torch of humanity and hold it higher than anyone has
ever held it before, let me tell you, these inhabitants of the cities of America

wanted to witness something different, they wanted to travel across the Great
Plains in their imagination, to ride through the canyons of Colorado and
experience the lives of the pioneers. It might appear strange, but by means of
the lives of the pioneers and the turbulent tales of their migration, the
inhabitants of the young American cities wanted to be present at a live
broadcast of their own History, that great display of courage and violence
which, a few thousand miles away, was still in the making.

All this was very splendid, but in reality, thanks to a fetid emanation from the
crowd or an effluence from the soul, Buffalo Bill knew that it wasn’t the

cowpokes or the sharpshooters that the crowds came to see. No. The power of
his spectacle (and he probably didn’t really know where it came from), the
idea that gave it its authentic substance, the thing that made it irresistible was
the presence of the Indians, real Indians. Yes, that was the only thing that
people came for. Oh! of course they didn’t realize this themselves, because

most of them despised Indians. But if they scrimped and saved to buy tickets
for every member of the family, and took their seats quietly in a row on the
bleachers, it was unquestionably to see the Indians and not for any other
reason. So Buffalo Bill had to show Indians. And for such a spectacle to
prosper, he had to keep coming up with new stars.
For this, apart from Buffalo Bill himself, there was Major John Burke, his
impresario. Like most of the people who wore cuffs in those days, John Burke

wasn’t a major at all. You come across him sometimes under the name of
Arizona John, although he had never been to Arizona either. He was just a