Page 16 - Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business

CIVILIZATION IS A HUGE and insatiable beast. It feeds on everything. It needs
pepper, and tea, and coal, and tin. It is impossible ever to satisfy. Civilization
also demands less material sustenance, but it quickly wearies of its fare. It
constantly requires new recruits, new faces. And so the Wild West Show had

regularly to hire more actors. And for this, there is something better than
artistes, better than the best acrobats, better than any freak of nature. There are
the real protagonists of History. Just think about it! You can always pay a
juggler to astound an audience, you can always dig out a hunchback or a pair
of Siamese twins to draw a curious crowd. But getting tens of thousands of
people to come every day, to make fifteen thousand, twenty thousand people
pay over a dollar, morning and evening for years on end, requires something

more than jugglers and hunchbacks. It requires something quite
unprecedented. And this was why, one morning in 1885, after several years of
exile and imprisonment, the old Indian chief Sitting Bull, victor at the Battle
of the Little Big Horn, received a visit from John Burke.
The big beast had come alone. The weather was glorious. As he perched on

his sprung phaeton, between two jolts of his vehicle, John Burke had carefully
pondered his plan. It’s true that the road bucked a little too much for a man of
his girth, the potholes and the humpback bridges had caused him a fair degree
of misery. He had driven grumbling alongside a never-ending avenue of
willows, then taken a narrow track that cut across a boundless plain. But
although he was much tried by his journey, once he arrived, his manner was
relaxed and affable. Yes, he’d come with a mouth full of pieties, a few small

presents and a clear blue sky. He offered a cigar to the Indian, who refused it.
He smoked his nabob’s peace pipe by himself, before the silent Indian. After
the usual exchange of greetings, during which a sly and ferocious battle was
instantly engaged, John Burke launched into a long, convoluted, labyrinthine
and meandering speech. Between two compliments he rearranged his hair,
pushing it back and clamping it round his ears. But the old Indian maintained

an obstinate silence. And after a quarter of an hour of chatter, John Burke
realized that his hedging about was getting him nowhere; Sitting Bull seemed
cagey, and he would do better to get to the point.
The Indian chief had long since known that the white man presented
constantly changing faces and that he should not be taken in by any of them;