Page 36 - Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business

IT’S SAID THAT ARCHILOCHUS walked across a desert of bones and that he was
obliged to make the journey alone. An Indian physician, Dr Charles Eastman,
had come to scour the area for survivors. He’d arrived one morning, 1st
January, and by midday he and the men who were with him had found ten

people. They continued to search through the undergrowth, anxious, but full
of love and sorrow, going everywhere a dying person might have hidden;
when, all of a sudden, they thought they heard a baby’s cry. They assumed
they must have dreamt it, but there was a second whimper. So the men spread
into a line, moving forward slowly, stopping to cock an ear. The sky was grey,
the clouds were thick. The men walked in silence. Suddenly one of them
called out. The others hurried over. The crying came from a woman’s corpse.

They dropped onto all fours, and scraped around the dead woman. They lifted
up her body, stiff, cold and congealed in its own blood; in her dead arms, they
found a little girl. They had to use force to prise apart the frozen arms.

WHILE THE REGIMENT was slaughtering the Indians at Wounded Knee, Buffalo

Bill had landed in America, and then reached Nebraska. There he had learned
of the death of Sitting Bull and the massacre which had just taken place. It’s
claimed that to the end of his days he regretted that he hadn’t been able to
intervene. That’s as may be. The key fact is that he immediately made his way
to Wounded Knee. You can see him in a legendary photograph, at Pine Ridge,
with General Miles. It can’t be said that this connection bodes well. Miles was

a scumbag. He’d had the Apache scouts in his own army deported to Florida;
and Geronimo, who had given himself up only on condition that he would be
able return to his own territory after two years of captivity, never saw Arizona
again. A few years later, Miles would put down the strikes in the Pullman
factories in Chicago; twelve factory workers would be killed. Miles would die
in 1925, from a heart attack, in Washington DC. Attending a circus

performance with his grandchildren.

It was a few days after Buffalo Bill’s arrival that the young Leonard W.
Colby, an admired soldier and a womanizer, found himself at Pine Ridge
railway station. Later, when he had attained a fair degree of celebrity, Leonard