Page 39 - Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business

orphans, are violent and sentimental, he doubtless felt a mix of self-interest

and sentiment. The bargaining was fierce. Sitting in Asay’s store, right next to
the baby who was held close by an Indian woman, while May, the queen of
Pine Ridge, poured drinks, Colby, Buffalo Bill and Colby negotiated a price
for the child. No one knows how much Colby paid for Zintkala Nuni, but it
doesn’t matter; we know only that he was mad, and that more than once in his
life his behaviour bordered on insanity; but his greatest act of lunacy was
undoubtedly to buy the child and adopt it, and in so doing to mix tears and

profit to an extreme degree. Yes—as you can see on that dreadful photograph
where he’s holding the child in his arms, dressed in a sort of christening robe
—you could say that Leonard Colby advanced a long way into his insanity,
swallowing up the life of another person in his own life, and dissolving his in
a calamitous enterprise.

THEY CALLED THE LITTLE Indian girl Marguerite, Marguerite Colby. I’ve seen
pictures of the child, she must be four or five years old. In one of them she’s
wrapped in a lace or muslin curtain, standing by a sofa. Her face is dark. Her
eyes are black. She’s very pretty. She’s wearing a dress fit for a princess, as
they do in good families. She’s smiling timidly, her hand has grasped a bit of

the curtain and she’s holding it between her fingers, like an enigma. The
Colbys’ house was full of dubious antiques, ostrich feathers, lotus flowers and
hieroglyphs. Afternoon tea was served with sandwiches, fruit tarts and jam
cookies. Everyone was eager to know the details of the little Indian girl’s life,
and Mrs Colby, her adoptive mother, started a column in the newspaper about

the doings of her daughter. You can see that, from the very start, the mass
media had a propensity for excess.

And the little girl grew bigger and unruly, and she never became the model of
good Christian upbringing that people wished. When she was still very young,
and still playing tag among the washing lines in the yard behind the house, she
would hang around in the alleyway with the negro women chattering under
the porch. Then, from the boarding school where she was eventually sent, she
wrote long, incoherent letters to her mother; she was often ill, and sometimes
threatened to kill herself. In the end, her mother took her to Portland where

they set up home. As for her adoptive father, Leonard Colby, they never saw