Page 56 - Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business

speak of a town? In America in those days, towns flared up and died like

wicks in a lamp. In 1900, the town of Cody was still just a few scattered
hovels. Around 1903, Buffalo Bill Cody—it’s hard to know what to call him
now—built the Irma Hotel, named after his daughter. Its cherrywood bar was
a gift from Queen Victoria. On the wall, rifles were a reminder of his past
glories on the battlefield. John Burke had overseen all the details with devoted
and sensitive attention. Business is a form of insanity. A yawning abyss. It’s
all anyone can see now. Life outside of it barely exists; nothing is safe from

the gales that blow up out of the void. The entire world ends up in the stock
exchange and the trading pit.
Cody is a stage set. It speaks the truth by lying. From a distance it looks
hazy and insubstantial; it’s bathed in an atmosphere of unease and unreality.
This is because the town of Cody is dead. Completely and utterly dead. For

nearly a hundred and seventy days a year the temperature in Cody remains
below zero. And then it’s got every possible kind of fake Western
architectural feature: rustic balustrades, ugly brick house fronts, slot machines,
rodeo girls. There’s nothing in Cody. Just an all-consuming sadness.
At the time of Wounded Knee, four years had passed since Buffalo Bill
had created Cody. He was very attached to the place, especially as it was his
second project involving a town. You can’t fail a thousand times. You have to

create towns where people come to live—it’s absolutely indispensable. Just as
spectacles demand an audience, so a town needs inhabitants. But Cody didn’t
develop. Buffalo Bill was unable to apply to anything else the flair and the
luck he demonstrated on the stage. But he would really have loved to turn his
circus-performer’s instincts into a town, a pretty little town, a town that was
his and his alone; but which was also inhabited, luxurious even, full of life and

movement and tourists and businesses; and bore his name. But it hadn’t
worked. The town just stagnated in its stone-built decor. And then, it’s said
that in response to his request, Teddy Roosevelt, an old chum of Buffalo Bill,
launched the construction of Shoshone Dam, the biggest dam of its time, and
that suddenly the town of Cody took off. But this is only hearsay.

Buffalo Bill was constantly on the road, and the town of Cody was like an old
dream, an old gypsy’s dream, a desire to anchor his life somewhere, and to
give it a real shape. Perhaps, like Alexander before him, the old beast

imagined creating a town where he could end his headlong rush through the
world in the company of a young mistress, one last love, purer and sweeter