Page 63 - Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business

AND BUFFALO BILL CARRIED ON indefatigably with his tours. He grew older on
stage. Nothing would make him give up. He was hooked, smitten, addicted.
There was no curing him. Yet almost everywhere, new distractions were
emerging, new spectacles, new forms of rapture. The Wild West Show was

beginning to look tacky.
From now on, during his long tours round the US, in seedy little towns
where people still booked his show, Buffalo Bill would lodge with friends
when he wasn’t sleeping in his own tent. With age, friendships become
precious. You see each other less often, but you’re always glad to meet up.
And so from time to time Buffalo Bill would spend a few days with his friend
Elmer Dundy, an old chum. And while they chatted together in the large

sitting room, recalling this or that episode from their life in Nebraska, little
Elmer (in the US the eldest son often takes the father’s first name, like a
further proof of genealogy) would worm his way between the pompom-
fringed lampshades and the leather armchairs. He’d listen in open-mouthed
wonder—the way children look at the plaster figures on merry-go-rounds.
He’d listen for hours to Buffalo Bill talking about his exploits, the sixty-nine

bison he killed in a single day against Bill Comstock’s forty-eight, and thanks
to which he inherited the name Bill, which he stuck after Buffalo to
commemorate the day. Elmer listened to him telling the tales he’d already told
a thousand and one times about the Indian wars, his wild youth, how he
embarked on a life of adventure at the age of fourteen, how his feet hurt riding
mules without shoes, how Ned Buntline wrote the story of his life, the one that
Elmer had read in the three-cent volume his father had bought for him. Yes,

for hours on end, Elmer would listen to the old cheapskate rehashing this
prodigious bunkum. He would listen to stories about rangers and edifying
tales of battle. But what Elmer really wanted to hear, the thing that made his
heart race for hours as he sat on the floor of the sitting room, hanging on the
lips of Buffalo Bill, wasn’t the description of the Eiffel Tower, nor the

stories about Sitting Bull. It wasn’t life in the Wild West, nor the death of
Yellow Hair, nor the story of Little Big Horn. No. The only thing that
genuinely interested little Elmer, the only real reason he had for listening to
the old fart’s claptrap, was that after a thousand yarns about Sitting Bull and
the Pony Express, he always ended up talking about the Wild West Show.