Page 7 - Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business

SPECTACLE IS THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD. Tragedy stands before us, motionless
and strangely anachronistic. And so, in Chicago, at the World’s Columbian
Exposition of 1893 commemorating the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s

voyage, a display of relics on a stall in the central aisle included the desiccated
corpse of a newborn Indian baby. There were twenty-one million visitors.
They promenaded on the wooden balconies of the Idaho Building, admired the
miracles of technology, like the gigantic chocolate Venus de Milo at the
entrance to the agricultural pavilion, and then bought cones of sausages for ten
cents apiece. Huge numbers of buildings had been erected, and the place
resembled a gimcrack St Petersburg, with its arches, its obelisks, its plaster

architecture borrowed from every age and every land. The black-and-white
photographs we have convey the illusion of an extraordinary city, with
palaces fringed by statues and fountains, and ornamental pools down to which
stone steps slowly descend. Yet it’s all fake.
But the highlight of the Columbian Exposition, its apotheosis, the feature

that was to attract the greatest number of spectators, was the Wild West Show.
Everyone wanted to see it. And Charles Bristol—the proprietor of the stall
with the Indian relics and the exhibit of the baby’s corpse—also wanted to
drop everything and go! He already knew the spectacle, because right at the
start of his career, he had been the manager and wardrobe master for the Wild
West Show. But it was no longer the same, and it had now become a colossal
enterprise. There were two performances a day, and eighteen thousand seats.

Horses galloped past a backdrop of gigantic painted canvases. It wasn’t the
loose string of rodeos and sharpshooters that he had known, but a veritable
enactment of History. So while the Columbian Exposition was celebrating the
industrial revolution, Buffalo Bill was glorifying conquest.
Later on, much later on, Charles Bristol had worked for the Kickapoo
Indian Medicine Company, which employed nearly eight hundred Indians

and around fifty Whites to sell its stuff. Its flagship medicine was Sagwa, a
mixture of herbs and alcohol for the treatment of rheumatism and dyspepsia.
And it would appear that cowboys suffered particularly from wind and
borborygmic dyspepsia, because right across the country people were in
search of a remedy. Eventually, Charles Bristol abandoned the sale of
medicines and embarked on a series of long tours with his collection of objets
d’art. Two Winnebago Indians who were part of the Medicine Company had