Page 8 - Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business

decided to follow him. The museum toured in the Midwest and the little

sketches it staged, where the Indians performed dances to illustrate the
specific function of each object, were both entertaining and educational.
Towards the end of 1890, barely three years before the Columbian
Exposition, Charles Bristol had joined forces with a bum by the name of Riley
Miller. Once Bristol chummed up with Riley, the story becomes hard to
credit. Previously, according to him, Bristol had accumulated his treasures
thanks to his Indian friendships—a long succession of little gifts. But Riley

Miller was a murderer and a thief. He would scalp and strip dead Indians: he
murdered them and then took their moccasins, their weapons, their shirts, their
hair—everything. Men, women or children. A part of the relics displayed by
Bristol at the Chicago Fair came from these activities. Later on, the history
museum in Nebraska bought Charles Bristol’s collection; and today,

somewhere in the museum’s reserve collection, you might well come across
the desiccated body of the Indian baby from the Exposition. What this tells us
is that show business and the human sciences had their origins in the same
displays, with curiosities lifted from the dead. Which means that today, what
you find on museum shelves throughout the world is nothing but trophies and
plunder. And all the African, Indian or Asian objects that we admire were
stolen off corpses.