Review: Buffalo Bill and the Indians

At the heart of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, which thrilled audiences from 1883 to 1913, was a story about the struggle for the U.S. frontier. According to historian Richard White, the show featured the myth of the “inverted conquest,” depicting white Americans as victims suffering at the hands of their Native enemies and thus sanitizing their invasion of Indian country; in this telling, settler aggression was merely a form of self-defense. Not one to skimp on realism, William F. Cody (better known by his stage name, Buffalo Bill) enlisted dozens of Native people—some of whom had even fought against the U.S. military—to appear in his extravaganza, playing the foils. And for a brief stint in 1885, the Lakota holy man Sitting Bull, the era’s most famous Indian, was a celebrated member of the cast. A pair of new and starkly contrasting books considers his through-the-looking-glass experience starring in the endless rout of his own people.

“Blood Brothers” offers a brisk and compassionate retelling of a familiar story, but falters at times under the weight of its author’s dogged optimism about the redemptive power of this “strange friendship.” As Ms. Stillman muses in the introduction, “It would seem that America has embarked on the painful and necessary journey of healing our original sin—the betrayal of Native Americans. . . . Perhaps the brief time that Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill were together can serve as a foundation upon which this rift can be repaired.” It is an alluring thought. And yet, the recent completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline across Sioux land where Sitting Bull once lived, despite massive, pan-Indian opposition, is a reminder that tribal sovereignty, the linchpin of Native revitalization, remains precarious due to the overweening power of federal authority.

The novelist and film director Éric Vuillard, whose recent book about Hitler won the Goncourt Prize for 2017, shares none of Ms. Stillman’s optimism. First published in France in 2014 to great acclaim, his “Sorrow of the Earth” (translated into crisp and colloquial English by Ann Jefferson ) is a pungent work of historical reimagining, blending fact and speculation to capture the perspective of Sitting Bull and other Native performers in Cody’s show. The picture that emerges is ugly and dispiriting. Gone is the coarse but avuncular Buffalo Bill of more established narratives. Whatever financial benefit the Indian participants receive is offset by their ruthless exploitation, which includes, after each performance, the hocking of trinkets “that derive from their genocide.” And the men, women and children in the audience, who turn out in droves, are stirred less by curiosity than their unquenchable (and unselfconscious) hatred of Native peoples.

Mr. Vuillard is primarily concerned with the concept of spectacle, never satisfactorily defined but apparently a heady mix of voyeurism and entertainment derived through fetishizing the exotic. If, as he suggests, modern Europeans invented the spectacle, built from artifacts ripped from colonized outposts around the world and displayed in gilded metropolitan museums, the Wild West show elevated it to a kinetic art form: “Movement and action. Reality itself. Yes, just galloping horses, re-enacted battles, suspense, people falling down dead and getting up again. It had everything.” Only in the United States, Mr. Vuillard intimates, could a huckster like Cody turn the tragedy of Native dispossession, still unfolding even as the Wild West toured across North America and Europe, into a garish, multimillion-dollar extravaganza, with the Indians playing themselves. Mr. Vuillard’s contempt for the show, its creator and its audience is palpable.

“Sorrow of the Earth” is a compulsive read, with short, sharp chapters that move easily from the arena floor to Wounded Knee to Cody’s eponymous town in northwestern Wyoming, which the author dismisses as an “icy desert.” Mr. Vuillard’s outrage is infectious, and sharing in his exasperation indemnifies readers against their own complicity in the fruits of unchecked 19th-century U.S. expansion. But as with many ad hominem indictments, over time the insults that stand in for argument come to seem lazy and imprecise. The same is true of sweeping generalizations and overstatements, intended to provoke reflection but which instead begin to clutter the book. Take this: “Civilization is a huge and insatiable beast. It feeds on everything.” Or this: “Previously, no American or any Westerner in the world had ever seen anything. Up until now, all they had seen was their dreams.” Such rhetorical devices are distracting, and lessen the impact of this unusual, and powerful, meditation on Native peoples and the Wild West show.