Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull Play Cowboys and Indians

Tuesday, 01 July 2008 00:00

"I never shot an Indian but I regretted it," William F. Cody, aka Buffalo Bill, proclaimed. Quite a few Indians were shot whenever Buffalo Bill, Chief Sitting Bull and the cast of the Great Wild West Exhibition played cowboys and Indians—but by this time, it was just staged shooting with blanks.

A decade earlier it had been the real thing, when Sitting Bull and his Sioux warriors slaughtered General Custer and 265 soldiers of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry in the Battle of the Little Big Horn, before fleeing to safety in Canada. Here they faced years of hunger because the buffalo had vanished. Cody himself had shot 4,000 of them to feed railway construction workers.

When the Wild West show pulled into town, it was aboard an 18-car train with 150 performers, 80 horses, 19 buffalo, 2 elk, steers, donkeys, mules and the famed Deadwood coach.