8 AUGUST 22-28, 2024 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | I’m a racist.” At a February meeting, Clark revealed he’d visited the gift shop and was perturbed by some products, including a rubber toma- hawk. But Clark was most upset by Chief Lollipop — a so-called cigar store Indian whose headdress had drill holes stuffed with colorful suckers. “Jolon said, ‘There’s no way that’s defen- sible on any level,’” Carle recalls. No equivocation from Clark: “In Denver, we strive to be inclusive at all times and cre- ate environments in our public space where everyone feels welcome and respected. So I did share that there were items that I didn’t feel were in line with Denver values.” Clark says that discomfort over Carle’s displays had nothing to do with allowing the present contract to lapse. Still, Carle says he “sanitized” his sales fl oor by remov- ing anything that struck Clark as objec- tionable, despite his sense that he’d done nothing wrong. “A cigar store Indian isn’t like a Civil War statue,” he asserts. “It’s just an Old West thing.” Friesen, widely seen as the country’s most prominent Buffalo Bill expert, under- stands the tensions between these views. “It’s Americana versus political correctness,” he says. “Does it promote stereotypes? Yes, on some levels. But nobody’s going to buy a souvenir of an American Indian lawyer in a suit. One has to be realistic.” Friesen encourages a similar approach to analyzing Cody’s personal narra- tive. The museum’s Buffalo Bill biography notes that he was born in LeClaire, Iowa, in 1846; moved to Leavenworth, Kansas, as a child; left home at eleven to herd cattle and drive wagon trains; and tried his hand at fur trapping and gold mining before joining an early ver- sion of the Pony Express in 1860. After the Civil War, “Cody scouted for the Army and gained the nickname ‘Buffalo Bill’ as a hunter providing meat for the rail- road workers,” it continues. But he wasn’t universally acclaimed until “he met Ned Buntline, a dime nov- elist who transformed his life into a series of larger-than-life stories” that made him famous. In 1872, at age 26, he appeared in onstage dra- mas with Buntline before launch- ing his own ensemble the next year. He and a revolving series of co-stars put on plays over the next ten years before the 1882 launch of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, in which Cody replicated many of his battles as an Army scout, using tribe members to portray opponents. One bio passage concedes that the show “did little to educate audiences about the trauma American Indians faced from the American government.” But it credits Buf- falo Bill’s Wild West for offering “an alter- native way of life” that allowed Indigenous individuals “to earn money and represent their culture openly.” This overview leaves out plenty of Cody events that offend contemporary sensibili- ties, including his scalping of Cheyenne war- rior Yellow Hair following Colonel George Custer’s 1876 vanquishing at the Battle of Little Big Horn. (The scalp of a Crow combat- ant was part of an exhibit at the Buffalo Bill Museum until Friesen’s stint as director; he helped repatriate it to the tribe.) But Friesen stresses that controversial elements aren’t omitted from the museum itself. Rather, they’re put into perspective in ways that he’s tried to accomplish in books such as 2010’s Buffalo Bill: Scout, Showman, Visionary and 2017’s Lakota Performers in Europe: Their Culture and the Artifacts They Left Behind. “When we’re looking at any historical fi gure, I think it’s important to understand the context in which they operated and judge them less by our standards today,” Friesen recommends. “Yes, Buffalo Bill refl ected some aspects of his time. But he advocated for equal rights for the American Indians, he said women should vote, and he spoke out on behalf of saving natural resources. If we look at him that way, I’d say he was ahead of his time.” Other scholars are less willing to give Cody a pass. In 2014’s Sitting Bull, Buffalo Bill, and Native American Stereotypes, pub- lished by Texas Woman’s University, authors Marcello Monterrosa and Rosemary Can- delario contend that a photograph of Cody and Sioux Chief Sitting Bull is symbolic of innumerable sins against the Indigenous. “Buffalo Bill contributed to popular culture by introducing confl icting identities and harmful stereotypes of Native Americans as ‘savages’ but ‘noble,’ ‘exotic’ but ‘uncivilized,’ ‘spiritual’ but ‘heathen,’” they write. Indian Commission member Emerson endorses these opinions. “Buffalo Bill cre- ated, profi ted off of, and cemented in the American consciousness the image of the noble savage, the noble loser,” he says. “He connected Natives to the American West as something to be conquered and tamed, bent to the will of the brave pioneer.” At the same time, Emerson doesn’t cheer the impending shuttering of the Buffalo Bill gift shop. “My grandma and my mom would make dream catchers for the trading post — even though dream catchers have nothing to do with Diné [Navajo] culture — because that’s what tourists were buying,” he says. “Traders would bring Arab de- signs to weavers for Navajo rugs because they would sell better. I have heard that the gift shop bought and sold from Native ar- tisans here in Denver, and losing a buyer isn’t really something to celebrate.” Like the stars of yesterday and today, William F. Cody has his own page on the Internet Movie Database. IMDB also sports a list of the best fi lms in which Cody ap- peared — mainly shorts that were made in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Parade, in which New York City throngs gather to glimpse Cody and his cohorts, is on YouTube via the Library of Congress. The website also lists 47 fi lms or television series in which Cody was rendered by actors — a total that’s almost certainly low. Among those to slip into Buffalo Bill’s boots were Charlton Heston, Joel McCrea and Roy Rogers. But not all the depictions were laudatory. A cinematic compendium assembled by True West magazine observes that Cody was re- incarnated “as a fanciful buffoon in Marco Ferreri’s 1974 anti-American satire Don’t Touch the White Woman! and in Robert Alt- man’s absurdist exposition on stardom and manifest destiny, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson,” headlined by Paul Newman in 1976. True West calls Altman’s take on Cody “pathetic,” but the movie effectively captures the size, scope and ambition of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. The show embarked on its fi rst European tour in 1887, and the Julia Sim- one Stetler study Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in Germany: A Transnational History reveals that the logistics of the massive production were analyzed by both the German and the French military. The infl uence went both ways: By 1891, according to author Don Russell, the Wild West cast consisted of 640 “eating members,” including “20 Ger- man soldiers, 20 English soldiers, 20 United States soldiers, 12 Cossacks and 6 Argentine Gauchos” along with the “old reliables: 20 Mexican vaqueros, 25 cowboys, 6 cowgirls, 100 Sioux Indians, and the Cowboy Band of 37 mounted musicians.” The resulting costs associated with the vast undertaking eventu- ally wreaked havoc on Cody’s fi nances, and by the time he died, he was nearly broke. Pulitzer Prize winner Larry McMurtry was less interested in focusing on Buffalo Bill’s downturns, as evidenced by Cody’s presence at the cen- Canceling Buffalo Bill continued from page 6 continued on page 10 Part of the Denver Mountain Parks system, the museum was added in the ’70s, just down from the spot where Buffalo Bill was buried in 1917. MICHAEL ROBERTS MICHAEL ROBERTS
