Éric Vuillard - 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 Worlds Columbian Exposition of 1893 commemorating the 400th anniversary of Columbuss 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 its 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 Bristolthe proprietor of the stall with the Indian relics and the exhibit of the babys corpsealso 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 wasnt 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 dart. Two Winnebago Indians who were part of the Medicine Company had 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 friendshipsa 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 haireverything. 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 Bristols collection; and today, somewhere in the museums 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.

LET US GO BACK A LITTLE , to a time a few years before the Chicago Columbian Exposition, and take a closer look at the tremendous Wild West Show. What force of attraction can bring forty thousand people a day to see this spectacle? Down what incline in their fleeting lives do they slide to reach the great arena where yelling horsemen gallop through cardboard scenery? It was ten years before the Great Exposition that Buffalo Bill set up his show; the thing was nonetheless put together gradually, incorporating new acts, piecemeal fashion, one after the other. The early version was most likely nothing more than a tedious succession of rodeos, but Buffalo Bill didnt stop there. When the former scout took to the stage, he was determined to revolutionize the art of entertainment and make it into somethingdifferent. So Buffalo Bill dragged his circus from town to town, improving the acts and recruiting new stars; but as it developed, the Wild West Show acquired a new form of success; it was no longer just a circus, no longer a troupe of acrobats performing on stage. No, it was something quite new. And yet, when you looked carefully, it was all rather ramshackle, just a string of little numbers; and there was nothing very extraordinary about it, no monsters, no hideous creatures; so what was it, then?

Movement and action. Reality itself. Yes, just galloping horses, re-enacted battles, suspense, people falling down dead and getting up again. It had everything. And the audiences grew all the time, clapping, laughing, shouting, enthralled, completely spellbound; as if the world had been created in a drum roll.

However, the real spark was elsewhere. The central idea of the Wild West Show lay somewhere else. The aim was to astound the public with an intimation of suffering and death which would never lose its grip on them. They had to be drawn out of themselves, like little silver fish in a landing net. They had to be presented with human figures who shriek and collapse in a pool of blood. There had to be consternation and terror, hope, and a sort of clarity, an extreme truth cast across the whole of life. Yes, people had to shuddera spectacle must send a shiver through everything we know, it must catapult us ahead of ourselves, it must strip us of our certainties and sear us. Yes, a spectacle sears us, despite what its detractors say. A spectacle steals from us, and lies to us, and intoxicates us, and gives us the world in every shape and form. And sometimes, the stage seems to exist more than the world, it is more present than our own lives, more moving and more persuasive than reality, more terrifying than our nightmares.

And in order to bring in an audience, in order to get ever more people wanting to come and see the Wild West Show, they had to be told a story, the story that millions of Americans, and then millions of Europeans, wanted to hear, the only story they wanted to hear, and the one that, perhaps without knowing it, they were already hearing in the crackle of the electric light bulbs. The inhabitants of American cities, this new breed of humans whose disquiet is a stubborn question addressed only to them, and to no one else, who in the depths of their angst have a sense of being set apart, designated by the spirit of progress to seize the torch of humanity and hold it higher than anyone has ever held it before, let me tell you, these inhabitants of the cities of America wanted to witness something different, they wanted to travel across the Great Plains in their imagination, to ride through the canyons of Colorado and experience the lives of the pioneers. It might appear strange, but by means of the lives of the pioneers and the turbulent tales of their migration, the inhabitants of the young American cities wanted to be present at a live broadcast of their own History, that great display of courage and violence which, a few thousand miles away, was still in the making.