American Indian Culture and Research Journal

During the summer of 1896, the Queen City of the West experienced the Wild West. That June, eighty-nine intrepid men, women, and children from the Sicangu Lakota Sioux band traveled more than a thousand miles by train from Valentine, Nebraska, a small town near their home on Rosebud Reservation in western South Dakota, to Cincinnati, Ohio, a mid-western city of German heritage located on the Ohio River. The Sicangu packed their fine Plains clothing and large tipis, boarded their horses onto the train, and departed for the unknown. They had just signed contracts with Cincinnati Zoological Society officials agreeing to camp on the Zoological Garden’s grounds for three months and participate in a series of educational programs illustrating frontier and pioneer life for Cincinnati’s citizens. The zoo’s summer program imitated William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West shows that were capturing the imagination of awestruck crowds nationwide. Many people believed that these spectacles, promising to be realistic reenactments of frontier life, had deleterious effects on the Indians in the show. At least one Indian and numerous whites, including federal officials, humanitarians, and educators, claimed that these shows only reinforced the stereotype of Plains Indians prevalent at that time. Others maintained that Wild West events encouraged Indians to retain their culture at a time when government administrators preached that civilizing Native Americans and encouraging them to farm was critical to their survival. Still others felt that show Indians were exposed to undesirable elements of white society. Worse yet, some show owners abruptly abandoned Indians in out-of-the-way places, fueling the prevailing attitude that these shows were bad for Indians. Buffalo Bill was probably the only authority who, at that time, maintained that these frontier reenactments benefited Indians by educating the participants about white society. John M. Burke, Buffalo Bill’s general manager and press agent, publicly endorsed the zoo’s 1896 program.