What the Queen said

The guy was a showman. Really, he makes Donald Trump look like small potatoes. 

What Buffalo Bill tried to do--what he accomplished, in fact--was take an entire wild west panorama to Europe--the whole business: cowboys and Indians, cattle and buffalo, sharp-shooting women blasting away from rolling covered wagons, whole families of warriors who had, a decade before, dispatched America's favorite military hero, General George Armstrong Custer. And it's a marvel he didn't raise Custer from the dead to buy him passage to London too. 

The Ogalalas, the Minneconjous, the Two Kettles who got on the boat that would take them over "the big water," didn't quite know what to think of Buffalo Bill Cody. Some liked the idea of seeing the land where the white man came from, and all liked what Cody paid--far, far more than they could have received for any reservation job, and there weren't many of those. Some took their families, even children for Buffalo Bill's "Indian Village" display. Cody wasn't vile or unfeeling. The truth is, they liked him. He treated them well.

Wherever they visited in Europe were tourists of the best kind, men and women who knew absolutely nothing about the worlds they visited and were awe-struck with everything they say. They visited the Tower of London, of course; and despite their limited English they attended worship at Westminster Abbey (a requirement of employment was having been baptized in the Episcopal Church). Just imagine 19th century American Indians in buckskin and beads stopping the show at the theater, where they took seats to watch, of all things, Goethe's Faust.

And they entertained. Among them was a tall, handsome kid named Black Elk, who'd proven himself to be something of a mystic. Native people respected eccentrics; they handled their special-needs people with care and compassion, and Black Elk was one of them. For some years already, the kid had shown signs of seeing more than others did when they stood together on a hill, of feeling spirits in the wind, of knowing how to treat the sick. 

Black Elk was a dancer, a serious dancer who practiced his steps like some diva from the ballet. What's more, because dancing demanded the colorful dress, Black Elk took with him on the long trip over the big water every fine bit of comely costuming he would need to do dances that certainly meant more to him than having been baptized. Dancing was religious ritual; it was worship, an outpouring of heartfelt praise that expressed itself in a swirl of color and fabric and rhythm.

I'm generalizing, but it's fair to say that in the late 19th century, Europeans were far more taken with the American Indian than were Euro-Americans. Wherever Buffalo Bill took his cast, they found crowds willing to adore them, even royalty, even the Queen. 

Cody's people got together with Buckingham Palace and devised the opportunity of a command performance for the Queen Victoria, who, just as planned, arrived with her red-coat retinue and a bevy of court beauties in fifty horse-drawn wagons, at precisely five o'clock, as promised.

Black Elk was one of five warriors chosen to dance for the queen, the Grass Dance, a traditional dance created by the Omaha but eventually spread through west. The imagery was straight from the plains, the dancers recreating the special look of long prairie grasses moving like waves in the wind never ceasing.The effort was to describe the grass and then, in the deep spirituality of the movement, become the grass. 

When it concluded, when the drums stopped and movements ceased, Queen Victoria descended from her seat and walked out to greet the dancers. “All over the world, I have seen all kinds of people, and I have seen all kinds of countries, too," she told them, "and I’ve heard about some people that were in America and I heard they called them American Indians. Now I have seen them today.”

She smiled deeply and honestly. It was clear she was taken with the dance, the performance. “I have seen all kinds of people, but today I have seen the best-looking—the Indians.” She spoke this to Black Elk. “If I owned you Indians, you good looking people, I would never take you on a show like this.” And then more.  “I wish that I had owned you people," she told them, "for I would not carry you around as beasts to show to the people.” 

That's what the Queen said.

For a woman whose court required extreme punctuality, Queen Victoria lollygagged; she stayed almost two hours longer than she had planned, than she had told Cody she would. She walked among the people.

True story.