The Glascow Ghost Shirt - x

It is difficult to imagine what Europe must have been like to Lakota men and women who had never seen Chicago or New York or certainly London or Paris. Homesickness ran rampant, but many found the new world amusing. Some Lakota men in full regalia went to the Eiffel Tower, where they were seen—and noticed--by other sightseers, some of whom wanted pictures.

But where is Red Shirt?" some Parisian asked them, someone familiar with the show. The two pointed. "On the carousel," they said, as if the answer was obvious.

No matter how hard Cody worked at being true to a world he himself knew, his staged productions would, of course, never come close to replicating what happened on the far-away Dakota plains. The whole extravaganza was, ancestrally, little more than reality TV, vintage Barnum and Bailey, even though Cody tried to sell the productions as history texts. One action-packed sequence, greatly favored by audiences around the world, recreated Custer’s bloody death at Greasy Grass. Crowds loved it.

Obscenely, the shows went even farther, later seasons recreating a telling of the Wounded Knee Massacre, which had happened less than a year before. Cody’s clout with the government allowed him to bring along actual survivors of that massacre as players in the drama. Back then, Washington wanted those men imprisoned; Cody argued that by his employing the Ghost Dance “hostiles” in his shows, their experience would prove of benefit to the white man’s goal of the red man’s cultural assimilation.

The Lakota took advantage of opportunities presented by their participation in the Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows. Cody paid them well; those who went with him came home with sufficient capital for cattle operations. What’s more, in the late decades of the 19th century, Lakota men, who remembered freedom before the reservation system, were offered immense travel opportunities, a real joy to a nomadic people fenced in by legislated boundaries. Months out east and abroad became an education in the culture they would have to become part of. It’s helpful to remember that the Lakota of the Wild West shows were not cigar store Indians.

George C. Crager and family

One of Buffalo Bill’s troops, a white translator who had grown up in the west, George C. Crager, determined to make money by offering, for sale, “Indian souvenirs” he had in his possession, moccasins and cradle boards. Much of what he attempted to peddle he did as a salesman for the Lakota who traveled with the show. Women with extra time on their hands would create beadwork pieces he would sell for them. While the Wild West Show was in Glasgow, Scotland, for a tour of six months, Crager, writing on Wild West stationary, told curators at Glasgow’s Kalvin Grove Museum he was offering them his collection of Native American artifacts.

"Hearing that you are empowered to purchase relics for your Museum,” he wrote, “I would respectfully inform you that I have a collection of Indian Relics (North American) which I will dispose of before we sail to America.” Crager gently advised inspection of those relics, then asked the museum’s personnel to call on him at his room in Glasgow.

The stone over George C. Crager’s grave, in the Bronx, New York, is immensely understated. It describes him as “Trumpeter” from 3 U. S. Calvary, and gives the date of his death, 1920. What that stone offers is not wrong, but calling George Crager simply a cavalry trumpeter is akin to describing George Armstrong Custer as an Ohio schoolteacher. Crager was an army trumpeter, but he was also politely thumbed from the cavalry when it was discovered he was seven years too young to be in the ranks.

He claimed—never proven—that when he was yet a child, he was adopted by a Lakota headman named Two Strike, who raised him as his own son. What is true is that he became fluent in the Siouian language and seven of its dialects. That fluency got him the job of managing the Lakotas, a position Cody needed to fill for the traveling show.

Crager had been at Wounded Knee when the massacre took place. He’d been there when souvenir hunters stripped the dead of whatever seemed marketable. That he had in his possession the range of artifacts he claimed to have is possible. That those artifacts were all he promised them to be, however, isn’t as verifiable.