Rebecca Solnit: River of Shadows

In 1872 the whole world seemed to be in motion, but one moment of stillness punctuated the year. That August, on the Yellowstone River, the Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull and his tribesmen were fighting the soldiers protecting the Northern Pacific Railroad builders. A railroad line was being laid through what had been the last remote region, the last place in which the Plains nomads could live as they had lived. Earlier that summer Sitting Bull, whose very name described a buffalo, had declared at a peace conference, “I want those roads stopped just where they are, or turned in some other direction. We will then live peacefully together. If you stop your roads, we can get our game.” General Sherman replied, “You cannot stop the locomotive any more than you can stop the sun or the moon, and you must submit.” Sitting Bull was not ready to submit.

In the middle of the fight on the Yellowstone River, he laid down his gun and his quiver, walked toward the white soldiers, sat down on the grass and lit his pipe. Two Oglalas and two Cheyennes came and sat down with him, and he passed them the pipe as the bullets whizzed overhead. Reckless bravery was required for that act, which harks back to the intertribal battles where counting coup and winning honor for bravery were goals as potent as killing the enemy. but it suggests an even more powerful yearning for a reprieve from history and its hectic pace in the 1870s. It was as though through courage and will the five men stepped off the runaway train of history or even stopped it. Perhaps in that interval they had time to see the grass clearly, to look at the sky, to think about where they stood, in the landscape as well as in history, to remember their lifetimes of roaming across such grasslands, fording rivers, following buffalo, of living in what then seemed to be the cyclical time of the seasons before the linear time of history caught them up. It was late to be fighting railroads. In 1872 the Oglala Lakota leader Red Cloud and his followers, who had fought the UP so valiantly, had already taken the train to Washington to pursue their rights by other means. They ended up in the gold speculator Jim Fisk's box at New York's Metropolitan Opera.

In March 1872 the Yellowstone region near the battle had been declared a national park. Its thousands of square miles had been set aside to protect its geysers, geological curiosities, and splendid scenery from exploitation as the railroads made it accessible to tourists. Five years later, the Nez Percé fleeing the U.S. government east would traverse the park, but they, like the Oglala and the Hunkpapa Lakota, would end up dead or on reservations. Some of the last remnants of the once great herds of buffalo survived in Yellowstone, but the place was not for Indians and subsistence, but for tourists seeking food for the soul in the spectacle of wildlife and wild scenery. In 1872 William F. Cody, who had been a pony express rider and an army scout and who got his nickname Buffalo Bill for his work supplying bison meat for the Kansas Pacific Railroad builders, went onstage for the first time. He was more or less playing himself in a piece titled the Scouts of the Plains. It was the beginning of a career change for him, from working in the West to mythologizing it for the rest of the world. Most easterners loved buffalo and Indians, or at least loved what they represented in the romantic art and literature, even as their government's policies were annihilating them. Even in 1866, when the Union Pacific reached the hundredth meridian amid real battles with Indians, its directors brought out all the politicians and dignitaries that could be cajoled into venturing into Nebraska and treated them to banquets, speeches, fireworks—and a simulated attack on the camp by Pawnee warriors. Indians, buffalo, and open space stood for a freedom and wildness incompatible with the pervasive systems that railroads, factories, cities, and commercial agriculture represented. It was as though they were being kicked out of the real world but invited into art and entertainment, into dime novels, Wild West circuses, paintings, and photographs.

The same fluidity of western culture had made possible Muybridge's many name changes, Emperor Norton's peculiar career, the hundred novels about adventures Buffalo Bill never really had. Nothing was too real to become a fiction, and the rough authenticity that could be dangerous and uncomfortable as actual encounter was wonderful entertainment. In 1883, the year time was standardized across the United States, Sitting Bull gave a public address at the commemoration of the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad. Abandoning his text, he stood up and told the white audience that he hated all white people, and they were thieves and liars. His army interpreter decided not to depart from the script and translated Sitting Bull's speech as a flowery welcome full of faux Indian clichés. The audience applauded enthusiastically. In 1884 Sitting Bull and his entourage exhibited themselves in a wax museum in New York. In 1885 they joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West circus for a season's tour. Sitting Bull didn't participate in the circus's restaging of the Battle of Little Big Horn, but while he was on display he sold signed photographs of himself on the side. The man who had found a moment of peace amid a bitter war had found a place outside time again, but only as art, as the image frozen forever in a photograph, as the actor forever repeating himself as theater.