The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

No one exploited the opportunities of savage war more artfully than Buffalo Bill Cody. He had been performing on stage in Taunton, Massachusetts, when the conflict with the Lakotas commenced. He went west to join the Fifth Cavalry as head of scouts. Frank Grouard did the actual tracking, and he marked the complexity of the West and its cultural mixing. The son of a Mormon missionary and a Hawaiian woman, he had been captured by the Lakotas and for a while was one of them. Cody played to sharp divisions, and not the complicated mixtures Grouard represented. Dressed in a showman’s vaquero outfit, Cody participated in a skirmish, killing a Cheyenne war leader named Yellow Hair. He scalped Yellow Hair, dramatically yelling, “First scalp for Custer,” and took Yellow Hair’s weapons and war paraphernalia. Yellow Hair was about to become a show business prop.