Sorrow of the Earth - Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business

Zusatztext "Eric Vuillard uses musing prose to try to get inside the heads of Cody and of the Native Americans who performed in his shows! reenacting false versions of their experiences and creating an alternative history in the process. . . [Vuillard uses a] poetic style that conveys how the show shaped ideas about the West long after the frontier was gone." — Foreword Reviews "A swift and engrossing postmodern interrogation of the brutal cost of manufacturing myth... an attempt to see a fraction of the story of native North America more honestly than that story has been seen in decades and centuries past." -- New Statesman "Perhaps the shortest and most intense book on the Wild West ever published." -- Times Literary Supplement Informationen zum Autor Born in Lyons in 1968! Éric Vuillard is a French author and film director. His books include Conquistadors (winner of the Ignatius J. Reilly prize 2010)! and La Bataille de l'occident and Congo ! for both of which he was awarded the 2012 Franz-Hessel prize and the 2013 Valery-Larbaud prize. Sorrow of the Earth is the first of his titles to be translated into English. Fascinating, brilliant and angry: the tale of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and the tragic fate of its Native American participantsThe Museum of Mankind Spectacle is the origin of the world. Tragedy stands before us, motionless and strangely anachronistic. And so, in Chicago, at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 commemorating the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage, a display of relics on a stall in the central aisle included the desiccated corpse of a newborn Indian baby. There were twenty-one million visitors. They promenaded on the wooden balconies of the Idaho Building, admired the miracles of technology, like the gigantic chocolate Venus de Milo at the entrance to the agricultural pavilion, and then bought cones of sausages for ten cents apiece. Huge numbers of buildings had been erected, and the place resembled a gimcrack St Petersburg, with its arches, its obelisks, its plaster architecture borrowed from every age and every land. The black-and-white photographs we have convey the illusion of an extraordinary city, with palaces fringed by statues and fountains, and ornamental pools down to which stone steps slowly descend. Yet it’s all fake. But the highlight of the Columbian Exposition, its apotheosis, the feature that was to attract the greatest number of spectators, was the Wild West Show. Everyone wanted to see it. And Charles Bristol—the proprietor of the stall with the Indian relics and the exhibit of the baby’s corpse—also wanted to drop everything and go! He already knew the spectacle, because right at the start of his career, he had been the manager and wardrobe master for the Wild West Show. But it was no longer the same, and it had now become a colossal enterprise. There were two performances a day, and eighteen thousand seats. Horses galloped past a backdrop of gigantic painted canvases. It wasn’t the loose string of rodeos and sharpshooters that he had known, but a veritable enactment of History. So while the Columbian Exposition was celebrating the industrial revolution, Buffalo Bill was glorifying conquest. Later on, much later on, Charles Bristol had worked for the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company, which employed nearly eight hundred Indians and around fifty Whites to sell its stuff. Its flagship medicine was Sagwa, a mixture of herbs and alcohol for the treatment of rheumatism and dyspepsia. And it would appear that cowboys suffered particularly from wind and borborygmic dyspepsia, because right across the country people were in search of a remedy. Eventually, Charles Br...

Product details

• Authors: Ann Jefferson, Eric Vuillard
• Assisted by: Ann Jefferson (Translation)
• Publisher: Pushkin Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 25.08.2016
• EAN: 9781782272212
• ISBN: 978-1-78227-221-2
• Dimensions: 140 mm x 205 mm x 20 mm
• Subject: Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies