Sorrow of the Earth

Sorrow of the Earth, Eric Vuillard, Pushkin Press, £12.99 ISBN: 978-1-78227-221-2

HOW did Sitting Bull, the man who wiped out General Custer and the 7th Cavalry at Little Bighorn, end up in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and how did the braves who fought with him end up stuck for months in Nancy, Lorraine?This little gem is history but not as we have learned it from films: it is how Sitting Bull and his people were paraded to be jeered at and spat on and forced to relive not their victories but their defeats.Anger seeps from the pages as Mr Vuillard shows how Buffalo Bill Cody created the first mass spectacle but also wholeheartedly rewrote history and turned the vast race memory of the Native Americans into a dumbed-down colonialist sham.Royalty from Queen Victoria to Kaiser Wilhelm saw the show along with 2.5million others in London and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was in Paris for the Eiffel Tower opening in 1889, even performing under the legs of the Dame de Fer.But as the last few survivors of the Battle of Wounded Knee were re-enacting the deaths of their family and friends the Wild West had become circus, shamefully rewriting reality to turn a massacre into base entertainment.From the ‘woo, woo, woo’ as the red men ride round, slapping their palms against their mouths –just as Buffalo Bill had taught them – this was all invention. Show. This was no war cry and this was not history.