In 1887 Buffalo Bill Cody’s “Wild West Show” was one of the highlights of a summer of celebrations to mark Queen Victoria’s fiftieth year on the throne. One of the leading performers was Nicholas Black Elk – an Oglala Sioux medicine man and a Catholic catechist and mystic

As a boy of nine, he had a mountaintop vision – the Great Vision – in which his grandfathers told him to save his people. Black Elk had been born into an Oglala Lakota family in December 1863. In 1876, at the age of 12, he fought with his cousin Crazy Horse at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, “Custer’s Last Stand”. But Hehaka Sapa, commonly known as Black Elk, who Catholics now know as Servant of God Nicholas Black Elk, was still young and had to find his place in the world.
William “Buffalo Bill” Cody then enters the scene. He had earned his nickname killing bison on the Great Plains. His most famous stunt took place after the death of General George Custer when he shot and killed a Cheyenne, then scalped him, holding up the scalp to show the warrior’s friends while Cody’s fellow soldiers surrounded and protected him. This is known as “The First Scalp for Custer” because that’s what Cody told newspaper reporters to call it. Three months later he was playing himself as “Wild Bill” on stage, re-enacting the scene, using the phrase “The Red Right Hand” to describe his braggadocio.

Wild Bill then left the Army to create a full-time career of showmanship. He founded Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in 1883, hiring cowboys and Native people to travel circus-style, from city to city, and then to Europe. Indians were particularly fascinating to audiences, because they were vanishing. Long before reality television, Cody understood how a combination of spontaneity, danger and the unusual would draw large audiences. He understood the intrigue of historical figures that had already become myth, such as Daniel Boone and Billy the Kid.