210 PART 2 | FROM THE CIVIL WAR THROUGH WORLD WAR I
Show business Indians, based on famil-
iar images, grew more widespread as con-
tact between Indians and white Americans
decreased. Parodies of Hiawatha were stan-
dard fare, undermining the good inten-
tions of Longfellow’s fl awed original, much
as many stage versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
trivialized Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sympa-
thetic portrayal of the African American
experience (see chapter 5). Another popu-
lar entertainment was “Buffalo Bill’s Wild
West,” a traveling circuslike event staged by
William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, a plains hunter
turned showman. In Cody’s shows, which
began in 1882 and included real Indians,
whites were the heroes and Indians the
enemy in the grand fi nale, a reenactment of
Custer’s Last Stand. “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West”
set a pattern carried over into other popular forms, including dime novels, pulp
magazines, and later, western movies. As in minstrel shows and other entertain-
ments featuring “ethnic” (i.e., non-Anglo-American) characters, this strain of
representation emphasized racial stereotypes.
The second response, which rejected stereotypes, took place chiefl y at the
U.S. government’s initiative. Congress directed in 1879 that the Bureau of Indian
Ethnology be created at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, to fi nd out
more about the peoples with whom the army was still at war. During the 1880s
and 1890s fi eldworkers were dispatched from the nation’s capital to document
life in tribal settings. The drive to study Indians boosted the study of their music.
In 1882 Theodore Baker, an American music historian, published Über die
Musik der nordamerikanischen Wilden (On the Music of the North American Indians),
his doctoral dissertation at Leipzig University. Hailed as the fi rst scholarly treat-
ment of American Indian music, Baker’s work contained transcriptions of songs
he had heard on visits to a Seneca reservation in New York and the Carlisle
Indian School in Pennsylvania. More than a decade passed, however, before a
steady fl ow of similar studies began. A leader in that effort was Alice C. Fletcher,
whose 1893 report on the music of the Omahas was the fi rst of her many schol-
arly contributions. Emphasizing the subject’s scientifi c interest, Fletcher and
others gathered accurate data about the music. By the early twentieth century,
reports and monographs on American tribal music were appearing regularly.
Some idea of the process of collecting Indian music can be gained by looking
at an Omaha song notated in 1884 by Fletcher. Born in 1838, Fletcher studied
anthropology and was an assistant at the Peabody Museum in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, when in 1881 she traveled to Nebraska for her fi rst fi eldwork with
the Omaha people. The experience gave her a fi rsthand look at the sorry con-
ditions in which many Indians lived, making her a strong advocate for reform
and education. Fletcher’s outlook was also infl uenced by her affi liation with the
Bureau of American Ethnolog y, through which she administered grants of land
to tribes in the western states. Fletcher did not at fi rst think of her research as
primarily musical. But she soon recognized the key role of music in Indian ritu-
als and began transcribing melodies from the singers she met.K Alice Cunningham
Fletcher (1838–1923),
pioneer collector of music
of Plains Indian nations,
confers with Chief Joseph of
the Nez Percé tribe.Theodore BakerAlice C. Fletcher172028_09_205-230_r3_ko.indd 210 23/01/13 11:28 AM