1893 World's Fair: Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show

Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show was a performance that romanticized the American West and traveled across the United States and Europe between 1883 and 1913. Performers from Pine Ridge (Lakota) traveled the world with the Wild West Shows and were paid well, but the shows dehumanized Native people, depicting them as violent.

Bill Cody, the show's founder, tried to have the show included in the 1893 World's Fair. While Cody was eventually able to secure a location just outside of the fairgrounds, he ultimately failed to have the show officially included in the fair because of protests by Native people and anthropologists alike. Activist Henry Standing Bear (Lakota), who had toured with Buffalo Bill, petitioned the Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs asking that Bill Cody’s show not be welcomed on the fairgrounds.

Sources:

David Beck, Unfair Labor?: American Indians and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019).
Kiara M. Vigil, “Who Was Henry Standing Bear? Remembering Lakota Activism from the Early Twentieth Century,” Great Plains Quarterly 37, no. 3 (2017): 157–82.

Native Peoples at Chicago’s World’s Fairs

Chicago hosted two World’s Fairs, the 1893 “World’s Columbian Exposition” and the 1933 “Century of Progress International Exposition.” These fairs had a lasting impact on the way the city sees itself in the world. Two of the four stars on the Chicago flag, a ubiquitous symbol of city pride in the twenty-first century, represent the two fairs. Popular books, movies, and board games about the fairs abound. Native people had a complex relationship with the World’s Fairs. The events created an opportunity for Native people from around the country to assert their identity on the world’s stage. They created employment opportunities in a new cash economy at the turn of the century and allowed Native people to send money back to their communities. The World’s Fairs were also a powerful reemergence of Indigenous people in Chicago after their forced removal from the region. While many Native people lived in and visited Chicago during the nineteenth century, the 1893 fair was the first mass gathering of Indigenous people since leaders gathered in 1833 to negotiate the theft of millions acres of their land. However, commissioners of both World’s Fairs refused to grant Native people the opportunity to tell their own story. In fact, they often worked against them. For both fairs, the authorities in charge of recruiting Indigenous people were anthropologists who saw Native people solely as part of the past. They did not view their cultures as equal to those of the other nations of the world. As you will see in the following City Story, Native people were dehumanized by fair organizers, but you will also see the ways in which Native people defied that image. Sources: Rosalyn R. LaPier and David Beck, *City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893-1934* (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015). David Beck, *Unfair Labor?: American Indians and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago* (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019). Abigail Markwyn, “‘I Would Like to Have This Tribe Represented’: Native Performance and Craft at Chicago’s 1933 Century of Progress Exposition,” *American Indian Quarterly* 44, no. 3 (Summer 2020): 329–61. Lisa Cushing Davis, “Hegemony and Resistance at the World’s Columbian Exposition: Simon Pokagon and The Red Man’s Rebuke,” *Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1998-)* 108, no. 1 (2015): 32–53.