|
Post by Diane Merkel on Jun 16, 2009 6:10:27 GMT -6
I guess all of his shows weren't so wild . . . . Niagara Falls Museum operator Sidney Barnett, son of museum founder Thomas Barnett, conceived the idea of bringing a Wild West show and hired Hickok and another famed gunman, Texas Jack Omohundro, also known as the Sundance Kid. But the promoter ran into trouble when the Pawnee indian agent refused to allow Native Americans to join the show.
Barnett hired a Niagara Falls, N.Y., law firm to advance his cause with the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. A letter to the bureau from the firm of Griffith & Porter, of Niagara Falls, N.Y., exists today in the National Archives.
Wild West Historian James D. Horan wrote, "Hickok put on an exciting show with a band of Sac and Fox braves staging a buffalo hunt using blunt arrows, then finally lassoing the big beasts."
Posters of the event noted, "The Buffalos captured for this purpose near the foot of the Rocky Mountains, after one of the most exciting chases ever witnessed on the plains, will be liberated in a large and beautiful park at Niagara Falls, Canada side."
However, a Niagara Falls, Ont., reporter wrote, as previously related in this column, that the show turned out to be "a swindle and a farce." There were only two buffalo and one ox that behaved more like domestic cattle. Article: www.niagarafallsreporter.com/kostoff6.16.09.html
|
|