Chief Red Shirt was lionized by the British press and photographed by reporters wherever he went. His handsome features and stately bearing caused reporters to hang on his every word and he became the most quoted Wild Wester celebrity of Cody’s trip to England. Red Shirt explained to a reporter from Sheffield: “I started from my lodge two moons ago knowing nothing, and had I remained on the Native Reservations, I should have been as a blind man. Now I can see a new dawn. I have seen the great houses (ships) which cross the mighty waters, the great villages which have no end where the pale faces swarm like insects in the summer sun. Our people will wonder at these things when we return to the Native Reservation and tell them what we have seen.”
Statesman Red Shirt adopted a show business persona and proved to be a statesman. Red Shirt presented an image of Native Americans that Europeans could associate with progress, nobility, and civilization. Queen Victoria adored Chief Red Shirt and requested a special command performance. Red Shirt commented to
The Brisbane Courier on the future of Natives in the United States. "The red man is changing in every season. The Native of the next generation will not be the Native of the last. Our buffaloes are nearly all gone, the deer have entirely vanished, and the white man takes more and more of our land. But the United States government is good. True, it has taken away our land, and the white man have eaten up our deer and our buffalo, but the government now gives us food that we may not starve. They are educating our children and teaching them to use farm implements. Our children will learn the white man’s civilization and to live like him. It is our only outlook in the future. Now we are dependent upon the rations of the Government but we feel we are fully entitled to that bounty. It is a part of the price they pay for the land they have taken from us, and some compensation to us for having killed off the herds upon which we subsisted. For myself, I know it is no use fighting against the United States government. I accept my fate. The red man cannot kill all the white men that live in villages as big as the largest forests. But some of our young men do not know this, and they may perhaps elect to die like their fathers with their tomahawks in their hands rather than starve to death like a dog upon the prairie."
Visitors to Earl’s Court . "When I saw the great White Chief I thought he was a great man. When I heard him speak, then I felt sure he was a great man."
Chief Red Shirt The royal party inspected the Indian encampment after a performance and
Prince Albert Edward had an extended conversation with Red Shirt.
Princess Alexandra, through an interpreter, welcomed Chief Red Shirt and other Wild Westers to England. The chief, with great dignity, responded: "Tell the Great White Chief 's wife that it gladdens my heart to hear her words." On April 28, 1887,
William Ewart Gladstone, former Prime Minister and current leader of the opposition party in Parliament, toured the Wild West show grounds with his wife at
Earl's Court and spoke at length with Red Shirt. Red Shirt was impressed with Gladstone. “When I saw the great White Chief I thought he was a great man. When I heard him speak, then I felt sure he was a great man. But the White Chief is not as the big men in our tribes. He wore no plumes and no decorations. He had none of his young men (warriors) with him, and only that I heard him talk he would have been to me as other white men. But my brother Mr. Gladstone came to see me in my lodge as a friend, and I was glad to see the White Chief, for though my tongue was tied in his presence my heart was in full friendship. After he went away they told me that half of his great nation of white men have adopted him as their chief. If he were not both good and wise, so many young men of his nation would have never taken him for their leader.”
Grandmother England adored Chief Red Shirt. On May 9, 1887, Buffalo Bill's Wild West opened in London. Among the audience members was Queen Victoria, who visited the Earl's Court encampment three days later.
Black Elk recalled that Natives were told "that Majesty was coming. I did not know what that was at first, but I learned afterward. It was Grandmother England who owned Grandmother's Land where we lived awhile after the
Wasichus murdered Crazy Horse." Red Shirt expressed his pleasure in meeting the Queen and remarked to her that "I have come many thousands of miles to see you. Now that I have seen you, my heart is glad." The encounter and his words were widely circulated among the press and noted in her diary. Since the death of Prince Albert, her husband, which event had occurred thirty years previous to this "command," the queen had been more than ordinarily seclusive. She seldom appeared before great assemblages of her subjects and her visits to even her parliament were rare. To theatrical performances she never went during that long period of her mourning. Her latest knowledge of the greatest actors and actresses of the time was gained by private performances given, by command, in her court, and these were infrequent. "The Wild West was altogether too big a thing to take to Windsor Castle, and as in the case of Mahomet and the mountain, as the Wild West could not go to the Queen it became absolutely necessary for the Queen to go to the Wild West, if she desired to see it, and it was evident that she did." "Then I presented Red Shirt, the Native Chieftain, who was gorgeous in war paint and feather trappings. His proud bearing was fetching among the royal party, and when he spoke through an interpreter, saying he had come a long way to see her Majesty and "felt glad," the Queen smiled appreciatively, and as the red man, unconventionally, but proudly, strolled away with the dignity of a Supreme Court Judge, she seemed to say, "I know a real prince when I see him." "Every act went with a rush and a cheer, and was received by cries of 'bravo,' 'well done,' etc. At the close of the exhibition calls were made for Red Shirt and myself, in response to which I thanked my patrons and assured them that the recollection of that evening's display of kindness would ever be fresh in my memory. Cries of 'Bravo, Bill,' and the singing of 'For he's a jolly good fellow' by the entire audience brought the demonstration to a close."
Goethe's Faust and badge No. 25 identifying him as a Chief in Cummins's "Native Congress of Forty-eight Tribes." Cummins's Native Congresses appeared at worlds' fairs and international expositions from the 1890s through the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. Shortly after arriving in London, Cody took some of his Wild Westers to see Sir
Henry Irving's production of
Goethe's Faust at the
Lyceum Theater.
The London Times reported that the Sioux were greatly frightened by its horror. In the premier theater of London, Red Shirt, considered the "Chief of the Show Natives by the press, was seated in the royal box suggesting an aura of nobility for the cowboys and Natives in attendance. Irving used the occasion to his own advantage, inviting the performers onstage after the show. Irving remarked to the theatrical paper
Era that it was novel to "see Native chiefs in the full panoply of war–paint, holding the scalp–fringed banner in one hand and eating sugar plums with the other." Red Shirt remarked that the show reminded him of a dream. The Sioux, who did not believe in a hell, took the fantastic scenes of Hades, according to their interpreter, “for what it’s worth,” a
Wasichu’s dream.
Vision at Westminster Abbey "The white man’s lodges for the Great Spirit, whose pinnacles reach the sky, and which have stood for more seasons than the red man reckon, all struck me with terrible wonder. And the Great Spirit speaks to me sometimes since I have been here. When I was in the Great Spirit Lodge (Westminster Abbey) where the kings are buried, I laid my face upon my hands. The words of the preacher I did not know, but they sounded like the softy winds through a leafy forest and my eyelids were heavy. Then I heard soft music and sweet voices, and a great cloud came down towards me, and when it nearly touched me, it opened and I saw in a blaze of light the girls with wings and they beckoned me. And I was so certain that what I saw was that, I called out to my young men who were with me ‘Come and see what this is,’ and the young men replied, “You have been dreaming.’ But what I saw was true, for when I looked around the great lodge afterwards, I saw on the walls the same girls with wings as I saw in my dreams. Our people will wonder at these things, when we return to the Native Reservation and tell them what we have seen.”
Surrounded By the Enemy's funeral In 1887, Buffalo Bill and his Wild West camped in the
City of Salford, England, for five months. While in Salford, a Wild West gun-slinging and horse-riding stuntman known as Surrounded By the Enemy died from a chest infection, probably caused by the chilly weather, in his teepee at the Salford Quays. "Surrounded" was described as six feet seven inches tall, aged 22 and an imposing sight of a Sioux warrior. There was no recorded church burial, and it is believed that Surrounded was buried in a traditional Sioux ceremony conducted by Red Shirt and Black Elk. The Oglala Lakota connection lives on in Salford with street names such as Buffalo Court and Dakota Avenue.
Eiffel Tower In 1889, Cody's Wild West spent six months in Paris. On the centennial of the fall of the Bastille, a group of Wild Westers ascended the Eiffel Tower. From the observation plat, Red Shirt surveying Paris below him and the sky above, remarked "If people look so little to us up here, how much smaller they must seem to One
"Wakantanka" who is up higher." == Final days ==