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Although Col. George A. Custer's defeat at the Little Big Horn on 25 June 1876 was anything but a theatrical event, it certainly became one very soon after. By the middle of August, theatergoers in New York City were flocking to Wood's Theatre for Harry Seymour's blood-and-thunder re-enactment Sitting Bull; or, Custer's Last Charge. (1) Meanwhile, out on the Plains a scout and part-time actor and playwright named William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody accidentally found himself on 17 July face to face with a Cheyenne warrior named Yellow Hair. The two exchanged a single, simultaneous blast of gunfire, which only Cody survived. Taking his opponent's scalp in hand, Cody almost immediately began to weave the brief skirmish into a larger and more complex battle of deliberately taken revenge for Custer, with Cody as the hero. Moreover, according to most reports, Cody fought while decked out in "a stage costume of black velvet slashed with scarlet and trimmed with silver buttons" (2) Although he was at this particular moment in the employ of the U.S. Fifth Cavalry, Cody had by this time become something of a celebrity on the East Coast for his highly stylized (some might say cliche-riddled) touring stage reenactments of his own exploits. Thus, his wearing of a stage costume both arises from his ongoing interest in performing a frontier persona and inflects the event with a theatrical note. And in the autumn of 1876, Cody further embellished the importance of the skirmish, and hence his reputation, by starring in New York in a play he had commissioned about his killing of Yellow Hair called The Red Right Hand, or The First Scalp for Custer....
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