When Buffalo Bill, Texas Jack, and Ned Buntline brought their Scouts of the Prairie show to the big eastern cities of Boston and New York in March of 1873, the citizens of those cosmopolitan towns were primed to receive exactly what the western scouts were peddling. A little context explains why urbanites far from the nation's western frontier were at that very moment experiencing a kind of existential dread concerning the western Native American tribes.
In the months preceding The Scouts theatrical debuts in Baltimore, Boston, New York, and Washington D.C., Army troops and Modoc warriors had been facing off in the lava beds of northern California. This conflict between the Modoc and the American military was the tragic consequence of what historian Robert Aquinas McNally calls "a decades-long campaign of extermination and removal that symbolizes all too much of European America's treatment of Native America and the continent." The Modoc had largely ignored the white settlers who streamed through their lands in pursuit of gold after its discovery near Yreka in 1851. Another nearby tribe, the Pit River Tribe, attacked a white settlement, and an angry militia retaliated by killing the men, women, and children of a Modoc village, not knowing the difference between the two distinct groups. The Modoc retaliated by attacking and killing members of a California-bound wagon train. A peace parley was arranged—a ruse that would lead to the deaths of 41 more Modocs.
