Cranston Historical Society

“BURIED IN A STRANGE LAND”
A Pawnee Indian Dies in Cranston,
One story from Pocasset Cemetery, Cranston Historical Cemetery #2

CRANSTON – The town must have been abuzz in July of 1885. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show had come to town, setting up in Narragansett Park at the corner of Park and Gansett Avenues. Hundreds of workers and performers were about the fairgrounds, tending to horses and buffaloes and
building sets for two days of shows.

One of those workers was Ar-Sar-Kee-So-Lee-Shar, a 29-year-old Pawnee Indian from the Nebraska plains. But when the show packed up and headed to Newport on July 22, Ar-Sar-Kee-So-Lee-Shar stayed behind, buried in a small, barely marked grave in Pocasset Cemetery.

What little we know of Ar-Sar-Kee-So-Lee-Shar comes from a short article in the July 23, 1885 Providence Journal that chronicled not his life, but his burial.

He’d got up at 7 a.m. on the 22nd, but said he wasn’t feeling well and had to lie down. Within minutes, he was dead from what the coroner called “organic heart disease.”

An undertaker from Olneyville took his body to a barn where the coroner performed an autopsy. Pocasset Cemetery, on Dyer Boulevard, was only about a mile and a half from the fairgrounds and Cody arranged for him to be buried there. Cody is listed in the cemetery record book as the one
paying for the plot.

It was either too expensive to commission a headstone or the show had to schedule to keep, because Ar-Sar-Kee-So-Lee-Shar’s grave was marked by a short stone marker with the number ‘94’ carved in it, a common practice for pauper’s graves.

Native American performers were common in Cody’s and other wild west shows. In “Buffalo Bill’s America,” historian Louis S. Warren wrote that either as a performer or backstage, working on Cody’s show was a prized job for Native Americans. The shows featured elaborate reenactments of
battles, stage coach robberies and buffalo hunts with horse-mounted players. When Cody first started, he had used white performers to play the Indians. But by the late 1870s he found the real thing brought in bigger crowds, so he started hiring Native Americans – mostly Pawnee and Sioux –
to play themselves.

Many of them had gotten a start in show business at the forts and towns in the west, where they would perform dances and rituals for tourists. That created a pool of experienced performers for touring wild west shows. Cody paid his Native American performers at the same rate he paid
whites, Warren said, offering a steady income that was hard to match on the Pawnee reservation.

Ar-Sar-Kee-So-Lee-Shar may not have been famous, but his funeral was important enough that the Providence Journal sent a reporter to cover it. The New York Times even ran a short item on the ceremony, clearly based on the Journal’s account.

​

“The grave was dug so that when the body was placed in it the head pointed to the eastward, as is customary among the savage tribes,” the Journal reported. “Each member of the band who were traveling with Buffalo Bill then approached the grave and in their own tongue addressed the Great
Spirit on behalf of their comrade, who had gone before them to the Happy Hunting Ground.”

Ar-Sar-Kee-So-Lee-Shar’s fellow Pawnee were not the only ones there. Word of the funeral had spread and the Journal said a crowd of white professionals had tagged along with the procession “on the supposition that the Indians would indulge in a dance or other peculiarities.”

“They were much disappointed, as the services, which lasted but half an hour, were very solemn and impressive.”

​

A special thank you goes to George Daigneault, the keeper of the Pocasset Cemetery, who pointed
this grave out to us

​

For more details on this cemetery including a list of who was buried there and when, click here:
https://rihistoriccemeteries.org/newsearchcemeterydetail.aspx?ceme_no=CR002​