ABSTRACT
In 1910, agent Johan Adrian Jacobsen was busy rushing to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. This Norwegian was not the kind of agent usually mentioned in history books in relation to the Sioux; he was not an employee of the federal government. Instead, this well-known adventurer and ethnologist was in the service of one Carl Hagenbeck, a German merchant with a long career in selling wild animals – to American P. T. Barnum, for example. Hagenbeck was also an entrepreneur exhibiting “savage” populations. Since the mid-1870s, he had recruited Sámi, Sudanese, Mongols, Hindus, Australian Aborigines, Bella Coola (Nuxalk) Indians from British Columbia, and other indigenous peoples from around the world to perform in hugely popular human exhibits that toured Germany, Britain, and much of Europe. In 1907, he opened a permanent Tierpark, or zoo, in Stellingen outside Hamburg, Germany. Its attractions included exotic animals as well as exotic peoples put on display in extravagant ethnographic villages and in bloodcurdling performances. Each troupe could include as many as several hundred people. And this was the reason why Hagenbeck had hired his old friend Jacobsen, who came with massive experience in recruiting peoples for ethnographic shows, and dispatched him to Pine Ridge. His job was to get the Sioux to come to Stellingen. But Jacobsen needed to hurry because five other agents working for competing entrepreneurs were also converging on the reservation, while Buffalo Bill’s representative was also reportedly on his way.
