By Ruud Pompert:
Every other day, except when Buffalo winter weather is at its worst and a freezing Lake Erie or Lake Ontario wind is thrashing faces with tiny paper cuts, I go for a three mile walk/run through our neighborhood. After starting my orange watch and the Ska and Reggae mix on my I-Pod, I high tempo walk in my bright red Ajax Amsterdam wind jacket for four and a half minutes, followed by a two and a half minute not so high tempo jog and repeat that five times. In thirty-five minutes I break a solid sweat, pump my heart beat up to greater heights, bring some solid tension in my legs and create the illusion that I am losing some of the fat that has been threatening to boil over the top of my jeans lately, like milk in a small pan. When I get back to my driveway I feel good. And that’s all I really want.
The best part of my run is that it always takes me to Delaware Park and around the Buffalo Zoo. The smells and the sounds reveal that there is a Noah’s Ark like representation of creatures on the other side of the fence and grey stonewall, but the only animals you can actually see from outside the zoo are the four great American bison. We all call them buffalo and that’s okay, even though the only two real buffalo species roam on the other side of the world; the Asian Water Buffalo and African Cape Buffalo. Because of the way they are built, bum high and chest low, it seems that Bison bison always carry a lot of weight on their massive shoulders. Their dark brown eyes and shaggy beard add to that illusion. For a while I tried to cheer them up by chanting Buffalo! Buffalo! A.A. Gent! when I passed them. But nothing; the powerful animals remained stoic, somber and without any interest in me. Disconnected. As if they are fully aware of their tragic family history. As if they are still mourning the massacre; the ‘endlosung’, and know that less than three hundred years ago they were part of one giant big happy wooly American family, about sixty million members strong. That, once, they roamed without a care in the world next to their moms and dads, brothers and sisters, and sons and daughters freely over the wide open plains in Canada and the US. Until colonists and settlers, guns and rifles, and the Union and Kansas Pacific Railway appeared. ‘Sportsmen’ would be sitting in open trains passing herds of bison, shoot them, kill them, one after the other, and often, just let them rot on the side of the tracks. In no time the number of sixty million proud animals was decimated to a measly nine hundred. Annihilated for food and for fun.
One of those buffalo hunters was William Frederick Cody, part legend, part fabrication. Bill Cody, born in 1846, grew up on the prairie of Iowa but moved to Kansas at age 11 after his father had died. He was a mounted messenger and wrangler, a trapper, bull whacker, gold seeker, Pony Express rider, wagon master, stagecoach driver and a saloon manager. He chased Kiowa and Comanche Indians as a Union scout and saw action in the Civil War as a member of the Seventh Cavalry in Missouri and Tennessee. After the war, in 1867, he made a deal with the Kansas Pacific Railway to supply their work crews with bison meat. Cody was a top marksman and in a year and a half he killed over four thousand three hundred buffalo, an average of eight animals per day. During those days he also claimed the title ‘Buffalo Bill’ after beating another Bill and sharp shooter, William Comstock, in an eight hour shoot out match. Cody went back into the army, worked as chief of scouts for the fifth Cavalry and took part in sixteen battles, including the Cheyenne defeat at Summit Springs in Colorado. He became a real national icon in 1869 when Buffalo Bill adventures started to appear in the popular dime novels of Ned Buntline. From that moment on William Cody found himself on the same level as Wild West action heroes Davy Crockett, Kit Carson and Daniel Boone.
Buffalo Bill ended up on stage as an actor three years later in Ned Buntline’s play The Scouts of the Plains. He became an author of about seventeen hundred frontier tales and kept his hunting skills sharp by escorting rich Easterners and Europeans on Western hunting trips. Ten years after he made his first steps into theater life, he created his own show; Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. It was an outdoor circus-like spectacle with an over the top dramatization of life on the frontier of North America. It became an enormous success in the US and Canada and he even took his show to Europe many times, starting in 1887. The first European shows took place in England; in Birmingham, Manchester and in London, where over two and a half million tickets were sold and the show was part of Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee. In 1889 the show visited Paris, for of the Exposition Universelle, the festivities commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Storming of the Bastille. The Buffalo Bill troop continued their tour and traveled to other parts of France, Barcelona in Spain, and to Rome where Cody met Pope Leo XIII and performed in the ancient Roman amphitheater. Germany, Austria, the Balkans, Hungary, Romania, and the Ukraine were also visited, while he too celebrated great success in the lowland kingdoms of Holland and Belgium.
During the third week of September1906, the Buffalo Bill Wild West spectacle had arrived in Gent (Dutch), Gand (French) or Ghent (the classic way), a beautiful historical city in the Flemish part of Belgium, for shows on the 20th and 21stof that month. Gent was one of the richest and largest cities in Europe during the Middle Ages, bigger than London and Moscow for example. The people were rich or smart or both. The universities were highly respected and the architecture throughout the city stunning. The people of Gent were and are full of life and have always lived a somewhat burgundic lifestyle. They love food, beer, and wine and enjoy the good things earth has to offer. The picturesque streets are lined with nice shops, bars and restaurants. And to show that La Gentoise are a little bit above the rest of the Flemish population in their region they speak French and not Dutch, especially in the bonboneries, fancy cafés, and high-end fur boutiques in the expensive parts of town. The nickname of people from Gent is ‘de stroppendragers‘; the rope wearers. In 1539 Keizer Karel humiliated the noblemen of Gent by making them wear ropes around their necks after they stood up to him. The rope is now a symbol of proud resistance against every form of tyranny and misplaced authority. The people from Gent see themselves as stubborn, yet upstanding people who give room to uncommon and atypical opinions and value the importance of freedom and variety in research and thought.
The tents and wagons of Buffalo Bill Wild West were set up at Exercitie Square. For days newspapers were filled with stories about the show, heroic frontier adventures and life in America. Thousands of people came from all over the region to the city, contributing unexpected extra money to the local economy. Bar, restaurant, and hotel owners were so busy during those days that they did not even get a chance to see the show themselves. The circus opened with a parade on horseback of US soldiers, American Indians and performers from all over the world, including Turks, Gauchos, Arabs and Mongols who wore their traditional, colorful attire. The first act was followed by tough cowboys showing off their sharp shooting skills, staged races, the capturing of buffalos, Indian attacks on wagon trains and re-enacted war battles. During the finale Buffalo Bill and a group of cowboys would heroically save a settler and his family from a brutal Indian attack. Even though Cody always treated the Native Americans equal off stage, had great respect for them and acknowledged
and supported their cause rather passionately, in his show they were still portrayed as war hungry and bloodthirsty savages. Answering all the stereotypes of those days.
and supported their cause rather passionately, in his show they were still portrayed as war hungry and bloodthirsty savages. Answering all the stereotypes of those days.
The audience left the show in awe, impressed with the enormity of the spectacle, the bravery and skills of the cowboys, but especially with the great showmanship of Buffalo Bill. Kids started playing Cowboys and Indians in the streets of Gent, while Cody’s wild buffalo hunting cry Buffalo! Buffalo! Ra! became a favorite chant with rowdy local university students.
Many of those students were also die-hard fans of the athletics club, Association Athletique Gentoise; AA Gent. They were especially fond of the soccer team, since the first official voetbal team of AA Gent was formed by students of the College of Melle, a small university town nearby. It was therefore also not surprising that students brought Buffalo! Buffalo! Ra! into the soccer stadium on the Mussen Street, shortly after Buffalo Bill left town. Perhaps coming from café La Demi-Lune, the pub where the footballers used to change into their blue and white uniforms, and probably full of beer -what wine is to France, beer is to Belgium, and Gent, much like the city of Buffalo, was home to over twenty breweries around 1906 – the students replaced the word Ra with the club name AA Gent. And since then Buffalo! Buffalo! AA Gent! has become one of the most original chants in world soccer. The nickname of the club became The Buffalos, while a proud Indian with a full headdress, not William Cody, became the symbol of AA Gent.
AA Gent, currently a sub top team in the Belgium Eerste Klasse, will move into a brand new, hypermodern multifunctional soccer stadium this coming summer. With office and retail space, 19,999 covered seats, twenty sky boxes, twelve hundred business seats and a hotel, the Artevelde Stadium will undoubtedly give the club a huge boost, a chance to increase revenue dramatically and become an established, solid top club for years to come. AA Gent will enter a new era during the 2013- 2014 season, but the proud Indian and the Buffalo chant guarantee that William Frederick Cody and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West will never be forgotten and always be part of the beautiful Belgian city of Gent and its soccer club.
And from now on, when my run takes me past the Buffalo Zoo buffalo, I will whisper again; Buffalo! Buffalo! AA Gent!