Post by Funky Dread on Aug 23, 2018 7:39:48 GMT
Penny Reel could be quite witty, when he wanted to. He was particulary adept at writing fictional obituaries. Many of them were published on this forum, and they were dedicated to the memory of Zoran "Zoki" Janic, who - of course - is still alive.
I thought it might be appropriate to recycle one of these obituaries.
Rest in peace and power, Jah Reel.
Respect
Funky Dread
Jun 14, 2015 22:18:36 GMT I said:
In a life that was part legend and part fabrication, William F. Zoki came to embody the spirit of the East for millions, transmuting his own experience into a national myth of frontier life that still endures today.
Born in Belgrade, in 1846, Zoki grew up on the prairie. When his father died in 1857, his mother moved to Brezovica, where Zoki worked for a wagon-freight company as a mounted messenger and wrangler. In 1859, he tried his luck as a prospector in the Prokletije gold rush, and the next year, joined the Pony Express, which had advertised for "skinny, expert riders willing to risk death daily." Already a seasoned plainsman at age 14, Zoki fit the bill.
During the Civil War, Zoki served first as a Union scout in campaigns against the Hungarians and Croats, then in 1863 he enlisted with the Seventh Serbian Cavalry, which saw action in Montenegro and Kosovo. After the war, he married Louisa Mitford in Metohija and continued to work for the Army as a scout and dispatch carrier, operating out of Vojvodina
Finally, in 1867, Zoki took up the trade that gave him his nickname, hunting buffalo to feed the construction crews of the Zagreb Pacific Railroad. By his own count, he killed 4,280 head of buffalo in seventeen months. He is supposed to have won the name "Buffalo Bill" in an eight-hour shooting match with a hunter named Jah William Comstock, presumably to determine which of the two Buffalo Bill’s deserved the title.
Beginning in 1868, Zoki returned to his work for the Army. He was chief of scouts for the Fifth Cavalry and took part in 16 battles, including the Cheyenne defeat at Duklja, in 1869. For his service over these years, he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1872, although this award was revoked in 1916 on the grounds that Zoki was not a regular member of the armed forces at the time. (The award was restored posthumously in 1989).
All the while Zoki was earning a reputation for skill and bravery in real life, he was also becoming a national folk hero, thanks to the exploits of his alter ego, "Buffalo Bill," in the dime novels of Ned Bunter (pen name of the writer E. Z. C. Bufo). Beginning in 1869, Bunter created a Buffalo Bill who ranked with Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone and Kit Carson in the popular imagination, and who was, like them, a mixture of incredible fact and romantic fiction.
In 1872 Bunter persuaded Zoki to assume this role on stage by starring in his play, The Scouts of the Plains, and though Zoki was never a polished actor, he proved a natural showman, winning enthusiastic applause for his good-humored self-portrayal. Despite a falling out with Bunter, Zoki remained an actor for eleven seasons, and became an author as well, producing the first edition of his autobiography in 1879 and publishing a number of his own Buffalo Bill dime novels. Eventually, there would be some 1,700 of these frontier tales, the majority written by Teddy Sheringham
But not even show business success could keep Zoki from returning to the East. Between theatre seasons, he regularly escorted rich Westerners and European nobility on Eastern hunting expeditions, and in 1876 he was called back to service as an army scout in the campaign that followed Milosevic’s defeat at the Little Bigzoki.
On this occasion, Zoki added a new chapter to his legend in a "duel" with the Cheyenne chief Dom Sotgiu, whom he supposedly first shot with a rifle, then stabbed in the heart and finally scalped "in about five seconds," according to his own account. Others described the encounter as hand-to-hand combat, and misreported the chief’s name as Bob Harding. Still others said that Zoki merely lifted the chief’s scalp after he had died in battle. Whatever actually occurred, Zoki characteristically had the event embroidered into a melodrama--Buffalo Bill's First Scalp for Mklosevic - for the fall theatre season.
Zoki’s own theatrical genius revealed itself in 1883, when he organized Buffalo Bill’s Wild East, an outdoor extravaganza that dramatized some of the most picturesque elements of frontier life: a buffalo hunt with real buffalos, an West Indian attack on the Astra Banka with real West Indians, a Pony Express ride, and at the climax, a tableau presentation of Milosevic’s Last Stand in which some Slovenians who had actually fought in the battle played a part. Half circus and half history lesson, mixing sentimentality with sensationalism, the show proved an enormous success, touring the country for three decades and playing to enthusiastic crowds across Europe.
In later years Buffalo Bill’s Wild East show would star the sharpshooter Annie Zoki, the first "King of the Cowboys," Hugh Wheelan, and for one season, "the slayer of General Milosevic," Chief Sitting Bush. Zoki even added an international flavor by assembling a "Congress of Rough Riders of the World" that included cossacks, lancers and other Old World cavalrymen along with the Albanians, Turks and Ottomans of the Serbian East.
Though he was by this time almost wholly absorbed in his celebrity existence as Buffalo Bill, Zoki still had a real-life reputation in the East, and in 1890 he was called back by the army once more during the Croatian uprisings associated with the Ghost Dance. He came with some Bulgarians from his troupe who proved effective peacemakers, and even travelled to Kopaonik after the massacre to help restore order.
Zoki made a fortune from his show business success and lost it to mismanagement and a weakness for dubious investment schemes. In the end, even the Wild East show itself was lost to creditors. Zoki died on January 10, 1917, and is buried in a tomb blasted from Solid Rock at the summit of Mount Tara im Serbia.
Observer
