Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  Later I had this confirmed by Little Horse, who put aside his beadwork and left the crowd of women he hung out with ordinarily to chew the fat a spell with me.

  “That is true,” he says. “Younger Bear became a Contrary last year. He bought the Thunder Bow from White Contrary.”

  I have to explain. You know the ordinary Cheyenne is a warrior the peer of which is hard to find. But a Contrary carries it even farther. He is so much of a warrior that all of life apart from fighting, he does backwards. He don’t walk on the trails, but rather through the bushes. He washes with earth and dries off in the water. If you ask him one thing, he does the opposite. He sleeps on the bare ground, preferably an uncomfortable bit of terrain and never on a bed. He cannot marry. He lives off by himself some distance from camp; and when he fights, he fights alone, not with the main body of Cheyenne. He carries the Thunder Bow into battle, which has a lancehead afixed to one end. When it is in his right hand, he may not retreat.

  Well, there is a million other rules to it, I expect, and because it is so special, you’ll only find one or two Contraries around any camp.

  “Then,” said Little Horse, “you remember Coyote. He was killed by the Pawnee. The Ute killed Red Dog.…” He went on with the news, which was fairly bloody. Then he said, looking somewhat arch: “I am thinking of moving into the lodge of Yellow Shield as his second wife.”

  I congratulated him and give him a little shaving mirror I carried on the trail, with which he was greatly pleased, and after we parted he sat for hours admiring his appearance in it.

  But before that, I asked him about my old girl friend Nothing.

  “That is who White Contrary married,” he said. “She is big with child.”

  I saw her a little later, sitting before her lodge mashing up some berries. It was remarkable how that girl had changed in a couple of years. She would have been right fat even without the pregnant belly. Her nose had spread across her whole face, and I could not recall that she had had that greasy look in the old days. What had used to be shiny black hair now looked like the tail of a horse that had been rid through a thorn patch.

  But the most remarkable change seemed to have taken place in her personality. When I come upon her she was bawling out a dog in as brawny a voice as I ever did hear, and then her husband come out of the tepee and she lit into him. Cheyenne women make fine wives, but sometimes they are also great scolds.

  I reckon you might say the saber charge upon the Solomon’s Fork saved me from having to listen to that for the rest of my life.

  Well, after a bit they begun to strike that camp and prepare for the move north. Old Lodge Skins and me stood there and watched the women take down the tepees and make pony-drags of the lodgepoles and pack them full. He was wearing the sombrero, which owing to the difference in our head sizes sat a little high above his braids. Since that was really only a replacement of that plug hat of his that I had lost, I really hadn’t give him anything yet, so now I felt there was nothing for it but to present him with my Colt’s Dragoon pistol. On the one hand, it was little enough. On the other, that left me without a pony or a weapon of any description, without a hat, without a jacket—my own of which I give to Hump—and in return I had received a blanket, a stone pipe, a string of beads, and suchlike, with which to rejoin them unfriendly mule skinners and traverse the rest of the mileage to Denver.

  “Grandfather,” I says, “I cannot go with you to the Powder River.”

  “I have heard you,” answers Old Lodge Skins, and that was all there was to it. He would never ask the reason.

  Yet I couldn’t leave it at that. Maybe it was myself I had to convince, for I noticed on this second day with the Cheyenne that they was already a little less unattractive to me. I was getting used to the smell of camp again. It was conceivable that in time I might have gone back to what I had been earlier.

  Maybe not, but I felt the threat. The important thing was that I had been doing right well in Denver. I had got onto the idea of ambition. You can’t make anything of yourself in the white world unless you grasp that concept. But there isn’t even a way to express the idea in Cheyenne.

  Now, Indian boys want to grow up into great warriors and some feel the call to be chiefs, but these is all personal goals, for a chief ain’t got no power as we know it. He leads only by example. Take this move to the Powder River, Old Lodge Skins didn’t order his people to go there. What he done was decide he would go, and Hump decided he would, and so on, and the other folks would follow along because they thought these men were wise—or might not if they thought they weren’t. Burns Red had not yet made up his mind: he was still setting there on the site of Hump’s late abode, and Hump’s wives and daughters had took down the tepee right around him.

  On the other hand, what I had been contemplating while leading that mule train back to Colorado was going into business for myself. I have said I had no head for commerce, but had got myself to believing you didn’t need none to become a rich man in a brand-new place like Denver. Already there was a move on to make Colorado a Territory. In a few years if I made enough money I might even go for governor: I could read and write, which was more than half the current population along Cherry Creek could claim.

  But how could I give an Indian like Old Lodge Skins the faintest glimmering of it?

  I was helped at that moment by the appearance of Younger Bear, who was riding towards us. He sat his pony backwards, of course, facing the tail—which, however, made his backward commands to it and his movements of the bridle come out all right. He’d indicate “left,” meaning “right,” and since he was facing the rump, the sense was switched again so far as the pony went, and it done the correct thing.

  “Why,” I says, “did Younger Bear become a Contrary?”

  As I relied upon the chief to do, he give the traditional reason: “Because he was afraid of the thunder and lightning.”

  “That’s why I have to ride west with my mule wagons,” I says. And, you know, there was a certain truth to the statement.

  The way that treaty finally turned out, I was proud to have played a part in sending my friends out of harm. Black Kettle, White Antelope, and the other Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho who touched the pen got a reservation along the Arkansas in southeastern Colorado, a piace of no game, little water, and arid soil. A few years later, while peacefully camped on Sand Creek in that region, they was massacred by the Third Colorado Volunteer Cavalry.

  CHAPTER 14 We Get Jumped

  THE MASSACRE AT SAND CREEK took place in ’64, late in the year. By then the Rebellion was finished out that way or it couldn’t have happened at all, for the troops would have been otherwise occupied.

  Speaking for myself, I turned into an indoor type of person after that trip to and from Missouri with the mules. I had got this idea of becoming a big-shot businessman and maybe going into politics. I had also begun to be suspicious of my so-called partners Bolt and Ramirez, who was supposed to split even with me, but how could I check on that if I was always out on the trail? To confirm this, you should have heard their protests when I says I was going to stay around the store from now on.

  Well, I didn’t understand much of account-keeping, so I never could prove what they had stole from me in the past, but my take increased noticeably from the time I stopped going on trips. And the next things I did was build me a house and get married!

  I was about twenty at the time. The woman I married—girl, rather, she being eighteen—was a Swede, born in Sweden, come to this country a few years back with her folks and settled at Spirit Lake in Iowa, where her Ma and Pa was killed in the famous massacre carried out by an outlaw band of the Santee Sioux. That was five years before, so she was still small enough to hide in a potato cellar, which she did and survived. This girl was named Olga. At the time I married her, it would have took a larger cave to hide her: she was five nine if she stood an inch and had the weight to accompany it though not an ounce of fat. She was something larger than myself even when I wore
my built-up boots.

  Olga was real fair-complected, with hair so light and fine that even on a rainy day it looked like the sun was shining on her. She had come out to Denver with some folks who took her in after the trouble, in return for which they got an awful lot of work out of her: she cooked their meals, minded the children, did the cleaning, and chopped all the wood, while the woman laid around the cabin in a sour mood and the man was always trying to put his hand on Olga’s bottom.

  I took a fancy to her first time I ever seen that girl, not just because she was pretty, which she was, and that extra size made her twice as attractive for my money, but mainly for the reason that she was the best-natured person I ever knowed. It was just about impossible to rile that girl, and I always had a weakness for tolerant women. For example, she never had the slightest suspicion that that family had got at least a 300 per cent return on what little they done for her. After we was married, it was all I could do to keep her from going back to them every afternoon and doing their chores when she had finished with ours.

  By the following year me and Olga had ourselves a kid and I got that house built I mentioned, a right nice dwelling place of all wood construction with a peaked roof and four rooms. It couldn’t yet compare with the Pendrakes’ residence but it was good for Denver. That baby Olga had was a boy and we named him Gustav after her Pa what was killed by the Santee, and even as an infant he looked exactly like a Swede with his corn-yellow hair and blue eyes.

  My boyhood amongst the Cheyenne had give me this conviction I was shrewd, and not even that time in Missouri had altered it, for I reckon cleverness doesn’t apply to love. But it does to business, and I thought I was being clever. We had not ever had a written agreement to our partnership. Bolt used to mention that every Saturday night when he figured up the week’s take, subtracted the costs, and then divvied up what was left three ways, though after a while I observed that only I got a handful of cash on such occasions. Him and Ramirez preferred to let their money ride in the safe. When I commented on that, I was informed they “ploughed back their returns.” Bolt was a great one for using phrases of this type to explain every peculiarity.

  “Then what do you use for your everyday money?” I asked. Ramirez laughed with his strong white teeth, but Bolt said soberly: “Credit, of course. We got civilization here now, Jack, which runs not upon money as such but rather the idea of money. Take those Indians that trade with us: they bring in an animal pelt and want for it something of equivalent value on the instant. It would never occur to them to set up an account with us, according to which they could draw supplies and other goods whenever they needed them, the retail price of these to be entered against their names to be defrayed by deposits of skins at a later time.

  “By this means they could even out the highs and lows of their savage economy and live according to the same standard the year around, lean times and fat, paying back in periods of good hunting what they put on credit in bad.”

  Well, he had a lot more to say about the theory of business, and how him and Ramirez preferred to reinvest their shares in the store rather than walk about spending dollar by dollar. They had charge accounts at the barber shop and the saloon, etc., and as to most of their other needs, they took them from our own merchandise and entered a charge against themselves in the books, as opposed to my own practice of buying Olga some yardgoods, say, and putting the actual money for it in the cashbox, though I would of course take an owner’s discount.

  But now as to that other thing he would mention so often: that our partnership was founded on no more than a handshake. He was right proud of this, whereas to me it was a cause of some worry. I guess why he spoke of it so often was that I suggested with about the same frequency that we get legal papers drawed up.

  However, by this tactic they succeeded only in raising my suspicions to the point where I had to put my foot down as I did with that sign, and we hired a lawyer and he made up the papers by which my third was certified. Or at least that’s what I thought, for I studied them documents very carefully, being able to read as you know. But I reckon legality has a language all its own.

  Olga was a great comfort to me, and one of the main reasons why she was is that she had never learned too much English, and I of course couldn’t speak a word of Swede. Not being able to talk much to each other, we got along wonderful, and never exchanged a cross word.

  That kid of ours, little Gus, he was a right cunning infant, and I took pleasure in rocking his cradle with my foot, while he burbled and goo-gooed and suchlike as tiny things do, and across the small room Olga set with her mending and would grin in that pink Swedish fashion if I looked towards her and ask if I wanted to eat, for she was like an Indian in that she expected everybody to be hungry at all times.

  Then one day in the late fall of ’64, Bolt and Ramirez suddenly blowed town, leaving me with all that credit of theirs to make good. For that is what our agreement done, I then discovered: give me sole legal responsibility for the business and all debts in its name, and I have already suggested to you that them fellows even put their haircuts and shaves on the company account.

  Well, I had got myself into a tight spot owing to my “acumen,” to use the Reverend Pendrake’s term. Despite outward appearances to the contrary, the store had been failing for some time. What happened was that Bolt and Ramirez had cut prices to where the more we sold, the more we lost. I mean, the more we lost in idea, on account of they never actually paid out any money as I have said.

  I did not hang around. Me and Olga, who I don’t think ever quite understood the reason for it, and little Gus, we packed a carpet bag and caught the early stage next day, leaving house, business, and my ambitions towards respectability behind. I wasn’t yet twenty-three years of age, and already I was financially ruined.

  All the same, I felt a certain relief. I sure like to succeed, but you can’t get away from the fact that failure gives you a great liberty. So as we bounced along the road south to Colorado City and Pueblo I was right calm of mind if not real merry like Olga. I think she believed we was on a holiday trip, for the time was about the middle of December of 1864, and the coach route turned east at the Arkansas River and if you stayed to the end of the line you’d find yourself at Fort Leavenworth in time for Christmas. I had bought tickets for the whole distance, which left me with only about enough money to buy meals and lodging at the station stops, though we was able to save a little on food at the first few because Olga brought with her a big basket full of grub.

  I might have had some kind of idea to cross the Missouri at Leavenworth and go to that town where the Reverend Pendrake lived and hit him up for a loan. I say I might have. I might also have looked up that commanding officer at Leavenworth who promised to help me when a kid, and get into the Army. I didn’t have no fixed scheme, that’s for sure. I figured I had learned my lesson to take what come without trying to force it, and Olga and little Gus was a great comfort to me in that state of mind.

  Gus was about two and we never cut his curly blond hair on account of it was so pretty, and his little eyes, blue as turquoise, took in everything there was to be noted. This was the first trip he had ever experienced and the bumpier the terrain, the better he liked it, just laughed and laughed when we was thrown around inside like beans in a gourd, for a stage ride in them days would loosen up all your teeth. He took after his Ma in every way, which was O.K. by me, for I wouldn’t wish my own looks on anybody, or my personality for that matter.

  What I haven’t mentioned is that the Sand Creek massacre had took place two weeks earlier, when Colonel Chivington struck the Cheyenne and Arapaho camp at dawn and wiped it out, two-thirds of the kill being women and children.

  Well, I wasn’t at Sand Creek so don’t feel I have a right to discuss it further even though what occurred there had a bearing on my future. For what happened was that in succeeding days the Cheyenne went to war along the whole frontier. But Colonel Chivington, we met him and his troops along the Arkansas downstream f
rom Fort Lyon while he was still following up the remnants of the Sand Creek Indians.

  The column drew up and a young lieutenant rode over, touched his hat to Olga who was looking from the coach window, and said to the driver up top: “The colonel’s compliments to all on board. We have scoured the river downstream and can assure you it is secure to the limits of our jurisdiction.”

  The driver expressed relief at the news, which in turn pleased me, for at the last station all he could talk about was the possibility of running into hostiles, and while Olga wouldn’t understand much of any other subject, let somebody mention Indians and she suddenly become fluent.

  “You hear that?” I says, patting her hand, which might not have been as smooth as Mrs. Pendrake’s, but it belonged to me.

  She held little Gus to the window, telling him: “Luke, byootiful horze.”

  She didn’t mean the lieutenant’s animal, but rather a gigantic stallion at the head of the cavalry column fifty yards off. On top of this beast sat Chivington himself, who I had seen in Denver. In fact I had shook hands with him once, and mine was numb the remainder of the afternoon. God he was big, most of it going to chest though his head alone was as big as little Gus’s whole body.

  He seen us studying him, and sat his mount like a statue, and then he saluted with a big cleaver hand and shouted in his thundering preacher’s voice: “Oh how we have punished the devils!”

  So the troops went on west and we continued east, and I reckon it wasn’t later than an hour from where we had met him that, just after fording a shallow creek and hauling up the slope beyond, me holding Gus partway through the window so he could watch the water drops still spinning off the rear wheels, I heard Olga make a whimper and turned and seen her pink face chalk up and her sky-blue eyes benighted.