by Bill Albert
“When I had no more winters than this boy, the winter Five Brothers of Little Thunder were Killed, I became sick with the red-spot fever and my legs would not hold me. Because I was too weak to ride, I had to lie wrapped in buffalo robes in the travois as we moved to a new camp. There were no other ponies behind me, only the empty plain and the dust clouds from our passing. As I watched this dust rising into the air I suddenly found myself on a bluff overlooking the empty plain. I could not see my people. I could not see the dust. I was alone. I was a man and I was crying for my vision, waiting to receive the power of the Wakan. Nothing came to me, the sky remained cloudless and empty like the plain—no eagles, no swallows and not even the absence of sound. I was afraid that I had been cast out, that my hanble ceyapi would find no answer. I looked down once more and the plain had disappeared. I was in the air, above the clouds and there were hundreds of swallows around me, swooping, gliding, and calling to each other.”
One of the old men interrupted the story. He muttered a few words and the others in the circle nodded in agreement.
“The messengers of the Thunder-beings,” Charlie explained helpfully.
The recounting of the vision went on and on. Sunset Buffalo Dreamer told about different colored horses coming from the four corners of the winds, about the Six Grandfathers, about lightning, rainbows, and voices from the sky. There were also maidens doing stuff with a hoop, men with spears, someone called White Buffalo Woman, and a sacred pipe that turned into a flute, or maybe it was the other way around. You see, it wasn’t really a proper story at all. There was sort of a beginning, I gotta admit that, but then it just got all jumbled together.
“I was carried back down to the earth, to the same bluff overlooking the plain where my people had been. In the center of the plain there was a circle of tipis. I stood in the center of the circle and called out for my people. There was no answer. In front of the sweat lodge the stones were being heated. Near the vision hill were strips of red cloth on willow sticks. The sacred pipe was resting on the vision hill and in the west the sun was disappearing. All was in readiness. Behind me someone cried out. I turned to see an eagle rising into the air. Beneath it on the ground lay a buffalo calf still caught in the whiteness of its birth lining. It was struggling for life. I tore away the lining and touched it but it was not a buffalo calf. It was a naked boy crouched on all fours. A wasichu boy. He stood up and changed into a giant ta tanka, a buffalo bull. Then, I was on the bluff once more and below me the plain was full of buffalo, full to the horizon with a great moving herd that had no beginning and no end.”
“Newborn Buffalo Calf,” Sunset Buffalo Dreamer said, tapping me firmly on the shoulder.
He seemed mightily pleased with himself. But not everyone was so taken with his vision.
An Indian called Bent Nose, who in fact did have a bent nose and looked to be about as old as Sunset Buffalo Dreamer, said that it may have been a mighty vision once long ago but it had lost its power because they all knew that the buffalo would never return.
“Remember,” he said sadly “what happened when we followed the vision of the Piute Messiah? He too said the buffalo would return. That the earth would cover the nonbelievers. What does Sunset Buffalo Dreamer’s vision hold for us? It holds nothing. I say we must send the boy away. He is a mutilated wasichu, bad medicine. Let the white man take him back.”
“You are but an old woman,” replied Sunset Buffalo Dreamer, disdainfully. “We will not put on the Ghost Shirt again. Maybe the buffalo will not return, but there is a power here that we must understand. Why was there a wasichu boy in my vision when I had never seen one before? How do you account for that?”
“I do not account. I am not a dreamer,” returned Bent Nose, folding his arms defiantly.
“No, that is true,” agreed Sunset Buffalo Dreamer. “You are not a dreamer.”
“Little Cut-Penis!” Bent Nose snorted.
“Newborn Buffalo Calf!” insisted Sunset Buffalo Dreamer.
Then everyone started to talk at once and Charlie couldn’t keep up with it.
“They are discussing the meaning of the vision,” he said finally, throwing up his hands.
Little Cut-Penis, Newborn Buffalo Calf, what the hell difference did it make? I was too scared blue by the pain, which was intense and fearsome, and by all that grunted Indian stuff, to insist on my Upper West Side dignity and rights, even if I had been able to do any insisting. But in the stray wisps of light I glimpsed between the hurting and terror, I could make out that perhaps things were not all bad. Hadn’t I finally made it to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show? So I was a mite busted up, so I had made it as part of an old man’s dream-vision and not as a rich New York kid watching it from an expensive seat in the Madison Square Garden. So what? In the end my mother would be called to come get me and everthing would be safe and predictable again. I had managed to forget why I was there in the railway carriage and not on Eighth Avenue being a Liebermann.
I was Newborn Buffalo Calf. I just didn’t know it yet.
2
It didn’t happen somewhere along Oregon Trail or in the Badlands or on the empty Texas plains. No sir, half a block from Broadway is where it happened. The busiest street in the busiest city in the world. I can understand being beaten up and robbed there, but who gets captured by Indians right off the streets of New York City? Yet there I was, in their devilish clutches, far away from home and getting farther away each day. I reckon I should have been more concerned about getting back to my parents, no matter what they had said or what I had done, but I was pretty hazy about what was happening and so I lay there in the railway carriage, counted and recounted the windows, and watched the Indians come and go. And I listened. I couldn’t do much else.
I had been unconscious for three or four days and all that time Sunset Buffalo Dreamer had been making strong medicine to get me better. That’s what Charlie Pinto Face told me the day after I finally woke up and heard about the vision. He also told me that the chicken foot dangling around my neck on a rawhide thong was an eagle’s claw, a wasicun, in which Sunset Buffalo Dreamer had breathed the Wakan spirit to make me better.
“He has great strength from his vision and in his song. That is here in the wasicun. It is for this that you live again. Now Sunset Buffalo Dreamer, he is your father.”
Meyer Liebermann, with two ns, the boy who went to the Dr. Julius Sachs School for Boys, the young man so full of promise, that Meyer Liebermann, with a wild, painted-up old Indian for a father? I smiled broadly at Charlie, then laughed. The laugh got stuck hard in my crumpled windpipe and choked me, the ripples snaking down to bang against my busted ribs. As I spluttered, Charlie Pinto Face gave me a stormy look, stood up, and walked away. It was pretty clear that making fun of your father was as unacceptable among the Indians as among the Jews.
It was a useful lesson for I was stuck in the middle of a trainload of forty or fifty Indians. If the train moved at night, which it often did, they bedded down in the bunks. Otherwise, they slept outside in their tipis. Sometimes we stayed in the same place for a couple of days, but mostly it was one-day stands, tearing down and moving at night to be ready for the next day’s show somewhere down the line. The carriage would crowd right up, most of the Indians pretty young and looking hellish fierce, all staring at me, laughing and jabbering. I was their Sideshow, like Billy Baker the Boy Giant or Millie Owen the Long-haired Lady. I didn’t care much for that and I would have told them in no uncertain terms if I could have.
But I was a voiceless secret, hidden from sight in the railway carriage. Whenever a white man came they covered me with a buffalo robe. Jennie Spotted Horse brought me food from the mess tent. Always soup and bread, which was fine because even the soup hurt like the blazes to swallow. She was a wrinkled face wrapped in a red blanket who never had a word for me. Once in a while she would pick at my hair with her fingers and then laugh behind her hand. The boy, Standing W
olf, did the necessary with one of the red fire buckets.
All in all it didn’t match up to the reality of the Dimes or what I had imagined from the big color posters outside the Madison Square Garden. I wanted at least to peek out one of the windows to see the rest of the show, maybe catch sight of Buffalo Bill himself, but either the train put in a long way from the showground or there was a restraining hand if I tried to get up.
Of course, I did hear a lot; men shouting mostly, horses passing by outside, wagons crunching on the gravel, the crash of things being loaded and unloaded and, if the tracks were close enough to the showgrounds, the sound of the band playing, gunshots, and the crowds clapping and yelling.
Smells of sawdust and horses came with the Indians into the carriage. Sometimes they put out the clean smell of fresh sage and other times they stank awful bad, all sweat and bear grease. But then my odor was none too good either. I hadn’t had a bath since New York and every day Sunset Buffalo Dreamer would smear some high-stinking poultice on my chest and throat. It would help mend my ribs and give back my tongue, he told me.
When he wasn’t performing in the show. Sunset Buffalo Dreamer came into the railway carriage and talked to me and whoever else was there. He sure could talk and it didn’t seem all that important to him whether I understood or not. Most of the time the others, especially the older men, would sit around, joining in telling the stories. I might have started becoming a listener on the way down to the Henry Street Settlement with my mother, but my real apprenticeship began with Sunset Buffalo Dreamer and the others in that railway carriage.
I had always thought Indians were either stony quiet, or whooping and dancing, or maybe out killing white people and scalping them so as to hang the hair outside their tipis. Well, I can’t say about all Indians, but those with the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show, particularly the old guys, spent most of their time sitting around swapping stories. I knew they were stories because Charlie told me, but most of them he didn’t bother to translate.
“Stories about coup,” he would say with a shrug. “Old men telling themselves.”
I can’t remember all the stories I heard in the railway carriage. Most of them didn’t seem to have a lot to do with each other. Standing Elk recounted a tale about scalping some black soldiers, buffalo soldiers he called them, who were riding with a wagon train of settlers. He said their hair was like thorn burrs and the scalps didn’t hang well from the lodge polls. The warriors of his band captured some women and children, but he said they were too weak and soon died. Then Laughing Spear told of the time when he was a boy and was captured by a Crow raiding party. He escaped by rolling down a hill in the dark, cutting the rawhide thongs on a sharp rock and running away back to his people.
“I will tie another into it,” Sunset Buffalo Dreamer said.
Then he told about hunting buffalo and how he fell off his horse and was saved because he lay still and the stampeding herd parted around him. This, he said, was proof of the power of his vision and of the Great Spirit.
Bent Nose responded by recounting the time he killed a wolf with a single arrow through the eye. Another man, whose name I can’t remember, told of being saved from freezing to death by wrapping himself in the freshly killed skin of a solitary buffalo who had appeared suddenly out of a snow storm.
“The buffalo,” he said solemnly, “offered himself to me so I should not die and so my children should not go hungry.”
So it went, one story leading to another until, like Sunset Buffalo Dreamer’s vision of the endless herd of buffalo, the stories stretched over the horizon and beyond.
“The old world is no more,” Charlie Pinto Face said to me after a particularly long session. “You do not even see the shell of it here, only the whisperings, like wind through the buffalo grass.”
Charlie was a philosopher, maybe even a genuine poet. He was about thirty years old, although it’s hard to be sure with Indians who don’t get old like white people and who talk about moons and such. He had big white patches on his face and neck, as if someone had scraped off the copper color to find out what was underneath. He dressed up like the others and he went out to dance in the arena and chase the Deadwood Stage, but he was different, too. Being the official interpreter gave him authority, even over the older men like Sunset Buffalo Dreamer, and that white man’s authority seemed to set him apart.
Charlie also had a peculiar unhappiness about him. He laughed a lot, but not too far underneath, like the white patches on his face, he was sad in a way I’d never come across during my short and privileged life on the Upper West Side.
“When I was this high,” he said holding his hand near his waist, “Mr. Johnson, the agent he came to my father and said he must allow me to go away to the white man’s school. If he wouldn’t allow me to go then the policemen would come and take me. My father didn’t want me to go. Other children from the Pine Ridge Reservation had gone away to these schools and had not come back. But what could he do? My father was an old man without power. I was eight years at the Carlisle School learning the white man’s ways. They cut my hair, gave me stiff white collars and hard boots to wear. We all liked the boots because they squeaked loudly when we walked on the board floors. Our school father, Captain Pratt, he said it was necessary that we become civilized and put aside the tribal ways, that we make ourselves real Christian Americans. He told us that if we worked hard we could be as good as the white man. I learned to make the squeaky boots in the shop, to make tin cups and plates and pots for coffee, even to play a silver cornet. But when I finally went home to stay with my people I could do nothing I had learned at the Carlisle School. You see, no one on the reservation wanted boots or tin cups because the government gave them away. If I had played the cornet it would have only frightened the people. After all, was it not the sound of the horse soldiers? However, it was of no importance. I did not have a cornet.”
He took out a short black cigar and rolled it back and forth between his fingers. It crackled and after a couple of minutes he stuck it back in his jacket pocket. He sighed. Reaching down he touched me lightly on the chest.
“It was the policemen, the metal breasts, Bull Head and Red Tomahawk, they rubbed out Sitting Bull. They did this for the white man at the Standing Rock Agency. My uncle who had gone to bring Sitting Bull to the Pine Ridge Agency for the dancing, he said that when the old man fell dead in front of his house, Sitting Bull’s spirit entered the gray horse Pahaska had given him. The horse sat on the ground like a dog and raised its hoofs one at a time while Sitting Bull’s people fought the metal breasts with guns and clubs. Later, Big Foot’s people, Miniconjou people, ghost dancers who were coming in to give themselves up, they were rubbed out at the Pine Ridge Agency by the soldiers with big guns. Many were killed that day. Because I had been at the Carlisle School where I had become civilized like a white man, where I had become also a good Christian, the agent he told me I must go with Mr. Paddy Starr as an interpreter for the burial party.
“At Wounded Knee Creek there were many, many bodies caught up in the humps of snow with blood frozen hard on their wounds. Their arms and legs were stiff and straight, their faces were covered with surprise. Not only Miniconjou warriors, Big Foot, Yellow Bird and others too, but women and children had been shot as they tried to run from the soldiers’ guns. There were bodies lying along the creek for two miles, maybe more. The Indians who came with us from the Agency they cried and moaned loudly, many of them chanted the death songs. Mr. Paddy Starr he did not care. His men they cut the bloody ghost shirts from bodies, they cut the necklaces, chopped off fingers to take the rings. When they finished they stacked the people like logs, tossed them into a big hole and covered them with dirt. The dead they should stay above the ground. The white men did not understand this. It was not important to them to understand this. Many of the people went naked into the ground. They had not been washed or painted, they had no robes, their kin had not been able to ble
ed for them, they had no free-spirit moccasins to walk on the trail of the spirits to the land of their ancestors. They were swept away by the white men without honor. When the hole was almost full of frozen bodies the white men stopped to have their photograph taken. They held themselves very still and smiled.
“I was a civilized Indian but I did not want to be one any more. I should have acted like Plenty Horses. He also went to the Carlisle School and became civilized. Later he rubbed out a Long Knife officer so that he could stop being lonely and could take his place among his people. Maybe I was too civilized to do this. I do not know.”
Charlie stopped talking and stared out the window. The train had been stopped for a few hours and there was no one else in the carriage. The men were setting up the show, talking and laughing as they walked by outside. It was hot, stuffy with dust hanging in the air and flies buzzing against the ceiling. I wanted to get up, get out of the carriage and put some distance between myself and Charlie’s story. It was not how things were in the real West, I knew that. It was only some stupid Indian story, like the other tall tales I had heard. I reckon maybe I was getting overfilled with their stories. After a time Charlie laughed, showing his crooked white teeth.
“Captain Pratt he did not like the Wild West Shows. At Carlisle he told us many times, ‘Schools civilize, shows degrade.’ He told us that there were many white men who didn’t want the Indian to become civilized, many white men who thought we should stay savages with our feathers and blankets. Those Indians who were foolish enough to go with the shows, he told us, they became lazy and could do no steady work. They drank liquor, they had turned their backs on civilization, he said. I thought very hard about Captain Pratt, the Carlisle School, and about civilization as I watched Mr. Paddy Starr’s men cast the bodies of the Miniconjous one on top of the other into the big hole.
