Return of Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  Cody’s absence from the show meant I never had anything to do, for I had still been providing his drinks, either in his tent or his private railroad car. By the way, Pard was still with me, and we traveled, him and me, in a little section I walled off at the end of one of the cars that carried the livestock, in this case horses, which stank less and wasn’t so noisy as the steers and buffalo. I stayed apart because I didn’t want them white performers to complain about him, and I didn’t want to go near the Indians on account of my fear they might eat him.

  Speaking of the Indians with what since Carver’s departure had been called Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, I have so far mentioned only the Pawnee of Major Frank North’s bunch, who I avoided for reasons stated, but in fact Cody had managed to get ahold of a small contingent of Sioux as well, and like the Cheyenne they was historically hostile to the Pawnee and had always fought against that tribe. Yet with the Wild West the two groups camped peaceably side by side at each of our stops. This encampment was considered part of the show, and the public came and watched them, the Indians actually living in those tepees, cooking their meals on outside fires, and once in a while babies would be born in the traditional redskin fashion and not in a hospital and carried on their mothers’ backs while being called “papooses” by white visitors.

  I got to know a young fellow name of Gordon Lillie, then an interpreter for the Wild West, as he had worked at the Pawnee reservation in Indian Territory, and he told me the two tribal groups while feeling a natural rivalry in this situation, like baseball teams, tolerated each other and never come close to quarreling in his observation. Which caused me to reflect that even I tended sometimes to underrate the red man. He was getting plenty of grub here, a decent wage for the time, and admiration from the white public merely by pretending to be who he once had been, in the fake attacks on stagecoaches and settlers, and after the performance, being who he really was, a person with a wife and family and a portable home—two more things than me. He didn’t have no more territory to contest over, and no horses to steal or be stolen, so there wasn’t no reason for fighting.

  Lillie by the way later on took the name of Pawnee Bill and for a while had a traveling show of his own.

  When the Wild West closed its tour at Omaha that fall, I told Cody of my old connection with the Cheyenne and proposed to go up to their reservation and hire a bunch for the season to open next spring, and he says sure, the more the merrier, which reaction was typical of the man. We was back at the ranch in North Platte, along with a big bunch of others from the show, even an Indian or two, and Cody, full of drink and wearing a battered plug hat he had borrowed from somebody, was telling the stories for which he was noted but which, oddly enough, in various examples wasn’t as remarkable as some of his true adventures, as I learned only in later years when many of the Army officers who he had scouted for wrote or spoke of exploits of his he rarely or never mentioned and in fact called him modest. My own opinions changed as I knowed him better, and at any given point here I am trying to tell you how I felt at the time.

  In my earliest impressions, based on hearsay, I believed him just a blowhard. I had been wrong. If he were not the inventor of a new style, then he perfected it, and of course by now it is a pretty standard mix in which the true and the false are so intimately intertwined as probably never to be told apart, and anybody tries to figure them out will get thrown so off balance as to fear for his reason. I expected it’s only owing to this state of affairs that anybody ever gets elected to public office in this country.

  12. Little Mrs. Butler

  SO TOWARDS THE END of that winter I traveled up to Montana Territory, and I recruited a group of Cheyenne, of which most was men but some was women, all the latter married and with children, and brung them down to St. Louis, where the Wild West opened its second season.

  Now, thinking about Buffalo Bill Cody and his habit of presenting the brightest side of matters, and also with regard to the people who still live up there today, I ain’t going into detail about the Tongue River reservation, for while no doubt it was an improvement over where the Northern Cheyenne had first been sent down to the Nations, Indian Territory, it was not the place they would of been living permanently if they had my right to live anywhere I wanted.

  I wasn’t overwhelmed by the crowds of Indians who wanted to go off to parts unknown and join some kind of entertainment put on by the people who had slaughtered so many Cheyenne and taken away their land.

  I tried to explain these weren’t the same white people who done that, but I was hampered in this by my own conscience, for in fact the two main Indians Cody was credited with personally killing during his days as an Army scout, Tall Bull and Yellow Hand, was both of them Cheyenne, so the best I could come up with was the bury-the-hatchet argument, and them Sioux had come with the show after all, not to mention the Pawnee: why should both their friends and their enemies be profiting when they wasn’t? But they answered easily enough that they was too polite to comment on the taste of their friends and allies, but as to a miserable tribe like the Pawnee it could be said anything done by such would turn the stomach of a Human Being.

  Now I had went to a certain amount of effort in getting there, for with Cody’s help I had to obtain the Government agent’s okay to talk to these people at all, and it had first to be confirmed by Washington, and if you expected Indians to listen to you, you did well to bring them presents of a decent quality, for they had long since been too advanced to accept a handful of glass beads, so I invested in bolts of nice cloth and foods of the sort I knowed they liked, some of which, sugar and coffee and bacon and such, they was supposed to be issued by the Government but the rations was often short owing to the dishonesties all along the line of distribution.

  I don’t want to complain, for this was my own idea, but the point is I wasn’t getting far with the people who I was trying to lend a hand to, and I might of ended up with the bitterness so often felt by the rejected do-gooder had I not got unexpected assistance.

  First I ought to say that amongst the Indians gathered in the area near the agent’s office where I had parked the wagon full of presents and give them out, I didn’t recognize a single soul from either my old days with the tribe or from that little band of prisoners down in Kansas, Wild Hog’s bunch, who had been sent up here after the charges against them was dropped, but then the last-named had not taken to me much even when I helped them out and maybe to see me now would only remind them of a rotten time and they stayed away. And my old friends was probably dead.

  But just as I was about ready to quit and go back emptyhanded to Buffalo Bill, having proved my sole talent was in filling a glass from a bottle, who should make his appearance as a latecomer, hailing me with warm feeling, but that young fellow from the Indian school run by the Major and Amanda Teasdale, Wolf Coming Out, who if you recall I had got out of the Kiowa girl’s bed in the females’ dormitory but was caught myself in what looked like compromising circumstances.

  I clumb down from the wagon and shook his hand and said I was sorry all the presents had been handed out.

  “I’m glad to see you,” said Wolf. He was a few years older and his hair had growed long again. He was wearing the mostly white clothes with some Indian touches of them that lived on the reservations, moccasins and beaded vest over a blue cloth shirt and pants of wool. “Nobody would tell me,” he went on, “where you went when you left the school.”

  “Well, that’s past now,” I says, not wanting to remind him, and in fact myself either, of an embarrassing incident. “How are things at the school? Are you back home on vacation?”

  “I was thrown out and sent back,” Wolf says with a grin of apparent approval. “It took me a while to tell Gold Leaf that I was the one who caused the trouble, because he speaks only English. He can’t even talk in the signs. It was too bad you left, because everything was all right after that, and you could have stayed.”

  “How could it be all right if you were expelled?” I asked, th
ough knowing just what he meant: he was real happy to leave a place he never liked. But his response was not as simple as I expected. You always had to allow for that with an Indian. He seldom approached things like a white man, but not because of stupidity or ignorance as such. He was just answering another question than the one you thought you had asked.

  “Because I had learned enough by then,” says he, serious now. “It’s an excellent school, and Gold Leaf is probably the smartest white person in the country, along with your woman, of course.”

  “My woman?”

  “Heovo-vese.”

  “Yellow Hair wasn’t my woman!”

  Now he was smiling broadly. “Oho, she was Gold Leaf’s woman? Is that why you ran off? He was going to shoot you?”

  “She wasn’t anybody’s woman.” And then, since he was joking with me, I kidded him about the white man’s clothes he was wearing, the pants and shirt of cloth, and right away I regretted having done so.

  “When the leather clothing wears out, we can’t replace it nowadays,” he said. “There isn’t much game around here any more.”

  By the way, the rest of the Cheyenne, most of them also dressed in white style, gingham dresses on the women and the men in jeans and that high-crowned style of black felt hat I never seen on anybody but an Indian, had drifted away by now, having gotten the presents and politely listened to my pitch, but Wolf had not yet heard it, so I went through it again. “The food is plentiful, and it is of excellent quality, with lots of meat. Cody provides all the clothing, and it’s buckskin, with authentic decorations of the tribe. The women will be given the materials they need to make it, or he’ll have it done by people who work for him making costumes. Everything is provided, including the horses and guns, and Cody also pays twenty-five dollars a month to each warrior. If he is married and wants to bring his wife and family along, they get an additional fifteen dollars every moon.”

  “I am glad to hear the men get paid more than the women,” Wolf says. “Whites too often are run by their women, as in the case of Yellow Hair at the school and the other female teachers.”

  “The reason here,” I says, “is the warriors perform in the show, attacking stagecoaches and white settlements.”

  Wolf frowns and asks seriously, “Where does this man find the white people willing to get hurt or even die to entertain others?”

  Now, nobody was more familiar with Indian ways than me but I was rusty. I begged his pardon for neglecting to say all these fights was fakes, with blank cartridges, and then I had to explain what a blank was, for he had never heard of ammunition without bullets, which couldn’t do nothing but make noise. Indians rarely had enough cartridges, and of course couldn’t manufacture none, so they was careful of what they possessed, often using arrows at short range, to save their bullets for the long.

  “I’m not married,” Wolf says next.

  I figured he was thinking about that extra fifteen dollars he would not get as a single man, and I says, “I’ll offer you thirty-five dollars a month for yourself, if you can talk a group of Human Beings into coming with the show.” And I threw in an appeal to his vanity. “I noticed at the school that you were a natural leader.”

  He nodded solemnly. “That is true, but only among those of my own age and younger. The older men might not be willing to follow someone who has never been in battle.” He showed me a sensitive look. “My parents wouldn’t let me fight at the Goat River. It is not true as some whites have said, I understand, that so-called suicide boys went to the battlefield to distract the attention of the soldiers so our men could kill them more easily. The Americans were easy enough to kill as it was: they were all drunk. I went over there only when they were all dead. Having been to that very fine school and learned many things, I now know what money is, of course, but I did not in those days and neither did the rest of us, and the money belonging to the dead soldiers was blowing all over the field. Some of the girls used it to make dolls’ dresses.”

  “Greasy Grass” as I have said was what the Little Bighorn was usually called by the Indians, for that was mostly Sioux territory and the name was in the Lakota language, but the Cheyenne had previously known it as the Goat, and though young, Wolf had become a man of tradition.

  “I didn’t know you were there.” I decided for the moment anyhow to continue to be silent as to my own personal experience.

  “Only as a child. But many of the grownups were as ignorant as we children. A warrior named Rising Sun took a thick gold medal from a soldier’s dead body. It was at the end of a chain and made a ticking sound, so he hung it around his own neck. But when the ticking stopped, next morning, he believed its medicine was good only for white men and bad for a Human Being, and he threw it into the river.” Wolf’s teeth glistened in his dusky face, his color having darkened now he was mostly outdoors. “If I had been to school at the time I could have told him it was a watch. Gold Leaf had one just like it.”

  Well, after some more talk, and a meal prepared by his relatives from the gift eats I had brung—he lived with them in a tepee made of shabby old canvas on account of buffalo hide was scarce, and they was waiting for a government shipment of lumber to build a shack, and they had a mean patch of land on which to grow crops when and if the seed arrived—after eating and then of course smoking a pipe on the matter, Wolf collected a little bunch of nine fellows, six of which was married and brung their wives and some little kids, including babes in arms, and after the necessary permissions had been granted, with telegrams back and forth to Cody and him to his pals in the Government, we made our way down to St. Louis by steamboat and railroad, which none of them except Wolf had ever rode on, so he could confirm his superior position, and let me say though I have made clear my high regard for Indians, they was altogether human in such things as envy and self-interest.

  Now don’t think Pard was forgotten. He stayed on at Cody’s ranch in Nebraska while I went up to Montana. Buffalo Bill liked him, and he got on all right with the hired hands and the other dogs on the property. I didn’t take him with me this time, for I was concerned the Cheyenne might be hungry for their old delicacy.

  When we reached St. Louis and I met up with Pard, who Cody had brung along with him, I took the precaution of asking Wolf Coming Out to keep himself and the other Human Beings from licking their lips when seeing my four-footed pal if I wasn’t always there to protect him.

  To which Wolf says I needn’t fear for the animal, because his uncle once had a dream he would die if he ate dog and, having done so anyway, was killed next day by a bolt of lightning, after which everybody in their band regarded that sort of meat as bad medicine. “Besides,” he says, “that dog of yours is too old to eat.” I took some comfort in that fact: it was true that their preference was for puppy-dog soup.

  In the encampment at the show grounds, the Cheyenne set up the tepees Cody provided, next to the lodges of their pals the Sioux, and it was only then that I learned Wolf could talk Lakota. It seems his aunt on his Ma’s side was the wife of an Ogallala, like more than one Human Being woman, intermarriage being one of the practices that caught on after the first one or two done it, and it kept going. At the Greasy Grass the two camps was adjoining. Despite this longstanding connection, the two languages was totally different from each other, and unless an individual learned the other fellow’s tongue they had to converse in the signs. I never knowed till I got over to Europe that pretty much the same thing was true of the French and the Germans, but then they wasn’t all that close friends.

  So I asks Wolf if he would translate if I ever wanted to talk to the Lakota, and he says sure, but maybe I’d want him to learn me the lingo and then I could practice it with the Sioux contingent.

  “Oh,” says I, needling him, “go to school as you did? I just hope I can be as good a student.”

  “You have to be as smart as I to learn that much,” says he, and I swear he was altogether serious, “but whatever you learn will be worthwhile.”

  I thought it
would of been nice for the Major to know what a high opinion Wolf held regarding the institution, but I was embarrassed at not being able to use good enough English to write him in, and not so much for his sake as if he showed it to Amanda.

  Now having broke up with Doc Carver, who immediately started a rival show, Cody went into partnership with a fellow name of Nate Salsbury, who had been a stage actor for a long time, but with the Wild West he handled the business end and never performed any more though I bet he would of liked to be a star like Cody, but there wasn’t ever no one else in existence, then, before, or since, better at what he did than Buffalo Bill.

  The first thing Salsbury done was to get a promise from Cody to stop excess drinking. In view of the job I had been hired for, and maybe to his mind still held in addition to being interpreter for the Cheyenne, I guess it made sense to read me the letter he had wrote to Nate when they signed the deal.

  I had to keep a straight face when he promised not to drink no more while they was partners other than the “two or three” he would take to “brace on, today.” Now that could be taken two ways, but maybe he wasn’t being devious but just trying to fool himself as well with a vow that, the way I read it, said he could take three drinks a day without specifying how big they could be, and in fact this promise become part of the Cody legend in later years, with just that supposed limit at the heart of it: you had people saying he swallowed three beer buckets of whiskey every twenty-four hours, and next it become barrels. All I can honestly say is I henceforward never saw him drink no more, and—I guess you can see this coming—no less.

  “Lucky I have this other job now,” I told him.

  “Oh, we’d have found something else for you to do,” he says. Cody was loyal to the people around him, his employees usually becoming his personal cronies, who was closer to him than his real family. “Tell me this, Jack. Do those Cheyennes of yours carry a grudge because I killed some of their people in the past?”