Return of Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  For his performance, which never consisted of more than just riding around the arena on the gray horse Cody give him, Sitting Bull sported an outfit of fringed buckskins and one of them big warbonnets whites thought, and think, all Indians wore all day, and then he went to sit in front of his tepee, where people lined up to buy cards like Annie’s with his picture on them, which he signed ahead of time, tracing a signature I first wrote out for him, but when Annie looked at it she sighed and wrote a better one, easier to read, herself, but then Frank allowed as how it ought to be more masculine, so he added his improvements.

  Every once in a while a person of the type they used to call a smart-aleck or whippersnapper, generally wearing a real thin mustache and slicked-down hair, would, so as to impress a lady friend, question them ready-to-go cards, asking me with a smirk, “How do I know they wasn’t signed back in the tent there by you and not the Chief?”

  “He’ll write his autograph in front of you, but it will cost an extra dollar,” I would say, and sometimes to save face before the lady in question he would have to shell out this sum, for which he could of bought a fine dinner for two, in which case Sitting Bull would “draw” his signature, for with some practice he had gotten pretty good at imitating the letters me and Annie and Frank had designed for him.

  Another moneymaking idea of mine come about when some big fat fellow seeing the Bull’s beaded tobacco pouch asked if he wanted to sell it.

  When I translated the question, Sitting Bull put his hand to his mouth, hiding the smile I knowed he was making, doing this because he was supposed to look fierce whenever the public was watching. “Is there nothing that Americans will not buy or sell?” he asked me.

  I’ll admit I never myself been averse to turning a profit when one was offered, for while the best way of surviving in a place like Deadwood, Dodge, or Tombstone in the old days was to keep out of the way of flying lead, the best anywhere at any time is making money. But I got his point, and was about to tell the fat fellow to forget about it when Sitting Bull says, “If he needs the pouch I will give it to him. One of the women will make another one for me.”

  So I says to the white man, who, with a heavy gold watch chain stretched across his bulging vest and a sparkling tie pin not far below his second chin, looked like he could afford it, “Well, sir, you’re talking about an article of great sentimental value to the Chief. He was carrying that pouch in his pocket at the time he scalped General Custer.”

  “I’ll give him ten dollars.”

  I takes the man aside while the line of them waiting for their autographs moves up. This fellow by the way hadn’t waited his turn but bought the place from the young boy who had: I seen that.

  I says to him I wouldn’t translate such an insulting offer, fearing for his safety when the Chief heard it.

  Well, who knows how high I could of run him had I not had to get back—some sharper might try to pass off Confederate money or other shin-plaster on Sitting Bull—so we settled on twenty-five simoleons, cash on the barrelhead, more than most people in them days earned for a week’s work.

  “You’re getting a museum piece,” I told him, “and we’re throwing in the baccy.”

  In succeeding days I kept the Sioux women busy turning out more tobacco pouches and sold them all, not usually getting so much as the first time but once taking more from a drunk, and I was quite proud of myself, for I had to keep this trade from Sitting Bull’s knowledge, to do which I would tell the potential buyer that the pouch being offered was the original while the one on the blanket alongside the Chief was a copy.

  What I done was add the pouch sales to what come in from the autographed pictures and turn it over to Nate Salsbury to credit to Sitting Bull’s account, less what the Bull kept as pocket money though he rarely got beyond the show grounds, because we stayed each place so short a time, but also because Cody was held responsible by the Indian Commissioner for the moral welfare of the red men who worked for him, which meant they wasn’t supposed to stray into such fleshpots as was offered locally wherever we was.

  But after I had been selling the pouches for a time, Sitting Bull says he wanted more money to keep on his person, so I give him some in coins before turning the rest over to Nate, and he put them in a little bag he carried on his belt, for Indian garments didn’t have no pockets. I figured he thought of it like a medicine bundle of the kind Indians keep at hand for what you might call good fortune though it’s more than that, until I mentioned the matter to Annie Oakley, and she told me he give quite a bit of money away.

  “Who to? The other Indians?” I wasn’t with him twenty-four hours a day.

  “Why,” says Frank Butler, “those ragamuffins that hang around his tent.”

  Cody would let a lot of young kids who looked poor into the show for free, and in them days there was plenty of such whenever we played a large city. Now, there wasn’t no kid rich or poor who wasn’t fascinated with Indians in general and Sitting Bull in particular, and if I have failed to mention previously how a bunch would hang around him until me or other whites, never him, shooed them off, it’s because at that time they was not noticed except as annoyances. I don’t say this to shock anyone of a later time; it’s just the truth. Or I should say wasn’t noticed by anybody but Sitting Bull.

  So I brung the matter up with him soon thereafter, for I found it as strange as some of the white ways that puzzled him.

  “If you kept that money it could go to help Hunkpapa children.”

  “Hunkpapa children don’t need it that badly,” said he. “They never wander among strangers, as if they have no family or friends, and if they are hungry and in tattered clothing, it is only because that is also true of the rest of their family.”

  Within their tribe and all the more so within a particular band and then their circle of relations, redskins stuck together in a fashion that the civilized didn’t always practice, including myself, and he had shamed us, no doubt about it. But there was another issue here that an Indian couldn’t be aware of, unless he was that pathetic kind called Hang-Around-the-Forts, and that was when you started to just hand out money, more and more would show up to get it including finally some who wasn’t needy, and the giver might get disgusted and stop giving to anybody. I mention this fundamental problem of the human race because I’m not saying Sitting Bull had the universal answer, just that he was mighty generous to the offspring of the people who stole his land and tried to exterminate his own folk. That meant he was a fine man, but what made him great was he never in any way did anything in disrespect of himself.

  Having said as much, I don’t mean he was at all grim like the pictures usually show him, with them pouchy eyes, big nose, and scowl. The Bull was real interested in his appearance, call it vanity or pride, and when dressed for the show he braided his hair with intermixed otter fur and his leggings was decorated with porcupine quills. Under the big warbonnet his leathery face was brightly painted. When not attired for a performance, he sported a vest of brocade that reminded me of one Wild Bill Hickok once wore, a fancy shirt the tails of which hung over his pants, and a big white sombrero that was a present from Buffalo Bill. His deerskin moccasins bore elaborate arrangements of sewn-on beads. Like all such footgear as worn by Indians they was soled with only a double thickness of leather, too easily worn through unless you walked only on the prairie, so I got him to let me have a cobbler stitch on rubber soles.

  He wore a red tie, which I doubt he knowed was like the ones George Custer sported from the Civil War to the ridge above the Little Bighorn River. His favorite piece of jewelry was a brass crucifix hung on a thong around his neck, and I don’t mean just a plain cross but the real religious article, with a little pale wood figure of Jesus attached to it, and seeing this Annie told me to ask him if he was a believer.

  Sitting Bull said a Black Robe, a priest, give it to him a long time before. He pointed to the little Jesus. “This doll is the image of a man killed by the white people for being too good.”


  This was on one of the occasions when me and him had tea with the Butlers along with cake, bread and jam, and other sweet things, all of which he favored, along with me, especially the ice cream we had on occasion, which I thought maybe he had never ate before but he had done so several times though he still didn’t understand how it could be kept so cold unless the weather was freezing—and in fact neither did I nor do I to this day, except in a electric Frigidaire which wasn’t yet invented then. I should also say Sitting Bull could use a spoon and fork just like anybody else, and he sure did so in Annie’s presence, and afterwards he enjoyed examining her and Frank’s remarkable collection of firearms of all sizes, calibers, and gauges.

  The Bull was a real sociable person with an easier way than mine when in genteel surroundings amidst white women. I don’t know how he acquired it, but he had a natural sense of how to act. For example, one of the first times he had ever been brung to a white town the people in charge took him, I guess as a joke, to a place like the Lone Star and he saw dancing girls. Now, not only did he tell about this in front of Annie, but he suddenly gets up and begins to imitate the movements of them dancers, kicking his legs and swiveling his hips in a hilarious way, but what worried me now was he had not only wore out his own welcome at the Butler tent but ruined mine as well.

  But I tell you Annie laughed harder than even Frank and me when I saw it was okay to do so.

  And who would think that the one time I got to the White House it was due to Sitting Bull, but it’s true. The Wild West was performing in Washington, D.C., and on an off day Cody led a delegation of our Sioux to the Father’s Tepee, headed by old Bull in all his finery, and we was let right in the door, which surprised me even though I knowed Buffalo Bill had a lot of pull by now as a celebrity and also was a Democrat, but as it happened President Cleveland was not home, so we just passed the time of day with a smooth-talking fellow who flattered the Indians without saying anything for which he could be held accountable and give us a tour of the ground floor, which I found real nice though not comfortable-looking.

  But Sitting Bull had wanted to ask the Father, which is how the Indians called the President, if he couldn’t do better by the Lakotas, and furthermore he didn’t think much of a chief’s home in which a visitor wasn’t fed, so he was not in a happy mood when we went next to the headquarters of the U.S. Army and he had to shake hands with General Philip H. Sheridan, who was credited with the expression about the only good redskin was a dead one, though the Bull probably wouldn’t of known that. What interested him was that Little Phil wasn’t much taller than me but was about twice as heavy. Sheridan had been Custer’s protector before the Little Bighorn fight, pleading his cause with President Grant, who despised him, and his defender ever since, maybe because he had a crush on Mrs. Custer, though I couldn’t blame any man for that.

  Now when that season come to an end in the fall of ’85 at Columbus, Ohio, Cody sat down with Sitting Bull for a smoke and told him he had contributed greatly to the success of the Wild West and invited him to join up again when we started up next spring.

  But the Bull had me tell Long Hair that while he liked him and believed himself and the other Lakota had been treated well, and he had been interested in seeing all the white towns, he missed his home so much he did not want to leave it again for so long. “I am an old man,” he said. “I would not want to die in a place that is foreign to me.” Though most of his homeland was now denied to him, he cherished what little was left, that cabin on the Grand River and a few acres around it.

  Cody thanked him again and saying he would be welcome back any time he wanted to come, he made Sitting Bull a gift of the gray horse he had rode around the arena at every performance, which animal had previously been trained by our cowboys to do tricks like sitting down and raising one hoof as if to shake hands, and taking a bow at the end of its performance. The Bull wore that big white sombrero Cody had given him also, along with the rest of his street outfit including the rubber-soled moccasins, when he boarded the train home. Wearing any kind of white-man’s hat, he usually put an Indian touch to it, like sticking a feather in the band or pinning a butterfly onto the brim, but this day there was something new.

  I peered and asked, “Is that a little American flag?”

  “Yes,” said he.

  “Does that mean you are showing you’re an American?”

  “It means I have fought against the American Army,” says he. As I mentioned, he always had his own original slant on everything.

  Me and him shook hands. I had become real fond of Sitting Bull, who reminded me a lot of Old Lodge Skins, the Cheyenne chief in whose band I was reared in my formative years. I says, “I hope this is not the last time we see each other.”

  “You are always welcome at my house,” Sitting Bull says. “You know where it is.” Then his dusky face, lined as it was to begin with, crinkles up like the terrain of the Badlands. It was the biggest smile I ever seen on him. “Maybe by the time you come to visit, you will have learned to speak good Lakota and not have to fill in with Shyela and the signs.”

  How do you like that? I actually begun to think I was perfectly fluent in Sioux, and though I was aware of occasionally using Cheyenne words, I didn’t even realize I was also resorting to sign language, the use of which I guess was instinctive when trying to speak in a tongue I wasn’t sure of, as in this case, or didn’t know at all, like in the old days when us Human Beings talked to strangers. But I was touched by him pointing this out, which with a white person or maybe even another Indian would of been impolite, but by doing so on saying goodbye here, he was demonstrating a close feeling for me.

  Me and Bill Cody had come with the group seeing Sitting Bull off on the train, and riding in a carriage back to the encampment, where all the animals was being readied for shipment to his ranch and the equipment crated for winter storage, Cody says, “I couldn’t keep the Chief against his will, but he’s been the main attraction this season and will be sorely missed. I can get all the Indians I want, but it’s Sitting Bull’s historical value that is hard to replace. He’s the only savage most people know by name. It’s that connection with Custer. What does it matter if the Bull didn’t kill him? People like to think he did, and that brought all of us a nice piece of change this year.”

  Warming up on the subject of Custer, he told me about how he once guided the General from Fort Ellsworth to Fort Larned in ’67. I had never mentioned my own association with Custer, either to Cody or, for that matter, Sitting Bull, but for another reason in each case. More than once I had heard the former’s scorn for the now sizable number of fakers claiming to be Last Stand survivors and wanting him to hire them for the Wild West. As for Sitting Bull, I couldn’t of explained to him how though intending to assassinate the General in revenge for the attack at the Washita which killed my Indian wife, I got close enough to knife him but never did.

  Buffalo Bill went on to tell me a lengthy but not uninteresting story for them days in which mounts was so important, how him and Custer had a friendly rivalry as to which was the better animal, his mouse-colored mule or the General’s horse, and of course the mule’s endurance in rough country had it all over a thoroughbred’s. Custer was supposedly so impressed by this that he wanted Cody to be his chief of scouts.

  “But as we know, that never happened,” said Buffalo Bill. “Else he might be alive today—though admittedly that was nine years before the Little Bighorn.”

  Now while Cody was talking in this wise, I got one of the best ideas I ever had, but before I could pursue it further we had reached the camp, pulling up in front of the headquarters tent, which was always distinguished by the mounted buffalo head hung over the entrance, and he says come and join him for a drink to mark the end of the season.

  So I goes in and there is his partner Nate Salsbury and Arizona John Burke, and Nate scowls when Bill asked me to pour for old times’ sake, on account of Salsbury thought my job was still private bartender. There ain’t much you can do
to change the impression others get of you without doing something big to distinguish yourself otherwise, and just interpreting for Sitting Bull had not been enough.

  But as it happened—and this ties in with that idea I suddenly got while listening to Cody talk about General Custer—what I had been cooking up for a while now was no less than a plan to put together a show of my own, and I had been saving most of my wages towards that end, rarely leaving our encampment to visit any of the other attractions in the cities where we played. Yessir, this dream had replaced the one of running a dance hall I had entertained throughout the time I was in Dodge and Tombstone. I had long since come to understand that going into business for yourself was the way to succeed in this country, and how all of them big fellows what run things like J. P. Morgan and the rest, or their Daddies, got started. Then if you made a lot of money it would make up for any lack of polish, for if you could offer a better class of woman a life in which she could buy anything she wanted to make her happy, she wouldn’t care if at the beginning you talked real ignorant, picked your teeth with a clasp knife, and so on, because she could teach you how to be a gentleman.

  So here’s the particular idea I got now: I would build this show of my own around a reenactment of the fight at the Little Bighorn, and the emphasis would be on the heroic courage of George A. Custer, a positive value rather than the negative fact that him and his men got whipped so bad. But don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t going to present anything that would downgrade the Indians. I have talked often enough about my regard for them, and it was my old childhood friend/foe Younger Bear what saved my hide that day at the Greasy Grass. But the truth remained that what whites would pay money to see was their own kind being massacred by savages, only in the end to have civilized principles come out on top. For the fact that it was the subject of a dramatic exhibition at all, performed in the major cities of the country, meant that though sustaining a momentary defeat, the right side soon won again as usual.