Return of Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  If I say this event was made for show business, I’m talking about a different matter than the actual killing of a lot of young men who had that morning of June 25th, 1876, got up, their lives in front of them, and by the middle of the day was corpses, naked and cut so bad nobody’s Ma would of known him.

  Anyway, at this moment I was feeling real good, having them drinks with Buffalo Bill, who I now started to think of as a competitor. True, it was him who give me my start in show business, and like they say I would always be grateful, but a fellow with the real goods had to strike out for himself sooner or later, the way Cody separated from Doc Carver, who had continued with a show of his own. It was also true that no love was lost between Doc and Bill, who had went to court against each other only recently. I didn’t like to think the same might happen in my case, but I had to face the possibility. Successful folks have to put up with a lot of envy from them they surpass.

  Well sir, the way I was getting grander and grander in my daydreams seems pretty pathetic at this late date, but there wasn’t much wrong with that idea of mine—except that the preeminent showman of his time had already had it.

  Cody hoists his glass and he says, “Gentlemen, I have arrived at the perfect solution to our problem.”

  Nate Salsbury, who the drinking hadn’t mellowed on account of he wasn’t doing any, asks sourly, “What problem?”

  “Why,” says Buffalo Bill, “the absence of Sitting Bull next season.”

  “A stellar attraction,” says Arizona John, who was throwing down a deal of drink himself, “winning favor all over this blessed land of ours, ‘Foe in ’76, Friend in ’85.’” He was quoting the slogan he had used to publicize Sitting Bull’s appearance with the Wild West.

  “It came to me while talking with Captain Jack just now,” Colonel Cody goes on. “George Armstrong Custer, you will agree, is a name that rings a bell.”

  “A hallowed name,” says Major Burke. “That of a true martyr of the modern age.”

  Salsbury, the only one present without a phony military rank, did not experience a rise in mood. “Just tell me what it’s going to cost,” he says, sourer than ever.

  “Nothing,” said Cody. “We’ll have all the Indians needed, and the cowboys to play the Seventh Cavalry.”

  My heart falling, I says, “You’re gonna depict Custer’s Last Stand, ain’t you?”

  “I only wish I had thought of it while Sitting Bull was with us,” says Buffalo Bill. “What a scene that might have provided! The old fellow leading the attack on the soldiers!”

  “In all his feathered finery,” Burke chimed in, “brandishing a fearsome tomahawk against the golden-haired General and his flashing saber: truly a battle of the Titans.”

  “At first I assumed I would myself play Custer, for the true-life physical resemblance was remarkable. But the young people would not want to see Buffalo Bill the loser in a fight with Indians. Someone else must portray the General, heroically of course. Buck Taylor is the perfect choice.”

  This was another example of Cody’s genius as a showman. Disappointed as I was, I had to shake my head in admiring wonderment. Buck Taylor was indeed perfect, being six foot five in height and plenty visible to an audience at the distance at which they sat in the grandstand. He was already with the show, where he specialized in the roundup features—later to be called by a name not yet used, namely, rodeo—bronco busting, roping, steer-throwing, and all, and Burke billed him as “King of the Cowboys,” who though “amiable as a child, has the titanic strength singlehandedly to hurl a steer to the ground by the horns or tail.” Notice how “cowboy” here had lost both its Dodge City sense of a fellow who drove cattle up from Texas and then spent his wages on whiskey and harlots and the Tombstone meaning of outlaw or rustler, and was on its way to becoming what every young American lad wanted to be prior to the age of getting interested in the opposite sex: more than anybody else, Bill Cody was responsible for that.

  I tried to salvage something for myself. “That’s a real good idea,” I told him, “but don’t you think somebody ought to go to New York City and ask Mrs. Custer about it, and get her approval? I hear she’s real sensitive on the General’s behalf.” I ought to mention that the Wild West had visited New York a couple of times, but I myself had never yet set foot outside the show grounds. I could of tried to look up Libbie Custer on those occasions, but I didn’t. I was too timid, for I didn’t have no excuse that sounded believable when I tested it on myself. Now I might have one.

  As to why I never set foot in the place irrespective of Mrs. Custer, I’ll admit this: I was still bluffed by a town of that size, coming from where I did. I had always thought of myself as smart when it come to the frontier, but considered myself no match for a city slicker when in a big town, especially one so full of foreigners including drunken Irish, though I wouldn’t of wanted to say that to Frank Butler.

  Speaking of who, him and Annie arrived at that moment, and Bill tells them about his plans for the big finale at next year’s performances, and then he says, “Captain Jack here has asked me about getting Mrs. Custer’s blessing. Well, my old friend Jack, let me assure you that having sent the gracious lady a written assurance that our exhibition will spare no expense to do credit to her gallant husband and deepen the luster of his glorious reputation as an American soldier and a man, I received her wholehearted sanction.”

  “So you don’t need to send no one to see her, I guess.”

  Annie in her female way caught the dejection in my voice and, smiling prettily, asks me, “Why, Jack, are you sweet on the lady?”

  And Frank says, “Sure, she’s a comely one.” Annie wasn’t ever jealous of him praising other women, stuck on her as he was.

  “Why,” said Cody, “we all of us are devoted to this noble widow, Missie, and I’m sure I speak for you as well.” He offered Annie a glass of lemonade, but she refused it, I think because she had heard about Salsbury calling her too stingy to buy her own.

  “Colonel,” she said, “there’s nothing I would like more than to meet that great lady.”

  “That you will most assuredly do, Missie,” says Buffalo Bill. “She has accepted my invitation to attend our opening performance.”

  So I’d finally get a chance at least to look at the lady on whom I’d had a crush for all of them years, much longer than the one I had on Annie, which was soon, by the fact of Frank Butler, converted to brotherly affection. But I had to be realistic and remember that it had been ten years since the only time I laid eyes on her, when she tried to board the Far West and ride up the Yellowstone to join her husband just before the Little Bighorn battle, having suffered a dream which foresaw his death, a decade of mourning: she might not still be as she was then, the loveliest woman I had ever seen. You will notice what I was doing here: protecting myself from another disappointment.

  Well, that was the end of the season of ’85, and Annie and Frank headed for Ohio, where her kinfolk lived. Cody returned to his ranch at North Platte, and having noplace other to call home and being welcome there, with anyone else who would drink with Buffalo Bill and listen to his stories, me and Pard went along.

  14. Widow Woman

  NOW I AIN’T MENTIONED Pard for a while, but he was still with me and not getting any younger. Fact is, he had turned downright old, as it took me a while to realize, for seeing him all the time, mostly nowadays sleeping in my tent except when I brought in the grub or when he relieved himself, on which trips I went along so he wouldn’t do it noplace in the encampment where it would make someone mad. Being with him so much I was slow to notice the gray when it first started on his muzzle, and if he didn’t respond as quick as once to what I said, I thought he just wasn’t interested in what I was saying or had got miffed because he could smell Annie’s dog George on me after I would come back from visiting with the Butlers, not realizing he was getting deaf.

  George by the way had died while the Wild West was in Toledo in Annie’s native state of Ohio, and her and Frank give h
im a big funeral at the private property of a fan, burying him wrapped in the satin and velvet banner hung at the show while he was performing, with his name embroidered on it in gold, and the whole troupe come from B.B.W.W., including the Indians, some of whose women made wreaths and chanted their death songs, which you got to admit was more than a slight gesture on the part of people who might of ate him had they been back home.

  Back on the ranch, it seemed Cody was so on the outs with his wife that he let her stay alone in the Welcome Wigwam, which meant the people he took home with him from the show had to jam into a smaller house on the property, which didn’t rightly affect me and Pard, for we always bunked in a harness room of one of the barns. Bill was trying without success to get divorced from Mrs. Lulu, who hated everything he did including most of all the Wild West and had gotten him to put all his money and property in her name and didn’t want to share it with him. Also she was real jealous of some of the female performers that had appeared with him in his stage plays and now, in addition to Annie, in the Wild West.

  I might just say here that Buffalo Bill tried throughout the rest of his life to divorce Lulu and never did succeed. It wasn’t easy to do in them days, not to mention that despite their eternal quarreling him and his lady had a deep attachment to each other though not hitting it off in the fashion of Frank and Annie Butler.

  I thought Pard might perk up some when he got back to open country as opposed to the back lot of the show when camped in some eastern town or traveling in the baggage car every couple of days, but in fact as the weeks went by in Nebraska he seemed to get wearier, spending more and more time wrapped up in an old horse blanket and having to be nudged awake when the time came I thought he should visit the outdoors, like before I blew the lamp out at night, so he wouldn’t be woke by the need to make water and blunder around in the dark, maybe getting kicked by a horse, for even his daylight vision wasn’t what it once had been, nor his balance.

  Pard was at the end of his life, but I wouldn’t admit that to myself until it got to the point where he lost most of his interest in eating, for food is a dog’s religion, of which you might say Pard was a priest or maybe even the pope: there had been a time when I had to sleep on my leather articles, including boots and belt, lest he chew and swallow such in the middle of the night. I would catch him eyeing many an animal big as a burro, considering whether he might be able to bring him down and have enough meat for the next week—make that two days, for though the size of the coyotes from which I always figured he come in part, he had a bear’s capacity for grub, one emerging from hibernation.

  Well, not wanting to turn this story of mine into a tearjerker, when so many of the people I was close to had died, most at real early ages, I won’t dwell on the death of a dog who nobody had knowed well but me, for I don’t count my brother Bill or whoever Pard come from before that, an Indian camp likely. He hadn’t lived a bad life, for what dogs require is food and company, and I provided both, with him returning the favor when he could. It was ten years since him and me joined up together, plus he wasn’t a pup when we met, so he had put in what was a lengthy lifetime for a four-footed creature of his day, and if you count it according to the difference between dog and man of seven years to one, Pard had lived twice as long as most of the people I ever knowed, Sitting Bull, not far beyond fifty, being ancient.

  So one winter morning Pard did not wake up, staying under his blanket even after I had gotten the little iron stove so hot nobody but a dog could of come near it, as he would have if he could, drying his nose till it was like sandpaper, and if you touched it at such a point you would think him sick, but that was when he had been well. I knowed only death could keep him away from a source of heat in the icy season, but I pretended otherwise, patting the blanket and kidding him as a slowpoke who wouldn’t get to breakfast before it was all gone into the bellies of others, but all I felt was a stone replica of a dog, hard and cold like it had been outside all night in the snow, but when I wound the blanket tighter and picked him up, he wasn’t as heavy as I expected though having turned to rock, or even as he had been when alive, especially in recent years when he got less exercise but ate more. His spirit had obviously been real hefty.

  I had quite a job with pick and shovel to penetrate the soil, having first to clear away a three-foot drift of snow and keep it off. The usual wind that blows across the plains, having no natural hindrances, was persistent as ever, but the work went quicker when I got below the frostline, and I kept going to some depth, for I didn’t want no animal to dig Pard up and chaw on him.

  When the hole was deep enough I let him down by the lariat lashed around the bundle at nose and tail, and I says goodbye to my old comrade in English, Cheyenne, and Lakota, and begged his pardon if he had come from another tribe instead and might of been insulted by the language of his enemies. The important matter was nothing concerned with his death but rather how him and me took care of one another over all them years of life, which death had ended but could not otherwise affect now it become memory. You can think less of me, if you want, for being so close to a dog, but that will matter to me about as much as it would of to Pard.

  But I’ll be the first to admit my life was wanting for human companionship, especially of the respectable female sort, and while I was sure looking forward to meeting Mrs. Custer when we reached New York City during the next season, I knowed it would be more practical for me to get a girlfriend who wasn’t confined totally to my imagination, and I thought maybe the latest young woman to join the Wild West might be a candidate, for though being a bit on the plump side she was comely, with a head of dark curls and neat little features, and she had a saucy way when talking to you I found quite taking, until I become aware that every other man had that same effect on her. Her name was Lillian Smith, and she was a sharpshooter, real good at that art, rivaling Annie Oakley, but what I didn’t care for was her boast that with her arrival Annie was done for.

  Of course Annie couldn’t understand why Colonel Cody had hired the “California Girl,” as Arizona John Burke billed her, for in addition to herself there was young Johnny Baker, who Annie had trained to shoot and was real good at it while having the sense not to compete with his teacher; but master showman that he was, Cody knowed not only that you couldn’t have too many sharpshooting young ladies for the public, but the natural competition between them would keep each with a keener edge that she was likely to maintain on her own, for even such a levelheaded person as Annie was not above envy, her being all of twenty-six by this time, whereas Lillian was—well, let me first tell you an ironic particular. If you remember, when I first laid eyes on Annie Oakley only the year before, I took her for a schoolgirl. In the case of Lillian Smith, I figured she was about Annie’s age. Fact is, Lillian was fifteen at the time. I reckon it was that “ample” figure of hers that misled me: the term was Annie’s, who seldom spoke of Lillian without using it.

  In truth Annie never had a good word for her professional rival, suspecting her of loose morals just because Lillian wasn’t as prudish as her, and when I says after all the girl wasn’t married, that observation put Annie on the outs with me for a while, and I tell you as happened so often with women it was me who lost on that deal, for I had too much competition from the cowboys to get far with Lillian (who within a year married one of them named Jim Kidd) and anyway she was a bit young for me though I never looked my age. Annie was cool to me for a time even after the thing with Lillian was over.

  Now we spent the entire summer of ’86 in one place, Staten Island, at a resort called Erastina, to which regular ferries come across the bay from the city, passing the newly erected Statue of Liberty. The opening had been preceded by a big parade through Manhattan, with all the Indians, the Deadwood stagecoach, the cowboys on prancing broncos, wagons full of buffalo, and so on, the star markswoman on her horse, wearing a fancy outfit of her own design and needlework, labeled OAKLEY on both sides, prominent enough so it could be read by the crowd as she went by. I do
ubt she would of gone to this trouble had Lillian Smith not been elsewhere in the parade, for when we was back in camp Frank had to bring the doctor, who found Annie had so bad an ear infection that blood poisoning had set in and she went to the hospital for a few days, rushing back while she was still weak so the public wouldn’t have time to replace her in their hearts.

  They never did, not taking that much to Lillian, who didn’t have Annie’s style and charm, nor figure, and while Johnny Baker was a first-rate shot and Bill Cody himself regularly performed, always from horseback, there was something special about a pretty girl with a gun. Men thought it was sexy, and I guess women wanted to be like her.

  Now that Sitting Bull wasn’t there nor my Cheyenne bunch, I didn’t have no particular job, so I made myself useful, throwing up glass balls and clay pigeons for Lillian Smith, Johnny Baker, and Buffalo Bill to break, and giving Frank a hand with Annie’s act. I also done some translating with the current troupe of Sioux, headed by an Ogallala name of American Horse. And if they needed an extra actor for the Deadwood stage during the attack by Indians, I might fill in, riding shotgun. Cody usually stuffed the interior of the coach with celebrities, politicians, or visiting foreign dignitaries, who got a kick out of being shot at with blanks and being in mock danger of being scalped.

  But when the re-creation of Custer’s Last Stand was being readied, I really had to be included. I still never managed to tell Cody of my personal connection with the real thing, how I was certainly the only genuine white survivor in the world. As for the Sioux now with the show, it was hard to tell if any had participated in that fight, for the white feeling against them that had killed Custer was still strong, so any which had took part might be leery of admitting as much. On the other hand, there was also plenty of whites, especially in the eastern cities, generally people who though having a horror of violence, admired Indians for being ruthless killers and would reward any as such, buying photos and souvenirs, like with Sitting Bull, so undoubtedly there was Indians ready to confess more than they had ever done. The event was ten years earlier by now: the young men had only been kids then, if they was anywhere near the Greasy Grass that day in June.