Return of Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  It took a while to get everything prepared for this act, like having some artists paint a great big canvas backdrop representing the valley of the Little Bighorn, which probably looked believable if you hadn’t never seen the real one, and having cavalry uniforms made, and so on, and meanwhile we had to give the usual shows at the Staten Island site, where the attendance was so good, day and night (with gas, flares, and fires lighted for the latter), that Cody and Salsbury decided to stay in New York for the whole winter, moving the Wild West into Madison Square Garden as of that November, hiring a writer name of Mackaye to design a program that was more like a theatrical presentation than the previous series of exhibitions of riding and shooting.

  The result was billed as “The Drama of Civilization,” consisting of five separate parts, beginning with “The Primeval Forest,” showing Indians and wild animals rented from a circus (some, like the African lion instead of a cougar, not authentic), and going through “The Prairie,” with a buffalo hunt, a fire on the plains, and a stampede; the “Attack on the Settler’s Cabin,” the old standby from the very first show of B.B.W.W.; the “Mining Camp,” supposed to be Deadwood, destroyed at the end by a cyclone so forceful it sometimes knocked over the stagecoach in reality, being made by enormous fans driven by steam power. The final act was Custer’s Last Stand.

  Between each of the above came an interval of the riding, roping, Indian dances, and marksmanship exhibitions from the show as done in the outdoor arenas. Cody, Johnny Baker, and Lillian Smith all did their specialties, but Annie Oakley’s nose was still out of joint on account of the California Girl, so not only did she exceed herself with all manner of firearms, pistols, shotguns, and a variety of rifles—the people what ran the Garden had the roof raised twenty-five feet for the sake of the shooting acts—but she added tricks done on horseback, untying a bandanna from around her mount’s ankle while hanging from a sidesaddle, picking one of her hats off the ground, and so on, while maintaining her personal modesty with costumes that despite this vigorous activity never revealed more of her leggings than when standing still.

  We performed the Last Stand as long prepared for, and of course it was quite a spectacle with the Indians milling around the hillock where Buck Taylor in his fringed jacket stood heroically, firing his pistol, and around him the cluster of blue-jacketed soldiers, including me as an unidentified sergeant, but of course it never looked much like the actual event or any other fight I ever saw between the cavalry and the Indians, for in real battles awful sights and sounds are interspersed with long stretches like time stopped and nothing is happening, and then you are looking at the fellow next to you, and a bullet hits him in the head and his brains splash all over you.

  What I’m saying is not critical of the Wild West version, for in an association of several years now I had become a professional, and this was show business, with no blood spilled and the dying usually represented by the victim clapping a hand to his chest, so the audience could tell where he was supposed to be shot. The firing of blanks was a lot louder within walls and a roof than outdoors, and would of deafened me had Cody, a veteran of the stage, not warned us to stuff our ears with cotton. And of course it was him who come up with that finale which never happened but didn’t actually change the historical truth of Custer’s death while adding the positive character that Bill Cody always was at pains to represent.

  After Buck Taylor clasped the bosom of his jacket and flopped down in fake death, the rest of us having previously gone under (myself taking care to lay out of his range, so as not to have his big carcass falling on me), and the Indians stopped yelling and shooting, in rode Buffalo Bill in a fancy buckskin suit and big white sombrero, leading a bunch of cowboys who scattered the redskins and joined Bill in a sad salute to the fallen while a lighted legend appeared on the canvas backdrop: TOO LATE.

  Now if you recall, my own idea concerning the re-creating of the Last Stand had been to use it to get a personal connection with Mrs. Libbie Custer, so I was real excited when I heard she had accepted an invitation to attend opening night, but I had so many chores to do back of the scene during the early part of the show that I couldn’t get out and see where she was sitting, which Annie told me on coming off her own performance was a box-seat section for guests of honor all festooned with bunting. And during the act itself, I couldn’t look around the audience while shooting blanks at the Indians with my Springfield carbine, and soon there was too much smoke to see through anyway.

  Right after the show was as busy for me as just before, for we didn’t have as large a company as when outdoors and at moments of commotion everybody not one of the stars had to pitch in, getting the horses into their stalls, putting away equipment, moving scenery into position for next day’s performance, so by the time this was done all the audience had long gone, Mrs. Libbie C. with them.

  I found Bill Cody in the office him and Salsbury had back of the arena, and I says, “I wonder how it went over with Mrs. Custer.”

  “Take a pew, Jack,” Buffalo Bill says, “and help yourself from the bottle yonder.” Over to the side, Nate Salsbury and several male assistants was counting stacks of bills on a table. They was all wearing pistols, and standing to the side was a big officer of the New York police, with tall blue helmet and a handlebar mustache. I couldn’t see no armament on him but a billy club. “And while you’re there, pour one for Sergeant O’Leary.”

  “Now, Colonel,” said the policeman with a big wink, “you wouldn’t want me to defy regulations.” But he throwed down the drink I handed him so quick his mustache stayed dry.

  “As to the lovely and gracious widow lady,” Cody said, “she congratulated us on our exhibition.”

  “You saw her?”

  “She left the premises not three minutes ago, Jack, with her little all-female entourage. The saintly woman remains devoted to her departed husband, ten years gone. Would that she be a model to all American wives.” No doubt he was thinking of his troublesome Lulu, but at the time all that mattered to me was I had missed the only person in the world I wanted to meet.

  Right at this moment I was so disappointed I didn’t care what she thought of the show, but I asked him anyway.

  “How could she but admire it?” Cody says, “when its sole purpose was to spare no expense to deepen the luster of her glorious husband’s reputation as a soldier and a man.” He swished the whiskey around the glass, then swooshed it down his hatch. “I told her, ‘Your presence on this occasion will attract the attention of all the good women of America, who will share your pride and my triumph.’”

  “That’s nice,” I said.

  “Let me tell you,” says he, “how she responded. ‘My dear Colonel,’ she said, ‘your exhibition is the most realistic and faithful representation of a western life that has ceased to be with the advance of civilization.’”

  “Is she still real pretty?”

  Cody piously lowered his eyelids, then raised them. “The lady is an angel,” says he, with a hint of reproach in his voice, like the question was coarse. He was always holier-than-thou when talking about the ladies, and I ain’t going to comment on that, except to note that it might of give Lulu a nasty laugh.

  As if it wasn’t enough to hear how close I missed meeting Libbie Custer with Buffalo Bill, when I dropped in on Annie Oakley, she tells me Mrs. C. had come backstage to personally congratulate her on her shooting and trick riding.

  “Where were you. Jack?” asked Frank. “We said afterward, ‘Too bad Jack didn’t come round.’”

  “I was working,” I says with some bitterness. “I ain’t a featured performer, you know.”

  I regretted that as soon as it was uttered, but to show you the kind of person Annie was, she says sweetly, “He’s teasing you, Jack. Mrs. Custer invited Frank and me to tea on Sunday.”

  “But I’ve got an appointment with one of Annie’s commercial sponsors that afternoon,” says Frank. “I want you to escort Annie.”

  I tell you, they didn’t come nicer
than the Butlers. What I suspected from the first was that Frank never had no other business and that he just did it as an act of friendship, knowing of my interest in the lady. But here’s the way men can sometimes be even when doing a favor: when later on I told him of my suspicion, he says, “You were doin’ me the favor, Jack. My idea of a good time isn’t lifting a teacup with my wife and some widow.”

  I worried the next few days I’d break a leg in some strenuous part of the show, like when the Deadwood stage ran into the cyclone, or I’d fail to get out of Buck Taylor’s way when he bit the dust as Custer, but I survived to dress in my best suit of clothes and a clean shirt with a new collar bought for the occasion and so tight at first I thought any tea I swallowed wouldn’t get past my adam’s apple, and me and Annie went over to East 18th Street, where Mrs. C. had her flat, Annie for once not in her shooting outfit but looking like a grand lady in a silk dress and a coat trimmed with fur and a great big hat like was the height of fashion.

  Well sir, there she was, opening her door herself, Elizabeth Bacon Custer, who I had last seen when she was the lovely young wife of the still living General though his days was already dwindling fast by then, the sweetheart he wrote to most every day when separated from her, on account of whom he had once got court-martialed for joining her without permission in the middle of an Indian war.

  He was ten years dead by now, and she had endured a decade of grief, but to my eyes was still beautiful as a forty-four-year-old woman, which was middle-aged for that time, and real old to the likes of Lillian Smith. Her eyes was still of that luminous gray, her hair yet of a rich and lustrous brown, that soft round face still with the blush of rose in the cheeks. She was wearing black, as I heard she done all the time ever since Custer died, but her present dress looked fashionable in its cut. She was of about my own height.

  I didn’t have no interest in any other human, including even Annie, when in the presence of Libbie Custer, who apart from her beauty and grace I was connected to in the most special way there was, next to having saved her own life: I had been with the closest person to her in all the world when he was rubbed out.

  There was pictures of her husband all over the sitting room, atop every table and along the mantelpiece, as well as a marble bust, showing him in one or another of his many versions of uniform, almost always wearing stars, more often the two of the major general than the one for the brigadier, the brevet ranks he had gained in the Civil War and for which he had been called the Boy General, being in his twenties, whereas during the last decade of his career, the one he is best remembered for on account of how it ended, he had been but a lieutenant colonel in the Regular Army, though nobody ever addressed him that way. Officers was generally addressed by the highest rank they ever reached, as a matter of military courtesy, so you can’t blame Custer in that regard.

  I was, and am, trying to be fair to the man, who I think I made it clear earlier on, had always rubbed me the wrong way from the first I seen him, though I was already prejudiced by reason of his attack on Black Kettle’s camp at the Washita, where my Cheyenne family was killed. I didn’t like him no better after I seen him die—that, which will happen to us all, being no distinction in itself—but I thought he done it real well. He had lost the fight, his men, his lovely wife, his future, his military reputation, more than enough to ruin a man’s sense of himself, but Custer never wavered in his absolute belief that he always done the right thing. If reality said otherwise, it didn’t speak to him. I think I would of been fascinated by his case even without a personal connection, for I was exactly the opposite type, as maybe you have discovered, hearing about this life of mine. There has been little of my own motives I was ever sure of, and still less of my deeds. Looking from one angle, my existence has consisted of a series of regrets. I doubt if Custer ever had a single one. I think if God said to him in the Afterworld, “George, I’m going to give you a test. I’m going to turn back the clock to your arrival at the Little Bighorn, and you can do it all over again in the light of what you know now. Would you do anything different?” And Custer would say, “No, sir, nothing whatever.”

  It ain’t that he wouldn’t, but rather that he couldn’t: that’s always the thing to keep in mind about him.

  Here I am, meeting Mrs. Libbie after all them years and instead of talking about her I am going on about her husband ten years dead and gone. Well, so it happened on the occasion of which I speak, led by her. She started off by saying how much the General would of admired Annie’s prowess with firearms, and how he would share her own approval of the care Buffalo Bill had taken in reproducing the battle so accurately, though she admitted she turned her eyes away for the last moments.

  When Annie complimented her about the book she had recently wrote, Mrs. Custer continued on the same subject, for the book was all about the General, and she said she wanted that, and the other writing she was doing now for the papers, to bring in enough income so she could apply most of her efforts into getting rid of the “monstrous” statue of her husband which had been erected at West Point.

  When Annie asked her how she liked New York, where she had now lived for some years, Libbie said how kind the people had been to her, but her only truly happy memories was those from when she and the General visited the city, with its fine restaurants and shops and the theater that he so loved.

  “Mr. Lawrence Barrett,” said she, “was his closest friend, and his picture hung in Armstrong’s study in our residence at Fort Lincoln.”

  Barrett was a famous actor of that day. There was some who said Custer picked up certain dramatic flourishes from him, but I assure you if there was any tutelage it went the other way. Nobody had to teach the flair to George Armstrong Custer, though none of the pictures here on display did him justice in that respect, as in fact most photographs did not, which was real peculiar and not true, for example, of them of Bill Cody, who was always as handsome in pictures as in life, which I found was generally true of people experienced in performing: I reckon they knowed how to hold their face so it would catch the light.

  Now, Lawrence Barrett could probably of taught that to his friend, for the camera of that time didn’t do no favors for Custer. His color looks sallow and hair seems drab if not dirty and his mustache in need of a trim. His everyday uniforms look dingy, whereas the fancy attire he had specially designed for himself, with stars and brass buttons all over it, appears foolish. But I guess if you never seen the General on one of the spirited horses he rode, you can never get a sense of the figure he cut, the mount prancing and snorting, Custer giving the impression that he was restraining the animal only by the force of his will, showing what looked like an easy left hand on the reins while his right went to doff his hat and sweep it through the air. Too bad he died before Mr. Tom Edison perfected the cinematograph. (Edison by the way come to see the Wild West on Staten Island, and he too congratulated Buffalo Bill on it.)

  Now Annie had introduced me, the way Cody always did when I was meeting someone for the first time, as Captain Jack Crabb. I had gotten so used to the title that I never thought about it, but all of a sudden now I had to do so, and it was an awkward moment.

  Having talked incessantly about her husband for the first half hour or so, Libbie Custer suddenly looks directly at me for the first time and says, “Please forgive me, Captain. As the wife of a cavalryman, I am remiss in not asking which was your regiment? I am only certain that it was not the Seventh of my day, for I knew each of Armstrong’s officers as if he were a member of my family, for in fact he was.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” says I. “The title’s honorary, so to speak.” Now no man likes to lessen his credit with the ladies, who quite rightly admired our gallant military men, so I hastens to add, “But I was with the Army in other capacities....” And here I hesitated, for throughout the ten years that I had to prepare for meeting Mrs. Custer, I had still never decided just what I was going to tell her about her husband’s final moments. How much of what I could say would only cause pa
in?

  For that matter, I had still to bring myself to a conclusion about the man. If I got to thinking about what I admired in him, I quickly reminded myself of the good reasons to think him basically an enemy. On the other hand, whenever I got to hating his guts as the bastard who, while the regimental band blared “Garryowen,” rode down on that peaceful Cheyenne village on the Washita one winter morning, I remembered him all by himself, the way every person dies, on that hill above the Little Bighorn. At least he always knowed what he was, like his Indian adversaries, unlike me.

  However, I never needed to worry when it come to Mrs. Custer, who after that briefest of acknowledgments of my presence went right back to her singleminded concern, as I expect she would of done even if I had a distinguished military career to brag about. Fact is, if she thought about it at all, she would probably have preferred me never to of heard a shot fired in anger, so the General could monopolize all the valor in the world.

  Well, now you are thinking that meeting the lady at long last, I had all my illusions shattered, that she turned out to be the perfect fanatical widow for the most self-centered man of his time. But in fact I wasn’t disillusioned at all and if anything the crush I had always had on her in my imagination was now as strong in reality though of a different nature. I begun to think that there must of been a side to Custer I never knew about, if a lady like Libbie could be so stuck on him.

  Annie of course, being a woman and a happily married one herself, was interested in that subject without having my own personal connection to the General, who she knowed about only as the martyr portrayed in the press and also in the description Sitting Bull once give her of Custer, I guess thinking it would please her, for as I said before, the Bull wasn’t nowhere near the General at the Greasy Grass: “standing like a sheaf of corn with all the ears fallen around him.”