Return of Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  Annie didn’t have no better education than me, but to show you how sensible a person she was, she says now, “Well, maybe ‘tiger’ is what you call a leopard in French.”

  I run into Two Eagles on leaving the tent and asked him if he had seen the big chief of Senegal and party go past.

  “Yes,” says he, “and I liked his spotted robe very much. I wondered where a Black White Man killed such an animal.”

  Which is what Indians called colored folk at home, and they didn’t differentiate by name between types, so I tried to clear him up on the matter. “He’s completely black,” I says, “and comes from a place called Af-ri-ca.”

  “But he is here with the whites,” Two Eagles pointed out, getting that expression an Indian will show when he becomes stubborn.

  “He’s just visiting.”

  “He is not a captive?”

  I hadn’t wanted to get into this, for I didn’t know all that much about the subject. “He seems to come and go as he pleases.”

  “Why does he not stay home in his own country-of-the-spotted-animals?”

  “I don’t know,” I says. “But he’s probably come here to ask the French to do something for his country, which I believe is actually owned by them, so he doesn’t run anything, but they let him stay on as big chief.”

  “Then it seems to me he can be called a Black White Man,” Two Eagles said.

  I changed the subject to explain something I felt guilty about. “That hat you returned to me in New York? The reason I’m not wearing it is that I got drunk in Paris last night and lost it.” This was always a good excuse with anybody in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, beginning with its founder, except for Annie of course.

  “I thought maybe you gave it to some French woman,” Two Eagles said, with a trace of grin beneath his big hawk nose.

  “You’re too smart for me,” I told him. Fact is, by the time we left Paris, there was few of us who still had the American stuff we brung along on arrival, and some of the cowboys had to send back home for replacement boots, chaps, sombreros, and all, and Cody had to warn against losing guns, for bringing firearms into them foreign countries was under strict controls and the red tape involved in clearing the show’s arsenal on first arrival had been trouble enough.

  I should mention that the Lakota as usual when speaking of anybody not an Indian called him some version of wasichu, their word for “white man.” An Englishman was just plain wasichu; a black man was wasichu-sapa; a Frenchman, wasichu-ikceka. None of them was the normal folks they called themselves.

  18. Sitting Bull Again

  IN THE FALL OF ’89 we finally left Paris and went south in France, down to Marseilles where they drank a licorice-tasting concoction that turned milky when water was added and ruined some well-known people, well, that and the ailment which each European country tried to blame another for by calling it by the other’s name, like the “Neapolitan disease,” and so on, and their chief food down there, being on the seashore, was fish, especially a stew containing a mix of all kinds called billybase, which was a little too rich for my blood, but the Sioux, who never ate fish at home, could get sick just by smelling a bowlful. But not sick in reality, the kind you could die from: that happened however when we continued on down to Barcelona, in the land of Spain, where I found such Spanish as I had learned from the Mexicans was looked on as being fairly ignorant, for I couldn’t bring myself to lisp on certain words as they do in that city, but I never had much chance to do so anyway, for we run into an outbreak of both typhoid fever and the flu, against which the city was quarantined, so few people appeared at our performances, plus which a number of the company come down with serious ailments, including some of the Sioux, and the man who announced the acts, Frank Richmond, died. Annie nearly did too, and Frank Butler was hit hard.

  The only other thing of note was Arizona John Burke, always looking for a chance at publicity, took a bunch of our Indians to the local statue of Christopher Columbus and got them photographed there, sending the picture back to the U.S.A. with a comment to the effect that Columbus was four hundred years early as an advance agent for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Burke really done that. But I heard later on that someplace it was told that one of the Indians stared at the statue and said, “It was a damn bad day for us when he discovered America.” That never happened, and I was there. The Sioux at that time didn’t know anything about Columbus, aside from the fact they never seen him anywhere near Montana nor Dakota territories, and they thought of themselves as Lakota and not “Indians” and “America” so far as they was concerned was the part of the country where the white people, including the black white people, lived.

  The further difficulty in Spain was once we got quarantined, we couldn’t leave even though nobody was buying tickets, but finally we got out of there in January of the year and went on to the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, the latter being the birthplace of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the Indians did know his tomb was at Paris, for they seen it, and when I mentioned he was supposed to be short, they called him Little Big Man, I believe in all seriousness.

  Next came Naples, and a mountain named Vesuvius was nearby. The first day we was there, Red Shirt told me, “That is the mountain that Black Elk saw, the one that belches fire.”

  “I don’t see any right now.”

  “It’s the one,” he said with certainty, but I never understood how he could know that.

  Some days later we was took to visit the ruins of the city of Pompeii which was being dug out of the ground, having been buried by volcanic ash centuries before, so Red Shirt was sure right about that mountain.

  Now at Pompeii in its heyday there had been at least as many harlotries as in Dodge City centuries afterwards, but the difference was they had pictures painted on the walls of the Pompeii whorehouses illustrating the pleasures available. The Indians found these of interest, for they was learning some of this stuff for the first time, but a lot of cowboys, who wasn’t, was nevertheless shocked to see it depicted in public and thought worse of the Eye-ties for doing so and said we shouldn’t let many of them into the U.S.A. lest our morals go to hell and also them foreigners was so ignorant as to misspell Chris Columbus’s name as Cristoforo Colombo and claim he was one of them. I admit I myself didn’t know the truth of that at the time, for we had just come from Spain, where the Spanish claimed him, only called the man Cristobal Colon!

  Luckily the Butlers was going to visit Pompeii another day, so I was able to warn Frank to steer Annie clear of the filthy pictures.

  Cody had big plans for Rome, wanting to hold the performances of B.B.W.W. in the Colosseum where the gladiators fought and the Christians was fed to the lions, but found it was worse for many centuries of wear and had half fallen down. His idea of going to the Vatican with a troupe of Indians and having a private audience with Pope Leo worked out better.

  Now people meeting the Pope was supposed to be dressed formal, meaning swallowtail coats and high hats for the men, but as this was not practical for the Indians—though I can tell you they might of liked it—Arizona John Burke got special permission for the Sioux to wear their regular show outfits, but they went him one better. For the sake of the occasion Cody pretended to be Catholic, but Burke actually was one, and he had lectured at length to the Indians about who and what the Pope was and how to act when they met him: not to get excited and yell, etc. So what they did was break out their very best clothing and jewelry for the visit, a lot of which I never seen on them before, shirts of the finest deerskin and beadwork, the decorated bone chokers and breastplates, the most lavish of feather bonnets.

  Of course the old Pope could top anybody in the display department, what with his crown and the fanciest robes embroidered in gold and white and being carried into the Ducal Hall by some big gaudily uniformed fellows in a throne held at shoulder level on a tall man, with horn music and the singing of choirs, having been preceded by a slow parade of cardinals, bishops, and the like, all of them dressed to a fare-thee-well in
satins and silks—well, the Indians was more impressed than I had ever seen them be by any sight we had yet encountered in Europe, for a spectacle of this sort, with sound, color, and movement, meant more to them than any building or machine could ever do.

  In translating what Burke had told them about the Pope, I had gotten them to take it as solemn, though the exact concepts of white religion—which I can’t say I understood that well myself though having both a father and stepfather so to speak in the trade—wasn’t easy to explain in Lakota.

  It turned out that unbeknownst to me, some of them had been baptized by Catholic missionaries at the Pine Ridge reservation, and Burke hadn’t been altogether off when he called them Christians at the Eiffel Tower, but if so they was of their own sort, for getting back to the encampment after the Vatican visit they found that the only one of their troupe not to go to meet the Pope, Little Ring, who had not gotten up in time, had stayed in bed because he had died of what the Italian doctors said was a heart attack.

  Now these Sioux thereupon changed their hitherto mostly favorable opinion of the Pope, for if he was God’s spokesman, why hadn’t he spoke up and asked God not to kill Little Ring just when the rest of them was about to make their visit in their best clothes? The doctors determined the time of death as occurring during the night, so Arizona John couldn’t blame it on Little Ring having decided to stay in bed, thereby incurring the wrath of the Almighty—as I assure you Burke would of, had I not myself made this point.

  And having been disappointed by the Pope on that score, the Indians also was emboldened to criticize him further: though he was very rich and lived in the grandest house they had ever seen used as a personal dwelling place, he failed to offer them food at any time during their visit, which meant either he was too stingy to speak for God or that he was ignorant of how to treat his guests, in which case his connections with the Almighty must not be too close.

  But in interpreting I didn’t pass along all this negative commentary to Burke, who had been thrilled to meet the most important person in the world if you was a Catholic, for I didn’t see it would do either him or the Indians any good. The Pope had his own ways, and the Sioux had theirs, and to show you how wide they was apart, when instead of putting the question to Burke I took it upon myself to give an answer and said the Pope couldn’t feed nobody, but had to get fed himself, for he didn’t have no wife to do the cooking, they thought he should get married as soon as possible.

  Maybe it was this experience that turned the Sioux against Rome, but they didn’t care for the place, believing the people on the street laughed at them, which I didn’t know was true or not, for Italians seemed naturally a lively, noisy bunch and maybe they was just trying to be pleasant: I never spoke a word of that language.

  Also the Indians didn’t like to be asked to buy things all the time, and in Rome this happened everywhere you went, people sticking out hands they wanted filled, not shaken, so we wasn’t sorry to move on to the other towns in the country, most of them, after all these years, blending into one in my memory, for they was all filled with real old stone buildings, about half of which was churches, on real narrow stone-paved streets. The big exception was Venice, which had as many churches as anywhere else but the main roads was paved with water.

  No sooner did we get to that town than Burke in his eternal quest for publicity loaded too many Indians, Buffalo Bill, and me into a gondola, which had sunk to the gunwales before anybody paid attention to the fact except the front and back gondola drivers, screaming in Italian which nobody understood, not to mention that normal conversation in Italy was mostly yelling.

  The Sioux though in unfamiliar conditions saw what was happening but out of pride wouldn’t show their concern, but finally we unloaded a few passengers and floated out on the Grand Canal to have some photographs took, with that fancy building in the background that our cowboys, and me as well, called the Dogie’s Palace until straightened out.

  Later more pictures in front of St. Mark’s cathedral at the end of the big square in Venice full of pigeons where crowds of people come, I think to get away from the water for a change, for it’s at your doorstep everywhere else in town and sometimes, with a real high tide, so I heard, in your parlor as well, and a lot of us, red and white, begun to miss home and the eternal dust-dry wind of the Plains, after a whiff of canal air on days when it was real thick, most of them.

  Germany was the next country we went to, that spring of ’90, so still another language was spoke by the locals which none of us understood, and there was more old buildings to see, castles as well as villages full of what looked like big dollhouses, but I don’t think there was anybody in all the world so interested in anything pertaining to the American West as Germans, where a fellow name of Karl May, who had never set foot in the U.S.A., had already begun to write fictional stories about the frontier, which I heard later on wouldn’t of been recognizable to anybody who had experienced the real thing, but then the same could be said of most movies on the subject made in California and not Dutchland, which was the Germans’ name for their own country.

  Anyway, of all the places we had went to, Germany no matter the town give us the heartiest reception of all, for they tend to be real thorough about everything, good or bad, depending on when, and I heard in later years that man Hitler’s favorite writer was Karl May, and Adolf, like Winston Churchill before him, would likely have enjoyed the Wild West if he ever got the chance to see it as a lad.

  But by the time we reached Germany, being admired by white people of whichever country had lost its novelty for the Indians, and they had gotten tired of looking at the wonders of civilization that the whites had come up with before they went across the ocean to a land that didn’t have none of them and started from scratch, which didn’t make sense.

  “Why,” Two Tails asked me once, “do it all over again when all these things existed here?”

  I told him honestly, “I think that the ones who came over the ocean did not live in these big fancy lodges and have a lot of power, so they went to a new place where they would have a better chance to get these things than if they stayed here. America seemed an empty land to them, not being used by anybody but a few Indians who didn’t need all that space.”

  “I think,” says he, “that it might have been all right if there had not been so many whites. I was surprised when I first saw the big towns in America. Within the range of an arrow shot, there are more people in New York than there were Lakota and our friends at the Greasy Grass, the largest gathering of normal people ever. Within the range of a rifle shot, there are more New York wasichu than all Lakota, Shyela, and Arapaho in the world, and even including the Crow, Pawnee, and all our other enemies. But the towns on this side of the water look more crowded yet.”

  “A lot of them are full of poor people,” I said, “who don’t see much future here. So we can expect more to come to America in search of a better life.”

  He said he was real sorry to hear that. Like most people I’ve knowed regardless of color, he was not given to looking from any other point of view than his own. The Plains Indians thought the right way for people to live was in little bands which was freely associated with tribes that in themselves wasn’t too numerous, everybody wandering around more or less at will, looking for buffalo. This wasn’t how you could build a cathedral, or palace, or a factory or foundry, but of course you wouldn’t need any of those.

  Anyway, by now we had been on this tour for more than a year, and our Indians was not only homesick, but some was physically ailing as well, and in fact a few, like Little Ring, had died from smallpox, consumption, and the like, not bad treatment or starvation or anything Cody done or failed to do, but it was in Germany he learned he was being so blamed back home by certain Government officials, Congressmen, newspaper writers, and others of who I bet I could name one, and no doubt I would myself of been of that company had I been able to join up with Amanda. The accusations was wrongheaded with respect to B.B.W.W., but ours
was not the only show that included Indians. Doc Carver, Buffalo Bill’s old partner, had an outfit of his own that went as far as Moscow, in Russia, and there was Mexican Joe’s and others, and I don’t know about any of them, but I swear Indians could have no serious complaint against William F. Cody.

  Yet when he sent five ailing Sioux back to the U.S.A. from Germany that summer, his political enemies got one of them, White Horse, to tell the papers that Buffalo Bill didn’t feed them enough food and made them sick and when they was too weak to perform sent them back home as being useless. Now, I knowed White Horse, and I’m not calling him a liar, but none of this was true, so what I figured is somebody got him drunk and told him what to say or, more likely, what he said in Lakota was mistranslated by an immigration official named O’Beirne who claimed to be fluent in the language but I suspect was one of them whose interpretations of others invariably agree exactly with their own prejudices.

  We was in the city of Berlin, where if you dig into the ground you will find not earth but sand, which interested the Indians more than additional architecture, and by now they had also seen too many soldiers, anyway in Berlin the U.S. Consul General passed on to Cody a letter from the Indian Commissioner containing a list of the complaints against him for mistreating the red men in his employ.

  Buffalo Bill was real annoyed by these accusations, but the kind of fellow he was, he never wasted time on either being mad or getting even, but kept his eye on the possible practical effects. If the Commissioner decided he couldn’t have Indians any more in B.B.W.W., that would be the end of the whole shebang, for nobody anywhere in the world would pay just to see cowboys without Indians. If you think of it, anyone could learn to wear a wide-brimmed hat and spurs and ride a horse and rope cattle and shoot firearms though not maybe as good as Annie, but a headful of feathers and painting your face couldn’t change you into a real Indian: you had to be born one. And though white people had killed as many as they could and taken away their land, whites seemed universally fascinated with red people, not as performers—for such performing as was done with Cody, in the daily sham battle of the Little Bighorn, could of been managed by white actors in costumes—but as a matter of existence: this unusual folk, someplace between human and animal, they was what made the American West one of a kind.