Return of Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  “So he don’t want Cody to arrest Sitting Bull, but he’s going to send the Indian police to do it?”

  Gruber winked a now reddening eye, and he says, “I’ll say this for McLaughlin: he knows how to deal with Indins. He’s married to a squaw! If you ask me, that’s a mighty high price to pay, though.” He squints and says, “You going to need the rest of this?” Meaning the bottle. “You got a whole wagonful.”

  “Consider it yours,” says I, and leaves him there.

  Then I went around the fort until I found an Indian who was wearing a blue tunic with a yellow scarf that turned out to be the police uniform and not clothes pulled off a dead trooper at the Greasy Grass, which I had wondered about before noticing the badge pinned on him.

  Now you put a Sioux of that day into such an outfit, you had a person who was uncertain of himself when talking to a white man, even in his own language. He never wanted to be an arse-kisser of the people who if they hadn’t been there he wouldn’t of needed to become a cop over his own kind, so he didn’t really like or trust the whites he worked for, but on the other hand Indians was as human as anybody else, which meant they did not find it without pleasure to lord it over their fellowman, which in their case could happen only if he was red.

  Believe me, I appreciated his position, being so often myself between two standards of judgment, so I spoke in a flattering way about his uniform, which included a black hat with the smooth-dome crown Indians always favored without a crease, worn on a head with as short a haircut as our boys at the Major’s school was obliged to have. This was a remarkable style for an adult, Indians putting the high store on their hair as they did. Just think, these fellows was of a people who used to take the scalps of their dead enemies: now they was trimming their own in the service of the same folks.

  “My wife,” said High Dog, for that was his name, “wanted to make this coat prettier with some beads and trimming, but that is not permitted. She can’t understand why we are supposed to all look alike. Women find it hard to think in the new way.”

  “I see you are still wearing moccasins.”

  “That is permitted,” High Dog said in his stilted fashion. “It is too uncomfortable to wear boots. The hat and coat and especially the pants were hard to get used to, and I take them off as soon as I get off duty and go home, but how white men can wear boots I have never been able to understand. You can’t feel the ground through them, you walk on boards. Yet Bull Head is able to do so. I think that’s why they made him lieutenant.”

  “I’m sure that’s why,” says I, and changed the subject. “What I wanted to speak to you about is Sitting Bull. Long Hair Cody and I are friends of his, since a few summers ago when he was with Cody’s show. We have heard he is in some trouble now, and want to help him if we can.”

  A change come over High Dog’s dusky countenance. Where he had been slightly sanctimonious, talking to a white man who presumably approved of him being a policeman, he was now guarded. I sensed he believed me a spy of the ruling power, but I didn’t know how else to approach him given the shortness of time available. If I had had a week, I would of tried to slowly gain his confidence, and smoked and ate some meals with him, but if I knowed Cody I had only until the next morning, after he had drunk all them officers under the table.

  “Sitting Bull,” High Dog said, “lives on the Grand River with his wives and children and horses.”

  “So I have heard.” I waited awhile for him to go on, but he never. “What I wonder,” says I, “is what he thinks of this Ghost Dance that seems to interest a lot of tribes and not only the Lakota.”

  “I have heard of that,” High Dog informed me. “But I don’t know enough about the subject to say anything worthwhile, and my father told me when I was a child not to open my mouth unless I had something of value to talk about.”

  So though I had succeeded in getting information out of Corporal Gruber, I failed to get any out of High Dog. From the Sioux with B.B.W.W. I already knowed that Indian politics had gotten complicated due to white policies. A law called the Dawes Act, a couple years back, had offered a hundred sixty acres of land to every Indian who wanted it, and after them parcels had been distributed, all of the rest of that big hunk of land embracing what today would be most of eastern South Dakota, originally belonging to the Sioux by treaty, was to be made available to white ranchers and farmers at a dollar and a quarter an acre. Most of the chiefs at first opposed this offer, which to go into effect had to be accepted by three-quarters of all the adult males in the Sioux nation, but somehow in the end the Government claimed they had collected sufficient signatures (though how that could be told from what must of been a collections of X’s was uncertain at least to me) including those of some of the very chiefs who had originally been against it, but one of them was not Sitting Bull. He was too smart to fall for a deal like that, and too stubborn to pretend to do so. He had compromised all he was ever going to do by becoming a farmer, because there wasn’t an alternative left, but he wouldn’t ever give whites the okay they wanted to destroy the way of life into which he had been born.

  And now this Ghost Dance movement come along, it seemed likely he would support it if only out of cussedness, so the authorities decided to arrest him before he could do any harm.

  To my knowledge, the last time a prominent Lakota leader had been taken into custody, he had got stabbed to death in a scuffle that nobody could ever rightly explain. I refer to Crazy Horse. If that fact immediately occurred to me, it would certainly be remembered by Sitting Bull. I figured he ought to be warned soon as possible rather than wait for Cody to empty every bottle at Yates, so I left a note in the room assigned to Buffalo Bill in the officers’ quarters and started off for the Grand River, of which I knowed the direction, having if you recall been there in ’85 with Arizona John Burke when we signed the Bull up for the Wild West.

  Having no mount, and I couldn’t borrow one without letting Colonel Drum know where I was going to ride it, I was on foot. It was a thirty-mile walk. I wasn’t as young as I once had been, and before long it was nighttime, but the terrain was mainly flat, and I hit my stride after a while under the helpful light of the moon in the clear cold air of late fall.

  By first light I had reached the Grand and headed west along the river and inside another hour I looked down from the bluffs and seen a little settlement of cabins and corrals and cultivated fields below.

  So I went on down there, not seeing anyone at all or even hearing the barking of dogs, until I come around the corner of the biggest of the log cabins, and there, standing in the open doorway, wrapped in a red blanket, was Sitting Bull.

  “Do you want to eat?” says he. And then, “How far behind you is Long Hair?”

  “He’s still back at Yates,” I says. “You dreamed that we were coming?”

  “No,” says he. “I saw someone’s breath on the bluff a while ago. I recognized you only when you reached the cornfield.” The high ground was almost a mile away, and the cornfield a good two hundred yards, and he hadn’t seen me in five years!

  “Yes,” I said. “I would like to eat. I’ve been walking all night.”

  That weathered face of his, so fierce even in repose, crinkled up further in amusement. “And you’re not as young as you once were.”

  “None of us is.” I give it right back to him, and his smile broadened. I mention this because of the idea that Indians, and especially the likes of Sitting Bull, was without humor. “But how did you know Long Hair was coming unless you dreamed it? Can you see all the way to Fort Yates?”

  “I have friends,” said he, and he did not go further.

  “I think you know,” I says, “that Long Hair means no harm to you. Bear Coat asked him to come because he likes you.” I wasn’t going to mention the detail about arresting him. “Pahaska wants you to come back to the Wild West.” Taking some liberties in what I said, I told him he was the biggest attraction the show ever had; that when I told the Grandmother, the Queen of England, he had wo
rn a medal with her likeness on it, she said it was her great honor and wanted to tell him so to his face; that Little Sure Shot missed him badly; and that Cody would double his wages from five years ago. As to the last-named, if that wasn’t possible, I’d kick in my own salary.

  “Long Hair has a good heart,” Sitting Bull said. “When we go inside my house I will show you the white hat he told me to take along when I left, and back there in the corral is that fine gray horse that was also a parting gift from him. But I’m an old man, too old to travel to all those towns, to be amidst white people all the time, looking at them and what they have built and what they own.” He winced. “My head begins to hurt when I even think about it. This is my home.” His brown arm, still looking strong, come out from beneath the red blanket, and he pointed in the direction of the Grand. “Right there is where I was born. I would have put my lodge across the river, but the white man from the agency told me the land on this side looked better for raising crops, and I listened to him, as I always listen to people when they speak about something they know and I do not.”

  “You have a nice-looking farm,” I says, looking around. “I’m sure you’re a good farmer.” I hoped the amenities wouldn’t take too long, for though we still had some time, given that Cody would be sleeping late once he finally got to bed and then would have to make the ride down here, I really didn’t know what he would do when Sitting Bull turned him down, for Buffalo Bill had a great respect for the Army and was flattered to be given the mission by General Miles. So I wanted to get to the heart of the problem at hand, but with an Indian that’s never the matter of a moment, unless of course you are attacked by force and without warning, when talk would be beside the point.

  In all other situations you had to eat and smoke and palaver for a long time, starting out as far as possible from the subject and only gradually closing in on it, for the arriving at a decision was as important as the decision itself. I told this to some bearded fellow in France at one of the parties they give for B.B.W.W. and he says it had an amazing similarity to a theory he was developing about poetry and philosophy, et cetera, there being Frenchmen who spent their lives fiddling with such concerns, for it takes all kinds.

  I could see, however, with a falling heart that the Bull was not going to be hurried. He pulls his arms back inside the red blanket and says, “Come in and eat.”

  So we enter his cabin, which looked pretty much as it had in ’85, consisting of one room with log walls on which hung various items on nails, feathered headdresses, weapons of various sorts, leather or cloth garments, medals presented at the signing of treaties, and in a real prominent place so it could be seen as soon as you entered, that big white sombrero Buffalo Bill had give him. Aside from having square corners, the place was pretty much like a tepee inside, for there wasn’t no furniture to speak of, unless a number of separate beds made of buffalo robes and blankets, on the floor, qualified.

  He invited me to take a seat on a folded hide, and he said, “The woman will bring the food soon. She had to collect the eggs.” He sat down himself, across from me. “I own eighty chickens,” he said. “The woman would have prepared the meal more quickly, but by the time I recognized you, she was in the midst of the other work.”

  I reckon he meant feeding the livestock, milking cows, fetching buckets of water from the river, and suchlike, the normal chores for which even white farmwomen would pitch in, but with the Indians of them days would be done entirely by the females of the house.

  Which reminded me of what I had heard at the fort about some white woman living with him, but there wouldn’t be any polite way to look directly into such a matter, so I didn’t try.

  And in fact didn’t need to, for she herself now come in the door, carrying a tin platter of food. She was dressed in long, real modest garments of the type worn by Lakota women, though hers was entirely of dark cloth, unadorned with ornamentation, nor did she wear any on herself, no necklace, earrings, or bracelet. But the most noticeable of her differences from an Indian female was her pale face, framed in lank hair that, though it could of used a wash, was still blond. Last time I seen it it had been piled fashionably high.

  In fact she was Amanda Teasdale.

  19. Life on the Grand River

  NOW I COULD SPEND a lot of time here on what feelings was caused to arise in me by the sight of Amanda, meanwhile growing even older, but suffice it to say I had a good many and at a rush, and for a while I was on my own with these, for attending to her job like the Sioux woman she was, so to speak, impersonating, she never met my eyes.

  Also, since I quickly poked my chin into my chest, lowering the brim of my hat, she couldn’t of seen my face for more than a second even if she had looked. I should mention here that I continued to wear the hat indoors not in any disrespect but because Sitting Bull lived in the cabin as if it was a tepee, and in the latter you wore any head covering you wanted to. In other words, taking off your hat indoors was just a white man’s way, and the Bull might of even been insulted if I did it in his lodge.

  So Amanda put that platter on the floor between us and went out the door.

  I didn’t know what to think, and there wasn’t anything I could of said that wouldn’t sound improper, so I kept silent. I also must of ate some of that food, but I wasn’t even aware of doing so, such was the turmoil in my mind.

  The Bull chewed with great gusto, smacking his old seamed lips. Since this would of been real late for his first breakfast, it must of been the second, and I reckon he was pleased by my arrival if only for the excuse to eat again while feeding a guest.

  He chewed for a time and then said, “That is the first white woman I ever knew who could cook a good meal.”

  As I say I hadn’t even noticed let alone tasted what I guess I too was eating.

  He went on. “The other one wasn’t any good at cooking, but she could paint nice pictures. I’ll show you one of them afterwards.”

  I was grateful for a peg to hang my attention on. “There was another white woman?”

  “She went away,” he said. “She did not approve of the Ghost Dance, and like a white woman, had to tell me as much though it was not her place to do so, even after Seen by the Nation and Four Robes explained it was not proper.”

  Them last two named was his Indian wives of many years, and they was sisters. Annie Oakley never liked to hear they was bought by him for one horse each, though Frank always got a big laugh out of that fact. Annie never had trouble understanding that it was quite a high price at the time, but what she couldn’t believe was that a man could care for a wife obtained in this manner, let alone two. But she wasn’t an Indian.

  “I didn’t run her out,” the Bull says, I guess in case I would think him a mean man. “She got mad and left.”

  I remembered why I come here. My personal feelings had to be put aside. “Bear Coat thinks you are causing trouble with the Ghost Dance, and so do the agent and the soldiers at the fort. They all agree you should be arrested. Good as this food is, I think we should get out of here as soon as possible.”

  Sitting Bull nodded and chewed some more. “Don’t worry about it. Everything has been decided.”

  I had been afraid he would come to some such conclusion, based on my early experiences with Old Lodge Skins: you couldn’t talk an Indian out of what he seen in a dream or heard from an animal. In the present case it turned out to be a meadowlark, sdosdona, for that breed is, as everyone knows, fluent in Lakota (and he took time out here, even on this solemn subject, to kid me about my supposed faulty command of that language). Birds had always been his friends, since one saved his life once as a boy when he was attacked by a grizzly bear, by telling him to play possum.

  “If Sdosdona saved my life by speaking truly, he can prepare me for my death,” said he. “He did not say when I would be killed, but he told me who would do it.”

  It didn’t matter if I believed it or not, and I tell you I did and I didn’t, for I had been raised Indian but had since went to
many of the major cities of the world and met queens and popes and went up in the Eiffel Tower and rid on railroads and steamboats and stood next to someone talking on the telephone, while here he was, setting on the floor of a crude log cabin eating with his hands, damn superstitious dumb redskin—tears come to my eyes as I’m telling this, as they might of at the time, for I feared he knowed what he was talking about, for at bottom we each live in our own situation.

  “You believe the soldiers will finally kill you?” It might be the way he wanted to go, in one last fight.

  He shook his heavy head, braids swinging, and he snorted. “The soldiers have never concerned me my entire life. They are only another enemy, one much stronger than the Crow and Pawnee, but still just enemies. Those who will kill me, the meadowlark said, are my own kind.”

  This I could not believe. “He could not mean the Lakota.”

  “Yes,” said Sitting Bull, “and he spoke the truth.”

  It didn’t matter if I believed him or not, for he sure did, which of course could and maybe should of been the end of the matter for me. I liked him but I doubt he had any special attachment to me, and I never owed him nothing the way I would of had he been Cheyenne: he weren’t family.

  But I have always admired a man of whatever color for standing up for his own point of view while the rest are falling all around him. You will recall that principle applied to my feeling for George Armstrong Custer, who I otherwise never cared for. The attitude he had of regarding as pathetic everyone who could not be Custer stood him in good stead at the end. So with Sitting Bull: if a bird told him how he would die, he regarded that as one more proof he was spiritually superior to his enemies, white or red, in which case being killed could be seen as the greatest success.

  But I wasn’t going to stand by and let another of my friends get slaughtered after having had a premonition of approaching death. If I let myself think about it, I still could not evade some blame for failing to stop Wild Bill Hickok’s murder.