Return of Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  The Chicago Fair opened on the first of May of ’93 and luckily the overnight rainstorm stopped in time for the procession of two dozen open carriages to make a grand entrance carrying President Grover Cleveland and a lot of other big shots including the governor of Illinois, the mayor of Chicago, and numerous other politicians, a couple Spanish ladies, one of royal blood and called an “Infant,” though she looked growed-up to me, and of all people, old Bear Coat, General Miles, who was real popular with the crowd due to having answered the Indian question at Wounded Knee. The Sioux of our troupe of course didn’t recognize him by appearance, but neither could I find any who even remembered his name. I keep telling you stuff like this to emphasize that the individual identities of even their enemies held little interest for Indians unless they had personal association with such. They never looked at life in the general way that when done by white people resulted in history, progress, culture—in other words, the Columbian Exposition—nor understood that the visitors thereto considered them part of the exhibition, as examples of the savagery from which superior humans had climbed up to the White City.

  The opening ceremonies was held in the heart of the Fair and the single most impressive sight, the Court of Honor, a continuation of snow-white, columned, porticoed, balustraded, statued, bric-a-bracked edifices around a pool called the Basin, with an enormous sculptured figure standing in the water at the far end, which a lot of folks who hadn’t never seen the real one thought was a replica of the Statue of Liberty but wasn’t, and at the head of the pool was the high-domed Administration building behind the Columbian fountain in which a bunch of goddesses, angels, and the like rowed a stone boat with long stone oars.

  There was balconies at various levels of the Administration building and it was to the highest of these that Buffalo Bill led a bunch of us from the Wild West in opening day, most of which was Sioux warriors, dressed in their feather-bonneted finery also displayed at Windsor Castle, the Eiffel Tower, and the Vatican, and from there we could look over the entire Court of Honor and beyond to where the U.S. Navy had sent battleships down Lake Michigan to salute the Fair with firing cannons, puffs of smoke followed by the booming reports, which I felt I had to explain to the Indians, fearing they might think we was being shot at.

  But here was a case that reminded me they had learned some things without my help.

  “I think they are shooting the same kind of blanks we use in the make-believe battle with Custer,” said Rocky Bear, “only bigger.” Then he shrugged. “Americans do strange things, but they don’t build all of this and then send war boats to blow it apart.”

  I felt like a fool when he put it that way, and so as to regain authority I pointed out the ships might of been sent by an enemy.

  “But we don’t have any boats,” said he, showing how narrow his Indian focus was and his ignorance of the greater world, unless he was having fun with me, which was entirely possible.

  In the foreground way below us was the dais where the President and the other dignitaries had took their places, along with a grandstand accommodating several thousand people, and a big band played patriotic tunes while the multitude of fountains shot plumes of water high into the air. It was quite a grand sight, but though Cody shushed us when various folks took the podium below to give speeches, we was too far up to hear much, which I would call my good luck, for otherwise I would of had to translate a lot of hot air, though the Indians might well have liked it, given as they were to their own windbag oratory.

  Also they got a favorable impression of Grover Cleveland, whose stout figure in tailcoat and striped trousers was recognizable even at a distance and in a day when few public men was skinny, and Rocky Bear praised him for it.

  “A man that fat and rich-looking is probably a good president.”

  Next day Cody was real happy to see the Chicago papers include mention of this B.B.W.W. appearance at the ceremonies, for it had achieved just what he wanted, the most effective kind of free publicity.

  “Listen to this, Jack,” he says, and putting on the spectacles he should of wore at all times, especially when doing his marksman act (but instead used shells with a broader shot pattern), held up one spread newspaper and read excerpts from it. “‘Could it be mere coincidence that as from the vast assemblage below rose the glorious swell of “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” a painted and bright-feathered line of American savagery moved along a balcony high above, colored blankets like flames against the alabaster dome. These remnants of a bygone primitive majesty waved their congratulations to cultured achievement and submissive admiration to a new world.’” Cody lowered the paper and took off the steel-rimmed specs. “I don’t think it could have been better expressed.”

  Well, it sure sounded poetic, as did a lot of newspaper writing at the time, which has deteriorated since, more’s the pity, but this particular example described an episode that took place only in the writer’s imagination, like a lot of what has been wrote about events which I have personally participated in or witnessed. You should always allow for that possibility no matter what you read—unless the God’s honest truth I am talking here is ever transcribed into print.

  Now I have referred earlier to that Midway Plaisance, which was the kind of amusement-park annex to the high-toned body of the Fair with all the white temples and reflecting pools. Whoever thought that idea up was brilliant, for the Midway wasn’t only fun but could also be educational while providing it: for example, that dance by Little Egypt, which our cowboys called the hootchie-cootchie and sung the smutty words somebody made up to go with the tune that was real catchy, “Oh, the girls in France/ They don’t wear no underpants,” wasn’t properly no dirty show but rather a demonstration of what the Ay-rabs see as respectable entertainment, including the outfit she wore, though it was thought real raw by some, particularly preachers and women, showing a bare belly button between a band of silk across the bosom and a filmy skirt giving the impression you could see through it.

  And there was dioramas and panoramas of the Destruction of Pompeii, the Swiss Alps, a Hawaiian landscape with erupting volcano, not to mention models of sights which us of B.B.W.W. was familiar with the originals, the Eiffel Tower, St. Peter’s Basilica, a German village, and so on, as well as a lot we nor most other civilized people ever before had occasion to see, like the Samoan Islanders who supposedly, at least when they was at home in the Pacific Ocean, favored a diet of human flesh, and black Africans from a place called Dahomey, also reputed to be cannibals, but whether this was true or not, some prominent American Negroes complained at how their race was represented, so them that run the Fair promised to add Colored People to the list of nationalities which each got a special Day of their own, German, Polish, Italian, and so on including one even for Catholics, and furthermore offered, as a gesture of good will, to provide two thousand watermelons for the occasion.

  But the foremost spectacle of the Midway was the one you couldn’t miss even if you never rode it, namely the gigantic revolving wheel made by Mr. George Ferris, and it could be seen as representing technical achievement as well as offering a then unique entertainment, two hundred and fifty feet high, carrying two thousand passengers at a time, I don’t think it has ever been surpassed by anything else of its type. For half a dollar you got to travel around twice. For a while I spent most of my off-time on that wheel, along with my ready money, finding it well worth the expenditure just to get the view at the top of each revolution. That might of been childish, but it made me feel good to travel in that big slow loop in the company of a multitude of my fellow men, women, and children: each big car held more than three dozen seated, with others standing, and you could bring food along and eat your meal off the provided counters.

  It took me a while to talk the Indians into riding the Ferris wheel. They was fanciful about a lot of life, but mechanical devices tended to make them overly literal. At first they figured it might be exciting to rise into the air that way, but when the wheel come around it would naturally
roll over the passengers, and even though I had them look and see this never happened, they remained stubborn, but finally changed their minds and once they did, you could hardly get them off it even at show time. They next thought if it turned long enough it would come off its base and roll down the street and on through Chicago, and they never wanted to miss that ride.

  The wheel was right next to a replica of the Eiffel Tower, which at only twenty foot high was another thing that puzzled those of our Sioux who had took the elevator up the real one in Paris a few years earlier. Why had it shrunk if it was the real one? If it was an imitation, then why was it so short? For the sole point of the real one was its extreme height. The special construction, which I wager to say would be what took the eye of the typical white man, held no interest to them, even though in some respects you could say it was more of an iron tepee than an actual building. But it wasn’t nobody’s home nor burial platform nor the pole used for a Sundance, the only types of structure having a practical purpose, and it couldn’t move like the Ferris wheel, so in the end it wasn’t that much in the big game that I decided they saw civilization as, maybe because though Buffalo Bill’s Wild West had traveled throughout half the world, everyplace we went there was either a fair in progress or we brought our own.

  Well, sir, I could go on about this fair, the sights, the sounds, the smells, and by the way the last-named was pleasant, coming usually from hot popcorn or the pancakes fried by a stout, handkerchief-headed colored woman at the Aunt Jemima pancake demonstration, or if passing a chewing youngster, Juicy Fruit gum, introduced there along with Dr. Welch’s Grape Juice, Shredded Wheat, and Pabst’s Blue Ribbon beer. Luckily Chicago’s famous wind usually blew in from the lake, so we didn’t smell the equally famous stockyards or the stinky Chicago River, which was so thick with filth you had to stare hard to see a current. The reality of that city give you little incentive to leave the make-believe of the Fair. But then that was pretty much my feeling wherever I went with B.B.W.W. After much experience in the actual world, I preferred the imaginary. And if I had had any doubt on that question, seeing Sitting Bull shot down would of removed it.

  By the way, I should say the next season after that happened, Annie Oakley was so affected by the Bull’s death I spared her the details of it. Annie wasn’t no Amanda with a lifelong mission to fight injustice, but she had stayed mad about what she called a murder which, had the victims been white, somebody would of got hanged for the crime.

  Reason I mention this is because of an attraction further along the Midway than anything I’ve yet described. I hadn’t even heard of it yet, having never got past the Ferris wheel, the replica Eiffel Tower, and the Street in Cairo, with the minaret and Little Egypt, about halfway along. There was so much to see, and of course we had our own performances to do.

  So it wasn’t till we had been in Chicago for a few months that one day I was helping Frank set up Annie’s act, readying the glass balls, the playing cards and other targets—she handled the ammunition herself—when he says she was real upset and maybe I should try to console her, knowing Sitting Bull as well as I had.

  I didn’t know why this should be now, for he had been killed three years earlier, but I went to where she was loading the various pistols, rifles, and shotguns she used, a job that required great care, so I waited until she was mostly done before mentioning Frank’s concern.

  Annie was no longer the young girl she had been on joining us in New Orleans eight years before, but she was still pretty, with her curls and bright eyes, and that wide-brimmed hat with the star on the brim.

  She was biting her lip now and blinking. “Jack,” she says, “I guess I should thank you for not telling me about Sitting Bull’s cabin.”

  “Well,” says I, thinking for some reason she had got to brooding about the sorry event of three years earlier, “I didn’t see it would do you any good to hear more. He can’t be brung back.”

  “I mean that cabin of his on the Midway.”

  I hadn’t no idea of what she meant until finally I found out somebody told her Sitting Bull’s house had been dismantled log by log at the Grand River site and shipped to the Chicago World’s Fair, where it was rebuilt and on exhibit down at the far end of the Midway.

  “I never knowed anything about that,” I says. “Our Sioux probably do, but the Bull’s death is a painful subject they don’t talk about. These people do their lamentations at the proper time, but that’s the end of it.” Also, Lakota tribal politics was involved: some probably did not have friendly memories of Sitting Bull. But I never mentioned that.

  “Is it supposed to be educational?” she asked bitterly, and broke open one of the shotguns and angrily popped shells into the barrels. “I call it a dishonor.”

  What I was thinking was how did Cody miss out on the idea and fail to acquire Sitting Bull’s cabin for the Wild West? The act was ready-made, like “Custer’s Last Stand”: the fight breaks out between Sitting Bull’s people and the Indian police, and the Bull is killed, only in the re-creation most of the brutality done to the corpse could be omitted for the sake of the children in the audience, and then Buffalo Bill rides in at the head of his cowboys. Too Late Again.... I answered myself: how many would pay to see Buffalo Bill try to rescue the Indian who killed Custer? Which is how Sitting Bull was still seen by the normal white person of the time.

  “I agree with you,” I says. “I’d go and burn it down if I didn’t think people would take it as revenge for the Little Bighorn. Also, they probably paid the widows a few dollars for the cabin, which they might try to get back if it was burned.”

  But Annie snapped the shotgun closed now and scowled at me. She was too straitlaced for such talk. “No, Jack,” says she. “Destruction of property can’t ever be right. I’m going to put the matter to some people I know.”

  I reckon she meant folks like the many public officials who was fans of hers, for she remained one of the best-known celebrities in the country. I expect she did as promised, for Annie always spoke to the point, but Sitting Bull’s cabin stayed where it was for the rest of the Fair, which in fact had only a few more months left to go, a far shorter time than any politician can get anything done provided he even wants to.

  Right now she swore she wasn’t never going over there to look at it, and again I agreed with her. In my case, added to my moral disapproval of them making a commercial spectacle of it was my own personal and painful memories: I had slept in that place and ate there, as a guest of my friend, and then seen him shot down and his dead body dishonored on the frozen ground outside. This sorry event joined all the others I tried not to relive in memory: I seen too many die in my time.

  When I brought the subject up with Cody, I guess his reaction was typical, though at first I considered it unfeeling. “Why, sure I was aware of that exhibit, Jack. I always keep one eye cocked for the competition, but we don’t have to worry. They won’t take a penny away from us.”

  “It just seems immoral to me to put a man’s home on display after he is dead,” I says.

  “Look at it this way, though, Jack: you can go to Mount Vernon and see all George Washington’s personal effects including his false teeth. I don’t think old Bull would mind, and I can claim to have known him better than most. He had quite a head for business. I assume you know he sold his one-of-a-kind personal tobacco pouch several times a day to eager souvenir-collectors, and kept the women busy making replicas thereof.”

  Say what you want, Cody always managed to make me feel better about things. He would of saved Sitting Bull if he could. After all, he had tried in his own way. And in the light of his principles he wasn’t being disrespectful now to the old chief’s memory.

  Right here let me correct an omission that comes to mind: since the beginning of our engagement at the World’s Fair, Buffalo Bill led the procession around the arena that begun every performance riding on that big gray stallion he had give Sitting Bull, the one that on hearing the gunfire at the Grand River shootout had went thro
ugh the tricks learned him during his previous time with the Wild West. Cody had bought the horse off the widows. But I didn’t find this objectionable, for the horse started off with us.

  “Frankly,” he now goes on, “I wouldn’t want that cabin, which gives the wrong impression. There’s nothing uplifting about it for the youth of this country. I feel the same way about Comanche.”

  “How do the Comanche come into it?”

  “Not the Indian tribe,” he says. “The horse of that name that was the only living survivor of Custer’s last fight.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I says, “Captain Keogh’s buckskin gelding. I recall—”

  “Exactly,” Cody says, “the one found wandering amongst the bodies on the Little Bighorn battlefield, wounded so badly that the Indians didn’t want him. But he was precious to the Seventh Cavalry and they nursed him back to health. When he finally died a couple of years ago the animal was stuffed and put on exhibition at the state university. Now he’s on display in the Kansas Building over at the Fair. Back when Comanche was alive, Major Burke suggested we include him in our recreation of the battle, provided of course that I could have borrowed or rented him from the Seventh, but I surely could have, given the reverence with which I celebrate the memory of their late great commander and mourn the greatest tragedy in their or any other regiment’s history.” He had spoke too long without taking a drink, so he did so now.

  I hadn’t ever found a better time to try again to get into the matter of having been at the side of the dying Custer, at which I had made innumerable though more and more halfhearted attempts throughout the years, but by now I lacked in sufficient energy. And I got no further than saying, “You know, I was—” when Bill resumed.