The Yellowstone Kelly Novels

by Bowen, Peter

  Red Cloud went on yelling at Little Big Man for a while, and Little Big Man finally told him to go piss up a bear’s ass, and then Red Cloud yelled at Spotted Tail, who just grinned and gave him a pipe of tobacco.

  Red Cloud headed off to find a dog with a callused butt to work off a little steam on, and I set down next to Spotted Tail just outside his lodge and et dog stew and plums and root salad.

  “Politics, politics,” says Spotted Tail.

  “Politics is no fun at all,” I says.

  Little Big Man had made me more than a mite nervous, and Spotted Tail fetched me a bottle of whiskey, which I drank slowly to damp down the whips and jangles.

  “Little Big Man consumes himself and others with his hate,” says Spotted Tail. “He does the whiteman’s work for him. A warrior consumed by hatred will make many mistakes, and just when many depend upon him.”

  I couldn’t blame Little Big Man, really. Half of his band had died of smallpox and his father had been shot down like a gopher as the blind old man walked to a spring for some water—just a passing hunter trying out the sights on his rifle. Oh, you read about the savagery of the Injuns, it warn’t nothing to ours. Very thorough we were, not even sparing the day-old babies.

  So I sat there with Spotted Tail and we sort of kept track of him and his progress around the camp by the yelps of startled dogs surprised from sleep by a mighty kick from Red Cloud’s War Toe.

  He come back, still fizzing like a heavy charge of soda water, rage running out his ears and his fingers beating rapid time on his leggin’s.

  “We go back to the Tongue tomorrow,” says Spotted Tail.

  “You ought to go, like Grant asks, to Washington,” I says. “Might save your people. If you see how many whites there are and watch guns and bullets being made ...”

  “The young men would never believe us. They could call us fish-hearted. The young men are young; they think bravery solves all.”

  We was interrupted by someone falling into the campfire. Spotted Tail dragged him out and I looked at his contorted face—he was having some sort of epileptic seizure—and the feller foamed and twitched for a few minutes and then he sat up and he commenced to sing of buffalo and great battles and the death of the Sioux Nation.

  And so I met Sitting Bull, He Who Sees Long, and folks will tell you he was a war chief. He warn’t, he was a prophet. Sides, he’d not have lived long making war, for he would get these attacks fairly frequent, the more so when there was excitement around. (He was always right in his predictions, sort of, because you couldn’t really make out what he meant till it had happened. It would be clear as a bell then. For instance, he saw many bluecoat soldiers falling head first into Sioux camps just before the Little Big Horn. He also saw many white hands pulling the buffalo beneath the earth. So Custer got his and they danced for joy and was starved into submission a short time later.)

  Spotted Tail propped Sitting Bull up against a willow backrest and he just laid there breathing shallow and exhausted. A thin strand of saliva ran from his mouth to his eagle-thighbone breastplate, glinting gold in the firelight.

  Out in the soft dark a dog yelped off Red Cloud’s foot. It must have been a big dog, and a warrior, too, because Red Cloud yelped and commenced into cussing in that bass viol voice of his.

  Sitting Bull opened his eyes and smiled, a weak and gentle smile. His eyes was soft and gentle and glazed and rolled up a bit in his head.

  “Long road, no grass, no buffalo, many graves, many Sioux in one grave, dark where they fall down, fall down, fall down,” Sitting Bull said, his voice like the rasp of grass in the wind. He went back to sleep.

  “How much would the Black Hills be worth?” Spotted Tail says suddenly.

  I had to think about it.

  “I’d demand twenty million dollars, and twenty percent of the metals,” I says. “And I’d be damned careful about who was keeping the score.”

  “And what will we do with the money?” Spotted Tail asked. “Buy a thousand blankets apiece? A thousand rifles apiece? And the horses to carry them all?”

  Red Cloud limped in out of the dark. His hand was bloody, where the dog had bitten him.

  “Shit,” says Red Cloud. Diplomatic language, shorn of embellishment.

  I liked it.

  “We will go to Washington in early summer,” says Red Cloud, “And Kelly will be our interpreter.”

  “Now just a goddamn minute ...” I spluttered.

  “Little Big Man is waiting,” says Red Cloud.

  “Honored at the appointment ...” I mumbled.

  “Oh, this will be fun!” says my good friend Spotted Tail, no doubt considering the comic possibilities.

  Winter was late in coming. We moved south slowly, and

  I fell back into the easy rhythms of a winter Injun camp. They provided for me well. For the first time in years I held a young Indian woman in my arms, and I thought of Eats-Men-Whole and I wept. The girl looked at me with her dark eyes and she reached out her hand and touched my tears. It unmanned me completely. She dressed and slipped away. I never learned her name.

  29

  SITTING BULL AND CRAZY Horse. Strange, good men, half in another world. Doomed. They both shone with a mad light, a pale nimbus. In the firelight, their shadows were larger than other men’s.

  Crazy Horse was mostly off studying battlegrounds and trying to make his young men into soldiers, which they hadn’t any good strong natural talent for. They were brave as hell, but tribal warriors rather than the cold professionals who had taken war over almost everyplace else.

  Spotted Tail gave me a lodge and we spent pleasant days at chess. Alone of the Sioux, Spotted Tail knew that they could not win, and that the things they needed to win were as foreign to the business of being Sioux as the dust on the moon, and as far away in time as Elijah.

  When an Injun fights, see, it is a good brave fight and everything is settled, the enemy is dead or beaten, the songs are made, the dances danced, the scalps hung on the warpole, and life goes back to hunting buffalo.

  I warned Spotted Tail about the buffalo. Everything the Sioux ate or made depended on the buffalo. Little Billy Sherman would be after them like they was the enemy. I hadn’t seen what he done to Georgia and Mississippi, but I’d heard after he got through with it a bird would have had to pack a lunch to fly over it.

  When the wind was from the south, where the Republican River herd was down to a handful, it stank of rotten blood.

  In February, during one of them warm lulls, I headed south with Red Shirt to see what was going on. He was the bravest man I’d known, and he never felt a need to brag on it. He never abandoned a battle till the air was about half lead and only after he had reflected on it considerable and had a pipe or two of tobacco and a nice nap, as he did not wish to be thought overhasty in his judgments.

  The Sioux was all bored as hell and the more they sat around and pumped one another up the more they thought the Big Piney was the sort of battle they’d fight. Fetterman and his eighty men wasn’t even loose change to the U.S. Army. So the worse the bragging got the dumber the boasts. God, the sorrow that come of that fool Fetterman.

  But when Red Shirt spoke everybody shut up, because he reduced everything down to the most boiled-off and unpalatable of forms, and there it was, boys, and don’t sing me the chorus again. The bragging was grating on him, and that’s why we left.

  Travel was pretty easy, our biggest problem was fording the rivers, because fords is shallow that’s where the ice builds up, too. The williwaw or chinook wind would bust the ice out of the rapids and stack it in the fords—and it was too busted up to walk on. Each time we had to cross a river it took the rest of the day to dry out our traps. We crossed the Missouri by the government ferry and no one looked at us twice, figuring I was a scout and Red Shirt was a whiteman’s dog, a paysoldier.

  Red Shirt found the Union Pacific railroad line a great horror, and he saw immediately how fast troops and horses could be moved on it. The Plains tri
bes’ best defense was their speed, but no horse could go sixty miles in an hour, and no horses could carry ton upon ton of supplies on their backs. The black plume of coal smoke writ on the winter air lingered for a long time, and made everything behind it dark and stinking.

  The hunters was working north, starting where there was the fewest Injuns, after the Kiowas and Comanches were crushed, and so north. We passed buffalo hides tiered up waiting on the freights, stacks a mile long and twenty feet high and forty feet deep. Big lobo wolves howled off in the distance, so fat they could barely walk. They wasn’t a danger at all, there was more carrion than a million wolves could eat, and there never was many of them.

  At one of our camps I went off to take a shit and over a little rise I come face-to-face with a big dog wolf, head on him three times the size of the biggest dog I ever seen, and feet the size of dinner plates. He looked at me with his yellow eyes and yawned. Them ivory choppers in his mouth seemed to go back in there all the way to his ass, which was plump. Noble animal, waddled when he walked.

  The sight bothered me and I snapped at Red Shirt over nothing and he just looked at me sadly. A part of me was dying, but all that the Sioux had known was, I felt petty and mean and cheap.

  However bad it was for me, I always had other places I could go, but Red Shirt was over soon, and he knew it. I got to wondering how he stayed sane.

  He would be brave for his people, of course, and see what he could do for the living after their lives was gutted with a dull antler.

  We run on to Bill Cody down in Kansas, he had gone in for lace at the throat of his cossack-type shirts, and real gold buttons and beaded gauntlets near up to his armpits, and high polished black boots clear up to his crotch, looked like they’d take three sweating assistants and a railroad crane to get on and off.

  The loathsome Buntline was still in attendance on Bill, but he tried to fluff us up some—named Red Shirt Chief Red Eagle. Red Shirt just smiled, pitying him. We was in a saloon at the time and the barkeep give us crap about not serving Injuns. I offered to eat the barkeep’s lungs and that shut him up some. Then he threw a drink at Red Shirt and I was over that bar like that and punching him silly, and Bill and Red Shirt hauled me off him and we went to another place. Buntline soothed the barkeep by giving him money.

  I took Red Shirt out to watch the horse soldiers drill at Leavenworth, there was two thousand of them, and I said this was kind of a small part of them as could be sent against the Sioux, on trains.

  We headed back up north, past spur tracks laid down to hold the hide cars, watched buffalo hunters on their stands shooting. Bam bam bam bam. Every thirty seconds, like they was automatic.

  We watched the teams of skinners jerking the hides off with horse teams and the wolves, coyotes, foxes, ravens, and crows feasting on the carcases.

  Red Shirt had already guessed as much as I showed him, but at least now he could say he had seen this with his own eyes. He doubted it would do much good. Young men are always ready to die bravely.

  I learned of the death of Brigham Young, gone home to himself as God, no doubt. A pure bastard, and therefore a hero to thousands. It would have been a pleasure to kill him, and I regretted it hadn’t fallen to me to send him to hell—I don’t believe any of that stuff, but I could have made an exception in Brigham’s case. Old scores was being settled without my having to be around. The best way, I can see now.

  We got to the Canadian camp of the Sioux in May. After Red Shirt had addressed the council the Sioux going to Washington to meet with Grant formed up and with me at the head, all of eighteen, off we went to see the mountain. I herded everybody onto a train in Minnesota, paying for their tickets and assuming that my beloved government would repay me. (Forty years later they still haven’t. It used to annoy me, but now the less the government does, the better, far as I’m concerned.)

  One thing these Sioux was long on was dignity—you could have set fire to them and they damn well would have set there unblinking, amused at yet another obnoxious whiteman custom. In all that followed I never saw one show fear or anger, though there was some pretty sharp rejoinders that I will get to in a minute. Red Cloud and Spotted Tail and Hump and Red Shirt and Sitting Bull and Low Dog were a substantial bunch of men. (Low Dog, by the way, ain’t a comment on his character. It meant the low to the ground stance of a stalking dog and Low Dog stalked a lot of bluecoats. He favored a sharp hatchet.)

  I bought some box lunches on the train and handed them out. The ham was spoiled. So I herded up my Sioux and headed them toward the dining car. Several matrons and mothers with small children fainted dead away, after some fairly piercing shrieks, and the waiters in the dining car gave me some backchat. I told them to telegraph the White House and the reply must have been pretty sharp, because at the next station we pulled off to get a private railcar for the rest of the journey, and a gourmet car and kitchen behind that.

  Everything was laid on a little too well, you ask me. The railroad furnished us with oysters and lobsters for supper. The Sioux, who lived fifteen hundred miles from salt water, thought the oysters was gobs of snot and the lobsters was lice of great size, but hardly fit food for warriors. I raised hell in the major-domo car and got us beefsteaks. Other than Low Dog getting a sneezing fit from his first glass of champagne, which he took as an attempt to poison him. He made straightaway for the steward, knife in hand but I leaped over two tables and brought him down before he could avenge himself. Things was only mildly eventful until we got to Chicago.

  Christ on a stickhorse.

  We had a bit of a layover and some officious ass of a provost marshal sent a brigade of troopers to guard us. They was armed right down to the bayonets, and Hump and Low Dog began to sing the deathsongs of their warrior societies. It took all of my considerable tact—my revolver in the provost’s ear, the fool come to parley—and a blistering telegram from Washington to get everybody out of a fighting mood. I thought that a last stand by six half-drunk Injuns armed with lobster forks against the power and might of the American Nation would amuse historians no end.

  After the troops had slunk off I took my chums out for ice cream, which I purely am glad I did, because they loved it and were to go on asking for it throughout the trip. (I broached the idea of free ice cream forever to President Grant. He thought it was a good idea.) Then we went on to a burlesque show.

  This was a great hit with them, too, and Low Dog got into the whiskey at intermission and as soon as the show started again he leaped up on the stage and whipped out his pecker and caused a smallish riot. I led the other five in a death-or-glory charge and we swept up Low Dog and his tool and went out the stage door and through the shadows to the club car.

  Several policemen showed up and suggested strongly that we stay in the club car until a puller come along to take us farther on our journey.

  Off to see scruffy little U. S. Grant, who intimidated me because he had done a job or two in his time. Like on me, for instance.

  We went past steel mills glowing with hot metal, and cranes and ships of giant size. The Injuns pressed their faces to the dirty windows and counted and thought. Such mechanical monsters weren’t even in their dreams. Even with the stench and filth the plants were impressive, something out of hell.

  My six friends counted men and factories.

  Out west the rifles boomed and the buffalo dropped and as long as grass should grow and the waters flow the sacred Black Hills would belong to the Sioux.

  And I am the goddamned King of Siam.

  30

  SITTING BULL BEGAN TO have more seizures the closer we got to Washington. I think it was the poisonous air. He’d been quiet and sort of out of the prophecy business, but late one night he let out a beller and tumbled from his berth to the rocking floor, foaming at the mouth and drumming his heels on the floor.

  He had had a vision of the Black Hills crawling with whites, a deep shaft in the heart of the mountain, down below the sea, allowing who knows what evil to escape. The sacred Whit
e Mountain was defaced by carvings of giant heads chiseled by a dark force that had a white face and a big moustache, and he saw the Sioux starving, massed rifles shooting them, the dead dumped in a common pit, laid out in rows, while the birds pecked at their eyes and the winter wind blew.

  Sitting Bull seemed calmer. He never went to war, but he could see the future, and that is handicap and heartbreak enough for any man.

  He was real weak and shaky after his fit and the others gathered round him and fed him and held cups of water to his lips. Whatever awe the tall buildings and giant machines may have caused the Sioux, they gave no sign.

  When we finally chuffed down off the Piedmont into Washington we was tired and out of sorts. They was all sick from the unfamiliar food and the lack of sleep. After a lifetime of sleeping in buffalo robes they didn’t find the Pullman bunks any too restful, and of course the sheer racket of modern cities compared to the silence of the plains kept them awake. We all regretted having come at all.

  Spotted Tail reminded me once again that he’d just as soon no one knew that he spoke English considerably better than I did. He thought me, he said, a fine feller who would do a fine job of interpreting and how were my balls anyway?

  When the train pulled in to the station there wasn’t no brass band or red carpet and I wondered if the government here had plumb forgot or what. There was a tall, dark-complected feller in a clawhammer coat standing easy under his stovepipe hat and finishing the last of a thick seegar.

  I come down off the club car and nodded to the gent.

  “I am Commissioner Parker of the Indian Bureau,” he said. I looked at him close, and he looked more like my friends in the car than he did me.

  His eyes was twinkling. “General Grant who is now President Grant is a simple soldier,” he said. “My Iroquois name is Donegahwa, the Keeper of the Western Door of the Long House of the Iroquois.”