Return of Little Big Man (13 page)

Dull Knife, what some have called the greatest of the Cheyenne chiefs, finally surrendered in the spring of ’77 and immediately come to regret doing so, for him and his band was thereupon compelled, though they was Northern Cheyenne, to join their cousins of the Southern branch of the people, on a reservation down in Indian Territory, which later become the state of Oklahoma, but was known by the likes of me as the Nations, after the other tribes that lived there, many of which had been run out to the region from their natural homelands in the Southeast years earlier, the Cherokees and the rest.

When you consider how the Government treated Indians, which was rarely better than absolutely rotten, you sometimes make out the glint of a bright idea, like
Why wouldn’t these folk welcome being collected together into one big happy family of Cheyenne?
There might also of been a thought that the association would make them less warlike, the southerners having been subdued for some time.

Whatever the reasons why they had to go down there, Dull Knife’s people found the place intolerable. The game was long gone, and anyway they was not supposed to hunt but rather to be issued Government food, which as usual proved scant on account of the corruption familiar since time immemorial with them that have access to public funds. And the terrain and climate, to which Indians, being on such close terms with nature, was very sensitive, were all wrong in these hot and humid lowlands, whereas their lifelong home had been near the Bighorn Mountains and the Black Hills. The northern Cheyenne took sick with fevers and chills from maladies they had never previously heard of. Not to mention the mortal illness resulting from the heart being broke over and over again.

So after a year they up and left the reservation and headed north, a move that was strictly illegal, so the troops went after them, and there followed that long journey in which about three hundred Cheyenne, only sixty-seventy of them warriors, fought off the U.S. Army’s continued efforts to stop them over many weeks and many hundreds of miles.

I had lost all track of the people to which I had been closer than to my natural-born race, for the years I spent with the Indians was the ones where a person absorbs much of what will get him through life, and my existence with Old Lodge Skins’s band was more concentrated than any subsequently with whites, including my time with my wife and child, which lasted only a couple of years and besides, as I have said, Olga was Swedish and though she probably spoke better English than me, I believe she thought in her native tongue, of which I never learned a word, except a drinking toast that says
Skoal
to all the pretty girls.

In fact I tried not to reflect on the Indian situation, which after Custer was rubbed out was all losses for the red side: there wasn’t nothing I could do about it. Since telling Wild Bill Hickok that I had survived at the Little Bighorn and not being believed, I had not mentioned that fact to a soul, for I realized if anybody did believe me he’d then have to deal with me getting my life saved by one of the Indians who was slaughtering every other white man in sight, the kind of thing difficult to explain to the folks of that time.

But then, all of a sudden, the matter was at hand. In the middle of September in ’78, them northward-moving renegade Cheyenne was within twenty miles of Dodge City, raiding little settlements and ranches, and they killed a mail carrier out from Dodge, who had the bad luck to cross their trail. So there was enough panic locally to distract all concerned from the usual drinking, gambling, and whoring, and since hardly any troops was at the nearby fort, reinforcements was summoned and meanwhile civilian volunteers assembled to save the capital of civilization from the savages.

I didn’t join this bunch. The killing of Dora Hand was still eating at me. If Bat had let me go along on the pursuit of Jim Kennedy, the latter wouldn’t of stayed alive. So Kennedy escaped all punishment and returned to Texas, but the Cheyenne was to be kept from returning to a home what had been taken from them. I couldn’t see the justice in it, so I stayed behind the bar, pouring whiskey for the many others who stayed behind, because when I say the vices was put aside totally for defense of the city, I was speaking loosely. When it come to drinking, there were some who would keep doing it while they was getting scalped alive.

The emergency was over before long with the Indians moving on north and that seemed the end of the matter locally, until the following February when Bat, looking in at the Lone Star, tells me the Governor of Kansas has ordered him to Fort Leavenworth to pick up a half-dozen Cheyenne prisoners from the Army, to bring back for a trial by the civil authorities of Ford County, on the crimes they had committed while in the vicinity of Dodge.

The news hit me hard. Them Indians was likely to get lynched if brung back to this place as common criminals.

“Who you taking along?” I asked him, and he names several deputies including his brother Jim and Charlie Bassett. “Any of you speak the language?”

“
I
don’t,” Bat says.

“You could use an interpreter.”

He put on his familiar smirk. “Yourself?”

“Goddammit, Bat,” I says. “Take me serious for once. I really can speak Cheyenne.” I rattled off a stream of it.

He smiled more broadly and threw down a shot of whiskey, then resettled his derby. “Now, Jack, since I don’t speak it myself, how in hell would I know if what you just said was Cheyenne?”

“I’m going to lie to Bat Masterson?”

I’ll mention again that Bat’s head was a lot less swelled than others of the time, but flattery sometimes worked even with him. “Well,” he says, “I can’t pay you extra. Just expenses.”

I accepted the deal, even though I’d be losing my Lone Star pay as well, for them was the days before paid vacations and sick time off, but I had that nest egg I have spoke of and wasn’t doing this with monetary gain in mind.

So me and Bat and the four deputies traveled to Fort Leavenworth, where the Army turned over the Cheyenne prisoners to us, seven of them, in their blankets, dusky countenances totally blank despite the unpleasantness of their situation. They was all handcuffed and in leg irons as well. It was from this sort of lack of display of emotion that whites saw redskins as having no feelings that wasn’t prompted by bloodlust. But the truth was rather that Indians wouldn’t give their enemies the satisfaction of showing that the latter had hurt them.

We all returned to Dodge on the Santa Fe, taking up half a car for our party, and as the Cheyenne wasn’t causing any trouble, the lawmen spent most of their time keeping away the white civilians on the rest of the train and then, at the many stops, fending off the unruly mobs that had formed at a number of the stations with an idea of dragging the now helpless warriors out and hanging them. Speaking from the experience of now more than a century, I can tell you that the type of man who most thirsts for revenge is likely to be one who has himself never suffered any damage from the person who is the object of his vengeance: it might be he feels insulted by the very lack of menace to him by them who have done dirty to others he don’t even know.

Now Bat Masterson was at his best in situations where he could assert personal authority without a show of even suggested force, and without no bluster so much as raising his voice beyond the volume necessary while standing in the doorway of the car to address a crowd on the platform. This worked at most towns, but at Lawrence the mob got sufficiently pushy for Bat to have to knock down the man nearest him, which however turned out to be the town marshal, and Bat found himself under arrest. But finally we reached Topeka, where a thousand people was waiting, along with a closed wagon to convey the prisoners to the jail for overnight, which was done through a lot of milling and yelling, but the Indians was protected by our bunch from Dodge and local deputies of Shawnee County.

Since there wasn’t no practical need as yet—they went where they was pointed—I had not addressed a word to the Cheyenne, despite what Bat might make of my silence, and the reason was none of them would believe me if I started talking to them in their own language. So far as they could see, I belonged to the enemy that held them prisoner. It wouldn’t make no sense by their lights that I would have friendly feelings towards them. If such was the case, then why didn’t I let them loose? I had a real problem, and while the lawmen was holding off the mobs, I was trying to figure a way to deal with it.

It called for real delicacy. I sure couldn’t show any moral weakness. I decided therefore to start with the one whose name translated as Wild Hog. With Dull Knife he had been a principal chief of them who headed north from the Nations. We was told he had tried to stab himself to death while at Fort Leavenworth and was still not healed, though nobody asked him now to unwrap his blanket for a look. Suicide amongst the Cheyenne was unusual in normal times, though on this subject Bat said he had been with the other buffalo hunters in ’74 at Adobe Walls when they was attacked by Quanah Parker’s band of Comanche, Kiowa, Arapaho, and Southern Cheyenne, and a young warrior of the last-named, called Stone Teeth, blew out his brains after being badly wounded by two rounds from a Sharps Big 50 buffalo rifle.

Maybe the fact that Wild Hog failed in the attempt to end his own life suggested he hadn’t his heart in it, for as a fighting warrior he would sure know how to kill with an edged weapon. Anyway, the Indian prisoners at the Shawnee County jail wasn’t given any implements with which to cut the tough-looking meat they was served, and I didn’t try to talk with the Hog while he was gnawing at his grub, which like all the others he put away with good appetite, so I guess he intended for the moment anyhow to stay amongst the living.

For the convenience of their captors, all seven Cheyenne was kept in one large cell of the kind for the temporary holding of drunks, and they was all sitting on the floor, not even talking to one another, at least not when under observation, which was most of the time, owing to that worry about suicide.

I wanted to take along a present but was pretty restricted in what was available. The old favorites of flour, coffee, and other foods needing to be cooked would be of no use to them now, and they wasn’t allowed to smoke, owing to the possibility of fire, so tobacco wouldn’t do.

What I settled on was sugar, Indians having a notable sweet tooth. I bought me a loaf of it at a shop in town when Bat and us went in to feed, and when we come back I asked the county jailors to give me a while with the captives, which they did, so long as I disarmed myself first of any weapons.

None of the Cheyenne paid me any mind when I entered the cell, all of them continuing to stare ahead, each cocooned in a dirty blanket. They wore no feathers or other ornamentation, and none of them looked young. People of a different race from your own, whatever you are, tend to resemble one another, as everyone knows and resents when it applies to his own type, but then when you live amongst the others they become immediately as distinguishable as anybody you ever knowed—only to get blurred again after you move out. I say this because it was true of me as well. When we picked up these men at Leavenworth, I had not recognized any of them, which despite my intimate association with the Cheyenne was not unusual, for mostly Old Lodge Skins’s band roamed around on its own, for reasons I give earlier, and were not that close to any other, except for a few special occasions such as at Black Kettle’s village on the Washita and then again at the Greasy Grass, attacked by Custer both times. And in a big gathering of thousands you wouldn’t get to know a lot of individuals any more than you would if visiting St. Louis or Chicago.

But now when I come into that jail cell and looked down at Wild Hog, I suddenly saw what I had not seen earlier: I thought I could recognize him as one of the boys I had been raised with as a child. We had played together with kid-sized bows and arrows and little toy horses made of wood or clay, and with others we had sat around Old Lodge Skins as he told us the educational stories of great Cheyenne exploits of the past, like the one concerning Little Man, from whose name my own was taken after I had done well in a horse-raiding expedition against the Crow. But two things puzzled me, the first of which was if I knowed him as a young kid, where had he been since then? For I rejoined the band a couple times later on, was with them at the Washita, yet could not recall seeing Wild Hog. Not to mention if we was boys together, how come he now looked so old, whereas I thought of myself as still quite youthful. I put in that last so you can get a laugh out of it. I was considered fairly old for the time myself, being well into the second half of my thirties, with only a year or so left if I was to be as imprudent as Wild Bill and play cards with my back to the door.

I’ll tell you about dealing with Indians: in some things it’s best to be as direct as possible, like if you’re hungry or cold or have to make water or any natural thing, you just say so. Courtesy does not demand otherwise. But with certain matters, for example time, you don’t just talk freely about it even with family members and intimates, for that can be rude. In trying to figure out why this is true I come up with the idea that time belongs to everybody and everything, and nobody and nothing can lay claim to any part of it exclusively, so if you talk about the past as though there was just one version of it that everybody agrees on, you might be seen as stealing the spirit of others, something which the Cheyenne always had a taboo against. You could shoot a man and while he lay dying rip off his scalp, but if you felt sorry for him under them conditions, you was trying to steal his spirit as well, and that was out of order.

So whether or not Wild Hog was the grown version of the boy I had knowed, I sure didn’t make the suggestion to him. Instead I squatted down and unwrapped the sugarloaf from the piece of paper around it and presented it to him. I didn’t say it was for everybody, for that too would of been discourteous. Indians instinctively shared everything they ever got, with the exception of whiskey.

He took the gift, but did not look at either it or me.