Return of Little Big Man (34 page)

More reliable marksmen, and easier to get along with, was a man name of Captain Bogardus and his four sons, and Cody himself was a fine shot from horseback, which even if you never been mounted you can imagine as an achievement, hitting 75 out of 100 glass balls at twenty yards while at the gallop. There have been some who discounted this, as well as the other feats of exhibition shooting in them shows, for loose shot and not solid bullets was used even in the rifle and pistols. Well, they started with lead slugs, until they busted windows half a mile away and nearly plugged a few citizens, so from then on used a half load of powder and a quarter ounce of Number 71/2 shot, in case you want to try it, but my advice is don’t do it at home, not even with a BB gun, for you’re likely to put an eye out with it sooner or later.

Then Cody had some bad personal fortune. We was at Indianapolis at the time. In the buffalo herd, which at every show was chased around a fenced enclosure, individual animals getting roped and not killed, was one big bull who nobody even tried to put a lariat on, him being so strong and mean to begin with and getting meaner, having at every performance to get run around like that. But never letting anything go untried, Cody asks the leading rider, Buck Taylor, billed as “King of the Cowboys” and an enormous fellow six foot five or six, to not only rope and throw this big devil but climb on and ride him!

“Hell, with that,” Buck said, meaning the riding, but him and Jim Lawson got ropes on the bull, who was called Monarch, and managed to throw it.

Now I could repeat for almost every episode that Buffalo Bill produced more hot air than anyone I knowed, but he also really done a lot of things that took more nerve than was common or even sensible.

He now comes over to where Monarch is down but struggling so hard to get free that it was all Buck and Jim could do to hold onto the ropes. As a joke Cody once again asked Taylor to climb on, for he liked to kid him, but then he admitted that not even Jim Bullock, the lead steer-rider with the show, would come near old Monarch.

“So,” says Buffalo Bill, “I guess that leaves only me.” And don’t you know, he got on the back of that enraged animal, which when allowed up, the ropes still trailing from it, took maybe three steps, then bucked with all the force of its massive, hairy body, big brute head lowered to the ground, snorting through wide-open nostrils and beady eyed, and Cody flew high into the air and come down so hard he didn’t breathe for a spell nor could talk at all.

The audience give him a mighty cheer, believing this a part of the spectacle, and the other performers, including the Indians, had been prepared by Bill himself to go on with the show no matter what happened, so while he was being taken to the hospital the redskin attack on the settler’s cabin proceeded, the only difference from the usual being that Cody didn’t lead the rescuers, for he had no stand-in. How could there be a substitute for Buffalo Bill?

He stayed in the hospital a couple of weeks and joined us in Chicago, fully recovered from the stunt, but then something a lot worse occurred. He had to hurry back to the Nebraska home where he spent so little time, on account of the sickness of one of his children he saw so seldom, namely little Orra, only eleven. Now while living winters at the ranch I had hardly seen his missus or the little daughters, so far did his wife Louisa, called by him Lulu, keep aloof from anybody or -thing associated with Bill’s career, believing it beneath her, and she might of been right about that, but it did not bring them closer. And now little Orra died, though at least he was there for that sad event and not too late as with the little son who had passed away previously.

Cody’s absence from the show meant I never had anything to do, for I had still been providing his drinks, either in his tent or his private railroad car. By the way, Pard was still with me, and we traveled, him and me, in a little section I walled off at the end of one of the cars that carried the livestock, in this case horses, which stank less and wasn’t so noisy as the steers and buffalo. I stayed apart because I didn’t want them white performers to complain about him, and I didn’t want to go near the Indians on account of my fear they might eat him.

Speaking of the Indians with what since Carver’s departure had been called Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, I have so far mentioned only the Pawnee of Major Frank North’s bunch, who I avoided for reasons stated, but in fact Cody had managed to get ahold of a small contingent of Sioux as well, and like the Cheyenne they was historically hostile to the Pawnee and had always fought against that tribe. Yet with the Wild West the two groups camped peaceably side by side at each of our stops. This encampment was considered part of the show, and the public came and watched them, the Indians actually living in those tepees, cooking their meals on outside fires, and once in a while babies would be born in the traditional redskin fashion and not in a hospital and carried on their mothers’ backs while being called “papooses” by white visitors.

I got to know a young fellow name of Gordon Lillie, then an interpreter for the Wild West, as he had worked at the Pawnee reservation in Indian Territory, and he told me the two tribal groups while feeling a natural rivalry in this situation, like baseball teams, tolerated each other and never come close to quarreling in his observation. Which caused me to reflect that even I tended sometimes to underrate the red man. He was getting plenty of grub here, a decent wage for the time, and admiration from the white public merely by pretending to be who he once had been, in the fake attacks on stagecoaches and settlers, and after the performance, being who he really was, a person with a wife and family and a portable home—two more things than me. He didn’t have no more territory to contest over, and no horses to steal or be stolen, so there wasn’t no reason for fighting.

Lillie by the way later on took the name of Pawnee Bill and for a while had a traveling show of his own.

When the Wild West closed its tour at Omaha that fall, I told Cody of my old connection with the Cheyenne and proposed to go up to their reservation and hire a bunch for the season to open next spring, and he says sure, the more the merrier, which reaction was typical of the man. We was back at the ranch in North Platte, along with a big bunch of others from the show, even an Indian or two, and Cody, full of drink and wearing a battered plug hat he had borrowed from somebody, was telling the stories for which he was noted but which, oddly enough, in various examples wasn’t as remarkable as some of his true adventures, as I learned only in later years when many of the Army officers who he had scouted for wrote or spoke of exploits of his he rarely or never mentioned and in fact called him modest. My own opinions changed as I knowed him better, and at any given point here I am trying to tell you how I felt at the time.

In my earliest impressions, based on hearsay, I believed him just a blowhard. I had been wrong. If he were not the inventor of a new style, then he perfected it, and of course by now it is a pretty standard mix in which the true and the false are so intimately intertwined as probably never to be told apart, and anybody tries to figure them out will get thrown so off balance as to fear for his reason. I expected it’s only owing to this state of affairs that anybody ever gets elected to public office in this country.

S
O TOWARDS THE END
of that winter I traveled up to Montana Territory, and I recruited a group of Cheyenne, of which most was men but some was women, all the latter married and with children, and brung them down to St. Louis, where the Wild West opened its second season.

Now, thinking about Buffalo Bill Cody and his habit of presenting the brightest side of matters, and also with regard to the people who still live up there today, I ain’t going into detail about the Tongue River reservation, for while no doubt it was an improvement over where the Northern Cheyenne had first been sent down to the Nations, Indian Territory, it was not the place they would of been living permanently if they had my right to live anywhere I wanted.

I wasn’t overwhelmed by the crowds of Indians who wanted to go off to parts unknown and join some kind of entertainment put on by the people who had slaughtered so many Cheyenne and taken away their land.

I tried to explain these weren’t the same white people who done that, but I was hampered in this by my own conscience, for in fact the two main Indians Cody was credited with personally killing during his days as an Army scout, Tall Bull and Yellow Hand,
was
both of them Cheyenne, so the best I could come up with was the bury-the-hatchet argument, and them Sioux had come with the show after all, not to mention the Pawnee: why should both their friends and their enemies be profiting when they wasn’t? But they answered easily enough that they was too polite to comment on the taste of their friends and allies, but as to a miserable tribe like the Pawnee it could be said anything done by such would turn the stomach of a Human Being.

Now I had went to a certain amount of effort in getting there, for with Cody’s help I had to obtain the Government agent’s okay to talk to these people at all, and it had first to be confirmed by Washington, and if you expected Indians to listen to you, you did well to bring them presents of a decent quality, for they had long since been too advanced to accept a handful of glass beads, so I invested in bolts of nice cloth and foods of the sort I knowed they liked, some of which, sugar and coffee and bacon and such, they was supposed to be issued by the Government but the rations was often short owing to the dishonesties all along the line of distribution.

I don’t want to complain, for this was my own idea, but the point is I wasn’t getting far with the people who I was trying to lend a hand to, and I might of ended up with the bitterness so often felt by the rejected do-gooder had I not got unexpected assistance.

First I ought to say that amongst the Indians gathered in the area near the agent’s office where I had parked the wagon full of presents and give them out, I didn’t recognize a single soul from either my old days with the tribe or from that little band of prisoners down in Kansas, Wild Hog’s bunch, who had been sent up here after the charges against them was dropped, but then the last-named had not taken to me much even when I helped them out and maybe to see me now would only remind them of a rotten time and they stayed away. And my old friends was probably dead.

But just as I was about ready to quit and go back emptyhanded to Buffalo Bill, having proved my sole talent was in filling a glass from a bottle, who should make his appearance as a latecomer, hailing me with warm feeling, but that young fellow from the Indian school run by the Major and Amanda Teasdale, Wolf Coming Out, who if you recall I had got out of the Kiowa girl’s bed in the females’ dormitory but was caught myself in what looked like compromising circumstances.

I clumb down from the wagon and shook his hand and said I was sorry all the presents had been handed out.

“I’m glad to see you,” said Wolf. He was a few years older and his hair had growed long again. He was wearing the mostly white clothes with some Indian touches of them that lived on the reservations, moccasins and beaded vest over a blue cloth shirt and pants of wool. “Nobody would tell me,” he went on, “where you went when you left the school.”

“Well, that’s past now,” I says, not wanting to remind him, and in fact myself either, of an embarrassing incident. “How are things at the school? Are you back home on vacation?”

“I was thrown out and sent back,” Wolf says with a grin of apparent approval. “It took me a while to tell Gold Leaf that I was the one who caused the trouble, because he speaks only English. He can’t even talk in the signs. It was too bad you left, because everything was all right after that, and you could have stayed.”

“How could it be all right if you were expelled?” I asked, though knowing just what he meant: he was real happy to leave a place he never liked. But his response was not as simple as I expected. You always had to allow for that with an Indian. He seldom approached things like a white man, but not because of stupidity or ignorance as such. He was just answering another question than the one you thought you had asked.

“Because I had learned enough by then,” says he, serious now. “It’s an excellent school, and Gold Leaf is probably the smartest white person in the country, along with your woman, of course.”

“My woman?”

“Heovo-vese.”

“Yellow Hair wasn’t my woman!”

Now he was smiling broadly. “Oho, she was Gold Leaf’s woman? Is that why you ran off? He was going to shoot you?”

“She wasn’t anybody’s woman.” And then, since he was joking with me, I kidded him about the white man’s clothes he was wearing, the pants and shirt of cloth, and right away I regretted having done so.

“When the leather clothing wears out, we can’t replace it nowadays,” he said. “There isn’t much game around here any more.”

By the way, the rest of the Cheyenne, most of them also dressed in white style, gingham dresses on the women and the men in jeans and that high-crowned style of black felt hat I never seen on anybody but an Indian, had drifted away by now, having gotten the presents and politely listened to my pitch, but Wolf had not yet heard it, so I went through it again. “The food is plentiful, and it is of excellent quality, with lots of meat. Cody provides all the clothing, and it’s buckskin, with authentic decorations of the tribe. The women will be given the materials they need to make it, or he’ll have it done by people who work for him making costumes. Everything is provided, including the horses and guns, and Cody also pays twenty-five dollars a month to each warrior. If he is married and wants to bring his wife and family along, they get an additional fifteen dollars every moon.”

“I am glad to hear the men get paid more than the women,” Wolf says. “Whites too often are run by their women, as in the case of Yellow Hair at the school and the other female teachers.”

“The reason here,” I says, “is the warriors perform in the show, attacking stagecoaches and white settlements.”