Return of Little Big Man (35 page)

Wolf frowns and asks seriously, “Where does this man find the white people willing to get hurt or even die to entertain others?”

Now, nobody was more familiar with Indian ways than me but I was rusty. I begged his pardon for neglecting to say all these fights was fakes, with blank cartridges, and then I had to explain what a blank was, for he had never heard of ammunition without bullets, which couldn’t do nothing but make noise. Indians rarely had enough cartridges, and of course couldn’t manufacture none, so they was careful of what they possessed, often using arrows at short range, to save their bullets for the long.

“I’m not married,” Wolf says next.

I figured he was thinking about that extra fifteen dollars he would not get as a single man, and I says, “I’ll offer you thirty-five dollars a month for yourself, if you can talk a group of Human Beings into coming with the show.” And I threw in an appeal to his vanity. “I noticed at the school that you were a natural leader.”

He nodded solemnly. “That is true, but only among those of my own age and younger. The older men might not be willing to follow someone who has never been in battle.” He showed me a sensitive look. “My parents wouldn’t let me fight at the Goat River. It is not true as some whites have said, I understand, that so-called suicide boys went to the battlefield to distract the attention of the soldiers so our men could kill them more easily. The Americans were easy enough to kill as it was: they were all drunk. I went over there only when they were all dead. Having been to that very fine school and learned many things, I now know what money is, of course, but I did not in those days and neither did the rest of us, and the money belonging to the dead soldiers was blowing all over the field. Some of the girls used it to make dolls’ dresses.”

“Greasy Grass” as I have said was what the Little Bighorn was usually called by the Indians, for that was mostly Sioux territory and the name was in the Lakota language, but the Cheyenne had previously known it as the Goat, and though young, Wolf had become a man of tradition.

“I didn’t know you were there.” I decided for the moment anyhow to continue to be silent as to my own personal experience.

“Only as a child. But many of the grownups were as ignorant as we children. A warrior named Rising Sun took a thick gold medal from a soldier’s dead body. It was at the end of a chain and made a ticking sound, so he hung it around his own neck. But when the ticking stopped, next morning, he believed its medicine was good only for white men and bad for a Human Being, and he threw it into the river.” Wolf’s teeth glistened in his dusky face, his color having darkened now he was mostly outdoors. “If I had been to school at the time I could have told him it was a watch. Gold Leaf had one just like it.”

Well, after some more talk, and a meal prepared by his relatives from the gift eats I had brung—he lived with them in a tepee made of shabby old canvas on account of buffalo hide was scarce, and they was waiting for a government shipment of lumber to build a shack, and they had a mean patch of land on which to grow crops when and if the seed arrived—after eating and then of course smoking a pipe on the matter, Wolf collected a little bunch of nine fellows, six of which was married and brung their wives and some little kids, including babes in arms, and after the necessary permissions had been granted, with telegrams back and forth to Cody and him to his pals in the Government, we made our way down to St. Louis by steamboat and railroad, which none of them except Wolf had ever rode on, so he could confirm his superior position, and let me say though I have made clear my high regard for Indians, they was altogether human in such things as envy and self-interest.

Now don’t think Pard was forgotten. He stayed on at Cody’s ranch in Nebraska while I went up to Montana. Buffalo Bill liked him, and he got on all right with the hired hands and the other dogs on the property. I didn’t take him with me this time, for I was concerned the Cheyenne might be hungry for their old delicacy.

When we reached St. Louis and I met up with Pard, who Cody had brung along with him, I took the precaution of asking Wolf Coming Out to keep himself and the other Human Beings from licking their lips when seeing my four-footed pal if I wasn’t always there to protect him.

To which Wolf says I needn’t fear for the animal, because his uncle once had a dream he would die if he ate dog and, having done so anyway, was killed next day by a bolt of lightning, after which everybody in their band regarded that sort of meat as bad medicine. “Besides,” he says, “that dog of yours is too old to eat.” I took some comfort in that fact: it was true that their preference was for puppy-dog soup.

In the encampment at the show grounds, the Cheyenne set up the tepees Cody provided, next to the lodges of their pals the Sioux, and it was only then that I learned Wolf could talk Lakota. It seems his aunt on his Ma’s side was the wife of an Ogallala, like more than one Human Being woman, intermarriage being one of the practices that caught on after the first one or two done it, and it kept going. At the Greasy Grass the two camps was adjoining. Despite this longstanding connection, the two languages was totally different from each other, and unless an individual learned the other fellow’s tongue they had to converse in the signs. I never knowed till I got over to Europe that pretty much the same thing was true of the French and the Germans, but then they wasn’t all that close friends.

So I asks Wolf if he would translate if I ever wanted to talk to the Lakota, and he says sure, but maybe I’d want him to learn me the lingo and then I could practice it with the Sioux contingent.

“Oh,” says I, needling him, “go to school as you did? I just hope I can be as good a student.”

“You have to be as smart as I to learn that much,” says he, and I swear he was altogether serious, “but whatever you learn will be worthwhile.”

I thought it would of been nice for the Major to know what a high opinion Wolf held regarding the institution, but I was embarrassed at not being able to use good enough English to write him in, and not so much for his sake as if he showed it to Amanda.

Now having broke up with Doc Carver, who immediately started a rival show, Cody went into partnership with a fellow name of Nate Salsbury, who had been a stage actor for a long time, but with the Wild West he handled the business end and never performed any more though I bet he would of liked to be a star like Cody, but there wasn’t ever no one else in existence, then, before, or since, better at what he did than Buffalo Bill.

The first thing Salsbury done was to get a promise from Cody to stop excess drinking. In view of the job I had been hired for, and maybe to his mind still held in addition to being interpreter for the Cheyenne, I guess it made sense to read me the letter he had wrote to Nate when they signed the deal.

I had to keep a straight face when he promised not to drink no more while they was partners other than the “two or three” he would take to “brace on, today.” Now that could be taken two ways, but maybe he wasn’t being devious but just trying to fool himself as well with a vow that, the way I read it, said he could take three drinks a day without specifying how big they could be, and in fact this promise become part of the Cody legend in later years, with just that supposed limit at the heart of it: you had people saying he swallowed three beer buckets of whiskey every twenty-four hours, and next it become barrels. All I can honestly say is I henceforward never saw him drink no more, and—I guess you can see this coming—no less.

“Lucky I have this other job now,” I told him.

“Oh, we’d have found something else for you to do,” he says. Cody was loyal to the people around him, his employees usually becoming his personal cronies, who was closer to him than his real family. “Tell me this, Jack. Do those Cheyennes of yours carry a grudge because I killed some of their people in the past?”

“They don’t even know you did it.” It might of been my imagination but I thought he looked a little disappointed.

“Say, Jack,” says he, “that’s a fine dog you have. While he stayed with us at the Welcome Wigwam I noticed he was a very bright animal. Have you taught him any tricks?” I allowed as how I never thought of it. “Well,” Cody goes on, “you might want to consider the matter. People like trained dogs, especially the children, and such a feature would be quite edifying, demonstrating the benevolent domination of the higher type of mentality, as in the human, over that of the beast, to the betterment of both.”

I says I would think about it, but whether I could get Pard to do it was another thing, for though I never knowed how old he actually was, he was getting a bit grizzled under his pointy chin, and I figured it had been a while since he was a candidate for learning new tricks.

With this second season the show seemed to be doing better due to Nate Salsbury’s business sense, but a couple misfortunes happened.

Major Frank North, Cody’s old friend from Cheyenne-fighting days, was throwed from his horse when a saddle girth busted during a performance at Hartford in Connecticut, and he got badly trampled. He never did fully recover, and died the following year.

The next trouble was only temporary, but highly inconvenient and not without expensive damage. We had give well-attended performances in the major cities of the East, including even New York, where I hadn’t ever been before and on this occasion never saw anything of beyond the Polo Grounds where we was camped, because like most places we went that season it was but for one day after all the effort in getting there and setting up. I ought to mention how big the Wild West was getting, with the troupe of cowboys, all the Indians, as well as now a bunch of Mexican
vaqueros,
the buffalo herd, horses, mules, and donkeys by the hundreds, the Deadwood stagecoach and other wheeled vehicles, the collapsible scenery including the settler’s cabin that was attacked by the Indians at every performance and canvas backdrops of painted mountains, crates of ammunition, extra weapons, costumes, saddles, horseshoes, ropes, and non-perishable foods, the fresh having to be purchased wherever we stopped. It was a traveling town in every sense of the word.

Well, this whole shebang got dumped into the Mississippi River that winter, when Cody and Salsbury decided to keep the show going during the months it would usually be closed, performing at Southern places where the weather was warm enough, so we all loaded onto a steamboat at Cincinnati, the name of which always reminded me uncomfortably of Mrs. Agnes Lake Thatcher Hickok and the money of Wild Bill’s I lost, but I didn’t have time to look her up right then.

We went down the Ohio River, joining the Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois, stopping at various places on the route to New Orleans, but the attendances was disappointing, and then our boat slammed into another at Rodney Landing, Mississippi, and sank, taking with it a lot of livestock, much of our wheeled equipment except for the Deadwood stage, and a deal of other stuff, but fortunately no human life, and not Pard, who I never saw swim before but who did a real good job with churning paws. As is obvious, I too made it to shore.

Soon as we all got in and was counted, Cody found the nearest telegraph and sent Nate Salsbury, in Denver at the moment, a wire as follows:
OUTFIT AT BOTTOM OF RIVER PLEASE ADVISE.
And when Nate telegraphed back,
GO N ORLEANS REORGANIZE
, why that’s just what Buffalo Bill did in eight days, getting hold of another herd of buffalo, more wagons and all, and opening when it had been announced for weeks earlier—and then it rained in the Crescent City for the next forty-four days straight, keeping most people away, and the show was in the red sixty-some thousand dollars by winter’s end. Cody advised Salsbury he had a mind to go home and,
for a change,
get drunk.

Though Buffalo Bill wouldn’t call off a performance if three tickets was sold, we had some time on our hands and New Orleans weren’t a place without interest, with its mix of all kinds of people speaking different lingos including not only what was supposed to be proper French but a version known locally as Coonass, which hadn’t no meaning of colored, for the black folk talked what they called Gombo Zerbes, combining West Indian and African palavers with everything else, and they had also concocted a tasty stew of the same name, which might burn your mouth if you had only previously used salt on your steak, though speaking for myself I had ate a meal or two in the better eateries of Tombstone like the Maison Doree and swallowed stuff with foreign names which underneath it all was usually proved to be the familiar meat and potatoes, but the New Orleans fodder was really different, maybe including even bugs and lizards and so on, but I reckon you could get a taste for it in time. The sporting houses was awful fancy too and offered special features unavailable in the cattle and mining camps—or so I was told by acquaintances.

So far as I was personally concerned, I had got another of my crushes on a respectable female, though you might well ask why I was still wasting my time. All I can say is I was only doing what came natural to me, though in this case you might question what was natural about a man now forty-four being attracted to a girl who looked fourteen, with a fringe over her forehead and long wavy brown hair back of her ears and falling down over her shoulders, and not quite as tall as me, and I will hasten to tell you it was mostly a fatherly feeling, protective and not romantic, she being just the kind of pretty little thing any man would be proud to take care of and maybe write about as follows:

She’s a loving little fairy

You’d fall in love to see her.

Her presence would remind you

Of an angel in the skies.

And you bet I love this little girl

With the rain drops in her eyes.

Now, I sure could never write such fine poetry myself, and in a minute I’ll tell you who did, but at the first time I ever saw this pretty gal we was still in N.O. camped out beyond Audubon Park in the rain and she was entering Cody’s tent accompanied by several men, among them our press agent John Burke, a big heavy fellow also known as Major or Arizona John, for most everybody around Cody had to have a title, nickname, or both, Buffalo Bill even naming each of his rifles.