Return of Little Big Man (36 page)

Having fallen for her on just that glimpse, scoff if you want, I waited till she left and then went to ask Cody whose daughter she was, and I tell you I wasn’t uneasy in so doing, given the clear conscience of my feeling.

But he was busy at the time, going over the schedule with Burke, so I couldn’t ask him till later and by that time, what with his money worries and all, he couldn’t recall much about her except she was a performer with the Sells Brothers circus, which was also appearing locally and also suffering from the weather and about to leave town. I was disappointed to hear that, given the general reputation of females involved in entertainment in that time, which my experience with Dora Hand hadn’t gone to disprove, so with the idea that her schoolgirl appearance and demeanor was intended to deceive, and likely she was one of them lady acrobats wearing indecent tights that outlined the limbs, I dropped the matter from my mind.

As it happened Buffalo Bill didn’t go home but instead took the Wild West upriver to Louisville, Kentucky, towards the end of April, and one day early in the engagement he called most of the company together in front of his tent and by the hand he brings forward the pretty girl I seen in New Orleans, and for a minute I thought what was the Wild West coming to, was we doing such bad business we had to hire a girlie act?

“Little Missie here is joining us,” Cody says. “She’ll be the only white woman with our company, and I want you boys to welcome and protect her.”

Standing next to me was another newcomer to the show—at least I assume he was for I never seen him before—a good-looking fellow of the middle height, with short, neat hair and a well-trimmed mustache, and I says to him out of the corner of my mouth, “She looks like a real velocipede,” which was what you might say in them days to mean quite lively.

And he says, “Sure if she’s not my wife, little man, and I’ll kick your arse.”

I had put my foot in it for fair, for he turned out to be an Irishman named Frank Butler, a sharpshooter of reputation, and this little wife of his was even better though nobody knew at the time that she was just about the best as ever held a firearm, man or woman. Of course I’m talking about Annie Oakley.

I sincerely apologized, explaining I had meant nothing immoral by the word, which in fact I wasn’t even sure of the meaning anyway, and thereupon begun a friendship with Frank that lasted all the while we three was with the Wild West, which meant I was Annie’s friend as well, for them two was close as could be, Frank being a rare fellow for that day or maybe any other in that he give up his own career to manage his wife’s after recognizing her greater talent. And I’ll say further that I kept my crush on Annie, who was actually about twenty-five at this point, but even when you knew that, she seemed like one of them young girls whose unstained character you wanted to protect from the ugly traffic of the world as long as possible. In fact there was little about harsh reality that Annie didn’t know from the age of nine or ten, when to take the strain of supporting a half-dozen other kids off her widowed mother, she was farmed out to a married couple what managed a poorhouse and insane asylum in that part of Ohio, and this pair put her at hard labor all day long. So she finally run back home, got her Pa’s old rifle, and subsequently become the provider of meat to her own family, killing so much small game she sold the excess to hotels and restaurants in the region.

Now with the Wild West the Butlers had their own private tent, which in fact was their only residence at this point, so Annie made it homey as possible, with a nice carpet on the ground and proper furniture, including the rocking chair where she sat between shows, doing fancy embroidery or working on her costumes, of which she made all by hand. Frank wrote more of that poetry of which I give a sample earlier, not all of it romantic, some being what I guess could be called moral instruction, like the one entitled “What the Little Bird Said”:

Life is like a game of cards

In which we pass our stand.

Sometimes the stake is a true heart,

Ofttime it’s but a hand.

Sometimes we take in the trick

Which we should have passed,

But if you play your cards for all they’re worth

You’re bound to win at last.

But in case you might think him a henpecked sissy, I should say Frank Butler was a fine enough shot to hold his own with the best, and sometimes he’d compete in shooting contests, apart from the show, keeping his aim keen, but his best talent of all was as a shrewd businessman, a much rarer gift in the world of entertainment than marksmanship. Not only did he set up profitable deals for Annie, both with Cody and in other public and private appearances in between seasons when the Wild West was shut down, but Frank was also a representative for several companies making guns and cartridges. I don’t think Annie ever had to reach into her own pocket to pay for a weapon or a round of ammunition. What weren’t given her gratis by some manufacturer, as an ad for his product, was sent by admirers first in this country, then all over the world, and the presents included valuable jewelry, silver services, rare china and crystal, and she also got medals everyplace she went.

There wasn’t many who was not in love with Annie Oakley, so I don’t feel funny about including myself with the majority for once and not joining the few who detracted, usually with nothing more forceful than that she was stingy. I’d call it prudent. The fact was everybody looked parsimonious around Bill Cody, who was a big spender even before he had much money, so if she filled her little pitcher with lemonade from the gallon-sized one in his tent, you can be sure he didn’t complain, especially since he kept that fluid on hand only to give to child visitors and maybe to make Nate Salsbury believe it was what he himself was drinking. Though I’ll say again, Cody never missed a performance owing to drink, nor did it seem to affect his aim. He might not of been on Annie’s level, but there wasn’t nobody better at shooting from horseback.

What did Annie do that was so special? Well, she would trip into the arena like a girl returning home from Sunday school, and then as if only just becoming aware there was people watching, shyly curtsy and wave and blow a kiss to all, wearing her wide-brimmed hat with a single silver star on the edge of the upturned brim, and a fringed dress and matching leggings that looked like buckskin but wasn’t, Annie considering leather too hot to perform in in summer.

So there she was, a little, frail, helpless figure all alone in the middle of the arena big enough for the simulated buffalo hunts and Indian attacks to follow, and then she’d lift her rifle and begin to shoot, the first noises of which, extra-loud due to bouncing off the grandstand, would always startle the female spectators, who might scream at first, adding to the dramatics of the occasion, but gradually get used to the rapid fire from then on.

What would she shoot? Glass balls, some filled with red-white-and-blue feathers or confetti, and clay pigeons hurled into the air by spring-powered traps operated by Frank. She could bust five balls, launched simultaneously, before any reached the ground. She would wait till the traps sent up two clay pigeons, then jump over a table, grabbing her gun off the top, and fire two shots busting both birds in the air. At times she tied her skirt at the knees, took off her hat, stood on her head, and, upside down, hit everything she aimed at. She shot a cigarette out of Frank’s mouth, and a dime held between his fingers at a range of thirty feet. She would hit targets behind her, holding a mirror in one hand and with the other firing the gun over her shoulder and, sighting on the thin edge, slice a playing card in two.

Then, when her act was over, she would take a bow, blow a kiss, and make a cute little kick, a finale which become as famous as her shooting.

But the biggest crowd-pleaser, though frankly I had a hard time watching it, was when she shot an apple off the head of her little poodle named George, and he would catch one of the burst slices in his mouth and eat it. I always feared a big horsefly, of which there was always plenty around due to our livestock, would buzz around when this act was in progress and George might snap at it just as Annie squeezed the trigger. The fact is this never happened, George staying ever still as a dog made of china. But then Annie’s reflexes was so fast she might of gotten off a safe shot even if he moved.

Remember Cody’s suggestion I train old Pard to do tricks? Damn if I wanted to try that one. I sure never took Pard along when I went to the Butlers’ tent for a cup of tea. Just as I feared the Indians might eat him, I suspected he might of gotten the same idea about little George!

Annie was the biggest single attraction of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, which by the way she was wont to call “B.B.W.W.,” with the possible exception of Cody himself, and the poster for the show, plastered all over every city we played, usually featured her stanch little person, wasp-waisted and bosom covered with medals, “The Peerless Lady Wing and Rifle Shot,” but she was to get an even better title by which she has been remembered ever since. And this come about as follows.

I ain’t spoken about the Indians with the show since bringing Wolf Coming Out and the other Cheyenne to it, but my bunch done fine that season, enjoying the buffalo hunt and shooting at the settler’s cabin and the Deadwood stage even if the shots was blanks, and they never got tired of producing the bloodthirsty yells Cody encouraged, which in my experience was louder than what you heard in real fights and also a lot more gunpowder was burned in just one show than in any historical battle, for the redskins never had that many cartridges to burn, whereas the Wild West was better supplied than the U.S. Army, and it was fun for the Indians to be able to fire at whites and get paid and applauded for it. And if you think they might of been upset by having to lose every battle when Buffalo Bill showed up, they was not, for though going so much by dreams and visions and “medicine” like they did, Indians was at the same time rock-bottom realists: having lost the whole country in fact, they wasn’t bothered by getting whipped in make-believe fights, but more important was the consideration that Buffalo Bill was paying them and supplying their meat, which by the way had to be beef at every meal unless one of the show buffalo died by accident, and Cody understood such details. I never knowed any other white person who never having lived with Indians got on so well with them as him, and I figure it was some of the same qualities that made him so good a showman that appealed to them: the taste for display and color and noise, and his personal style of being the center of attention without lowering the value of them around him, which was the manner of an Indian chief. So with real admiration and pride Bill could promote Annie’s career without any worry it would diminish his own.

Nevertheless it was during that last disappointing engagement at the end of the season that Wolf Coming Out told me him and his bunch wanted to return home.

I made the mistake of thinking their decision had to do with the show. “It will stop raining sometime,” I says. “Anyway, we’ll be moving north before long and the Wild West will get back to normal.”

“We have to return for spring planting,” Wolf told me.

“I am surprised to hear you talk like a farmer.”

“That’s one of the things I learned at that very fine school,” says he. “It’s hard work and I don’t like it very much, but it is what I ought to do. Maybe I will come back some other time if you ask me, but now I have to go and do the plowing. The agents doesn’t want the women to perform that sort of work, because whites think women should be idle.”

“The idea is that women are smaller and not as strong,” I pointed out, “so men should do the heavier tasks.”

He raised his chin defiantly. I should mention this was not long before a performance and he was wearing the red-and-yellow facial war paint for the show, which Cody had them apply extra-gaudy so it could be seen clear from the grandstand. “The women of the Human Beings are stronger than most American men.”

You can see how he turned the point I was making. It wasn’t easy to argue with an Indian. So I just noted that “Cody says red men are Americans now too.”

“I will call myself American when more Americans than Cody call me one.” Wolf made two words of
Co-dee.
Indians tended to complicate the simplest white names, so you could see why they wouldn’t even try to say longer ones like Winchester and Smith and Wesson. Usually even the non-Sioux called Cody by the Lakota term
Pahaska,
meaning Long Hair, for to an Indian a name always had to have a personal reference to the individual holding it, which is why there couldn’t ever be, say, a Bad Bear, Jr. If Cody’s Sioux name sounds familiar, it might be because Custer was also called Long Hair, though as I’ve said earlier he was known to the Crow, who liked him but not so much they stayed to die with him at the Greasy Grass, as Son of the Morning Star.

“I will call you an American if you want,” I says.

He frowned under them glaring slashes of color, which was especially bright in that it was not homemade Cheyenne stuff but rather theatrical greasepaint. “Do you have to be American to be white?”

He had asked me a question nobody but an Indian would of thought of, I swear. If you want to know what I consider most valuable of all the things I learned from the Cheyenne, beyond the practical matters like riding, hunting, et cetera, I’d have to say how to look at life from other angles than the obvious.

“No,” I says. “There are all kinds of white people on the earth, many different tribes from the Americans. In fact, there was no American tribe in the beginning. It was not created by the Everywhere Spirit but by people, as a big family which everybody can join and get a new start, no matter who he is, what he has, or where he came from.” I never waited for him to point out the exceptions to this, at least as it was practiced, but added, “It is a fine dream, and as with all such it is not exactly like life, else there would have been no reason for a dream. But you are right if you think it is a dream of white people and applied first to their own kind.”