Return of Little Big Man (39 page)

I peered and asked, “Is that a little American flag?”

“Yes,” said he.

“Does that mean you are showing you’re an American?”

“It means I have fought against the American Army,” says he. As I mentioned, he always had his own original slant on everything.

Me and him shook hands. I had become real fond of Sitting Bull, who reminded me a lot of Old Lodge Skins, the Cheyenne chief in whose band I was reared in my formative years. I says, “I hope this is not the last time we see each other.”

“You are always welcome at my house,” Sitting Bull says. “You know where it is.” Then his dusky face, lined as it was to begin with, crinkles up like the terrain of the Badlands. It was the biggest smile I ever seen on him. “Maybe by the time you come to visit, you will have learned to speak good Lakota and not have to fill in with Shyela and the signs.”

How do you like that? I actually begun to think I was perfectly fluent in Sioux, and though I was aware of occasionally using Cheyenne words, I didn’t even realize I was also resorting to sign language, the use of which I guess was instinctive when trying to speak in a tongue I wasn’t sure of, as in this case, or didn’t know at all, like in the old days when us Human Beings talked to strangers. But I was touched by him pointing this out, which with a white person or maybe even another Indian would of been impolite, but by doing so on saying goodbye here, he was demonstrating a close feeling for me.

Me and Bill Cody had come with the group seeing Sitting Bull off on the train, and riding in a carriage back to the encampment, where all the animals was being readied for shipment to his ranch and the equipment crated for winter storage, Cody says, “I couldn’t keep the Chief against his will, but he’s been the main attraction this season and will be sorely missed. I can get all the Indians I want, but it’s Sitting Bull’s historical value that is hard to replace. He’s the only savage most people know by name. It’s that connection with Custer. What does it matter if the Bull didn’t kill him? People like to think he did, and that brought all of us a nice piece of change this year.”

Warming up on the subject of Custer, he told me about how he once guided the General from Fort Ellsworth to Fort Larned in ’67. I had never mentioned my own association with Custer, either to Cody or, for that matter, Sitting Bull, but for another reason in each case. More than once I had heard the former’s scorn for the now sizable number of fakers claiming to be Last Stand survivors and wanting him to hire them for the Wild West. As for Sitting Bull, I couldn’t of explained to him how though intending to assassinate the General in revenge for the attack at the Washita which killed my Indian wife, I got close enough to knife him but never did.

Buffalo Bill went on to tell me a lengthy but not uninteresting story for them days in which mounts was so important, how him and Custer had a friendly rivalry as to which was the better animal, his mouse-colored mule or the General’s horse, and of course the mule’s endurance in rough country had it all over a thoroughbred’s. Custer was supposedly so impressed by this that he wanted Cody to be his chief of scouts.

“But as we know, that never happened,” said Buffalo Bill. “Else he might be alive today—though admittedly that was nine years before the Little Bighorn.”

Now while Cody was talking in this wise, I got one of the best ideas I ever had, but before I could pursue it further we had reached the camp, pulling up in front of the headquarters tent, which was always distinguished by the mounted buffalo head hung over the entrance, and he says come and join him for a drink to mark the end of the season.

So I goes in and there is his partner Nate Salsbury and Arizona John Burke, and Nate scowls when Bill asked me to pour for old times’ sake, on account of Salsbury thought my job was still private bartender. There ain’t much you can do to change the impression others get of you without doing something big to distinguish yourself otherwise, and just interpreting for Sitting Bull had not been enough.

But as it happened—and this ties in with that idea I suddenly got while listening to Cody talk about General Custer—what I had been cooking up for a while now was no less than a plan to put together a show of my own, and I had been saving most of my wages towards that end, rarely leaving our encampment to visit any of the other attractions in the cities where we played. Yessir, this dream had replaced the one of running a dance hall I had entertained throughout the time I was in Dodge and Tombstone. I had long since come to understand that going into business for yourself was the way to succeed in this country, and how all of them big fellows what run things like J. P. Morgan and the rest, or their Daddies, got started. Then if you made a lot of money it would make up for any lack of polish, for if you could offer a better class of woman a life in which she could buy anything she wanted to make her happy, she wouldn’t care if at the beginning you talked real ignorant, picked your teeth with a clasp knife, and so on, because she could teach you how to be a gentleman.

So here’s the particular idea I got now: I would build this show of my own around a reenactment of the fight at the Little Bighorn, and the emphasis would be on the heroic courage of George A. Custer, a positive value rather than the negative fact that him and his men got whipped so bad. But don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t going to present anything that would downgrade the Indians. I have talked often enough about my regard for them, and it was my old childhood friend/foe Younger Bear what saved my hide that day at the Greasy Grass. But the truth remained that what whites would pay money to see was their own kind being massacred by savages, only in the end to have civilized principles come out on top. For the fact that it was the subject of a dramatic exhibition at all, performed in the major cities of the country, meant that though sustaining a momentary defeat, the right side soon won again as usual.

If I say this event was made for show business, I’m talking about a different matter than the actual killing of a lot of young men who had that morning of June 25th, 1876, got up, their lives in front of them, and by the middle of the day was corpses, naked and cut so bad nobody’s Ma would of known him.

Anyway, at this moment I was feeling real good, having them drinks with Buffalo Bill, who I now started to think of as a competitor. True, it was him who give me my start in show business, and like they say I would always be grateful, but a fellow with the real goods had to strike out for himself sooner or later, the way Cody separated from Doc Carver, who had continued with a show of his own. It was also true that no love was lost between Doc and Bill, who had went to court against each other only recently. I didn’t like to think the same might happen in my case, but I had to face the possibility. Successful folks have to put up with a lot of envy from them they surpass.

Well sir, the way I was getting grander and grander in my daydreams seems pretty pathetic at this late date, but there wasn’t much wrong with that idea of mine—except that the preeminent showman of his time had already had it.

Cody hoists his glass and he says, “Gentlemen, I have arrived at the perfect solution to our problem.”

Nate Salsbury, who the drinking hadn’t mellowed on account of he wasn’t doing any, asks sourly, “What problem?”

“Why,” says Buffalo Bill, “the absence of Sitting Bull next season.”

“A stellar attraction,” says Arizona John, who was throwing down a deal of drink himself, “winning favor all over this blessed land of ours, ‘Foe in ’76, Friend in ’85.’” He was quoting the slogan he had used to publicize Sitting Bull’s appearance with the Wild West.

“It came to me while talking with Captain Jack just now,” Colonel Cody goes on. “George Armstrong Custer, you will agree, is a name that rings a bell.”

“A hallowed name,” says Major Burke. “That of a true martyr of the modern age.”

Salsbury, the only one present without a phony military rank, did not experience a rise in mood. “Just tell me what it’s going to cost,” he says, sourer than ever.

“Nothing,” said Cody. “We’ll have all the Indians needed, and the cowboys to play the Seventh Cavalry.”

My heart falling, I says, “You’re gonna depict Custer’s Last Stand, ain’t you?”

“I only wish I had thought of it while Sitting Bull was with us,” says Buffalo Bill. “What a scene that might have provided! The old fellow leading the attack on the soldiers!”

“In all his feathered finery,” Burke chimed in, “brandishing a fearsome tomahawk against the golden-haired General and his flashing saber: truly a battle of the Titans.”

“At first I assumed I would myself play Custer, for the true-life physical resemblance was remarkable. But the young people would not want to see Buffalo Bill the loser in a fight with Indians. Someone else must portray the General, heroically of course. Buck Taylor is the perfect choice.”

This was another example of Cody’s genius as a showman. Disappointed as I was, I had to shake my head in admiring wonderment. Buck Taylor was indeed perfect, being six foot five in height and plenty visible to an audience at the distance at which they sat in the grandstand. He was already with the show, where he specialized in the roundup features—later to be called by a name not yet used, namely, rodeo—bronco busting, roping, steer-throwing, and all, and Burke billed him as “King of the Cowboys,” who though “amiable as a child, has the titanic strength singlehandedly to hurl a steer to the ground by the horns or tail.” Notice how “cowboy” here had lost both its Dodge City sense of a fellow who drove cattle up from Texas and then spent his wages on whiskey and harlots and the Tombstone meaning of outlaw or rustler, and was on its way to becoming what every young American lad wanted to be prior to the age of getting interested in the opposite sex: more than anybody else, Bill Cody was responsible for that.

I tried to salvage something for myself. “That’s a real good idea,” I told him, “but don’t you think somebody ought to go to New York City and ask Mrs. Custer about it, and get her approval? I hear she’s real sensitive on the General’s behalf.” I ought to mention that the Wild West had visited New York a couple of times, but I myself had never yet set foot outside the show grounds. I could of tried to look up Libbie Custer on those occasions, but I didn’t. I was too timid, for I didn’t have no excuse that sounded believable when I tested it on myself. Now I might have one.

As to why I never set foot in the place irrespective of Mrs. Custer, I’ll admit this: I was still bluffed by a town of that size, coming from where I did. I had always thought of myself as smart when it come to the frontier, but considered myself no match for a city slicker when in a big town, especially one so full of foreigners including drunken Irish, though I wouldn’t of wanted to say that to Frank Butler.

Speaking of who, him and Annie arrived at that moment, and Bill tells them about his plans for the big finale at next year’s performances, and then he says, “Captain Jack here has asked me about getting Mrs. Custer’s blessing. Well, my old friend Jack, let me assure you that having sent the gracious lady a written assurance that our exhibition will spare no expense to do credit to her gallant husband and deepen the luster of his glorious reputation as an American soldier and a man, I received her wholehearted sanction.”

“So you don’t need to send no one to see her, I guess.”

Annie in her female way caught the dejection in my voice and, smiling prettily, asks me, “Why, Jack, are you sweet on the lady?”

And Frank says, “Sure, she’s a comely one.” Annie wasn’t ever jealous of him praising other women, stuck on her as he was.

“Why,” said Cody, “we all of us are devoted to this noble widow, Missie, and I’m sure I speak for you as well.” He offered Annie a glass of lemonade, but she refused it, I think because she had heard about Salsbury calling her too stingy to buy her own.

“Colonel,” she said, “there’s nothing I would like more than to meet that great lady.”

“That you will most assuredly do, Missie,” says Buffalo Bill. “She has accepted my invitation to attend our opening performance.”

So I’d finally get a chance at least to look at the lady on whom I’d had a crush for all of them years, much longer than the one I had on Annie, which was soon, by the fact of Frank Butler, converted to brotherly affection. But I had to be realistic and remember that it had been ten years since the only time I laid eyes on her, when she tried to board the
Far West
and ride up the Yellowstone to join her husband just before the Little Bighorn battle, having suffered a dream which foresaw his death, a decade of mourning: she might not still be as she was then, the loveliest woman I had ever seen. You will notice what I was doing here: protecting myself from another disappointment.

Well, that was the end of the season of ’85, and Annie and Frank headed for Ohio, where her kinfolk lived. Cody returned to his ranch at North Platte, and having noplace other to call home and being welcome there, with anyone else who would drink with Buffalo Bill and listen to his stories, me and Pard went along.

N
OW I AIN’T MENTIONED
Pard for a while, but he was still with me and not getting any younger. Fact is, he had turned downright old, as it took me a while to realize, for seeing him all the time, mostly nowadays sleeping in my tent except when I brought in the grub or when he relieved himself, on which trips I went along so he wouldn’t do it noplace in the encampment where it would make someone mad. Being with him so much I was slow to notice the gray when it first started on his muzzle, and if he didn’t respond as quick as once to what I said, I thought he just wasn’t interested in what I was saying or had got miffed because he could smell Annie’s dog George on me after I would come back from visiting with the Butlers, not realizing he was getting deaf.

George by the way had died while the Wild West was in Toledo in Annie’s native state of Ohio, and her and Frank give him a big funeral at the private property of a fan, burying him wrapped in the satin and velvet banner hung at the show while he was performing, with his name embroidered on it in gold, and the whole troupe come from B.B.W.W., including the Indians, some of whose women made wreaths and chanted their death songs, which you got to admit was more than a slight gesture on the part of people who might of ate him had they been back home.