Return of Little Big Man (54 page)

Cody had big plans for Rome, wanting to hold the performances of B.B.W.W. in the Colosseum where the gladiators fought and the Christians was fed to the lions, but found it was worse for many centuries of wear and had half fallen down. His idea of going to the Vatican with a troupe of Indians and having a private audience with Pope Leo worked out better.

Now people meeting the Pope was supposed to be dressed formal, meaning swallowtail coats and high hats for the men, but as this was not practical for the Indians—though I can tell you they might of liked it—Arizona John Burke got special permission for the Sioux to wear their regular show outfits, but they went him one better. For the sake of the occasion Cody pretended to be Catholic, but Burke actually was one, and he had lectured at length to the Indians about who and what the Pope was and how to act when they met him: not to get excited and yell, etc. So what they did was break out their very best clothing and jewelry for the visit, a lot of which I never seen on them before, shirts of the finest deerskin and beadwork, the decorated bone chokers and breastplates, the most lavish of feather bonnets.

Of course the old Pope could top anybody in the display department, what with his crown and the fanciest robes embroidered in gold and white and being carried into the Ducal Hall by some big gaudily uniformed fellows in a throne held at shoulder level on a tall man, with horn music and the singing of choirs, having been preceded by a slow parade of cardinals, bishops, and the like, all of them dressed to a fare-thee-well in satins and silks—well, the Indians was more impressed than I had ever seen them be by any sight we had yet encountered in Europe, for a spectacle of this sort, with sound, color, and movement, meant more to them than any building or machine could ever do.

In translating what Burke had told them about the Pope, I had gotten them to take it as solemn, though the exact concepts of white religion—which I can’t say I understood that well myself though having both a father and stepfather so to speak in the trade—wasn’t easy to explain in Lakota.

It turned out that unbeknownst to me, some of them had been baptized by Catholic missionaries at the Pine Ridge reservation, and Burke hadn’t been altogether off when he called them Christians at the Eiffel Tower, but if so they was of their own sort, for getting back to the encampment after the Vatican visit they found that the only one of their troupe not to go to meet the Pope, Little Ring, who had not gotten up in time, had stayed in bed because he had died of what the Italian doctors said was a heart attack.

Now these Sioux thereupon changed their hitherto mostly favorable opinion of the Pope, for if he was God’s spokesman, why hadn’t he spoke up and asked God not to kill Little Ring just when the rest of them was about to make their visit in their best clothes? The doctors determined the time of death as occurring during the night, so Arizona John couldn’t blame it on Little Ring having decided to stay in bed, thereby incurring the wrath of the Almighty—as I assure you Burke would of, had I not myself made this point.

And having been disappointed by the Pope on that score, the Indians also was emboldened to criticize him further: though he was very rich and lived in the grandest house they had ever seen used as a personal dwelling place, he failed to offer them food at any time during their visit, which meant either he was too stingy to speak for God or that he was ignorant of how to treat his guests, in which case his connections with the Almighty must not be too close.

But in interpreting I didn’t pass along
all
this negative commentary to Burke, who had been thrilled to meet the most important person in the world if you was a Catholic, for I didn’t see it would do either him or the Indians any good. The Pope had his own ways, and the Sioux had theirs, and to show you how wide they was apart, when instead of putting the question to Burke I took it upon myself to give an answer and said the Pope couldn’t feed nobody, but had to get fed himself, for he didn’t have no wife to do the cooking, they thought he should get married as soon as possible.

Maybe it was this experience that turned the Sioux against Rome, but they didn’t care for the place, believing the people on the street laughed at them, which I didn’t know was true or not, for Italians seemed naturally a lively, noisy bunch and maybe they was just trying to be pleasant: I never spoke a word of that language.

Also the Indians didn’t like to be asked to buy things all the time, and in Rome this happened everywhere you went, people sticking out hands they wanted filled, not shaken, so we wasn’t sorry to move on to the other towns in the country, most of them, after all these years, blending into one in my memory, for they was all filled with real old stone buildings, about half of which was churches, on real narrow stone-paved streets. The big exception was Venice, which had as many churches as anywhere else but the main roads was paved with water.

No sooner did we get to that town than Burke in his eternal quest for publicity loaded too many Indians, Buffalo Bill, and me into a gondola, which had sunk to the gunwales before anybody paid attention to the fact except the front and back gondola drivers, screaming in Italian which nobody understood, not to mention that normal conversation in Italy was mostly yelling.

The Sioux though in unfamiliar conditions saw what was happening but out of pride wouldn’t show their concern, but finally we unloaded a few passengers and floated out on the Grand Canal to have some photographs took, with that fancy building in the background that our cowboys, and me as well, called the Dogie’s Palace until straightened out.

Later more pictures in front of St. Mark’s cathedral at the end of the big square in Venice full of pigeons where crowds of people come, I think to get away from the water for a change, for it’s at your doorstep everywhere else in town and sometimes, with a real high tide, so I heard, in your parlor as well, and a lot of us, red and white, begun to miss home and the eternal dust-dry wind of the Plains, after a whiff of canal air on days when it was real thick, most of them.

Germany was the next country we went to, that spring of ’90, so still another language was spoke by the locals which none of us understood, and there was more old buildings to see, castles as well as villages full of what looked like big dollhouses, but I don’t think there was anybody in all the world so interested in anything pertaining to the American West as Germans, where a fellow name of Karl May, who had never set foot in the U.S.A., had already begun to write fictional stories about the frontier, which I heard later on wouldn’t of been recognizable to anybody who had experienced the real thing, but then the same could be said of most movies on the subject made in California and not Dutchland, which was the Germans’ name for their own country.

Anyway, of all the places we had went to, Germany no matter the town give us the heartiest reception of all, for they tend to be real thorough about everything, good or bad, depending on when, and I heard in later years that man Hitler’s favorite writer was Karl May, and Adolf, like Winston Churchill before him, would likely have enjoyed the Wild West if he ever got the chance to see it as a lad.

But by the time we reached Germany, being admired by white people of whichever country had lost its novelty for the Indians, and they had gotten tired of looking at the wonders of civilization that the whites had come up with before they went across the ocean to a land that didn’t have none of them and started from scratch, which didn’t make sense.

“Why,” Two Tails asked me once, “do it all over again when all these things existed here?”

I told him honestly, “I think that the ones who came over the ocean did not live in these big fancy lodges and have a lot of power, so they went to a new place where they would have a better chance to get these things than if they stayed here. America seemed an empty land to them, not being used by anybody but a few Indians who didn’t need all that space.”

“I think,” says he, “that it might have been all right if there had not been so many whites. I was surprised when I first saw the big towns in America. Within the range of an arrow shot, there are more people in New York than there were Lakota and our friends at the Greasy Grass, the largest gathering of normal people ever. Within the range of a rifle shot, there are more New York
wasichu
than all Lakota, Shyela, and Arapaho in the world, and even including the Crow, Pawnee, and all our other enemies. But the towns on this side of the water look more crowded yet.”

“A lot of them are full of poor people,” I said, “who don’t see much future here. So we can expect more to come to America in search of a better life.”

He said he was real sorry to hear that. Like most people I’ve knowed regardless of color, he was not given to looking from any other point of view than his own. The Plains Indians thought the right way for people to live was in little bands which was freely associated with tribes that in themselves wasn’t too numerous, everybody wandering around more or less at will, looking for buffalo. This wasn’t how you could build a cathedral, or palace, or a factory or foundry, but of course you wouldn’t need any of those.

Anyway, by now we had been on this tour for more than a year, and our Indians was not only homesick, but some was physically ailing as well, and in fact a few, like Little Ring, had died from smallpox, consumption, and the like, not bad treatment or starvation or anything Cody done or failed to do, but it was in Germany he learned he was being so blamed back home by certain Government officials, Congressmen, newspaper writers, and others of who I bet I could name one, and no doubt I would myself of been of that company had I been able to join up with Amanda. The accusations was wrongheaded with respect to B.B.W.W., but ours was not the only show that included Indians. Doc Carver, Buffalo Bill’s old partner, had an outfit of his own that went as far as Moscow, in Russia, and there was Mexican Joe’s and others, and I don’t know about any of them, but I swear Indians could have no serious complaint against William F. Cody.

Yet when he sent five ailing Sioux back to the U.S.A. from Germany that summer, his political enemies got one of them, White Horse, to tell the papers that Buffalo Bill didn’t feed them enough food and made them sick and when they was too weak to perform sent them back home as being useless. Now, I knowed White Horse, and I’m not calling him a liar, but none of this was true, so what I figured is somebody got him drunk and told him what to say or, more likely, what he said in Lakota was mistranslated by an immigration official named O’Beirne who claimed to be fluent in the language but I suspect was one of them whose interpretations of others invariably agree exactly with their own prejudices.

We was in the city of Berlin, where if you dig into the ground you will find not earth but sand, which interested the Indians more than additional architecture, and by now they had also seen too many soldiers, anyway in Berlin the U.S. Consul General passed on to Cody a letter from the Indian Commissioner containing a list of the complaints against him for mistreating the red men in his employ.

Buffalo Bill was real annoyed by these accusations, but the kind of fellow he was, he never wasted time on either being mad or getting even, but kept his eye on the possible practical effects. If the Commissioner decided he couldn’t have Indians any more in B.B.W.W., that would be the end of the whole shebang, for nobody anywhere in the world would pay just to see cowboys without Indians. If you think of it, anyone could learn to wear a wide-brimmed hat and spurs and ride a horse and rope cattle and shoot firearms though not maybe as good as Annie, but a headful of feathers and painting your face couldn’t change you into a real Indian: you had to be born one. And though white people had killed as many as they could and taken away their land, whites seemed universally fascinated with red people, not as performers—for such performing as was done with Cody, in the daily sham battle of the Little Bighorn, could of been managed by white actors in costumes—but as a matter of existence: this unusual folk, someplace between human and animal, they was what made the American West one of a kind.

There was horses and buffalo or the equivalent elsewhere, and mountains and deserts and wide-open spaces all over the world, and other races of various colors and plenty of violence and cruelty on every side, both the stronger and the weaker, but an Indian of the warrior tribes, so long as he wasn’t trying to kill you at that moment, was the perfect combination of every quality that civilized people enjoy seeing in savages on exhibition. It was all make-believe in the show, but some of these might of been the same Sioux that slaughtered Custer’s command and mutilated the bodies, and yet they had wives and babies and sometimes smiled when selling photos of themselves and always was as polite as Europeans and a lot more so than Americans.

Cody now decided on a typical bold stroke. He moved the white part of the Wild West to Alsace-Lorraine, which was either depending on your sympathies the German part of France or the French part of Germany, and set up winter quarters to await his return in the spring, and then with me, Nate Salsbury, “Major” Burke, and a few others, took all the Indians back to the U.S.A. to answer the phony charges against him on their supposed behalf.

And let me say them Sioux went on to Washington, D.C., when we landed, accompanied by Salsbury and Burke, and while Arizona John conducted one of his publicity campaigns to discredit the critics as effectively as he had promoted the Wild West, the Indians went to the Commissioner’s office and said Cody fed them so much they got fat and paid them so well they had a lot of money to send home to their families. If the Government made them stop, them and their families would be poor again. Then President Ben Harrison invited them to the White House.

Whether any of this would of been enough to shut up them who, like so many reformers, missionaries, and politicians in general, know what’s better for others even when the others don’t agree, the controversy was put aside at that time on account of a much bigger Indian problem had started up out West and, for the first time, involving more than just one tribe and its allies. This one in fact united a lot of former enemies.