Return of Little Big Man (58 page)

This found a mark with her. “They’re horrible. Poor Catherine Weldon! The newspaper called her Sitting Bull’s white squaw, living in sin with an old savage. And she was given worse names at Fort Yates—by the white wives, of course.”

“There you are,” I says. “I bet you was doing a swell job back East, right near Wall Street too.” I had no real idea of what I was talking about, but I did so want to buck her up.

She sneered again, though as before it was not at me but at herself, nor was such an expression an unattractive one with a face like Amanda’s. “I did such a good job that the money we laboriously collected managed to disappear without a trace, though neither Agatha nor I took any of it beyond administrative expenses.”

“I doubt you’re the only person to run into crooks on the money side of an enterprise,” I pointed out. “Next time you’ll know what to look for.”

“There won’t be a next time,” Amanda said. “I’ve learned my lesson.”

First it was Sitting Bull who exasperated me. Now it was her. Why is it people you like are always the most stubborn? It was time for me to get stern. “Now, Amanda,” I says, “how long are you going to hang around here working like a flunky? You ain’t an Indian woman and you’ll never be one. What you’re doing is just make-believe, for the reason you can go back to the white world any time you get tired of this.” She had throwed her head back and looked away. “And I expect you will do that soon enough, for Indian wives perform all the hard labor of the camp while the men don’t do much of anything, and to the white way of thinking that’s wrong.”

Now she looked at me and said, “Ha!”

“All right,” I says, “so amongst whites except for rich people the women do a lot of chores too, but the husbands go out to work. All I’m saying is it’s different with Indians, but so is most everything else, except for the fact that they seem to like what they do, which includes, or used to in the recent past, being merciless towards their enemies, torturing, killing, scalping, and mutilating. If you think you can become a squaw as your latest project, then you really ought to think about what it took to cut the guts out of a wounded cavalryman laying on the field at the Little Bighorn.” Even talking turkey as I was, I couldn’t bring myself to tell her sometimes it wasn’t guts but the private parts of such a poor devil, after which they stuffed them in his mouth. “Yet there ain’t no mother more tender to her offspring than an Indian, so they’re not always different in everything. But it takes a long time to see Indians as a whole, as well as a real strong stomach.”

I could never get one up on Amanda. She smiled at me now and, though her face was dirty, spoke with her old assurance. “That was an eloquent lecture, Jack, but as it happens, I already agreed with its points before you made it. I have no intention of impersonating a Lakota woman. I’m just trying to understand what it means to be one, admittedly in white terms. And I think I’ll learn more here, though no doubt never enough, than in some Indian-betterment organization, or at some university under the direction of white men.”

That was reasonable enough, I figured. But then what?

“Write about it,” says she.

I was always impressed by anybody who could just read and write in the common way, being fairly shaky at both all my life, but to write
about
something meant more than a postcard or list of camp supplies. “For a newspaper?”

“Well, maybe,” said she. “Or a book.”

“Excuse my ignorance, Amanda,” I says, “but that would likely take you a few days, would it not?”

“At least.” She seemed amused by my question.

“Yeah, well, I doubt you’re going to have that long, here anyway. They’re aiming to put Sitting Bull out of business in one way or another, and none will be pretty. Please get out right away. I know what I’m talking about!”

One thing this accomplished, if nothing else: she took more personal notice of me than ever before. “Jack,” she says quite warmly, “you’ve always tried your best to help, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed by me. You have a good heart.”

Hearing that, my good heart fell. Who wants to be praised for his kindness by a woman he takes to? I wasn’t no preacher nor settlement worker. But she wouldn’t of been Amanda without adding a twist, which brung back my hopes after all.

“I wonder whether you would do me still another favor?”

“Anything at all, Amanda.”

“My greatest difficulty here has been due to my ignorance of the language. I had expected some of the Sioux to know more English than it turns out any of them do. Of course I have learned a little by pointing and asking what it’s called, but that’s a laborious process and useless for nonmaterial things such as thoughts and feelings.” Her smile though with a dirty face was as beautiful as I ever seen. She gestured towards me, putting out a slim hand. “Could you teach me to speak Lakota?”

“You ain’t going to leave?”

“Sitting Bull,” said she, “is the greatest living Indian leader. My study is not simply of what it is to be a Lakota woman but what it is to be a wife of Sitting Bull. I’m going to stay near him.”

Which meant she as usual wasn’t really taking me seriously. However, I had no choice but to say, sure, I would start the lessons soon as she wanted, and she said it would have to wait a little, for she had other chores to do. Now you might wonder, like me, how that had come about if she couldn’t communicate no better with the Indians, but I found it was her idea to hang around the women and imitate them, and if it turned out she was in their opinion pretty good at something, like cooking food to please the Bull, why, she was welcome to do it. As odd as Indians often was by our lights, they could also be totally practical.

I don’t want to be indelicate, but I admit when Amanda mentioned learning about being a wife to Sitting Bull, I hoped she wasn’t referring to sharing his bed as part of her research. Of course I couldn’t openly pursue that matter. I’d just have to watch where she slept that night, if in fact I was to know that night as a free or even a living person. I figured Sitting Bull would just politely turn Cody down, but violently resist any attempt by Indian police or white troops to take him away as a prisoner, and while, had I been acting on my own behalf, I would of left before this happened, having done what I could to warn him and thus discharged my moral obligation to a friend, Amanda’s presence made it necessary for me to remain and help him, and maybe get myself arrested or even killed in the process.

But so as not to keep you in further suspense, let me go through what did and did not occur that evening and for the next couple weeks.

First, I waited all day for Buffalo Bill’s arrival, but he never come. What happened, as I learned afterwards, was that Agent McLaughlin and Colonel Drum had been able to stop him after all by that emergency appeal to President Harrison, who sent a return order telling Cody to lay off and go home.

Nor during that same period did anybody appear who was unfriendly to Sitting Bull, but a number of Hunkpapas did get the Ghost Dance proceedings set up in a nearby field, fallow now in winter and suitably flat for dancing, with an associated sweat lodge, an old-fashioned hide tepee where water was poured on hot stones, creating a steam that would make the naked bodies of the sitting participants perspire, purifying the spirit for the ceremonies. Afterwards they would put on special Ghost shirts of what to a white man would be real good quality deerskin, specially decorated, but finally just leather and not the bulletproof material an ordinary Sioux might well work himself up to believe. But I didn’t think Sitting Bull would go that far, and I’m not saying he did, though he went into the lodge and sweated with the others.

It wasn’t the kind of thing I could ask him about directly, but just being in the same camp I could pick up enough on the subject to get a general sense of the situation, and most of it come from Sitting Bull himself. He wasn’t sold on the Ghost Dance, but he wasn’t against it either. What he wanted to do was give it an opportunity. Probably it wouldn’t work, but maybe it would, and meanwhile it offered people something beyond the limited existence imposed on them by the victorious whites.

He had heard quite a bit about Christianity, from all sorts of missionaries, including even one who was female, and in fact sometimes wore as personal decoration that crucifix give him by a Catholic priest. But most of what it pertained to was quite distant from him and the Lakota way. What good was a Spirit up to who told you to turn the other cheek to an enemy with a raised hatchet?

He did not condemn white people for having beliefs that to him seemed lunatic, for obviously they derived great power from them, though he did observe that the whites who enjoyed the most power was those who acted as if they believed in nothing but force, which is to say, against the religious teachings he had heard, and this made even less sense and could not be explained by the missionaries except by the idea that this present life wasn’t the important one, but just preparation for a better one to come for them what was the losers now, and torment for those who at present was the winners. But it seemed to Sitting Bull that to believe in such an arrangement you had to hate the life at hand, the one you could see and hear and touch and taste, in favor of another that seemed real vague, and it was strange that the very people who controlled the world would have a religion that despised it.

But he admitted there was much here he never understood, and maybe many white people didn’t either, for it was on its face a lot simpler than it was underneath, and that’s why he was interested in studying the Ghost Dance, to see if it had the profitable complication for Indians that Christianity had for the Americans. For example, the magic shirt might not repel a lead bullet in the simple sense, but give the wearer so much spiritual strength that he would be harder to hit. As was proved in every battle, the bravest warriors was least likely to be wounded or killed. And the predicted great flow of earth that would cover white people while Indians rose above the surface might happen not in a literal fashion but rather be a visionary way of seeing the red man elevate himself over the whites by some means yet to be developed.

I tell you, Sitting Bull would of come to the top of any race he belonged to. I’m sorry he never met Queen Victoria, for I bet they would of admired each other as wise leaders, the best of their kind. I’m not saying he didn’t have no weaknesses, of which the main one was vanity, and he did not go without the “envyings” my foster father the Reverend Pendrake used to mention. The Bull believed himself principal chief of all the Sioux, and since the tribe didn’t have elections or hereditary titles, that position had to be self-bestowed, which never endeared him to the other claimants, who he then accused of selling out to the white man. I never heard him praise any other chiefs but Crazy Horse, who of course was safely dead. He was least fond of Gall, one of the main combat leaders at the Greasy Grass, where Sitting Bull never took the field. That the Bull was represented as the killer of Custer when he appeared with the Wild West was embarrassing to him on the one hand but probably gratifying as well, putting him one up on the lesser-known Gall, who got revenge by doing better in the complex politics amongst Sioux factions on the reservations.

Which brings us up to date on Sitting Bull’s predicament. He had finally gotten on bad terms with every bunch, red or white, and except for the family and friends at his camp, everybody was plotting for his ruination, including some Sioux visitors to the place, hospitably received as guests, who was actually spying for the Indian police.

But before I go on with this, I should say I had been giving Amanda them lessons in Lakota she wanted, but with the chores she had took upon herself she didn’t have a lot of time and so had not learned much except a number of names of things she thought it most practical to know first, like “beef,”
tado;
“stick,”
can;
“pot,”
cega;
and so on, mostly pertaining to domestic affairs, along with a few simple phrases, like “he comes,” which is just
u;
“we eat,”
unyutapi;
“you drink,”
datkan.

I had to try to explain to Sitting Bull why I had not gotten her to leave, but this turned out easier than I thought, for when I brought up the subject he smiled and said, “It’s no surprise to me. White men can never control their women.”

Well sir, I was stung by this, and I says she was not “my” woman but just somebody I knowed, a friend, almost a kind of sister.

“But you would like to make her your woman,” says he. “Anybody can see that from the way you look at her. My wives and daughters giggle about this and wonder why you don’t make her yours. But unlike me, they don’t know the ways of the whites.” That was another of his vanities, that he was an authority on the Americans. I expect he might of been so, in comparison with the others, but he was also not shy about representing himself as such to a white man.

“If you’re saying what I think, it’s against the law,” I pointed out.

“American law, perhaps,” says he. “But this is Hunkpapa land.”

Now to dispute him on that would be nasty, so I swallowed my pride and just mumbled something about how it wasn’t really the way he thought, about me and Amanda; it was just difficult to explain in Sioux.

“I hope you are teaching
her
to speak good Lakota,” he says, grinning, “even though you don’t speak it correctly yourself.” And he adds that he heard her ask a question using
hwo
instead of
he,
which was to say the male form instead of the female. She might of done so, for I admit I was not always as careful as I should of been—and look at my English—but he also might of been kidding, for he was given to that, as I like to give reminders of due to his reputation, like that of most Indians, for being humorless.

As for Amanda, I told the Bull she stayed on not to be annoying but to study him and write a book in which he would be celebrated (though I didn’t know it was true she would admire him without condition especially when it come to the woman question, but I expect he was safe, for if he survived the current trouble, he couldn’t read anyhow).