Little Big Man (53 page)

The buffalo range stretched from southern Nebraska down to the Colorado River in Texas. Before the railroads, it run all the way up into Canada in an unbroken sweep, the great herds moving north as the year warmed, then returning south when the first snows commenced to fall up that way.

Now when I say, as I have on occasion, that the continental herd was cut in two by the Union Pacific, I don’t mean there wasn’t plenty of animals left south of the tracks, nor north either. Indeed, there was at least ten million buffalo in 1871, for that is how many was killed on the southern plains from that year up to ’75. Ten million in five years. And I helped in that extermination to the fullest degree of my personal energy, for the simple reason that the more hides a person brought in, the more money he made. The main use of them hides when tanned was to be cut into belting for the operation of machinery. But they also made shoes of them, and harness and lap robes.

When you was a hide hunter you didn’t have no facilities nor time to deal with the flesh of the creatures you shot, other than to
take an occasional tongue or hump for your own supper; so most of it was just left where the animal fell, and ate by the wolves or rotted in the sun. In later days someone discovered the bones made good fertilizer, so they come and collected them by the wagonload, ground them into powder, and farmers spread it about their acres.

That still leaves the matter of the meat, and you can’t escape the fact that there was awful waste in that area, whereas Indians generally consumed in one form or another every inch of a buffalo from his ears to the hoofs, including even the male part, from which they boiled up a glue. Yet, as you know from my story, Indians was frequently hungry long before the buffalo had been eliminated, and even more so before the white man made his appearance, prior to which they never had the horse from which to hunt, nor the gun with which to shoot a buffalo at long range while afoot.

You got to consider them things before you get to blaming us hunters, the way I see it. We was just trying to make a living, and all we cared about was the market price of hides. Sometimes you get the idea from accounts of this enterprise, wrote by men who wasn’t there, that the great army of hunters went out to exterminate every bison on the continent so as to clean up the range for cattle grazing, or to whip the Indians by destroying their source of wild food. These things happened, of course, but it wasn’t by our plan. We was just a bunch of fellows carrying Sharps rifles, and if you ever topped a rise and seen a gigantic ocean of sheer buffalo covering maybe twenty miles, you couldn’t believe the day would come when a few thousand of us had caused them millions to vanish utterly.

Still, having said that, I admit it now seems a pity. But we done it, and here’s how: in late August and early September, the hunters would go up to Nebraska, make contact with the herds and follow them southwards down to Texas as it growed colder, killing as they went, and the hunt would generally extend until March of the next year. Then in spring the hunters closed up operations and went to K.C. as we have seen, for their vacation, while the buffalo was shedding on their summer plod back north.

You didn’t use a horse in this type of hunting. You moved by foot as close as you could get to one of the little bunches that a herd divided into while grazing, you set up your crossed-stick shooting rest, laid the long barrel of the Sharps into it, and picked off animals one by one around the edge of the bunch. Now, done right, you
could get away with this for quite a spell before the buffalo got wise, for they never cared about the sounds of firing nor did the others worry when their comrades dropped roundabout. The only thing that spooked them was the smell of blood.

If the wind stayed favorable, you could drop upwards of thirty animals with the remainder still grazing quietly, but much beyond that number and one bull would get a whiff of blood and stir and paw the ground, and then another animal smelled it and would bellow, which panicked the bunch and so on to the whole herd spread across five square mile of prairie, and within a minute or so you saw the tails of a monstrous stampede. Or, as happened once in a while, for there might well be other hunters a-working the far side of the same herd, the stampede would come in your direction and you’d see a remarkable horizon of horns just before you was trampled to death.

But usually that never happened, and when the herd was gone, your skinner would come up with the wagon, which had been kept back until then, and get to work on the fallen animals: cut a few slits, lash a rope around the gathered neck-skin, hitch the other end to a horse and lead him away, peeling off the whole hide. Back at camp the skins was pegged out to cure and stacked when that was done to await the buyers, who sent wagons around from time to time to all the hunting parties.

Well sir, that is about the size of what occupied me in the winter of 1871–72, and me and my skinner ended up the season down below the Canadian River, in the Texas Panhandle. In late March we come back up to Caldwell and tallied up with the hide buyers and received around six thousand dollars for that winter’s work, which meant I alone killed over twenty-five hundred buffalo my first time out. Old hands like Billy Dixon and Old Man Keeler done better than that.

Still, it seemed like there hadn’t been a dent made in the buffalo population. Near Prairie Dog Creek below the Canadian, me and the skinner come up over a rise and seen the entire world carpeted with brown hair. I reckon you could see twenty-five mile across the prairie, for the day was clear. Now, sweeping your extended arm from left to right across the horizon, you would have pointed, in so doing, at a million buffalo.

At Caldwell me and my partner split the take, and after settling up my obligations with the outfitters, I still had several thousand
dollars, and I headed back to Kansas City to see how Amelia was making out.

Before I get to that, though, I ought to mention a kind of coincidence that I experienced. Remember that fellow with the funny name what had preceded me as mule driver on the run from San Pedro to Prescott, Arizona? Wyatt Earp? Well, I had a run-in with him down on the buffalo range, and I’m going to tell you about it.

CHAPTER
23
Amelia Makes Good

WE WAS DOWN
on the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River at the time. At night after the day’s shooting, the buffalo hunters in the area would collect at one of the larger camps for sociable drinking and poker. The source of liquor was the peddlers who come out with wagonloads of barrels. No place was too remote for them fellows. There was a good many spots on the prairie where you might have died for want of water, but you could get a drink of whiskey most everywhere.

One evening me and the skinner rode over to a nearby camp to get us a blast, and who did I see tending the whiskey wagon but my brother Bill. One thing about him, he had found a trade at an early age and stuck to it. Maybe you recall what a rotten-looking man he had already been away back in ’57 when I encountered him selling rotgut to the Indians. Well, having sunk so far so soon, he didn’t degenerate much further during the next fifteen years. His teeth was all gone, but otherwise he looked the same to me: utterly filthy, of course, and as I come near he was telling his customers how he knowed John Wilkes Booth, who hadn’t been killed a-tall but was living at that very moment in El Paso, Texas, where he kept a general store.

Having heard from Bill’s own lips of how he dosed his goods, I decided to teetotal that evening, but couldn’t have talked the skinner out of his cup without revealing the kinship, which I hadn’t no interest in doing, so he went and ordered. As it happened, Bill was way down to the bottom of the present barrel, and had to tip it over so as to fill the dipper. In so doing he pointed its mouth towards the firelight, and I saw my skinner peer within and then stare at Bill.

“Hold on,” he says. “What’s them lumps at the bottom?”

Bill says: “That’s just the mother. You know, like on vinegar.”

The skinner shoves him away and tips the barrel over and a half-dozen objects slide out along with the trickle of the remaining whiskey, and alongside the campfire their identity was not long in doubt.

“You are a mother ____,” says the skinner. “Them is rattlesnake heads!”

Bill makes a toothless grin. “Well, all right,” he says.

Now the fellows all begin to get riled and threaten to break into the rest of his stock, so he admits there ain’t a barrel of whiskey on board that don’t have six snake heads inside it. That news causes some of them who been drinking to go off into the bushes and heave, and the remainder get out their lariats and look for a convenient limb on which to elevate my brother, but a tall, skinny young hombre pushes his way among the crowd and says to Bill: “You hitch up and get out of here and don’t come back.”

“They don’t hurt none,” says Bill in whining indignation. “They just put the old be-Jesus into the stuff. The boys like the bite of my goods.”

“Get out,” says the skinny fellow. “And you men step aside and let him do it.” And by God, if they didn’t; I don’t know why, for he didn’t look special to me, but he had some of the assurance of Custer and Hickok, if not the long hair.

The skinner rejoined me and says: “Did you ever see the like of that?” Meaning my brother, and being under some strain, I just belched. The sight of them snake heads had got to me, though I never touched a drop of the rotgut.

The skinny fellow walked quickly to me and staring coldly from under his straight black eyebrows, says: “You have an objection?”

I allowed I did not, but I also requested he state a reason why in the goddam hell he thought I might.

“You just spoke my name,” he says.

“I don’t know your name,” says I.

“It,” he says, “is Earp.”

“Oh,” I says, laughing, “what I done was belch.”

He knocked me down.

Well sir, I arose directly with gun in hand, but Earp strode away, giving me the choice of ventilating his back or agreeing with him that the incident was closed. But damn if I was going to let him set
the terms, so I throws some spectacular abuse at him in front of them other hunters, and he turns and comes back.

“Draw, you goddam Belch you,” says I, for in that measured stride he had come within ten feet of me and his weapon was still holstered, his hands swinging freely as he walked. But onward he come, and I found it impossible to raise my gun and shoot him down until he went for his, but he never. Finally, having reached a range of one foot, he detained my right wrist with the wiry fingers of his left hand, drew his pistol, and struck me over the head with its heavy barrel. I was cold-cocked for fair.

This was the technique called “buffaloing,” and it was Wyatt Earp’s favorite when he became a marshal later on. In all his violent life, he only killed two or three men, but he buffaloed several thousand. I guess he was the meanest man I ever run across. In a similar circumstance, Wild Bill would have killed his opponent. Not Earp, he was too mean. To draw on you meant he considered you a worthy antagonist; but he didn’t; he thought most other people was too inferior to kill, so he would just crack their skulls. I don’t know how it worked, but when he looked at you as if you was garbage, you might not have agreed with him, but you had sufficient doubt to stay your gun hand a minute, and by then he had cold-cocked you.

I returned to K.C. in the spring of ’72 as I have said, got a haircut and a twenty-five-cent bath at the barbershop, and having donned my city clothes from a trunk I kept in storage, went over to Amelia’s school.

That prune-faced headmistress could not have been kindlier.

“Ah,” she said, pouring me a dinky little cup of tea, “we were so concerned that you would not get back to us in time from your scientific expedition.”

I was aching to see my niece and what further refinements she had acquired over the winter, but figured I had ought to play along with Miss Elizabeth Wamsley, especially when sitting in the parlor of her Academy for Young Ladies, with a potted plant sticking its leaves into my ear and a crocheted doily under both arms and another back of my head to catch the bear grease.

“I trust,” Miss Wamsley said, “that you collected many rare fossils for deposit in our Eastern museums.”

You can see what little Amelia’s version of my buffalo hunting must have been.

“You must tell me about it,” Miss W. went on. “But first, I do think we should dispose of certain matters which, though crass, are pressing. Indeed,” she said, showing her long front teeth in a supposed smile, “aren’t they usually one and the same? … Now of course you understand, dear Mr. Crabb, that when a student withdraws after completing more than two weeks of a given term, no refund of fees is granted.”

I swallowed all my tea in one gulp, so that it wouldn’t make too much of a mess in case I dropped the cup and saucer.

“Amelia has run off,” I says, and my heart turned to bone.

Miss Elizabeth Wamsley give a high titter that sounded like somebody was ripping a silk shawl.

“Not in the least, my dear Mr. Crabb! Our dear Amelia is to be married. We had no earlier means of apprising you, no telegraph or postal address by which one could reach your far-flung desert and mesa.”

“Who to?” I asks. I reckon if I had been elsewhere than that stuffy parlor with its stink of dried flowers, I should have followed up the query with a fervent threat to kill him. I had just naturally assumed that anybody who might want to marry Amelia, or say he did, would be some low-life skunk. You see, in spite of my frequent mention of how much class she had developed, in the bottom of my mind was the memory of pulling her from the gutter, and a conviction that if left to her own devices she would return there.

Miss Wamsley says: “Modest as we habitually are here, Mr. Crabb, I do think that in this case we might be permitted to suggest our satisfaction at Amelia’s engagement. Wamsley Academy alumnae are mistresses of some of the finest houses in our Nation, and
____”

“Who to?” I asks again, for I didn’t realize she was delaying so as to build up the effect, rather than soften the blow.