Return of Little Big Man (40 page)

Back on the ranch, it seemed Cody was so on the outs with his wife that he let her stay alone in the Welcome Wigwam, which meant the people he took home with him from the show had to jam into a smaller house on the property, which didn’t rightly affect me and Pard, for we always bunked in a harness room of one of the barns. Bill was trying without success to get divorced from Mrs. Lulu, who hated everything he did including most of all the Wild West and had gotten him to put all his money and property in her name and didn’t want to share it with him. Also she was real jealous of some of the female performers that had appeared with him in his stage plays and now, in addition to Annie, in the Wild West.

I might just say here that Buffalo Bill tried throughout the rest of his life to divorce Lulu and never did succeed. It wasn’t easy to do in them days, not to mention that despite their eternal quarreling him and his lady had a deep attachment to each other though not hitting it off in the fashion of Frank and Annie Butler.

I thought Pard might perk up some when he got back to open country as opposed to the back lot of the show when camped in some eastern town or traveling in the baggage car every couple of days, but in fact as the weeks went by in Nebraska he seemed to get wearier, spending more and more time wrapped up in an old horse blanket and having to be nudged awake when the time came I thought he should visit the outdoors, like before I blew the lamp out at night, so he wouldn’t be woke by the need to make water and blunder around in the dark, maybe getting kicked by a horse, for even his daylight vision wasn’t what it once had been, nor his balance.

Pard was at the end of his life, but I wouldn’t admit that to myself until it got to the point where he lost most of his interest in eating, for food is a dog’s religion, of which you might say Pard was a priest or maybe even the pope: there had been a time when I had to sleep on my leather articles, including boots and belt, lest he chew and swallow such in the middle of the night. I would catch him eyeing many an animal big as a burro, considering whether he might be able to bring him down and have enough meat for the next week—make that two days, for though the size of the coyotes from which I always figured he come in part, he had a bear’s capacity for grub, one emerging from hibernation.

Well, not wanting to turn this story of mine into a tearjerker, when so many of the people I was close to had died, most at real early ages, I won’t dwell on the death of a dog who nobody had knowed well but me, for I don’t count my brother Bill or whoever Pard come from before that, an Indian camp likely. He hadn’t lived a bad life, for what dogs require is food and company, and I provided both, with him returning the favor when he could. It was ten years since him and me joined up together, plus he wasn’t a pup when we met, so he had put in what was a lengthy lifetime for a four-footed creature of his day, and if you count it according to the difference between dog and man of seven years to one, Pard had lived twice as long as most of the people I ever knowed, Sitting Bull, not far beyond fifty, being ancient.

So one winter morning Pard did not wake up, staying under his blanket even after I had gotten the little iron stove so hot nobody but a dog could of come near it, as he would have if he could, drying his nose till it was like sandpaper, and if you touched it at such a point you would think him sick, but that was when he had been well. I knowed only death could keep him away from a source of heat in the icy season, but I pretended otherwise, patting the blanket and kidding him as a slowpoke who wouldn’t get to breakfast before it was all gone into the bellies of others, but all I felt was a stone replica of a dog, hard and cold like it had been outside all night in the snow, but when I wound the blanket tighter and picked him up, he wasn’t as heavy as I expected though having turned to rock, or even as he had been when alive, especially in recent years when he got less exercise but ate more. His spirit had obviously been real hefty.

I had quite a job with pick and shovel to penetrate the soil, having first to clear away a three-foot drift of snow and keep it off. The usual wind that blows across the plains, having no natural hindrances, was persistent as ever, but the work went quicker when I got below the frostline, and I kept going to some depth, for I didn’t want no animal to dig Pard up and chaw on him.

When the hole was deep enough I let him down by the lariat lashed around the bundle at nose and tail, and I says goodbye to my old comrade in English, Cheyenne, and Lakota, and begged his pardon if he had come from another tribe instead and might of been insulted by the language of his enemies. The important matter was nothing concerned with his death but rather how him and me took care of one another over all them years of life, which death had ended but could not otherwise affect now it become memory. You can think less of me, if you want, for being so close to a dog, but that will matter to me about as much as it would of to Pard.

But I’ll be the first to admit my life was wanting for human companionship, especially of the respectable female sort, and while I was sure looking forward to meeting Mrs. Custer when we reached New York City during the next season, I knowed it would be more practical for me to get a girlfriend who wasn’t confined totally to my imagination, and I thought maybe the latest young woman to join the Wild West might be a candidate, for though being a bit on the plump side she was comely, with a head of dark curls and neat little features, and she had a saucy way when talking to you I found quite taking, until I become aware that every other man had that same effect on her. Her name was Lillian Smith, and she was a sharpshooter, real good at that art, rivaling Annie Oakley, but what I didn’t care for was her boast that with her arrival Annie was done for.

Of course Annie couldn’t understand why Colonel Cody had hired the “California Girl,” as Arizona John Burke billed her, for in addition to herself there was young Johnny Baker, who Annie had trained to shoot and was real good at it while having the sense not to compete with his teacher; but master showman that he was, Cody knowed not only that you couldn’t have too many sharpshooting young ladies for the public, but the natural competition between them would keep each with a keener edge that she was likely to maintain on her own, for even such a levelheaded person as Annie was not above envy, her being all of twenty-six by this time, whereas Lillian was—well, let me first tell you an ironic particular. If you remember, when I first laid eyes on Annie Oakley only the year before, I took her for a schoolgirl. In the case of Lillian Smith, I figured she was about Annie’s age. Fact is, Lillian was fifteen at the time. I reckon it was that “ample” figure of hers that misled me: the term was Annie’s, who seldom spoke of Lillian without using it.

In truth Annie never had a good word for her professional rival, suspecting her of loose morals just because Lillian wasn’t as prudish as her, and when I says after all the girl wasn’t married, that observation put Annie on the outs with me for a while, and I tell you as happened so often with women it was me who lost on that deal, for I had too much competition from the cowboys to get far with Lillian (who within a year married one of them named Jim Kidd) and anyway she was a bit young for me though I never looked my age. Annie was cool to me for a time even after the thing with Lillian was over.

Now we spent the entire summer of ’86 in one place, Staten Island, at a resort called Erastina, to which regular ferries come across the bay from the city, passing the newly erected Statue of Liberty. The opening had been preceded by a big parade through Manhattan, with all the Indians, the Deadwood stagecoach, the cowboys on prancing broncos, wagons full of buffalo, and so on, the star markswoman on her horse, wearing a fancy outfit of her own design and needlework, labeled
OAKLEY
on both sides, prominent enough so it could be read by the crowd as she went by. I doubt she would of gone to this trouble had Lillian Smith not been elsewhere in the parade, for when we was back in camp Frank had to bring the doctor, who found Annie had so bad an ear infection that blood poisoning had set in and she went to the hospital for a few days, rushing back while she was still weak so the public wouldn’t have time to replace her in their hearts.

They never did, not taking that much to Lillian, who didn’t have Annie’s style and charm, nor figure, and while Johnny Baker was a first-rate shot and Bill Cody himself regularly performed, always from horseback, there was something special about a pretty girl with a gun. Men thought it was sexy, and I guess women wanted to be like her.

Now that Sitting Bull wasn’t there nor my Cheyenne bunch, I didn’t have no particular job, so I made myself useful, throwing up glass balls and clay pigeons for Lillian Smith, Johnny Baker, and Buffalo Bill to break, and giving Frank a hand with Annie’s act. I also done some translating with the current troupe of Sioux, headed by an Ogallala name of American Horse. And if they needed an extra actor for the Deadwood stage during the attack by Indians, I might fill in, riding shotgun. Cody usually stuffed the interior of the coach with celebrities, politicians, or visiting foreign dignitaries, who got a kick out of being shot at with blanks and being in mock danger of being scalped.

But when the re-creation of Custer’s Last Stand was being readied, I really had to be included. I still never managed to tell Cody of my personal connection with the real thing, how I was certainly the only genuine white survivor in the world. As for the Sioux now with the show, it was hard to tell if any had participated in that fight, for the white feeling against them that had killed Custer was still strong, so any which
had
took part might be leery of admitting as much. On the other hand, there was also plenty of whites, especially in the eastern cities, generally people who though having a horror of violence, admired Indians for being ruthless killers and would reward any as such, buying photos and souvenirs, like with Sitting Bull, so undoubtedly there was Indians ready to confess more than they had ever done. The event was ten years earlier by now: the young men had only been kids then, if they was anywhere near the Greasy Grass that day in June.

It took a while to get everything prepared for this act, like having some artists paint a great big canvas backdrop representing the valley of the Little Bighorn, which probably looked believable if you hadn’t never seen the real one, and having cavalry uniforms made, and so on, and meanwhile we had to give the usual shows at the Staten Island site, where the attendance was so good, day and night (with gas, flares, and fires lighted for the latter), that Cody and Salsbury decided to stay in New York for the whole winter, moving the Wild West into Madison Square Garden as of that November, hiring a writer name of Mackaye to design a program that was more like a theatrical presentation than the previous series of exhibitions of riding and shooting.

The result was billed as “The Drama of Civilization,” consisting of five separate parts, beginning with “The Primeval Forest,” showing Indians and wild animals rented from a circus (some, like the African lion instead of a cougar, not authentic), and going through “The Prairie,” with a buffalo hunt, a fire on the plains, and a stampede; the “Attack on the Settler’s Cabin,” the old standby from the very first show of B.B.W.W.; the “Mining Camp,” supposed to be Deadwood, destroyed at the end by a cyclone so forceful it sometimes knocked over the stagecoach in reality, being made by enormous fans driven by steam power. The final act was Custer’s Last Stand.

Between each of the above came an interval of the riding, roping, Indian dances, and marksmanship exhibitions from the show as done in the outdoor arenas. Cody, Johnny Baker, and Lillian Smith all did their specialties, but Annie Oakley’s nose was still out of joint on account of the California Girl, so not only did she exceed herself with all manner of firearms, pistols, shotguns, and a variety of rifles—the people what ran the Garden had the roof raised twenty-five feet for the sake of the shooting acts—but she added tricks done on horseback, untying a bandanna from around her mount’s ankle while hanging from a sidesaddle, picking one of her hats off the ground, and so on, while maintaining her personal modesty with costumes that despite this vigorous activity never revealed more of her leggings than when standing still.

We performed the Last Stand as long prepared for, and of course it was quite a spectacle with the Indians milling around the hillock where Buck Taylor in his fringed jacket stood heroically, firing his pistol, and around him the cluster of blue-jacketed soldiers, including me as an unidentified sergeant, but of course it never looked much like the actual event or any other fight I ever saw between the cavalry and the Indians, for in real battles awful sights and sounds are interspersed with long stretches like time stopped and nothing is happening, and then you are looking at the fellow next to you, and a bullet hits him in the head and his brains splash all over you.

What I’m saying is not critical of the Wild West version, for in an association of several years now I had become a professional, and this was show business, with no blood spilled and the dying usually represented by the victim clapping a hand to his chest, so the audience could tell where he was supposed to be shot. The firing of blanks was a lot louder within walls and a roof than outdoors, and would of deafened me had Cody, a veteran of the stage, not warned us to stuff our ears with cotton. And of course it was him who come up with that finale which never happened but didn’t actually change the historical truth of Custer’s death while adding the positive character that Bill Cody always was at pains to represent.

After Buck Taylor clasped the bosom of his jacket and flopped down in fake death, the rest of us having previously gone under (myself taking care to lay out of his range, so as not to have his big carcass falling on me), and the Indians stopped yelling and shooting, in rode Buffalo Bill in a fancy buckskin suit and big white sombrero, leading a bunch of cowboys who scattered the redskins and joined Bill in a sad salute to the fallen while a lighted legend appeared on the canvas backdrop:
TOO LATE
.