Return of Little Big Man (53 page)

Speaking of Indians, who would turn up in Paris but Black Elk, one of them Sioux who, if you recall, missed the returning boat to the U.S.A. the year before and was stranded in England. Cody was relieved to see he was in good shape, for this was the kind of thing the reformers like Amanda could use to discredit putting Indians in shows, and invited him to take his old place in the troupe, but Black Elk said he was pretty homesick by now though he had had a nice time since the Wild West had sailed away without him, being hired right away by a fellow named Mexican Joe who run an imitation show of Cody’s though smaller, and they toured Germany and some other countries including one with a mountain which had smoke coming out of its top and sometimes, according to the people who lived there, it shot out flames and burned up the towns around its base.

“Yet the people continued to live there,” said he. “Because it is their home.”

“Tell my friend,” Cody says to me, “the name of that country would be Italy.”

So I did so, and Black Elk says, “But most of the time we were here with the French, who treated us very well, and a young woman became my friend and took me to meet her family, but I missed my own home so much I got sick and fell down and, so far as these people could see, I died, not breathing and having no heartbeat, and they were getting ready to bury my body when I finally woke up, because I had not died but rather had flown across the seas to the Black Hills and then to Pine Ridge and visited with my mother before coming back here. I told her I would return in the body as soon as I had the money for the boat.”

Cody now demonstrated again why the Indians liked and trusted him. “You’d better get started, then, for a man must always honor a promise he makes to his sainted mother.” And he give him a return ticket and ninety dollars, and got the French to provide one of them cops they call John Darms to go along and make sure he got on the right train and then caught the right ship on time.

Now, just to follow up on that vision Black Elk had, I heard from some other Pine Ridge Lakota with the show in later years that having talked with her son in the same dream, Black Elk’s Ma knowed he was coming home and exactly when, and I had no reason not to believe that, having many times known like results from the dreams of Old Lodge Skins, the man who taught me most everything of enduring value I learned in life.

In Paris, as in London, the B.B.W.W. Indians was taken around to see the sights, and reporters followed them everyplace, but not knowing the French language I couldn’t say whether the stories they wrote was any truer than anyplace else, but I doubt it, given the difference between the way an Indian looks at things and a fellow who tries to put it down in writing, for example when Red Shirt and some of the others went up to the top of the Eiffel Tower (me too, holding my breath on that elevator ride), Arizona John Burke went along with us and looking down remarked on what I guess there wasn’t a white man ever went atop any structure and
didn’t
say, which is how the persons below looked like ants, Red Shirt’s observation was how if the people down there looked so little from high up where he was, then how much smaller all people must look from the height of
Wakantanka.

Now that’s the way I translated it for Burke, who asks, “Where’s Wakanna?”

Distracted from the view and also still shaky from that elevator, I done a careless job. “Sorry,” I says, “he means God.”

And Burke says, “Here, here,” again using the British expression, and then I heard him tell the reporters what devout Christians our Indians all was, which was news to me, and Lord knows how it come out in print, for I never run into a Frenchman who claimed to know English who actually did, and the same thing was true in reverse, according to the French, who claimed there wasn’t anybody not born and brung up in France could hope to speak their tongue.

As you can tell listening to this story, I couldn’t be called fluent in English, and Sitting Bull wasn’t never impressed by the quality of my Lakota, so on Judgment Day, talking to the Almighty, maybe I’d better stick to Cheyenne. Anyway I guess I was pretty pathetic with French, and them people prefer you didn’t even try it if you was going to butcher their beautiful language. What really went over in Paris was being as Western American as possible, that is, if you couldn’t be Indian, which was best of all, and everywhere you went you saw the locals wearing sombreros and headbands with feathers and riding horses on American horned saddles, and little kids with bows and arrows.

So I had a real good time in that country, the details of which I won’t go into, but I was recovering from a great disappointment in the usual way a man does that, by means of what women see as empty frivolities though they usually figure in them, along with drink. Speaking of drink, Frenchmen do that all day long but generally with wine, so they ain’t really drunk but they ain’t cold sober either: they’re just French. And yessir, they really do eat frogs, though not at every meal.

But France nor any other foreign place wasn’t much to Annie Oakley’s liking, she being of the old-fashioned red-white-and-blue sort of girl with an eye open for un-American immorality, but one thing that concerned her personally she found good for a laugh. The King of Senegal, a colored country in Africa owned by the French at the time, while visiting Paris attended a performance of the Wild West and was so taken with Annie that he come around to Buffalo Bill’s tent after the show, a real big heavy person in his fancy robes of spotted furs and gold jewelry, with a bodyguard of husky young black fellows and a white interpreter who translated his French, and what he says was he wanted to buy Annie for a hundred thousand francs.

Now I know Cody thought this real humorous, but he pretended to be insulted, so the King upped the ante, until Bill lifted his hands and called quits.

“Madame Butler,” says he, “nor any other American lady can never be for sale, sir!”

The King speaks to the translator, who then tells Cody, “His Majesty says, ‘Oh, what a pity!’”

Bill turns his head towards me, with a hand covering his mustache and the top of his goatee, but got himself under control and turned back. “Ask him what he wanted to do with her.”

“To keel teegers,” the Frenchman says after consulting with the King, who now is smiling eagerly with a display of perfect teeth.

“Pardon?”

“Wild bists. To shoot dem.”

“To kill tigers?” Cody asks.

“May wee,”
says the King, and the interpreter explained, “They eat too many of his pipples.”

“Captain Jack,” Cody asks me, “will you be so good as to go to Miss Oakley’s tent and fetch her here to receive this offer? It’s too attractive to dismiss out of hand.”

So I done as requested, and the King repeated his proposal, and I’ll say this for Annie, she never got mad but just said politely she could not accept due to prior obligations. At which His Majesty parted his leopardskin robe and, amazingly graceful for a man of his bulk, knelt down on one bare knee, took her little surprised white hand in his big black one, raised it to his lips, and kissed it. Then he stood up, squared his shoulders, and marched out of the tent in a brisk military step, followed by his burly retainers.

As soon as the group could be expected to have gone beyond earshot, Cody let out a big guffaw, and he says to Annie, “I know for a fact there aren’t any tigers in Africa. That’s according to my personal friend Mr. Theodore Roosevelt.”

Annie didn’t have no better education than me, but to show you how sensible a person she was, she says now, “Well, maybe ‘tiger’ is what you call a leopard in French.”

I run into Two Eagles on leaving the tent and asked him if he had seen the big chief of Senegal and party go past.

“Yes,” says he, “and I liked his spotted robe very much. I wondered where a Black White Man killed such an animal.”

Which is what Indians called colored folk at home, and they didn’t differentiate by name between types, so I tried to clear him up on the matter. “He’s completely black,” I says, “and comes from a place called Af-ri-ca.”

“But he is here with the whites,” Two Eagles pointed out, getting that expression an Indian will show when he becomes stubborn.

“He’s just visiting.”

“He is not a captive?”

I hadn’t wanted to get into this, for I didn’t know all that much about the subject. “He seems to come and go as he pleases.”

“Why does he not stay home in his own country-of-the-spotted-animals?”

“I don’t know,” I says. “But he’s probably come here to ask the French to do something for his country, which I believe is actually owned by them, so he doesn’t run anything, but they let him stay on as big chief.”

“Then it seems to me he can be called a Black White Man,” Two Eagles said.

I changed the subject to explain something I felt guilty about. “That hat you returned to me in New York? The reason I’m not wearing it is that I got drunk in Paris last night and lost it.” This was always a good excuse with anybody in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, beginning with its founder, except for Annie of course.

“I thought maybe you gave it to some French woman,” Two Eagles said, with a trace of grin beneath his big hawk nose.

“You’re too smart for me,” I told him. Fact is, by the time we left Paris, there was few of us who still had the American stuff we brung along on arrival, and some of the cowboys had to send back home for replacement boots, chaps, sombreros, and all, and Cody had to warn against losing guns, for bringing firearms into them foreign countries was under strict controls and the red tape involved in clearing the show’s arsenal on first arrival had been trouble enough.

I should mention that the Lakota as usual when speaking of anybody not an Indian called him some version of
wasichu,
their word for “white man.” An Englishman was just plain
wasichu;
a black man was
wasichu-sapa;
a Frenchman,
wasichu-ikceka.
None of them was the normal folks they called themselves.

I
N THE FALL OF ’
89 we finally left Paris and went south in France, down to Marseilles where they drank a licorice-tasting concoction that turned milky when water was added and ruined some well-known people, well, that and the ailment which each European country tried to blame another for by calling it by the other’s name, like the “Neapolitan disease,” and so on, and their chief food down there, being on the seashore, was fish, especially a stew containing a mix of all kinds called
billybase,
which was a little too rich for my blood, but the Sioux, who never ate fish at home, could get sick just by smelling a bowlful. But not sick in reality, the kind you could die from: that happened however when we continued on down to Barcelona, in the land of Spain, where I found such Spanish as I had learned from the Mexicans was looked on as being fairly ignorant, for I couldn’t bring myself to lisp on certain words as they do in that city, but I never had much chance to do so anyway, for we run into an outbreak of both typhoid fever and the flu, against which the city was quarantined, so few people appeared at our performances, plus which a number of the company come down with serious ailments, including some of the Sioux, and the man who announced the acts, Frank Richmond, died. Annie nearly did too, and Frank Butler was hit hard.

The only other thing of note was Arizona John Burke, always looking for a chance at publicity, took a bunch of our Indians to the local statue of Christopher Columbus and got them photographed there, sending the picture back to the U.S.A. with a comment to the effect that Columbus was four hundred years early as an advance agent for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Burke really done that. But I heard later on that someplace it was told that one of the Indians stared at the statue and said, “It was a damn bad day for us when he discovered America.” That never happened, and I was there. The Sioux at that time didn’t know anything about Columbus, aside from the fact they never seen him anywhere near Montana nor Dakota territories, and they thought of themselves as Lakota and not “Indians” and “America” so far as they was concerned was the part of the country where the white people, including the black white people, lived.

The further difficulty in Spain was once we got quarantined, we couldn’t leave even though nobody was buying tickets, but finally we got out of there in January of the year and went on to the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, the latter being the birthplace of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the Indians did know his tomb was at Paris, for they seen it, and when I mentioned he was supposed to be short, they called him Little Big Man, I believe in all seriousness.

Next came Naples, and a mountain named Vesuvius was nearby. The first day we was there, Red Shirt told me, “That is the mountain that Black Elk saw, the one that belches fire.”

“I don’t see any right now.”

“It’s the one,” he said with certainty, but I never understood how he could know that.

Some days later we was took to visit the ruins of the city of Pompeii which was being dug out of the ground, having been buried by volcanic ash centuries before, so Red Shirt was sure right about that mountain.

Now at Pompeii in its heyday there had been at least as many harlotries as in Dodge City centuries afterwards, but the difference was they had pictures painted on the walls of the Pompeii whorehouses illustrating the pleasures available. The Indians found these of interest, for they was learning some of this stuff for the first time, but a lot of cowboys, who wasn’t, was nevertheless shocked to see it depicted in public and thought worse of the Eye-ties for doing so and said we shouldn’t let many of them into the U.S.A. lest our morals go to hell and also them foreigners was so ignorant as to misspell Chris Columbus’s name as Cristoforo Colombo and claim he was one of them. I admit I myself didn’t know the truth of that at the time, for we had just come from Spain, where the Spanish claimed him, only called the man Cristobal Colon!

Luckily the Butlers was going to visit Pompeii another day, so I was able to warn Frank to steer Annie clear of the filthy pictures.