Return of Little Big Man (55 page)

It was a religious movement based on the visions of a Paiute out in Nevada Territory called Wovoka, who believed the time would soon come, if enough Indians of all tribes would perform the Ghost Dance, when a great flow of earth would cover all the whites and everything they had brung, square houses, iron road, singing wires, the whole kit and caboodle, and the red men would be raised above it and the buffalo and everything else that was good from the old days would come back.

You might ask, why not let the poor devils enjoy their delusions? Way back when I was a young fellow with the Cheyenne, we was going into a battle with the U.S. Cavalry and it was a theory of a medicine man named Ice that if we dipped our hands in the water of a certain lake, we could hold them up when the soldiers shot at us, in which case the bullets would just trickle down the gun barrels and drop harmlessly on the ground, so we did and they didn’t, I mean the slugs, which didn’t seem to know about the spell, on account of Ice wasn’t fluent in the language of lead, or so I heard was his explanation to them that survived. Being white myself, I quick as I could surrendered to the Army.

My point here is that Indians was coming up with ideas of this sort all the time, and now and again they might even work. But when they worked it was in a particular way, not for a whole bunch all at once, and there sure wasn’t nothing dreamed up by a red Messiah that was going to get rid of white people by dancing. What the Army was concerned about was that the Indians would figure that out for themselves and give the Everywhere Spirit a hand by going to war again.

General Nelson Miles was in charge of the Army for the part of the country involved, and he sent a telegram that was waiting for Buffalo Bill at the hotel when we got off the ship in New York. Which proved to be why neither Cody nor me went to Washington with Salsbury, Burke, and the Indians.

“Miles wants me to come to Chicago, Jack,” Cody said, on reading the wire. “He’s worried about old Sitting Bull.”

“What’s that got to do with Chicago?”

“That’s where the General is headquartered now. He’s commander of the whole Department of the Missouri.”

“What’s the trouble with Sitting Bull?”

“We’re both going to find out. I want you to come along with me. You are a friend of his and speak the lingo.” He smiled and hoisted one of the glasses a bellhop had delivered, along with several bottles, soon as we had got to his rooms. “Besides, you’re a fine fellow to travel with. Have another.”

So me and him went to Chicago and saw Bear Coat, which is what the Sioux and Cheyenne called General Miles, who told us all he knowed about the Ghost Dance and this Paiute who called himself Wovoka but was known to the Army as Jack Wilson, and Miles said it was too bad Sitting Bull, who ought to know better, had fell for this nonsense or was just making cynical use of it, but anyhow was preaching it to all the Sioux at the Standing Rock reservation and trying to start an uprising.

Now I never believed this for a minute, for the Bull I had gotten to know during the time he was with the Wild West wasn’t the type of person to preach anyone else’s cause, having a high opinion of his own self as a spiritual leader who had foreseen the great victory at the Greasy Grass in a vision. But I was never the type of individual to get much respect from a general, even a previously reasonable one like Bear Coat. I would leave it to Cody to make the truth known once we got out to the Standing Rock agency, in Dakota Territory, and talked with Sitting Bull himself, for that’s what General Miles wanted Cody to do.

Actually, he wanted him to do something much worse. I couldn’t believe it when on the train West, Cody showed me the written order, in which Miles said Colonel Cody was “authorized to secure the person of Sitting Bull and deliver him to the nearest commanding officer of U.S. Troops.”

“He wants you to
arrest
him, for God’s sake?”

“Simmer down, Jack,” Cody says. “No need to take the Lord’s name in vain. We’ll parley a little with Sitting Bull, wet our whistles some, and soon straighten out the whole thing. I’m betting it’s some kind of misunderstanding. Sitting Bull’s too good a businessman to involve himself in what sounds like a very shaky enterprise. Miles can think it’s an arrest, but I’m going to bring old Bull out for another tour with us.”

Which went to demonstrate how far gone Buffalo Bill was in his own sort of showman’s life by now and why some people thought he had never actually been west of Chicago but was altogether an invention of dime-novel writers like Colonel Ingraham and Ned Buntline.

Well, we finally reached Dakota Territory, at the Sioux reservation called Standing Rock, where the agency was under the direction of a man named McLaughlin, who considered himself a great friend to the Indians, to the degree that he had a Lakota wife, but like many such, his liking for them was based pretty close on whether they did what he wanted them to, which put him and Sitting Bull at odds from the first.

So when me and Cody showed up at Fort Yates, the nearby post maintained by the U.S. Army in case the Sioux disagreed too much with McLaughlin’s ideas, the commanding officer got hold of the agent and showed him General Miles’s order.

McLaughlin was not much taller than me, and had a big black drooping mustache over a mouth that was likewise turned down. He looked even unhappier after reading the order.

Cody of course was his usual positive self. “As you gentlemen may or may not be aware, Sitting Bull and I have not only enjoyed a close professional association, but I think I am safe in saying we are warm personal friends. I’m certain the fine old fellow and I can settle this little matter in no time.”

The commander there was a real colonel named Drum, and being a soldier knew better than to give any hint of disagreement with his superior back in Chicago. “Colonel Cody,” he says, “first let me welcome you to our post here at Yates. Your reputation precedes you, and I don’t mean just your distinguished career with the, Wild West, but also your prior exploits as a scout.”

“Why, thank you, sir, and may I present my associate, Captain Jack Crabb.”

I shook hands with Drum and then McLaughlin, who I hadn’t thought could get any gloomier-looking but in fact had done so.

Having give me a look of the kind a real Army officer will show to an honorary one without Cody’s celebrity and shook my hand in the same fashion. Drum says, “Colonel, your wish is my command. But before we get started on the trip to Sitting Bull’s farm, which is a few hours from here, down on the Grand, may I suggest you and your aide accept some refreshment at our officers’ club? It won’t be as luxurious as some you’ve no doubt known, but I think you’ll find the whiskey drinkable.”

Cody’s reputation had preceded him, to be sure. We adjourned to the club referred to, which might not of compared to them that the New York swells had entertained Buffalo Bill in, but was comfortable enough, for there wasn’t much else for the Army to do stationed at a place like this, and anyway Cody wasn’t a snob about drinking, needing only a bottle and a tent, and not even the latter if the weather was clear, so he settled there for what I could see right away would be quite a spell, for a sizable audience of young officers soon collected around him, which meant he would stay until either the liquor was exhausted or the rest of them collapsed, there being nobody in America, England, or the whole continent of Europe with as great a capacity, which he had proved across the world.

I stayed for only a while, for I noticed that soon as the fact was established that Cody was fixed in place for the foreseeable future, both Agent McLaughlin and Colonel Drum slipped out the door. I wasn’t in no doubt that they disapproved of his mission and though in no position to oppose it openly, would obstruct it sneakily as long as possible, beginning with this idea of getting him drunk.

I myself didn’t share Cody’s optimistical idea he could get the Bull to return to the Wild West, to sit in a headdress and sell autographed photos again, for I had heard from the Lakotas who newly joined our troupe from time to time that the old chief was doing right well as a farmer, with quite a few head of livestock and fields of corn, there in the bottomland along the Grand River, which furthermore was home ground to him, having been born nearby, something always important to an Indian though he might of wandered afield.

But neither did I trust McLaughlin and Drum. Having a natural suspicion of them in authority, which you might see as typical of someone who was never in that situation himself, it seemed to me to go without saying that neither an Indian agent nor an Army officer would at all times be acting only for the good of those under them. And if you say, Well, ain’t it too bad old Jack had that view of human nature? I’d point out how I experienced many a dangerous episode yet am still breathing at my present age.

What I wanted to do now was find out what them two was up to once out of Cody’s presence, and since they was unlikely to reveal it to me personally, I consulted the same kind of source from which I learned a lot about the Seventh Cavalry while en route to the Little Bighorn, namely, an enlisted man. There ain’t one ever served who didn’t welcome a chance to vent his bitterness against his superiors, which come to think about it ain’t only a characteristic of soldiers.

So what I done in this present case was outfit myself with one of the bottles of whiskey Cody brung along in the great amount of baggage he commonly traveled with, which otherwise was filled with changes of attire, for he was never less than Buffalo Bill wherever he went, which is to say on performance, and I loitered around outside Colonel Drum’s HQ until some soldier emerged wearing yellow corporal’s stripes on his blue jacket and started across the “area,” which was the Army term for any space whatever inside a fort—and by the way most of the Western forts wasn’t the walled and gated affairs shown in the movies, but just a collection of buildings in the open—and much of what soldiers were put to doing when stationed at any fort or camp was just cleaning up the “area.”

As it turned out, I struck gold right away. “Say, Corp,” I says to this fellow, “will you tell me where the officers’ club is? I got me a wagonload of fine whiskey over yonder I got to deliver.”

He points with a stubby finger that had a clean nail, not a common sight then. “Across the area.” He gives me a disgruntled stare. “I guess you ain’t got none for the noncoms’ club?”

From his squared-away forage cap and shined boots, I had took him for having a job at HQ and not merely visiting it to be chewed out by the commanding officer. “No, I have not,” I told him. “You know how that goes. I’m an old Army man myself.”

“Well, it ain’t changed,” says he.

“Say,” says I, “I got me an extra bottle, and you’re welcome to take a taste from it unless you’re on duty and can’t.”

He grins with his broad freckled face, showing one tooth broke off clean at just the halfway mark. “I’m supposed to pick up the Colonel’s shirt at the laundry and wait for it if it ain’t ironed yet. I got the time. But let’s get out of the area.”

So we went back to the stables, always a good place to find a quiet corner, and I fetched the bottle out of the coat pocket it had been weighting down, and me and Corporal Gruber had a few sips from it, though actually the sipping was mine, whereas he did the gulping. Anyhow, as Colonel Drum’s orderly he was able to furnish me with the information I needed.

Drum and McLaughlin wanted to delay Cody from going after Sitting Bull till they could get orders calling him off, and this would take a while, for they had to take the matter to somebody higher than General Miles, whose idea it was for Cody to come in the first place, and all this had to be done on the telegraph, if it was working and not disconnected somewhere along the thousands of miles of wire.

“I don’t know, though,” says Gruber, “I think if Buffalo Bill can’t do something about Sitting Bull, who could? He’s got that show of his, which all my family back East see every time he comes to town, and he’s real rich and he’s got all the women he wants, like that Annie Oakley I seen pitchers of, she’s a pretty little piece, and I’d like—”

“Here,” I says, “you have another.” For which he didn’t need no urging, and while he was a-gurgling, I asked, “Why are they so set on stopping him from seeing the Bull?”

“’Cause they’re feared it might start a war,” says Gruber. “Say one of them hotheaded young bucks whipped up by that old bastard would kill Buffalo Bill, then we’d have to go down there with troops and make ’em all good Indians, which if you ask me wouldn’t be a bad idea. It really burns me up they’re still making trouble after all the times we whipped them.”

General Sheridan’s saying about the only good redskins being dead ones was a familiar sentiment with soldiers on Western duty, but I hadn’t heard it said for a while, for in the East and especially in Europe most whites appeared sympathetic to the Indians and often even friendly in their own fashion, so I was took by surprise, but to argue with Gruber at this point would of defeated my purpose. Of course you did well with Indians in a state of excitement not to put yourself in a defenseless situation. But Sitting Bull had a high regard for Cody and I was sure wouldn’t let him be harmed, and as for Buffalo Bill himself, he was a lively fellow but never really reckless.

I urged Gruber to make free with the bottle we was sharing. It was his own affair if he reported back to Colonel Drum stinking drunk and without that fresh-laundered shirt. “I don’t know,” I says, “I thought Sitting Bull become a farmer. Would he want to start a war?”

The corporal took a long pull at the bottle, then worked his prominent adam’s apple. “That smelly old sonbitch does whatever he feels like. Did you hear? He’s keeping a white whore down there in his cabin. I mean, she ain’t a captive, else we’d ride down and pull her out pronto. Imagine a white woman doing a filthy thing like that, even if she is trash.”

It was true enough that the houses of ill fame with which I was acquainted would not accept a customer of another race than white, even them with black girls amongst their offerings, like there was colored barbers who would cut only white men’s hair and not that of their own kind. With a Mexican it depended on how Mexican he looked. This seemed altogether normal at that time, so much so it wouldn’t ordinarily be questioned. But like everything else I had heard about Sitting Bull beginning with Bear Coat’s reasons for ordering his arrest, I found this hard to believe. White people in general seldom really knowed what was going on with Indians, and with the Army that confusion was multiplied tenfold: for example Custer, and he had been a veteran of fighting the red man. The mistake was in looking for white reasons in Indian actions, going from point to point in straight lines. No doubt this was the effective way to work with electricity when inventing the light bulb or telephone, but not when making the old Bull into a warrior whoremonger, despite appearances.