Return of Little Big Man (8 page)

Such delicacies come to mind on account of I was in the same need of finding food again as I had been before arriving at Deadwood, or sure would of been were it not for my new supplier, namely that dog what had left the company of my brother Bill for mine, which was so far nameless. My main experience with this type of animal had been when amongst the Cheyenne, who carry a lot of dogs with them at all times but generally don’t make pets so don’t give them names. They put dogs to work, hauling smaller travois, and on occasion, usually a celebratory feast of some kind, knock a puppy in the head, singe off its hair, boil it up, and eat it. From the redskin point of view this is practical, not cruel, and my own position on the matter was as usual divided: when amongst Indians I ate dog if it was offered, yet when with whites I would never of thought of doing so.

But what about now, when I was real hungry soon enough after leaving town, with no weapons with which to acquire meat and no place to buy, beg, borrow, or steal even a plate of beans? Unless you been in a similar situation you don’t know what it’s like to have to personally catch or gather every morsel of food you swallow. Sure, you can locate a springy bough and make a bow of it with your shoelace, find some flint and chip a point from it then tie it to a straight twig, and with such an arrow drop an elk or antelope, and your problem’s gone. I estimate to accomplish this wouldn’t take no longer than a month or two. Or you spear a mess of fish—if there happens to be fish in the streams you come across. Incidentally, the Cheyenne was one of the few Plains tribes that would catch and eat fish, dating from the ancient days when they lived in the lake country, before the coming of the horse. But fish like game was not always to be found.

However, as it turned out with that dog, I didn’t have nothing to complain of, as I first realized when, not far along the trail, he run off on his own and, not long after I figured I’d seen the last of him, he returns with his teeth sunk in the nape of a limp jackrabbit of a sufficient size, when roasted over the little fire I started (real little because you never knew who it might attract), to feed us both. He thereby proved, and confirmed it further as we proceeded, that he was a real partner, catching our red meat all the way to Laramie, jackrabbits, prairie dogs, and the like, being partial to that with hair on it, which is to say he just backed up, barking, at rattlesnakes, which was left to me to kill with knife and forked stick, but he weren’t shy about eating the result, which when cooked is real palatable, but if you ever offer any to a white woman you better say it’s chicken. Anyhow, seeing the kind of association we had established, I gave him the name of Pard.

At Fort Laramie the talk was all about the aforementioned Fifth Cavalry, which in July had departed from there to get the Cheyenne what had illegally bolted from the nearby Red Cloud agency to try to join the hostiles up in the Little Bighorn region. At a place called War Bonnet Creek, William F. Cody, so-called Buffalo Bill, who returned briefly from what had become his full-time career of showmanship in the East to serve as Army scout, supposedly had a personal fight with a Cheyenne called Yellow Hand. There was many accounts of this incident from the first, beginning with them that claimed to be eyewitnesses, with the most lavish coming from Cody himself, which had him in a hand-to-hand with knives, concluding with lifting Yellow Hand’s bloody hair and crying, “The first scalp for Custer!” This is naturally the one given in dime novels and the later moving-picture shows. I got to know Cody right well in future years, but wasn’t at this event, for which I heard he wore one of his theatrical costumes, a black-and-red velvet Mexican suit with silver buttons and lace, and a enormous big-brimmed hat of the kind favored south of the border, so I can’t comment except to say there was a lot of people, including Yellow Hand’s own sister, who said Buffalo Bill never did it. I mention this because it was typical of everything that ever happened in the West that became famous. You don’t know what the truth was unless you was there—like me, on so many well-known occasions, and I never claim anything I can’t vouch for, like the Cody–Yellow Hand combat. It is especially hard to determine what was or was not true about Bill Cody, one of the greatest masters of the art of throwing buffalo chips who ever lived, in a time when there was a lot of competition.

I know there’s some of you saying, “Of which you, old boy, might be the last living example.” If so, just listen to what I tell you, and then check it against the facts if you can.

My trouble, most of my life, was nobody would listen. You recall Wild Bill wouldn’t let me tell him about being with Custer at the Greasy Grass. Well, this continued. Occupied at Deadwood with my brother Bill and then Hickok’s last days on earth, I hadn’t encountered talk about the destruction of most of the Seventh Cavalry by the Sioux and Cheyenne but at Laramie that was still the main topic, and of course there wasn’t nobody representing the redskin side of the argument, least of all the tame Indians what was called Hang-Around-the-Forts because there was a lot of them still doing that, begging for whiskey, et cetera. This was definitely not the place to reveal my intimate experience of the fighting Cheyenne, but I could and did try to tell a few folks I knowed Custer well, starting out at that, with an intention of going on, but everyone was sick of the many impostors already circulating, hardly two months since the event, claiming to have survived the Little Bighorn battle. Anyway, all anybody wanted to talk about was how there wasn’t any longer no excuse for not just wiping out every rotten dirty Indian in the country. We tried to get along with them, and look what happened! The men who expressed this feeling strongest was, as always, them so drunk they could hardly stand up, let alone take on the savages.

Me and Pard didn’t linger long at Laramie. For one, the dog couldn’t do much hunting at or around the fort, owing to the commotion there, and I still never had no money, having, properly, not been paid by Colorado Charley for bodyguarding Wild Bill the day he was murdered. I was once again in my familiar need of a profitable occupation, and I thought the pickings might be better down at the town of Cheyenne, which had been a growing place on my visit of the previous spring and was surely even more so by now, for that’s how it went in them days and those parts.

When me and Pard got there, indeed I saw a city of some fifteen thousand souls, with all manner of shops, eateries, dance halls, variety theaters, gambling places, sporting houses, everything men really like but little of what’s supposed to be good for them. The latter was sure to come, given the natural progression in human affairs, usually due to the arrival of respectable women, like mothers and schoolteachers and churchgoers, them who believe life ought to be more than the mere pleasuring of the lowest appetites which uninstructed men think is just fine. But this has even been true of the more than a few harlots I have known: they was always saving up some kind of nest egg for when they left the profession and settled down with a fine decent man and raised a family, and what’s more, some of them actually done as much.

In some ways I was not much better prepared for civilization than an Indian, with the difference that I was white and therefore, if ever the target of hatred or contempt on the part of the civilized, it was only personal and not general. Also, I had a term or two in decent society, beginning when I was the adopted son of the Reverend and Mrs. Pendrake, which also represented the only period of formal book-learning I ever endured. Then there was the time I was in the trading business with Bolt & Ramirez in Denver and thought I had settled down with a Swedish-immigrant wife named Olga, but she and our boy, little Gus, was captured by the Indians, who I myself rejoined from time to time, by fate and not by choice, for I could recognize there wasn’t no future in barbarism however attractive it might at times seem.

Looking at the main street of Cheyenne, I realized that I had to find me a more profitable kind of life than heretofore. I was real tired of being hungry, broke, and dirty and not having a shelter against the elements, which was unruly in my part of the world that summer, with storms of rain and hail.

“Pard,” I says to my canine pal, who had got chilled and soaked along with me, “we got to find a way to get in on this prosperity.” He was a good listener but being a dog was not equipped to understand as I did that any number of them frequenting these pleasure palaces was likely to be no more prosperous than me, but simply able to put up a better front.

While I was standing there, thinking, being careful to keep out of the way of more affluent-looking passersby, what does Pard do but approach a dandified sort of fellow with derby hat, stickpin, and gold-headed walking stick. Now Pard was right friendly, but I was afraid a man dressed like that might get the wrong impression when approached by a mutt, maybe take a swipe at him with that stick, so I moves up to defend my pal if so.

But this fellow, who wore the standard droopy mustache of the day, just smiled down at the dog, then at me.

He says, “He looks like he could use a good feed.”

“I expect he could,” says I. “Him and me just come in off the trail from Laramie, and there ain’t much game around.”

“Lots of people have gone that way for gold,” says he. “That was the reason I came here, but before I could get outfitted to haul up to Deadwood, a lot of them started to come back. They say all the good claims are gone and the vein is already running thin.”

“That’s where I come from myself,” I told him. I was trying to decide whether to say much further when he up and asks me if I happened to be at Deadwood when Wild Bill Hickok was shot.

I decided on caution. “I might of been.”

He grins under his black mustache. “What kind of answer is that? Either you were or were not.”

Now speaking well as he did, and being so nicely dressed, he was a far cry from the usual type I run into. In fact he struck me as probably hailing from back East, like one of them writers what came West looking for colorful topics to write about for the cake-eaters in the big cities. He didn’t look like no sissy, being of a husky build though of the middle height, and talking in a straightforward manly way. But I decided he was likely a tenderfoot in matters pertaining to the frontier and therefore just the right person to tell my story to, and not just about Wild Bill but also Custer and all. I starts in, but he says his whistle could use some wettening and he’d be glad to buy me one as well.

Pard was already lowering his head and long nose, giving me a dirty look from the tops of his eyes, because by now he could foresee things in that canine way. “Sorry,” I told him, “saloons and gambling halls are just for them with two feet, probably to their detriment. You’re lucky to get to stay outdoors. Just wait here for me. If you spot somebody with a drawn gun, you run away and hide.”

“You’re fond of him,” said my new acquaintance.

“Friends of any breed come in handy out here where your back is often to the wall,” I says self-importantly as we enter a big fancy establishment I wouldn’t of had the nerve to try alone, shabby as I was at present, and I sure wouldn’t have got in now, I figured, had the big mean-looking, Colt’s-wearing fellow posted at the door not recognized my companion, nodding at him respectfully, from which I gathered my benefactor was wont to spend a lot of money on the premises.

Now this place was enormous, being a complex under one roof of full-sized theater, hotel, gambling hall, and a bar all full of polished brass and mirrors and big shiny hanging lamps, where we bellied up and my friend tells the bartender to leave the bottle.

He proceeds to throw down three fingers in one swallow, and I wondered if he knew what he was doing, for I had been told once that liquor has more effect in the high air of the West than at Eastern sea levels. I was myself more sparing, having so little food in my belly. I didn’t rightly care if
he
got drunk, though, for he might then listen with more credulity.

But the one who got plastered, and soon enough on an empty stomach, was me, not him. By my second shot I was feeling it, and with the third all that glass and glitter lost its clear edges and I felt more and more like I was trying to see things with my head immersed in a stream.

But the other fellow just kept drinking without no visible effect, at least to my impaired vision. This situation however did not stop me from not only telling the truth about Wild Bill’s last days but embellishing it quite a bit. Why would I do this when the facts was remarkable enough as they stood? Well, remember what a poor job I done as bodyguard: I wouldn’t want to boast about that. But why
boast
about anything? Because that’s what Westerners always done when in the presence of them from the East. It was expected of you, you felt you owed it to the landscape, but the real reason was you could get away with it to some tenderfoot who traveled by parlor car and never ate a meal except by knife and fork. And also I was drunk.

I don’t remember after all these years and, at the time, all that whiskey, exactly what I said, but it is likely I come out the hero of the event even though failing to stop Jack McCall from shooting Wild Bill in the back. Maybe my gun misfired—though I never had one at the time. But at least there was a grain of truth within it, unlike a good many first-person accounts around in them days, and it seemed to go over with my friend, who poured me regular refills at the rate of about half the frequency with which he poured for himself while remaining cold sober.

“I never had the good fortune,” he said at one point, “to personally meet Wild Bill, and I am sorry I now won’t ever have the chance.”

“Well sir,” says I, “I can tell you anything you’d like to hear. And not only concerning Bill Hickok. I’ve knowed them all, General Custer and his lovely wife”—it was true I had some personal association of the General though only seeing Mrs. Libbie once—“and old Kit Carson”—just barely factual, for on my sole face-to-face with him, he slammed his front door in my face when I asked him for a handout. But then I made a big mistake, I picked up my brother Bill’s line on another famous gunfighter. “I expect the fellow still alive that I know best is Wyatt Earp, whose name might be recognizable. Fact is, I taught him most of what he knows about shooting.”