1876 ‘Either the most neglected hero in history or a liar of insane proportion’, to quote the publicity tagline for the movie, Thomas Berger’s Jack Crabb – alias Little Big Man in the 1964 novel of that name – seems to have been present at nearly every factual (or fanciful) event in the history (or romance) of the Old West. Captured as a child when the Lakota Sioux attack his family’s wagon train, he is brought up in the native language and culture until recaptured by soldiers and adopted by a childless couple in Missouri.
He marries a Swedish girl and starts a family, only to be ambushed again by the natives and reunited with his old Lakota family. Settling back into the tribe, he marries a native woman. On the very morning their child is born, Custer’s 7th Cavalry attacks their camp on Washita Creek. Crabb’s wife and child are killed, along with two dozen other women and children. Crabb escapes, determined to get even with George Armstrong Custer.
After a run-in with Wyatt Earp and a spell of being taught how to gamble (and shoot) by Wild Bill Hickok, Crabb winds up in Custer’s camp on the eve of Little Bighorn, working as a teamster, still seeking revenge. But he finds Custer puzzling over a set of sand drawings and bones that the natives have left behind in their abandoned lodge, and can’t resist helping the general interpret the signs, the ‘practical combination of fact and fancy’, as he calls them, left as a warning that they are there and intend to fight this time.
Custer is so amused by this teamster promoting himself as Indian expert that he appoints him his personal jester. Of course he disregards everything Crabb has said, and next day rides to his doom.
Crabb’s double perspective on white and native life works to reverse many of the old clichés of western fiction. Natives turn out to be more sensitive than savage, more loyal than treacherous, while the whites are incompetent, rapacious and dishonest. Yet Little Big Man is not simply a satire on received notions. Wild Bill may never have been able to put ten shots through the dot of an ‘i’ on a sign at 200 yards, but he did get them all within the ‘O’ at 100 – and with a handgun, that’s some shooting. Custer may have been incompetent, cruel and mad, but Crabb is moved to admire his courage – even his style – in death. Little Big Man redeems even the objects of its satire, which is to say that the book accepts that the romance of the Old West can hold its own against the historical actuality.