NOW I HAVEN’T MENTIONED the Cheyenne for a while—I mean, in the sense of what they had been up to since the big fight at the Greasy Grass—but that don’t mean they disappeared from the face of the earth, like many whites wanted to hear. Them and their Sioux and Arapaho friends all separated into many different bands following the Custer battle and scattered all over Montana and Dakota territories. The hostiles was not done fighting, and at one point they even come close to Deadwood at Slim Buttes, but the three generals they called respectively Three Stars (Crook), Bear Coat (Miles), and Bad Hand (Mackenzie) run them all to ground—except Sitting Bull, who ended up in Grandmother’s land (Canada)—within a year, and even the great Ogallala Crazy Horse surrendered and come into the agency, where before long he lost his life in a scuffle the explanation of which depended on not only what race you belonged to, but which faction thereof. I was not on hand for it, so have nothing to say except that the incident involved either his best friend or worst Judas, one Little Big Man. Which was not me, this person being another Ogallala and his name, though translating the same as mine, was Sioux in its original form, as mine was Cheyenne. I think I have said this before, but people don’t always listen, and get it wrong. If the distinction is hard to grasp, think of how when I went to Europe with Cody’s show (of which more to come) a French lady said “Little Big Man” as Pertygrandum, or thereabouts, and in Germany some mustachioed and bemedaled prince told me in his language it was, more or less, Klynergrossman. Same name, different lingos.
Dull Knife, what some have called the greatest of the Cheyenne chiefs, finally surrendered in the spring of ’77 and immediately come to regret doing so, for him and his band was thereupon compelled, though they was Northern Cheyenne, to join their cousins of the Southern branch of the people, on a reservation down in Indian Territory, which later become the state of Oklahoma, but was known by the likes of me as the Nations, after the other tribes that lived there, many of which had been run out to the region from their natural homelands in the Southeast years earlier, the Cherokees and the rest.
When you consider how the Government treated Indians, which was rarely better than absolutely rotten, you sometimes make out the glint of a bright idea, like Why wouldn’t these folk welcome being collected together into one big happy family of Cheyenne? There might also of been a thought that the association would make them less warlike, the southerners having been subdued for some time.
Whatever the reasons why they had to go down there, Dull Knife’s people found the place intolerable. The game was long gone, and anyway they was not supposed to hunt but rather to be issued Government food, which as usual proved scant on account of the corruption familiar since time immemorial with them that have access to public funds. And the terrain and climate, to which Indians, being on such close terms with nature, was very sensitive, were all wrong in these hot and humid lowlands, whereas their lifelong home had been near the Bighorn Mountains and the Black Hills. The northern Cheyenne took sick with fevers and chills from maladies they had never previously heard of. Not to mention the mortal illness resulting from the heart being broke over and over again.
So after a year they up and left the reservation and headed north, a move that was strictly illegal, so the troops went after them, and there followed that long journey in which about three hundred Cheyenne, only sixty-seventy of them warriors, fought off the U.S. Army’s continued efforts to stop them over many weeks and many hundreds of miles.
I had lost all track of the people to which I had been closer than to my natural-born race, for the years I spent with the Indians was the ones where a person absorbs much of what will get him through life, and my existence with Old Lodge Skins’s band was more concentrated than any subsequently with whites, including my time with my wife and child, which lasted only a couple of years and besides, as I have said, Olga was Swedish and though she probably spoke better English than me, I believe she thought in her native tongue, of which I never learned a word, except a drinking toast that says Skoal to all the pretty girls.
In fact I tried not to reflect on the Indian situation, which after Custer was rubbed out was all losses for the red side: there wasn’t nothing I could do about it. Since telling Wild Bill Hickok that I had survived at the Little Bighorn and not being believed, I had not mentioned that fact to a soul, for I realized if anybody did believe me he’d then have to deal with me getting my life saved by one of the Indians who was slaughtering every other white man in sight, the kind of thing difficult to explain to the folks of that time.
But then, all of a sudden, the matter was at hand. In the middle of September in ’78, them northward-moving renegade Cheyenne was within twenty miles of Dodge City, raiding little settlements and ranches, and they killed a mail carrier out from Dodge, who had the bad luck to cross their trail. So there was enough panic locally to distract all concerned from the usual drinking, gambling, and whoring, and since hardly any troops was at the nearby fort, reinforcements was summoned and meanwhile civilian volunteers assembled to save the capital of civilization from the savages.
I didn’t join this bunch. The killing of Dora Hand was still eating at me. If Bat had let me go along on the pursuit of Jim Kennedy, the latter wouldn’t of stayed alive. So Kennedy escaped all punishment and returned to Texas, but the Cheyenne was to be kept from returning to a home what had been taken from them. I couldn’t see the justice in it, so I stayed behind the bar, pouring whiskey for the many others who stayed behind, because when I say the vices was put aside totally for defense of the city, I was speaking loosely. When it come to drinking, there were some who would keep doing it while they was getting scalped alive.
The emergency was over before long with the Indians moving on north and that seemed the end of the matter locally, until the following February when Bat, looking in at the Lone Star, tells me the Governor of Kansas has ordered him to Fort Leavenworth to pick up a half-dozen Cheyenne prisoners from the Army, to bring back for a trial by the civil authorities of Ford County, on the crimes they had committed while in the vicinity of Dodge.
The news hit me hard. Them Indians was likely to get lynched if brung back to this place as common criminals.
“Who you taking along?” I asked him, and he names several deputies including his brother Jim and Charlie Bassett. “Any of you speak the language?”
“I don’t,” Bat says.
“You could use an interpreter.”
He put on his familiar smirk. “Yourself?”
“Goddammit, Bat,” I says. “Take me serious for once. I really can speak Cheyenne.” I rattled off a stream of it.
He smiled more broadly and threw down a shot of whiskey, then resettled his derby. “Now, Jack, since I don’t speak it myself, how in hell would I know if what you just said was Cheyenne?”
“I’m going to lie to Bat Masterson?”
I’ll mention again that Bat’s head was a lot less swelled than others of the time, but flattery sometimes worked even with him. “Well,” he says, “I can’t pay you extra. Just expenses.”
I accepted the deal, even though I’d be losing my Lone Star pay as well, for them was the days before paid vacations and sick time off, but I had that nest egg I have spoke of and wasn’t doing this with monetary gain in mind.
So me and Bat and the four deputies traveled to Fort Leavenworth, where the Army turned over the Cheyenne prisoners to us, seven of them, in their blankets, dusky countenances totally blank despite the unpleasantness of their situation. They was all handcuffed and in leg irons as well. It was from this sort of lack of display of emotion that whites saw redskins as having no feelings that wasn’t prompted by bloodlust. But the truth was rather that Indians wouldn’t give their enemies the satisfaction of showing that the latter had hurt them.
We all returned to Dodge on the Santa Fe, taking up half a car for our party, and as the Cheyenne wasn’t causing any trouble, the lawmen spent most of their time keeping away the white civilians on the rest of the train and then, at the many stops, fending off the unruly mobs that had formed at a number of the stations with an idea of dragging the now helpless warriors out and hanging them. Speaking from the experience of now more than a century, I can tell you that the type of man who most thirsts for revenge is likely to be one who has himself never suffered any damage from the person who is the object of his vengeance: it might be he feels insulted by the very lack of menace to him by them who have done dirty to others he don’t even know.
Now Bat Masterson was at his best in situations where he could assert personal authority without a show of even suggested force, and without no bluster so much as raising his voice beyond the volume necessary while standing in the doorway of the car to address a crowd on the platform. This worked at most towns, but at Lawrence the mob got sufficiently pushy for Bat to have to knock down the man nearest him, which however turned out to be the town marshal, and Bat found himself under arrest. But finally we reached Topeka, where a thousand people was waiting, along with a closed wagon to convey the prisoners to the jail for overnight, which was done through a lot of milling and yelling, but the Indians was protected by our bunch from Dodge and local deputies of Shawnee County.
Since there wasn’t no practical need as yet—they went where they was pointed—I had not addressed a word to the Cheyenne, despite what Bat might make of my silence, and the reason was none of them would believe me if I started talking to them in their own language. So far as they could see, I belonged to the enemy that held them prisoner. It wouldn’t make no sense by their lights that I would have friendly feelings towards them. If such was the case, then why didn’t I let them loose? I had a real problem, and while the lawmen was holding off the mobs, I was trying to figure a way to deal with it.
It called for real delicacy. I sure couldn’t show any moral weakness. I decided therefore to start with the one whose name translated as Wild Hog. With Dull Knife he had been a principal chief of them who headed north from the Nations. We was told he had tried to stab himself to death while at Fort Leavenworth and was still not healed, though nobody asked him now to unwrap his blanket for a look. Suicide amongst the Cheyenne was unusual in normal times, though on this subject Bat said he had been with the other buffalo hunters in ’74 at Adobe Walls when they was attacked by Quanah Parker’s band of Comanche, Kiowa, Arapaho, and Southern Cheyenne, and a young warrior of the last-named, called Stone Teeth, blew out his brains after being badly wounded by two rounds from a Sharps Big 50 buffalo rifle.
Maybe the fact that Wild Hog failed in the attempt to end his own life suggested he hadn’t his heart in it, for as a fighting warrior he would sure know how to kill with an edged weapon. Anyway, the Indian prisoners at the Shawnee County jail wasn’t given any implements with which to cut the tough-looking meat they was served, and I didn’t try to talk with the Hog while he was gnawing at his grub, which like all the others he put away with good appetite, so I guess he intended for the moment anyhow to stay amongst the living.
For the convenience of their captors, all seven Cheyenne was kept in one large cell of the kind for the temporary holding of drunks, and they was all sitting on the floor, not even talking to one another, at least not when under observation, which was most of the time, owing to that worry about suicide.
I wanted to take along a present but was pretty restricted in what was available. The old favorites of flour, coffee, and other foods needing to be cooked would be of no use to them now, and they wasn’t allowed to smoke, owing to the possibility of fire, so tobacco wouldn’t do.
What I settled on was sugar, Indians having a notable sweet tooth. I bought me a loaf of it at a shop in town when Bat and us went in to feed, and when we come back I asked the county jailors to give me a while with the captives, which they did, so long as I disarmed myself first of any weapons.
None of the Cheyenne paid me any mind when I entered the cell, all of them continuing to stare ahead, each cocooned in a dirty blanket. They wore no feathers or other ornamentation, and none of them looked young. People of a different race from your own, whatever you are, tend to resemble one another, as everyone knows and resents when it applies to his own type, but then when you live amongst the others they become immediately as distinguishable as anybody you ever knowed—only to get blurred again after you move out. I say this because it was true of me as well. When we picked up these men at Leavenworth, I had not recognized any of them, which despite my intimate association with the Cheyenne was not unusual, for mostly Old Lodge Skins’s band roamed around on its own, for reasons I give earlier, and were not that close to any other, except for a few special occasions such as at Black Kettle’s village on the Washita and then again at the Greasy Grass, attacked by Custer both times. And in a big gathering of thousands you wouldn’t get to know a lot of individuals any more than you would if visiting St. Louis or Chicago.
But now when I come into that jail cell and looked down at Wild Hog, I suddenly saw what I had not seen earlier: I thought I could recognize him as one of the boys I had been raised with as a child. We had played together with kid-sized bows and arrows and little toy horses made of wood or clay, and with others we had sat around Old Lodge Skins as he told us the educational stories of great Cheyenne exploits of the past, like the one concerning Little Man, from whose name my own was taken after I had done well in a horse-raiding expedition against the Crow. But two things puzzled me, the first of which was if I knowed him as a young kid, where had he been since then? For I rejoined the band a couple times later on, was with them at the Washita, yet could not recall seeing Wild Hog. Not to mention if we was boys together, how come he now looked so old, whereas I thought of myself as still quite youthful. I put in that last so you can get a laugh out of it. I was considered fairly old for the time myself, being well into the second half of my thirties, with only a year or so left if I was to be as imprudent as Wild Bill and play cards with my back to the door.
I’ll tell you about dealing with Indians: in some things it’s best to be as direct as possible, like if you’re hungry or cold or have to make water or any natural thing, you just say so. Courtesy does not demand otherwise. But with certain matters, for example time, you don’t just talk freely about it even with family members and intimates, for that can be rude. In trying to figure out why this is true I come up with the idea that time belongs to everybody and everything, and nobody and nothing can lay claim to any part of it exclusively, so if you talk about the past as though there was just one version of it that everybody agrees on, you might be seen as stealing the spirit of others, something which the Cheyenne always had a taboo against. You could shoot a man and while he lay dying rip off his scalp, but if you felt sorry for him under them conditions, you was trying to steal his spirit as well, and that was out of order.
So whether or not Wild Hog was the grown version of the boy I had knowed, I sure didn’t make the suggestion to him. Instead I squatted down and unwrapped the sugarloaf from the piece of paper around it and presented it to him. I didn’t say it was for everybody, for that too would of been discourteous. Indians instinctively shared everything they ever got, with the exception of whiskey.
He took the gift, but did not look at either it or me.
I addressed him in Cheyenne. “I will speak for you whenever you want to say something to the Americans.”
He flickered his glittering black eyes at me. “Can you tell me why we are here?”
Nobody had even let them know why they was arrested. “The Kansans,” I says, “are going to put you on trial for murder and taking women against their will.” Wild Hog shrugged inside his red blanket and said nothing, but some of the others muttered. “You don’t have to admit doing these things,” I told him, “whether or not you did them. You cannot be forced to speak against your own interest.”
“That makes no sense,” says he.
I tried to explain though I wasn’t no lawyer. “The Americans got that from what happened on the island of the Grandmother, where most of them came from at first. The reason why you cannot talk against yourself is that your enemies might make you do that by torture.” I could see I wasn’t getting nowhere: a Cheyenne had nothing against torture, which seemed only normal to him. “Just take my word for it. It does not matter whether you committed the crimes or not. They must prove you did. You don’t even have to say anything.”
He frowned, the lines cobwebbing his leathery face. “I have not said anything, nor have these others, but here we are.”
“The saying something doesn’t have to do with being arrested. It has to do with only the trial, where you go before a judge, one man who is the chief of the affair and maybe also a jury, which is a kind of council of several people who listen to the accusations against you and decide if you’re guilty or not. They might decide you are not guilty, and then you cannot be punished.”
Wild Hog was still holding the pale loaf of sugar in his brown hand. He shook his head. “You speak the language of the Human Beings very clearly, so the difficulty cannot be in how you are saying it. All my life I have been unable to understand the Americans. I tell you I have come to prefer those who are just bad, because you can predict that everything they tell you is a lie, and unless you kill them first they will take everything from you including your life. But the others are a problem. Why capture a man when later some other people sitting in a council can decide there was no reason to take away his liberty in the first place?”
“Have a taste of that sugar,” I says to distract him from inquiring further as to what I couldn’t answer. But this was a mistake.
“It is no gift if you tell me what to do with it. Then it still belongs to you.”
“I was only trying to be polite,” I says, “as Old Lodge Skins always taught us.” I thought I saw a little glint in his eye, but he made no direct response. Let me explain that what I’m putting into English here is not word-for-word from Cheyenne, where you’d not actually say “polite” but rather more like “the way things ought to be” or “how you ought to act,” but it was true enough that the Cheyenne was courteous people and brung up their children that way, so long as you understand that don’t mean lifting your little finger when sipping from a teacup or patting your lips with a napkin, and there’s nothing against belching when you eat, but unlike some white folks I have known you don’t exchange abuse when breaking bread with others and you don’t insult a visitor in your tepee.
I went on. “White ways might never make sense to you, but you are in their power now, so you have to do the best you can. Here’s another matter you might not understand: by law they have to provide a man who will speak for you. He is called an attorney. This is another example of what you might think is crazy. Why would the same people who accuse you of doing wrong help you to deny it? There’s a reason, and maybe sometime the Human Beings, especially the young people, can learn about this in school.”
“I hope not,” says Hog with a stubborn expression only an Indian has the facial bones to make seem like it’s carved in rock. “Already they are learning too little about a man’s proper duties: hunting and fighting.”
“Things have changed since you and I were boys,” I told him. “Pretty soon there won’t be any game at all, just tame cattle, and as for the fighting, you can see that’s a thing of the past too, because you cannot possibly win in the end.”
“You can die fighting,” Wild Hog says, “as a man is supposed to.”
“But I notice you did not.” I put it straight to him. Mind you, I don’t make no secret of my regard for the Cheyenne, but I always try to be honest about serious matters. It goes without saying that winning don’t necessarily make you one hundred percent morally in the right, but neither does losing. On the other hand, putting a man in his place don’t give much satisfaction when he’s a helpless prisoner, wrapped up in a blanket, sitting on the floor of a jail built where within living memory his kind rode free, so I quickly added, “I think you did not die because if you did there would be nobody to look after the women and children, and what kind of world would it be with no Human Beings in it?”
For the first time he looked at me as if I was a person worth being looked at with any interest at all.
“Suddenly you speak perfect truth,” said he, but quizzically. “Then you go back to being white again. You have been doing that sort of thing all your life.”
“Damn,” I says in English, in my shock. “You do know me?” Then caught myself and repeated it in Cheyenne, without the “damn,” which they don’t have.
“I have seen you since we were children together,” Wild Hog tells me. “It is easy to notice a person with red hair and skin so pale except for the blue spots.” Meaning my freckles, which was more pronounced as a kid. “Nevertheless, despite your appearance, when we were boys I naturally assumed you were a Human Being.”
As I said, I don’t recall seeing him again after he was a child, for I could swear he was not with Old Lodge Skins’s band as a grown-up. I won’t go through what it took to get his story out of him, with the Indian aversion to history as known to whites, as well as the discourtesy of questions that are too nosy, but I finally was able to gather he had been in that big camp on the Washita and seen me at a distance without coming up to talk. I never did find out why his father pulled out of the band when Hog was still a boy, and didn’t ask in case it was for some delicate reason like a quarrel with Old Lodge Skins concerning a woman, maybe his own Ma.
“I remember you too,” I says, “but only as a child. You were a better rider than I.” I was a keener shot with a bow, but I didn’t add that. “I wish you had spoken with me when you saw me later on.”
“Why?” he asks, suddenly colder than before, though he hadn’t really warmed up much.
“It’s good to keep in touch with friends.”
“You’re not my friend,” said Wild Hog. “Else you would either be dead or sitting here with me in jail. You are a white man, and you have been one all along. As soon as you got big enough to run away from the Human Beings, you did so.”
“Then why did I come back and marry a woman of the Human Beings and have a child by her and live with the band of Old Lodge Skins and be at the camp on the Washita when the soldiers attacked it?”
“Don’t expect me to answer such questions,” said Hog, but his frown indicated I had got to him. Indians did a lot of thinking, contrary to what you might suppose from the kind of life they lived, if thinking is the right word for an activity that includes more than reason and might even turn on a dream.
“The truth is I am of course white of skin, was born of a white mother and father, and lived amongst whites a lot and am doing so now. But I’ve also lived and fought as a Human Being.”
“You should make up your mind what you are,” Wild Hog says, at last placing the sugarloaf on the floor beside him. “You can’t be both, and I cannot accept as friend a person of the people who have acted so badly towards us.”
“That’s because you cannot see beyond what you can touch,” I told him, meaning he was deficient in spirit. This is a very serious point to make with an Indian, and he knew it. “The Human Beings killed my father, and not in a real fight but because they went crazy after drinking whiskey. What worse thing can be done to a child than to kill his father? Yet I lived amongst them of my own will as both boy and grown-up.”
I could see this argument had its effect, but he was a proud man in a degrading situation, and the fact remained that I was of those who had power over him, so I didn’t look for an apology or warm gesture, and dropped the subject to make the point I aimed to.
“I want to help you, whether you trust me or not. White man’s law has a lot to do with words. The better you understand them, the more power you have to protect yourself. The people who make the laws know that and often therefore write them so they can be understood by nobody but themselves.” But now I was getting into an area that would be incomprehensible to him. The Cheyenne lacked altogether in this feature of a higher civilization by which deceit became an essential part of dealing with your fellow man and the only way you could hold your own was to be as shifty as them you was competing with, namely everybody else.
“That attorney I mentioned earlier. They have to provide you with one, but he will not be likely to speak your language, and the interpreter they will furnish—because they are supposed to do that too—might do a bad job. You probably know of the trouble Frank Grouard caused for Crazy Horse?”
“Crazy Horse,” Wild Hog said loftily, “though an Ogallala, had a wife who was a Human Being.”
Well, I figured he knowed well enough what I was talking about, for Indians without a postal service, telegraph, or a semaphore system—don’t believe them movie smoke signals by which complicated messages was supposed to be sent—always was aware of what pertained to them, I can’t explain how. All I know is with Old Lodge Skins it was through dreams. In any event, I was referring to a mistake made by Grouard, a breed who scouted for the Army, when translating remarks of Crazy Horse to a white officer, which led to Crazy Horse’s death, only with Grouard it was accidental on purpose, for he were a mean man.
“I hope I have made myself clear,” I says. “I am going to do what I can for you. I’ll listen to everything said by the Americans and tell you about it. I’ll also see that you get a good lawyer. If the authorities want to give you a bad one, I’ll pay for another myself.”
I was feeling noble in promising as much, not on account of the money but rather with the idea that in view of the local crimes them Cheyenne was accused of, on top of the Custer massacre of recent memory, a white fellow who didn’t want to string them up might run a risk of having the same done to himself.
Wild Hog brung me down a peg. “Do for yourself what you need to, but do not think that you are doing anything for us.”
Well, as it happened the one place where there wasn’t no mob when we got there was Dodge, where people had better things to distract them, namely, whiskey, gambling, and whores, and nobody paid any attention to my visits to the Ford County jail to see the Indians while they awaited their trial, though in case they did, in a nasty way, I armed myself with a Peacemaker stuck in my holsterless belt, but run into assistant town marshal Earp while going along Front Street.
He glares at the weapon and then at me. “You know better than that.”
I took too long to figure out what he meant, which was the law against carrying a gun inside city limits, and so once again, as he had years before on the buffalo range, he hit me over the head with the barrel of his pistol. But having dodged a little, I wasn’t knocked out this time, only bruised.
“God damn you, Wyatt,” I says, for we knowed each other by now.
“God damn you, Jack,” says he, and takes me to the magistrate, where I was fined five dollars for the offense and another five for resisting arrest, of which each one got a cut.
Another unpleasant incident happened at about this time. I got me a bad ache in one of my teeth so finally had to go to a dentist, something I’d rather be scalped than do, but the doctor turned out to be real good at his job, not exactly painless but he did give me a big slug of whiskey before taking two or three of his own, and turning from his work to cough a lot, proceeded to yank out the bad tooth without giving me more than one sharp twinge.
After this he poured me another drink, along with another for himself, and him and me shot the breeze for a bit, since no other patients was waiting, and the killing of Miss Dora Hand come into discussion.
This dentist, amidst more fits of a hacking coughs commented on how big her funeral was, and then he smiles and says, “I guess everybody who ever had her showed up.”
Owing to that law, I had left my gun at the Lone Star, but I told him I was going to get it and come back and kill him.
Now, running along the street, I encounter none other than Bat Masterson, and I know it was foolish to appeal to him, but I was all worked up at the time. I hadn’t been able to do nothing to protect Miss Hand from the likes of Jim Kennedy, but by God I could avenge the polluting of her name by some foulmouthed dentist.
“Bat,” I says, out of breath owing to the state of my feelings plus the running, “I need to borrow your gun pronto.”
Naturally he asks me why.
“I ain’t going to let it happen!” I says. “That woman was a saint. I won’t let a coughing, drinking, no-good son of a bitch besmirch her name.” He gets more details out of me, while I get madder. “Miss Dora Hand!” I says. “Just because she were a performing artist on a public stage! That dear lady spent every Sunday in church. I’m going to kill him.”
Bat pulls on his big mustache, and says carefully, “Now you listen to me, Jack. I’m not going to lend you a gun, and if you get one elsewhere you’ll have to face me first. If you look at that dentist’s shingle you will see the name John Holliday. I don’t know where you’ve been living if you haven’t heard of Doc Holliday, but then—and hold on, now!—you don’t even seem to know that the late Miss Hand was not only a fine singer and a regular churchgoer but also did other things in her life. You can’t just put her in one category. For example her real name wasn’t even Dora Hand but Fanny Keenan.”
As he talked I went from murderous anger into, well, I don’t quite know what state of mind, call it confusion. I wasn’t ready to face up to the fact then that I had been so besotted first by that heavenly voice and sweet look she had onstage and by what she appeared to be when in church, but maybe that was not the whole of her existence. So you can call me at that point anyway a bartender who for a change didn’t know as much as his customers, me who always had quite a high idea of my common sense.
I hung my head. “I’ve heard of Doc Holliday as a killer,” I says. “I guess I missed the news he was in Dodge, and I never knowed he was a dentist and consumptive as well.”
Bat sniffed. “I don’t like him, but he’s kept his nose clean since coming to my county, and he’s a good friend of Wyatt’s.”
So far as friendships went, there was me and Bat’s, which probably saved my life in this case, Holliday being as skilled in taking life with either pistol or blade as he was at pulling teeth, and Bat’s with Wyatt Earp, and Wyatt’s with Holliday. Earp and me didn’t take to each other, nor me and Holliday, who incidentally I never saw again in Dodge but encountered later in Tombstone, as will be told, at which time he had no memory of me whatever. You might think a man suddenly runs out of your office saying he’d be back to shoot you would be memorable, but no doubt such incidents was routine in the life of Doc Holliday, who spent most of his time gambling and killing people and not dentisting.
Well I tell you along about now I had a bellyful of Dodge and might of been ready to go back to the tribe if the Cheyenne would let me, but the ones in the Ford County jail give me no encouragement. I had kept my word to Wild Hog and hired a lawyer to represent the prisoners, and he was slick enough to get the proceedings moved from Dodge City to Lawrence on account of the possible local prejudice, though as I have said I couldn’t see that nobody in Dodge much cared, while Lawrence was precisely where the biggest mob had assembled the first time and might of lynched the Indians had Bat not taken charge. So maybe this was a bad idea? Not at all. If you know anything about the law, the technique is to keep moving. Not for nothing do lawyers call what they do making “motions.” By the time the Cheyenne was taken back to Lawrence, the townsfolk there had forgot all about that issue and had rushed off to the next fad, so this time we—the Indians, Bat and me and the deputies—went there without commotion. After a few more months of jail for his clients, and expense for me, that counselor got the case dismissed for lack of evidence.
Eventually them Cheyenne, along with the others who survived the long journey north from the Nations, got that reservation on the Tongue, not far from where they helped rub out Custer, so you might say they won another victory and at the usual excessive cost.
Wild Hog, Old Crow, Big Head, and the others never turned more friendly to me over the months I traveled periodically to Lawrence to see them, and I never expected them to. I tried not to think about redskins beyond this specific instance, for how farmers and wanderers could share the same acreage without conflict was beyond my mental capacity, as was what would happen to the loser of this dispute, who would not be the one that fastened himself to one place, built a house, and planted crops. Even though a few such individuals might get massacred, plenty more was coming from over the water to replace them, to the permanent disadvantage of Lo, to use a sarcastic name of the day, which come from
Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind; His soul proud Science never taught to stray Far as the solar walk or milky way;
quoted from Mr. Alexander Pope, whose verse I used to read as a boy with my foster-mother Mrs. Pendrake. Some newspaper writers also would call Sitting Bull “Slightly Recumbent Gentleman Cow.” In addition to losing most of their homeland, Indians got made fun of a lot, which was nasty but didn’t bother them as much as you might think, for not being able to read they didn’t know about most of it, and besides they had quite a high idea of themselves, which wasn’t destroyed by them being overpowered and outnumbered.
On the other hand, along about now some of them was beginning to see their children would do well to learn how to hold their own in a world run by whites, at least to read and write and do sums, so they wouldn’t be cheated so easy by traders, government officials, and other dishonest Americans, and though it went against every principle of being a warrior, get some acquaintance with the vocations by which white people managed to eat regular and keep warm and dry: plowing and seeding fields, raising livestock, digging wells, erecting buildings permanently anchored to the earth, instead of starving when game was scarce, thirsting in a drought, and freezing every winter.
There was two kinds of white people who wanted to help the Indian. One for practical reasons, for unless you had the stomach just to kill them all, what should be done with them? The second type was usually religious and saw red men, as well as black and the yellow Chinese what built the western railroads, as fellow creations of God and thus brothers under the skin, which meant they all should be treated kindly and helped to become white in behavior. Now, lest you think this theory hadn’t nothing going for it but arrogance, you might reflect that whites had the accomplishments to dominate all these folks the world over, whether for good or ill, so the decision was theirs to make by the law of life, and was it not preferable that some of them tried to bring a little decency to the process? If you ever seen the work of somebody without a conscience, then you know what I mean.
This is by way of introducing the next phase of my life. It happened through that church that Miss Dora Hand had went to. I found myself in attendance there after her untimely death, which had an effect on me out of proportion to my slight acquaintance with her—and even so, I had finally to accept that my impression of the lady had been somewhat in error. But the idea underneath it, of grace and goodness and gentility as embodied in a female person, was not discredited. I had gone through that before, with Mrs. Pendrake, and though my illusions was dashed there too, and with a lot more shock, young as I was then, I have a right stubborn personality when it comes to certain convictions.
Sol went to church of a Sunday morning, not to meet women, but to be in an atmosphere in which their influence was predominant without them being whores like the girls, all friends of mine, who worked at the Lone Star. Of course there was men in that church as well, but they seemed to be of two kinds, either sissies for whom it was what a saloon was to a cowboy, or merchants who was drug to the services by their wives and, though knowing it was for their own eternal good, was bored stiff by the particulars, and in fact the preacher was mighty dull, lacking in the colorful rant of my Pa on the one hand and the Reverend Pendrake’s lofty oratory, taken from Scripture, on the other.
After several Sundays the lady churchgoers begun to view me more kindly than when Miss Hand was alive, and a couple of them come up to me after one service and says they was right proud to welcome me to their congregation and hoped to see me at their lawn fete Saturday next, weather permitting, with lemonade and homemade layer cake, the proceeds going to the Indian mission school run by their parent church body, which I don’t intend to name, for it may still be around today and I don’t want to hurt the feelings of any of its followers by what I say here, which is the truth but by no means all negative.
Come the following Saturday afternoon, I went as invited, and I must say I was greatly pleased to be in an atmosphere of ladies in brighter clothes than they wore in church, some real comely and all fine-mannered, making them little gestures of finger and angles of head with pursed lips and squinty eyes shown by people of the better sort as opposed to the gaping mouths, nose-pickings, and arse-scratchings I was accustomed to seeing.
One of them from the previous Sunday comes up and introduces herself as Mrs. Homer Epps. She was quite a sizable person, made even a bit wider by her fancy dress, and taller than me by a couple hands.
“Mr. Epps,” says she, “is president of the Merchants National.” Which was a local bank.
I give her my name, and as she seemed to be waiting for a statement of my own calling, I told her I had to apologize when in present company, but I was in the entertainment line.
She shows a tolerant smile involving all but maybe one of her chins. “No apology needed, Mr. Crabb. I am aware that you were professionally associated with our dear departed Dora Hand. When we saw you first, I’m afraid we worried that you represented another faith and had come here to lure her away from us. But now I realize your connection was only professional.”
You never know what impression you’re making on others. Here I had been concerned I’d be taken as what I was, a bartender in a dance hall–bordello, while a bunch of church ladies was worried I might be from a rival church.
“It was personal as well, Miz Epps,” I said sanctimoniously but not untruthfully. “Miss Hand and I shared spiritual interests.”
More ladies joined us, and Mrs. Epps introduced me to them all. I didn’t see any men whatever for a while except for the preacher, who had staked out the refreshment table, along with what had to be his scrawny wife and three or four shabbily dressed kids, and all was stuffing themselves with cake, which unlike Mrs. Epps and some of the other women they looked like they could badly use, being all built real close to the bone. Preaching on the frontier wasn’t usually the way to prosperity.
Everybody who spoke to me regretted the loss of Miss Hand and hoped I would nevertheless continue to come to services. One woman, a sharp-nosed, birdy-eyed little person in a shiny green dress, named Mrs. John Teasdale, allowed as how though no Dora Hand she was thought by all to be a soprano singer good enough to go on a stage.
“Yes, ma’am,” I says.
“Well then,” says she, “perhaps you could recommend me to Mr. Bell at the Varieties or Mr. Springer at the Comique.” And she cocks her head to one side, more like a sparrow than ever, and simpers.
I hate to disappoint anyone with high hopes, having had a few of my own, so I said let me look into those matters, which was good enough for her at this point. For all I knowed she could of been the world’s best singer, but now I had put my crush on Dora Hand into balance, I realized no female who was altogether respectable, like Mrs. Teasdale surely was, could be a professional performer in that time and place. A girl either went onto the stage or she stayed home and was somebody’s wife, mother, or old-maid daughter, and speaking of the last-named, a tall, slender young lady come up to us at that point. She was real pale-complected, fair hair parted in the middle and pulled back so hard her facial skin seemed under tension, bony of cheek and nose, and with deep dark-blue eyes. Unlike the other women she did not wear a hat, and her dress was plain and modest as could be.
“This is my eldest,” says Mrs. Teasdale, now assuming the sort of smirk that is intended to ally the person addressed with the speaker and against the other individual present, even though in this case she had just met me and the other was her own flesh. “Amanda,” she goes on, “is the serious one.... Amanda, this is Mr. Crabb. He is involved in professional entertainment.”
The girl’s manner was of a kind with her plain clothing. She says straightforwardly in a strong though not loud voice, “You speak Cheyenne.”
“Yes, Miss,” I says. “I sure do. But could you just look at me and know that?” I intended this remark to be light, but she answered it as soberly as she said everything.
“I was told you translated for the Cheyenne prisoners held at the Ford County jail,” said she. “I’ll tell you why I am interested.”
Her mother broke in here. “Let’s hope Mr. Crabb finds it interesting.” And again she gives me the special look. “I warned you, Mr. Crabb, she’s the serious one. She would even like women to have the vote.”
Amanda ignored her, being one of them offspring utterly unlike the parent who would be expected to be their model. She stared at me with them deep eyes that looked larger than they were on account of the paleness of her skin and the delicate but prominent bone structure of her face. “We need a Cheyenne translator at school.”
“There are Cheyenne students in public school in Dodge?” I asked in amazement.
“Of course not,” she said, wincing irritably. “The mission school. The one for which funds are being raised today.”
“Well, Mr. Crabb,” said Mrs. Teasdale, “I must tell my friends about your promise to manage my career as a singer. Don’t let Amanda bore you too much with her savages.” She tittered. “She means no harm.”
When her mother had went away Amanda made a smirk of her own, which was a good deal more forceful than her Ma’s, and said, “Actually, I mean a lot of harm, Mr. Crabb. Let me ask this. Does being fluent in the Cheyenne language bring with it a concern for the welfare of the Indian?”
“Let me tell you how I come to speak it,” I began.
But this stern young woman, who was only in her early twenties, stops me right there. “That’s irrelevant,” says she. “What I want to know is whether you would like to do something to elevate the Indian from the miserable condition in which we find him today—a position, I hasten to say, into which we white people bear the most responsibility for putting him.” This point she accompanied with a gesture of her long white index finger, the nail of which was trimmed back to the flesh.
I was not offended, but I didn’t intend to let this girl push me around, either. “What I have got to say is to the point, Miss. I was raised mostly by the Cheyenne, and I am right fond of them and wish them the very best in life and am just sorry I ain’t got the power to give them back all their home grounds.”
She frowned and nodded. “You’re wasting time, Mr. Crabb. What is needed is not sniveling about the past, which is dead and gone. The Indian must face the present and future. He can no longer be a hunter and warrior. But he is capable as any other person of any race. That his ways are now obsolete should not reflect adversely on him. He can learn new ones. For all, reading and writing, doing sums. How to plant and harvest crops, for the men. For the women, the domestic sciences as practiced by the civilized race, which it cannot be emphasized enough is nevertheless not morally superior.”
She said this in her usual flat, apparently calm fashion but I begun to sense a real strong emotion underneath.
“Well, Miss, let’s just say I’ll be proud to help out if I can. If you want me to do some translating, like I done between Wild Hog’s bunch and the legal authorities, I’ll be happy to do it, and there won’t be no charge.”
She had still been staring at me with them big indigo eyes, but now she blinked in what I took for a slight softening of manner, and she says, “We certainly wouldn’t expect you to work for nothing. We will provide quarters and food and a stipend of...” She proceeded to name so low a figure I can’t even recall what it was, these many years after, but it didn’t seem to matter, for I repeated that I wouldn’t charge anything, having adequate income from my present situation.
The fine flanges of her pale nose flared slightly as if she smelled something unpleasant. “You’ll have to give up tending bar,” said she, revealing she knowed more about me than her Ma did.
“Ours is a boarding school, in ——,” naming a place some distance away, which I won’t identify for reasons that will be self-evident.
Now I could of ended the discussion at that point, unless I really wanted to forsake a profitable job pouring whiskey for cowboys who bought more the drunker they got, and go to a religious boarding school for Indians at wages that was less than the colored fellow, an ex-slave, got for mopping out the Lone Star. It wouldn’t be long before I built up another nest egg and started thinking again of opening that place of my own. Why, I might go on to become another Dog Kelley, the businessman-mayor, and get married to a young future Mrs. Epps or Mrs. Teasdale, and have an offspring like Amanda, who somewhere within her severity was not only a young girl but, I recognized, a basically handsome one who however could use some fattening up as well as a realization of what was eating her.
But I have said I was sick of the side of Dodge I knowed and was coming to see that hanging around that church was not a successful alternative, having little in common with the folks there, with the exception of this Amanda insofar as she was involved with Indians. I was also aware of her femininity, probably more than she herself was at this time. I’ve had a remarkable partiality to the ladies all my life, as is no secret by now to the reader of this life story of mine. Young white women can be vexsome, owing to an abundance of expectation, but I consider myself fortunate to have knowed them when I did, which was long ago, for when a man gets past ninety the only females around him tend to be nurses.
Anyway, I ended up taking the job offered by Amanda, and thus begun my involvement, such as it was, in educating Indians to be white people.