I NEVER SAID GOODBYE to Bat Masterson, for he had previously left Dodge himself, without a goodbye to me, to go to Leadville in Colorado Territory, where they had lately struck silver. As when he headed for the Deadwood gold strike, getting only as far as the town of Cheyenne, his primary interest was gambling and not prospecting. I was not unusual for the time in wandering throughout the West. Everybody done it—everybody that is who didn’t settle down on some land and make a go of ranching or farming and raise children, so I expect I ought to say everybody who didn’t do nothing much to civilize the place, everybody, that is, you’ll pardon the coarse saying, with a wild hair in his arse. This sure included Wyatt Earp, who also left Dodge, in his case to go to Tombstone in Arizona, where he was soon followed by the painless but lethal and consumptive dentist Doc Holliday.
To get to the mission school, me and Amanda traveled by railroad, finally getting off at a town where we was met by an old colored fellow driving a wagon. Amanda lost no time in climbing up to sit right beside him, which got her stares from the other people on the platform and from the windows of the train as it pulled away, for a white woman didn’t properly place herself on an equal level with a man of a darker race, and that included Mexicans.
She had not sat next to me on the train, placing a number of bundles on the seat alongside her, and having paid for a bath at the barbershop I hoped it wasn’t because of my odor, but we could not of conversed anyhow. In them cars the noise of the steam engine was deafening, and you had to keep an eye open for the glowing cinders that blowed in through the windows along with those that was not burning, just dirty. I was filthy by the time we got off, but oddly enough, especially given her pale skin and gold hair, Amanda still looked spotless.
We finally reached the school after jolting some miles in that wagon with me riding not up on the seat with the driver and Amanda, not having been invited to do so, but in the bed of the wagon with the luggage and lots of sacked supplies the driver had picked up in town. The school consisted of one big whitewashed three-story building and several smaller structures, all appearing fairly new, and some distance off, a weatherbeaten barn with a few head of livestock visible and beyond them fields of tawny grain rippling in the breeze. Between the buildings would of been the usual dust of that part of the world, but rain had fell overnight and instead it was the comparably usual mud.
The wagon crawled slowly up to the big building and came to a sticky stop. Amanda steps down into the mud and sweeps her white hand towards the grounds. “It’s still raw,” she said. “One of the projects the boys are working on is getting a lawn to grow from seed, but as you know that takes a long time and Indians are impatient.”
I agreed, though knowing nothing about domestic grasses, and added, “When it comes to plants they pick what grows by itself.”
Amanda was frowning, an expression she wore a lot. “We have our work cut out for us.” She nodded her smooth steep forehead at the building before us. “This is the dormitory: boys’ side to the left, girls’ to the right.”
As I found out later, there were two distinct entrances and though it was a single structure, a partition divided the interior. From one side you couldn’t get to the other without going outside to the other door, either in front or back.
Amanda told me now I would be shown to my personal quarters later, but it was suppertime at the moment and though we was already quite late we shouldn’t be no later, and she hikes off in the mud, besliming her shoes and the lower hem of her dress, so I had to do so too, regardless of a fairly new set of boots, and we reached the one-story building that turned out to house the dining hall and kitchen.
Not a soul but us had been seen till now, but there the whole school was at long tables inside the big bare-board room, all the swarthy-faced, black-haired young Indians, which given my experience was not in itself an unusual sight were it not that I had never seen so many members of that race arranged in alignment, seated on chairs and not the ground. But there was an even more unusual feature: they was all dressed alike, according to sex, the girls in blue-figured gingham dresses, the boys in blue-gray uniforms like soldiers’, with short tunics buttoning to the neck and navy stripes up the pants. In addition, all of them, boys and girls, had their hair cut short.
As if this wasn’t enough, there didn’t seem to be no talking amongst them, and Indians was not naturally a quiet folk when with their own kind, all the less so when eating, which they did fairly enthusiastically. Given the relative rarity that they could count on having enough food, they tended to chew and swallow wolf- or bear-style when nourishment was before them. But these lads and girls looked more like they was in a class than at a meal, with rigid spines against the chair backs and no expressions of face.
At the head of each of the tables, which was either for all boys or all girls, was a white person of the staff, and at one side of the hall, at right angles to the others, was a shorter table at which sat a whiskered, bald gent in, I’d say, his late fifties. He didn’t grow no hair on his scalp but had a bushy gray beard which concealed whatever kind of collar and tie he wore. He showed a stern look when no other was called for, so on first meeting up with him you might of thought he would necessarily be disagreeable, but he could be real pleasant, as now when Amanda Teasdale brung me to him, and he stood up smiling politely while she apologized for being late to supper but says she is happy to be able to deliver the sum of money collected by her church in Dodge, where she also found that translator of the Cheyenne language they had been looking for.
“Major,” she says, surprising me for he wasn’t in no uniform and I took him for a preacher, “this is Jack Crabb.”
He works my hand like a pump handle, but just twice. “Mr. Crabb,” says he. “We are pleased to see you here. Won’t you sit down?” He did so himself. When me and Amanda did the same, I noticed there wasn’t no plate nor eating tools before him as yet, which relieved me some, for I was right hungry by then. “It might seem paradoxical to you at the outset,” he goes on, “when I say that the purpose of your fluency in Cheyenne for us is to discourage the students from speaking that language.” He smiled as if what he meant was self-evident.
“Major,” says I, “I was wondering if you could make sense of that for me.”
He raised his still dark eyebrows in apparent wonderment, but said, in a paternal way, “It’s simple when explained—as I always told my boys in the Tenth Cavalry.” His eyes twinkled. “They were Negroes.” He makes a solemn gesture with his beard. “Our purpose here being to exterminate the wretched savage”—he waited a little, smiling ever broader, to let the provocation of that comment settle in—“and replace him with a fine man, we must begin with the fundamentals, of which language is primary, I hope you agree.” He never waited till I answered, which was just as well, for I didn’t have no idea whatever of where he was aiming. “What seems paradoxical is that to teach a man to quit his old language and adopt a new one, he must first be addressed in his original tongue, else he will never grasp the idea.” The Major blinked his eyes. “I know: we tried that. But we are learning. Hence you are here.”
There still hadn’t been a sound throughout the dining hall that I heard and nobody was showing up with food. I had caught a faint smell on entering, but that had diminished. As I figured the meal might be waiting on this conversation, I was quick to respond in a way you do when a point’s been well made. “Kee-rect.”
“Mr. Crabb,” said the Major, “having served as an Army officer for a number of years before becoming a minister of the Gospel, I am accustomed to being addressed as ‘sir.’ As all my other staff observe this practice, it would be awkward if you did not. This is not a military institution, true. But you are my subordinate.”
Actually he said this in a real nice way. I don’t want to give the impression that the Major was a bad fellow, though you might call him a fool.
“I don’t mind, sir,” I says. “And I take it you prefer to be called Major over Reverend.”
He waves a finger at me. “You are quite right, Mr. Crabb! It is simply explained: were I only a parson, with a Sunday sermon to deliver each week and visits to the sick and infirm in between, ‘Reverend’ would of course be more appropriate. But directing this school has more in common with an Army command. Also, in the realm of language ‘Major’ has more dynamic connotations than does the other term.”
Now Amanda was sitting right next to me, taking all this in and, despite her opinionated nature judging from her attitude towards me, she is saying nothing. Partly to needle her, and partly because it seemed polite, I included her in what I said next. “Sir, I was wondering if we might get a bite to eat. Me and Miss Teasdale just had a railroad ride all day without any food.” Amanda wasn’t the kind of woman who provides or even thinks about meals, and the train, which, in them days before dining cars, used to stop at a town and let the passengers off to feed at mealtimes, hadn’t done so on this trip, having to make up for a delay up the line.
“Aha,” the Major says, as if at a revelation, “but you see we finished our meal a few minutes ago.” He swept his coat back and went into a vest pocket and brung out a big silver turnip of a watch, which he studied. “Six and a half, to be exact. The tables were then cleared. Were it not for your appearance, the benediction would have been offered by now and the students would have filed out. I’m afraid you must wait for tomorrow’s breakfast, Mr. Crabb. We dine here precisely on time and do no eating between meals. If this seems stern, there is a reason. The Indian is a shiftless soul in his natural state, knowing no order, no direction, no principles. He lives as the wind blows—namely, at random—eating when he has food, abstaining when he has none, like an animal and not a human being. But he is not an animal, Mr. Crabb. He is a man, and as precious in the eyes of God as any other. To despise him is sinful. To help him realize himself as God’s creation is our duty as Christians.”
I should say right here that the Major was real sincere in his beliefs, and his interest in the red man was honestly based on his religious faith. He weren’t putting contributions to the school into his own pocket, he never had carnal connections with the female students or them on the staff like at some other institutions of the kind (nor was he a heemaneh), and he didn’t show any ambition to move on to a higher post in either education in general or his church in particular.
But I didn’t take kindly to the idea of going without food all day and all night, in the support of opinions not my own, and I might of quit then and there had I not been in country unfamiliar to me, without weapons or transport.
The Major now gets to his feet, followed by the rest of the assemblage—damn if it were not a strange sight to see Indians do anything in unison!—and gives a loud, clear, but real boring prayer that went on forever, after which the students line up in military order, table by table. Now Indians was normally quite curious about what went on around them: you got to be if you’re living off the land. But these young people didn’t pay no attention to one another or their surroundings, and from their expressions or lack thereof, they didn’t seem preoccupied by anything else either. They seemed in a kind of spell, which in fact was not in itself an unusual state for a redskin, who in the sun dance for example would get into a trance in which he didn’t feel it when he tied thongs to his chest skin that subsequently got ripped out.
Each group or troop was led by the white person who had sat at the head of their table, and now I noticed most of the latter was women, even if their unit was boys. The Major had managed a miracle if he could put Indian males under such a spell they could be marched around by a female of any race.
Then without another word, the Major strode out in his brisk stride, followed by the rest of the school, marching in a column of twos. I hoped I had not made a bad mistake by coming here, for I was sure out of my element, even, from the look of them, the Indians.
I says to Amanda, “All right, where am I going to get something to eat?”
Though being of the type of person who always has to get ahead of you, she would respond to genuine indignation. “I’ll take you to the kitchen,” she says without additional comment, and does so, at the other end of the building.
Now what had happened before we showed up, as I found on getting into the schedule next day, was that the students on marching in to eat went directly through a mess line at the end of the kitchen, took their trays to the dining-room tables, and after eating, which was timed for seventeen minutes, they marched back again, in units, to leave the trays off in that area of the kitchen where some big tubs was for washing up, went back into the dining room, and sat down again until the Major was ready to stand them up for the prayer.
Me and Amanda now passed them steaming tubs, where a number of young Indian girls was washing the trays and utensils while others was doing the drying with empty flour sacks, and went back to the big brick oven built into the far wall, where a substantial-sized woman of the colored race, hair covered with a blue bandanna, was about to heft one of the big wood paddles used by bakers, loaded with loaves of risen dough, and fill the racks above the glowing hearth, which was so hot you could feel it on your face from ten foot away.
When she sees us coming the woman scowls and says, “I got to git this braid a-bakin’.”
I says, using a familiar turn of speech in them days, “Auntie, I’m real hungry. I was wondering if—”
“I ain’t you aunt, little man,” says she, real peevish, pronouncing it “awnt,” like she was English, “and I’ll thank you not to call me out of my name.” She’s still holding the laden paddle, which took more strength than I would of had, but then she were a head taller than me and twice as wide.
“Yes, ma’am,” I says quickly. “I didn’t mean no disrespect. I’ll use your proper name when I know it.”
Amanda give me a dirty look. “It’s Mrs. Stevenson.”
“I apologize, Mrs. Stevenson. I’m a coarse man, been living with no-counts and lowlifes.”
The big cook studies me briefly, then she says, “Give you some nice hot braid if you kin wait.”
“Why, that will be just fine, Mrs. Stevenson.”
“You don’t have to say the name ever’ time,” she tells me and finally shoves that paddleful of loaves into the oven.
As it happened I never learned her first name even though I met her husband on various occasions, for he too called her Mrs. Stevenson. The Major had hired her for the job on account of her husband had formerly served under him in the Tenth Cavalry. The Stevensons lived not far from the school in a town that, like the enlisted men of the Tenth, was all Negro. There was more than one of these towns, the best known of which was called Nicodemus, which had been created by freed slaves what had come north to make a life for themselves and figured they were likely to do it better if they made common cause. Hezekiah Stevenson was one of the more prosperous citizens with his Army pension, a nice little grain-and-feed business, and he was also the local postmaster.
This husband of hers was about the only person Mrs. Stevenson admired. Most everybody else she considered a fool, but she had a soft spot in her heart for me because I greatly favored the food she would of cooked for them all had anybody else, beginning with the Major, cared for it, but they did not, especially them students, all of who just had a taste for what was simply boiled till it fell apart, and that included even the fresh vegetables they growed in the school garden, for that’s the only way the Indians of them days knowed how to cook, so that’s what their children liked. Though Indians might at times eat flesh that was utterly raw, like the liver cut out of a game animal at the time he was brought down, the only alternative was boiling for hours, with maybe some fried dough, which they had learned to make from the whites and consisted of just a hunk of flour-and-water paste in a greased skillet.
Fact is, I was fond of the fried dough and boiled flesh I ate with the Cheyenne, but being born hungry I liked most of what else was handed me to chew on, my life long, though you’d never know it to look at me, for no matter how much I ate I never gained a pound. I guess I was a challenge to Mrs. Stevenson, whose husband and five kids was also heavyweights. What I would do is take only a small amount on my tray at mealtimes, at which I was obliged as a staff member, one of the few males around, to sit at the head of a boys’ table. Then after I marched my bunch out, I would go back to the kitchen and get something special that Mrs. S. had cooked up for herself but was happy to share with me, the cheese biscuits, country ham with redeye gravy, roast chicken, spoonbread, spicy greens, also all kinds of creamed vegetables made with the products from the little dairy herd maintained by the school.
Mrs. Stevenson was helped out in the kitchen by them Indian student girls, as part of their studies in what was called domestic science, and I guess she was supposed to teach them to cook the white way (which in her case was actually black, but then the Indian name for Negro was Black White Man), but according to what she told me, she gave up the attempt after a while on account of they was hopeless at it, being too stupid to learn anything of civilization. Mrs. Stevenson was a fine person who treated me like a mother, but she had in her a good deal of what nowadays in the 1950s they call racial prejudice, but in the 1870s was just the way most people not themselves Indian, and not having had a special experience with them like me, looked at the red man and woman. And of course her husband as a veteran of the U.S. Cavalry was unlikely to be an Indian-lover, especially after the Custer fight.
Now, where I was quartered was in a private room on the top floor of the boys’ side of the big building Amanda showed me first, at the end of a big dormitory full of metal-framed cots, at the foot of each of which was a little trunk of the type the Army called foot lockers, and back of each cot, against the wall, was a rack for hanging clothes.
My own room was better than the one in that hotel I had lived in during my time in Dodge City, with a cot like the ones used by the boys and an upended wood crate for a washstand, with bowl and pitcher that was, like the mirror over it, uncracked though the thunder mug under the cot was not, and a beat-up chest of drawers.
Amanda was prohibited from stepping into the male side of the building, so I had been taken there by one of the teachers, a man named Charlevoix, ending in an x, which I would of pronounced had I first seen it written, but having only heard it instead, I believed he was named Charlie Vaw, and I politely called him Mr. Vaw a couple times till he put me straight as to the French origin of the name. He claimed descent from one of the French trapper-explorers who had been throughout much of the West before any English set foot in the region and usually got on well with the natives, even taking wives amongst the tribes they encountered, and he allowed as how he might of had a great-grandma who was of the red race, and maybe so, but he himself come from back East and never knew a word of any Indian language and had fairish hair and light-colored eyes, so I don’t know. He come West for his health, having weak lungs or the like.
Charlevoix told me that while I had a climb to my top-floor room, it would be made up for by having fewer boys to manage than he had on the floor below.
“Oh,” says I, thinking he had mistook me, “I ain’t no teacher. I was hired as an interpreter.”
“That’s right,” says he. “At least you will be able to talk to them and understand what they say in return.”
It took more explanation for me to finally get the idea that I was expected to control the boys lodged on my floor, see they obeyed the school rules as to personal appearance and conduct, which included keeping the place neat and clean, and didn’t make noise or act disorderly such as young male persons of any race take their greatest pleasure in doing, especially in the years just before they officially become men.
I tell you I hadn’t been at this school for more than a couple hours when I was ready to leave for the second time. I never had no experience keeping big kids in order, my own white child having been carried off by the Indians when he was two, and the baby I had with my Cheyenne wife Sunshine disappeared, with his Ma, after the Washita battle.
The place was empty at the moment, for after supper the students had to return to the schoolrooms for a study period in which they did homework, them boys what didn’t have evening farm chores and the girls who was not occupied in the kitchen or other housekeeping duties like laundering and ironing the school linens in the washhouse. The way the Major operated the place, it was supposed to be self-sustaining, using student labor, for there was never sufficient funds to pay anybody except the staff, and in fact none of us ever got paid in full and on time. I don’t think the Major himself took any wage.
“It’s a relief to have another man on hand,” Charlevoix told me. “There haven’t been enough of us to put anybody on the top floor, and without supervision the boys have had things their own way up here.” He raised his thin eyebrows and snickered sadly. “They’re probably not going to be pleased when they see you. But as I say, at least you can speak their language. They’re Cheyennes. None of the rest of us know theirs or in fact any other Indian languages.” He shrugged in exasperation. “But the Major doesn’t want the teachers to speak anything but English anyway. How else can the students learn English unless they are forced to use it? He had a point, but these boys haven’t learned a word, so far as I can see, and we can’t even find out what’s wrong. Aren’t we teaching the right way? Perhaps you’ll be able to find out.”
I said I was thinking for the second time that I might of made a mistake in accepting this job without finding out more about it, but what he said appealed to my pride. It hadn’t been often in my life up to that time that anybody treated me as though I might know something of value to them, and here it looked like maybe I could help out both sides. Also I admit I wouldn’t of minded accomplishing something that might impress Amanda.
So I put the contents of my carpet bag into the chest of drawers, and Charlevoix pulled out his watch, and saying it was about time for the boys to return, he went downstairs.
He was right, for everything around here happened on schedule, which was more remarkable for Indians than it would of been for white students, for the notion of time as measured by a little machine carried in your pocket was altogether foreign to them. I never met an Indian who could understand how 5:00 P.M., say, could be the same in winter when the sky was dark as in the bright late afternoon of summer.
So up the stairs, taking two at a time, come running the young fellows what bunked on the top floor. They was no longer in the stunned condition in which they had sat at the dining-room tables, but was laughing and hooting and chattering like persons their age of any race, added to which these boys had been stifled all day by that routine that meant nothing to them except that they was compelled to follow it, and now at last they could let go until tomorrow morning.
Well, I sympathized with them, but I had a job to do, so when I had judged by ear that all of them had arrived, I stepped out of the doorway of my room and, waiting a second or two till the din died down, announced my presence.
Notwithstanding that I spoke in Cheyenne, they all immediately seemed to fall back into the suppertime trance, and this was rather comical in that already most had stripped off their uniforms and was all but bare-arsed naked, down to the breechcloths they wore instead of the underwear I later found out that they was issued but never took out of the foot lockers, not having any idea of what it was for.
“Can it be,” I asks, “that the Human Beings when amongst white men forget their native speech, which is the finest language of all, because it is spoken by the bravest of all men?”
The lads now peered at me, and the tallest amongst them says, “We speak our language all the time to one another.” He had the kind of slanty eyes and high-boned bronze face that should of been framed with long hair, but here he stood in his leather breechcloth, his head shorn as close as a white man’s who worked in a city bank, an odd combination.
Now he had broke the ice, the others come out of the coma but let him do the talking, as them grown-up Cheyenne had let Wild Hog speak for them back in Dodge. This was courtesy. Indians was less likely than any other race I come across to follow their leaders in lockstep, being by nature of an anarchistic temperament, but they was also the politest and most respectful.
“I am relieved to hear that,” I told him, “for I was worried you had been deprived of speech by some trickster.” Now, in Cheyenne that last word, Veho, is the same term used for “white man.”
This lad, whose name I might as well use here though I never learned it till later, was Wolf Coming Out, he scowls in thought and says, “But you are yourself white. Are you therefore a trickster? And if you are, maybe you are trying to trick us by using that name and getting it out of the way before we can accuse you of being one.”
“You might not have learned much else since you’ve been here,” says I, grinning, “but maybe you have begun to think like a white man.”
“I really hope not,” he says, “else I could understand why you would try to make friends by insulting me first, and I don’t want to understand that. Nor do I want to know how and why you speak the language so well, because I can see no other reason than to use it to deceive us.”
He was working himself up, and he was, at sixteen or seventeen, a head taller than me. For that matter, in this group of boys, from twelve to his age, I was amongst the shorter and outnumbered worse even than the Seventh Cavalry at the Greasy Grass. But I had me a weapon, and I proceeded to use it.
Pulling up my pants leg and uncovering the top of the boot I wore under it, I drawed that knife I still carried from my last days with Old Lodge Skins’s band.
Wolf backed up a step when I did so, then with typical Indian bravado quickly took two steps forward to show how brave he was, though unarmed.
“Here,” I says, holding out the weapon by the tip of the blade, rawhide-wrapped handle towards him. “Here’s a present for you.”
For a short while he looked at the knife and then he stared at me. It was just that old skinning knife, but pretty obviously no white man had made it. “Why are you doing this?” asked Wolf.
I must say that question annoyed me, and my answer was, “You are a young boy who doesn’t know how to act,” which was to say, he had bad manners, a reflection on them who had brought him up, and it was a comment of some force.
But Wolf Coming Out chose to ignore that point, saying, “We are not allowed to own a knife or any other weapon at this place. You must know that if you are one of them.”
I couldn’t encourage the breaking of rules, at least not a sensible one like that. “I just came here, and I didn’t know of the rule,” I says, “but I guess it’s a good one, for the Human Being boys might want to cut the Pawnees or other old enemies, and also the reverse.”
“We don’t fight with one another here,” Wolf told me, “because we all are in the same trouble.” The other boys murmured their agreement, but all of them was less tense now I had shown I wasn’t going to attack them with the knife.
“You mean stuck in school.”
“What I mean is being told what to do by white people.”
“But since the whites run every school I ever heard of,” I pointed out, “and Indians have none as yet, you might think about enduring this one until you learn enough to leave it and set up a school run by Indians, particularly the Human Beings, who everybody knows are the smartest.” I let this sink in and then I says, “I was given this knife by Buffalo Calf Woman, wife to Old Lodge Skins, when I was last with his band just after the Greasy Grass fight. I was born white but I was reared amongst the Human Beings. I took this job so that you will have someone on your side who can speak your language. But I don’t blame you for being suspicious.” I stepped over to the entrance to my room and drove the blade of the knife into the door frame deep enough to maintain it at an up thrust angle. “This knife is yours. It’s against the rules for you to carry it, so we’ll leave it stuck here, where you can see it at all times. I hereby name it the Medicine Knife. Its protection extends to all of us.”
Used as what you might call a talisman like that, the knife worked out better than it would of as just a simple present for him. Indians liked stuff of that kind which could be seen materially but had significance that was felt, as do we all when it comes to flags, crucifixes, and, for some, money.
I’m not saying them Cheyenne lads instantly accepted me as a blood brother, but beginning at that point they was not unfriendly and by degrees they come to trust me in large part though I was still an adult, plus I was obviously one of the staff at a place they never wanted to be despite any good reason for so being, the chief amongst which was that their parents wanted them to be there. They was not put in school by force. And when you think their fathers was formerly hostile savages, many of who had fought the U.S. Cavalry, illiterate, counting on their fingers, then you have to admit it was a remarkable thing for them to send their sons and daughters to acquire the white man’s learning.
Now, as I say, I hadn’t knowed till the Major told me that my job was supposed to be temporary and consisted of using the Cheyenne language to get the boys to learn English, so the more success I had, the shorter time I’d be working there. This by the way was typical of the Major’s procedure and might of surprised me in a military man, had I not had enough acquaintance with Army officers to know that if you looked to them for practical sense you’d do better with even a cowboy. You don’t tell a man that the better a job he does, the sooner he will lose it, unless maybe he’s a doctor.
But I did see the point that them young Indians ought to learn as much English as they could if they was going to prosper or even survive in the coming years now the Plains tribes had no immediate means of keeping body and soul together except on the basis of learning white ways, and you’d never do that talking only in Cheyenne.
What I didn’t get was why that couldn’t be accomplished without forsaking their own tongue altogether, which is what the Major wanted, and all the teachers agreed with him including Amanda. Various other tribes was represented at the school, Pawnee, Kiowa, Comanche, Omaha, and all had made reasonable progress in English. Only the Cheyenne boys was the holdouts, and they considered themselves to be defending the tribal honor in so doing. There wasn’t no Cheyenne girls there, so they felt alone, except now for me, and what I had to do was complicated: encourage them to learn English while being on their side when it come to retaining their own language. But I did have a peculiar advantage over everybody, for I was the only person there who could speak both tongues, and in translating to each side I could say whatever I wanted to as the opinion of the other.
Not that I was the first to discover that power, but I was surely one of the few who ever used it not solely for the benefit of the whites. The translators employed by the Government at the treaty conferences usually told both parties what each wanted to hear, regardless of what either actually said, but it was the Indians who invariably lost, for it was their land that was at issue, and also it was the Government paying the interpreters’ wages. Now, the school was paying mine, what little I was getting, but I didn’t come there for the money.
The way it worked was like this. Oh, first I should say I was in charge of the Cheyenne boys a good deal of the day, seeing they was up and washed and dressed on time to be marched to the dining hall for breakfast (they was supposed to make their beds too, but unless it was Saturday morning, when the Major come to make an Army-type inspection, I let that go as a task not worth the remarkable effort), sitting at the head of the table and seeing they acted all right during the meal, then to one of the buildings of classrooms where my boys had one all their own so as not to interfere with the other students, who had learned English. This meant they was never in the authorized company of girls, by the way, which the older lads considered a deprivation, about which subject more to come.
Now the first morning, before the instruction begun, the Major come in and addressed the class. After each sentence or so he stopped and let me give a translation.
“What a relief it is,” he says, standing there with his erect military posture and gray beard, smiling genially, “to be able to speak to you boys with an assurance that you will be able fully to understand what I’m saying.”
Now just remember my version, here in English, was in Cheyenne to them young fellows. “Here me when I speak. I am the leader here and am called Gold Leaf.” Which referred to the badge of rank a major wears when in uniform.
The Major went on. “I can at last explain to you what our purpose is here at school.” He raised his arms in a kind of general embrace of a multitude. “It is only to help you. Keep that always in mind, and whenever you are asked to do a certain thing that you may not like, or to keep from doing something you want to do, you must obey, for what we ask will always be for your own good.”
He stopped, and I translated as follows. “It is right that you show me the respect young people should have for their elders, for in doing so you also show respect for your parents, who sent you here.”
The Major resumed. “Mr. Crabb will translate anything you do not understand, but you must immediately begin to use any English words and phrases you think you know, even if you make mistakes. That is the only way to learn.”
My translation: “This is Little Big Man. He spent his boyhood with the Human Beings and has always kept them in his heart. He will help you understand white people and their ways, so far as that is possible. If you try you will learn their language quickly, for as Human Beings you are very smart and you will want to show how much better you speak English than the students from other tribes. To do less would be to bring shame to your families.”
The Major listened smiling when I spoke, and after I finished this time he nodded his beard reflectively and said, “It is interesting that some ideas take much longer to express in Cheyenne than in English, and vice versa.” He turned back to the boys. “You are a fine-looking group of young men, and I’m sure you will do well here. When you are eventually ready to return to your tribe, it will be as educated Christian gentlemen, and you will make them proud.”
This I rendered almost literally, including the Christian part, for Indians generally had no objection to anything religious.
“Now,” the Major said, “if you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them.” He told me, “You have lifted a burden from us all, Mr. Crabb. Not being able to communicate is a great inconvenience.”
I passed on the matter of questions to the boys and added that if they asked any, the asker should politely get to his feet.
The one who did was not unexpected. “This here,” I says to the Major, “is Wolf Coming Out.”
The Major rolls his eyes and says, “That’s another of our responsibilities: to replace those quaint names with real ones. There’s a lot these poor fellows have to overcome. You should have seen them when they arrived, in leggings and dirty blankets.”
What I wondered is what Wolf’s Pa, himself named for some animal, would make of his son coming home in a monkey suit, with his hair cut off, and named Horace Cooper or, as I heard they done at some of these schools, after the famous, like Thomas Jefferson.
“You are heard,” I says to Wolf now.
His question to the Major was: “How is it you have so much hair on your face but none on the top of your head, where it belongs?”
What I passed on, however, was: “We thank you for this opportunity, and we are eager to learn as much as we can. We do hope, though, that you and those of the staff are patient with us. It isn’t easy to make such a great change in one’s life all at once.”
The Major was beaming benevolently at Wolf. “The boy speaks well,” he told me. “If they can be taught discipline, how fine an all-Indian regiment would be. Best riders in the world, and it’s an old cavalryman who’s saying that, mind you. I served with the Tenth Horse, you know. Negroes. Very fine fellows.”
I told Wolf, “It’s me speaking now. I don’t blame you for being an ignorant young person, but that was a rude question, and I did not translate it for Gold Leaf. However, since I believe you were not intentionally being impolite, I will answer it in a general way. Some think white men often lose their hair as they age because of wearing hats all their lives, but others say it’s because they cut their hair short. I think it represents the way the Everywhere Spirit wants it, as with the hair that grows on white men’s faces but not on Indians’.”
Still standing there in his neat uniform, with close-cropped head, Wolf says, “I know that at the Greasy Grass a Human Being scalped the beard of one of the soldiers.”
“That was Wooden Leg,” says I. He cut off one of the muttonchops of Custer’s dead adjutant, W. W. Cooke. “But it’s not a good idea to talk of that around here.”
“Why not?” asked Wolf. “Nobody but the other Human Beings can understand the language, and they don’t mind.” And the other boys laughed on hearing this type of Indian joke.
He was getting too fresh, and I told him so and to sit down. Which he did.
The Major innocently joined in the mirth. He said, “They’re a happy-go-lucky lot when you get to know them, I see. I can’t wait until I can speak to them directly—no offense to you, Mr. Crabb, your help is essential. But surely, nothing beyond the most primitive concepts can be expressed in Indian. Yet we know all peoples are equal before the Lord. The red man is as capable as any other if introduced to the power of the word, beginning with the Word of God as it is recorded in the Gospels.”
Of course, I wouldn’t of translated this comment to them boys, who come from a tribe whose menfolk was known for orating, usually for hours at a time. And if the Major was referring to the Bible, I believe it dated from the Hebrews, who was unlikely to have wrote it in English. I don’t know if I ever mentioned that my old Pa, who made himself a preacher, believed the Indian race might be that lost tribe of Israel as he claimed it said in the Book of Mormon, which however he never read, being illiterate even in his own language. But then it’s always been my experience, in well over a century now, that words can be held to mean anything.