NEXT MORNING I WAS anxious to get going on the next phase of my life, but it was useless to look for Cody until late in the forenoon, given his social pursuits of the night before over in Manhattan, where he stayed at a hotel. I lived in a tent on the compound at Erastina, right near the encampment of Sioux tepees, so I went over there.
The Indians remained early risers even in London and New York, and by now a bunch of men was already occupied with what they did until the performance started, namely, playing poker, which some of the cowboys had taught them and for which they was keen, having a natural taste for gambling as they did.
A group of the women also was collected together, sitting on the ground in a circle, in their case sewing up some of the souvenir articles they sold, little coin purses, belts, watch fobs, and the like, decorated with beadwork, and gossiping as did females of whatever race and profession, from Lakota wives to the calico queens of the Lone Star—though I couldn’t imagine Amanda doing so.
White Bear Woman come out of her tepee, carrying a piece of deerskin, so I went over to her and said I was leaving the show pretty soon, but I didn’t want any of the Sioux to think it was because I no longer cared about them.
“You are going with Yellow Hair, I think,” she says, with a round-faced smile of approval. “That is good. At your age you should be married and produce some children and not just get drunk and pay bad women to go to bed with you.”
I’m not going to comment on what she said, aside from noting that married Lakota women, like Cheyenne wives, could be outspoken without being thought coarse.
Her advice was the same as that from several ladies I had been uninvolved friends of, beginning with even some at the Lone Star and then Allie Earp and Annie Oakley, and I told her she was right, that I sure wanted to do so as much, but I doubted Yellow Hair would have me as a husband, so meanwhile I was going to try to show her I was a good man.
“She should believe herself lucky to have caught your eye,” White Bear Woman said. “Skinny and pale as she is, how many men would want her?”
Well, you had to excuse her for having the redskin approach to this matter. Next she would want to know if Amanda was strong enough to skin a large animal without taking all day at it. And just let me point out that she wasn’t so weakminded that after a couple years amongst the whites of two countries she thought their women had the same job as Indian females: she just didn’t think much of what they did. There wouldn’t of been no point in mentioning in return that Amanda considered her a kind of slave condemned by savage tradition to a life of degrading drudgery. I have found females whatever their race or station in life to be usually more critical of their own sex than men are, either of women or other fellows.
When Cody finally got in, I went to his tent and sincerely thanked him for the job he had give me for the past five years.
“And you calculate,” says he, with a slow smile and a pull at one end of his mustache, “it’s more than time for a raise in pay. How about an elevation in rank instead?”
He was in a good humor, so I joked back. “But if I was raised to major, then Arizona John Burke would have to be colonel, and you’d be a general.”
“As a matter of fact, the governor is preparing to name me general in the Nebraska National Guard,” says he. “But I don’t know if I should accept the star, having become known as colonel throughout the civilized world.” He wasn’t conceited in the way this might sound: what he meant was what professional effect the change of title might have. “General” didn’t sound as suitable as a title for a showperson, unless applied to somebody like that little bitty midget of Barnum’s called General Tom Thumb.
“I didn’t intend to ask for money, Bill,” I says. “What I want to do is leave the Wild West.”
“What in the world will you do then, Jack?”
The question could be seen as insulting, I guess, but from his point of view it was sensible enough. I never had no previous trade so far as he knowed but bartender, and who would want to return to that after traveling with the Sensation of Two Continents, being celebrated by royalty and all?
“Bill, it’s time I stayed in one place for a while. I’ve really enjoyed being a part of B.B.W.W., and—”
“Let me give you a piece of advice, Jack. I know you have a few years on me, but I believe it’s reasonable to point out that I have more experience in the ways of the larger world. With all respect, that type of girl can mean trouble for a man like you.”
The question riled me. “Did I mention a girl?”
“You didn’t have to,” he says with a smug movement of his goatee, which by the way I noticed was showing signs of gray. “I won’t make the mistake of saying I know women, for no man can, but I have made a close observation of that sex. Your golden-haired friend is the kind who tends to expect more than can reasonably be delivered. Take my word for that, old friend.”
I was still irked. “Miss Teasdale is an acquaintance,” says I, “and nothing further.”
“If you’re speaking of her feeling about you, then you’re right,” says Buffalo Bill, leaning back in his chair. He was yet a fine-looking man though getting a bit of a belly. And he still had that shoulder-length hair, which was also now showing some gray. “But,” he adds after a pause, “you are besotted with her.” He cleared his throat. “I could tell all that from the way you looked at one another.”
Later on I realized what I found so offensive in his commentary was I knew deep down it was correct. “Dammit,” I says, “you might know how to B.S. an audience, but that don’t mean you are an expert on my life, which by the way has included a lot more than pouring whiskey and interpreting for show Indians. I could start up my own exhibition just on the basis of the places I been and the famous people I knowed at the most important times so far as history goes.”
Cody raised his eyebrows and showed a big smile. I doubt he believed me, but he says, “I’m proud to hear that, Jack. But you’d better stay here. Pawnee Bill’s business hasn’t gone well and is about to go under. And you’ll be interested to know that Little Missy’s coming back to us.”
He meant Annie. I didn’t like hearing that from him either, but I had fell out of touch with the Butlers since they went off with the show run by Bill Lillie. “That’s just fine,” I says, “but I’m giving my notice.”
“Then Miss Teasdale has replaced Missy in your affections?”
I refused to let him rattle me further. “Frank’s a personal friend of mine.”
Cody become serious. “That’s why it’s a better arrangement, Jack. Miss Teasdale doesn’t have a husband to protect you. These willful women are hard to handle. You don’t know what Frank Butler has to put up with, unless you’ve seen Missy’s mean side. Not that I don’t have my own problems with Lulu. That woman’s set on my ruination, and not only financially. She’s trying to turn my own daughters against me. Yet you saw how much Arta enjoyed coming to London.”
I seen Arta only once or twice during that trip and only at long range. He kept her away from the men in the show and I think had hoped she’d find a husband amongst the English swells.
But I wasn’t going to be sidetracked from my own concern. “Couple weeks be enough notice, Bill?”
“Jack,” says he, removing the big hat to wipe his forehead with a blue bandanna, “do what you have to do and when. And remember, there’ll always be room for you at the bar.” He swallowed as if with difficulty. “It gets hotter in New York than on the Plains. My whistle could use a wettening. How about you?”
Since I was standing and him sitting, I could see when the sombrero was off that his hair though long as ever was getting thin at the crown. I had lost only a little of my own, but at forty-seven I was acquiring some gray, and didn’t like it, so I admit I’d mix some coloring into the pomade and comb it into both my sideburns and the mustache. I was fond of thinking this plus my shortness of height made me look a lot younger than I was, not that I was all that much older than Amanda, putting the difference at about a dozen years, in a day when it might well be as much as thirty if the man had money and the girl hadn’t none, which of course wasn’t the case in the present instance.
Speaking of money, by working another couple of weeks I would make enough to get by for a little while without immediately retrieving any of my nest egg from North Platte, and maybe I could find some outside work in addition to the unpaid job with the Friends of the Red Man, like tending bar in one of the plentiful saloons in Manhattan, but I still didn’t feel I could at this time afford to send Wild Bill Hickok’s widow the money I owed her to replace the roll I had lost, though I was sure going to do so soon as possible.
Well, I don’t want to stretch out the telling of this episode, though when I was enduring it, them two weeks seemed to go on forever and not just be the “fortnight” they would of been called by the English. At my present age fourteen days pass in about an hour, but when your heart is still young enough to have some function beyond just beating, the clock is slower than you are. I just wish I hadn’t been so yellow about using the telephone, for I could of called up Amanda at her office not to bother her with a lot of palaver but just to remind her of what I had said I would do, if she was in any doubt. As to sending her a note, I tell you I was too worried about how ignorant I was in the use of words, when it came to putting them down in pen and ink.
So I remained out of touch with Amanda throughout this time, and didn’t even have no intimates to talk to on the subject, by which I mean a woman pal like Allie Earp, for if you speak to another man about being stuck on a girl he would think you soft, the way Cody done.
But the time eventually arrived, and having already said my goodbyes and collected my final wages the day before, I left the Wild West early one morning in late June and rode the ferry across towards my new life, wearing my city suit and hard-collared shirt, topped by a derby, and carrying a carpet bag containing what was left of my worldly possessions, having give what wouldn’t fit in to Two Eagles, White Bear Woman’s husband, including my wide-brimmed hat.
The water was a bit choppy in the breeze you always get on a stretch of ocean water even when contained in a bay, which was welcome for on land the day was fixing to get hot, which in the beginning surprised us Westerners with our idea the East always had mild temperatures to match its tenderfoot ways, but we was wrong on both counts: it could get as hot on the sidewalks of New York as in the streets of Tombstone, and as cold in winter as Montana Territory, and the habits of the locals, especially the kind of Irish who owned and also patronized the saloons, was as rough as anywhere beyond the Mississippi. And added to all of this was way too many people everyplace you went. But that was where, on account of a woman, I was going to make my life, and I thought on passing the Statue of Liberty that for me it was a giant image of Amanda.
I had my usual difficulty in finding the address, the streets being downtown in that part of the city that wasn’t laid out at right angles and being all named and not numbered, and the men I asked directions of either spoke with an accent I couldn’t understand or seemed to find my own speech hard to savvy, and I was afraid a stranger stopping a woman might be taken for a masher, so never done it.
But finally, more or less by chance, I found myself on the right block and located the building, which lucky for me wasn’t tall as some, for another thing of which I was leery was an elevator. I never cared how safe Mr. Otis was supposed to of made them: I never could see any reason why one stayed up, so I always walked. Fortunately in this case that was only four or five stories. But first I should say that down on the sidewalk, at the entrance, I run into some old fellow just unlocking the front door, and he was in a disagreeable mood most everybody who didn’t know you was in in New York all the time, unless of course they wanted to sell you something, though even then they was barely civil. I guess they just had to deal with too many strangers in a crowded town like that.
Anyway, this fellow, who as I say was old but maybe not more so than me at that time, it’s just he was so gray-faced and slow-moving, when he turns to shut the door and sees me behind him, he first flinches and then, seeing I ain’t there to rob him, says in a surly voice, “It’s too goddam early. There ain’t nobody here yet, for Jesus’ sake.”
Since this was Amanda’s building I didn’t want to make no trouble, so I just says I’d wait outside the office of the party I was meeting, and he turned his back on me, so I went on in and found the room number for F.R.M. on the directory board in the entryway and undertook the climb, which was a lot more strenuous due to the regularity of the stairs than mounting a comparable height outdoors. That was undoubtedly why there was so many weary-looking city folk: life there was more exhausting for the human body than in the prairie, mountains, or even the desert. An Indian who could survive hunger, cold, and bloodshed on his own terrain wouldn’t of lasted long in the wear and tear of Manhattan or what had become of it since the white men bought it.
So by the time I got to Amanda’s floor I was all tuckered out and panting like old Pard after he had a good run, and when following the numbers in the unlit hallway I come to her office, the letters painted on the frosted glass panel of the door, FRIENDS OF THE RED MAN, was big enough to see, but my vision was still too wobbly as yet to make out exactly, in the dim light, what was on the piece of paper stuck below, wrote in ink by hand.
So I had to wait a while before understanding that the office was closed not just for today but all week, no reason given. Any packages was to be left with the janitor.
Not only was I disappointed, but I was worried about Amanda. Maybe she was took sick suddenly. But if that happens, a person ain’t likely to specify a precise time when they’ll be back. I reckoned, or at least I hoped, it was more likely a vacation. If so, what would I do with myself for a whole week?
I clumped down them many steps and found that janitor on the ground floor, where he was pushing a wet mop around.
I was careful to stay on the part that was still dry, so as not to rile him before getting some information. I began, “Friends of the Red Man. I was wondering—”
With the usual New York impatience, he says, head down, “Closed,” and continued to swab that dirty mop in big circles without rinsing it in the nearby bucket.
“I know it,” I says. “But what I was wondering, due to sickness or vacation?”
His mouth went down in a sneer though he still didn’t look at me. “It’s her wedding.”
“She’s getting married?”
“Shit,” says he, “if you’re going to walk across this clean floor, then go and goddam do it.”
I had been brought too low by the news even to consider what I swore I’d do next time one of them city folk was nasty for no good reason: kick him in the arse. Fact is, at that point he could of kicked mine without fear of retaliation: I wouldn’t of felt it. I couldn’t even ask him any further questions, whether he would of answered or not, for I didn’t want to know any of the details. Now, these many years later, I can look back and see that Amanda hadn’t made no arrangement with me to do what I done. She hadn’t promised me a job or in fact even said she looked forward to seeing me again, professionally or socially. I myself had concocted that entire business out of thin air and overheated feelings. I had a tendency in that direction, but this was worse than with Miss Dora Hand, in that I had put more store in it, though of course not so bad insofar as Amanda was not shot to death, only married, but I was in the same fix, since I wouldn’t be seeing her again. I didn’t need another married woman friend like Annie.
My reaction to this was not noble. I went to what I believe was a number of saloons but due to my state of drunkenness I couldn’t keep track, and it’s always possible I stayed in the same one, and what changed was only the other customers and also my state of consciousness. I do recall at around the point I was two and a half sheets to the wind, like the sailors say, I got real bitter about how nobody in New York City knowed I was the sole white survivor of the battle supposedly shown in that picture the Anheuser-Busch brewery hung in every saloon in the U.S.A., “Custer’s Last Fight,” and it was back of the bar in each of them I visited now, unless it was one and the same place, and I got real mad looking at Custer wearing long hair and wielding a saber, neither of which he had that day, and I begun to tell, probably at the top of my lungs—though at the worst of it I could hardly hear my own voice—what really happened at the Little Big Horn, eventually getting so worked up I throwed my glass at the picture, and I guess I really did go to more than one place, for next day I retained a memory of being bum-rushed into more than one street, and the last time it happened, probably while I was laying facedown in a gutter full of filth, my wallet was lifted, along with my pocket watch and chain, my new derby, my boots, and even my celluloid collar. Whether my carpet bag was took at the same time or I had lost it earlier, I never knowed.
When I come to next morning I didn’t recognize the neighborhood at all. It wasn’t where I had started out, but seemed to be all slum, with dirty little kids running around and big dark buildings in solid walls from one end of the street to the other, and so crowded and noisy with people and pushcarts, with now and again a skinny overworked old horse pulling a battered wagon while its driver cursed it and everybody in the road, that I thought I was in a drunken dream of Hell or maybe had died and gone there. Anyway, there was enough commotion so that nobody paid any attention to me.
I was such a mess I would of stood out anywhere else, but here I was amongst the better dressed and groomed, and when I asked one of them little kids with holes in his pants and dried snot on his face if there was a public bath in the vicinity, he never had no idea of what I meant, though he could speak English, for he asked me to give him a penny, and when I searched my pockets and found I had lost every cent, he called me the dirtiest name I ever heard.
I walked till I wore through the soles of my shoeless socks, and finally I come to a commercial area with a lot of businessmen on the sidewalk, and picking the friendlier faces, though frankly you didn’t see many of such, I would say, “Excuse me, sir, I’m a respectable person irregardless of my present appearance, which is due to an unfortunate accident. I was wondering if you might extend me a loan often cents, along with your address, so I might return it promptly.”
I repeated this to several people but nobody listened to it much past the “Excuse me, sir,” most of them not looking in my direction, but one big fellow with a red nose says he would get a policeman to run me in, and another, the nicest, told me to go to such-and-such mission and get a free pair of shoes.
There’s nothing like physical privation to call your attention away from distress of the feelings. When you get uncomfortable enough, you can’t remember your other troubles. The summertime pavement of New York ain’t the place to walk barefoot. My feet got fried, and when I reached one of the rivers that flow around the island and found a dock low enough to sit on and dunk my hoofs, I hadn’t been there long before a big-bellied cop come along with his helmet and truncheon and says, “Be on yer way, or yuh’ll rigrit it.”
Finally I did end up at a mission on the Bowery, where they give me a used pair of shoes which was too big and with worn-through soles but served the purpose, and all I had to do for them was sing some hymns with the others, to the accompaniment of a piano played by a lady with a sorrowful expression who later said a word to each of us, taking me for just another tramp, and I never let on because at that moment, feeling lower than a snake’s belly, I figured I didn’t deserve better, at my age to make a fool of myself over a young woman; furthermore, a woman who was herself blameless. I mean, she wouldn’t even know of my feeling for her.... On the other hand, if she didn’t know, then I was not humiliated before her.
I have found throughout my long life that the older I got, the easier it was to deal with matters of pride, at least if they was not bad enough to shoot yourself over right away. I couldn’t blame my current predicament on any of the saloons I got thrown out of, but still the experience soured me on any idea I might of had to return to my barkeep career, at least when it come to New York, and I had demonstrated no talent whatever at panhandling, so unless I wanted to hang permanently around a mission, singing for suppers of thin soup and stale bread, I never had no sensible choice but to get back to the Wild West if Cody would let me.
So I found my way by foot to the Staten Island ferry landing and just lingered there till some of the cowboys showed up, returning from an overnight spree in the city, and they staked me to the fare when I told them I had gotten beat up and robbed in an outnumbered fight when I stood up for Texas amidst a crowd of Irish micks, squarehead Germans, and Eyetalian greaseballs, on account of they was always getting into such commotions or anyway claimed to.
I used the same story to explain to Buffalo Bill, only omitting the fight, for he was not himself a pugnacious drinker. I just had one, I says, and then another and so on, until I was blind drunk and busted, a state of affairs which he regarded as normal enough though I never did see him in it. In fact, I never seen him actually drunk, I expect because by time he was under the influence, everybody around him was so much drunker he seemed sober.
Anyway, he says sure my job was still there, and then he adds something I probably should of been offended by had I not been so shaken by the matter of Amanda. “The Wild West is home to you. Jack.” I knowed he meant it in a friendly way and probably would of applied it to himself as well, for he seldom stayed with his blood-family in Nebraska, but I didn’t have no alternative.
I drew an advance on my wages and bought new boots and replacements for the other clothes I had lost, except for the derby, which would only of been an unhappy reminder of the new life I wasn’t going to have, so I would of had to get me a hat had I not run into Two Eagles before doing so.
He was wearing the sombrero I had give him on leaving. Now he would never ask me why I was back, as he hadn’t inquired as to why I had been going away. But he did look at my bare head now, which was an unusual sight outdoors in them days with white men.
“Do you want your hat back?”
“I gave it to you,” I says.
“Yes,” says he, “but I think you need it.” And he takes it off and hands it to me.
I mention this because it’s a twist on what white people call Indian giving, and maybe demonstrates the redskin angle on the subject of personal possessions.
Well, so much for my imaginary love affair. I can shrug it off here, though it took me a while to get over it at that time.
That winter in North Platte the separate house Cody had built on his property and named Scout’s Rest was all finished and ready to move into, with fifteen rooms and big porches ten foot wide, and he had a special room upstairs fitted out for drinking, with a sideboard full of bottles and glassware arranged like in a bar, and a big bed for the use of any guest who was so drunk he passed out. His wife Lulu continued to live in the old Welcome Wigwam house, and as usual I never saw her all winter long.
I was back at my vacation job of personal bartender to Buffalo Bill and the many visitors he invited and also the passing cowboys, drummers, drifters, and all who dropped in without being asked but was whiskeyed and fed just like they was, some of them staying around for weeks, on account of Cody was always in the market for company and missed the show crowds. I myself for once welcomed having a lot of people around, for it was cheerier than if I had only the company of my disappointments. Also I missed old Pard real bad and often would go out to where he was buried and say hi to his bones, which I was relieved to see had not been dug up by any animal, for the grave could not be distinguished by now from the surrounding ground and the grass had grown evenly across all.
There was less money than I believed there’d be in the savings I kept at the local bank, not that they stole any, but I guess I hadn’t sent back as much as I thought and also not a lot of interest was earned on an account like that.
Cody seemed to have the golden touch, with his successful show, and I ought to say his ranch was a real one and profitable as run by his brother-in-law Al Goodman and several dozen working cowboys, and I decided if I was going to be lonely at least it wouldn’t be so bad if I was prosperous as well, so I asked Buffalo Bill to do me a favor and let me invest the modest amount at my disposal in the next project he come up with.
When he acted none too keen about that proposal, I got sore and, with some whiskey under my belt, accused him of being selfish. If I had been working for any other employer, my arse would have been kicked out the door at that point, but if there was anything Bill Cody was not, it was selfish or stingy or intolerant of the ranting of a drunk, so he says all right, but what I should know about the business ideas of Doc Powell was that they didn’t always make as much money as it seemed they might at the outset.
He was referring to an old pal of his who lived now in Wisconsin but showed up from time to time over the course of many years, in fact since Bill had met him when Powell worked for the Army as a physician at Fort McPherson long before. Unlikely as it seemed, Frank Powell was a genuine doctor and sometimes practiced as such, but he was also a character after Cody’s heart, a heavy drinker and a big talker, a sharpshooter who sometimes did an Annie Oakley act, an honorary Indian with the name of White Beaver, and a specialist in schemes designed to enrich himself and his fellow investors, among them the merchandising of such patent medicines as White Beaver’s Cough Cream, the Great Lung Healer, which was guaranteed to cure any complaint of the chest, from the congestion of a cold up to and including consumption.
Doc Powell’s latest project sounded sensible enough, at least when I was drunk, and also remember that Bill Cody was his partner: it was to colonize a couple million acres of undeveloped land down in Mexico that was free for the taking. Now, sneer if you will, but at the time it sure seemed like just the kind of thing that might appeal to a lot of foreigners in Europe who would want to get off to a fresh start in the New World, and this spot would be the newest part, starting from scratch. White Beaver was going overseas with us to sign up colonists.
That’s right, Cody was taking the Wild West across the ocean again in the spring, this time to Paris, France, and another celebration, which had a French name pronounced Eck-spoh-ziss-ee-awn Oon-ee-vair-sell, spell it as you will, and we’ll get to that directly. But first I want to dispose of the matter of money, though I can’t do it as thoroughly as my own savings was disposed of in this scheme: in a word, though this is jumping ahead some, Doc Powell couldn’t find nobody in Europe or anyplace else who wanted to colonize that acreage of Mexican desert. I had nobody to blame but myself, and Cody lost a lot more than I did. But he had a whole lot else.
Now I know what you’re thinking at this point: you’re tired of hearing how once again Mrs. Agnes Hickok never got reimbursed for Wild Bill’s roll which I lost while in hot pursuit of his murderer Jack McCall. It’s beginning to sound like I made all this up! Well, I was ahead of you, way back then. I myself got sick of being a welcher. Before giving a cent to White Beaver, I divvied up my savings into two equal portions. In five years with the Wild West, I had saved almost two hundred fifty dollars. I know that don’t sound impressive these days, but in that age you could buy a meal for ten cents, so such a sum was not to be despised. What I done was round out Mrs. Aggie’s share to an even one twenty-five and send it off in cash to the Cincinnati address I had gotten from her daughter Emma the Champion Equestrienne of the World. I hope it reached her. I never knew. I included a note in which, after apologizing for poor grammar and worse spelling, I said I had been a pard of Wild Bill’s many years before and owed him a poker debt, which I was long last able to return. I never said it was a dying request, for I was ashamed to have taken so long to fulfill it, and for the same reason did not sign my name.
So I had finally accomplished both the obligations I had took upon myself on leaving Deadwood a dozen years before with regard to the two widows, Mrs. Custer and Mrs. Hickok, though as usually happens in life the realization was somewhat different than the intention. I don’t know what I had in mind in connection with Libbie Custer before meeting her, beyond being her sincere friend, but I had not exactly hit it off with the lady. As for Agnes Hickok, I had wanted to provide her with a considerably larger bequest, regardless of how much was in the roll Wild Bill had entrusted to me, but it was the best I could do.
Now, getting back to B.B.W.W, off we went to Europe again on the same Persian Monarch we come back on the year before, with two hundred persons, almost half of which was Indians, some fifty buffalo amidst an animal cargo of three hundred, the Deadwood stagecoach and the other equipment, and while the crossing weren’t as rough as the first time, I never got used to traveling on water. I had first went West as a young boy in a so-called prairie schooner, but I tell you, going over the bumpiest ground, you could stop at any time. Stop on the ocean, you’re still there.
You got to bear with me when it comes to French names and places. “Paris” was simple enough to figure out even though they said it with an ee at the end, and the harbor where we landed, the “Harve” (though Americans would of said “Harb”) made sense, but where we set up the encampment on reaching Paris was in a park with a funny name on the order of “Annoying,” though I gather it didn’t mean that in French, and the iron tower what had lately been put up, so high you could see it from everyplace in town, had the right name in the English version, the “Eye-full,” but even the Frenchmen who liked it called it something that sounded like “Awful.” And by the way, a lot of them hated it even though it was the tallest manmade structure in the world, which was true of them people on almost every subject. Whereas in England everybody seemed to agree on basic matters, at least in public, the French made a specialty of disagreeing with one another on almost anything.
Eventually I found out that some of this was not what it seemed, but due to the language, which is more excited-sounding than ours and makes a lot of next to nothing, like “Good morning, sir” is just a mumble compared to Bone-JOO, mess-YEAR, which can be like a song. And a good many of their words though sounding like some in English, have different meanings, for example to us “assassin” would be John Wilkes Booth who killed Mr. Lincoln, but in Paris it meant only the driver of a cab whose trotting horse almost run you down when you tried to cross the road.
They had a lot of funny ways, which shouldn’t of been surprising, because after all they was French, and though they was nice and hospitable when we got to Paris, I had the feeling they was suspicious about what it was exactly that a performance of ours consisted of and whether they should like it and why, for I found there was nobody like a Frenchman for taking nothing for what it appeared to be and reserving judgment till he decided if he was being made a fool of or not. So at the opening performance, with their President, Mr. Carnot, and a lot of other big shots on hand, for that Exposition commemorated their Revolution of a hundred years earlier, there was an audience numbering twenty thousand people, and they wasn’t unfriendly, but neither did they show anything near the excited expectation that always greeted us at home and maybe even more so amongst the British, who was supposed to be restrained, as opposed to the hotblooded folks across the English Channel, which by the way ain’t called that by the French, who was always thinking about food, but rather the “Munch.”
As promised, Annie and Frank was back with the show. They had straightened out whatever difficulty they had with Cody, and Lillian was gone now, so there was Little Sure Shot, waiting for her entrance into the arena in Paris, and me and Frank was in attendance, ready with her guns, ammunition, a supply of them glass balls, and other equipment for the act, and I tell you she had stayed as pretty as she was when she first joined B.B.W.W. but had become even more accomplished as a performer, having acquired an ability to take hold of a crowd by simply walking in in her demure way, wearing that fringed outfit and star-marked hat, them neat little shoes and leggings, curtseying like a well-brought-up schoolgirl of the kind Libbie Bacon must of been not too many years before she married Autie Custer. Long before Frank handed her the gun and I throwed the first glass ball into the air, Annie would have an audience eating out of her hand.
But on this occasion, with the French still reserving judgment on the Wild West, Annie took it as a personal challenge to take them on, all twenty thousand. She had noticed that for the opening ceremonies, the audience applauded only when certain persons posted here and there throughout the arena give them the okay to do so by starting up the cheering. Later on we found out that every show in France, from circuses to highbrow plays, hired fellows of this type, who was called “clackers,” and once some Frenchman told me, with typical Paris humor tending towards the cynical, that after an act or two you could tell from the level of noise exactly how much the clackers had been paid on each occasion.
Anyway, Annie took this as an affront to her professional pride.
“Go on, Frank,” she says, “you and Jack tell them to keep quiet.”
Knowing Frank didn’t want to rile her before a performance, I took it upon myself to point out there was a number of such people: the show’d be over before we went through a crowd that size.
There was sparks in her eyes. Annie wasn’t really a shy schoolgirl. “Well, Jack,” she says, “if you ever bothered to look, you could see the main ones are right close. You go over to them and you tell them to hush. Now is that too much to ask of you two?”
If you have had experience in entertainment, you know performers are real highstrung just before going on, so I quick followed Frank, who being married to her had already started off, and being a clear-thinking man, had already figured out a practical answer to the problem, neither of us speaking French: he got one of the English-talking officials assigned to us to deal with the matter, and it was taken care of.
Which meant Annie come into the center of the arena to absolute dead silence. There wasn’t even any applause from the President’s box, where I heard later they thought Miss Oakley wanted complete quiet for some safety measure when shooting her firearms.
Well, them show guns, even with their light loads, made enough noise to startle city folks when they first went off at every performance, and the Frenchies wasn’t any exception. Fact was, they turned out to be just as excitable as supposed, only took a while to show it, but pretty soon their yells and cheers was even drowning out Annie’s guns, and before her act was over, the whole bunch was on their feet screaming and throwing hats and parasols and scarves into the arena and at one another, and in general going nuts for her. It sounded like another revolution had started, a century after the first.
If Annie was the toast of the town in New York and London, she was even more in Paris: the French toast, I called her, for them people always went any dish one better, like dipping it in egg, being crazy on the subject of food: you couldn’t get a piece of cheese in Paris, you had to name the kind, out of several hundred. You couldn’t buy butter unless you specified the fat content, for again there was a big choice. Incidentally, you couldn’t get “French toast” over there, where they call it, in their lingo of course, “lost bread.” And who else in all the world would eat liver raw?
You ought to know the answer to that one: Indians, of course, though it would probably be that of a hairy four-footed animal rather than a goose, but sharing that trait weren’t the only connection between the red man and the French, who from the first had a spot soft in their hearts for Indians and generally got along better with them in the New World than the British. The French and Indian War was even before my time, but I know that them two was allies in it against the Redcoats, like the Americans was a little later with the French against the same enemy, so though the French was peculiar, we had old ties with them on our side of the water, including even many tribal names, among them Sioux, Assiniboine, Nez Perce, Iroquois, and others, for they was first visited by Frenchmen in the market for furs and also priests, who had enough sense to tell an Indian he didn’t have to quit his heathen beliefs to become a Catholic: God would let him be both, at least until he learned better.
Speaking of Indians, who would turn up in Paris but Black Elk, one of them Sioux who, if you recall, missed the returning boat to the U.S.A. the year before and was stranded in England. Cody was relieved to see he was in good shape, for this was the kind of thing the reformers like Amanda could use to discredit putting Indians in shows, and invited him to take his old place in the troupe, but Black Elk said he was pretty homesick by now though he had had a nice time since the Wild West had sailed away without him, being hired right away by a fellow named Mexican Joe who run an imitation show of Cody’s though smaller, and they toured Germany and some other countries including one with a mountain which had smoke coming out of its top and sometimes, according to the people who lived there, it shot out flames and burned up the towns around its base.
“Yet the people continued to live there,” said he. “Because it is their home.”
“Tell my friend,” Cody says to me, “the name of that country would be Italy.”
So I did so, and Black Elk says, “But most of the time we were here with the French, who treated us very well, and a young woman became my friend and took me to meet her family, but I missed my own home so much I got sick and fell down and, so far as these people could see, I died, not breathing and having no heartbeat, and they were getting ready to bury my body when I finally woke up, because I had not died but rather had flown across the seas to the Black Hills and then to Pine Ridge and visited with my mother before coming back here. I told her I would return in the body as soon as I had the money for the boat.”
Cody now demonstrated again why the Indians liked and trusted him. “You’d better get started, then, for a man must always honor a promise he makes to his sainted mother.” And he give him a return ticket and ninety dollars, and got the French to provide one of them cops they call John Darms to go along and make sure he got on the right train and then caught the right ship on time.
Now, just to follow up on that vision Black Elk had, I heard from some other Pine Ridge Lakota with the show in later years that having talked with her son in the same dream, Black Elk’s Ma knowed he was coming home and exactly when, and I had no reason not to believe that, having many times known like results from the dreams of Old Lodge Skins, the man who taught me most everything of enduring value I learned in life.
In Paris, as in London, the B.B.W.W. Indians was taken around to see the sights, and reporters followed them everyplace, but not knowing the French language I couldn’t say whether the stories they wrote was any truer than anyplace else, but I doubt it, given the difference between the way an Indian looks at things and a fellow who tries to put it down in writing, for example when Red Shirt and some of the others went up to the top of the Eiffel Tower (me too, holding my breath on that elevator ride), Arizona John Burke went along with us and looking down remarked on what I guess there wasn’t a white man ever went atop any structure and didn’t say, which is how the persons below looked like ants, Red Shirt’s observation was how if the people down there looked so little from high up where he was, then how much smaller all people must look from the height of Wakantanka.
Now that’s the way I translated it for Burke, who asks, “Where’s Wakanna?”
Distracted from the view and also still shaky from that elevator, I done a careless job. “Sorry,” I says, “he means God.”
And Burke says, “Here, here,” again using the British expression, and then I heard him tell the reporters what devout Christians our Indians all was, which was news to me, and Lord knows how it come out in print, for I never run into a Frenchman who claimed to know English who actually did, and the same thing was true in reverse, according to the French, who claimed there wasn’t anybody not born and brung up in France could hope to speak their tongue.
As you can tell listening to this story, I couldn’t be called fluent in English, and Sitting Bull wasn’t never impressed by the quality of my Lakota, so on Judgment Day, talking to the Almighty, maybe I’d better stick to Cheyenne. Anyway I guess I was pretty pathetic with French, and them people prefer you didn’t even try it if you was going to butcher their beautiful language. What really went over in Paris was being as Western American as possible, that is, if you couldn’t be Indian, which was best of all, and everywhere you went you saw the locals wearing sombreros and headbands with feathers and riding horses on American horned saddles, and little kids with bows and arrows.
So I had a real good time in that country, the details of which I won’t go into, but I was recovering from a great disappointment in the usual way a man does that, by means of what women see as empty frivolities though they usually figure in them, along with drink. Speaking of drink, Frenchmen do that all day long but generally with wine, so they ain’t really drunk but they ain’t cold sober either: they’re just French. And yessir, they really do eat frogs, though not at every meal.
But France nor any other foreign place wasn’t much to Annie Oakley’s liking, she being of the old-fashioned red-white-and-blue sort of girl with an eye open for un-American immorality, but one thing that concerned her personally she found good for a laugh. The King of Senegal, a colored country in Africa owned by the French at the time, while visiting Paris attended a performance of the Wild West and was so taken with Annie that he come around to Buffalo Bill’s tent after the show, a real big heavy person in his fancy robes of spotted furs and gold jewelry, with a bodyguard of husky young black fellows and a white interpreter who translated his French, and what he says was he wanted to buy Annie for a hundred thousand francs.
Now I know Cody thought this real humorous, but he pretended to be insulted, so the King upped the ante, until Bill lifted his hands and called quits.
“Madame Butler,” says he, “nor any other American lady can never be for sale, sir!”
The King speaks to the translator, who then tells Cody, “His Majesty says, ‘Oh, what a pity!’”
Bill turns his head towards me, with a hand covering his mustache and the top of his goatee, but got himself under control and turned back. “Ask him what he wanted to do with her.”
“To keel teegers,” the Frenchman says after consulting with the King, who now is smiling eagerly with a display of perfect teeth.
“Pardon?”
“Wild bists. To shoot dem.”
“To kill tigers?” Cody asks.
“May wee,” says the King, and the interpreter explained, “They eat too many of his pipples.”
“Captain Jack,” Cody asks me, “will you be so good as to go to Miss Oakley’s tent and fetch her here to receive this offer? It’s too attractive to dismiss out of hand.”
So I done as requested, and the King repeated his proposal, and I’ll say this for Annie, she never got mad but just said politely she could not accept due to prior obligations. At which His Majesty parted his leopardskin robe and, amazingly graceful for a man of his bulk, knelt down on one bare knee, took her little surprised white hand in his big black one, raised it to his lips, and kissed it. Then he stood up, squared his shoulders, and marched out of the tent in a brisk military step, followed by his burly retainers.
As soon as the group could be expected to have gone beyond earshot, Cody let out a big guffaw, and he says to Annie, “I know for a fact there aren’t any tigers in Africa. That’s according to my personal friend Mr. Theodore Roosevelt.”
Annie didn’t have no better education than me, but to show you how sensible a person she was, she says now, “Well, maybe ‘tiger’ is what you call a leopard in French.”
I run into Two Eagles on leaving the tent and asked him if he had seen the big chief of Senegal and party go past.
“Yes,” says he, “and I liked his spotted robe very much. I wondered where a Black White Man killed such an animal.”
Which is what Indians called colored folk at home, and they didn’t differentiate by name between types, so I tried to clear him up on the matter. “He’s completely black,” I says, “and comes from a place called Af-ri-ca.”
“But he is here with the whites,” Two Eagles pointed out, getting that expression an Indian will show when he becomes stubborn.
“He’s just visiting.”
“He is not a captive?”
I hadn’t wanted to get into this, for I didn’t know all that much about the subject. “He seems to come and go as he pleases.”
“Why does he not stay home in his own country-of-the-spotted-animals?”
“I don’t know,” I says. “But he’s probably come here to ask the French to do something for his country, which I believe is actually owned by them, so he doesn’t run anything, but they let him stay on as big chief.”
“Then it seems to me he can be called a Black White Man,” Two Eagles said.
I changed the subject to explain something I felt guilty about. “That hat you returned to me in New York? The reason I’m not wearing it is that I got drunk in Paris last night and lost it.” This was always a good excuse with anybody in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, beginning with its founder, except for Annie of course.
“I thought maybe you gave it to some French woman,” Two Eagles said, with a trace of grin beneath his big hawk nose.
“You’re too smart for me,” I told him. Fact is, by the time we left Paris, there was few of us who still had the American stuff we brung along on arrival, and some of the cowboys had to send back home for replacement boots, chaps, sombreros, and all, and Cody had to warn against losing guns, for bringing firearms into them foreign countries was under strict controls and the red tape involved in clearing the show’s arsenal on first arrival had been trouble enough.
I should mention that the Lakota as usual when speaking of anybody not an Indian called him some version of wasichu, their word for “white man.” An Englishman was just plain wasichu; a black man was wasichu-sapa; a Frenchman, wasichu-ikceka. None of them was the normal folks they called themselves.