IN THE FALL OF ’89 we finally left Paris and went south in France, down to Marseilles where they drank a licorice-tasting concoction that turned milky when water was added and ruined some well-known people, well, that and the ailment which each European country tried to blame another for by calling it by the other’s name, like the “Neapolitan disease,” and so on, and their chief food down there, being on the seashore, was fish, especially a stew containing a mix of all kinds called billybase, which was a little too rich for my blood, but the Sioux, who never ate fish at home, could get sick just by smelling a bowlful. But not sick in reality, the kind you could die from: that happened however when we continued on down to Barcelona, in the land of Spain, where I found such Spanish as I had learned from the Mexicans was looked on as being fairly ignorant, for I couldn’t bring myself to lisp on certain words as they do in that city, but I never had much chance to do so anyway, for we run into an outbreak of both typhoid fever and the flu, against which the city was quarantined, so few people appeared at our performances, plus which a number of the company come down with serious ailments, including some of the Sioux, and the man who announced the acts, Frank Richmond, died. Annie nearly did too, and Frank Butler was hit hard.
The only other thing of note was Arizona John Burke, always looking for a chance at publicity, took a bunch of our Indians to the local statue of Christopher Columbus and got them photographed there, sending the picture back to the U.S.A. with a comment to the effect that Columbus was four hundred years early as an advance agent for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Burke really done that. But I heard later on that someplace it was told that one of the Indians stared at the statue and said, “It was a damn bad day for us when he discovered America.” That never happened, and I was there. The Sioux at that time didn’t know anything about Columbus, aside from the fact they never seen him anywhere near Montana nor Dakota territories, and they thought of themselves as Lakota and not “Indians” and “America” so far as they was concerned was the part of the country where the white people, including the black white people, lived.
The further difficulty in Spain was once we got quarantined, we couldn’t leave even though nobody was buying tickets, but finally we got out of there in January of the year and went on to the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, the latter being the birthplace of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the Indians did know his tomb was at Paris, for they seen it, and when I mentioned he was supposed to be short, they called him Little Big Man, I believe in all seriousness.
Next came Naples, and a mountain named Vesuvius was nearby. The first day we was there, Red Shirt told me, “That is the mountain that Black Elk saw, the one that belches fire.”
“I don’t see any right now.”
“It’s the one,” he said with certainty, but I never understood how he could know that.
Some days later we was took to visit the ruins of the city of Pompeii which was being dug out of the ground, having been buried by volcanic ash centuries before, so Red Shirt was sure right about that mountain.
Now at Pompeii in its heyday there had been at least as many harlotries as in Dodge City centuries afterwards, but the difference was they had pictures painted on the walls of the Pompeii whorehouses illustrating the pleasures available. The Indians found these of interest, for they was learning some of this stuff for the first time, but a lot of cowboys, who wasn’t, was nevertheless shocked to see it depicted in public and thought worse of the Eye-ties for doing so and said we shouldn’t let many of them into the U.S.A. lest our morals go to hell and also them foreigners was so ignorant as to misspell Chris Columbus’s name as Cristoforo Colombo and claim he was one of them. I admit I myself didn’t know the truth of that at the time, for we had just come from Spain, where the Spanish claimed him, only called the man Cristobal Colon!
Luckily the Butlers was going to visit Pompeii another day, so I was able to warn Frank to steer Annie clear of the filthy pictures.
Cody had big plans for Rome, wanting to hold the performances of B.B.W.W. in the Colosseum where the gladiators fought and the Christians was fed to the lions, but found it was worse for many centuries of wear and had half fallen down. His idea of going to the Vatican with a troupe of Indians and having a private audience with Pope Leo worked out better.
Now people meeting the Pope was supposed to be dressed formal, meaning swallowtail coats and high hats for the men, but as this was not practical for the Indians—though I can tell you they might of liked it—Arizona John Burke got special permission for the Sioux to wear their regular show outfits, but they went him one better. For the sake of the occasion Cody pretended to be Catholic, but Burke actually was one, and he had lectured at length to the Indians about who and what the Pope was and how to act when they met him: not to get excited and yell, etc. So what they did was break out their very best clothing and jewelry for the visit, a lot of which I never seen on them before, shirts of the finest deerskin and beadwork, the decorated bone chokers and breastplates, the most lavish of feather bonnets.
Of course the old Pope could top anybody in the display department, what with his crown and the fanciest robes embroidered in gold and white and being carried into the Ducal Hall by some big gaudily uniformed fellows in a throne held at shoulder level on a tall man, with horn music and the singing of choirs, having been preceded by a slow parade of cardinals, bishops, and the like, all of them dressed to a fare-thee-well in satins and silks—well, the Indians was more impressed than I had ever seen them be by any sight we had yet encountered in Europe, for a spectacle of this sort, with sound, color, and movement, meant more to them than any building or machine could ever do.
In translating what Burke had told them about the Pope, I had gotten them to take it as solemn, though the exact concepts of white religion—which I can’t say I understood that well myself though having both a father and stepfather so to speak in the trade—wasn’t easy to explain in Lakota.
It turned out that unbeknownst to me, some of them had been baptized by Catholic missionaries at the Pine Ridge reservation, and Burke hadn’t been altogether off when he called them Christians at the Eiffel Tower, but if so they was of their own sort, for getting back to the encampment after the Vatican visit they found that the only one of their troupe not to go to meet the Pope, Little Ring, who had not gotten up in time, had stayed in bed because he had died of what the Italian doctors said was a heart attack.
Now these Sioux thereupon changed their hitherto mostly favorable opinion of the Pope, for if he was God’s spokesman, why hadn’t he spoke up and asked God not to kill Little Ring just when the rest of them was about to make their visit in their best clothes? The doctors determined the time of death as occurring during the night, so Arizona John couldn’t blame it on Little Ring having decided to stay in bed, thereby incurring the wrath of the Almighty—as I assure you Burke would of, had I not myself made this point.
And having been disappointed by the Pope on that score, the Indians also was emboldened to criticize him further: though he was very rich and lived in the grandest house they had ever seen used as a personal dwelling place, he failed to offer them food at any time during their visit, which meant either he was too stingy to speak for God or that he was ignorant of how to treat his guests, in which case his connections with the Almighty must not be too close.
But in interpreting I didn’t pass along all this negative commentary to Burke, who had been thrilled to meet the most important person in the world if you was a Catholic, for I didn’t see it would do either him or the Indians any good. The Pope had his own ways, and the Sioux had theirs, and to show you how wide they was apart, when instead of putting the question to Burke I took it upon myself to give an answer and said the Pope couldn’t feed nobody, but had to get fed himself, for he didn’t have no wife to do the cooking, they thought he should get married as soon as possible.
Maybe it was this experience that turned the Sioux against Rome, but they didn’t care for the place, believing the people on the street laughed at them, which I didn’t know was true or not, for Italians seemed naturally a lively, noisy bunch and maybe they was just trying to be pleasant: I never spoke a word of that language.
Also the Indians didn’t like to be asked to buy things all the time, and in Rome this happened everywhere you went, people sticking out hands they wanted filled, not shaken, so we wasn’t sorry to move on to the other towns in the country, most of them, after all these years, blending into one in my memory, for they was all filled with real old stone buildings, about half of which was churches, on real narrow stone-paved streets. The big exception was Venice, which had as many churches as anywhere else but the main roads was paved with water.
No sooner did we get to that town than Burke in his eternal quest for publicity loaded too many Indians, Buffalo Bill, and me into a gondola, which had sunk to the gunwales before anybody paid attention to the fact except the front and back gondola drivers, screaming in Italian which nobody understood, not to mention that normal conversation in Italy was mostly yelling.
The Sioux though in unfamiliar conditions saw what was happening but out of pride wouldn’t show their concern, but finally we unloaded a few passengers and floated out on the Grand Canal to have some photographs took, with that fancy building in the background that our cowboys, and me as well, called the Dogie’s Palace until straightened out.
Later more pictures in front of St. Mark’s cathedral at the end of the big square in Venice full of pigeons where crowds of people come, I think to get away from the water for a change, for it’s at your doorstep everywhere else in town and sometimes, with a real high tide, so I heard, in your parlor as well, and a lot of us, red and white, begun to miss home and the eternal dust-dry wind of the Plains, after a whiff of canal air on days when it was real thick, most of them.
Germany was the next country we went to, that spring of ’90, so still another language was spoke by the locals which none of us understood, and there was more old buildings to see, castles as well as villages full of what looked like big dollhouses, but I don’t think there was anybody in all the world so interested in anything pertaining to the American West as Germans, where a fellow name of Karl May, who had never set foot in the U.S.A., had already begun to write fictional stories about the frontier, which I heard later on wouldn’t of been recognizable to anybody who had experienced the real thing, but then the same could be said of most movies on the subject made in California and not Dutchland, which was the Germans’ name for their own country.
Anyway, of all the places we had went to, Germany no matter the town give us the heartiest reception of all, for they tend to be real thorough about everything, good or bad, depending on when, and I heard in later years that man Hitler’s favorite writer was Karl May, and Adolf, like Winston Churchill before him, would likely have enjoyed the Wild West if he ever got the chance to see it as a lad.
But by the time we reached Germany, being admired by white people of whichever country had lost its novelty for the Indians, and they had gotten tired of looking at the wonders of civilization that the whites had come up with before they went across the ocean to a land that didn’t have none of them and started from scratch, which didn’t make sense.
“Why,” Two Tails asked me once, “do it all over again when all these things existed here?”
I told him honestly, “I think that the ones who came over the ocean did not live in these big fancy lodges and have a lot of power, so they went to a new place where they would have a better chance to get these things than if they stayed here. America seemed an empty land to them, not being used by anybody but a few Indians who didn’t need all that space.”
“I think,” says he, “that it might have been all right if there had not been so many whites. I was surprised when I first saw the big towns in America. Within the range of an arrow shot, there are more people in New York than there were Lakota and our friends at the Greasy Grass, the largest gathering of normal people ever. Within the range of a rifle shot, there are more New York wasichu than all Lakota, Shyela, and Arapaho in the world, and even including the Crow, Pawnee, and all our other enemies. But the towns on this side of the water look more crowded yet.”
“A lot of them are full of poor people,” I said, “who don’t see much future here. So we can expect more to come to America in search of a better life.”
He said he was real sorry to hear that. Like most people I’ve knowed regardless of color, he was not given to looking from any other point of view than his own. The Plains Indians thought the right way for people to live was in little bands which was freely associated with tribes that in themselves wasn’t too numerous, everybody wandering around more or less at will, looking for buffalo. This wasn’t how you could build a cathedral, or palace, or a factory or foundry, but of course you wouldn’t need any of those.
Anyway, by now we had been on this tour for more than a year, and our Indians was not only homesick, but some was physically ailing as well, and in fact a few, like Little Ring, had died from smallpox, consumption, and the like, not bad treatment or starvation or anything Cody done or failed to do, but it was in Germany he learned he was being so blamed back home by certain Government officials, Congressmen, newspaper writers, and others of who I bet I could name one, and no doubt I would myself of been of that company had I been able to join up with Amanda. The accusations was wrongheaded with respect to B.B.W.W., but ours was not the only show that included Indians. Doc Carver, Buffalo Bill’s old partner, had an outfit of his own that went as far as Moscow, in Russia, and there was Mexican Joe’s and others, and I don’t know about any of them, but I swear Indians could have no serious complaint against William F. Cody.
Yet when he sent five ailing Sioux back to the U.S.A. from Germany that summer, his political enemies got one of them, White Horse, to tell the papers that Buffalo Bill didn’t feed them enough food and made them sick and when they was too weak to perform sent them back home as being useless. Now, I knowed White Horse, and I’m not calling him a liar, but none of this was true, so what I figured is somebody got him drunk and told him what to say or, more likely, what he said in Lakota was mistranslated by an immigration official named O’Beirne who claimed to be fluent in the language but I suspect was one of them whose interpretations of others invariably agree exactly with their own prejudices.
We was in the city of Berlin, where if you dig into the ground you will find not earth but sand, which interested the Indians more than additional architecture, and by now they had also seen too many soldiers, anyway in Berlin the U.S. Consul General passed on to Cody a letter from the Indian Commissioner containing a list of the complaints against him for mistreating the red men in his employ.
Buffalo Bill was real annoyed by these accusations, but the kind of fellow he was, he never wasted time on either being mad or getting even, but kept his eye on the possible practical effects. If the Commissioner decided he couldn’t have Indians any more in B.B.W.W., that would be the end of the whole shebang, for nobody anywhere in the world would pay just to see cowboys without Indians. If you think of it, anyone could learn to wear a wide-brimmed hat and spurs and ride a horse and rope cattle and shoot firearms though not maybe as good as Annie, but a headful of feathers and painting your face couldn’t change you into a real Indian: you had to be born one. And though white people had killed as many as they could and taken away their land, whites seemed universally fascinated with red people, not as performers—for such performing as was done with Cody, in the daily sham battle of the Little Bighorn, could of been managed by white actors in costumes—but as a matter of existence: this unusual folk, someplace between human and animal, they was what made the American West one of a kind.
There was horses and buffalo or the equivalent elsewhere, and mountains and deserts and wide-open spaces all over the world, and other races of various colors and plenty of violence and cruelty on every side, both the stronger and the weaker, but an Indian of the warrior tribes, so long as he wasn’t trying to kill you at that moment, was the perfect combination of every quality that civilized people enjoy seeing in savages on exhibition. It was all make-believe in the show, but some of these might of been the same Sioux that slaughtered Custer’s command and mutilated the bodies, and yet they had wives and babies and sometimes smiled when selling photos of themselves and always was as polite as Europeans and a lot more so than Americans.
Cody now decided on a typical bold stroke. He moved the white part of the Wild West to Alsace-Lorraine, which was either depending on your sympathies the German part of France or the French part of Germany, and set up winter quarters to await his return in the spring, and then with me, Nate Salsbury, “Major” Burke, and a few others, took all the Indians back to the U.S.A. to answer the phony charges against him on their supposed behalf.
And let me say them Sioux went on to Washington, D.C., when we landed, accompanied by Salsbury and Burke, and while Arizona John conducted one of his publicity campaigns to discredit the critics as effectively as he had promoted the Wild West, the Indians went to the Commissioner’s office and said Cody fed them so much they got fat and paid them so well they had a lot of money to send home to their families. If the Government made them stop, them and their families would be poor again. Then President Ben Harrison invited them to the White House.
Whether any of this would of been enough to shut up them who, like so many reformers, missionaries, and politicians in general, know what’s better for others even when the others don’t agree, the controversy was put aside at that time on account of a much bigger Indian problem had started up out West and, for the first time, involving more than just one tribe and its allies. This one in fact united a lot of former enemies.
It was a religious movement based on the visions of a Paiute out in Nevada Territory called Wovoka, who believed the time would soon come, if enough Indians of all tribes would perform the Ghost Dance, when a great flow of earth would cover all the whites and everything they had brung, square houses, iron road, singing wires, the whole kit and caboodle, and the red men would be raised above it and the buffalo and everything else that was good from the old days would come back.
You might ask, why not let the poor devils enjoy their delusions? Way back when I was a young fellow with the Cheyenne, we was going into a battle with the U.S. Cavalry and it was a theory of a medicine man named Ice that if we dipped our hands in the water of a certain lake, we could hold them up when the soldiers shot at us, in which case the bullets would just trickle down the gun barrels and drop harmlessly on the ground, so we did and they didn’t, I mean the slugs, which didn’t seem to know about the spell, on account of Ice wasn’t fluent in the language of lead, or so I heard was his explanation to them that survived. Being white myself, I quick as I could surrendered to the Army.
My point here is that Indians was coming up with ideas of this sort all the time, and now and again they might even work. But when they worked it was in a particular way, not for a whole bunch all at once, and there sure wasn’t nothing dreamed up by a red Messiah that was going to get rid of white people by dancing. What the Army was concerned about was that the Indians would figure that out for themselves and give the Everywhere Spirit a hand by going to war again.
General Nelson Miles was in charge of the Army for the part of the country involved, and he sent a telegram that was waiting for Buffalo Bill at the hotel when we got off the ship in New York. Which proved to be why neither Cody nor me went to Washington with Salsbury, Burke, and the Indians.
“Miles wants me to come to Chicago, Jack,” Cody said, on reading the wire. “He’s worried about old Sitting Bull.”
“What’s that got to do with Chicago?”
“That’s where the General is headquartered now. He’s commander of the whole Department of the Missouri.”
“What’s the trouble with Sitting Bull?”
“We’re both going to find out. I want you to come along with me. You are a friend of his and speak the lingo.” He smiled and hoisted one of the glasses a bellhop had delivered, along with several bottles, soon as we had got to his rooms. “Besides, you’re a fine fellow to travel with. Have another.”
So me and him went to Chicago and saw Bear Coat, which is what the Sioux and Cheyenne called General Miles, who told us all he knowed about the Ghost Dance and this Paiute who called himself Wovoka but was known to the Army as Jack Wilson, and Miles said it was too bad Sitting Bull, who ought to know better, had fell for this nonsense or was just making cynical use of it, but anyhow was preaching it to all the Sioux at the Standing Rock reservation and trying to start an uprising.
Now I never believed this for a minute, for the Bull I had gotten to know during the time he was with the Wild West wasn’t the type of person to preach anyone else’s cause, having a high opinion of his own self as a spiritual leader who had foreseen the great victory at the Greasy Grass in a vision. But I was never the type of individual to get much respect from a general, even a previously reasonable one like Bear Coat. I would leave it to Cody to make the truth known once we got out to the Standing Rock agency, in Dakota Territory, and talked with Sitting Bull himself, for that’s what General Miles wanted Cody to do.
Actually, he wanted him to do something much worse. I couldn’t believe it when on the train West, Cody showed me the written order, in which Miles said Colonel Cody was “authorized to secure the person of Sitting Bull and deliver him to the nearest commanding officer of U.S. Troops.”
“He wants you to arrest him, for God’s sake?”
“Simmer down, Jack,” Cody says. “No need to take the Lord’s name in vain. We’ll parley a little with Sitting Bull, wet our whistles some, and soon straighten out the whole thing. I’m betting it’s some kind of misunderstanding. Sitting Bull’s too good a businessman to involve himself in what sounds like a very shaky enterprise. Miles can think it’s an arrest, but I’m going to bring old Bull out for another tour with us.”
Which went to demonstrate how far gone Buffalo Bill was in his own sort of showman’s life by now and why some people thought he had never actually been west of Chicago but was altogether an invention of dime-novel writers like Colonel Ingraham and Ned Buntline.
Well, we finally reached Dakota Territory, at the Sioux reservation called Standing Rock, where the agency was under the direction of a man named McLaughlin, who considered himself a great friend to the Indians, to the degree that he had a Lakota wife, but like many such, his liking for them was based pretty close on whether they did what he wanted them to, which put him and Sitting Bull at odds from the first.
So when me and Cody showed up at Fort Yates, the nearby post maintained by the U.S. Army in case the Sioux disagreed too much with McLaughlin’s ideas, the commanding officer got hold of the agent and showed him General Miles’s order.
McLaughlin was not much taller than me, and had a big black drooping mustache over a mouth that was likewise turned down. He looked even unhappier after reading the order.
Cody of course was his usual positive self. “As you gentlemen may or may not be aware, Sitting Bull and I have not only enjoyed a close professional association, but I think I am safe in saying we are warm personal friends. I’m certain the fine old fellow and I can settle this little matter in no time.”
The commander there was a real colonel named Drum, and being a soldier knew better than to give any hint of disagreement with his superior back in Chicago. “Colonel Cody,” he says, “first let me welcome you to our post here at Yates. Your reputation precedes you, and I don’t mean just your distinguished career with the, Wild West, but also your prior exploits as a scout.”
“Why, thank you, sir, and may I present my associate, Captain Jack Crabb.”
I shook hands with Drum and then McLaughlin, who I hadn’t thought could get any gloomier-looking but in fact had done so.
Having give me a look of the kind a real Army officer will show to an honorary one without Cody’s celebrity and shook my hand in the same fashion. Drum says, “Colonel, your wish is my command. But before we get started on the trip to Sitting Bull’s farm, which is a few hours from here, down on the Grand, may I suggest you and your aide accept some refreshment at our officers’ club? It won’t be as luxurious as some you’ve no doubt known, but I think you’ll find the whiskey drinkable.”
Cody’s reputation had preceded him, to be sure. We adjourned to the club referred to, which might not of compared to them that the New York swells had entertained Buffalo Bill in, but was comfortable enough, for there wasn’t much else for the Army to do stationed at a place like this, and anyway Cody wasn’t a snob about drinking, needing only a bottle and a tent, and not even the latter if the weather was clear, so he settled there for what I could see right away would be quite a spell, for a sizable audience of young officers soon collected around him, which meant he would stay until either the liquor was exhausted or the rest of them collapsed, there being nobody in America, England, or the whole continent of Europe with as great a capacity, which he had proved across the world.
I stayed for only a while, for I noticed that soon as the fact was established that Cody was fixed in place for the foreseeable future, both Agent McLaughlin and Colonel Drum slipped out the door. I wasn’t in no doubt that they disapproved of his mission and though in no position to oppose it openly, would obstruct it sneakily as long as possible, beginning with this idea of getting him drunk.
I myself didn’t share Cody’s optimistical idea he could get the Bull to return to the Wild West, to sit in a headdress and sell autographed photos again, for I had heard from the Lakotas who newly joined our troupe from time to time that the old chief was doing right well as a farmer, with quite a few head of livestock and fields of corn, there in the bottomland along the Grand River, which furthermore was home ground to him, having been born nearby, something always important to an Indian though he might of wandered afield.
But neither did I trust McLaughlin and Drum. Having a natural suspicion of them in authority, which you might see as typical of someone who was never in that situation himself, it seemed to me to go without saying that neither an Indian agent nor an Army officer would at all times be acting only for the good of those under them. And if you say, Well, ain’t it too bad old Jack had that view of human nature? I’d point out how I experienced many a dangerous episode yet am still breathing at my present age.
What I wanted to do now was find out what them two was up to once out of Cody’s presence, and since they was unlikely to reveal it to me personally, I consulted the same kind of source from which I learned a lot about the Seventh Cavalry while en route to the Little Bighorn, namely, an enlisted man. There ain’t one ever served who didn’t welcome a chance to vent his bitterness against his superiors, which come to think about it ain’t only a characteristic of soldiers.
So what I done in this present case was outfit myself with one of the bottles of whiskey Cody brung along in the great amount of baggage he commonly traveled with, which otherwise was filled with changes of attire, for he was never less than Buffalo Bill wherever he went, which is to say on performance, and I loitered around outside Colonel Drum’s HQ until some soldier emerged wearing yellow corporal’s stripes on his blue jacket and started across the “area,” which was the Army term for any space whatever inside a fort—and by the way most of the Western forts wasn’t the walled and gated affairs shown in the movies, but just a collection of buildings in the open—and much of what soldiers were put to doing when stationed at any fort or camp was just cleaning up the “area.”
As it turned out, I struck gold right away. “Say, Corp,” I says to this fellow, “will you tell me where the officers’ club is? I got me a wagonload of fine whiskey over yonder I got to deliver.”
He points with a stubby finger that had a clean nail, not a common sight then. “Across the area.” He gives me a disgruntled stare. “I guess you ain’t got none for the noncoms’ club?”
From his squared-away forage cap and shined boots, I had took him for having a job at HQ and not merely visiting it to be chewed out by the commanding officer. “No, I have not,” I told him. “You know how that goes. I’m an old Army man myself.”
“Well, it ain’t changed,” says he.
“Say,” says I, “I got me an extra bottle, and you’re welcome to take a taste from it unless you’re on duty and can’t.”
He grins with his broad freckled face, showing one tooth broke off clean at just the halfway mark. “I’m supposed to pick up the Colonel’s shirt at the laundry and wait for it if it ain’t ironed yet. I got the time. But let’s get out of the area.”
So we went back to the stables, always a good place to find a quiet corner, and I fetched the bottle out of the coat pocket it had been weighting down, and me and Corporal Gruber had a few sips from it, though actually the sipping was mine, whereas he did the gulping. Anyhow, as Colonel Drum’s orderly he was able to furnish me with the information I needed.
Drum and McLaughlin wanted to delay Cody from going after Sitting Bull till they could get orders calling him off, and this would take a while, for they had to take the matter to somebody higher than General Miles, whose idea it was for Cody to come in the first place, and all this had to be done on the telegraph, if it was working and not disconnected somewhere along the thousands of miles of wire.
“I don’t know, though,” says Gruber, “I think if Buffalo Bill can’t do something about Sitting Bull, who could? He’s got that show of his, which all my family back East see every time he comes to town, and he’s real rich and he’s got all the women he wants, like that Annie Oakley I seen pitchers of, she’s a pretty little piece, and I’d like—”
“Here,” I says, “you have another.” For which he didn’t need no urging, and while he was a-gurgling, I asked, “Why are they so set on stopping him from seeing the Bull?”
“’Cause they’re feared it might start a war,” says Gruber. “Say one of them hotheaded young bucks whipped up by that old bastard would kill Buffalo Bill, then we’d have to go down there with troops and make ’em all good Indians, which if you ask me wouldn’t be a bad idea. It really burns me up they’re still making trouble after all the times we whipped them.”
General Sheridan’s saying about the only good redskins being dead ones was a familiar sentiment with soldiers on Western duty, but I hadn’t heard it said for a while, for in the East and especially in Europe most whites appeared sympathetic to the Indians and often even friendly in their own fashion, so I was took by surprise, but to argue with Gruber at this point would of defeated my purpose. Of course you did well with Indians in a state of excitement not to put yourself in a defenseless situation. But Sitting Bull had a high regard for Cody and I was sure wouldn’t let him be harmed, and as for Buffalo Bill himself, he was a lively fellow but never really reckless.
I urged Gruber to make free with the bottle we was sharing. It was his own affair if he reported back to Colonel Drum stinking drunk and without that fresh-laundered shirt. “I don’t know,” I says, “I thought Sitting Bull become a farmer. Would he want to start a war?”
The corporal took a long pull at the bottle, then worked his prominent adam’s apple. “That smelly old sonbitch does whatever he feels like. Did you hear? He’s keeping a white whore down there in his cabin. I mean, she ain’t a captive, else we’d ride down and pull her out pronto. Imagine a white woman doing a filthy thing like that, even if she is trash.”
It was true enough that the houses of ill fame with which I was acquainted would not accept a customer of another race than white, even them with black girls amongst their offerings, like there was colored barbers who would cut only white men’s hair and not that of their own kind. With a Mexican it depended on how Mexican he looked. This seemed altogether normal at that time, so much so it wouldn’t ordinarily be questioned. But like everything else I had heard about Sitting Bull beginning with Bear Coat’s reasons for ordering his arrest, I found this hard to believe. White people in general seldom really knowed what was going on with Indians, and with the Army that confusion was multiplied tenfold: for example Custer, and he had been a veteran of fighting the red man. The mistake was in looking for white reasons in Indian actions, going from point to point in straight lines. No doubt this was the effective way to work with electricity when inventing the light bulb or telephone, but not when making the old Bull into a warrior whoremonger, despite appearances.
I was fixing to ask then what was McLaughlin’s and Drum’s plans for Sitting Bull, if they didn’t want Cody’s help nor to send the Army after him, short of war?
Gruber beat me to it, though taking another big swallow of whiskey first, for I now was letting him keep hold of the bottle. “See,” he says, “McLaughlin’s a pretty smart monkey. He’s been training a troop of Sioux police to handle the problems that come up around here. Indins like that: give ’em uniforms and some authority over their own, and they’ll strut around thinking they’re big men. Of course, they better not get the idea they are real cops when it comes to dealing with the Army, or they’ll next be strutting in the Happy Hunting Ground. But they can free us from the dirty work.”
“So he don’t want Cody to arrest Sitting Bull, but he’s going to send the Indian police to do it?”
Gruber winked a now reddening eye, and he says, “I’ll say this for McLaughlin: he knows how to deal with Indins. He’s married to a squaw! If you ask me, that’s a mighty high price to pay, though.” He squints and says, “You going to need the rest of this?” Meaning the bottle. “You got a whole wagonful.”
“Consider it yours,” says I, and leaves him there.
Then I went around the fort until I found an Indian who was wearing a blue tunic with a yellow scarf that turned out to be the police uniform and not clothes pulled off a dead trooper at the Greasy Grass, which I had wondered about before noticing the badge pinned on him.
Now you put a Sioux of that day into such an outfit, you had a person who was uncertain of himself when talking to a white man, even in his own language. He never wanted to be an arse-kisser of the people who if they hadn’t been there he wouldn’t of needed to become a cop over his own kind, so he didn’t really like or trust the whites he worked for, but on the other hand Indians was as human as anybody else, which meant they did not find it without pleasure to lord it over their fellowman, which in their case could happen only if he was red.
Believe me, I appreciated his position, being so often myself between two standards of judgment, so I spoke in a flattering way about his uniform, which included a black hat with the smooth-dome crown Indians always favored without a crease, worn on a head with as short a haircut as our boys at the Major’s school was obliged to have. This was a remarkable style for an adult, Indians putting the high store on their hair as they did. Just think, these fellows was of a people who used to take the scalps of their dead enemies: now they was trimming their own in the service of the same folks.
“My wife,” said High Dog, for that was his name, “wanted to make this coat prettier with some beads and trimming, but that is not permitted. She can’t understand why we are supposed to all look alike. Women find it hard to think in the new way.”
“I see you are still wearing moccasins.”
“That is permitted,” High Dog said in his stilted fashion. “It is too uncomfortable to wear boots. The hat and coat and especially the pants were hard to get used to, and I take them off as soon as I get off duty and go home, but how white men can wear boots I have never been able to understand. You can’t feel the ground through them, you walk on boards. Yet Bull Head is able to do so. I think that’s why they made him lieutenant.”
“I’m sure that’s why,” says I, and changed the subject. “What I wanted to speak to you about is Sitting Bull. Long Hair Cody and I are friends of his, since a few summers ago when he was with Cody’s show. We have heard he is in some trouble now, and want to help him if we can.”
A change come over High Dog’s dusky countenance. Where he had been slightly sanctimonious, talking to a white man who presumably approved of him being a policeman, he was now guarded. I sensed he believed me a spy of the ruling power, but I didn’t know how else to approach him given the shortness of time available. If I had had a week, I would of tried to slowly gain his confidence, and smoked and ate some meals with him, but if I knowed Cody I had only until the next morning, after he had drunk all them officers under the table.
“Sitting Bull,” High Dog said, “lives on the Grand River with his wives and children and horses.”
“So I have heard.” I waited awhile for him to go on, but he never. “What I wonder,” says I, “is what he thinks of this Ghost Dance that seems to interest a lot of tribes and not only the Lakota.”
“I have heard of that,” High Dog informed me. “But I don’t know enough about the subject to say anything worthwhile, and my father told me when I was a child not to open my mouth unless I had something of value to talk about.”
So though I had succeeded in getting information out of Corporal Gruber, I failed to get any out of High Dog. From the Sioux with B.B.W.W. I already knowed that Indian politics had gotten complicated due to white policies. A law called the Dawes Act, a couple years back, had offered a hundred sixty acres of land to every Indian who wanted it, and after them parcels had been distributed, all of the rest of that big hunk of land embracing what today would be most of eastern South Dakota, originally belonging to the Sioux by treaty, was to be made available to white ranchers and farmers at a dollar and a quarter an acre. Most of the chiefs at first opposed this offer, which to go into effect had to be accepted by three-quarters of all the adult males in the Sioux nation, but somehow in the end the Government claimed they had collected sufficient signatures (though how that could be told from what must of been a collections of X’s was uncertain at least to me) including those of some of the very chiefs who had originally been against it, but one of them was not Sitting Bull. He was too smart to fall for a deal like that, and too stubborn to pretend to do so. He had compromised all he was ever going to do by becoming a farmer, because there wasn’t an alternative left, but he wouldn’t ever give whites the okay they wanted to destroy the way of life into which he had been born.
And now this Ghost Dance movement come along, it seemed likely he would support it if only out of cussedness, so the authorities decided to arrest him before he could do any harm.
To my knowledge, the last time a prominent Lakota leader had been taken into custody, he had got stabbed to death in a scuffle that nobody could ever rightly explain. I refer to Crazy Horse. If that fact immediately occurred to me, it would certainly be remembered by Sitting Bull. I figured he ought to be warned soon as possible rather than wait for Cody to empty every bottle at Yates, so I left a note in the room assigned to Buffalo Bill in the officers’ quarters and started off for the Grand River, of which I knowed the direction, having if you recall been there in ’85 with Arizona John Burke when we signed the Bull up for the Wild West.
Having no mount, and I couldn’t borrow one without letting Colonel Drum know where I was going to ride it, I was on foot. It was a thirty-mile walk. I wasn’t as young as I once had been, and before long it was nighttime, but the terrain was mainly flat, and I hit my stride after a while under the helpful light of the moon in the clear cold air of late fall.
By first light I had reached the Grand and headed west along the river and inside another hour I looked down from the bluffs and seen a little settlement of cabins and corrals and cultivated fields below.
So I went on down there, not seeing anyone at all or even hearing the barking of dogs, until I come around the corner of the biggest of the log cabins, and there, standing in the open doorway, wrapped in a red blanket, was Sitting Bull.
“Do you want to eat?” says he. And then, “How far behind you is Long Hair?”
“He’s still back at Yates,” I says. “You dreamed that we were coming?”
“No,” says he. “I saw someone’s breath on the bluff a while ago. I recognized you only when you reached the cornfield.” The high ground was almost a mile away, and the cornfield a good two hundred yards, and he hadn’t seen me in five years!
“Yes,” I said. “I would like to eat. I’ve been walking all night.”
That weathered face of his, so fierce even in repose, crinkled up further in amusement. “And you’re not as young as you once were.”
“None of us is.” I give it right back to him, and his smile broadened. I mention this because of the idea that Indians, and especially the likes of Sitting Bull, was without humor. “But how did you know Long Hair was coming unless you dreamed it? Can you see all the way to Fort Yates?”
“I have friends,” said he, and he did not go further.
“I think you know,” I says, “that Long Hair means no harm to you. Bear Coat asked him to come because he likes you.” I wasn’t going to mention the detail about arresting him. “Pahaska wants you to come back to the Wild West.” Taking some liberties in what I said, I told him he was the biggest attraction the show ever had; that when I told the Grandmother, the Queen of England, he had worn a medal with her likeness on it, she said it was her great honor and wanted to tell him so to his face; that Little Sure Shot missed him badly; and that Cody would double his wages from five years ago. As to the last-named, if that wasn’t possible, I’d kick in my own salary.
“Long Hair has a good heart,” Sitting Bull said. “When we go inside my house I will show you the white hat he told me to take along when I left, and back there in the corral is that fine gray horse that was also a parting gift from him. But I’m an old man, too old to travel to all those towns, to be amidst white people all the time, looking at them and what they have built and what they own.” He winced. “My head begins to hurt when I even think about it. This is my home.” His brown arm, still looking strong, come out from beneath the red blanket, and he pointed in the direction of the Grand. “Right there is where I was born. I would have put my lodge across the river, but the white man from the agency told me the land on this side looked better for raising crops, and I listened to him, as I always listen to people when they speak about something they know and I do not.”
“You have a nice-looking farm,” I says, looking around. “I’m sure you’re a good farmer.” I hoped the amenities wouldn’t take too long, for though we still had some time, given that Cody would be sleeping late once he finally got to bed and then would have to make the ride down here, I really didn’t know what he would do when Sitting Bull turned him down, for Buffalo Bill had a great respect for the Army and was flattered to be given the mission by General Miles. So I wanted to get to the heart of the problem at hand, but with an Indian that’s never the matter of a moment, unless of course you are attacked by force and without warning, when talk would be beside the point.
In all other situations you had to eat and smoke and palaver for a long time, starting out as far as possible from the subject and only gradually closing in on it, for the arriving at a decision was as important as the decision itself. I told this to some bearded fellow in France at one of the parties they give for B.B.W.W. and he says it had an amazing similarity to a theory he was developing about poetry and philosophy, et cetera, there being Frenchmen who spent their lives fiddling with such concerns, for it takes all kinds.
I could see, however, with a falling heart that the Bull was not going to be hurried. He pulls his arms back inside the red blanket and says, “Come in and eat.”
So we enter his cabin, which looked pretty much as it had in ’85, consisting of one room with log walls on which hung various items on nails, feathered headdresses, weapons of various sorts, leather or cloth garments, medals presented at the signing of treaties, and in a real prominent place so it could be seen as soon as you entered, that big white sombrero Buffalo Bill had give him. Aside from having square corners, the place was pretty much like a tepee inside, for there wasn’t no furniture to speak of, unless a number of separate beds made of buffalo robes and blankets, on the floor, qualified.
He invited me to take a seat on a folded hide, and he said, “The woman will bring the food soon. She had to collect the eggs.” He sat down himself, across from me. “I own eighty chickens,” he said. “The woman would have prepared the meal more quickly, but by the time I recognized you, she was in the midst of the other work.”
I reckon he meant feeding the livestock, milking cows, fetching buckets of water from the river, and suchlike, the normal chores for which even white farmwomen would pitch in, but with the Indians of them days would be done entirely by the females of the house.
Which reminded me of what I had heard at the fort about some white woman living with him, but there wouldn’t be any polite way to look directly into such a matter, so I didn’t try.
And in fact didn’t need to, for she herself now come in the door, carrying a tin platter of food. She was dressed in long, real modest garments of the type worn by Lakota women, though hers was entirely of dark cloth, unadorned with ornamentation, nor did she wear any on herself, no necklace, earrings, or bracelet. But the most noticeable of her differences from an Indian female was her pale face, framed in lank hair that, though it could of used a wash, was still blond. Last time I seen it it had been piled fashionably high.
In fact she was Amanda Teasdale.