Return of Little Big Man (43 page)

Now I swear I had hardly ever mentioned Pard to her since telling her he died, a year earlier. So whether this was her womanly intuition or she was just reminded of the subject by her own purpose to replace little George with another pooch, I couldn’t say.

“Well, if I do I reckon it will have to wait till we get back from over the water,” I says, knowing Cody had told her as well as me of his latest bright idea, which for my money topped them all to this point. He was going to take the whole company across the Atlantic Ocean to perform for the Queen of England, the same that when I was a Cheyenne we called the Grandmother, who owned Canada.

Finally, in case you are wondering if Mrs. Custer gave us any tea, all I can say is I think she did, but I didn’t pay enough attention to it to remember.

N
OW AS WE ARE
ready to leave it for a while I realize I ain’t said much about New York, the biggest city I ever seen up to that point, and the reason I didn’t is it wasn’t the type of place where such talents as I had, enabling me to survive out west of the Mississippi, was very useful. I wasn’t so green (which by the way Libbie Custer called “verdant” when speaking of herself as a young bride fresh out of Monroe, Michigan) as to buy the Brooklyn Bridge, like the stories told about, for I knowed it was just newly built and unlikely to be for sale so soon, and likewise as to the Statue of Liberty, and I was aware that in a fine eating place like Delmonico’s it wouldn’t be right to chew hunks of meat off the end of your knife or pick your teeth when ladies was present or of course belch, for all them niceties was observed in the better eateries of Tombstone. But I didn’t know much else.

Cody however was as if in his natural element though his origins was in the same part of the world as mine and he really had guided for the Army, fought Indians, and shot buffalo. The difference was he had figured out how to get the upper hand over people who was socially superior to himself by being a romantic figure from the frontier, the most unique American you could find, whereas every country had financiers and politicians. So he had a high old time, dressed in his fringed buckskins and a hat with a brim so wide it wouldn’t of stayed on for a second in the wind of the Plains, entertained by the grandest people of the day and their ladies, in what they called salons, which for a time I just thought was fancier versions than where I spent so much of my life, namely saloons.

Annie and Frank was popular around New York too, but they went across the river to New Jersey a lot, her being a small-town girl, and was even thinking of buying a house over there.

Fact is, when in the capital of American civilization I tended to revert in my soul to my primitive past, and felt more Indian than I had in years. All them people on the sidewalks and vehicles in the streets, with the elevated railroad roaring overhead, the engines spouting black smoke and hot sparks, and the noise! I could speak a couple Indian languages and what I hope I will be pardoned for calling English, also more than a bit of Spanish, but none of these was much help when trying to make myself understood on the streets of New York, and for my part I comprehended even less of what anyone tried to say to me. It seemed a place where everybody was a stranger to everybody else.

So I don’t have much to report on outside the show except what had been true since about the day the Dutch bought the place for a handful of trinkets, namely people so rich their houses seemed like private little countries, with their own armies, and you never saw the occupants except briefly getting in or out of carriages (unless like Cody you was invited to their blowouts), and the roads where they lived was broad and kept amazingly clean of dung given all the horses what went through them, and then there was the other streets, the dirty, crowded ones, sometimes right around the corner from the nice ones, where at all times day or night you saw everybody who lived there, for they was all outside, jabbering in tongues I couldn’t make head nor tail of, and the kids was the freshest I ever seen, cursing, spitting, swiping stuff from pushcarts, even relieving themselves in public.

Also there was a lot of politics in New York, or so I heard, for that’s what you get soon as a lot of people gather together, and if it was bad enough in Dodge and Tombstone, think what it would be here.

But you can see me and New York having little in common as only to be expected in an ignorant hick like myself, and I won’t disagree. After all, Mrs. Libbie Custer found it the place where she could live the rest of her life, which ought to be recommendation enough. I reckon my own position on the matter was put by our leading Sioux, American Horse, when he was interviewed by some New York newspaper reporter, me translating.

When asked what he thought of the place, that Ogallala said, “It is wonderful and strange, so much so that it often makes my head spin, and I wish I could go out in the woods and cover myself with a blanket and try to make sense of what I have seen.”

Every once in a while somebody would get the bright idea to expose our Indians to the higher-minded areas of the local culture, and vice versa, and a delegation of them would be hauled around to places like churches, for example that one across the East River in Brooklyn where the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher sermonized at length on Sundays. Now you might think this was cruel and unusual punishment for them, but it was not. As I’ve said more than once, redskins had their own tradition for longwinded oratory, so they tended to respect others with enough energy to keep a monologue going, irrespective of what was being said, which in Beecher’s case they couldn’t understand a word of, and I couldn’t translate while he was talking and in fact didn’t see no purpose in even summing up when he was finally done, but they enjoyed it though being uncomfortable on them pews of hard wood, till I told them it was okay to take their blankets off and sit on them. But when they did so, they was naked to the waist and shocked some of the old biddies in the congregation, who complained to me.

Another time we visited a school for children, and the Sioux sang their songs for the pupils, but when the principal wanted them to do a war dance, I turned him down after only pretending to ask them, for though they would of done it to be polite, I didn’t like them to be thought of as entertainers aside from their professional work with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. I mean, when Indians danced to work themselves up for war, it was serious: afterwards they went out and killed enemies and scalped them, which ain’t something that should be suggested to entertain American school kids, even though the children would of liked it.

The Indians enjoyed such excursions, which included visits to the notable sights around the city like the Statue of Liberty, which took a bit of explaining on my part: no, there was never a real white woman nowhere near that big and it wasn’t a representation of George Washington’s wife or Ma or Grandmother England who ruled Canada, though some who had seen the picture on the Canadian medals give to them what went north with Sitting Bull swore she looked like the same person, who if she was so powerful a woman must be of a giant size (what a surprise they got when they met the real little Queen Victoria a few months later!). And while they was naturally homesick when in such foreign territory, they liked all the beef they got to eat and the money they made just for being Indians. Unlike the whites with the show, they wasn’t acting, except insofar as shooting blanks in the stage battles went. When the performances was over, Annie put away her guns and was Frank’s wife, and Cody went out to dinner with his swells, but the Indians stayed Ogallala and Pawnee. This might be why when they started making movies in Hollywood about the West, the leading redskins was seldom played by the real McCoy but rather by white actors who was gangsters in other pictures, because Indians playing Indians wasn’t make-believe.

Maybe I should explain that better, but I want to get on with the story here and say that all of a sudden Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was attacked in the House of Representatives by some Congressman from Brooklyn for taking the Indians off their reservations to appear in a degrading spectacle for private profit. In that they was wards of the U.S. Government, this “Drama of Savagery” was being given under its auspices.

Now Cody lost no time in getting his influential friends to counter this with testimonials as to the educational value of his “exhibition” for both whites and Indians, amongst them another Congressman who said bringing savages to the East to see its wonders would convince them of the foolishness of ever again becoming hostiles. And of course nobody was better at shoveling it than Buffalo Bill when defending his favorite cause. “The so-called savage sports,” he told some reporter, “are simply their everyday form of amusement in their own country.” He pointed out that what the Indians did while in New York, visiting churches and seeing uplifting sights, was morally elevating. And then he added what he seen as the clinching argument, since he couldn’t of said it for most of the whites with the show except Annie, least of all for himself: “Not one of them out of seventy-five or eighty has ever been known to be drunk since they came to this city.”

Cody was especially concerned at this time, for the Indians was with the show only by permission of the Secretary of the Interior, and he wanted an okay to take them to England, along with the rest of the company, to perform daily for six months at a big American trade fair to be held during the celebration of Queen Victoria’s half-century on the throne, the so-called Golden Jubilee. This was the most ambitious stunt he ever dreamed up, and the North Platte
Tribune
come right out and said he expected to make barrels of money from it.

Well, being such a successful public figure by now, he soon got the Government’s blessing, and we all sailed for the Old Country on the last day of March in 1887, more than two hundred strong, of which almost a hundred was Indians, on the S.S.
State of Nebraska.
There was also a dozen and a half of buffalo on board, a herd of deer and elk, a number of longhorn cattle, and a couple hundred horses, mules, and jackasses, along with the Deadwood coach and tons of painted backdrops representing the terrain of the American West.

Now most of the Indians felt real queasy about this trip from the first, though as it turned out they wasn’t worried near enough about crossing the ocean, for we was in for a ride even the sailors admitted later was rougher than usual—and let me say right off, there wasn’t nobody on board no sicker than me. Like the Indians I begun the voyage with a sense of bad medicine. Most of this was because me and them hadn’t never been afloat on a body of water too big to see across, but I personally also felt superstitious when our Cowboy Band, up on the top deck as the boat pulled out into New York harbor, started playing “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” which happened to be what I heard the regimental band, not themselves going on the campaign, played as Custer led the Seventh Cavalry out of Fort Abe Lincoln towards the Little Bighorn. Not even thinking of the well-known indecent words to it, invented by forgotten soldiers, eased my mind now.

It took only one look at the crowded aisles and tiny compartments in the innards of that ship to convince the Indians to camp on the open deck, and I joined them, but it was uncomfortable even before the big storm hit us about halfway through the two-week crossing, lasting a couple of days, and I tell you even worse than being seasick is being so while hearing Lakota death songs for forty-eight hours and seeing Red Shirt, the leader of the current Sioux contingent, examine himself every day to determine whether the dream he had was true: that going over the water would cause his flesh to decay and fall off his body.

Even Cody was under the weather, no doubt soon learning, as I did, that though alcohol was the cure for snakebite, gunshot wounds, and consumption, it only made your heaving worse when you was tossed around on the briny. But wouldn’t you know the person who would come through it best was Annie Oakley, who wrapped in an oilskin, spent her time on the captain’s deck, watching him deal with the problem of keeping the ship afloat with a smashed rudder in an Atlantic storm. She was only disappointed at having to postpone the target practice she done from the deck on better days.

Well, we finally reached England without loss of life, human or animal, but it took me a few days on land before I stopped feeling I was still walking on a rolling ship and my appetite returned, but the Indians and Cody was quicker to recover, the former when it came to eating enough beef to replace what they had been too sick to swallow on board the boat, and Buffalo Bill regained not only his land legs but they was once again hollow when his English hosts was pouring at the big welcome celebration we was given.

The Wild West encampment and show grounds was at a place name of Earl’s Court in the district called Kensington, west of what I thought of as downtown London, but the local English had their own terms for everything, such as the “City” as referring not to London in general but to their Wall Street. Anyway there was a lot of open land at Earl’s Court, and we occupied twenty-three acres of it, setting up a sizable American town there of tents and tepees, Old Glory flying from the flagpole, with thousands of English, children and grownups, gawking at us from the sidelines even during the times between performances.

Cody was in his element with the British, even more so than he was back home, where he did have a certain competition from others also of frontier experience, but over here he was as special as you could get, and even before the official opening, a lot of swells cultivated his acquaintance and most of these had titles, beginning with the Prince of Wales, who got a dress rehearsal for himself and party, four days before anybody else got to see the show, which I believe come under the principle of “nobleness obliged,” that is, if you’re in some country where they got people with inherited ranks, you are obliged to please them, though I personally drawed the line at kissing anyone’s hindquarters and so wasn’t real happy when Cody asked me, of all people, to serve as guide or escort to the Prince while he was on the premises of the Wild West.