Return of Little Big Man (65 page)

I hadn’t ever found a better time to try again to get into the matter of having been at the side of the dying Custer, at which I had made innumerable though more and more halfhearted attempts throughout the years, but by now I lacked in sufficient energy. And I got no further than saying, “You know, I was—” when Bill resumed.

“But after due thought I decided against the idea of having this mount in our dramatic presentation, standing there in good health, for I doubt if a horse can be trained to act wounded in a believable way. Also there’s the matter of creating the wounds, with theatrical makeup, to be visible from the grandstand. Beyond this, what I didn’t care for was the negative associations the animal would bring with him. The essential message of the re-creation is the eventual triumph of the American people as symbolized by the arrival of Buffalo Bill and his men.”

Which of course never happened in real history, but the way I come to understand him over the years is that it was even better that it hadn’t, for if he had actually come with reinforcements in time to save the day at the Little Bighorn, there wouldn’t of been any triumph to proclaim beyond just another routine defeat for the Indians. Custer wouldn’t of died a martyr, and civilization, as well as show business, which maybe was one and the same, would not of been furthered.

Let me also clear up Cody’s position on Indians, who as I say he greatly liked and genuinely befriended, and as I hope I have shown, they returned the favor. So how could he represent them in the show as being pretty much the same ruthless devils as those who hated them thought they was? This is tricky, or again maybe it’s real simple: underneath all the flag-waving. Bill really did love his country and believed he was showing nothing but its true history, and now the smoke of battle had cleared away, the Indians too should come to realize they had played a part in it, and was Americans too and could take pride in the result.

Maybe that was overly simple, but it wasn’t exactly simpleminded. And in later years, when the motion pictures showed the U.S. Cavalry ride in to save outnumbered whites about to be massacred, I know for a fact that Indian-reservation audiences might cheer—if you want to take that as confirmation of his point.

Having completed his remarks on the subject, Cody now spoke of the great success of the Wild West in its World’s Fair engagement, which exceeded that of any year to date and might amount to as much as a million dollars before it was over.

“And this,” said he, “during the Panic.”

Once again I had to ask him for a translation.

“Why, the national financial crisis, Jack. I thought you took an interest in money matters. It’s in all the papers.”

Involved with Indians as I was, I didn’t pay much attention to newspapers unless he read me something from them pertaining to our show, but as it turned out there had been a number of bank failures and the gold standard, whatever that was, was threatened, the stock market was falling and businesses going bankrupt, all of which already had got the name of the Panic of ’93. But B.B.W.W. was doing better than ever, turning people away at every performance, so this trouble didn’t seem to apply to us, except in the sense of some more of them outside projects of Bill’s going under, taking along my own modest investments, but of course that usually happened in the best of times.

Now Annie had swore she wouldn’t go near Sitting Bull’s cabin, and my sentiments was similar at the time I first heard about it, but then I got to wondering about the possibility that it might be only a re-creation or imitation of the real thing, in short, such as what we did in the Wild West. It would sure of been easier to build a fake than to dismantle and ship in the original from that remote spot on the Grand River, and who would know the difference? Unless like me you had experience of the genuine article, and as for me, I’d feel better if it was a respectful counterfeit, along with the midget Eiffel Tower and the model of the Pope’s home church.

So I decided I ought to make sure one way or the other before making up my mind what to think. I didn’t have no influence on anyone like Annie did, so it wouldn’t matter to nobody but myself—which meant to a person of my sort, it couldn’t of been more important, on account of how I’d had to survive on my own so long while not losing the principles I had acquired along the way.

Yet I’ll tell you something held me back all the same, like I never really wanted to know. The result in any case wouldn’t be heart-lifting, whereas thus far I had been enjoying myself at the Fair. So I kept postponing a visit and who knows how long I might of kept doing so, avoiding the issue forever, had not Annie come up with something else.

“Jack, did you see this?” she asks a few days later, showing me a pamphlet handed out to publicize the attractions of the Midway, with a page opened to a picture of an Indian with a caption saying it was Rain in the Face. She tapped her trigger finger on it. “He’s with Sitting Bull’s cabin.” She waited a second for my reaction, but I was too slow in producing one, so she said, “Didn’t he actually kill General Custer? Whereas Sitting Bull was falsely accused of it?”

“It was the General’s brother Tom that Rain in the Face was supposed to hate for some reason and said he’d cut his heart out and eat it one day, and then supposedly did so at the Little Bighorn. But I don’t know if that really happened.” I did see Tom’s body after the battle, and it was mutilated worst of any, but I wouldn’t tell that to Annie, who had taken on some of the grief, now seventeen years long, of her friend Mrs. Custer.

“I just think this whole business of the cabin is a shame,” said she.

“I do too.”

Annie kept her eyes on me. “That poem says Rain in the Face did it to Tom.”

“What poem is that?” I asked. “One of Frank’s?”

“No,” says she. “Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ‘The Revenge of Rain-in-the-Face.’”

“I never read it.”

“Well, Mrs. C. believes it was him who killed Tom, anyway.”

“Rain in the Face?”

“That’s right.” Annie could be persistent when she took a mind to it.

“So you want me to go over and find out, is that it?”

“I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do, Jack.”

“Suppose I find out he did it,” I says. “What will we do? Take revenge on the revenger?”

“Well, I sure will complain to the management of the Midway,” said she. “But don’t you go if you don’t think it’s right, Jack. I’ll have to find me somebody else who speaks Sioux.”

She knowed how to appeal to a man’s pride. “All right,” I says, “I’ll go over there. But it won’t be as easy as you think. An Indian’s idea of politeness is to tell you only what he thinks will please. I can’t see Rain in the Face admitting to a white stranger he killed and cut up Tom Custer, especially if he really done it.” But she was still looking at me with them sparkling eyes of hers, so I put up my hand and says, “All right, all right, I’ll go.”

Funny how so often, in fact usually, things have worked out so different from what I expected and, while I can’t claim always for the best, given my presence at so many events at which people was slaughtered, my life has taken another turn.

For example, what occurred at this point. Next chance I got, I went down the Midway past the show run by a German circus man named Hagenbeck that I wanted to get around to seeing when I got tired of the Ferris wheel, if that ever happened, for he supposedly had a tiger that rode a tricycle, past the Japanese Bazaar, the Javanese Settlement, the Samoan Islanders, the German Village, the Turkish Village, a big indoor swimming pool called the Natatorium, and the panorama of the Alps, Little Egypt’s Street in Cairo, the Destruction of Pompeii (of which if you recall we had seen the real ruins), the French Cider Press, Old Vienna, the Eiffel Tower, the Volcano of Kilaueau, and many other attractions including the gigantic revolving wheel on which I’d rather of been a rider than whatever I was supposed to be on this mission, a spy, an ambassador, an avenger, or just Annie’s flunky.

I finally got there. Past the Captive Balloon (which you could ascend in the basket of but was attached by a cable so it couldn’t fly away), next to the Ostrich Farm and back of the Brazilian Music Hall, there it was, the log cabin I last seen on the Grand River the day Sitting Bull had been killed and his corpse disfigured.

It looked like the genuine article, though the surroundings was so different, with the background of all them Midway attractions, that the experience of seeing it was unreal. I couldn’t certify its authenticity until I got closer, but at the moment there was quite a few white visitors going inside and coming out, along with a few Indians here and there for decoration, for they didn’t seem to speak English. A couple of white fellows was selling entrance tickets and acting as guides.

I tell you, everything about it went against my grain, more so now I was here than even when agreeing to come, and I felt indignant towards Annie. I wasn’t married to her, after all. She had her nerve, asking me to do something like this.

Now while I was standing there, just outside the area which you had to pay to enter, along comes a heavyset Indian from the direction of the Midway, eating from a bag of popcorn. He was limping. He wore the full warbonnet that was more or less required for all Indians on display at white entertainments in those days. I heard this was true even with Apaches, who normally hadn’t never worn feathers, but the audiences demanded this supposed proof of real Indianness. This fellow was an older man and obviously not in prime condition.

I seen from the beading on his buckskin clothes and moccasins he was Sioux, and I asks him in Lakota if he knows where I might find Rain in the Face.

Now from the way he failed to answer this directly, I knowed I was talking to the man himself. Had he not been Rain he would have told straightforwardly where I could find the man. Being the real McCoy, however, he had to go through some devious maneuvers, neither admitting nor denying, and if tradition was to be observed, I would of had to stand there for some time before establishing the truth.

So what I did, startling but also relieving him, was to let him see I knowed and proceed from there.

“Is this really
Tatanka Iyotanka’s
lodge or is it an imitation built by the
wasichus?”
I asked him.

“It is real,” he said. “The whites took it apart and shipped it here and put it back together. It seemed to me a strange thing to do, but that’s the way they are. I am here because they are paying me more than I could make in any other job. Do you want to eat?” He offered me the bag of popcorn.

It smelled mighty good, and I took some. It tasted good too, being warm and buttery and salty, and I made the sounds of approval, “How, how.”

“There are a lot of Indians here at Chi-ca-go,” Rain says, pronouncing the city’s name like the redskin word from which it supposedly come, meaning, so I heard, either “strong” or “polecat.” And while I’m on the subject of language, I might point out that Lakota didn’t have an actual word for “Indian” as such. Amongst themselves they never needed any in the old days, using tribal designations. But after the white man come, they had to find a general term that made more sense than the name he had erroneously give them and kept even after learning it was the wrong continent for it. So the word the Sioux come up with for “Indian” was the same as for “normal person.”

“Yes.” I never said more on account of I wanted to keep him talking.

“I hear there are a lot of Lakota in Long Hair’s show.”

“That is true,” I says, chewing.

People was walking past us all this while, gawking at Rain in his headdress, and one little boy stopped and stared for quite a while, and noticing him, Rain in the Face offered him some popcorn. But before the boy could take any, his Ma come and pulled him away.

“Sitting Bull told me Long Hair is a good man and treats people very well.”

“I work for
Pahaska,”
I says, “and can tell you that is true.”

“I haven’t seen the show,” said Rain in the Face, “and I’ll tell you why. I am told they do an imitation of the Greasy Grass fight. The Americans have always accused me of killing the other Long Hair’s brother in that fight, though I did not do so.”

“You did not?”

“I didn’t see him, and if I had seen him, I would not have known who he was. A white man came to Standing Rock not so long ago and showed me pictures of those two brothers. I did not see either one at the Greasy Grass. I admit I killed soldiers that day, but I didn’t cut up anyone on the ground. But the whites think I did, so I won’t go over there and get shot if some American gets excited by the imitation of the fight.”

“You must do as you think best,” I told him, seeing he figured he was safe here at Sitting Bull’s reconstructed cabin, where the Indians had lost.

He shared the rest of the popcorn with me, filling my cupped hand.

“A man told me the other Long Hair’s widow has never taken another husband.”

“She still mourns him.”

“I asked if he would send me a picture of her,” said Rain, “and he told me he would try, but I have never received it.”

So here was another, and an unexpected, admirer of Libbie Custer. “Let me see whether I can get you that picture,” I says. “I know a friend of hers.”

I had found out what I come for, so I shook his hand and thanked him for the talk and the warm popcorn and fixed to leave. Visiting the cabin wouldn’t of done nothing except make me feel bad.

However, if I hadn’t glanced briefly towards it on turning away, my subsequent life might not of been what it was: that’s all I can say as a sure probability.

Some stout white man, wearing a brown derby, his teeth clenched on an unlit cigar, come out of the cabin door. His stride was that of considerable exasperation, for some blond-haired woman emerged right on his heels, speaking angrily at his fat back.

She was Amanda Teasdale.

M
Y FIRST IMPULSE WAS
to run away and hide. I tell you that woman scared me, not in the way you feel when a gun is pointed at you or a war club is lifted over your head, fearing for your skin, but in that region of the heart where you feel you just ain’t up to the job, and I sure hadn’t never been so with regard to Amanda.