Little Big Man (19 page)

His dumb look never altered, but he said: “Then why in hell are you dressed like that?”

“It’s a long story,” says I, and let him up.

CHAPTER
8
Adopted Again

YOU CAN PROBABLY READ
about the fight in books because it was the first real engagement between the Army and the Cheyenne, causing quite a stir at the time. The soldiers claimed thirty Indians was killed in the saber charge, the colonel reported nine, and the truth was four dead, several wounded. It took place in the month of July, 1857.

That’s the kind of thing you find out when you go back to civilization: what date it is and time of day, how many mile from Fort Leavenworth and how much the sutlers is getting for tobacco there, how many beers Flanagan drunk and how many times Hoffmann did it with a harlot. Numbers, numbers, I had forgot how important they was. Kansas had also become a Territory, for all the difference it made to me.

That trooper, whose name was Muldoon, took me to the colonel when the excitement was over, and the way I told it was the Cheyenne had forced me on pain of death to join their war party, after having five years earlier killed my whole family and held me henceforward in brutal imprisonment. Muldoon vouched that I sure could have killed him but refrained from it. With the paint scrubbed completely off, and in a gray wool shirt and blue pants Muldoon lent me from his extras, about eight sizes too big, I appeared pretty harmless.

I didn’t have no need to worry. Regarding Indians you could tell anything in them days and have it swallowed, and sooner by the military than the civil, for the reason that a white soldier keeps up his nerve by believing his enemy is contemptible to the point of buffoonery. Some of them troopers thought Indians ate human flesh, for example, and had relations with their own daughters.

So the colonel expressed his sympathies, then tried to get some information out of me as to the location of the Cheyenne lodges and horse herd, as he proposed to burn the first and capture the second, but I acted as if rendered half idiotic by the tortures I had underwent for years and so eluded that. It turned out he found the camp anyway by merely following the trail, and burned the abandoned tepees. I was happy to see that Old Lodge Skins’s was not among them; Buffalo Wallow Woman and White Cow Woman must have took time to fold it up before fleeing. From there on, that general trail burst into many little ones, as is the Indian practice for evasion. The warriors, who had gone off to the east, would circle around later. Everybody would get together at some later time when the danger was over.

The Army mucked about that area most of the summer, at one point going as far west as Bent’s Fort and seizing the supplies there that was supposed to go as annuity payments to the Indians under the existing treaty, then coming back to the Solomon again. But they never found no more Cheyenne and at length returned to Fort Laramie.

I had of course been with them this while, being looked after by Muldoon, who found it convenient to forget I could have killed him with my hands tied behind me and pretend I was a helpless kid. Well, I let him, for he was a kindly slob. He used to make me wash a lot with strong Army soap, claiming I still stunk like a goat for weeks after I had left the Cheyenne. I believed
he
did, and the rest of them soldiers; but it was just a case of relative smells, I expect, and I could recall what had seemed to me the stench of the Cheyenne camp when me and Caroline had entered it years before.

The other soldiers treated me the same, and other than having to listen to a lot of their stupid talk, I never actually suffered. On a campaign like that was an easier way to break back into white life than any other. At least we was outdoors and slept on the ground, and though that Army grub, chiefly sowbelly and hardtack, was garbage, I shot some game now and again, for I had retained my bow and arrow and my Cheyenne pony, and the soldiers liked red meat too, so that made me quite popular with them though I never talked much, which they laid to my weak-mindedness owing to years of captivity.

You might have thought the colonel would be interested in my experiences of five years’ barbarism, but he wasn’t. I wasn’t long in
discovering that it is a rare person in the white world who wants to hear what the other fellow says, all the more so when the other fellow really knows what he is talking about.

I’ll say this, my medicine failed when we got to Laramie. I had not had anything in mind when I went white at the Solomon battle, except to save my life while not retreating. I sure didn’t figure out what such a decision would entail in the long run. I was away from civilization so many years that I forgot how everything is organized there: you don’t just move into someone’s tepee and let it go at that.

For example, we hadn’t been long at Laramie, where I was still bunking with the soldiers, when the colonel sent for me.

“The records in this department are far from adequate,” says he. “The unfortunate incident in which the red fiends assaulted your father’s wagons has never been entered, so far as we can determine from our files. I’m afraid punishment of the particular malefactors will be rather difficult owing to the insufficient information you have so far provided as to their identity—this of course added to the problem of laying our hands on the Indians concerned were they even to be clearly identified.

“For as you know they are a wily lot. Eventually, I suppose, we will be forced to kill them all off—I can see no other possibility in the face of their savage obduracy against setting aside the life of the brute.

“So much for those unhappy memories. The important thing is the life that opens before you,” and so on, the upshot of which was he sent me east to Fort Leavenworth, the departmental headquarters, with a column that was going there the next day. Leavenworth was on the Missouri River, right near Westport, what was later named Kansas City, and Independence, where my Pa bought his wagon and team of ox. This was civilization, or what passed for it in them days, in the extreme.

I got a choking, sensation when I heard the news. There was already so many white men around Laramie you could hardly breathe, and I didn’t sleep well in them rectangular barracks, on account of having been trained by the Cheyenne to favor the circular dwelling. I think I have mentioned their feeling about circles, the circle of the earth and so on. They was set against the ninety-degree angle, which brought continuity to a dead stop. Old Lodge Skins used to say: “There’s no power in a square.”

Now I was going back to a whole world of sharp corners, while
somewhere out on the prairie the Human Beings had collected again, and having keened for their dead, was eating roast hump and dreaming and telling stories by the buffalo-chip fire and stealing ponies from the Pawnee and getting theirs stole in return, and Nothing was there in her fringed dress of white antelope.

They knew about where I was, although they might not have been told, the way they knew about everything that concerned their people and nothing else. They wouldn’t have heard of or understood the slavery troubles, John Brown and all that was going on in white Kansas at the time.

But I never regretted leaving Laramie as such, which had grown into as ugly a place as you could find—that’s what I thought then before I seen many other white places. A lot of Indians pitched their tents thereabout, among them I’m sorry to say certain Human Beings, but they didn’t resemble the ones I had known, and the individual tribes was not so important as that they all belonged to a degraded type known as the Hang About the Forts. The free-roving bands didn’t think much of them. A good many of these gentry literally just sat around their stockade in their blankets, looking stupidly at what went on, for they was permitted to come and go at will, and if a soldier wanted the space they occupied he would roust them out of it, like shooing a dog. Some did a little trading in second-rate skins, and some prostituted their women, and all of them subsisted on Government handouts give to them for being “friendlies.” These last of course was usually less than half of what they was authorized by law, for the Indian agents withheld the rest and sold it to white emigrants or the Army seized it for their own use on account of the quartermaster’s stores was generally insufficient owing to crooked purveyors back East or thieving supply officers.

It was also against the law to sell liquor to the Indians, but the Hang Around the Forts was oftener drunk than not, for the troopers would sneak them whiskey in exchange for a roll with their wives and daughters, a sorry lot but presumably better than nothing—few white women was to be had thereabouts. Also the traders did quite a good business in firewater, fairly open, and I never heard they was arrested for it, probably because when drunk the fort Indians was even more harmless than when in possession of their faculties.

I mention this subject because while I was at Laramie I run into someone I knowed from the old days. I had wandered among the
Indian camp out of nostalgia for my old life, but I was about to be driven back to the fort by dirty old squaws trying to sell me mangy buffalo robes and their whoremaster husbands, grinning and sniveling, when I saw a canvas tent pitched there out of which from time to time an Indian buck would stagger and then maybe fall flat before he reached his destination or puke all over the ground.

A number of braves was inside when I poked in, each singing a different song or orating hoarsely to nobody in particular. The smell was indescribable. At the back of the tent was an open barrel with a rusty dipper hanging on it, and alongside stood a white man dressed in filthy buckskins. He looked as if he had never washed his face from the day he was born; you could have peeled the dirt off it like a rind. He also never owned a razor.

“How’re ya, partner,” says he, showing his mossy teeth. One of the Indians lurched over then, and taking off his moccasins, handed them to this sowish fellow, who after examination of the articles shakes his head. So the Indian pulls off his shirt, which was a gray wool trade item, black with grease, and hands that over.

The white fellow puts up his first finger, with the top two joints folded down, and says: “Half, you brown-arsed son of a bitch. Half, you shit-eater.” And half-fills the rusty dipper, and the Indian takes it and pours it down his throat.

“Have one on me,” the white man invites yours truly.

I just look at him, and he says: “I don’t mean of this horse piss. I got a bottle of the real stuff here.” He fetches the same from a sack on the ground, while stuffing into it the shirt and moccasins he has just obtained.

“For that in the barrel I use a pint of whiskey per gallon, add gunpowder, tobacco, sulfur, tabasco, and black pepper, then water it up to level. These skunks don’t know the difference. But I swear that this here is the good. Drink up.” He pushes the bottle at me.

“No, thanks,” I says.

“Well, stay anyway. I don’t get much chance for conversation during the day, dealing with these.” He upends the bottle and lets it gurgle, and one of the Indians sees it and staggers towards him, but he kicks him in the groin and the Indian, who from his braids is a Cheyenne, falls to the ground and passes out. The others don’t pay no attention to this incident.

“Of course,” the fellow says, lowering the bottle, “I generally goes over to the fort of an evening and take dinner with the commanding
officer, a personal friend of mine, but during the day I get pretty lonely. It ain’t easy for me to deal with this trash, considering they murdered my whole family in front of my eyes and _____ all the women in it. I reckon when Kansas becomes a state one of these years, I’ll go up to Congress for Senator.” He took another swallow. “Sure you don’t want to take a pull of this? It’s still got the hair on it.”

But I turned my back on him and, stepping across that recumbent Human Being, left the tent. I didn’t drink whiskey as yet, and I never could stand to hear the lies of my brother Bill. I was just grateful he didn’t recognize me.

At Leavenworth, quite a big fort, I was quartered with an Army chaplain who had a little house for himself and family. This was a skinny horse-toothed fellow with a wife who resembled him strongly and several fair-haired children who didn’t look like either of them. I stayed there for several weeks, during which time whenever the wife and kids was out of the house and I was there with the chaplain, he’d ask me into his office and start talking oily about my spiritual well-being, in the course of which to make his point he’d lay a spidery hand on my knee. I think he was a
heemaneh
though he never went farther. I wasn’t sorry to leave when the time come, for in addition to that, his wife claimed I still stunk and made me bathe a lot.

At last I was called in to see the head officer there, a general with whiskers, and he said: “Well now, Jack, we’ve got a fine home for you. You’ll be schooled and get proper clothes and have a splendid father to look after you. You have a lot to catch up with, but you’re a bright boy. And if in later years you wish to pursue a military career, to follow the guidon with our brave boys, I’ll be glad to let you use my name.”

With that he stuck his head into a pile of papers, and his orderly led me outside to where that Army chaplain I had stayed with was talking to an enormous fat man sitting in a buggy.

I just want to say here that was the first and last time I saw the general. Nobody at Leavenworth ever asked me a word about the Indians I have lived among for five years. But neither had it occurred to the Cheyenne to ask me about the ways of the white man, not even when they was being destroyed by them. You got to knock a man down and put your knife at his throat before he’ll hear
you, like I did to that trooper. The truth seems hateful to most everybody.

So I was brought outside to that buggy, and the chaplain says: “Here’s our little savage now.”

The other man had a square-cut beard of black, and he wore a black frock coat, but his belly was too great to fasten it across. His fat was hard and not soft, if you know what I mean. The old-time strong men used to be like that, with enormous potbellies that was fat but felt like muscle if you hit them there. I had seen pictures of such, and I thought maybe that’s what this fellow was.