Little Big Man (29 page)

“That may be so,” said Old Lodge Skins. “On the other hand, the white men are coming in ever greater numbers and building permanent dwelling places. If they do not find wood, they cut bricks from the earth or burrow into the ground like prairie dogs. Whatever else you can say about the white man, it must be admitted that
you cannot get rid of him
. He is in never-ending supply. There has always been only a limited number of Human Beings, because we are intended to be special and superior. Obviously not everybody
can be a Human Being. To make this so, there must be a great many inferior people. To my mind, this is the function of white men in the world. Therefore we must survive, because without us the world would not make sense.

“But to survive if the white men drive away the buffalo will not be easy. Maybe we should try this farming. Other red men have done so. When I was a boy a people called Mandan farmed along the Big Muddy River. It is true that the Lakota were always attacking their villages and killed a lot of them. And then the Mandan caught smallpox from visiting white traders and died every one. There are no more Mandan.” Old Lodge Skins raised his eyebrows. “Perhaps they were not a great people.”

“I never heard of farmers who were,” said Hump. He then asked me: “I suppose you have a lot of powder and lead in your wagons?”

I didn’t answer, not wanting to get into that. Which was all right, for I was getting ready to make a speech myself. I ranked pretty high in these quarters, not because I was important enough to lead a wagon train—the Cheyenne didn’t care about that, nor had they asked me how I spent the time since we had last seen one another—no, I was influential here because though I had apparently been killed on the Solomon’s Fork, I had returned.

Here’s what I was thinking: Old Lodge Skins had spent more than seventy years on the prairies and what did he have to show for it? Indians loved their land, but the peculiarity was that the most miserable cabin of a white man had a relation to the earth that no nomadic redskin could claim. One way of looking at it was that in any true connection, each thing being joined makes a mark on the other: a tree, say, is fastened to the earth, and vice versa. In Denver they was erecting buildings now with foundations: not only on the ground but in it; so that if one day the whites left that place again, it would still bear their brand for a long time. I never heard of a natural force that would tear cellar walls from the earth.

Maybe white men was more natural than Indians! was what I had got to thinking. Even prairie dogs had fixed villages.… Now I know that every living thing is neither more nor less of Nature than the next, but I was young then and them distinctions bothered me, what with the conflicting claims: Indians believing they was more “natural” than white men, and the latter insisting they themselves was more “human.”

Whatever the judgment on that, I knowed right then that the Cheyenne way was finished as a mode of life. I saw this not in the present camp, but back in Denver; for truths are sometimes detected first in a place remote from the one to which they apply. Think of how if you was standing in China when gunpowder had been invented, you could have known that thousands of mile away stone castles and armor was finished.

So what I said in that speech of mine had practicality as its point of view. I stood up in Hump’s tepee. I wore Burns Red’s best red blanket. We had exchanged gifts, and he in his Indian way give me his finest possession.

“Brothers,” I says, “when I sit among you, I think of the beautiful Powder River country where we did so many happy things when I was a boy. Do you recall the time Little Hawk was sleeping in his tepee and suddenly was awakened by the smell of beaver-gland perfume and raised the lodge cover and saw a Crow stealing his horse and killed him? And when Two Babies returned from his lone war trail against the Ute, after staying away a whole year, his belt full of scalps and singing the song an eagle had taught him as he lay wounded in a dry wash.

“Do you remember how lovely Cloud Peak looks with its cap of white and shoulders of purple and blue? And think of the clear, cold water of the Crazy Woman’s Creek, which runs fresh all summer from the melting snows of the mountains. The forests full of lodgepoles and firewood, the elk with his great antlers, the bear in his coat of fur.…

“I think it is better up on the Powder River than it is here in this place.

“I know nothing of this treaty, but I do I now that more and more white men will come through this place where we are now camped, because it is as the bird flies from a white village called Denver to a big white place called Missouri. I have been to both of these places and I know that neither will go away but will rather grow larger. It is my opinion that as they do, they and the land between will be less and less pretty to the eyes of a Human Being.”

I took a breath; it ain’t easy to get supernatural when you are out of practice. “I had a dream,” I says, “after the Battle of the Long Knives. I flew above all this country and saw below me white men building square houses, but to the north, along the Powder River, I
saw the great nation of Human Beings living happily, fighting the Crow and Mountain Snakes, killing buffalo and elk, and stealing horses.”

Old Lodge Skins spoke: “I believe that I have heard wisdom,” he said. “We had intended to talk of this treaty in support of our southern brothers. Black Kettle and White Antelope will go there, and they are great chiefs. I understand that the Arapaho, Kiowa, and Snake People will also talk. It is a very pretty sight to see all the tribes at a treaty conference with their countless ponies and in their best clothes. The Father of the whites gives presents to everybody. Just because you go to a treaty council, that does not mean you have to touch the pen.

“The Father wants to buy from the Human Beings and others the land where the yellow dust lies. Bent will be there and he is a good man who has married a woman of the Human Beings. I was willing to go and talk about farming because Black Kettle and White Antelope, who are wise men, have said the Human Beings must think about settling down.

“But dreams do not speak two ways, and there must be some reason why Little Big Man has been returned to us to tell of his vision.”

I hadn’t give him a new idea. Indians wasn’t necessarily fools about what they should or shouldn’t do. They sometimes just had reasons that a white would find difficult to understand. Old Lodge Skins was going to the council mainly to get another silver medal and to see the entertainments put on when all the tribes got together and showed off their prowess at riding and their best clothes so as to impress the Government representative. He might even have went so far as to sign the treaty without any intention of taking up farming as a result.

Now he had decided on my suggestion to forget about the whole thing and return to the north country. But I’ll tell you something: he never did that because of my “dream”; he did it because he knowed damn well I was white and knew what I talked about as to the situation in Kansas and Colorado.

So did they all, and if you’ll look again at the myth they had built around Little Big Man, you’ll see what I mean. It hadn’t aught to do with me personally, and insofar as I was to be identified with it, I had to live up to it rather than vice versa. If I did something that would not jibe with the legend, that meant I was not Little Big Man.
By this means Indians kept their concepts straight and their heroes untarnished, and did not have to lie. I guess it wouldn’t work, though, for somebody who understood the principle of such things as money and the wheel.

After the talk in Hump’s lodge, my other foster-brother Little Horse, dressed like a Cheyenne woman, come in and entertained us with very graceful singing and dancing. It did my heart good to see he made such a success of being a
heemaneh
.

I stayed the night in Old Lodge Skins’s tepee. Next morning I met another old friend. I was coming back from a wash in the little creek when I saw an Indian who seemed to be either blind or deliberately walking through sagebushes and cactus on his route from one point to another. I decided after observation that it was the latter, for only by intent could he have found such a rugged course for himself. Eventually he reached the creek, where he proceeded to wash. But not with water, with earth from the bank.

I had recognized him straightway. It was Younger Bear. So when he had finished his curious ablutions, I went over to him. I didn’t know whether he still considered himself my enemy or not. It seemed so long ago that I never even thought of it.

At my greeting he turned, not unfriendly, but instead of saying the Cheyenne hello, he says goodbye. Then, the way a person who has just took a bath will sit upon the bank to dry, he goes into the creek and sets down in the water. I guess it made sense, seeing how he had just washed with dirt. I realized he was doing everything backwards, and understood then what he had become.

Later I had this confirmed by Little Horse, who put aside his beadwork and left the crowd of women he hung out with ordinarily to chew the fat a spell with me.

“That is true,” he says. “Younger Bear became a Contrary last year. He bought the Thunder Bow from White Contrary.”

I have to explain. You know the ordinary Cheyenne is a warrior the peer of which is hard to find. But a Contrary carries it even farther. He is so much of a warrior that all of life apart from fighting, he does backwards. He don’t walk on the trails, but rather through the bushes. He washes with earth and dries off in the water. If you ask him one thing, he does the opposite. He sleeps on the bare ground, preferably an uncomfortable bit of terrain and never on a bed. He cannot marry. He lives off by himself some distance from camp; and when he fights, he fights alone, not with the main body
of Cheyenne. He carries the Thunder Bow into battle, which has a lancehead afixed to one end. When it is in his right hand, he may not retreat.

Well, there is a million other rules to it, I expect, and because it is so special, you’ll only find one or two Contraries around any camp.

“Then,” said Little Horse, “you remember Coyote. He was killed by the Pawnee. The Ute killed Red Dog.…” He went on with the news, which was fairly bloody. Then he said, looking somewhat arch: “I am thinking of moving into the lodge of Yellow Shield as his second wife.”

I congratulated him and give him a little shaving mirror I carried on the trail, with which he was greatly pleased, and after we parted he sat for hours admiring his appearance in it.

But before that, I asked him about my old girl friend Nothing.

“That is who White Contrary married,” he said. “She is big with child.”

I saw her a little later, sitting before her lodge mashing up some berries. It was remarkable how that girl had changed in a couple of years. She would have been right fat even without the pregnant belly. Her nose had spread across her whole face, and I could not recall that she had had that greasy look in the old days. What had used to be shiny black hair now looked like the tail of a horse that had been rid through a thorn patch.

But the most remarkable change seemed to have taken place in her personality. When I come upon her she was bawling out a dog in as brawny a voice as I ever did hear, and then her husband come out of the tepee and she lit into him. Cheyenne women make fine wives, but sometimes they are also great scolds.

I reckon you might say the saber charge upon the Solomon’s Fork saved me from having to listen to that for the rest of my life.

Well, after a bit they begun to strike that camp and prepare for the move north. Old Lodge Skins and me stood there and watched the women take down the tepees and make pony-drags of the lodgepoles and pack them full. He was wearing the sombrero, which owing to the difference in our head sizes sat a little high above his braids. Since that was really only a replacement of that plug hat of his that I had lost, I really hadn’t give him anything yet, so now I felt there was nothing for it but to present him with my Colt’s Dragoon pistol. On the one hand, it was little enough. On the other, that left me without a pony or a weapon of any description, without
a hat, without a jacket—my own of which I give to Hump—and in return I had received a blanket, a stone pipe, a string of beads, and suchlike, with which to rejoin them unfriendly mule skinners and traverse the rest of the mileage to Denver.

“Grandfather,” I says, “I cannot go with you to the Powder River.”

“I have heard you,” answers Old Lodge Skins, and that was all there was to it. He would never ask the reason.

Yet I couldn’t leave it at that. Maybe it was myself I had to convince, for I noticed on this second day with the Cheyenne that they was already a little less unattractive to me. I was getting used to the smell of camp again. It was conceivable that in time I might have gone back to what I had been earlier.

Maybe not, but I felt the threat. The important thing was that I had been doing right well in Denver. I had got onto the idea of ambition. You can’t make anything of yourself in the white world unless you grasp that concept. But there isn’t even a way to express the idea in Cheyenne.

Now, Indian boys want to grow up into great warriors and some feel the call to be chiefs, but these is all
personal
goals, for a chief ain’t got no power as we know it. He leads only by example. Take this move to the Powder River, Old Lodge Skins didn’t order his people to go there. What he done was decide
he
would go, and Hump decided
he
would, and so on, and the other folks would follow along because they thought these men were wise—or might not if they thought they weren’t. Burns Red had not yet made up his mind: he was still setting there on the site of Hump’s late abode, and Hump’s wives and daughters had took down the tepee right around him.

On the other hand, what I had been contemplating while leading that mule train back to Colorado was going into business for myself. I have said I had no head for commerce, but had got myself to believing you didn’t need none to become a rich man in a brand-new place like Denver. Already there was a move on to make Colorado a Territory. In a few years if I made enough money I might even go for governor: I could read and write, which was more than half the current population along Cherry Creek could claim.