Little Big Man (56 page)

For that matter, when I was acquainted with Wild Bill in Kansas City, neither did he take any interest in public affairs; so this new attitude of his must have been connected with getting married. You recall when me and Olga was hitched was the same period in which I participated in the public life of Denver.

Anyway, Bill told me there was a stink about the Army post traders in which Orvil Grant, the President’s brother, was involved. Nobody else but authorized traders could sell anything on a military reservation, so naturally these fellows put no limit on their prices and was gouging the troops. They was also getting ahold of supplies that was supposed to go to the reservation Indians under treaty obligations and selling them to soldiers and civilians. Orvil Grant was believed to be illegally selling traderships to the highest bidder, using his brother’s pull. Belknap, the Secretary of War, was in back of all this, etc.,
etc.

“Oh, is that all?” says I when Bill had apprised me, for to tell you the truth I thought all this was perfectly normal, having never known a case among white men where the fellows with authority and connections did not make the most of it. I think a good case could be made for the modesty of Orvil Grant’s operations, considering whose kin he was.

“Well,” Bill says, slightly irritated, “you asked about Custer. That’s
why he isn’t going out after the Sioux: he went to Washington to testify in the hearings.”

Now to show you how limited my idea of Custer was, I says: “Wants to get himself in good with the President.”

Hickok shook his head. “You stick to poker, hoss,” he says. “Politics is too much for you. Custer’s going to testify
against
Belknap and Orvil. Grant will probably run him out of the Army for it.”

“What’s Custer want to do that for?”

And Wild Bill says: “Because he always does what he thinks is right. There are a lot of people who hate his guts, but there isn’t anybody who can say that he doesn’t back up what he believes in.”

Then Hickok returned to the subject of getting married. “Agnes,” he says, “is a fine lady, and not to be confused with the kind of women you and me knew in K.C. That’s the reason why I have decided to go for gold and become rich. I hear you can pick it off the ground, practically.” He ordered another round of drinks and we got to talking over what gear we’d need and whether we should take in other partners, for we was sure enough going as soon as he got hitched and come back from his honeymoon which he and the Mrs. was going to take back East in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Wild Bill had sure changed. In K.C. I could swear he never knowed the name of the President, let alone the ins and outs of politics he now spouted. Nor do I think he really cared about money in the old days. Obviously it was this woman of his that had made him more of a normal human being. I noticed he was learning to use his right hand occasionally to drink with, and he wasn’t nearly so nervous about the other customers of the saloon; nor did he jump when I went into my vest pocket for a dollar.

I don’t mean he was turning to butter. As a matter of fact, a day or so later he killed a man who drew on him in front of a livery stable. But there wasn’t no question of his being under less pressure, or maybe in view of what he was going to do before the summer was out, just another kind.

I certainly didn’t bother the man none about my sister Caroline, so I don’t know to this day whether her romance with him was purely imaginary or had a basis, for I’ll tell you something about that gal: she was losing her mind, poor thing. I should have seen it coming years back. Now that I thought of it, I remembered that everything I had ever heard about her unhappy love affairs come
from her alone. It was right likely that Frank Delight, for example, never had asked her to marry him.

The point was that while Caroline survived them romantic disasters in her earlier years, she wasn’t getting any younger. Indeed, she was forty-four if she was a day, and hadn’t so far as I knowed ever got married yet, which she had been trying to do as far back as ’52 when the drunken Cheyenne massacred our menfolk.

But you couldn’t have told it from her appearance. She had looked much the same for twenty years except, as I mentioned, her front teeth was knocked out and her ear was some chawed up,
etc.
But I couldn’t see a gray hair on her head; and her features, which had always been strenuous, didn’t need to get more so as she went through life, as they usually do with the rest of us.

However, her mind had definitely sprung some bad leaks. For example, when I come back from that meeting with Hickok to the hotel where me and her had rooms, I decided to confront her with the truth, like slapping a hysterical person in the face to bring him out of it.

“Wild Bill is getting married,” I says.

Caroline was setting on her bed, with her leg cocked up, a-scraping at the sole of her boot.

“And not to Calamity Jane,” I goes on.

She lifted her head and folded up the jackknife and says, real smug: “I know. It is me that he is marrying.”

Right then is when I realized she should be put in the booby hatch, though I didn’t go right out and look for one then. But I should have, for once she fixed upon the theme of the wedding she kept it up day after day, and I guess was pathetic enough, for I had to lock her up in her room so as not to be embarrassed by a crazy sister in front of the other people I had got acquainted with in Cheyenne, and she would drape the window curtains about her like a bridal veil and parade around, etc., though never trying to bust out of the door or window, which in itself showed how far gone she was, for Caroline had never been able to stay in one place for long.

They didn’t yet have a nuthouse in Cheyenne, and while there was surely one down in Denver, I hadn’t been to that city since leaving it with Olga and Gus in ’64 and would have felt funny returning there now with a loony sister in tow, so I took Caroline on the Union Pacific, which we had helped to build, east to Omaha.

She didn’t give me no trouble, on account of I convinced her the
wedding ceremony was going to be held there, for Wild Bill liked to do things up right and wanted to get married in a big town. Omaha was real big by then and had a gloomy home for the mentally defective, run by people who you would have took for the patients had they not been wearing uniforms. So it wasn’t no pleasure to hand Caroline over to them, I’ll tell you, but it had to be done, and I don’t believe my sister was unhappy with the arrangement, for she immediately took that home for her own house and them attendants for her servants and become so involved with her wedding plans that she never even said goodbye to me.

That is how I happened to miss Wild Bill’s real wedding, which took place in Cheyenne while I was gone, and I never did see his wife.

I never went prospecting with Wild Bill, either. In fact, I never laid eyes on him again. He come back from his honeymoon alone, leaving Agnes in Cincinnati, and went on up to Deadwood in the Black Hills where they was scratching for gold in that celebrated gulch, only he didn’t do no mining. He played poker. On the afternoon of August 2, 1876, he took a seat with his back to the door, and in come a man named Jack McCall and shot him dead. Nobody knows why he left his spine unguarded that day, for the first and last time, unless it was that he had reached the point in life where he had to have confirmed what he always suspected.

Anyhow, what he was holding when he died has ever since been called the dead man’s hand: two pair, aces and eights. R.I.P., J. B. Hickok.

It was April when I deposited poor Caroline in the nuthatch, and seeing as how Omaha lays on the Missouri River, I decided to go by boat up into Dakota Territory, maybe as far as Pierre, and then overland to the Hills. The river was just opening up from the winter, and I got me passage on a sternwheeler and rode it as far as Yankton, where I changed to another boat by the name of
Far West
. I did that so I could be at Custer’s Last Stand.

I’m kidding. But you know how them things look later. The way it really happened was that the first boat had a little layover in Yankton, in the course of which I heard a lot of talk about the
Far West
and its captain, a man named Marsh who was famous along the Missouri. There used to be quite a body of legend about riverboating—captains who could navigate in a heavy dew, etc.—and Marsh
was part of it, not having been hurt any by being a friend of an author named Mark Twain who wasn’t noted for understatement.

Now I didn’t have nothing for nor against Marsh, but what interested me was to learn that he was taking the
Far West
all the way up the Missouri and then down the Yellowstone, carrying supplies for the campaign against the hostiles who had, now it was spring, run off the reservations in considerable numbers and was thought to be in the Powder River region. Which of course was up in Montana and nowhere near the Black Hills. Actually, the Indians never did much at all to defend the Hills and I believe already counted them as lost by this time. They had in reality run away again, and the Army was going to hunt them down and whip them as at the Washita. You understand it was all wild country up on the Powder: there weren’t no settlers there, nor even gold miners. It was the native place of many of them Indians,
but it was not the reservation they had been assigned
.

The latter was an important point to the Government, because it constituted a defiance of law. And then a lot of people had got sick by now of uppity redskins. It was after all the one-hundredth year since the Declaration of Independence, and they had opened a Centennial Exposition in the city of Philadelphia, featuring a deal of mechanical devices such as the typewriter, telephone, and mimeograph machine; and it did not seem logical for such a country to be defied by a bunch of primitives who had not invented the wheel. So President Grant okayed the campaign against them. He had earlier tried to treat the redskins nice by hiring a number of Quakers to run the Indian Bureau, but that had not worked out on account of most other people believed that brotherly love was cowardice and the Indians thought it was insanity.

Sitting Bull was up there in the Powder region and Crazy Horse and Gall, and a number of other famous Sioux, with a couple thousand of their followers, and as the spring progressed, more was leaving the agencies every day. If they was not quickly discouraged, it would become the fashion, for though the southern buffalo had been mostly killed off by people like myself, the northern herd was up in Montana and an Indian preferred that sort of eating over the beef he was issued at the reservation, which besides he was often cheated out of anyway by the agents and traders.

So the Army was sending General Crook from the south, Gibbon from the west, and Terry from the east, converging on the area
where the Powder, Tongue, and Bighorn rivers flow into the Yellowstone. The idea was to gather the hostiles before the three prongs and if they showed fight, to hash them up. There was infantry, cavalry, and Gatling guns, and the
Far West
would penetrate as far up the rivers as it could, farther than any other boat ever had, for it was built for the purpose with a real shallow draft and two steam capstans for pulling off sandbars.

All this I found out in Yankton, but even bigger news to me was that Custer had come back from Washington and though Grant was sore at him for testifying against his brother, he had reluctantly agreed to let him go fight Indians. The other generals wanted Custer along, you see, owing to the reputation he had made in wiping out Black Kettle’s village.

It has been ever so long since I have mentioned Old Lodge Skins and the Human Beings, whom I had not seen for eight years. The Southern Cheyenne had been quiet for a length of time now, down on their reservation in Indian Territory. The Washita and the other campaigns of ’68 and ’69 had settled the question for them: they since lived on Government handouts and scratched at a little farming and a few of them let their kids take schooling.

But if I knowed anything at all, it was that Old Lodge Skins and his band had not stayed down in the Nations. I could swear they had went back up to the Powder; either that, or the old man had gone under, for God knows he was old enough, but he wouldn’t tolerate no farming nor do I believe he would stand for little Human Beings learning rot in a white man’s school.

So Custer would be going once again to do to these people what he had done before. I commenced to look at it again as a personal matter. There I was in Yankton, southern Dakota Territory, in May of 1876, and the
Far West
was getting up steam to negotiate the upper Missouri and go help Custer to slaughter the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne.

I went onto the vessel and to the captain’s cabin, and I says to Marsh that General Custer had telegraphed me to come as a scout for him, owing to my experience in that position at the celebrated Battle of the Washita where we wiped out Black Kettle and his cutthroats; and besides, I was ready to pay the fare.

Marsh says it was all right with him if I could find a place on deck to pitch my bedroll among the supply boxes and barrels lashed there, for the cabins was full up with all manner of persons, military
and civilian, and there was even a sutler on board to sell whiskey when they reached the troops.

So the
Far West
dug its paddlewheel into the muddy water of the Missouri, and we headed north for the biggest Indian battle of them all. You know how a fellow says: but we never realized it at the time. Everybody knowed the tribes was gathering and that Custer would find them. Where we was wrong was in supposing they would run again; or if forced to fight, would lose.

CHAPTER
25
Custer Again

IT TOOK THE BETTER PART
of two weeks to reach Fort Abraham Lincoln, up the spring-swollen, bank-crumbling Big Muddy; and when we got there, the troops had been gone for about the same length of time on their direct overland march to the Yellowstone, led by General Terry, with Custer as second in command.