Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  Pa took us all to Independence, Missouri, where he bought a wagon and team of ox, and we set out on the California Trail. That was near as I can figure the spring of 1852, but we still run into a number of poor devils going out on the arse-end of the gold rush that started in ’48. Before long we had accumulated a train of seven wagon and two horse, and the others had elected Pa as leader, though he didn’t know no more about crossing the plains than I do about the lingo of the heathen Chinese who in later years was to work sixteen hours a day building the Central Pacific Railroad. But given to shouting the way he was, I think they figured since they couldn’t shut him up, might as well make him boss. Then too, every night stop he would preach around the fire, and they all required that, because like everybody who gives up everything for the sake of one big idea, they periodically lost all of their hopes. I ought to give a sample of my Pa’s preaching, since if we don’t hear from him soon we’ll never get another chance, but it wouldn’t mean much a hundred year away and in a Morris chair or wherever the reader is sitting, when it was originally delivered by evening on the open prairie next a sweetish-smelling fire of dried buffalo dung. It might seem just crazy, without showing any of the real inspiration in it, which was a matter of sound rather than sense, I think, though that may be only because I was a kid at the time. The ironical thing is that my Pa was somewhat like an Indian.

  Indians. Now and again, crossing the Nebraska Territory, following the muddy Platte, we would encounter small bands of Pawnee. Indians was Indians to me and of course as a kid I approved of them generally because they didn’t seem to have a purpose. The ones we saw would always appear coming over the next divide when the train was a quarter mile away, and would mope along on their ponies as if they were going right on past and then suddenly turn when they got alongside and come over to beg food. What they wanted was coffee and would try to get you to stop and brew them a pot, rather than hand out a piece of bacon rind or lump of sugar while rolling. I believe what they preferred even better than the coffee, though, was to bring our progress to a halt. Nothing drives an Indian crazy like regular, monotonous movement. That’s why they not only never invented the wheel, but never even took it up after the white man brought it, as long as they stayed wild, though they were quick enough to grab the horse and the gun and steel knife.

  But they really did favor coffee, too, and would sit on their blankets, nodding and saying “How, how” after every sip, and then they chewed the biscuit my Ma would also hand, out, and said “How, how” after every swallow of that as well.

  Pa, as you might expect, was much taken with Indians because they did what they pleased, and he always tried to involve them in a philosophical discussion, which was hopeless on account of they didn’t know any English and he didn’t even know sign language. And it is a pity, for as I found out in time to come, there is no one who loves to spout hot air like a redskin.

  When the Pawnee were finished they would get up, pick their teeth with their fingers, say “How, how” a couple of times more, climb on their ponies and ride off, with never a word of thanks; but some of them might shake hands, a practice they were just learning from the white man, and as anything an Indian takes up becomes a mania with him, those that did would shake with every individual in the train, man, woman, and child and baby in the cradle; I was only surprised they didn’t grab an ox by the right forefoot.

  They never said thanks because it wasn’t in their etiquette at that time, and they had already shown their courtesy with them incessant “how-how’s,” which is to say, “good, good.” You can look the world over without finding anyone more mannerly than an Indian. The point of these visits had somewhat to do with manners, because these fellows were not beggars in the white sense, the kind of degenerates I seen in big cities who had no other means of support. In the Indian code, if you see a stranger you either eat with him or fight him, but more often you eat with him, fighting being too important an enterprise to waste on somebody you hardly know. We all could have run into one of their camps, and they would have had to feed us.

  This entertaining kept getting bigger every day, because I figure one Pawnee would tell another, “You ought to go over to that wagon train and get some biscuit and coffee,” and as we traveled with them ox only about two miles an hour when moving, and stopping to brew coffee slowed it down even more, we was in range of the tribe for several weeks. Larger and larger bands would show up, including women and even infants in seats fixed up on lodgepoles trailing behind the horses, the so-called travois. So by the time we reached Cheyenne country, in the southeastern corner of what is now the state of Wyoming, and it started all over again with a new tribe, everybody in the wagons had used up their coffee, making that the principal supply we intended to lay in on the stop at Fort Laramie at the junction of the Laramie and North Platte rivers.

  At Laramie, though, they had run out of the beans and did not expect another shipment for a week, that being some years before the railroad. Oddly enough my Pa would have been willing to wait, but the others were hot to get on out to California, being they was already three years behind time.

  Jonas Troy was an ex-railway clerk who had come out from Ohio. I remember him as wearing a little fringe of beard and having a skinny wife and one kid, a boy about a year older than me, a very nasty child who tended to kick and bite when we fell out at play and then when you got him back would cry.

  “Indins,” said Mr. Troy, “like whiskey even more than coffee, so I heard. Besides, it’s easier to serve. You don’t have to stop rolling, just tip the jug.”

  Troy and my Pa at this minute were standing in front of the stores at Laramie that were built into the inside of the stockade wall. Must have been a dozen people passed them during the time they arrived at that decision who could have told them otherwise and saved their lives—trappers, scouts, soldiers, even Indians themselves—but of course they never thought of asking: Troy because he believed in anything thought up by himself and confirmed by my Pa, and Pa because on the basis of his encounters with the Pawnee he figured he knew an Indian to the core.

  “Sure,” said Pa. “I can tell you, Brother Troy, that the nature of the fluid don’t concern the redman. It is the act of libation itself. Remember it is written in the Book of Mormon that the Indin comprises the lost tribes of Israel. That accounts for my difficulty in speech with them noble specimens along the Platte, knowing not a word of Hebrew though I intend to give it study when we reach Salt Lake. But the Lord has enabled me in His inscrutable wisdom to communicate directly, heart to heart, with our red brothers and what I hear is love and justice commingled.”

  So they bought a number of full jugs from the traders and shortly thereafter we pulled away from Laramie without any coffee. I can still recall seeing the fields on the west side of the fort covered with junk throwed away by others who had gone before: oak tables and chairs, bookcases with glass doors, a sofa covered in red plush.… It’s a wonder what some people will want to take across thousands of mile of buffalo grass, desert, river, and mountain. There was even a lot of books laying there, all swoll up from the weather and bust open, and my Pa took time to run through some of them in hopes of finding the Book of Mormon he talked about but actually had not ever seen a copy of, having got all his information on the Latter-day Saints from some traveling tinker who come in the saloon in Evansville and was drunk at that. As a matter of fact, now that I look back on it, I don’t think my Pa knew how to read, and such parts of the Gospel as he could quote he had heard from other preachers when he was still a barber.

  A day or so from the fort, on the south side of the North Platte, still in rolling grass country though up ahead the bluffs began and beyond them the Laramie Mountains showed peaks of snow, and the date I reckon to have been in early June, we had our chance to give Troy’s theory a workout. For here, from the direction of the river, their ponies’ feet still dripping water, come a band of about two dozen Cheyenne braves. The Cheyenne is a handsome folk, often tall and straigh
t-limbed, and like all great warriors the men tend to be vain. As courtesy would have it when upon a visit, these fellows were all decked out in bead necklaces and breastplates of joined bones, and their hair was braided with that ribbon the traders carry. Most of them wore a single eagle feather, and one a plug hat of which the crown was cut out so his head could breathe.

  As usual, they had appeared of a sudden over a bluff when the train was at the distance of about a quarter mile. You will seldom encounter a party of Indians moving along a flat space; they go along level ground, of course, but the usual white man won’t catch them at it. Even after I lived among redskins for some years I couldn’t explain how they know when other people are in the neighborhood. Oh, they drive a knife blade into the earth and listen at the haft, but you can’t generally hear your prey unless it’s galloping. Or they might pile up a little cairn of stones at the top of a divide, and with that as cover for their head, spy around it down the valley. But the plains is one swell after another, like ocean waves frozen in position, and since all you can see from one rise is the intervening stretch to the top of the next, you will miss whatever is beyond it. And the Indians don’t pick every divide; just certain ones; yet when they do look, they generally see something.

  Troy’s idea about serving the whiskey from the rolling wagons was a bust before it was tried. A moving wagon of that era was about as steady as a sleigh being drug across a field of dry boulders, and the bumping was enough to shake a piece of bread to pieces before it reached your mouth, let alone a drink of any description. Besides, the Cheyenne were in a formal mood and dismounted soon as they reached us, coming over to shake hands first, so we surely had to stop.

  The fellow in the plug hat was their leader. He wore one of those silver medals that the Government give out to principal men at treaty signings; I think his showed the image of President Fillmore. He was older than the others and he carried an ancient musket with a barrel four foot long.

  Now I haven’t referred to her before, but my eldest sister was six foot tall and, being very strong of feature, she was still unmarried at more than twenty years of age: a great big rawboned girl with a head of flaming orange hair. She used to spell Pa in driving the ox team and could throw a whip better than any of the men except Edward Walsh, who was an Irishman out of Boston weighing two hundred pounds and as a Catholic never cared for Pa’s preaching but was tolerant about it since other than his family there wasn’t any more of his own kind along; the others tolerated him because he was so big.

  This sister’s name was Caroline, and on account of her size and doing a man’s work, she wore men’s clothing on the trail—boots, pants, shirt, and flop hat—although there were those who thought the worse of her for it.

  A very athletic person and a stranger to fear, she hopped from the box to the ground on the Indians’ approach, and Plug Hat marched up to her, sticking out his brown right hand while the left held the old musket across his front and also kept his red blanket from falling off.

  “Right pleased to make your acquaintance,” says Caroline, who is a deal bigger than the old chief, and gives him a grip so hard you can see the pain travel up through his hat and down the other arm. He almost lost his blanket. His chest was naked underneath, and that’s how I saw his medal and also a scar across his belly that looked like a weld on a piece of iron. That provided the name he was known by among the whites, Scar Belly, though among the Cheyenne he was called Old Lodge Skins, Mohk-se-a-nis, and also Painted Thunder, Wohk-pe-nu-numa, and I never did know his real name, which among Indians is a secret; and if you find it out and call him by it he will at the least be terrible insulted and at the worst have ten years of bad luck.

  Old Lodge Skins (at present he didn’t identify himself, which always seems irrelevant to an Indian, but I was to see a lot of him in afterdays), when he recovered from Caroline’s shake, give a speech in Cheyenne, which was one phase of his courtesy and the other was that in between sentences he said the English words he knew, “goddam” and “Jesus Christ,” which he had been taught for a joke by earlier immigrants and the soldiers at Laramie, and didn’t of course understand was cursing and wouldn’t have known if it was explained, on account of Indians don’t have swearing in their languages though they have lots of things that are taboo: for example, after you are married you can’t mention the name of your mother-in-law.

  My Pa was standing alongside Caroline, and I don’t recall what it was upset him most, the swearing or the attention my sister was getting, but he pushed out in front of her, saying, “If you was looking for the wagonmaster and spiritual leader of this flock, that be me, Your Honor.”

  Him and Old Lodge Skins then shake hands, and the latter fetches from a beaded pouch he carries in the vicinity of his belly a filthy, tattered hunk of paper on which some other white wag had scrawled the following:

  This heer is Skar-gut he is a good indun and takes a bath unse a yar wether he needs it or not he won’t cut your thoat under enny condishun so long as you keep a gun on him his heart is as black as his hind end yer fren

  BILLY B. DARN

  The chief evidently figured this to be a recommendation, because he looked right proud while my brother Bill was reading it aloud on request of my Pa (that’s the reason I said earlier I don’t think Pa could read himself; but it’s more than a hundred year ago and I don’t remember everything).

  Pa was a considerate person to strangers, especially if they was savages, so he pretended the note said something good and invited the whole bunch to come have a drink, which I don’t believe the Cheyenne understood right off. “Whiskey” they would have known, but Pa put it some long way, “potation” or whatever—and they still didn’t get it when Troy and our men broke out the jugs. You see, an Indian figures no white man in his right mind would give them liquor unless he had a running start. The traders always left the whiskey negotiation till last, brought out the barrels, and rode off fast as they could go.

  Indians are first to admit they can’t hold their liquor, and even in those early days some of the chiefs tried to keep it from their young men, though a redskin leader has only advisory power which is frequently ignored. Old Lodge Skins could not believe ten white men, counting the larger boys, half of them unarmed and with only two horses and having seven wagons full of twelve women and girls and eight smaller children, would feed whiskey to two score Cheyenne braves on the open prairie. If he had, he would have warned my Pa before he took a drink, because Indians are fair that way. They don’t feel any guilt about what they do under the influence of liquor, regarding it as a mysterious sort of power like a tornado—and you don’t see reason to blame yourself for knocking a fellow down if a high wind picks you up and throws you into him; although if you see it coming you would tell him to move clear. So with an Indian when he hits the booze, if he hasn’t anything against you.

  Old Lodge Skins took the tin cup my Pa handed him and drained it in one swallow, as if it was water or cold coffee, tilting his head back so far the plug hat fell off. The drink was already down his gullet before he altogether comprehended the nature of it, and you might say simultaneous with that recognition he became instantly drunk, his eyes swimming with liquid like two raw eggs. He fell over backwards on the earth and kicked his feet so hard one moccasin flew off and hit the cover of our wagon. His musket dropped, muzzle down, and packed some dirt in the end of the barrel, of which we’ll hear more later.

  Meanwhile our men politely ignored him and passed on to the other Indians. Not having brought out more cups, they handed around the jugs, grinning and shaking hands, and Troy thought his idea was proceeding so well that he started a practice of slapping the braves on the shoulder as if they was saloon cronies. Now I could see, at the age of ten, that the Cheyenne didn’t get the import of that: giving him a present with one hand and striking him with the other, and both by an individual of a different race, would call an Indian’s whole code of manners into question, as it would with a horse you fed and flogged at the sam
e time.

  The others weren’t so quick to fall drunk like Old Lodge Skins, with whom it was more the surprise than the beverage. Having seen him, they were somewhat prepared—well as a redskin can ever be—and went under the influence by stages: sort of pathetic gratitude when they was handed the jug, puzzlement when Troy hit their shoulder, then a slow beginning of elation when the stuff hit the stomach—all this fairly quiet, except of course for the “how-how’s” and mutterings of satisfaction.

  We might still have got away after everybody had one round apiece, but Old Lodge Skins come back to life, got up, and indicated he would swap his pinto pony, his plug hat, his Government medal, his musket, in fact, everything down to the breechclout, for a second swallow.

  “Never mind that,” says Pa. “It ain’t going to cost a desert patriarch nothing to partake of our hospitality. I just wish I could talk Hebrew.” With that, he hands the chief a whole jug all for himself.

  Troy gives seconds to a flat-nosed brave and claps his back. This fellow, whose name was Hump, swallows slow, licks his lips, hands back the jug, grimaces like he smells something stinking, then begins to howl like a coyote under a full moon. Everybody else is still quiet at this point, so it sounded funny, and Old Lodge Skins takes a breath between pulls at his own jug and looks glassy-eyed at Hump, which seems to annoy the latter, for he draws his iron tomahawk and starts at the chief, who lifts up the ancient musket and fires it at the other, but the earth, remember, is packed into the muzzle and the barrel peels back, like a banana skin, almost to the lock.

  Nevertheless, Hump is scared by the explosion and also unable to reply in kind because he doesn’t possess a firearm himself, but only a bow slung over his shoulder along with a quiverful of arrows. He turns slowly, licking his lips, and sees Troy, who is handing refreshment to a young brave called Shadow That Comes in Sight (these names I learned later). Hump studies Troy’s back for a spell, then pats him with the left hand like Troy had done him, at which the white man turns, hearty as a fellow at a lodge meeting (he and Pa and our others have ignored the gunshot), and Hump plants the hatchet blade into his forehead. It was one of those trade tomahawks of which the reverse of the head is a pipe that can be smoked by boring a hole through the handle.