Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  We stayed the rest of the year up in that territory, which was prettier country than along the Platte, nearer to lodgepoles, firewood, elk, and bear, for the Big Horn Mountains rose fifty-sixty mile to the west with their purple base climbing to a silver crown, and they was rich in timber and game and kept the watercourses fresh through the summer from their melting snows. When winter come, we left off fighting on the larger scale, though now and again you might encounter little enemy parties trapping buffalo in the drifts while you was out doing the like, and the whiteness might end up splashed here and there with red.

  But sometimes it was just too cold, with the snow up to a bull’s shoulders, and I recall once when four of us coming back from an unsuccessful hunt ran across six Crow in a blizzard, we reached wearily for our slung bows, but they signaled: “We’ll fight when the weather gets better,” and went on. That was a relief: you could hardly see them.

  When it got real fierce, when your very speech would freeze as it emanated from your lips and blow back in stinging rime against the cheeks, we hung close to the tepees and ate the dried meat taken the summer before and stored in rawhide parfleches, and pemmican, the greasier the better on account of a bellyful of melting fat will warm you sooner and stick longer than most anything I know. The value of stout women also went up in the snowtime, and I believe it was that winter that that enormous fat girl from the antelope surround ran the price for her hand up to six horses and other gifts too numerous to count (all of which went to her family) and was led to the bridegroom’s lodge.

  One time when Nothing was outside her tepee gathering snow in a kettle to melt down for water, I slogged over to her vicinity and warbled like a bird, but she didn’t take any more notice than if I hadn’t been present, and soon her Ma come out and throwed a little bone at me and said go away, bad boy. That was the extent of my love life that winter.

  By the thaw we was all, men and animals, pretty well trimmed down to basic muscle and sinew, with our tongues sharp for fresh provender. Spring was really something to look for in those days when you were lean and hungry and young. Old Lodge Skins wasn’t the latter by upwards of fifty years, but the sap rose in him before it did in the trees and he got his younger wife, White Cow Woman, with child again. I have previously mentioned only Burns Red and Little Horse as his offspring, because I was closest to them, but there was others around in various sizes, of which I didn’t take much notice of the little girls and was banned by custom from doing so with the females of my own age, they being so to speak my sisters; and more was dead.

  Shooting Star, Burns Red’s wife, was also pregnant, and a lot of the other women after that season of lay-off from war. These new children would make up for our losses in battle, those that were males, that is, and if they grew up. At present there was five or six women to every adult brave. I’ve slipped by the subject of death as if we won all the time. We lost almost as often; mostly it was an even score in the long run. What made the Cheyenne special was that they were fewer than most of their enemies; always outnumbered but never outfought, as the saying goes.

  As to the punishment we sustained, I don’t count wounds, and sometimes apparently mortal ones would be cured by the medicine men in the style I’ve described, but it might give an idea when I say that before the winter closed in, three of those five grownups I went on the raid with were dead: Cold Face, Long Jaw, and Yellow Eagle. Spotted Wolf, who if you recall was going to assault my white Ma when Caroline cold-cocked him, he was killed against the Pawnee in the spring before. These is just to mention some of the names you might recognize. We never at full strength could mount more than forty warriors.

  For a long time I believed Old Lodge Skins’s bunch was the whole Cheyenne nation, then at least one of the main bands that constitute the tribe, but in fact what it turned out to be was one big family: most of these folk were related to one another by blood or marriage or adoption, and there was a few stragglers from hither and yon, now and then, but not enough to alter the complexion of things.

  A Cheyenne won’t pass on shameful gossip about himself or his own. So it was a while before I found out why Old Lodge Skins’s camp kept to themselves.

  Quite some years back, when Old Skins was a boy, his Pa had killed a fellow Cheyenne in a quarrel over a woman and been exiled from the Burnt Artery band. Him and his relatives took off and lived alone, and at length he died, but the kin had lived so long by themselves that they was leery about going back. They also bore that shame, and when they did run across other Human Beings would rest their chins on the chest and look out of the sides of their eyes if at all. They come to be known as the tatoimana, which is to say the Shy Folks.

  Now Old Lodge Skins became their leader, having proved himself wise and brave and generous, and the time come when they was invited back to the Burnt Arteries on the occasion of the sun dance where all the tribe joins together. By God if that Indian didn’t get into the same kind of trouble as his Dad—a vein of horniness run right through the family—he swiped the wife of a man from the Hair Rope band and though he left two horses as payment the other fellow didn’t like the deal and come after him and in the set- to got an arrow through the windpipe and choked to death.

  Skins didn’t bother to come back to that dance after that, but was joined by the rest of his family out on the prairie and they wandered by themselves again for years. Somewhere along the line they was reinstated. By the time I joined up, they could go to the all-Cheyenne get-togethers but was not encouraged to camp in the Burnt Artery circle. They stayed pretty shy for a long time.

  But now that fat girl had got just about the last eligible husband in our camp, for the Cheyenne won’t stand for incest and we hadn’t picked up any new people since the coming of Yellow Eagle, who was now dead leaving two widows and a tepeeful of orphans which Shadow That Comes in Sight had to adopt.

  I don’t think Old Lodge Skins can be condemned for deciding to move south again when spring got well under way, though it defied his intention to keep clear of the whites. We had to get some fresh blood before we could let some more, and most of the other Cheyenne was down below the Platte., There were Sioux up around the Powder, and they was our fighting allies, but Skins was quite the snob when it come to family connections. He never forgot that version of Cheyenne history which he mentioned to the Minneconjou: the Human Beings had horses when the Lakota was still using dogs. He didn’t spell it out, but I know he figured the Sioux as lower-class.

  That was how the women come to strike camp and make travois of the lodgepoles, on which they packed the folded tepee skins and the rest of the gear, and did the same with the lighter articles onto the bigger dogs, including among the baggage certain small kids lashed atop it, and those of us with horses mounted them and some walked, and in a great messy caravan stretched for a mile, the warriors riding flank, we wended southward, leaving a wide trail of horse dung, wornout apparel, cleaned bones, and the ashes of many old campfires.

  I was on the way to becoming a white man again, although I never suspected it at the time.

  We traveled all the way to the Solomon’s Fork of the Kansas River, in the north of the present-day state of the latter name, and there in a great camp covering a mile or more of bottomland we found the entire Cheyenne nation, who except for us had wintered together the preceding season. That was a mighty assemblage, the biggest I had seen up to that point, and it made me proud: probably a thousand lodges in the configuration of a circle, with the tepees of each band making a little circle within the greater. And all the bands was there: the Hair Rope, the Scabby People, etc., which were hitherto known to me only in narrative, not to mention the military societies such as the Dog Soldiers, who acted as a police force, and the Contraries who do everything backwards.

  Old Lodge Skins was sort of uneasy when we was riding in: I could see that, for an Indian’s face is as expressive as anybody’s when he is among his own, but nobody tried to stop us and nobody came up and asked: “Where are you going? What do you
want?” which they would have done to someone who did not belong, and after a while I could see, beneath his chiefly dignity, that the old man was considerable relieved.

  Shortly out come some headmen from the Burnt Artery band and greeted him like a brother, inviting our bunch to camp in their circle. The old crime had been washed out. So everything was perfect and they had taken buffalo on a big ritualistic hunt up on the headwaters of the Republican River, so we all had to eat six or seven consecutive meals that day because every Indian who saw you would pull you into his lodge and press a feast on you.

  Then there was some speechifying by the orators and songs by the singers, and some dancing by the heemaneh—with whom Little Horse now definitely threw in his lot—which was very graceful and well received. And gossip was exchanged on every hand, Shadow That Comes in Sight told his jokes, and gifts were presented back and forth and it got to be a problem to remember what you had left to give the next guy without passing on something you had just received.

  I was in the middle of all this. There were those among the new people who sized me up, and I expect some talk went on out of my hearing until they all got it straight, but I never had to undergo one embarrassing moment, except maybe owing to the excess of approval that was manifested after Old Lodge Skins, Burns Red, and Little Horse done their bragging about me.

  Everything seemed to be swell, but after purely Indian matters had been pretty well gone over, up came the subject of the whites and that was like a storm sky obscuring the sun. The spring before, there had been a difficulty over four horses which the Cheyenne said were strays found roaming the prairie but the soldiers claimed as their own, so they killed one Human Being and put another into the post guardhouse, where he died. Then in the summer a party of young men came across a mail wagon and asked the driver for some tobacco, but he shot at them, so they put an arrow in his arm and the next day the troops attacked their camp, killing six Indians and stealing their horses. As the Cheyenne was fleeing from this assault, they ran across a wagon train, so they took revenge upon the whites and killed two men and a child.

  There had been other troubles, with a chief called Big Head wounded while on a friendly visit to Fort Kearny. The Cheyenne felt especial put upon, for by their lights they had always been amiable to white men. Even after all these bad things, they sent a delegation to see the Government Indian agent and apologized. They also returned a woman they had captured. But you see the complication was this: Indians wasn’t ever organized. Them that come in to apologize wasn’t the same as what killed the whites. And them that the soldiers usually punished was never the ones who had committed the outrages. The white people on whom the Indians took revenge had no connection with the soldiers.

  It was pretty early on that I come to realize that most serious situations in life, or my life anyway, were like that time I rubbed out the Crow: he spared me because I was white, and I killed him because I was Cheyenne. There wasn’t nothing else either of us could have done, and it would have been ridiculous except it was mortal.

  Anyhow, the Cheyenne now had got to believing they might soon have to destroy all the white men on the plains, an idea that didn’t seem altogether preposterous when you saw the size of that camp. Even I got to entertaining the possibility: we could ourselves mount maybe fifteen hundred warriors, and we was now friends with the Kiowa and Comanche who lived just south, and our old pals the Arapaho would help and the Sioux from the north. I was making out all right as an Indian and didn’t figure on losing any sleep over what happened to my native race when I thought of how little they had ever done for me. Besides, there wasn’t any talk of invading St. Louis or Chicago—or Evansville—which is where white people belonged.

  That was before I heard the oratory of the medicine men: two of them, named Ice and Dark. They had great powers. All they had to do was make certain motions towards the soldiers, and when the latter fired their guns the bullets would roll slowly down the barrels and fall harmless to the earth.

  I used to stand along the path that Nothing took when she went to the river for water, and as she passed I’d grab the fringe on her skirt and give a little tug, then let go. About the only compensation I got for it was that she didn’t show no more attention to Coyote, who was also now stuck on her, than to me. He and I would take turns in paying her notice: such as that if I was waiting for her on the river path, he would let that go and try to approach her when she was gathering buffalo chips. Since neither of us was yet getting anywhere, we wasn’t jealous of each other and maintained the neutral relations me and Coyote had always had. You know how it is: you have your friends and enemies, and then there is that host of others you can take or leave: same way among Indians.

  I also had developed an Indian sense of time. I must have been about fifteen when we was on the Solomon’s Fork, and I had this crush on Nothing but I wasn’t any more impatient in regard to it than she was: the Cheyenne take five years or so to court their women and even so I was young to be starting now. I’ll bet you never knowed redskins was so slow in this area. But being warriors, the Cheyenne like to keep themselves bottled up. You try fighting sometime after going at it hard and you’ll see the point: you’ll just want to sleep.

  Well sir, it was interesting to be in that big camp with all the activities and pretty soon they held a sun dance which went on for eight days of highly elaborate doings that wouldn’t mean anything to an individual not of that persuasion, but it reaffirmed the Human Beings in their sense of superiority, if it was possible to do that when they already never believed they had even close competition. In the self-tortures Younger Bear distinguished himself of course. He ripped the pegs out of his chest within fifteen minutes after their being attached, and had them hooked into new places and hung against the rawhide lines all night long. Next day his whole upper body was like an open sore, and he didn’t treat it with salve or mud or anything but strutted around with the blood drying.

  Now you might call it typical of the Cheyenne that after all the talk of how they was going to wipe out the whites, and all the ceremony that fitted them to do so, they began to break up the camp and move off with a purpose to keep out of trouble. After all that, it would have seemed like an anticlimax to go and really fight, and Indians, who war among themselves all the time, didn’t get no pleasure out of tangling with white men, which was a nasty business even if you won.

  The bands traveled individually but for some distance formed two general movements: northward or south, for the tribe as a whole was divided most of the year into a larger segment that roamed as separate parts about the Platte, and another that hung around the fort of William Bent the trader, on the Purgatory and Arkansas rivers down in southern Colorado.

  We who followed Old Lodge Skins was of course Northern Cheyenne and now moved with the Burnt Artery band in that direction. I should say before we get too far along that we had done a good bit of business at that gathering and married off most of our available females, whose husbands was now with us. That and his acceptance back into his proper band had put Old Lodge Skins in such a good mood that I figure he would have got into trouble again under the wrong buffalo robe had not camp been struck when it was. I had seen him flickering his ruttish old eyes at several fat figures. I myself as yet didn’t have a horny thought towards Nothing, just would have liked to hear her shy, soft voice or draw a peek from them glowing black eyes.

  We hadn’t got far when our scouts come back with the report of a column of troops about half a day’s ride ahead, moving our way. Now at the big camp they had had a few flintlocks, so about three of our warriors was now armed in this fashion, and Hump, who had been waiting for years for this eventuality, wanted to ride on and fight the soldiers. But Old Lodge Skins and the head chiefs of the Burnt Arteries was concerned for the women and children, so we turned and went back south in search of our other folks. Traveling east, we caught up with some of the southern people and reassembled with them again near the Solomon’s Fork. It wasn’t the whole cro
wd from before, but we had maybe three hundred fighting men and say ten or fifteen flintlocks which seemed to the Cheyenne pretty formidable armament.

  The excitement was so great I didn’t have no time to work out my new point of view: I had already decided theoretically, as I said, that the utter annihilation of the paleface on the western prairie wasn’t no skin off my arse: I didn’t know a white man west of St. Joe except for the remnants of my own family who by now must long have reached Salt Lake. But when I studied that out, I never actually saw myself participating in such a massacre. Now here was a battle coming up with the U.S. Cavalry and I was passing for a Cheyenne warrior of some repute. I had the choice of being a coward or either kind of traitor. I remember wishing we was still fighting the Crow.

  It sure was a serious problem, but all the time I considered it I was stripping down, daubing myself with red and yellow war paint, and honing the heads of my arrows on a little whetstone. There are some who in moments of indecision cease all bodily movement so as to give free play to the mind, but I’m the other type: I give employment to my hands, figuring my brain will follow suit. When this don’t work, there ain’t no reason to believe I’d have got any farther by sitting with my chin on my knuckles.

  We sent the women and children off south below the Arkansas, although owing to the confidence the Cheyenne had at this moment they set up the lodges again and left them standing. Then Ice themedicine man led us to a little lake nearby, in which we made ourselves invulnerable by dipping our hands in the water. When the soldiers fired we’d just put up our palms and the balls would barely clear the muzzles and dribble to the ground.

  That was when the whole business cleared up for me: I was going to die.