Of course, now I realize that him and his band would have been my best means of tracing the location of my family and buying them back. Provided I could have found that chief without being killed while looking for him—you couldn’t telegraph an Indian or write him a letter. Well, the point is I never tried. I went on back to Fort Larned with the troops and hired on as a scout for a while, but there wasn’t any more trouble along the Arkansas. The attack on our stage had been an isolated circumstance. The real action took place up along the Platte, where the Cheyenne had smoked the pipe of war with the Sioux and Arapaho, and together in a force of a thousand warriors raided the town of Julesburg in early January, plundering the stores there. For a month they terrorized the South Platte, destroying ranches and stage stations, ripping the telegraph lines, and capturing wagon trains. Then in February they hit Julesburg again, and having sacked it once more, burned it to the ground.
In the spring the hostiles moved north into the Black Hills, and then on to the Powder. The Army went up there in summer and got more or less whipped in a series of engagements and then was caught in an early-autumn storm that killed most of their animals and come back, ragged and barefoot, making it only because Frank North and his Pawnee Scouts found them and led them in. The following year the Sioux and Cheyenne run Colonel Carrington out of the north country and made the Army vacate the forts he had built to protect the route to the gold mines of Montana.
I am working my stomach up to admitting here that instead of looking seriously for Olga and little Gus, I become a drunk. That’s a hard confession to make about yourself, and I have never done it before, but it is true. I lost my guts. I had got whipped at everything so far, and a habit of that kind can mark a man. When we patrolled the Arkansas the next few months and never found no hostiles, I was relieved, for I had got to thinking my family would be safer if the Indians they was with kept eluding or beating the Army. Maybe when things settled down, I could get me some negotiable items, blankets, beads, and such, wander among the tribes as a trader, and find Olga in that fashion.
Meanwhile I was drinking, and the more I drank, the less I saw about Indians in general and the Cheyenne in particular that I approved of. I won’t go into that, which was an elaboration of the feelings I had commenced to get in Denver. I’ll just say that now it no longer seemed stupid for me to hear somebody say what we ought to do was exterminate every one of them. For all I know, I may even have been the fellow who shouted that sentiment at the top of his voice, for I always heard it after I had got towards the bottom of the jug, and sometimes I’d be sitting all by myself along the stockade wall.
I had almost rather do it over again than to recount my ensuing wanders during the summer of ’65, for when I wasn’t drunk I was suffering the aftereffects, which is worse. I wended eastwards, and Kansas was building up now with the War over, and there was ranches and even towns where it was buffalo range before, and one wagon train had its nose at the arse of the next, and wherever you’ll find white men, you’ll find whiskey.
Now I didn’t have no money to use in a saloon, and I wasn’t in no condition to render service around a camp, like hunting, say, for I hadn’t a gun and couldn’t have steadied my hand if I had. I might have got me a drink or two out of sheer hospitality, but could hardly have consumed the volume of liquor I nowadays needed without some form of recompense to them who poured it.
So that accounts for how and why I become a buffoon. I mean, I would come into a wagon train at their evening stop, or up to a ranch house, or into a saloon if in town, and say: “How’d you fellers like some entertainment? You buy, and I’ll provide.”
There was a lot of curiosity in them days, and somebody’d always agree to the deal and set ’em up, and I would pack in enough rotgut to stop the tremor that got to running through my frame whenever I was empty, and then make a public spectacle of myself. I’d sing and dance, getting my talent from the drink, for I had no natural gift in those directions, being born hoarse and then the firewater roughed up my palate further, and I reckon it must have sounded like a raven announcing to the rest of his pack that he had just spotted some juicy carrion a-rotting on the prairie.
One of the songs I croaked out I had learned down in Santa Fe, which concerned a little mule, and I can dimly recall singing it once in a saloon in Omaha, Nebraska, and some of the boys there was mule skinners and they makes up from some belts and junk a mock pack saddle and puts it on my back and I trotted around on all fours on the floor while they booted my rump, and a specially mean type of soul fetched forth his long-lashed whip and I believe was ready to take skin from my hindquarters with it when another fellow stepped up to him and said: “I’ll take that off’n you.”
“You will like hell,” says the other.
I had collapsed on the floor at the moment and was watching them through my bloodshot eyes: I never really cared whether I was to be flogged or not. I couldn’t even recall at that point as to how I had reached Omaha, or why. I say this because if anybody had ever asked for a good beating, I did.
“All right then, you blue-arsed, buffalo-balled, piss-drinking skunk, then I’ll knock your f teeth out,” says my savior, and proceeded to do just that, with a mighty blow that swung from southeast to southwest, catching the whip-man where his big mouth hung, and his front choppers spewed out like a handful of corn amid a torrent of blood.
His friends carried him out directly, and the rest of the crowd was whistling and yelling: “Goddam, you are the hairy one, a real two-tit wonder,” etc. None of this meant nothing to me. Then the victor in that little scene leans over, uncinches the pack saddle from my belly, picks me up like a child, throws me over his shoulder as if I was a folded serape, and hikes on out of there.
The next thing I knowed is that I had been dropped into a horse trough outside, and that every time I tried to come up, a big hand pushed my head back into the water. So I figured, O.K. then I’ll drown if that’s what you want, for I didn’t have no will of my own any more. But when I was all set to draw a lungful of brackish water, I was suddenly pulled out again by my tormentor, clouted in the back two or three times, put up onto his shoulder again, hauled up a narrow stair, into a room, and throwed onto a brass bed.
Then I got my first good look at this stranger, for he took off his hat and his long red hair fell out of where it had been poked into the crown. Only it wasn’t a man but a woman. And she come then and set beside me on the bed.
And says: “I don’t know why I done this, little feller, but I go for you real strong. No sooner than I seed you crawling the floor, it come over me. I’m helpless for you, honey, worthless polecat that you are, and I a-goin’ to love you. You’re my own little man,” and so on.
I says: “Hold on there, Caroline. Don’t you recognize your brother Jack?” I had to say it several times, my voice being weak, before it took effect on her, for as she said she was real heavy for this mistaken idea of hern.
But at last her mouth fell open and she almost lost the plug of baccy she was chawing, and then said: “Oh my God.” Then: “You son of a bitch!” And then a few more choice oaths, for few could curse like my sister.
And finally she starts to cry and kisses and hugs me like kin, and fetches some water in a tin basin and washes off my filthy face and recognizes me for sure, and goes through it all again.
Well, I was glad to see old Caroline and even gladder to have someone care for me a bit, but after them months of dissipation and shame I didn’t have much energy and my mind was weak, so I soon fell to sleep.
Next day I felt real horrible and required whiskey merely to sustain the breath of life itself, but Caroline wouldn’t allow me any, soaked me instead for hours in a tin tub they had in that house. All day and the next she soaked me, pouring in fresh kettles of boiling water whenever the tub got bearable to my hide, and when I finally emerged from this treatment I might have had the poison sweated from me but it took along with it the rest of my juice as well, and I had the rubber legs of a foal.
Caroline hadn’t changed much. Her features had coarsened up some, and she chawed tobacco always, which did not benefit her teeth; and though she washed regular as most, the smell of mule was right noticeable in her presence, for that was what she did for a living: drove a team, hauling out of Omaha for the Union Pacific Railroad, then a-building along the River Platte.
While I was still weak she related the story of her intervening experiences between the time she left me in Old Lodge Skins’s tepee and the present date. These I gather was varied and characterized by violent ups and downs, for I think you have the correct idea by now that Caroline was romantic as they come and thus ever being disappointed.
She had gone on farther west, been to San Francisco itself. That was where she had tried to hire on as seaman on a ship, but the crew thereof, they was quicker than the Cheyenne to discover her gender, and pitched her into the bay. I don’t know why Caroline could never get it through her thick head that the way to attract men was not to do what they did, but rather—no, I do know: she thought she was ugly, that’s why. Only she wasn’t. She wasn’t beautiful by a long shot, but she was nowhere near hideous, just had a strong cast of feature.
Well, she had got a better idea when the Civil War started and went East for that and took up nursing the wounded, at which I believe she must have been right good with her qualities of muscle and stamina added to a real feminine nature underneath. She sure liked men, that Caroline, no mistake about that; in fact, her troubles could be traced to the fervor of that taste. In time she fell in love with a man she met in a military hospital near Washington, D.C., which shows you how far east she ranged. He was not a casualty but rather a male nurse who worked alongside her, a real cultivated person who went so far as to write poetry in his spare time. According to Caroline, he was shy but she felt sure he returned her feeling, for he give her some of his writings and it was full of burning passion and though he never come right out and admitted it to her face, she knowed she was the one he meant, and together they bathed and bandaged them poor devils, and the very suffering around them cemented their love for one another, etc.
I see no need to go through the whole story, for the point is that when this fellow got to where he saw Caroline was in great sympathy with him, he confessed he was in love with a curly-headed little drummer boy what had got his rosy shoulder barked by a Minie ball. It had never occurred to that sister of mine to question why some big healthy man would be volunteering to carry bedpans when he could have been out fighting. I remember this individual’s name, but I ain’t going to mention it, for he got quite a reputation in later times for his robustious verse, some fellow told me once, and I wouldn’t want to sully no one’s pleasure in it, in case it’s still being read at this late date.
So much for Caroline, who had then brought her broken heart out West again and took up mule-skinning. She wasn’t embarrassed at all about mistaking me at first for a potential lover, having been hardened by her various troubles in that area. I reckon she figured now that the only way she would ever get a man was to carry him off as she did me.
I asked if she had ever in her travels run across any of the rest of our family.
“No, I never,” she says, throwing her boot across her knee and spitting a thin stream of tobacco juice into a spittoon the landlady furnished her with, “though I heerd from a soldier in the hospital that he served with a Bill Crabb who died a hero at Fredericksburg, and I reckon that was our little brother, God rest his soul.”
Nothing to my mind was less likely than that Bill had straightened out from what I saw him as in ’58, but I didn’t mention that to her. Also, at present I was hardly in a position to cast aspersions on another man.
And the next thing Caroline says was: “Tell me about yourself, Jack, and how it was you went bad.”
That was putting it on the line. So I related my story, and I’ll say this for Caroline, she had never paid much attention to me as a little kid and even deserted me there among the Indians, but she realized after a while now that I done a few things worthy of her attention and give it freely. And it is strange that though she made a mess of her own affairs, it was her attitude towards my calamity that pulled me out of that hopelessness I had fell into.
For when I told her about the capture of Olga and little Gus, she says, quite merciless: “You best forget about them, Jack. They have shorely been kilt long since.”
“Don’t talk like that, Caroline.”
“I was just saying what it appears you already decided for yourself, Jack old boy,” my sister states, making another use of the spittoon. “You should know how Indins act, if you lived with them as long as you claim to. And then I take it you ain’t forgot the way they butchered Pa and misused me and our Ma. I for one have never got over that experience. You was probably too young at the time to recall how attractive I used to be as a young gal afore my maidenhood was brutally stole by them dirty beasts. I still have nightmares upon the subject.”
I reckon Caroline believed this, for it give an excuse for her failures at love; just as my brother Bill took from his own version a motive for becoming what I had seen him. Lest you think I am being too hard on my family, I might say that they wasn’t the only ones who found Indians right useful in them days for explaining every type of flop.
And there was I, in the same situation. My wife and child had indeed been captured by the savages, and it was certainly possible they had been killed. But it never give me no excuse to throw over my manhood, and no matter how many misadventures you suffer, you ain’t a genuine and absolute failure until that occurs.
But I had lost my old free ways during them years of respectability in Denver, and it was the wildness of that experience on the Arkansas which had unmanned me.
“Oh, they mightn’t have kilt your woman,” Caroline goes on. “They maybe just—”
Funny how members of your own family, even when you haven’t been specially close to them, can drive the knife home with perfect accuracy. In this case, though, it was more complicated: if you recall, I always figured Caroline had been disappointed that the Indians had not offered her violence. Sight unseen, she was jealous of Olga on several counts: for being married, for having had a kid, for likely being raped; these in addition to the natural disapproval felt by a sister for the woman who has got her brother.
All of which produced a change in Caroline’s attitude. She stopped the reclamation procedure that had begun to straighten me out—baths, solid food, and so on—and brought in a jug of whiskey and encouraged me to drown my sorrows in it.
She found me more satisfying as a derelict, I expect. My sister really had the same type of taste as them men who was entertained by the spectacle of my degradation. The Cheyenne would have been depressed to see a fellow tribesman gone to rot; they would have believed it reflected discredit upon all Human Beings. On the contrary, an American just loves to see another who ain’t worth a damn. And my sister proved no exception.
Well, I get a grand pleasure out of disproving expectations. I reckon I would of died of drink had I not encountered my sister; and had she continued trying to reform me, it might have hastened the process. But from the time she took an active interest in assisting my ruin, with an eye I reckon to looking after me the rest of my life, fishing me out of saloons, beating up my tormentors, etc.—from that moment on, I never took another drink. At least not during that phase of my career.
I don’t mean I got up the next minute and become a normal person. It took a couple weeks before I could walk with any kind of vigor, and a month or so before I could resume a man’s work, for I ain’t kidding when I say I had hit bottom. For quite a spell my hand quavered when held tightly by the other, and there was hours at a time when my vision was like looking under water. On into the fall, I still thought I’d pass out from the effect of the midday sun.
The latter comes to mind because towards the end of summer I took me a job. Same as Caroline, driving a team of mules, though she tried hard
to keep me from it, going so far as to tell the contractor what hired us that I was an irrepressible alcoholic, and therefore he watched me close and I had to do twice the work of anyone else.
The only reason I had the job at all was that they needed every man they could get for the building of the U.P., which had took such a while to start up that they was in a big hurry now. It was supposed to begin in ’63, but first steel wasn’t laid till the summer I’m talking about, ’65, and by October only ten miles had been completed. However, what happened during that winter was the effects of the War being over took hold and Government money was forthcoming, so that by the following April end-of-track lay at North Bend and by July, another eighty-ninety miles on, at Chapman.
For hard labor they used a lot of Irishmen who had emigrated to America, but there was also a number of War veterans who done this work, and they really hit a stride in ’66, laying two-three miles of steel a day, with big sweaty devils pounding spikes like carpet tacks, and others meanwhile setting ties in place further on and running up new rails. And right behind them an engine, puffing and roaring. Its sparks was setting fire now and again to what was left of the prairie grass after that human herd had trampled it, and the buffalo had long since took off for other parts.
At the end-of-track the honkytonkers set up shop in tents and moved right along with the railroad, offering drink, gambling, and harlots, and there was purveyors and traders, and even preachers, and soldiers and some Indians, friendlies, who would come up and trade an item or two or sell their womenfolk or just stare, and if you never seen an Indian stare you have missed a real phenomenon, for it might go on all day. I recall seeing a Pawnee study the locomotive smokestack for hours, and after a while I couldn’t forbear from asking him, in the signs, what he figured it was for.
He says: “First I thought it was a big gun for the shooting of birds, but then I saw that it scared the birds away before they could fly over it. Next I thought it was a big kettle for cooking soup, but then I saw the white men eating in another place. Fighting Bear looked at this thing and believes it is for making whiskey, because all the white men are drunk every night.”
Little Big Man Page 25