Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  We had all been men. Up there, on the mountain, there was no separations.

  I turned to Old Lodge Skins to tell him I had got his point, but he had drawn off from me, dropped his blanket, and standing with his scarred old body naked to the falling sun, he yelled in a mighty voice that sounded like thunder echoing from peak to peak.

  “HEY-HEY-HEY-HEY-HEY-HEY-HEY!”

  It was the great battle cry of the Cheyenne, and he was shouting it at all eternity and for the last time. His blind eyes was crying with the ferocious fun of it, his old body shaking.

  “Come out and fight!” he was shouting. “It is a good day to die!”

  Then he started to laugh, for Death was scared of him at that moment and cowered in its tepee.

  Then he commenced to pray to the Everywhere Spirit in the same stentorian voice, never sniveling but bold and free.

  “Thank you for making me a Human Being! Thank you for helping me become a warrior! Thank you for all my victories and for all my defeats. Thank you for my vision, and for the blindness in which I saw further.

  “I have killed many men and loved many women and eaten much meat. I have also been hungry, and I thank you for that and for the added sweetness that food has when you receive it after such a time.

  “You make all things and direct them in their ways, O Grandfather, and now you have decided that the Human Beings will soon have to walk a new road. Thank you for letting us win once before that happened. Even if my people must eventually pass from the face of the earth, they will live on in whatever men are fierce and strong. So that when women see a man who is proud and brave and vengeful, even if he has a white face, they will cry: ‘That is a Human Being!’

  “I am going to die now, unless Death wants to fight first, and I ask you for the last time to grant me my old power to make things happen!”

  That sheep I had seen earlier, or another, come into view on a neighboring crag with his magnificent scrolled horns and seemed to look questioningly over towards us. But this was not what Old Lodge Skins meant, and he couldn’t see it anyway, so he give his war cry once more, and as it went reverberating across that range, an answering roll of thunder come out of the west, and that sky which had been crystal pure suddenly developed a dark mass of cloud above the sun and it begun to roll towards us across the vast distance.

  I stood there in awe and Old Lodge Skins started to sing, and when the cloud arrived overhead, the rain started to patter across his uplifted face, mixing with the tears of joy there.

  It might have been ten minutes or an hour, and when it stopped and the sun’s setting rays cut through, he give his final thanks and last request.

  “Take care of my son here,” he says, “and see that he does not go crazy.”

  He laid down then on the damp rocks and died right away. I descended to the treeline, fetched back some poles, and built him a scaffold. Wrapped him in the red blanket and laid him thereon. Then after a while I started down the mountain in the fading light.

  Editor’s Epilogue

  IT WAS SHORTLY after reaching this point in his narrative that Jack Crabb himself passed on, as I have described in the Preface. A pity that we will never get the account of his later years, which he led me to believe were no less remarkable than his first thirty-four. From various of his references, always spirited, I gather that he toured for a time with the Wild West spectacle directed by the late William F. Cody, “Buffalo Bill.” He may have traveled to Europe with that company. His allusions were ambiguous, but it is possible that he went as far as Venice and was there photographed in a gondola with several Sioux Indians.

  He seems in later years to have visited the Sandwich Islands—Hawaii, in our modern terminology—and there to have developed a taste for the female inhabitants, whose custom it was yet to swim in the nude. He led me to assume that he was no stranger to Latin America in the last years of the nineteenth, and the early twentieth, century. There were elusive references to Guatemala, Cuba, Mexico, generally in time of revolution—though as he has made so clear, Mr. Crabb was devoid of political convictions.

  Which is perhaps as deplorable as his apparent approval of violence, from which I must dissociate myself. I am after all a white man, and believe that reason must eventually prevail, the lion will lie down with the lamb, if, though agnostic, I may use the idiom of the superstitious to express a serious moral proposition. I made such expression once to Mr. Crabb, and his answer made me shudder: “That’s O.K., son, so long as you add fresh lambs now and again.”

  Jack Crabb was a cynical man, uncouth, unscrupulous, and when necessary, even ruthless. In sponsoring this his partial biography, I can in no way commend it to the overimpressionable. He must be seen as a product of his place, time, and circumstances. It was such men who carried our frontier ever westward to meet the shining ocean.

  However, in concluding, I must make a frank admission. I have never been able to decide on how much of Mr. Crabb’s story to believe. More than one night, I have awakened in the wee hours with a terrible suspicion that I have been hoaxed, have rushed to my desk, taken out the manuscript, and pored over it till morning.

  It is of course unlikely that one man would have experienced even a third of Mr. Crabb’s claim. Half? Incredible! All? A mythomaniac! But you will find, as I did, that if any one part is accepted as truth, then what precedes and follows has as great a lien on our credulity. If he knew Wild Bill Hickok, then why not General Custer as well? The case is similar when we suspect his veracity at a certain point: then why should he be reliable anywhere?

  I can certify that whenever Mr. Crabb has given precise dates, places, and names, I have gone to the available references and found him frighteningly accurate—when he can be checked at all. There are exceptions: according to the best authorities, the only Negro at the Little Bighorn was a man named Isaiah Dorman, but he had earlier lived with the Sioux and he was killed in the valley while riding with Major Reno’s command. There is no Sergeant “Botts” on the rolls of the Seventh Cavalry, though a Sgt. Edward Botzer appears upon the fatality list. As to Crazy Horse’s not wearing feathers, we know that statement to be erroneous—his war bonnet, as mentioned in the Preface, presently reposes in my own collection; the dealer who sold it to me is a man of the highest integrity.

  And so on.… But one name is missing from every index, every roster, every dossier. In my library of three thousand volumes on the Old West, in the hundreds of clippings, letters, magazines, you will search in vain, as I have, for the most fleeting reference to one man, and not a commonplace individual by any means, but by his own account a participant in the pre-eminent events of the most colorful quarter-century on the American frontier. I refer, of course, to Jack Crabb.

  So as I take my departure, dear reader, I leave the choice in your capable hands. Jack Crabb was either the most neglected hero in the history of this country or a liar of insane proportions. In either case, may the Everywhere Spirit have mercy on his soul, and yours, and mine.

  —R.F.S.