The Return of Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  Now before I forget let me say while I was at Tombstone I had sent back by mail that money Klaus Kappelhaus loaned me on my hasty departure from the Indian school, and I did the same in the case of Longhorn Lulu of the Lone Star in Dodge, along with one of them postcards she loved to get, in this case showing a picture of Schieffelin Hall, which I called my house: she’d get a laugh out of that when it was read to her.

  I didn’t send any money to Mrs. Agnes Hickok, to replace that of Wild Bill’s I had lost, on account of I never had an address for her.

  So where did me and Pard head on leaving Tombstone? Well, you might recall when me and Bat was up in Nebraska rescuing no-good Billy Thompson, helped by Buffalo Bill Cody, the latter had spoke about a traveling show he was going to put together and had invited both me and Bat to join him—he really wanted Bat and probably included me just to be polite, but I thought of that now and figured though I didn’t have any special talents at riding, shooting, and the like, I could make myself useful and was willing to work as a flunky if I could get some association with entertainment, which the more of it I seen as a spectator, the more alluring it was to me. I don’t mind admitting I could put myself in the place of that fellow in the story who give enemas to circus elephants and got beshat a lot but stayed at the job because he couldn’t give up show business. That halfway offer of Cody’s seemed the best chance I’d ever have.

  So I’ll skip the details of our trip up to Nebraska now and go direct to North Platte, where I figured right in looking in on Dave Perry’s saloon first before going out to the Welcome Wigwam, though it was only midmorning, for there was Buffalo Bill, belly up to the bar, and as usual in the midst of a number of fellows listening to what he was saying. His subject at the moment was patriotism, George Washington and the cherry tree, Ben Franklin’s kite, Paul Revere’s ride, and the like, and lifting his glass, he says, “Let’s drink to Tom Jefferson, who was known for taking a beaker of good cheer on occasion.”

  Then he spots me, who he hadn’t seen in a couple of years and besides had paid most of the attention to Bat at that time, and what I had been worried about was that given all the people he had dealt with since, traveling around the country performing in plays, not to mention his heavy drinking, he wouldn’t believe my reminiscence of the last time I was in his town. But Cody was a remarkable individual, as I hope I will be able to convey.

  “Good to see you again, Captain!” he says heartily, and to the crowd around him, “Step aside, boys, and let Captain Jack wet his whistle.” And he gives me one of his big handshakes that made anybody else’s seem weak. “And how is my friend Colonel Masterson?” He was wearing one of his buckskin jackets, even fancier than the ones I had seen before, with fringes on top of fringes, beadwork on beadwork, and embroidery likewise, and an enormous white sombrero which must of been part of his stage costume, for it was certainly impractical garb elsewhere, though Cody probably could of wore it untarnished through a mud storm.

  After a decent interval I brought up the reason I was there. “You might not recall it, but the time me and Bat was over here you mentioned a show you might be—”

  “Let me head you off at the pass, Captain,” he says, motioning the others to close in again now I had been given entrance, for Cody loved to be crowded especially when drinking. “Not only do I renew my personal invitation to you to join me in that endeavor, but the first phase of it is already at hand. You could not have arrived at a more opportune moment, sir. Let’s drink to that!” After several big swallows, he elucidates. “To my unpleasant surprise, nothing by way of local observance had been planned for our nation’s birthday, which will arrive before you know it. No redblooded lover of the country could stand by while the Glorious Fourth was treated as inconsequential. I couldn’t look my wife and family in the face again, let alone the multitude of fellow Americans who expect better. I have therefore been drawing up some preliminary ideas. Given that the season will be summer and the fact that while we here in North Platte have no indoor stage large enough for what I envision, which would include a simulated buffalo hunt, riding, roping, shooting competitions, and the like, there is a fenced racetrack at the edge of town which should be ideal. I am about to persuade a number of our generous businessmen”—he tipped the brim of the big white hat at Dave Perry, back of the bar, who thereupon refilled every extended glass—“to invest in some prizes.”

  I took note that he put everything in a positive way, which no doubt had something to do with his popularity, for it tended to make people feel good. Take that “invest in” instead of just saying they was donating sums of money like it was charity. He made it sound like a profitable business opportunity, as in fact it turned out to be.

  Now the interesting thing about Cody’s optimism is that it generally started out sounding like exaggeration, but when it was applied to entertainment it usually proved to be on the modest side. He thought his blowout for the Fourth of July would attract maybe a hundred contestants. Instead, more than a thousand showed up when the time come, and most everybody else living at the time in western Nebraska, northeastern Colorado, and upper Kansas showed up as audience, so in fact the local merchants did turn out to have invested in a successful venture, with what the visitors ate and drank and bought in North Platte.

  And I had a part in this, as well as a place for me and Pard to stay in one of the outbuildings at the Welcome Wigwam. Now though adequate enough at both, I never claimed to be a dead shot nor a champion rider, and all my life I been sufficiently clever not to pretend to be something I ain’t if there is a great likelihood I will be put to the test. So at this point what could I do that Cody would find worthwhile? For though he had that lavish manner he was no fool when it came to getting the best from the people he associated with, and soon enough he established which of my capabilities was most useful to him at this moment. You might snort when you hear what it was. He figured I could serve him best as his personal, well I guess the right term would be bartender, though he give me the respectable title of quartermaster.

  You might wonder why Cody needed someone to provide a supply of drink when he spent so much time in saloons, but when planning outdoor shows he had to spend time outdoors. You got to know this about Buffalo Bill, his entertainments would never of been so successful as they was did he not apply himself to them in the ideas and the applications. I never knowed anybody worked harder than Bill Cody, and he seemed to take energy from a quantity of drink that would of paralyzed the average man.

  But he couldn’t be seen with a bottle, for kids had already begun to look up to him, and besides he didn’t want anybody to think of him as a drunk—which you might laugh when I say he wasn’t, but I never saw him worse than what could be called feeling real good, certainly never the real low-down and dirty drunkenness which was common enough in them days by many whose intake was less than his.

  What he done was get me a cart that could be pulled by one horse, and it had a canvas cover on it like a miniature covered wagon. The inside was fitted with a little desk and some boxes full of papers, ledgers, and the like, so he could call it his “field headquarters,” for Cody always had to give a special name to everything associated with him. It was big enough to climb on board and sit down at the desk as though he was going to work on the business records, but underneath the papers was bottles of different kinds of spirits and wines, each type in a box of its own with the outside labeled according to a code known only to me and him, like “Accounts Payable” might signify gin and “New Expenditures,” brandy, and so on.

  I would park this vehicle near that racetrack where the Blowout was being readied, and then during the events themselves, and Bill would visit the interior from time to time for reinforcement for his energies. He was so pleased by how I handled the job that he offered me regular employment on a similar basis with the traveling show he begun to prepare now on the basis of that commemoration of the Glorious Fourth.

  Now I was pleased to have found a new direction for mys
elf, but not thrilled to be doing essentially the same kind of work I wanted to get away from, though truly it wasn’t no longer in a smoky room full of gamblers ready to go outside at some point and shoot one another down. Cody’s shows was real wholesome from the first, decent entertainment for families, and you never heard no filthy language from the performers even amongst themselves, nor unruly behavior, and that was just the kind of association I wanted at this time of my life. What I had to do was come up with an idea that would appeal to Cody beyond this wagon full of wet goods, but I was unequipped for fancy horsemanship or spectacular shooting, and I tell you, seeing the performances in the various events at the Blowout, and by amateurs, I realized no mere practice would elevate me from mediocrity. There was ordinary cowboys who could make their horses dance on hind feet, and ranch hands who ordinarily pitched hay and shoveled manure but with a pistol could hit a silver dollar thrown in the air.

  So I had to employ my brain, which had gone unused too long else I would of left Tombstone earlier. What I come up with now was such a good idea that Cody had already gotten it himself and in fact had already arranged to carry it out by means of a well-known man of that day, Major Frank North, who back in the ’60s had organized the Pawnee Scouts what become part of the U.S. Army and back when the railroad was being built across the plains, when I hired out as a wagon driver, I met North, who didn’t think much of me, and at least one of his sharp-eyed Pawnee recognized me from being on the other side in a previous fight they had had with their traditional enemies the Cheyenne, and I felt real uncomfortable until everybody’s attention was claimed by a battle.

  Yessir, the idea I had for Cody’s show was to include Indians in it, and by Indians I of course meant them who I knowed best, the Cheyenne, who was wonderful riders, though they never did a trick on a horse unless it had practical value, like hanging on the far side of a galloping pony’s neck if being fired at, and was also remarkable shots with a bow and arrow while riding, which called for controlling the animal with the legs alone. I figured there was white audiences, especially in the cities where Cody was planning to take his troupe, that would find such a demonstration real entertaining without no danger to the audience, while on the Indian side it would be a way to get paid for showing prowess at activities they was discouraged or even prohibited from doing on the reservations.

  Well, it was such a good idea that as I say Cody had it himself, and as always with that pertaining to public performance, he took it much further than my limited concept.

  Seated at that little desk in the wagon, he says, “Madeira wine, Captain, if you please.” He pounded himself in the area of his stomach. “I’m off my feed today.” I found the bottle under some ledgers in the box marked “Matters Pending” and poured him a tin cup full. After a big swig he says, “As for your suggestion, I welcome it.” He smiles broadly and raises his cup in a toast. “Major Frank North will join us with a band of his Pawnees.”

  “Pawnees!” I said with an instinctive disgust which might of been noticed and inquired about by another person, but Cody disregarded anything of a negative nature.

  “Fine fellows,” he says. “We go back a long way.” He referred to the battle of Summit Springs against Tall Bull’s band of Cheyenne, and so far as North himself went, him and Cody was also partners in a ranch up on the Dismal River, so I wouldn’t be able to talk him out of this arrangement, and if the Pawnee was there, I sure wasn’t going to want to invite some Cheyenne, in view of the old enmity between them two tribes.

  Frank North was not just going to bring Pawnee warriors but also women and children and set up a village at the show grounds, wherever they happened to be at the moment, so white folks could see at close hand how redskins cooked and ate their food and how they spent the night, and in the show itself the Indians would not just ride their horses like my idea but would attack a stagecoach, shooting blanks of course, and be driven off by Buffalo Bill and his white scouts and cowboys, and later have a big scalp dance, and then in a grand finale would surround the cabin of a helpless settler and his family and be about to burn it down when Buffalo Bill and his bunch show up once again in the nick of time. It was real ironic that the Pawnee would be acting these parts, for in real life they was the white man’s ally. What they’d be doing in the show, you might say, was playing Cheyenne.

  The first season opened up the following spring, and I won’t go into it day by day but just touch the highlights, many of which was unfavorable, beginning with the rehearsal of the Indian attack on the Deadwood stagecoach, conducted by Major North and them Pawnee, with the mayor of Colville, Nebraska, and several town councilors as passengers. Now the Indian charge, with screaming war cries and much firing of blanks, spooked the mules and they stampeded, which excited the Indians even more, and it was quite a while before anyone but the driver and them inside the coach knowed anything had gone wrong. When the vehicle was finally brung to a stop, the mayor jumped out and, though on wobbly legs, wanted to whip Cody’s arse for what he believed a practical joke.

  Then in Omaha in late May of ’83, Doc Carver was suffering from a hangover and missed a lot of the glass balls thrown into the air as targets for the shooting exhibition and was booed by the crowd, who called for Buffalo Bill to take over, which embittered Doc, but I forgot to explain who he was in the first place. W. F. Carver was a fellow Cody had met in New York while performing in a stage play, Carver himself being a champion shot who traveled as far as Europe with his marksmanship shows and could put up enough money for Buffalo Bill to take him on as a full partner in what was now called Cody and Carver’s Rocky Mountain and Prairie Exhibition.

  Carver also claimed to of had extensive Indian-fighting experience, a close friendship with Wild Bill Hickok, and other distinctions, all of which was lies as anyone who could of made genuine claim to them things but did not (guess who?) could tell right away. Cody privately told me once that Doc “went West on a piano stool.” And guess why he was called Doc? He was another damn dentist! On top of all this, though he wore decorated buckskins and sported long hair like his partner, he couldn’t hold his liquor like the latter, and every time I seen him he was notably under the weather. Yet when he broke with Cody at the end of the first season, he says it was on account of Buffalo Bill was drunk throughout.

  More reliable marksmen, and easier to get along with, was a man name of Captain Bogardus and his four sons, and Cody himself was a fine shot from horseback, which even if you never been mounted you can imagine as an achievement, hitting 75 out of 100 glass balls at twenty yards while at the gallop. There have been some who discounted this, as well as the other feats of exhibition shooting in them shows, for loose shot and not solid bullets was used even in the rifle and pistols. Well, they started with lead slugs, until they busted windows half a mile away and nearly plugged a few citizens, so from then on used a half load of powder and a quarter ounce of Number 71/2 shot, in case you want to try it, but my advice is don’t do it at home, not even with a BB gun, for you’re likely to put an eye out with it sooner or later.

  Then Cody had some bad personal fortune. We was at Indianapolis at the time. In the buffalo herd, which at every show was chased around a fenced enclosure, individual animals getting roped and not killed, was one big bull who nobody even tried to put a lariat on, him being so strong and mean to begin with and getting meaner, having at every performance to get run around like that. But never letting anything go untried, Cody asks the leading rider, Buck Taylor, billed as “King of the Cowboys” and an enormous fellow six foot five or six, to not only rope and throw this big devil but climb on and ride him!

  “Hell, with that,” Buck said, meaning the riding, but him and Jim Lawson got ropes on the bull, who was called Monarch, and managed to throw it.

  Now I could repeat for almost every episode that Buffalo Bill produced more hot air than anyone I knowed, but he also really done a lot of things that took more nerve than was common or even sensible.

  He now comes over to wh
ere Monarch is down but struggling so hard to get free that it was all Buck and Jim could do to hold onto the ropes. As a joke Cody once again asked Taylor to climb on, for he liked to kid him, but then he admitted that not even Jim Bullock, the lead steer-rider with the show, would come near old Monarch.

  “So,” says Buffalo Bill, “I guess that leaves only me.” And don’t you know, he got on the back of that enraged animal, which when allowed up, the ropes still trailing from it, took maybe three steps, then bucked with all the force of its massive, hairy body, big brute head lowered to the ground, snorting through wide-open nostrils and beady eyed, and Cody flew high into the air and come down so hard he didn’t breathe for a spell nor could talk at all.

  The audience give him a mighty cheer, believing this a part of the spectacle, and the other performers, including the Indians, had been prepared by Bill himself to go on with the show no matter what happened, so while he was being taken to the hospital the redskin attack on the settler’s cabin proceeded, the only difference from the usual being that Cody didn’t lead the rescuers, for he had no stand-in. How could there be a substitute for Buffalo Bill?

  He stayed in the hospital a couple of weeks and joined us in Chicago, fully recovered from the stunt, but then something a lot worse occurred. He had to hurry back to the Nebraska home where he spent so little time, on account of the sickness of one of his children he saw so seldom, namely little Orra, only eleven. Now while living winters at the ranch I had hardly seen his missus or the little daughters, so far did his wife Louisa, called by him Lulu, keep aloof from anybody or -thing associated with Bill’s career, believing it beneath her, and she might of been right about that, but it did not bring them closer. And now little Orra died, though at least he was there for that sad event and not too late as with the little son who had passed away previously.